20260903-1900

nation.

I'm with you, I'm with you, I'm with you

I'm with you, I'm with you

I'm with you

We sold, understood, joined, transferred, to connect with you

This is a journey to align yourself with a new cycle of true power

We sold, understood, joined, transferred, to connect with you

I'm with you, I'm with you

I'm with you

Starting from the bridge of connection between the true sources of power

And exhaling and exhaling here and now

And exhaling and exhaling and exhaling

I see you slowly up

On all parts of your self to be here present

And exhaling and exhaling and exhaling

I see you slowly up

I'm with you

And exhaling and exhaling here and now

And exhaling and exhaling

So, you're so, you're here present.

We just got a permission 20 years ago.

A bunch of old bills,

I'm a master.

Who loves the sun?

Who cares that it shines?

Who cares what it does since you grow?

My heart.

Who loves the sun?

The sun.

Not everyone.

The sun.

Who cares what it does since you grow?

My heart.

Who loves the sun?

Not everyone.

Who loves the sun?

Not everyone.

The sun.

Alex, you just explained what you're doing?

I've found a writer.

My companion, a spectacle man in army for teagues, says he's searching this forest near the Arctic

with a metal detector to see what lies underneath.

That's a bit of a shell, yeah?

No.

It's a shell.

Did you just find that just now?

No, no, no.

It's the most common find, a fragment of a shell.

This area came under very heavy fire on the 30th of December 1918.

The place was pounded with 1,500 shells from the Bolshevik site.

The whole wood is filled with iron remnants of the fighting.

As you can see, as we walk along, the metal detectors beep almost without interruption.

Those shell fragments, bullets and cartridges, fragments are everywhere, underfoot, big pieces and small ones.

That is the kind of war it was.

The events which took place here at the end of the First World War have been partly suppressed, partly forgotten.

Today, few people know that thousands of foreign troops, under British command, once fought Russians on Russian soil.

What lies underfoot is evidence of a conflict which transformed Russia and affected relations with the West for decades.

I would argue even to the present day.

Archangel Orr Archangelsk is the capital of this northern region, Rich in Timber and Fish.

It was founded by Ivan the Terrible as Russia's first seaport, a vital link to the outside world.

My producer Natalia is from here and she says three words encapsulate her hometown before the Russian revolution.

Daska, Triska, Daska.

It's quite hard to translate because it rhymes in Russian.

Yeah, Daska is wood. Triska is corn.

And Daska, you know, it's debatable, but it's a mix of melancholy and, I don't know, hopelessness.

Yeah, isn't it?

The First World War brought yet more melancholy.

Russia was allied with France and Britain.

Out of Russia's 15 million strong army, nearly 2 million were killed, 3 million wounded, and more than 2 million taken prisoner.

A letter from a local soldier on the front line down south captures the mood in the ranks.

We all hate this war. This slaughterhouse, like bitter radish.

We put our chest in front of bullets and shells, while the propotted classes and the millionaires only fill their pockets.

Our fathers, brothers, sisters and children die of hunger.

Less than a year after this letter was written, the continuing war, the chronic lack of food and social unrest, ended the monarchy.

In February 1917, hundreds of thousands took to the streets of the then capital Petrograd, demanding bread and peace, and overthrew the Romanov's, who'd ruled Russia since the 17th century.

Death to all the parasites of the working class.

Death to plutocrats and kings. The solemn hour of victory is near. Go the words of this revolutionary anthem.

Lenin had come to power promising supporters not only bread to eat and a share of the aristocrats land, but also peace.

When he signed a treaty with Germany in March 1918, western governments acted rapidly to reopen the Eastern Front.

Tens of thousands of foreign troops were ordered to Russia in what became known as the intervention.

14,000 British American French and others came to Archangel, the strategic seaport in the north.

But what were they actually told about their mission, I asked the historians Stephen Smith, of all Sol's College Oxford.

Well, that they were going to maintain the Eastern Front against the Germans.

The north was important for the Allied war effort because of the ports of Archangel and Murmansk.

And these were threatened.

You know, there are people who insist, not many, but people who insist that the entire intervention was always motivated by military concerns.

And they dismiss the idea that there was a conscious attempt to suppress the Bolshevik revolution.

I don't personally find that convincing because from the middle of 1917, actually, people like the military mission in Petrograd, the British military mission and others, the US were in cooots with opponents of the left.

On August 1, 1918, there was a coup d'etat in Archangel, led by anti-Bolshevik forces, which from now on, I'll refer to as the Whites.

They got that name because of the white uniforms of some Tsarist army officers.

Some were reactionary military types and monarchists, but others were moderate socialists.

The following day, the British-led intervention forces arrived and the Bolsheviks fled.

Here are the first impressions of General William Edmund Ironside, who later became commander of the Allied forces in Archangel, as he sailed into the city from the White Sea.

As we steamed up the channel, we passed row upon row of busy sawmills, but few of the bearded workers so much as looked apetus in our crowded ships.

Though our men shouted to them their usual cheery greetings, they let us go past in stony silence.

There was neither interest nor resentment at our coming, just complete apathy.

How did the people of Archangel react when these foreigners getting off battleships were greeted by priests and local dignitaries with the traditional bread and salt?

Here's one account from a radical journalist called Pavarraskazov, later imprisoned by the Allied troops.

August 2, a clear sunny day, at three in the afternoon the Allied squadron approached the city.

The peers and the embankment of the Dvina River are packed full of overdressed philistines.

It is striking that there virtually no workers present.

The bourgeoisie, vegan small, together with the officers and other officials, got together to play the foul role of speaking of behalf of the Russian people.

Anyone who saw this disgusting expression of loyalty before the foreign bayonet will never forget it.

We've come to a nursing home on the outskirts of Winchester. It's a beautifully sunny day and there are daftles and tulips going up to the main house.

I've come here to meet his lordship Edmund Ionside, who is actually the son, the 92-year-old son of the man who is in charge of the North Russian Allied intervention.

This is 1918 Vol.1, you see.

It's bound in leather and you've got lots of post-it notes sticking out and this is your father's handwriting, yeah?

Very neat.

There are a few more pictures.

Boats stuck in the ice, a nice breaker.

A nice breaker? There you see.

That's a sledge being pulled by reindeer.

The reindeer. Here is a picture of my father's wrist up in Bethel's wrist on the left.

Shuba. Shuba.

Your father, he had a nickname, didn't he?

Tiny.

Because he was so large. Well, he was about 6'5".

He looks like a sort of wall of fur in that, doesn't he? That's amazing.

Lord Ionside's sitting room is filled with the diaries' photographs intricately drawn maps and all manner of paperwork from menus for St. Patrick's Day in Archangosk to more serious documents.

This is what you want to see. There is a proclamation on the 8th of November, 1918.

And what does it say the proclamation?

The Allied command is prepared to receive all Germans' checks and lets with all inhabitants of Baltic provinces of Russia who are prepared to come in and hand themselves over.

They should come forward unarmed under a white flag and armistice has been declared in Europe.

The desire of the Allies is merely to restore order to Russia.

And this is the duty of all good European patriots to work for this object and it's signed Brigadier General commanding Allied forces in Northern Russia.

And that's your dad.

That is what my father proclaimed when he was out there on the 8th of November.

But then he stayed out there and of course didn't return to England until the mid-1919.

That upset a lot of the forces there because everybody else you see started peace a good deal earlier than that.

There was some awkward marches down the streets in London complaining about the conditions.

The intervention became increasingly unpopular in Britain.

There were debates at the Labour Party Conference trade unions passing hands off Russia resolutions and newspapers arguing that the frozen plains of Eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier.

At his headquarters in Archangel, General Ironside got more and more frustrated with the Russians who were supposed to be on his side.

Here's his take on Nikolai Chakowski, the head of the provisional white government.

The old man was completely an utterly unmilitary.

He didn't seem to realise that force would be necessary to defeat the Bolsheviks.

He was living quietly in the past and was the same old plotter he'd always been.

Now that the chance had come to him he had no vigorous plan to put into effect.

Ironside was even more disappointed with senior white army officers in Archangel.

He described one as an insignificant little man with an untidy, straggling beard and dismissed the chief of staff as a nervous young dandy.

The stark fact was that they had done exactly nothing during the two and a half months that they had been in office.

When I asked them how they thought they were going to make their army without officers or NCOs, they just shrugged their shoulders.

Did they not realise that it was they who had to defeat the Bolsheviks?

That the Allies must leave them at no distant date.

I never knew anything about Russia. I didn't know where Russia was practically.

George Green served as a private with the machine gun corps as part of the North Russia relief force in 1919.

Researchers at London's Imperial War Museum interviewed him seven decades later.

Had you heard Mr Green that there had been a revolution there?

Did you hear about that before you went?

Yes, yes. We knew there was a revolution.

I thought it was a revolution with a Russian army and a navy against Germans and things like that.

Did you have any idea where you were going?

No.

Or what you were going to do? Did you have a brief?

No, no, no, no, there was no brief.

Except that we knew that we was going to meet some unknown enemy.

Gunna Green had come to relieve American troops from the 339th Infantry Regiment from Michigan,

who'd already spent tough winter months on the front line against the Reds.

When the Allies first arrived, they chased the retreating Bolsheviks upriver and hoped for a speedy victory.

But it soon became clear they'd overextended themselves in a harsh and unforgiving terrain.

General Ionside gave orders to dig in for winter and adopt a defensive position.

You heard lots of things.

Back in the forest in Yempsa, Alexei Suchenowski's friends showed me what they've dug up in just half an hour.

Andrei, you just found Grenade under the tree over there, yeah?

Are you sure it's not dangerous?

No, it's not.

He says it's empty. That's good.

Actually, they have something much more impressive to show me.

I just can't believe Alexei found this dugout because it was built 98 years ago by American troops

that were trying to hide from Bolshevik artillery.

And there was snow in it, even though it's July going down.

And there were crystals of ice on the ceiling.

They're like diamonds, yeah.

It's absolutely freezing in here.

The only good thing is that there are no mosquitoes.

It's very solidly built to last 100 years.

Did you find it? We actually.

Alexei says he found this place 10 years ago.

How did you feel when you found this place?

If I say I was surprised, that would be an understatement.

It is a great discovery and going down here is like going back in time to the year 1918.

Well, I also have made a dugout supported by heavy tempered and covered with dirt.

Howard French, a corporal in the 310th engineers from the United States, helped build dugouts in Russia,

very like the one I just climbed out of.

Much later, he described what it was like on October 14, 1918, when the Bolsheviks attacked with naval guns.

I know the other boys rushed with me to get into the dugout from the next shell exploded.

Charlie Doehead is right leg between the knee and hip, frankly shot off, which I had to finish chopping off and applied the turning key.

So imagine that he had to amputate his buddy's leg with a pen knife.

I got that recording from Mike Grobel of the Polar Bears Association, the memorial group for the US troops

who fought in North Russia for nine months in 1918 and 1919.

Mike's grandfather, Clement Grobel, a raw recruit in charge of a Lewis machine gun crew, was decorated for bravery in the battle against the Bolsheviks at Yempsa.

It's the very spot where I camped with Alexey and his friends.

Do you think it's possible that maybe your grandfather helped to build the dugout that I went into?

Since he wasn't an engineer, he probably didn't help, but I'm sure he was in there many, many hours.

What do you know about some of the conditions that the soldiers had to put up with when they were there?

During February, they were seeing forty below zero. They had to keep moving in order to keep from freezing, particularly during the coldest part of the winter.

The trench coats they had been given were dragging in the snow, so they would cut them off at the knee so they could get around.

During the late fall and during the spring, they were besieged with mud and flies.

When they had to march, they were slagging through either wet marshes or frozen slippery pears on either side of the railroad front.

They could never get their feet dry. They weren't allowed to make fires the first month on the railroad front.

The orders were no fires because you'll give yourself a weight of the enemy.

So they were marching in what clothes, what boots, what socks?

It sounds like utter hell.

Yes, there's a book out called Quartet In Hell that's taken from one of the letters, one of the men, wrote back.

It probably accurately describes the types of conditions they were facing.

This is extraordinary because there's like a whole dormitory of sort of wooden bunks, one above the other,

and wooden dividers in between the beds.

If conditions for soldiers were grim, they were far worse for those the allies incarcerated.

The remains of a deserted prison camp lie on the island of Mujuk in the White Sea.

In winter you can drive here across the ice, but it took us three hours by boat from Archangel.

Ludmila Noviková, a Moscow-based historian who's an expert on the short-lived White Administration in the Russian North, joined me on the island.

All the windows are covered in rusty barbed wire, and like here on the end wall, there's some signatures.

The handwriting is quite typical for that earlier period, and even some people try to write poems.

Really? So, did you find a pen?

If we were to be able to write a book, we would have to write a book.

It's kind of rhyming, right?

Or wondering whether freedom will ever come their way.

Yes, and if it doesn't come, what will become of us?

It's a muggy July afternoon, the air is thick with mosquitoes, but I dread to think what it would be like here in winter.

Signs from the now abandoned museum point out the ice cells, where troublesome inmates spent the night, and either perished or lost limbs to frostbite.

Pavar Askázov, the radical journalist, so disgusted by the arrival of the British,

was one of those sent here.

In his prison memoirs which became something of a sacred text in the Soviet era, he describes one of the worst tortures, the lack of food.

In the mornings, when they distributed the dry russcks, there was an incredible noise from the young prisoners in the corners of the barracks,

starving angry men with greedy eyes, crawled all over the filthy damn floor full of spit, picking up each and every crumb.

And these chilling scenes were repeated daily.

Somehow Pavar Askázov managed to survive this place, but some were not so lucky.

Marina Titova came with us on the boat.

Her great-great uncle, Fjorda Aparen, Arufa, had been arrested and sent to Moodyug, accused of recruiting men in his village into the Red Army.

He didn't live on the island for long.

20 days, maybe 25, then on the 15th of September, he tried to escape.

According to one account, he had become quite weak and couldn't move quickly, so he was shot as he was running away.

The second version of events is that he was caught and executed the following day, along with some other prisoners.

Under some fir trees, Marina has found a commemorative plaque to those who are killed trying to escape.

She quietly places two red carnations on the crumbling stone.

Does it make you feel very resentful or angry about the foreign troops that did this to your relative?

I don't think it's right to get angry at these people.

Those were different times. Yes, that's true. It was indeed very cruel and not right.

But to feel anger and hatred? No, I don't feel that. It's part of our history.

Perhaps not a very good page in the history of our country, but it happened, and maybe we can learn from it.

In Soviet times, Moodyug certainly became an object lesson in propaganda.

We pass an obelisk with a hammer and sickle on top, and an inscription honoring the patriots who were tortured to death by the interventionists.

Walking back to the boat, I asked Ludmila just how much general ironside, the British commander in charge of the Allied troops, knew about what happened to prisoners here.

He definitely got some reports, but he had other issues to take care of.

For him, the priority was security, and if a few hundred people were incarcerated on a distant island, well, all of them were suspected of some sympathies to the Bolsheviks.

After all, people were fighting and people were dying every day on all the fronts.

It was just a drop in the ocean, suffering here.

The Brits, the Americans and others have been told their job was limited to training Russians and guarding war materials.

They weren't expecting active combat, says Ludmila.

In autumn 1918, when the armistice was signed on the western front of the First World War, the First World War was over.

They wanted to go home. What are they doing in this distant northern country among the snows?

And what are they fighting for, or against whom they are fighting now here?

At his headquarters in Archangel, General ironside was asking himself the same question, at least in the privacy of his own diary.

I'm struck by his graphic description of Russia.

To me, it was like a great sticky pudding.

A hand could be easily thrust into it, everywhere it gave way so long as the thrust continued.

Immediately the thrust ceased, the mass began steadily to close in on the hand, wrist and arm,

then came the horrible fear that the hand could never be withdrawn.

By the time of the armistice, the driving force is Churchill.

Professor Stephen Smith

And Churchill is obsessed with Bolshevism, and talks about strangling the baby of Bolshevism in its cradle,

and does seem that he really believed that Bolshevism was likely to get to Britain if it wasn't stopped.

And also a sort of sense of one could call it hypocrisy, Britain never formally went to war in Russia.

This was a kind of intervention by stealth, you know, that people gradually woke up to.

Churchill was Secretary of State for War at the time, but his Prime Minister Lloyd George overruled him.

Finally he and the other Allied leaders said this is getting nowhere.

And even then, Churchill had the idea of relief mission, bringing 8,000 more troops,

because you know, with one last push, we will really be able to establish a strong white presence,

which will be an opposition to the Bolsheviks.

And Lloyd George said, hey, you've been doing this for eight months now, and it's not working.

Bolsheviks propaganda was working when it came to discouraging foreign soldiers like George Green.

We did this pamphlet. This cost-exselter went through the woods, scattering all these pamphlets.

If you don't go back home, we will send the red guards from Moscow to annihilate you and leave your bodys to rot in the masses of North Russia.

And let the Lord the morale of fraction have won, became bad.

The morale of flattened down a bit because we weren't a victor's worthy.

I don't think we did an atom of good. Perhaps might stand the advance of the Bolsheviks,

perhaps for a month, but I don't think we achieved anything.

We withdrew in 1919 and came home with our tale between our legs.

So nobody wanted to brag about it.

Mike Grobel of the Polar Bear's Memorial Association says the intervention which cost hundreds of Allied soldiers' lives became an embarrassment.

It was very under a bushel basket by our government because they didn't want to discuss it.

We're sometimes reckless in our particularly military interventions in other countries affairs.

The lesson learned is that if you're going to do that, you better be committed to it, and you better provide the resources that are needed.

And that didn't happen.

Some rejoiced when the foreign ships first arrived with sacks of flour and other vital supplies.

But it soon became clear that Allied and White authorities would be unable to solve the Arctic provinces' dire food shortages.

And there was forced conscription for local people.

So the honeymoon period was short-lived, says historian Ludmila Novikov.

Many people were ready to join the very short and successful campaign to put down an ant to the red rule, but they were not ready to get engaged in months and months and months of hopeless fighting.

And if eventually they will be losing sight, they will face all kinds of repressions from the hands of the winning Bolsheviks.

As time went on, there were more and more mutinies by White Russians, whom the British had trained to fight the Bolsheviks.

Local people could see the boot would soon be on the other foot.

General Ionside was forced to speed up the withdrawal, moving it from November to September 1919.

On his return to the UK, for some time he suffered the humiliation of being put on half pay.

Alexei Suchanovsky, who searches for remnants of the battles in the forest near Archangel, argues the intervention was ruinous for Russia.

Britain had a very advanced invasion mentality.

As we can see from history, the sun never set on your empire.

This was an operation which didn't help relations, and now it is very clear it was a mistake.

I believe that if you land in someone else's country with weapons, this gives rise to violence, conflict and disruption.

Nothing good can come of it.

Invading Russia rarely goes well.

It's a lesson painfully learned by both Napoleon and Hitler.

And by General Ionside, George Green, Clement Grobble, one-legged Charlie Doe, and so many others in 1918 and 1919.

The End

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was a nice start, she will be back in her breaks.

And now we have been from Zandam, we're seeing about Zandam and other forms of misery, your stupperware 3.

And now we have been from Zandam and other forms of misery, your stupperware 3.

The End

20260903-1900

About this Episode

More from Podcast Patapoe

20260904-0600

20260904-0500

20260904-0400

20260904-0300