Intervention at Archangel

During the Russian Civil War, the North Russian regions around Murmansk and Arkhangelsk (Archangel) were briefly occupied by Allied forces hostile to the Bolshevik regime. "Intervention at Archangel" is a straightforward narrative history of the Arkhangelsk episode. The book was published already in 1944. This is a 1971 reprint edition.

The author, Leonid Strakhovsky, participated in the intervention himself, first as a secretary working for the renegade Murmansk Soviet, later as a soldier in the French Foreign Legion (sic). Since the book is supposed to be scholarly, Strakhovsky says very little about his own activities. Still, "Intervention at Archangel" is written in a somewhat more vivid style than average scholarly books. I almost get the impression that the author wanted to write his reminiscences, but eventually decided on a fully documented, scholarly approach.

Being a mostly narrative history, the book contains little in-depth analysis. That is left to the reader. The intervention at Arkhangelsk was led by the British military, but there were at least three other centres of power in the city: a group of foreign diplomats dominated by the American ambassador Francis, a "provisional government of North Russia" led by Chaikovsky and other Right SRs, and a Russian volunteer army led by former Czarist officers. These groups didn't always see eye to eye with the British, and certainly not with each other. Further complicating the situation were left-wing labour unions which eventually became hostile to the Allies, underground Bolshevik agitators, and peasant "partizans" who gladly defended their own villages against Bolsheviks but refused to join the regular armies. According to foreign newspaper reports, there was also a city council of 36 socialists, 25 bourgeois and 2 Jews!

Strakhovsky's sympathies are obviously on the monarchist, White Guard side. He paints the socialist Chaikovsky in very bad colours, while being full of admiration for the British general Ironside, even citing an unconfirmed rumour that the future "Baron of Archangel and Ironside" whipped a teacher at the age of ten! The author's fascination with military parades and paraphernalia gets tiresome after a while, since he insists on describing every Allied celebration in the city. On a more humorous note, Ironside is said to have trained a group of ex-Bolshevik soldiers known as "Ironside's Bolshies". They eventually staged a mutiny. For some reason, Strakhovsky says very little about the American troops in Arkhangelsk, except that they were unreliable, infested with Bolshevik propaganda and occasionally fraternized with the enemy!

Am I right in suspecting that Strakhovsky has a grudge against somebody somewhere?

"Intervention at Archangel" isn't the most exciting book around, but it could be of some interest to Russian Civil War buffs.