The Blumkin Project by Christian Salmon

Author:Christian Salmon [Salmon, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

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In the Russian Civil War, 1919 was a pivotal year. For the first six months, White Armies encircled the Soviets’ republic, threatening Petrograd and Moscow. Fighting had destroyed the country’s industrial infrastructure. Natural resources were drying up, and the occupation of Baku deprived the Bolsheviks of the oil that is essential to a wartime army. The cars that Bolshevik commissars drove ran on a mix of turpentine and alcohol. Lacking kerosene, airplanes filled up with a pharmaceutical mixture concocted by chemical engineers. Pistons and connecting rods were lubricated with castor and cotton oils. Marine diesel fuel was rationed, and steam engines were fed dead fish and animal carcasses.

The White Armies led by Denikin, Kolchak, Yudenich, and Wrangel were gaining ground everywhere, backed by the French in the south and west, and by the English in the north and the Urals. The French supported Pilsudski’s Polish troops and Denikin’s army in the Caucasus and the Black Sea coast. The British supported Yudenich and Kolchak in the Urals. Denikin’s soldiers occupied Baku. The Reds lost Kharkov on June 24, and Ekaterinoslav on June 27. Tsaritsyn (the future Stalingrad, the “Red Verdun”) fell under pressure from British artillery and air strikes.

Denikin launched the White Armies’ big offensive on July 3, making no secret of his objective. “We were already choosing which horses we would ride for our triumphant entrance into Moscow,” remembers a British lieutenant who served under Denikin.

The intervention by Allied armies in Russia would reach its greatest intensity in 1919. By the summer, few people were betting on Lenin’s survival. Newspapers in New York, London, and Paris announced Red Army defeats daily. Whether true or not, the reports lent credence to the promise of an imminent victory over Bolshevism.

Every Western government had its wartime hawks, but Winston Churchill, the United Kingdom’s young secretary of state for war, was one of its most rabid. Even Prime Minister Lloyd George was concerned: “He is obsessed by Bolshevism, and absolutely wants to go fight in Russia.” The British press, most of which opposed intervention, spoke of “Mr. Churchill’s personal war.” But Winston stuck to his guns. To the prime minister, who listened with alarm, he declared, “Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevist tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading.” In the House of Commons he proclaimed, “Bolshevism is not a policy; it is a disease…Civilization is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of their cities and the corpses of their victims.” He called them “a league of failures, the criminals, the morbid, the deranged and the distraught”…sustained by “typhus-bearing vermin.”

In fighting that “vermin,” Churchill wanted to pull out all the stops. Researchers at the Porton Down military laboratory had just perfected a secret weapon dubbed Device M: a shell that released a toxic gas derived from arsenic when it exploded. It was intended for use against the rebellious tribes of northern India. The general in charge of its development called it “the most effective chemical weapon ever devised.

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