There is a stereotype in history that in 1918, allegedly with a humanitarian mission, the troops of the United States, Britain, France and Japan invaded the lands of the former Russian Empire to help the White Guards restore tsarist power. In fact, their goal was completely different: to get rid of a powerful world rival, depriving the majestic power of political influence on the world community, and to tear the vast expanse of the country, rich in raw materials, especially furs, oil, gold and timber, to colonial shreds.
Indeed, our country was almost torn apart into occupation zones. Russia was almost turned into a raw material colony of the Entente. Traders from America exported from Siberia and the Far East for next to nothing, and sold valuable furs, timber, grain, black and red caviar in their warehouses. American industrialists also exported manganese from Russia free of charge and illegally to use it in steelmaking. Even the American merchant fleet was formed from the captured fishing vessels of the Russian Northern Fleet.
On the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Anarchists, White Guards, in fact, they did not really give a damn. It is for this reason that their well-equipped and armed forces lost to the young nascent Bolshevik country. For Americans, history textbooks mark these pages not as years of intervention in a foreign country, but as a northern humanitarian expedition. But it is terrifying to read lines from the personal diary of the American Colonel Morrow, which are rarely published anywhere and are not associated with the terrible years of this military "humanitarian" mission. Morrow wrote how his soldiers, during the intervention, already had such mental problems that they were not able to sleep unless they committed some kind of murder during the day. He especially noted in the notes the day on which over one thousand six hundred people were immediately killed,brought to the Andreyanovka execution station in fifty-three cars. Local peasants suspected of a partisan movement were generally buried alive in the ground.
If you delve deeper into the archives of that wartime, it turns out that the troops of the USA, France, and England did not participate in any significant battle at all. What did the invaders really do on the territory of a foreign country?
Such an intervention consisted in the forthcoming secret division of the vast Russian territory, when its opposing sides in the struggle for their regime would weaken, it does not matter "white" or "red". The interventionist countries did not care at all, just to weaken and tear the former great-power Russian empire to pieces, thereby getting rid of a very dangerous and powerful competitor.
The seizure of the northern territories of Russia began with the landing in Murmansk in the spring of 1918 of an English five-thousandth landing, ostensibly to protect warehouses with military equipment from German troops. At that time the First World War was going on.
According to historical information, it was the British generals at the stage of the Boer War of 1901-1902 who thought of placing people in isolated concentration camps. Tallerhof and Terezin were among the first concentration camps in world history. It was they who began to build them in South Africa for the civilian population. Without hesitation, they applied this experience twenty years later and during the capture of the northern regions of Russia. By secretly implementing their policy, the interventionists achieved the introduction of a wartime regime and, for the first time in world history, organized concentration camps for dissidents and strong-minded people on the territory of the Russian island of Mudyug in the Arkhangelsk region. More often it was not called Mudyug, but the island of death for political prisoners. Every day, hundreds of exhausted and tortured people died in the unheated barracks of the concentration camp. The prisoners did not have any food, except for two biscuits given to them a day, there was no opportunity to wash with soap, there was no change of linen and no medical assistance, therefore epidemics of typhus, dysentery, scurvy, dystrophy, and parasitic infection quickly spread among the convicts. In addition, to punish prisoners, a punishment cell was provided in the form of a pit, or rather a mass grave, three meters deep and nine meters wide.
Another camp for the invading American and British invaders, disliked and outraged by the new policy, was organized in the Murmansk region. This Yokang camp, which the locals called the Yokang churchyard, was considered overly cruel. Inhuman torture was used here, and prisoners were regularly shot.
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But half of the insurgent population in the north of Russia could no longer fit in the concentration camps. In this regard, the interventionists in a hurry had to use public premises and decommissioned warships for temporary camps. One of the floating prisons was the old cruiser Chesma, which was a participant in the war between Russia and Japan. In August 1918, in the Kola Bay, he was captured by the interventionists, along with other ships of the combat core of the Arctic Ocean flotilla. Some of the prisoners in the floating prison were taken to England and placed in the Whitley Bay concentration camp.
During the intervention of 1918-1920, thousands of Russian residents from Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok were tortured. Even on the southern outskirts, in Novorossiysk, Saratov and Volgograd, the Entente regiments of conquest settled. In 1920, during the hasty evacuation of the British from Murmansk, their deceitful intentions were eloquently revealed. The invaders flooded everything, and the "allies" got nothing - neither ammunition, nor food supplies.
Even Emperor Alexander III said that Russia has only two of its loyal allies - the army and the Russian fleet. Indeed, for seven decades now, thanks to its nuclear shield, the state has been reliably protected from possible intervention by NATO generals. Having a nuclear shield, a huge country can only collapse from the inside if its main pillars are shaken - the tolerance of nations, civil unity, political stability, that is, if geopolitical "allies" again begin to incite the people to enmity and incite a new civil war. In spite of this, the Russian people must unite in order not to repeat the terrible mistakes of the historical past.