Archangel has many excellent and substantial buildings.
The Archangel water-front has miles of good docking facilities.
This was a military job. Even the military, however, find it necessary to consider popular opinion to some extent. So this new government was composed of democratic men. Tschaikowsky was made President. The people knew him and trusted him. His government failed to realize at first that it was only the creature of foreign military authority and began to function sincerely. It was kidnaped for discipline and put on an island for a few days of meditation. The allied military did not come to Archangel to set up a pure democracy nor to encourage socialism nor to listen to theories. They came to fight the plans of Germany, to fight the Bolsheviki, to guard stores, to teach Russia to fight. Beyond this the military mind goeth not. So the venerable Tschaikowsky was gradually put aside and ignored and before long sent to London on an important mission, never to return, but still a valuable figurehead, while a Russian military government grew up under the aegis of the British army, composed of monarchists and military men of the old school. The head of this government was General Miller (Mueller) a militarist and monarchist who is without popular Russian support and whose position is entirely due to his standing with the British military establishment.
III
MANAGEMENT
It was a British show. The British were in absolute command. Whole shiploads of British officers were sent there to perform all possible functions of management and to cover all possible needs. The Americans, Russians, French, Italians, and Serbians all obeyed the British officers, and found British officers duplicating their own at every juncture. Even at that there was a surplus, and I have had several of them, from a colonel down, tell me that they were hanging around Archangel waiting for something to do.
It was British responsibility to decide where we should stand, when we should move, and who should do what. They never neglected this responsibility in any detail. If they could avoid it, they never delegated any detail of authority to any officer of any other nationality. If they took counsel with their associates of other nationalities it was never heard of in the ranks. I have heard an American officer of high rank speak very bitterly of the fact that the British never consulted him except to give him orders, and made him feel quite useless.
IV
THE FALL CAMPAIGN
As our ships rode into the mouth of the Dvina River with the first troops of the expedition, and the last train pulled out of Archangel Preestyn bearing the last of the Bolsheviki away to the south, the people of Archangel came out to the river bank and the docks to see the incoming fleet and to welcome their deliverers from Bolshevist proletariat tyranny and prolonged political and industrial unrest. The Russians were tired of war, and as they lined up on the river banks in front of the hundreds of peasant villages bordering a thousand versts of rivers to express their welcome it was Peace and Prosperity that they thought they were welcoming.
In fact, however, it was war, war such as that part of Russia had never known before, and most expensive war.