By the end of the month the Bolshevik government in Vladivostok had also been overthrown. Some resistance was met at Barnaul, and there was especially heavy fighting around Lake Baikal, centered on the thirty-nine railroad tunnels bored through the rugged escarpments that curve along its southern shore. The Bolsheviks tried to demolish the tunnels with a trainload of explosives, but the Czechs anticipated their strategem and blew the train up. On Lake Baikal, heavy log rafts mounted with guns also defeated Bolshevik armed steamers, and elsewhere the Reds proved unable to rally a strong defense. An armored train and a small excursion steamer converted by the Czechs into a gunboat helped take Irkutsk in mid-July; the Soviet government for Siberia retreated to Chita. Meanwhile the Czechs in Vladivostok had marched westward to link up with units pushing eastward from Irkutsk, and those on the Volga and at Chelyabinsk had joined to advance on Yekaterinburg, where the imperial family was being held. Their threat to this stronghold probably hastened the family’s massacre on July 11, before the Reds withdrew to the west. Yekaterinburg fell to the Whites on July 25, and a fortnight later the Legion helped to take Kazan, where they captured the Imperial Gold Reserve, valued at more than $330 million. Ironically, this fund had originally been evacuated from Petrograd to Samara for safekeeping, and from there (when Samara was about to fall to the Czechs) to Kazan by barge.
By mid-September all of Siberia was White, and Red loyalists had dispersed into the mountains and forests to form partisan bands.
Lenin was convinced that the Allies had colluded in the Czechoslovak mutiny; and Trotsky declared, “Here was a malicious, precisely worked out plan.”644 Their theory gained credibility when (as if in reward for the Legion’s actions) France promptly recognized an independent Czechoslovak Republic on June 30, followed by Great Britain, the United States, and Japan. The Soviets also knew that Allied warships had gathered at Vladivostok, ostensibly to guard the huge stockpiles of war materiel assembled there for transshipment to the Eastern Front, yet no troop ships to evacuate the Czechs had ever arrived. They therefore interpreted the Czech revolt as part of a larger design, in which Vladivostok was to serve as a supply depot for an interventionist campaign.
And that, in fact, is what it became.
The temptation to intervene was considerable. Munitions, rifles, armored vehicles, truck wheels, barbed wire, field guns, rubber from Sumatra, harvesting machinery, lathes, ship and airplane parts, rope from the Philippines, jute from India, and even sugar from Cuba and wine from France had been laid up by the Allies for the war effort, not only at Vladivostok but at Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. There was genuine concern that some of it might find its way into German hands; partly to prevent this, a company of British Royal Marines had landed in Murmansk at the beginning of March. Then, on April 5, the Japanese began landing at Vladivostok, followed by troops of other powers. Schemes to repossess these stores, using a more or less token force, began to give way to others designed not only to rescue the Czechs but to punish the Bolsheviks and reopen the Eastern Front. The British (especially War Secretary Winston Churchill) were the most ardent advocates of intervention, and it was even suggested that a joint Allied expedition be sent across the whole of Siberia to fight the Germans in the Ukraine.
President Woodrow Wilson regarded the scheme as impractical, which of course it was, but by June 1918 the Siberian question had begun to cost him sleep. Loath to involve America in the growing Civil War, Wilson confided to an aide: “I have been sweating blood over the question what is right and feasible to do in Russia. But it goes to pieces like quicksilver under my touch.”645 Finally, he evolved the desired formula and embodied it in a document which he tapped out on his own typewriter, and which became known as the Aide-Memoire. This stated the intention of the United States to intervene with the rest of the Allies militarily, but only “to steady any efforts at self-government or self-defense in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance.” And he called upon the others to forswear “any interference of any kind with the political sovereignty of Russia, any intervention in her internal affairs, or any impairment of her territorial integrity either now or hereafter.”646 Although he suggested Japan send troops not in excess of the seven thousand America was prepared to commit, the Japanese volunteered to send a good many more than that, and did. For they intended to do everything the Americans had forsworn.
Secret agreements had already been signed between Japan and China in mid-May, which virtually allowed the Japanese to occupy northern Manchuria; the northern half of Sakhalin Island, Vladivostok, and other coastal strips also tempted them to wider imperialistic designs. On August 2, they landed two more divisions at Vladivostok, occupied Khabarovsk, and in October poured tens of thousands of troops into Manchuria, the Amur and Ussuri river valleys, and the Transbaikal. As justification for this beyond the official Allied mandate, they argued (rather fantastically) that since Eastern Siberia was adjacent to Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, which in turn were contiguous to Korea, they were therefore all “in very close and special relation to Japan’s national defense and her economic existence.”647 Meanwhile, a French colonial battalion of 1,100 from Indochina had also disembarked at Vladivostok, followed by two American infantry regiments on August 16 from the Philippines. By August 21, Japan had brought the whole of the Chinese Eastern Railway under its control. By the end of September, in a campaign that would eventually include 14 nations, the Allies had 44,000 men in the Far East, and by the end of October over 125,000, of which 75,000 or more were Japanese.
The American force was commanded by Major General William S. Graves, a West Point graduate who had served on the Mexican border and in the Philippines, and in Washington, D.C., as Secretary of the General Staff. He was an educated and highly trained officer, but was given little official guidance as to American aims. After having carefully read the government’s studied declaration of neutrality, he later recalled, “feeling that I understood the policy, I went to bed, but I could not sleep; I kept wondering what other nations were doing and why I was not given some information about what was going on in Siberia.”648 His send off did little to clarify the case. In a memorandum given to him in the course of a ten-minute briefing held in a room at the Kansas City railway station, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker had warned: “Watch your step; you will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite. God bless you and goodbye!”649 All Graves had to go on was, as Baker later acknowledged, the vaguest of imperatives, namely, not to “create situations demanding impossible military exertions on the part of Allies and particularly of the United States, and involve our country in complications of the most unfortunate kind.”650 Graves steered a resolutely neutral course, to the chagrin of the Whites and even the other, far more partisan Allied commanders, while his own State Department (influenced by Churchill) tried to have him replaced. In the whole sad debacle, he may have been the only honorable man.
Aside from the war materiel stockpiled there, Vladivostok – “Russia’s back door” – formed a natural stronghold for the Allied troops.651 Before the revolution, the port had been steadily strengthened by fortifications and scores of great cannon mounted on concrete blocks set upon the crests of the hills that half-encircled the town. Caverns and vaulted tunnels linked these emplacements, and huge underground shelters carved out of solid rock protected the stores of powder and shell. Near-impregnable quarters for the gunners had also been dug into the sides of the hills.