The initial impetus behind the interventions was to secure munitions and supply depots from falling into the German Empire's hands, particularly after the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and to rescue the Allied forces that had become trapped within Russia after the 1917 October Revolution.

[19] In early 1917 the Russian Empire found itself wracked by political strife – public support for World War I and Tsar Nicholas II had started to dwindle, leaving the country on the brink of revolution.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson dropped his reservations about joining the war with the despotic tsar as an ally, and the United States began providing economic and technical support to Kerensky's government.

According to William Henry Chamberlin, "A few weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, on December 23, 1917, an Anglo-French convention had been concluded in Paris, regulating the future operations of British and French forces on Russian territory.

This convention defined as a British 'zone of influence' the Cossack regions, the territory of the Caucasus, Armenia, Georgia and Kurdistan, while the French zone was to consist of Bessarabia, Ukraine and Crimea.

The Allied Powers felt betrayed and turned against the new regime, aiding its "White" enemies and landing troops to prevent Russian supplies from reaching Germany.

According to William Henry Chamberlin, even before Brest-Litovsk, "Downing Street contemplated a protectorate over the Caucasus and the Quai d'Orsay over Crimea, Bessarabia and Ukraine" and began negotiating deals for funding White generals to bring them into being.

In 1917, the Bolsheviks stated that if the Czechoslovak Legions remained neutral and agreed to leave Russia, they would be granted safe passage through Siberia en route to France via Vladivostok to fight with the Allied forces on the Western Front.

Also worrisome to the Allied Powers was the April 1918 landing of a division of German troops in Finland, increasing speculation they might attempt to capture the Murmansk-Petrograd railway, and subsequently the strategic port of Murmansk and possibly Arkhangelsk.

the Polar Bear Expedition) were sent to Arkhangelsk while another 8,000 soldiers, organised as the American Expeditionary Force Siberia,[33] were shipped to Vladivostok from the Philippines and from Camp Fremont in California.

They desired the establishment of a buffer state in Siberia,[34] and the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff viewed the situation in Russia as an opportunity for settling Japan's "northern problem".

[58] On the Murmansk front, the British 6th Royal Marine Light Infantry Battalion was ordered to seize the village of Koikori on 28 August as part of a wide offensive into East Karelia.

On 27 October, Allied forces were ambushed at Kulika near Topsa, losing at least 27 men killed and dozens wounded, a figure that could have been higher if it had not been for a detachment of Poles who bravely covered the retreat as others panicked.

[104] On 22 September, with the Allied withdrawal already ongoing, a British detachment from the Royal Scots was sent by river to Kandalaksha on four fishing boats to stop sabotage operations carried out by Finnish Bolsheviks against the railway there.

[114] To support the mutiny, a flotilla of British Coastal Motor Boats under the command of Lieutenant Augustus Agar raided Kronstadt Harbour, sinking the cruiser Oleg and the depot ship Pamiat Azova on 17 June 1919.

Gough's deputy, Brigadier Gen. Frank Marsh required Yudenich to immediately issue a statute that would establish the Government of the North-West Russian Region[120] encompassing Petrograd, Pskov and Novgorod Governorates that would officially guarantee de jure recognition of Estonia.

[122] This included small-scale mutinies amongst the crews of HMS Vindictive, Delhi – the latter due in part to the behaviour of Admiral Cowan – and other ships stationed in Björkö Sound.

The causes were a general war-weariness (many of the crews had fought in World War I), poor food and accommodation, a lack of leave, and the effects of Bolshevik propaganda.

The local French commander was allowed to negotiate a truce with Hryhoriv, and on 14–16 March all allied and German troops were evacuated by sea without any fighting, leaving considerable quantities of war material behind.

[34] Britain sent a 1,800-strong unit to Siberia commanded by Labour Party MP and trade union leader Lieutenant Colonel John Ward, which was the first Allied force to land in Vladivostok on 3 August.

In 1917, Dunsterforce, an Allied military mission of under 1,000 Australian, British, and Canadian troops (drawn from the Mesopotamian and Western Fronts), accompanied by armoured cars, deployed from Hamadan some 350 km (220 mi) across Qajar Persia.

[141] The British forces served only a defensive purpose and were withdrawn in the summer of 1919, as regular troops were needed elsewhere and others were long overdue for demobilisation after the Armistice that ended the First World War.

[155] Allied military action began on 11 August 1918, when General Malleson intervened in support of the Ashkhabad Executive Committee, who had ousted the Tashkent Soviet Bolsheviks from the western end of the Trans-Caspian Railway in July 1918 and had taken control of Krasnovodsk.

The Japanese military stayed in the Maritime Provinces of the Russian Far East until 1922 and in northern Sakhalin until 1925, following the signing of the Soviet–Japanese Basic Convention in Beijing, in which Japan agreed to withdraw its troops from Russia.

[167] Modern historian Robert Maddox summarised, "The immediate effect of the intervention was to prolong a bloody civil war, thereby costing thousands of additional lives and wreaking enormous destruction on an already battered society.

He wrote:[169] However, it did succeed in so thoroughly engaging the forces of revolutionary expansionism that the countries of war-torn eastern and central Europe, potentially most susceptible to the Bolshevik contagion, were able to recover enough social and economic balance to withstand Bolshevism.

The interventionist attempt left an ugly legacy of fear and suspicion to future relations between Russia and the other great powers, and it strengthened the hand of those among the Bolshevik leadership who were striving to impose monolithic unity and unquestioning obedience on the Russian people.According to Sheldon M. Stern, Stalinist propaganda later portrayed the Allied intervention as a U.S. military invasion of Russia while denying or minimizing the American famine relief effort that saved millions of Russian lives during 1921–1923.

[170] Winston Churchill, who had been the most prominent supporter of a campaign to remove the Bolsheviks from power, long lamented the Allies' failure to crush the Soviet state in its infancy.

In 1949, Churchill stated to the British Parliament: I think the day will come when it will be recognized without doubt, not only on one side of the House, but throughout the civilized world, that the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.

[171]In a further speech at the National Press Club, Washington D.C., in June 1954, Churchill lamented: If I had been properly supported in 1919, I think we might have strangled Bolshevism in its cradle, but everybody turned up their hands and said, "How shocking!