Centered in the frozen wind-swept White Sea region, a small force of White troops held out against the Reds with the help of a few thousand Interventionist troops.

When Allied forces landed at the frozen Arctic Circle ports of Murmansk and Archangel on March 2, 1918 to safeguard caches of military supplies that had been sent from them to the Tsar’s army, it effectively forced the local Bolsheviks from the area. The Allied interventionist forces were a polyglot of some British marines, Canadian troops, 5000 American soldiers, and a few thousand Polish, Serbian, and Italian troops. To these were later added 4,000 Romanians who had been reorganized by the French.

This power vacuum allowed a White Russian force under General EK Miller to form in the region. Miller has risen to chief of staff of the Russian 5th Army during World War One. Miller, who was an armored car expert, had been sentenced to death by Bolsheviks and had narrowly escaped them by taking an assignment as the Russian adviser to the Italian Army. He made his way from Italy to Murmansk with Allied help and was made the commander of the small force of Whites there in January 1919. Admiral Kolchak, the White military dictator of Siberia, recognized Miller has head of the White effort in the North Russian region in June 1919. The White Russians missed several opportunities to link up with Kolchak’s forces as they neared Moscow in the southeast that summer* and also failed to make any sort of military pact with the newly-independent Finnish government to the southwest. At the height of the Northern Army’s push in the summer of 1919, elements reached the far shores of Lake Lagoda, which borders the northern suburbs of St Petersburg. They however were not able to link with General Yudenich's White Army south of the city. If either of these tasks had been accomplished the Russian Civil War and communism itself may have ended differently.

General Miller’s force never numbered more than 20,000 at any given time and fought a score of small pinprick fights against poorly-equipped Reds in the area. This force had very poor discipline and it was only with great difficulty that the troops could be coaxed to do anything but stay in their garrisons. British General Maynard declared it 'one of the most motley forces ever created for the purpose of military operations;' The only reliable units were a regiment of Karelian Finns, force of former Reds led by British officers known as the Slavo-British Legion and a sub-brigade sized group of stranded cavalrymen from the Caucasus mountain region known as the White Sea Mountain Cavalry Regiment. When the Allied forces that Miller depended on for support, arms and munitions withdrew from Russia in September 27, 1919 he knew his days were numbered and he evacuated with his band of 800 remaining followers by ship from Archangel to Tromso in Norway on February 19, 1920. The last of the White movement in Murmansk lasted unit March 14th when Murmansk fell to the Reds. The Whites from these ports immigrated in a large group to Canada. General Miller went on to become active in the White Russian Army in-exile and was kidnapped in 1937 in France by Soviet agents.

* It is known that a unit of skiers from Millers forces met a mounted reconnaissance team from Kolchak's Army near Viatka (now Kirov), 600 miles south from Archangel and west of the Urals in March 1919 but the main forces never came within 200 miles of each other.

Sources for this and other articles in this series

Valeri Claving, Civil war in Russia : White Army. .2003.

Denikin, Anton I. The White Army. Translated by Catherine Zvegintsov. Jonathan Cape, 1930.

Footman, David. Civil War in Russia. Faber and Faber, 1961.

Kenez, Peter. Civil War in South Russia, 1918: The First Year of the Volunteer Army. University of California Press, 1971.

Kenez, Peter. Civil War in South Russia, 1919-1920: Defeat of the Whites. University of California Press, 1977.

Luckett, Richard. The White Generals: An Account of the White Movement and the Russian Civil War. Longman, 1971.

Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War. Allen & Unwin, 1987.

Stewart, George. The White Armies of Russia: A Chronicle Counter-Revolution and Allied Intervention. Macmillan, 1933.

AI Deryabin The Russian Civil War (four volumes) by, AST Moscow, Translated by Thomas Hillman.

Alexis Wrangel General Wrangel: Russia’s White Crusader Hippocrene Books, Inc., New York, New York, 1987