J. KIM MUNHOLLAND

THE FRENCH ARMY AND INTERVENTION IN SOUTHERN RUSSIA

1918-1919

Allied intervention in the Russian Revolution and civil war continues to fascinate historians and to provoke lively controversy over Allied policy. One episode of the intervention that has been vigorously criticized from diverse viewpoints was the French decision to send an Allied military force into the Ukraine and the Crimea during the winter and spring of 1918-1919. While differing in their explanations, western and Soviet historians are virtually unanimous in describing the French intervention in Southern Russia as a failure. A leading Soviet historian has attributed this failure to war-weariness and mutinies among the Allied troops, an inability of French leaders to chose among the conflicting anti-Bolshevik movements, and to the effectiveness of the Bolshevik- led resistance.1 For most western historians French military intervention appeared to have been badly organized, insufficiently supplied, and ill-defined in its objectives. In a severely critical assessment Peter Kenez has observed that French leadership failed to match its policy with the resources necessary for success, thereby casting doubts upon its own competence, and John Reshetar has dismissed the operation as "a French fiasco."2 Only one historian so far has argued that French policy was not an unrelieved catastrophe, but this assessment was made without benefit of French archival sources that recently have been opened to scholars.3 Most western accounts rely heavily upon memoirs of participants sympathetic to the Volunteer cause and upon documents brought to the west by white émigrés after the defeat of anti-Bolshevik forces. These memoirs and documents reflect the biases and frustrations of the Volunteers who were bitterly critical of French policies in Southern Russia.

Although any attempt to improve the tarnished image of French actions may be difficult, the opening of French military and diplomatic archives permits at least a clearer understanding of the influences that shaped French behavior during these turbulent days. This evidence suggests that intervention in Southern Russia was initially conceived along lines of a pre-war "colonial" expedition whereby French leaders hoped to acquire political (a Bolshevik defeat) and economic (a sphere

Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, XXII (1), janv.-mars iç8i, pp. 43-66.