On 20 July [1918], British forces moved to occupy Archangel, the first open Allied offensive. They backed the local White Guard (anti-Bolshevik) revolt and overthrew the local Soviets. By the end of the year 14,000 troops were there, from Britain, the USA, France, Italy and Serbia.As the Allied war against Germany ended in November 1918, the Soviet government was still in power, defending Russia’s national independence. When it was clear that the German army was beaten, the Soviet government offered to negotiate peace with the Allies.But the Allies rejected this peace proposal. Instead the British government organised and led a much bigger invasion force into Russia – eventually some 180,000 Allied troops (60,000 British) from sixteen countries across six fronts. And in addition 70,000 Japanese troops intervened in Siberia....The Allies and their White Russian friends committed war crimes on a vast scale, only ever matched by Hitler’s later assault. Allied officers instructed their soldiers “…to take no prisoners, to kill them even if they came in unarmed.”#Churchill was well aware of the Whites’ massacres of Jews, but denied all the reports, claiming that in White-held territory “protection was always accorded to the Jewish population”. Stopping military aid, he warned, would deprive Britain of the leverage to “exercise a moderating influence”.In the Sunday Herald, Churchill asserted that “International and terrorist Jews were plotting worldwide revolution.” The White conviction that Jews masterminded the Revolution fed into Nazism via émigré organisations in Munich and Berlin.The British government had spent £100 million on the war. The war killed 1.35 million Russians and crippled three million. Another 14 million people died of starvation, cholera, typhus and “Spanish flu”.
