Documentary about the U.S. Invasion of Communist Russia in 1918

Ever wonder where that Russian Mosin Nagant rifle you own have may been?

You might be interested to know that a documentary has been made about "a little known chapter in U.S. history. At the end of World War I, thousands of soldiers from Michigan were sent to Russia. There they endured a severe winter and bloody battles against Communist troops."

The Michigan PBS schedule can be found on the official documentary web site link: Voices of a Never Ending Dawn.

The first airing is Sunday Nov. 8, 2009 at 3:00pm on WTVS Channel 56 in Detroit, with airings coming to other parts of the state over the next few months.

The documentary has also been picked up by PBS and will air nationally in 2010.

This link is to a story about it in my local (Livonia, MI) newspaper:
Documentary on WWI Polar Bears features 2 Livonia men | hometownlife.com | the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers and Hometown Weeklies

If you have ever been to the Detroit Zoo, you may have seen the plaque about these soldiers near, of course, the polar bear exhibit there. I believe there is also a memorial somewhere in the Troy, MI area.

In the June 2008 issue of The American Rifleman magazine, Bruce Canfield wrote about the Polar Bears. He mentioned that they were issued Mosin Nagant rifles! Not long ago, I purchased a Mosin Nagant rifle made by New England Westinghouse. Remington also made them. The rifle has marks indicating Russian, Finnish and perhaps German use. If only there was a way to show that it may have also served in the U.S. Army!

Depending on how many chores "she who must be obeyed" has for me, I hope to catch it this Sunday.

Dan

I lthought that the US & other allies were asked by the White Russians (as opposed to the Reds; the Whites were the remnants of the czarist regime and were anti-communists) to intervene.

Kirk,
I think you may be right, but from what I have seen, there were a lot of either conflicting or unclear objectives.

Dan

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kirk

I lthought that the US & other allies were asked by the White Russians (as opposed to the Reds; the Whites were the remnants of the czarist regime and were anti-communists) to intervene.

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You are correct. My grandfather on my fathers side fought with the White Russian army in Siberia based out of Harbin, China. He was a communications officer for General Gaida, leader of the White forces in Siberia. My grandfather was granted political asylum in 1922 after all support by the British, French, US and Japanese was withdrawn.

Interesting enough my maternal relatives from Estonia were involved with the White forces in Archangel too.

Made perfect sense with all those unpaid for(?) or at least undeliverable M-N's sitting in US warehouses.

The intervention was at the request of "White Russian" forces, which of course was the legal, constitutional government of Russia, following the February Revolution. They came very close to success too. As Churchill said and as he tried to ensure at the time, Bolshevism could have been "strangled" for very little cost in men or money. What a different world it would have been.

Well, Surpmil, I would have to disagree. The legitimate government was the Kerensky Social-Democrat/menshevik coalition. IMHO. The Whites were a real mixed bag - Cossack hetmen, military leaders, warlords, each with his own little piece of turf. Add to that Pilsudski's grab for the Ukraine, and the Allied interventions.

The Kerensky government was a provisional government. A constituent assembly was supposed to meet and develop a constitution. Instead Kerensky led a 5-mAn junta that seized power in September 1917. And in October, the Moscow and St. Petersburg soviets hit the streets.

The time to intervene was probably summer of 1917. But setting up a democratic government in Russia at that time would probably have led, by 1922, to the same situation we see in history.

A good reAd about that period is Isaac Babel's "Red Army Cavalry" which is dispatches from the front with Budenniy's cavalry as they threw the Poles back to Warsaw.

jn

I assume you're disagreeing with the premise that the "Whites" could claim to be the legitimate government? Certainly more than the Bolsheviks. Yes, the Whites were a "mixed bag"; when a small group of militants sieze power in a country, those who oppose them not surprisingly come from a wide variety of sources. The rest of society for example.

Kerensky's creation of the Directory was largely a response to the degenerating situation and the "Kornilov Revolt" which was a reflection of military discontent with the weakness of the central government and their failure to address the military problems. Kerensky of course was an ineffectual creature.

I would disagree on your timelline for intervention. By 1918/19 the Russian peoples had seen very well what the Bolsheviks were capable of and were much more hated for it. Their Menshevik and SR dupes of course had realized this too late.

As for Budenny and friends, a few Imperial battalions would have cut them down like grass. Some tanks and armoured cars would have seen for the rest. The White armies of the South would have rallied around a good sized, well equiped and well-led intervention force.

It came down to a failure of leadership. The Grand Duke Michael commented at the time: "The Russian aristocracy is not worth spitting on". All Kerensky had to do was arrent Lenin and friends when they arrived on their sealed train via Germany and confiscate their German gold and that would have been the end of it.

Surpmil,

I gotta thank you for making me think about that situation in Russia. I could see a succesful, four-power intervention in 1917 or early 1918 taking out the Bolsheviks, arresting Lenin and propping Kerensky up for a while.

What then? Kerensky was not capable of holding a government together. I think you would have seen a collapse of central authority. Instead of a Brest-Litovsk Treaty there wold have been a stand-down on the eastern front, mass desertions, a few bands of partisans and a few regiments fighting on.

I think absent the Bolsheviks Russia would have splintered. You would have seen something like the warlord period in China into the mid-30s. Poland, Germany, Turkey and to a lesser extent Britain, France and Czechoslovakia would have been each backing their favorite warlords. There would have been constant fighting with no resolution, eonomic chaos, and famine for the civilians.

From 1935 on, the Germans would have poured resources into the fight, setting up a puppet state in the Ukraine and assuring their access to grain and oil.... The German's man, a Georgian bandit named Dugashvili, earns Hitler's trust by capturing and killing Lenin and Trotsky. He has lately taken to calling himself Stalin. the Germans use him but they do not trust him.

It is not too much to think there would heve been an understanding between Turkey and Germany. The old friendships and commercial relations are still intact. The Turks have no illusions as to where they stand vis the european allies. Hitler is offering them a new deal.

Having consolidated his position on the eastern front, Hitler would have invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, Poland in 1939, the rest of Europe in 1940. There would have been no eastern front. Hitler's armies would have crossed the channel in the summer of 1941, and been surprised by the lengthy guerilla war that bogged them down. Those Canadian and ANZAC forces whose troopships made it past the submarines would have joined the remainder of the British forces trying to hold a line from Manchester to Wales.

In the US, the America First party would take both houses of Congress in 1942 . Roosevelt, his hands tied, agrees to enforce neutrality. The lend-lease shipments stop and the Commonwealth forces are forced back, ultimately surrendering at Cardiff.

In Asia, without the Soviet Union as an example, Communism never gains a constituency. The warlord period continues in CHina. With no USSR to support him Chiang Kai Shek aligns himself with the Germans. German arms and advisers flood the country. The Japanese invade in 1937. The warlords side with Japan. Germany sends "volunteers." German units are fighing alongside KMT forces. There are casualties. There is no German-Japanese Axis.

Turkish forces occupy all of the old Ottoman Empire and move into Central Asia. After the collapse of the UK, Bose marches into New Delhi at the head of an army, with Japanese planes flying overhead. The world is aligned with two blocs, except for the United States which is attempting to maintain both its neutrality and its sphere of interest in the western hemisphere. Australia and New Zealand reach an accomodation with Japan.

German and japanese agents and proxy armies are fighting throughout Central America, as well as in Peru and Chile. By 1944 the US is moving into an understanding with Hitler... Roosevelt's death in the spring of 1944, and Lindbergh's victory running as the America First candidate of the Republican Party. Henry Luce throws the weight of his Time-Life enterprise behind Lindbergh. the Luce publications are champions of an American-German alliance to "save China." By 1946 US and German forces are coordinating closely throughout the Pacific and South America.

Americans are getting used to the sight of German soldiers. They seem to be everywhere. Most of them seem like nice boys, except for the ones in black uniforms. German warships in our harbors, goodwill visits, American-German military exercises. German purchases of weapons, aircraft, motor vehicles and materiel have revived the American economy. The plants at Willow Run and in southern California are making so many Me261 and HortenXVII aircraft, that they are now called "Amerikabombers."

Lately there has been a lot of chatter in the media about the Jews - ordinary Americans are starting to talk about the "Jewish problem."

Well, that's my take on a world without the USSR.

I’m afraid I can’t agree with that premise. Hitler had an obsessive hatred of Bolshevism; along with other things of course. He wanted to keep the UK out of his plan to destroy Bolshevism and make Poland and the western parts of the Soviet Union German colonies. He and his cronies spent a lot of effort in the 30s trying to convince the British that they would leave the British Empire strictly alone in exchange for a free hand in eastern Europe. It was a pipe dream of course, because as centuries of British leaders have known, to allow any one power to dominate Europe is to put themselves in mortal danger. Hitler on numerous occasions expressed his admiration for the British Empire and his wish that it should remain intact. He had acquired this respect in the trenches of WWI by the way.

Of course the British were smart enough to know that Hitler wouldn’t live forever and that most of his followers were the same obsessive anglophobes that a lot of Germans are, and that therefore war was bound to occur sooner or later, and that if the Germans were allowed to vanquish Russia and Eastern Europe they would be immeasurably stronger when Hitler’s successors turned their attention west again. It is now well known that Hitler halted the forces surrounding the BEF to allow it time to withdraw in the belief that he could obtain a settlement once the British Empire had been shown the “impossibility” of continuing the war. What we largely do not know, and indeed will never know, is the intelligence operations that were undertaken to convince Hitler of this, even at that time. In F.W. Winterbotham’s “The Nazi Secret” you will get I think a good sense of the possibilities and probabilities though. As well as a probably unequaled insight into the minds of the Nazi leaders.

One has to remember that until Lenin arrived, the Bolsheviks, including Trotsky and Stalin were standing around waiting for theoretical Marxist development to ‘take its natural course’ from the bourgeois revolution to the socialist etc. etc. Without Lenin, there would have been no October coup/revolution. It was he who planned their strategy and forced his followers to act on it. Remember the Finland Station.

So, the Bolsheviks without Lenin would have continued as just another band of loud-talking malcontents like the SR’s etc. milling around with no clear course of action or leader to unite them. Therefore no Bolshevism.

But since Kerensky was too foolish to nip Lenin in the bud, had there been an effective intervention in 1918/19, the Bolsheviks would have been destroyed, as they believed they would be at one or more points (including Lenin). Russia would then have resumed her course of development relatively unmolested. Her intellectuals, aristocrats, and middle classes would not have been exiled or massacred and she would not have had to wait 70+ years for the creation of a new middle class. Her population would be much greater and with the children of the 50 million odd people killed by the regime and WWII, she would be a very, very different country today.

Of course, without Bolshevism in Russia, the whole course of 20th century history would have ben different. I very much doubt Naziism would have even arisen in Germany, as it was the threat of Bolshevism that drove many into the extreme right in Europe and particularly Germany. Hard to understand now, but the Russian exiles were in every country and any white Russian taxi driver could tell you about trains being stopped by the Bolsheviks and everyone with uncalloused hands being taken off and shot by the rails, or say, a hospital with 5000 wounded soldiers of the White Army being set on fire and burned to the ground with the wounded inside. We could go on and on

No, without Bolshevism, you have no Naziism. Versailles was not enough, nor the phony inflation Germany used to escape her war debts and reparations. With Russia continuing her rapid industrialization that began before WWI, with Stolypin’s reforms of the land turning the peasants into small holders, communism would never have had a chance to take hold. There is this bizarre idea in a lot of Western minds that Russia was a medieval, amorphous mass until Stalin dragged it into the 20th century. It’s just wrong, but not surprising. Bolshevism actually set back Russia’s development enormously and the human losses are frankly irreplaceable.

And without Naziism there is no WWII, the Japanese never get the nerve or the chance to attack the US or British in the Pacific. A purely opportunistic attack on their part which they quickly organized when they saw the defeat of France and the BEF in 1940. Would they have attacked China anyway? Perhaps. Perhaps the “strike North” faction would have seen Russia as weak enough to invade eastern Siberia or the Maritime Provinces. Perhaps the Japanese would have got their butts kicked as they did at Nomohan in 1938 anyway? Does anyone wonder why the Russians fought so well there, albeit under Zhukov, when they were such a flop against the Finns and Germans in 1940 and 41? The answer is that though they hated the regime, they hated the Japanese more and revenge for 1905 would not have been long in coming whether it was a Soviet army or a Russian one, had Japan provided the pretext.

A very different world it would have been.

Surpmil,

There you have it. Two different alternative histories of the 20th century. Your history is based on the survival of a strong, united Russia. Mine is a "what if" based on its disintegration. You are placing a lot of weight on national character and mass psychology. I'm mainly rearranging the people, forces and events that actually took place. The only kind of iffy item in my scenario is Lenin has to escape or be released by the intervention forces sometime before, say 1921 or 22. Probably when the intervention forces declare victory and go home, leaving Russia a shambles.

I do agree that there was a period when things were pretty shaky for the Bolsheviks. However they were still the dominant force in Moscow and Petrograd, they controlled a big piece of the military establishment, and they were organized and disciplined. In my view they would have continued as one of the warring states, controlling Russia's industrial regions and posing a threat to all their neighbors.

There would still have been Bolsheviks under a lot of peoples' beds.

jn

dfrak, The "Polar Bear" memorial is located in White Chapel cemetary, Troy, MI. There are some great photos and information on the Polar Bear website. Introduction - "Detroit's Own" Polar Bear Memorial Association

Here is a photo from that site of the memorial and one of the color guard at a memorial service. Note the rifles are Mosin-Nagants.

It is very difficult to put oneself back into a previous place and time and try to look forward from that point, without being influenced by the people and events that followed it.

I try to steer a middle course between the "masses" and the "great man" theories of history; frankly theories are best left to theorists. There are no rules of history except as Churchill so pithiliy put it, that the only thing we learn from the study of it is that man learns nothing from the study of it!:D

There is no doubt that certain critical figures like Lenin play a decisive role at times. Had Fanny Kaplan's aim been a little better, or Hitler on time for his speech at the Burgerbraukeller, the history of the world would have been very different indeed. I don't think anyone can deny that.

I don't think you can "rearrange the people, forces and events", because they are not chess pieces, they are created by each other in turn.

The best example I can think of is the oft-cited underestimation of the Japanese before 1941. Historians go on about this as though it was some inexplicable blindness that afflicted our forefathers. Few seem to remember that Japan had stumbled about in China for years by the late 30s. China which the Western powers had defeated with the most puny expeditionary forces a generation or two earlier. To add insult to injury, the Japanese lost dramatically to the Soviets at Nomohan around the same time. The same Soviets who barely managed to bring Finland to the armistice table in 1940 and only at the cost of huge losses. Does anyone see the logical conclusion at the time??

Few people were acute enough to realize that "the little men" as they were derisively termed were seething with racial resentment and and a belief in their own innate cultural superiority, creating a fanatical desire to make events match their self-image, in their more confident moments at least.

And the rest is history, or is it merely prologue?!;)