Unknown Patriotic War 1918-22

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The military operations of the troops of foreign states on our land in 1918-1922 have practically been erased from our national history. On the contrary, the myth of the fratricidal civil war allegedly unleashed by the Bolsheviks is being awakened in every possible way.

The events that unfolded on the territory of Russia in the first years after the October Revolution remain interesting, relevant and … little known for us. On vast territories, there was a war with front lines, tanks, guns and warships, and whole partisan armies and groups of underground fighters were operating behind the front lines! It is known who was in the heart of the state at that time, who defended and gathered it. Who was on the other side?

Was that great war civil, or was it some other? The only way to understand (if we want to) is to study history calmly and consistently, rethinking the known and taking into account the newly discovered facts.

Let's go back to those distant years … Lenin put forward his famous slogan "Let's turn the imperialist war into a civil war" in August 1914, addressing the working people and socialists of ALL the belligerent states, implying their SIMULTANEOUS action against the imperialists - the organizers of the war (Lenin V. I. collection of works, 5th ed., vol. 26, p. 32, 180, 362)

But after the victory of the October Revolution, the first decree of the Soviet government was the Decree on Peace, the cadets and Cossacks, who opposed the Bolsheviks, were released after captivity. And the civil war itself, the war of citizens, was very short in Russia, taking on a kind of focal, "echelon" character. It lasted from November 1917 to March 1918 and ended with the almost complete defeat of the "hotbeds of the White struggle."

Lenin in March 1918 had every reason to write: “In a few weeks, having overthrown the bourgeoisie, we defeated its open resistance in a civil war. We passed the victorious triumphal march of Bolshevism from end to end of a huge country (Lenin V. I. The main task of our days. Complete collection of works, 5th ed., Vol. 36, p. 79.).

However, then, in the period from February to July 1918, more than 1 million foreign soldiers - occupiers entered the territory of Russia from different sides

This large-scale invasion of the troops of many states on land, at sea and in the air for some reason was fixed in history under a soft, almost gentle name "INTERVENTION", while in fact a real war of conquest began!

In the Russian north, from the summer of 1918 to the fall of 1919, the British, Americans, Canadians, French, Italians, Serbs, numbering about 24 thousand people at the end of 1918, fought. From Finland and the Baltic States through Belarus, Ukraine up to Rostov-on-Don from February to November 1918, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians (about 1 million people) were fighting. Immediately after their departure and until the end of the spring of 1919, French and Greek troops, numbering about 40 thousand people, continued the war in Ukraine and the Crimea.

Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were occupied from winter to autumn 1918 by Germans and Turks numbering more than 30 thousand people, then, until July 1920, they were replaced by British troops of about the same number. Large cities of the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia were captured in the summer of 1918 by the 30,000th Czechoslovak Legion, which was part of the French army.

In the Far East, from the summer of 1918 to the end of 1919, the Japanese, Americans, the same Czechoslovakians, British, French, Italians, in total more than 100 thousand people at the end of 1918, were actively fighting. Moreover, Japanese troops were evacuated only at the end of 1922! *

For the period from 1918 to 1920.only the British Royal Navy used 238 ships and vessels of all types for naval operations against Soviet Russia! *

It was foreign states that, through direct military intervention, not to mention various indirect ones, destroyed the de facto Soviet power recognized by the people in most of the territory of Russia, thereby breaking the natural course of Russian history. In the occupied territories, foreigners imposed authoritarian military regimes, carried out political repression, and shamelessly plundered! Having put the Bolshevik government in conditions of a complete blockade, they forced it to build a new society according to a tough, military scheme. A completely different war began, to which the term "Patriotic" is much more appropriate!

With whom did the Siberian peasants, Ukrainian peasants fight …? Together? Or is it still the first - mainly with the Czechoslovakians, Japanese, Americans, British, etc., and the second - with the Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, etc.?

In secret note No. 25, approved by the Supreme Military Council of the Entente on May 2, 1918, signed by Clemenceau, Foch, Petain, Lloyd George and other then leaders of the Western world, about the Czechoslovak legionaries stretched out in echelons from the Volga to Vladivostok, it was indicated that “… they could … if necessary, facilitate the actions of the allies in Siberia."

American researchers D. Davis and J. Trani in the work "The First Cold War", based on numerous documents, show that the attack of the Czechoslovak legionaries on the Soviet regime as the vanguard of the Entente interventionists was approved by the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson!

The eastern front of Soviet Russia appeared precisely "thanks" to the legionnaires who fought there in the first line from June to December 1918. A well-known but not popular now historical fact is that the approach of units of the Czechoslovak legion to Yekaterinburg was the direct reason for the execution of the former tsar and his family. In 1919, the Czechoslovak Legion served as the backbone of the foreign occupation army on the Trans-Siberian Railway and carried out punitive and anti-partisan "missions".

The events of the so-called “evacuation” of Czechoslovak legionnaires from the east of Russia in the winter of 1919/1920 are little popularized: “Having seized Russian cars, the Czechs mercilessly threw out the Russian people from them, betrayed the very officers who were drawn into the civil war by them…; … thanks to the Czech management of the road, the artels could not deliver money, … communication with the front was interrupted, all vehicles were taken away from the Russian military units …; the sale of property brought in Czech trains in Harbin quite vividly depicts what interests were preferred when locomotives were taken away from trains with wounded, sick, women and children."

The manager of affairs of the Kolchak government G. K. Hins in his voluminous memoirs "Siberia, Allies and Kolchak." So isn't it time to call their descendants to repentance?

In 1919-1920, Polish troops equipped with France, Britain and the United States fought with Soviet Russia, among many others. They trampled Kiev, Minsk, Vilno with their boots … the 12 thousandth Polish division as part of the interventionist troops killed Russians even in Siberia! “Tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers who ended up in Poland … disappeared or died,” recalled Dmitry Medvedev, speaking at a press conference in Warsaw at the end of 2010. Isn't it time for Polish officials to repent for these atrocities?

But can the troops of Kolchak, Miller, Yudenich, Denikin, for the most part, forcibly mobilized and equipped at foreign expense be considered a "Russian army"? The rear of Kolchak was provided for the whole of 1919 by an almost 200 thousand foreign army, consisting of Japanese, Czechoslovakians, Americans, Poles, British, Canadians, Australians, French, Italians, Serbs, Romanians! She controlled the Trans-Siberian Railway and fought with a 100,000-strong army of red partisans.

On the Kola Peninsula and the Northern Dvina, it was not so much the forcibly mobilized Russians of General Miller's Northern Army that fought as British volunteers of General Ironside with their ships, planes, armored trains and tanks, as well as the Americans, French and others who helped them.

Yudenich's small army was formed and equipped through the efforts of the English generals Gough and Marsh. Together with her, the Estonian army equipped with the same British attacked red Petrograd, and from the sea in the Baltic they were supported by the English fleet. In southern Russia, with Denikin's army, the two thousandth British military mission fought with Soviet Russia - staff officers, instructors, pilots, tank crews, artillerymen. For the amount of technical, human and financial resources invested, British Minister of War Churchill called Denikin's army “my army”.

“It would be a mistake to think,” he wrote in his book “The World Crisis”, that throughout this year (1919 - BS) we fought on the fronts for the cause of the Russians hostile to the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, the Russian White Guards fought for our cause!"

A wide foreign "trace" of those tragic events for Russia is vividly written in Sholokhov's "Quiet Don". Reading, we see how the old Cossack on the Don escapes from the German invaders who are trying to take the chaise away from him along with the horses, how Grigory Melekhov drinks and heart-to-heart with an English tanker, how the English battleship "Emperor of India" "fights" the Reds from the main caliber near Novorossiysk, as Gregory goes with the Reds to the Polish front!

So what was this war? Civil or Unknown Patriotic?

The political and military atmosphere that surrounds modern Russia makes us turn to the almost century-old past. Let's put side by side (or open on the Internet) maps of the Russian Empire, Soviet Russia in the ring of fronts of 1918-1919, the USSR and the Russian Federation. It is enough to look at these 4 cards to think sadly - the situation is repeating itself. The Baltic states are again separated from Russia, they are part of the aggressive military NATO bloc, German, British and American planes and ships ply the Baltic area. NATO is moving eastward in the Black Sea region, probing Central Asia. The Polish leadership again, taking a position unfriendly to Russia, is hosting American missilemen, just as it received American pilots in 1920. There is a fresh experience of Yugoslavia, which, unlike Soviet Russia, the Western powers managed to completely dismember in several stages. The almost ten-year stay of the Western interventionists of the XXI century in Afghanistan and Iraq also suggests that they are "present" there not only to fight terrorists …

Not realizing the similarity of the processes and not making the appropriate conclusions, we, in conditions of economic instability, weakening of the state and the army, risk also getting a new intervention! And someone will probably be like Bunin in "Cursed Days" to joyfully wait and meet the invaders.

* data on the number of foreign troops are given on the basis of A. Deryabin's books "The Civil War in Russia 1917 - 1922. Intervention Troops" and "The Civil War in Russia 1917 - 1922. National Armies".