The Volunteers had every reason to be optimistic. With the defeat of the Germans, they expected the Allies to increase their support for the White cause in the south. Until then, the Allies had looked at the civil war from the sidelines. Their main interest had been in the north and in Siberia, where they had been hoping to resurrect a Russian army to continue the war against Germany. A few hundred British marines had occupied the Arctic ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk to defend Allied military stocks. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk they had even become involved in minor skirmishes against the Reds. German occupation of the Ukraine and their control of the Black Sea had made it difficult for the Allies to get military aid to the Volunteers. But all that had now changed. The Allies recognized Denikin as the main White leader in the south and pledged material support, including twelve divisions, to help occupy the Ukraine. They also promised the Volunteers the Allied military supplies left behind by the Russian army on the Romanian Front — if only they could get their hands on them. The height of this wave of euphoria came on 23 November, when an Anglo-French fleet sailed into Novorossiisk. General Poole and Lieutenant Erlich disembarked and were met by vast cheering crowds. They assured them that Britain and France were committed to the same goals as the Volunteers. Everyone expected the Whites to march triumphantly on Moscow, now that the Allies were on their side. They had defeated the mighty German armies; it would surely be a simple task for them to see off the Bolsheviks. Such optimism was further strengthened by the rise of Admiral Kolchak on the Eastern Front.
In fact the promise of Allied aid turned out to be empty. The involvement of the Western powers never amounted to much in material terms and always suffered from a lack of clear purpose or commitment. Western public opinion was divided between the Reds and Whites, while most of those in the middle, weary after four years of total war, were opposed to sending more troops abroad. Most of the Allied politicians were not sure why they should get involved in a foreign civil war now that the World War was over. Many of them knew very little about Russia — Lloyd George, for example, thought that Kharkov was a general rather than a city — and, as always in international matters, ignorance bred indifference. Some politicians, such as Churchill, wanted to launch a Western crusade against Communism, but others feared that a White victory would result in a strengthened Russia with renewed imperial ambitions, and preferred to see Russia Red but weak. The Western leaders wavered schizophrenically between these two views. They could not decide whether to make war or peace with the Soviet rulers — and thus ended up doing both. With one hand they gave military aid to the Whites; with the other they tried to force them into peace talks.fn5
As so often in these situations, Western policy was one of drift. Once the British gave aid to the Whites, France and the other imperial powers quickly followed suit. It was like a poor man’s game of poker: none of the players wanted to be left out of the bidding, since the prize (influence in Russia) was much too great, but none of them would play with very high stakes. The result was that all the major powers (Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Japan and the United States) despatched only small forces — just, as it were, to keep their hand in. The intervention never reached the threatening level later claimed for it by Soviet historians. It was just enough to keep the Whites from defeat but insufficient to give them a real crack at victory. Denikin’s forces, for example, received a few hundred khaki uniforms and some tins of jam during the first months of Western aid. British soldiers and tanks arrived in the spring, followed by the French navy, which landed at Odessa. Almost immediately, the sailors mutinied — they had no stomach for a war against the Reds who were at that time advancing on Odessa — and the French ships had to be evacuated.
