Amid the Bolshevik chaos
Pictou County’s connection to the Russian Civil War
On Nov.11, the western world recognized that a century had passed since signing of the Armistice ending the “War to end all wars.”
But it is not well known that for many allied soldiers, including a man with close ties to Pictou County, the war didn’t end with the Armistice. A new conflict had begun in which Canadian soldiers fought and died, and which heralded the beginning of a conflict with Russia that preoccupied the 20th Century, and remains with us today.
That conflict began with the Russian Civil War, which followed the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Few people remember that Canadian, British, French, American, Japanese, Czech and other soldiers were deployed in that war. One of them was Reverend Captain George Farquhar, who later served as minister in St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in New Glasgow from 1920 to 1925.
As a member of the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force, he was sent to Siberia in 1918 with several thousand Canadian troops. He did not return home until the summer of 1919.
In the fall of 1917 Germany and the Allies were locked in a stalemate on the western front. With the Bolshevik withdrawal from the war following the Russian Revolution, German troops were removed from the eastern front and thrown into battle in the west. German offensives in March of 1918 very nearly turned the war in their favour. It seemed imperative that Russia should re-enter the war on the Allied side, to reopen the eastern front.
Within Russia, reactionary movements were growing to challenge Lenin’s Bolsheviks. It was to these ‘White’ forces that the allies turned with aid and assistance, hoping to topple the ‘Reds’ and re-establish a government willing to carry on the fight against Germany. In Siberia, the most important of these White Russian forces was based in Omsk, a Railway town east of the Ural Mountains.
The reason a White Russian government was established in Omsk is a fascinating story in itself. In Russia were tens of thousands of Czech and Slovak soldiers who, during the war, had been unwillingly conscripted to fight in the Austro-Hungarian army. They didn’t want to fight for the AustroHungarian Empire. They wanted to be free of the Empire and establish their own country.
They had surrendered en masse to the Russians, and took up arms against the Germans and Austrians. With the Russian withdrawal from the war, they sought to leave Russia and join the allied forces fighting on the western front. Their only way out of Russia was over the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostock – a seaport on the Russian pacific coast and the terminus of the railway – and then by ship to Europe. But Russia was descending into anarchy, the Bolsheviks were no friends of the Czechs, and the Czechs feared for the security of their route home.
So in an act of extraordinary initiative, the Czechoslovaks took control of many thousands of miles of the Trans-Siberian railway. This allowed White counterrevolutionary groups to spring up in Siberia, and the most prominent of those groups became the White government formed in Omsk under a former Tsarist Admiral, Alexander Kolchak.
In 1918-1919, Kolchak’s forces, based in Omsk and fighting the Bolsheviks on a front on the western side of the Urals, posed the most serious military threat to the Bolsheviks. But as 1918 progressed, the German offensives failed, the war on the western front turned in the Allies’ favour and Germany began to collapse.
The military rationale for allied intervention in Russia, supporting White governments to restore the eastern front, faded. This led to disagreement over allied objectives in Russia. Some, like Churchill, concerned about the new Bolshevik ideology, wanted to “crush infant bolshevism in its cradle.” The Japanese were interested in securing economic and strategic advantages and sent some 70,000 troops to Russia.
President Wilson was reluctant to interfere in Russia’s internal affairs but was concerned about Japanese intentions as well as the fate of the Czech soldiers. He eventually sent 7,000 troops. At Britain’s request, Canada sent several thousand. But there was considerable domestic opposition to this decision.
By the time most Canadian soldiers were sent to Siberia, the Great War was over. Families wanted their boys to come home. Soldiers in Victoria mutinied to protest the deployment. Prime Minister Borden was reluctant to engage Canadian troops in active fighting, and most Canadian soldiers spent a cold, boring winter in Vladivostok, before returning home.
In Northern Russia, in contrast, Canadian soldiers engaged in active fighting along the railway between Murmansk and St. Petersburg, and several were killed in that fighting. Some Canadian soldiers in Vladivostok, were ordered to assist British forces which played a more active role in supporting the White Russian government in Omsk. One of those Canadians was Captain Farquhar.
Farquhar grew up in Hants County. He enlisted in 1915, and saw action at Vimy Ridge and Ypres, where he was gassed and wounded. He joined the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force in September 1918, and sailed to Vladivostok, arriving Oct. 26, then, by train went to Omsk in December with the British Hampshire Regiment. They travelled the 2,200 miles in boxcars in frigid conditions – the temperature dropped to – 58 F and arrived in Omsk in early January 1919.
Farquhar left a detailed journal, and photographs, which record his experiences in Siberia and provide a fascinating insight into the convulsions of the Russian Revolution and civil war.
He described Russia as a land of “extreme contrasts.” In Omsk, where refugees fleeing the Red Terror trebled the city’s population from 200,000 to 600,000 he met Russians who had experienced Bolshevik cruelty first hand and observed their hardships: “It is difficult to see how they manage to live.”
He photographed women in Omsk washing clothes by hand in the ice-covered river. He described Bolshevism as the “most vicious form of anarchy”: “Russia today is held by terror.” But he had little regard for the Russian officer class. One Russian soldier had “the same story as all the Russians of being whipped, beaten and treated brutally by Russian officers.” The officers “seemed to have plenty of money but little else.” In one Siberian town, he noted, the Russian officers “do the night sentry-work. Evidently can’t trust their men.”
When he arrived in Omsk, the city was under martial law. He mentions mutinies: “Russian soldiers killed four officers and deserted…”; alarms, “Alarm in the night, guards doubled and patrol out”; and reprisals, “14 executed for the murder of officers two weeks ago.”
By April, he observed that the Kolchak government was growing stronger: “when first came there were burglaries, robberies and murder. No crime of that sort for over a month.” The White army also seemed to be strengthening; he attended reviews of troops and watched, “Cossacks riding at the gallop, standing up in their saddles with their spears… on the receiving end, a terrifying sight.” Optimistic reports from the front described the successes of White armies. Russian staff officers predicted that, “by spring the Bolshevik will collapse.” Another was not so sure. He was leaving for the United States, “has no faith in Russia.”
He mentions decadence in the Russian Orthodox Church, and corruption in the White government; “pilfering” amidst “a shortage of supplies.” Soldiers at the front were in a “pitiable state.” Wounded soldiers in hospitals “lying on straw, no bandages.” Admiral Kolchak dealt harshly with war profiteers in Ekaterinburg; he “had them shot.” On the train back to Vladivostok he saw, “Bolshevik hanging from trees.” “Neither side takes prisoners.”
National rivalries, presaging what would come later in the century, were apparent in Siberia. The British had “no love for the Japanese and no confidence in them.” “They are overbearing.” The Americans, “are much disliked by the Russians.”
In the spring of 1919, Canada finally bowed to domestic pressure and ordered its troops in Siberia to return home. Soon after, Kolchak’s armies began a long retreat ending in defeat and in Kolchak’s execution in 1920.
Farquhar left Omsk in late April, arriving in Vladivostok in early May, and reaching Winnipeg May 24.
Prior to being discharged, he was tasked with a speaking tour to describe his experiences in Russia to Canadian audiences. At a time of economic depression and Canadian labour unrest, when Bolshevism was attractive to the uninformed, he described its vicious reality.
Later in 1919 he moved with his wife to New Glasgow. When the United Church of Canada was founded in 1925, St. Andrew’s remained Presbyterian. Farquhar, who supported church union, was out of a job. In the 1930s, the heyday of newspapers, he became editor of the Halifax Chronicle. He died in 1975.
The story of Farquhar’s Siberian adventure provides a glimpse into a much-forgotten chapter of Canadian history, in the context of a defining event of the 20th Century.