The Journal of Slavic Military Studies | 2019
Australia and Russia’s Civil War: Few Lessons to Be Learned
Abstract
The Australian role in the Russian intervention from 1917 to 1920 is perhaps the least known episode in the nation’s military history. Jeffrey Grey argued that its obscurity is due to the fact that ‘the Australians involved fought as part of imperial, rather than Australian, units’, making it difficult to identify individual Australians. Moreover, in the inter-war period, the Australian archives destroyed documents relating to the intervention, including the papers of Captain Ernest Latchford, an Australian officer who served with the British Military Mission in Siberia. The Australian military contribution to the Russian intervention took four forms. The first— and the most identifiably Australian — was the deployment of seven Royal Australian Navy (RAN) warships to the Black Sea in November and December 1918. The second was the approximately 100 Australian soldiers who volunteered to serve in Northern Russia with the British Army, mostly with the 45th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, and the 201st Special Battalion, Machine Gun Corps. The third was the 48 Australian officers and sergeants attached to Dunsterforce who deployed to the Middle East with the aim of preventing Ottoman and Bolshevik forces gaining control in Mesopotamia, Persia, and Transcaucasia. The fourth and final role was the attachment of a small number of Australian advisers to the British Military Mission in support of Russian Admiral Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak in Siberia. With the armistice on 11 November 1918, Australian Prime Minister William Morris Hughes’s main concern was not supporting the Russian intervention but ensuring the speedy homeward return of Australian troops to ensure this would not become a political issue, as the government faced a national election on 13 December 1919. Nonetheless, the Russian Civil War did find an echo in the Australian state of Queensland. Here, conservatives, including former soldiers opposed to the Labor government, attacked members of the local Russian community in the state capital of Brisbane on 23 March 1919, in what became known as the ‘Red Flag Riots’.