agreed in July 1918 to send American forces to northern Russia and Siberia. About 4,600 American troops, dubbed the Polar Bears, arrived in Murmansk and Archangel in August 1918, accompanied by a slightly larger British force and smaller Allied units (a total of about 12,000). The expeditionary force was under British command, much resented by the Americans throughout the campaign. Its mission was to protect the supplies in the ports, but also to secure lines of communication by water and rail into the interior. The latter resulted in a number of skirmishes with Red Army units during the winter of 1918 to 1919 and several casualties (though the influenza epidemic would claim many more). This intervention on Russian territory was supported by much of the local population, which was represented by a non-Bolshevik but socialist soviet at Archangel, thus complicating the question of what kind of Russia the Allied forces were fighting for. The end of the war challenged the legitimacy of an Allied interALLIED INTERVENTION vention and provoked opposition among the troops there and at home.
The opening of a Second Russian Front in Siberia was rather different, since it involved a more substantial American expeditionary force (around 9,000) under its own command and a much larger Japanese army of approximately 70,000, along with 4,000 Canadians and token “colonial” units of French, Italian, Chinese, and British. Their ill-defined mission was to assist the transfer to the Western Front of a Czecho-Slovak Legion consisting of 60,000 former prisoners-of-war who supported the Allies, to protect munitions in and around Vladivostok, and to guard against one another’s imperialist ambitions. On the long way to the Western Front, the Czech Legion managed to seize most of the Trans-Siberian Railroad to prevent released German and Austro-Hungarian pris- oners-of-war in the area from forming a “German front” in Siberia; and to provide aid to what at first seemed a viable anti-Bolshevik government centered in Omsk under the leadership of Admiral Alexander Kolchak. For the United States, limiting Japanese ambitions for a more permanent occupation was a major factor. In any event, the American commander, General William S. Graves, was under strict orders from Washington not only to avoid coming under the control of the larger Japanese army, but also to desist from direct hostility with any Russian military units, of which there were several of various political orientations. Most of the Allied expeditionary force remained in the vicinity of Vladivostok and at a few points along the Chinese Eastern and Trans-Siberian railroads until the decision to withdraw in May-June 1919.
Another commitment of men, supplies, and financial assistance came to the south of Russia but only late in 1918, when the end of war allowed passage through the Straits into the Black Sea. The catalyst here was the existence of substantial White armies under Anton Denikin and his successor, General Peter Wrangel. In the spring and summer campaigns of 1919, these forces won control of extensive territory from the Bolsheviks with the support of about 60,000 French troops (mostly Senegalese and Algerians), smaller detachments of British soldiers with naval support, and an American destroyer squadron on the Black Sea. Divided command, low morale, vague political objectives, the skill and superiority of the Red Army, and, finally, Allied reluctance to provide major aid doomed their efforts. This “crusade” came to a dismal end in late 1920. Besides a direct but limited military presence in Russia, the interventionist powers provided financing, a misleading sense of permanent political and economic commitment to the White opposition, but also medical and food relief for large areas of the former Russian Empire.
Allied intervention in Russia was doomed from the beginning by the small forces committed, their unclear mission and divided command, the low morale of the Allied soldiers and their Russian clients, the end of the war of which it was a part, and the superiority of Soviet military forces and management. Throughout, it seemed to many that the Allied interventionists were on the wrong side, defending those who wanted either to restore the old order or break up Russia into dependent states. To many Americans, for instance, the Japanese posed more of a threat to Siberia than did the Bolsheviks. In the aftermath, genuinely anti-Bolshevik Russians felt betrayed by the failure of the Allies to destroy their enemy, while the new Soviet power was born with an ingrained sense of hostility to the interventionist states, marking what could be claimed as the beginnings of the Cold War. An immediate tragedy was the exodus of desperate refuges from the former Russian Empire through the Black Sea and into Manchuria and China, seeking assistance from erstwhile allies who had failed to save the world for democracy. See also: BREST- LITOVSK PEACE; SIBERIA; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH; WHITE ARMY; WORLD WAR I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carley, Michael J. (1983). Revolution and Intervention: The French Government and the Russian Civil War, 1917-1919. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Foglesong, David S. (1995). America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism: U. S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Goldhurst, Richard. (1978). The Midnight War: The American Intervention in Russia, 1918-1920. New York: McGraw-Hill. Graves, William S. (1932). America’s Siberian Adventure, 1918-1920. New York: Jonathan Cape amp; Harrison Smith. Kennan, George F. (1958). The Decision to Intervene: The Prelude to Allied Intervention in the Bolshevik Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Saul, Norman E. (2001). War and Revolution: The United States and Russia, 1914-1921. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Ullman, Richard H. (1961-73). Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917-1921. 3 vols. Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press. Unterberger, Betty. (1956). America’s Siberian Expedition, 1918-1920. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Unterberger, Betty, ed. (2002). The United States and the Russian Civil War: The Betty Miller Unterberger Collection of Documents. Washington, DC: Scholarly Resources.
NORMAN E. SAUL
(b. 1926), daughter of Soviet general secretary Josef Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva.
The daughter of an old Georgian revolutionary friend, Sergo Alliluyev, Nadezhda Alliuyeva was sixteen when Stalin married her on March 24, 1919. In addition to Svetlana Iosifovna, she had one son in 1919, Vasily. Svetlana also had an older half-brother Yakov (Jacob), the son of Stalin’s first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze, a simple peasant girl, whom he married in June 1904 at the age of 25, but who died on April 10, 1907.
Nadezhda Alliluyeva’s death in 1932, apparently a suicide following a quarrel with Stalin, deeply affected both her husband and her daughter. Morose, Stalin withdrew from Party comrades with whom he had socialized with his wife. Some believe her suicide contributed to his paranoid distrust of others.
Svetlana was twenty-seven when Georgy Malenkov summoned her to Blizhny, the nickname for Stalin’s dacha at Kuntsevo, just outside of Moscow. In her first book, Twenty Letters to a Friend (1967), she poignantly described Stalin’s three-day death from a brain hemorrhage. “The last hours were nothing but a slow strangulation. The death agony was horrible. He literally choked to death as we watched.” Although she had lived apart from Stalin, who had always been “very remote” from her, she nevertheless experienced a “welling up of strong, contradictory emotions” and a “release from a burden that had been weighing on [her] heart and mind.” After her father’s death, Svetlana taught and translated texts in the Soviet Union. In late 1966, while in India to deposit the ashes of her late husband Brajesh Singh, she asked Ambassador Chester Bowles in the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India, for permission to defect to the United States. She left a grown son (Josef) and daughter (Katie) from two earlier marriages in the Soviet Union. Svetlana’s defection caused an international sensation. “I could not continue the same useless life which I had for fourteen years,” she told reporters on March 9, 1967. Settling in Locust Valley, New York, she wrote the abovementioned memoir describing the deaths of her two parents, and a second one two years later (Only One Year), in which she described her decision to defect. Upon becoming a U.S. citizen, she married an American architect, William Peters, in 1970 and had a daughter by him. After separating from Peters, she returned to the Soviet Union in 1984 and settled in Tbilisi. She again left the USSR in 1986 and returned to the United States, but then settled in England during the 1990s. See also: STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alliluyeva, Anna Sergeevna, and Alliluyev, Sergei Yakovlich. (1968). The Alliluyev Memoirs: Recollections of Svetlana Stalina’s Maternal Aunt Anna Alliluyeva and her Grandfather Sergei Alliluyev, comp. David Tutaev. New York: Putnam. Clements, Barbara E. (1994). Daughters of Revolution: A History of Women in the USSR. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson. Radzinskii, Edvard. (1996). Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia’s Secret Archives. New York: Doubleday. Richardson, Rosamond. (1994). Stalin’s Shadow: Inside the Family of One of the Greatest Tyrants. New York: St. Martin’s.
ALMANAC See FEMINISM.
