A warm weekend in Northern Russia

This weekend was the first major reenactment of the season at Kelmarsh Hall. I was with the Bluejackets group and for most of the day we were on our static display doing a detachment from HMS M. 33 in northern Russia in 1919. Most people do not realise that when the guns fell silent on the western front in 1918 there was still conflict in Russia, and the western powers were very much part of it. Russia had stopped fighting with the central powers after their first revolution in February 1917. Getting out of that meat grinder had been one of the principal reasons for the revolt. This allowed the Germans to free up men for what was to be their final push on the western front before the naval blockade imposed by the Royal Navy finally staved them into surrender.

In the end the Entente Cordial powers won the First World War not because they were victorious on the feild of battle but because they had better logistical support. The British Empire could draw in material from the four corners of the globe to supply it, and its navy could block off the sea lanes to prevent the German Empire trading with anybody that did not share a land border with it. Once the almost unlimited resources of the United States were finally brought to bear there was simply no way that Germany and Austro-Hungary could realistically expect to win anymore.

However the Central Powers where not the only ones with resource problems. The Russian Empire was still basically an agricultural economy, and much of it still ran on a system which would have seemed familiar to the Feudal lord of the manor in Medieval England. They were not an advanced industrial power like their enemy Germany, but luckily for them they were allied to two of the biggest, France and Britain. So to try and make sure that Russia could continue to fight and so force the Central Powers into a war on two fronts Britain supplied Russia with the material that it could not have produced itself. This was shipped up through the arctic circle to the Barents Sea port of Murmansk. Before the war this had been nothing, barely even a village. The British soon changed that building it up into a port city with enough warehouse space to store the millions of tons of material that they were shipping in. Being British they also built a railway to connect this new city with the rest of the country.

When the Tsar fell from power and the Russians declared a cease-fire this left the other allied powers with a problem. They had been shipping all of this stuff into Murmansk and stockpiling it there so that there would still be material during the winter when the sea route closed. There where millions of tons of stuff there ready to be used by the Imperial Russian forces, but now there was no Imperial Russia. They could not ship it back out, there was too much stuff, and if Germany or their Finnish allies got hold of it then that could extend the war considerably. Murmansk needed to be defended, there was no Russian force that they trusted to do it, so they had to do it themselves; and because of that we slowly got drawn into the Russian Civil War on the side of the Whites. Britain continued to fight all the way into the 1920s before finally being able to disengage and retire home, leaving our White allies to the (non-existent) mercy of the Bolsheviks.