Russia, U.S. Military Intervention in, 1917–20

Russia, U.S. Military Intervention in, 1917–20. American intervention in Russia developed in response to the political turmoil and great power competition triggered by the Russian Revolution and civil war. President Woodrow Wilson and his advisers enthusiastically welcomed the revolution of March 1917, seeing the overthrow of the incompetent and allegedly pro‐German Czarist regime as a triumph of American political principles, an opening to displace German and British rivals for Russian markets, and an opportunity to revitalize Russia's military effort against the Central Powers at the moment when the United States was entering the Great War on the side of the Allies. However, in the following months, Bolsheviks and other antiwar radicals challenged the Russian provisional government's continuation of the war and stimulated socialist and pacifist agitation in foreign countries. In response, in the summer and fall of 1917, American officials offered financial and political support to the liberal and moderate socialist leaders of the provisional government and approved publicity campaigns to counter Bolshevik and German propaganda.

The American loans and pro‐war propaganda did not prevent the Bolsheviks from seizing power in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in November 1917. Five weeks later, on 12 December 1917, President Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing authorized covert financial support for anti‐Bolshevik forces then gathering in southern Russia. American leaders hoped the Cossacks and Russian officers would be able to block German access to Russian resources and would serve as a nucleus from which a democratic Russia could be regenerated.

While Wilson was willing to provide money and moral encouragement to anti‐Bolshevik groups, in the first half of 1918 he repeatedly declined British and French proposals for direct military intervention in Russia. Wilson and his top advisers feared that Allied intervention, particularly by Japanese soldiers, would cause Russians to rally around the Soviet government and seek protection from Germany. American leaders also believed that the war was going to be won on the western front, that diverting forces from France would be unwise, that Allied proposals to recreate an eastern front were impractical, and that condoning or participating in expeditions to Russia would undermine American popular support for the war.

After the Bolsheviks ratified the Treaty of Brest‐Litovsk with the Central Powers and Germany launched a new western offensive in March 1918, Allied leaders intensified their pressure for military intervention in Russia. In the United States, Congress and the American people grew more favorable to action that might keep German forces in the east. At the same time, anti‐Bolshevik leaders outside Russia issued numerous appeals for the liberation of their country from Bolshevik and German domination.

By the end of May, Wilson agreed to contribute American soldiers to an Allied expedition to northern Russia, and in early July he consented to Allied requests for an American expedition to Siberia. On 17 July 1918, Wilson issued an aide‐mémoire that explained to Allied leaders that he remained opposed to military intervention directed at the unrealistic objective of restoring an eastern front. American forces, he declared, could only be used to guard military stockpiles at Archangel and Vladivostok, to assist pro‐Allied Czechoslovakian soldiers who had come into conflict with Red forces along the Trans‐Siberian Railway, and to aid patriotic Russians who were attempting to organize armies and regain control of their affairs.

Despite Wilson's strictures, American forces became involved in fighting Bolsheviks. In early August, shortly after anti‐Bolshevik forces overthrew the local Soviet government at Archangel, the USS Olympia sailed into the port and deployed fifty bluejackets, twenty‐five of whom immediately joined Allied soldiers in chasing Bolsheviks retreating to the south. On 4 September, the 4,500 men of the 339th Infantry Regiment arrived at Archangel. While Lt. Col. George E. Stewart lacked clear instructions about the deployment of his command, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, David R. Francis, authorized the assignment of American soldiers to the front lines along the Dvina River and the Archangel‐Moscow railway. In the following months, the American North Russian Expeditionary Force suffered more than 500 total casualties, including 100 killed in combat with numerically superior Red Army units. The Wilson administration's failure to provide a convincing explanation for why American troops remained in northern Russia after fighting against Germany ceased in November 1918 exacerbated declining troop morale among the Americans and provoked demands by their relatives for the return of the expedition. In February 1919, facing persistent criticism from Republican senator Hiram Johnson of California and many other members of Congress, President Wilson ordered the withdrawal of the expeditionary force, which was carried out in June 1919.

Though the Archangel expedition involved “doughboys” from the Great Lakes region, most of the American soldiers dispatched to Siberia were from the West Coast. In August 1918, the 27th and 31st Infantry Regiments sailed from the Philippines to Vladivostok. On 1 September, they were joined by 5,000 men from the Eighth Division. Although some American diplomats and officers hoped to provide active military assistance to anti‐Bolshevik armies, Gen. William S. Graves, commander of the Siberian expedition, followed a strict interpretation of President Wilson's aide‐mémoire and tried to keep American forces largely neutral in the civil war. In patrolling the railway between Vladivostok and Lake Baikal, however, American soldiers safeguarded the route over which American and Allied supplies were shipped to anti‐Bolshevik armies under Adm. Alexander Kolchak in western Siberia. Consequently, American forces clashed both with Red partisans who attacked the railroad and with Cossacks who contested Kolchak's authority in eastern Siberia.

As in the case of the Archangel expedition, the Wilson administration faced demands to bring American soldiers home. Yet Wilson and his advisers had committed themselves to supporting Kolchak, and they worried that withdrawing the American expedition while 70,000 Japanese soldiers remained in eastern Siberia would lead to the establishment of an exclusive Japanese sphere of influence. American officials decided to evacuate the U.S. forces only after the Red Army drove Kolchak's troops eastward across Siberia in the fall of 1919. American soldiers completed their departure from Vladivostok in April 1920.

The limited American interventions in Russia failed to sustain democracy, protect American loans and investments, revive Russian military resistance to Germany, or prevent the Red victory in the Russian civil war of 1917 to 1920. While aid to anti‐Bolshevik armies and an economic blockade of Soviet Russia did not eliminate the menace of Bolshevism, they aggravated Bolshevik suspicions of the West and provided Soviet leaders with major themes for anti‐American propaganda over seven decades. Wilsonian policy toward Russia also had lasting repercussions in the United States, where senators like Hiram Johnson and many other progressives and socialists viewed the “secret” interventions as dangerous precedents of presidential usurpation of war powers and ominous signs that membership in the League of Nations would entail further interventions around the world to suppress revolutionary change.

Intervention in Russia has been a subject of enduring controversy among American historians. “Orthodox” or traditional scholars have tended to portray the military expeditions to northern Russian and Siberia as reluctant aberrations in Wilsonian foreign policy caused by the exigencies of waging war against Germany. “Revisionist” or “New Left” historians, on the other hand, have tended to view the expeditions as parts of a wider effort to contain the ideological threat of Bolshevism and overthrow the Soviet government.
[See also Russia, U.S. Military Involvement in, 1921–95; World War I: Military and Diplomatic Course.]

Bibliography

George F. Kennan , Soviet‐American Relations, 1917–1920, 2 vols: Russia Leaves the War, 1956, and The Decision to Intervene, 1958.
N. Gordon Levin, Jr. , Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolution, 1968.
Lloyd C. Gardner , Safe for Democracy: The Anglo‐American Response to Revolution, 1913–1923, 1984.
Benjamin D. Rhodes , The Anglo‐American Winter War with Russia, 1988.
Betty M. Unterberger , The United States, Revolutionary Russia, and the Rise of Czechoslovakia, 1989.
David S. Foglesong , America's Secret War Against Bolshevism: United States Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920, 1995.

David S. Foglesong