Fighting Without a War: An Account of Military Intervention in North Russia

by Ralph Albertson

The men of this expedition were told many stories of Bolshevik atrocities. No care or effort was spared in printing these stories in both English and Russian and getting them into the hands of the soldiers. It was important to inspire fear and hatred of the Bolsheviki in the hearts of our men, more important than the verification of the stories. After the evacuation of Shenkursk we were told, with complete details, of the murder of the nuns and the Abbess, and of the members of several families who were well known to us, also of the forced marriage to favored Bolsheviki of some of the young ladies who in the happy days had danced with our officers. We were told of rape and of tortures, all in convincing circumstantial setting. This "information" we were told had been obtained most cleverly by us through spies and prisoners—and it did its work. In July, however, we learned the truth—at least I did. Three Russians whom I had known all winter and in whom I have the utmost confidence, went to Shenkursk, stayed there incognito a week, and came back. They told me that they had seen the nuns, and talked with the people who were supposed to have been murdered, that the Abbess was alive, that the girls were unmarried, and that there had been no forced marriages whatever. The one atrocity and the only one committed by the Bolsheviki in Shenkursk was the shooting of one priest. One priest was shot in the street by soldiers without official sanction. The only other Bolshevik atrocity about which I had any authentic information throughout the entire expedition was the mutilation of the bodies of some of our men who had been killed in the early days of Ustpadenga. I was unable to find any one who had any proof, however, that they had ever killed our men whom they had once taken prisoner. Perhaps they did it, but even so we were there not to imitate their worst practices but to wipe them off the face of the earth because of those practices.

A friend of mine was walking unarmed on a lonely road near the front one day when a Bolshevik soldier came out of the woods and made a friendly approach. He asked my friend if it was safe to go in and give himself up as a prisoner and was assured that it was. They went in together, the guard at the barricade took charge of the prisoner, taking him to headquarters. Ten days later my friend learned that this prisoner had been shot, and the only reason given was that he had refused to give certain desired information as to the enemy. I have heard an officer tell his men repeatedly to take no prisoners, to kill them even if they came in unarmed, and I have been told by the men themselves of many cases when this was done.

I saw a disarmed Bolshevik prisoner, who was making no attempt to escape and no trouble of any kind, and who was alone in charge of three armed soldiers, shot down in cold blood. The official whitewash on this case was that he was trying to escape. I have heard of many other cases of the shooting of Bolshevik prisoners. At one time this had become so common that the Officer Commanding troops issued and had posted up an order forbidding it and calling attention to the fact that there were many Bolshevik soldiers who wanted to come over and give themselves up but feared to do so because they had heard about our shooting prisoners, and warning our men that the Bolsheviki might retaliate by shooting our men whom they held as prisoners. I have seen at various times many prisoners brought in, but I have never yet seen one that was not robbed. The plunder belonged to the captor or the robber. We got as high as three thousand roubles off of some of them. Their boots and belt buckles were especially prized trophies. I have known cases where the captor was generous and left the prisoner some small thing, but it was only to have some other soldier take it away from him later.

We used gas shells on the Bolsheviki, but that I understand is no longer an atrocity. We fixed all the devil-traps we could think of for them when we evacuated villages. Once we shot more than thirty prisoners in our determination to punish three murderers. And when we caught the Commissar of Borok, a sergeant tells me we left his body in the street, stripped, with sixteen bayonet wounds. We surprised Borok, and the Commissar, a civilian, did not have time to arm himself. The sergeant was quite exultant over it. He killed Bolsheviki because they were barbarians and cruel. This was the only thing his government had ever told him as to why they should be killed. And the only safe way to fight barbarians is with their own methods.

The spoliation of scores of Russian villages and thousands of little farms, and the utter disorganization of the life and industry of a great section of the country with the attendant wanderings and sufferings of thousands of peasant-folk who had lost everything but life, are but the natural and necessary results of a military operation, and especially a weak and unsuccessful military operation such as this one was. One would hardly say, however, that it was necessary to close the school in order to use the schoolhouse for the storage of whisky, nor to put an entire Russian family into the street in order to make room for one officer, nor to loot personal property and ransack churches, nor to take so much whisky into the country that it could hardly be consumed when there was the greatest need for all kinds of merchandise, yet all these things were done, and acts of this kind are now outstanding features of the military "helpfulness" we went into so reluctantly.

We have been told about the employment by the Bolsheviki of Chinese mercenaries, and the dreadfulness of this was much stressed in April, but in July, August, and September we were importing large numbers of Chinese to Archangel, dressing them in British uniforms, and training them for fighting the Bolsheviki.

XV

THE MUTINIES

Early in the year there had been a few small defections of conscripted Russians at Shenkursk, Murmansk, and later at Toulgas, but the thing that broke loose in July when the Yankees had gone home and the new British army had come and started its big campaign was quite another matter. At Troitsa, at Onega, at Pinega, at Obozerskaya, on the Vaga and on the Murmansk railroad our Russian soldiers mutinied, killed their officers, and went over to the Bolsheviki. On six of our seven fronts these mutinies occurred. They were evidently not concerted, not uniform in method, but spontaneous, having the same nature, and springing from the same causes.

There were some distinctive features about the Troitsa affair of July seventh. The Dyer's Battalion that mutinied here was composed of ex-Bolsheviki prisoners who had been given the option of joining our army or remaining prisoners of war, and who for obvious reasons had chosen to join the army. This battalion had been fêted and honored in many ways, and the privilege of wearing the British name on their shoulders was supposed to give assurance of their loyalty to our army. We did not conceal our stupidity about the Bolsheviki from these men. We did not keep them from hearing the stories on which we had fed our men. They saw the attitude of the English military toward the Russians and had learned the true state of Russian peasant feeling toward the military. They despised the name of the Slavo-British Legion that they wore. On Troitsa's fateful night they murdered five English officers and eight Russian officers and went over to the Bolsheviki. We recaptured a considerable number of them and executed them. Those that had not been in the mutiny we disarmed and put to labor. We had lost heavily and by treachery. It was enough to get the wind up of anybody. It got ours up. I heard many an Englishman say after that that he would never again trust any Russian anywhere. He would not discriminate. They were all treacherous, ungrateful swine. Every Russian was a Bolo. There was no longer possible any big coöperative campaign.