ABSTRACT
On April 15, the General Staff completed a major paper on British policy in North Russia. The British Government, it was assumed, wished the Allied withdrawal to be carried out ‘with as little loss of prestige as may be, and to avoid a repetition of the pitiable exhibition recently afforded by the sauvequi-peut at Kherson and Odessa’. By then, therefore, both the Archangel Government and the North Russian troops must be able to stand alone. But to make ‘quite certain’ of this, it would first be necessary to strike a ‘sharp and succesful’ blow at the Bolshevik forces, to secure a ‘real and permanent’ link with the Siberian Army, and to provide British officers and NCOs to ‘organise, instruct and lead’ the North Russian troops. If the first and second conditions were fulfilled, the desired result would ‘almost certainly’ be achieved; if only the first and third, it ‘may possibly’; if neither, the ‘fall of the Archangel Government and the disintegration of the anti-Bolshevik forces may be reckoned on as certain’, warned the General Staff.1
