Murmansk Venture Book

The icy northern Russian port of Murmansk was the scene of one part of the international intervention by an array of western nations at the end of the Great War in a doomed bid to overturn the Bolshevik regime which had seized control of Russia in 1917. Britain sent a task force to Murmansk to aid White Russian troops battling the Bolsheviks, and this book tells how they fared. Written by the commander of the force, Major-General Sir Charles Maynard, this book tells the full story of the inglorious expedition. Maynard's force was sent to Murmansk late in the Great War to deny the port and its facilities to the Germans after they had concluded the Treaty of Brest-LItoskv with the Bolsheviks. A village before the war, Murmansk had increased in importance thanks to the construction of a railway to St Petersburg, making it the best placed port in north-west Russia. After the German surrender, Maynard's tiny force, backed up by small naval and RAF contingents, stayed in the area to help White Russians in their civil war with the Bolsheviks - they succeeded in pushing the Reds south, but withdrew in 1920, with Maynard's only regret being 'That the help we gave fell short of that required to throttle in its infancy the noisome beast of Bolshevism'.