WHY SIBERIA?
CANADIAN FOREIGN POLICY AND SIBERIAN INTERVENTION, 1918-19
P. Whitney Lackenbauer, University of Waterloo
©April 1998 published on Canadian Military Heritage Project with author’s permission
Page Four continued from “The limited Canadian role was hardly romantic, nor could it be sold to the Canadian public as essential. ……”
From a structure standpoint, Elmsley immediately recognized that the Canadian military command in Siberia was not as autonomous as anticipated. As head of a “British” contingent, the Canadian major-general was under the operational direction of the War Office in London and ultimately subordinate to General Otani, the Japanese commander whose Siberian contingent was the largest. The arrangement was clearly based upon the system of control that had been used for the Canadian force in France. However, in the Siberian case, there was a fundamental difference; Canadians represented the major component of the imperial force, making the military command situation less favourable to the Canadian government. Political and military officials in Canada insisted that the Canadian general “should have in effect a power of veto in respect to the commitment of his force to operations, and should possess at all times the right of communication with and appeal to his own government.”(28) In reality this was not the case. The presence of a Canadian at the head of a British contingent was prestigious, but the military command structure limited the amount of real decision-making power available to him.
The promotion of potential economic benefits in Siberia was a key selling point to the Canadian public. This impetus for participation, however, became less viable. As Dana Wilgress, one of the commissioners, reminisced in 1967, “optimism and naiveté” dominated Canadian and Allied thinking regarding their ambitious ideas for the Siberian market. The railway into the interior was overloaded with the transport of war supplies to the front four thousand miles away; there was no means of moving trade goods. Furthermore, the Allies could not bring “order out of the chaos” because jealousies and distrust between the nations involved meant that “no country would allow another to assume responsibility for reorganizing the railway.”(29)
In early 1919, Canadian commissioner A.D. Braithwaite ventured into the interior of Siberia to investigate the economic situation. His observations were pessimistic: the economy was deteriorating and increasingly chaotic, inflation was out of control, many different currencies (including those of the Romanov, Kerensky, Siberian, and Bolshevik regimes) were circulating, the value of outstanding notes was over six hundred times the value of the reserves of the State Bank, and the Siberian government had no means of obtaining foreign exchange.(30) “Weird proposals for barter trade were seriously discussed” but did not bear fruit, and Braithwaite’s proposals for stabilizing the currency and inflation were not adopted.(31) These factors undermined the tenuous justification for Canadian involvement.
Domestic considerations also came to bear on Canada’s participation. Censorship and heavy fighting on the Western Front during the final stages of the European war initially diverted public interest away from Canadian involvement in Russia. Armistice, however, ended public apathy and critical attention turned to the northeast and Canada’s role in the postwar world. With the conclusion of the Great War, domestic discontent towards Russian intervention became increasingly aroused. Visible opposition manifested a pervasive sense that Canadian military participation overseas was no longer desired, especially when it involved conscripts. For example, on 21 December 1918, a small number of French Canadian troops bound for Vladivostok refused to board a ship in Victoria, B.C.(32) They blatantly refused to participate. Furthermore, when soldiers returned to Canada from the Western front in late 1918 and early 1919, they were greeted by a depressed economy, massive unemployment and inflation in a country that was not prepared for their return. Mounting labour unrest focused government attention away from international considerations and toward issues of domestic stability and national unity. Some of the increasingly vocal and active revolutionary industrial labour groups in Canada embraced the Siberian expeditionary campaign as a grievance, marrying what was seen to be Canadian imperialism and oppression abroad with their own domestic concerns [see appendix A].(33)
The federal government faced pressures to withdraw on several fronts. The international and domestic settings placed the Borden government in a tenuous position. Canada seemed to be caught in the middle of the two great English-speaking powers.
By early 1919, Major-General Elmley was convinced that interventionist policy was bankrupt because two conflicting Allied policies were being pursued in Siberia: the Anglo-French policy advocated active intervention; the American, Czechoslovak, Japanese, and Canadian policy did not. The Canadian commander firmly believed that the aggressive British perspective, by this point openly advocating the suppression of communism, could only lead to further trouble. He wrote the following to a close collegue in Britain:
The past has shown that neither [Britain] nor France can take an unduly prominent part in Russia’s affairs without danger of having the brand of Imperialism placed upon your actions and thereby giving our home Bolsheviks material for initiating industrial unrest. Adopt a more conciliatory attitude towards America, Japan and Canada. Modern nations can be led but not driven.(34)
Canada’s senior military official in Siberia had become committed to and would aligned with the American policy position. Popular protest against the intervention continued to gain momentum and, as George Stanley succinctly explained, the “real aims of the communist revolutionaries had not emerged in sharp relief, and there was widespread sympathy for what appeared to many to be a liberal revolt against a decadent and autocratic regime.”(35)
Even the Toronto Globe, usually a strong supporter of Borden’s Union government, had began to speak out against intervention by November 1918. The impact of labour unrest and domestic pressures to withdraw appeared more important than some historians have suggested; nevertheless, the Winnipeg General Strike of May 1919 showed that Canada’s internal cleavages were widening and deepening substantially. Compounded by concerns over the moral and legal right to send conscripts to Siberia (given that the war had ended), the memories of the 1917 conscription crisis still very fresh, left the government little choice but to withdraw or reopen these “painful divisions within the Dominion.”(36)
ENDNOTES
28. Stacey, 279.
29. Wilgress, 364-367.
30. Murby, 390-391. Percentage calculated from statistics provided by Murby.
31. Wilgress, 367.
32. William Rodney, Review of Allied Intervention in Russia, 1918-19: And the Part Played By Canada by John Swettenham, Canadian Historical Review, XLIX, 2 (1968), 186. While in Victoria, Bolshevik sympathizers organized meetings to try and agitate desertion amongst the soldiers. These efforts were largely unsuccessful, and appeared to be a distinct phenomena from the French Canadian disenchantment described above. MacLaren, 152.
33. The strongest proponent of the idea that labour unrest and popular discontent forced the government to abandon the Siberian campaign was Tim Buck. He overstated the case but certainly had a point. See, for example, Buck 44-49.
34. Major-General Elmsley to General Radcliffe, War Office, London, 6 February 1919, quoted in MacLaren, 190; quoted as same but dated 19 January 1919 in Smith, “Canada and the Siberian Intervention,” 874. This earlier January date is more likely correct as the content of the letter better fits the context at this time.
35. Stanley, 335.
36. MacLaren, 158, 171.
Continue reading CANADIAN FOREIGN POLICY AND SIBERIAN INTERVENTION, 1918-19 page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4, page 5, page 6, Appendix A, Appendix B, Bibliography