Foreign Office, and made John Picton Bagge their commercial secretary in Odessa.17
The Allied powers set about facilitating international commerce in the areas under White control. The trading conditions were not of the easiest kind. The economy of the former Russian Empire had been terribly disrupted in 1917–18. Although business deals continued to be conducted outside the Soviet-occupied territory, corruption and fraud were widespread. Entrepreneurs in Russia and Ukraine lacked financial credit and Western banks were understandably wary of underwriting projects to trade with them.18 But many businessmen from Russia who were currently based abroad were willing to take chances by re-entering Russian and Ukrainian markets. Vladimir Bashkirov in Paris was one of them. Seeing that he would make no progress in France, he liaised with Bakhmetev’s embassy in Washington with a view to restarting the Pacific trade with Vladivostok. The Siberian Creameries Co-operative Union welcomed such initiative and planned to send its products across the ocean to the US ports of Seattle and San Francisco.19 Western Siberia had exported huge quantities of yoghurt and butter to Germany before 1914; and the Union now looked east for new markets in America, at least until Kolchak started his headlong retreat in summer 1919. The difficulties were immense. It was hard to find shipping companies willing to sail for Vladivostok even though the arms and equipment for the Whites had been assembled in Seattle for transit.20 Civilian categories of goods were still more difficult to move to and from Siberia. But there were glimmerings of a future very different from the one which Lenin and Trotsky intended for Russia.
Yudenich did not rely entirely on Paris for his funds. Before starting the North-Western Army’s offensive, he created a financial consultative committee to help until money reached him from the ambassadors. Emil Nobel was a leading committee member who, together with other oil company owners, put up a loan to tide Yudenich over the campaign. It was a scheme of mutual advantage. If the companies were ever to reclaim their assets in Baku, they needed the White armies to be properly financed to do the fighting.21
Appreciation of the difficulties facing the Whites earned them a degree of sympathy — and a blind eye was turned to the evidence that White commanders aimed to conquer all the territories once ruled by the Romanovs. This is what the slogan of ‘Russia One and Indivisible’ meant to them. The Whites played along with Allied demands to the extent of expressing semi-compliance with their commitment to make concessions to the peoples of the borderlands of the former Russian Empire. But they failed to follow this up with action. When General Gustaf Mannerheim, the Finnish army leader, came to Paris to propose an alliance against Sovnarkom and the Red Army, he was sent packing. The Whites flatly refused to recognize Finland’s independence. Sazonov’s reaction was characteristic: ‘We shall get along without them, because Denikin will be in Moscow in two weeks.’22 Denikin himself was furious with the Allies for recognizing the Finnish government and said that war would come of it.23 The White armies preferred to fight alone rather than compromise their objective of reconstituting Russia complete with all its territorial appendages. Allied governments reinforced this recalcitrance of the Whites by refusing to give official recognition to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; and in the Estonian case they put pressure on Tallinn to provide Yudenich with freedom for his military preparations on Estonian soil.
At the British War Office, Churchill energetically removed impediments to the Whites’ procurement of supplies. Eighteen aeroplanes were shipped to the North-West Army.24 Tanks were also made available. Yudenich, though, faced a different kind of shortage as a commander. Operating from newly independent Estonia rather than Russia itself, he had a problem in recruiting Russian troops. Conscription being impossible, he asked the Allies to enable volunteers to leave the POW camps in Germany; he badly needed experienced officers, and again Churchill was helpful.25 E. L. Spears, who had headed intelligence operations for a while in northern Russia, put him in touch with Boris Savinkov when he came over from Paris for discussions.26 Churchill and Savinkov took to each other. Savinkov also had a meeting with Lloyd George but immediately sensed the Prime Minister’s ambivalence about increasing the assistance to the Whites. Churchill was obviously the best hope of the Whites, although Savinkov complained that he had an alarming tendency to regard the Russians as British subjects. When pointing to a map of Russia with Denikin’s regiments marked with flags, Churchill declared: ‘Here, this is my army.’27 This was not a good way to win the respect of a Russian patriot, but Savinkov restrained himself. Churchill’s delusions of grandeur did not matter so long as he continued to support the White cause.
The labour movements in Europe remained an obstacle to such efforts since dockers were militantly opposed to British and French assistance to the anti-Bolshevik armies. Germany was another potential source of supplies for the Whites; its military equipment was cheap after the Great War and there was plenty of it on sale. But German workers persistently held up such exports to Russia and Ukraine.28 As it happened, this mattered less to Denikin than to other White armies because he could buy material channelled clandestinely through Salonika and Alexandria where no trade union was likely to hold things up.29
One crucial piece of assistance came free of charge: Western intelligence reports. After the Allies withdrew their diplomatic corps from Russia they usually relocated their espionage networks to wherever the White military headquarters were operating at the time, whether in southern Russia, mid-Siberia or Estonia. The British with their immense empire had established the world’s most comprehensive cable system and could tap into almost any message whenever they wanted.30 Allied and White networks shared a lot of the information they were gathering. Denikin could rely on being told what the French and British military missions learned from their capitals and from their own secret agencies in Russia and Ukraine.31 Yudenich too obtained material from ministries in Paris and London.32 He received information of high quality about the political and social situation in Russia and Ukraine,33 and he usually got the data he needed on the latest deployments and appointments in the Red Army.34 And although the commanders of the Whites — Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich and Miller — had their disputes, they did not let them escalate to the point of disrupting each other’s military operations. Each White army used its team of radio telegraphists to keep the others informed of their plans, and Sazonov in Paris was also included in the exchange of telegrams.35
The Whites conducted a deep surveillance of planning and conditions in the Red Army. Denikin’s agency was called Azbuka (or ABC). Its operatives received a wide licence from him for its spying activity — they even kept an informant inside the National Centre despite the fact that it was firmly allied to his Volunteer Army. Azbuka’s penetration of Ukraine had been deep ever since 1918;36 and as the Volunteer Army grew in strength, the agency increased its geographical range and reported in detail on what Russia’s workers thought about the Bolsheviks and on how the peasants were reacting to Soviet rule.37 In 1918, the technical specialists working for Azbuka had often even succeeded in intercepting conversations between Bolshevik leaders on the Hughes telegraph apparatus;38 they had also been well informed about exchanges between the Germans and the Soviet authorities.39 In 1919 they regularly picked up Moscow’s confidential news broadcasts to local Bolshevik administrations across Russia and caught Soviet messages going to and from European radio stations.40
Nonetheless these advantages in intelligence and equipment did Yudenich no good when he started his offensive in October 1919. Kolchak was fleeing eastwards through Siberia with his beaten army; Denikin was hastily withdrawing to the Ukrainian south. The Red Army was free to concentrate on the military threat emerging from Estonia. And even though Zinoviev, the Bolshevik leader in Petrograd, began to panic, the Politburo in Moscow reacted swiftly. Trotsky and Stalin were dispatched to head the political co-ordination of defence. Stern measures were taken against the middle classes across the city. A preventive terror was organized. Stalin ordered that formerly wealthy citizens should be paraded in a line in front of the Red defences so that they would be the first to be hit by the artillery fire of the North-Western Army. Trotsky travelled away from the city outskirts and saw military action while stiffening the resolve of his troops and commanders.41 As the Whites advanced from Estonia into Russia, they gave a good account of themselves and for a few days the battle for Petrograd lay in the balance. But the Red Army had the resources and experience it needed. Yudenich’s offensive collapsed and he was quickly forced into retreat with his men and equipment.
A young Russian observed them as they streamed back towards Estonian territory:
We saw a vast column on the move. They had arrived by the same branch line as us and disembarked at the same place. There were at least 2000 of them, wearing British greatcoats and accompanied by light artillery and machine guns. Obviously something was wrong at the front, and either the Reds had broken through it or outflanked it at Luga. The rumour was that Pskov too was about to surrender.42
The rumour was all too true; and although the Civil War was not yet over in the old borderlands, Russia itself was firmly in the hands of the communists. Bolshevik celebrations in Petrograd and Moscow were long and
