Only a vague historical memory now, without any great battles or garlanding of sensational headlines, the American intervention in Russia would loom larger in the ensuing half century. The general staff believed the country had taxed itself to the utmost in sending an expeditionary force to France and had little moral energy or physical reserves to expend on adventures on the other side of the globe. Siberia, as viewed from the War Department in Washington, seemed a good place to avoid as far as United States military involvement was concerned. The Far Eastern intervention proceeded despite warnings that the project would chiefly benefit Japan in its ambitions to expand on the Asian mainland, that Siberia already was a political and military maelstrom in which the various Bolshevik partisan bands, the Russian counterrevolutionary forces soon to be headed by Admiral Kolchak, Cossack regiments turned to brigandage, and a pan-Mongol movement led by a demented Baltic baron all were trying to fill the vacuum caused by the fall of the Romanoffs and the present weakness of the Soviet central government.

The intervention was to be in two widely separated areas, both theoretically propitious to Allied aims: at Murmansk and Archangel in north Russia and at Vladivostok on the Pacific. President Woodrow Wilson wasn’t bent on smashing the revolution but, he said, on aiding a force of over forty thousand Czechoslovak soldiers, formerly a unit of the Russian army and now supposedly heading for Vladivostok along the TransSiberian railroad, thence to embark for the western front to renew the fight against Germany.Įarly in 1918 it was proposed in the Supreme War Council at Versailles that Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States send forces to Russia to re-establish an eastern front against Germany, the new Soviet government having negotiated a separate peace and opted out of the war.

From Moscow it appeared that the United States had joined other western nations and Japan in supporting the White counterrevolution, which just then was making dangerous headway against the Red armies, and on August 30, in a speech before a throng of factory workers, Lenin denounced the United States as a fake democracy standing for the “enslavement of millions of workers.”įrom a Washington hazed over with Wilsonian rhetoric about self-determination the perspective was quite different. During mid-August, 1918, American forces began landing at Vladivostok, the capital of the Soviet Maritime Territory, in one of the more curious side shows of the First World War.

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