By the middle of May the entire force, moving eastward to the Pacific, was strung out in detachments across 5,000 miles of railway from Kazan to Vladivostok, a natural prey to anxiety and rumour. In point of fact, the story of a new German "mobili zation" was found by Anglo-American military investigators to have no more justification than the enrolment of some 1,50o ex soldiers of the Central Powers who had renounced their allegiance to join the Red Army; but the Czechs were in no position to judge. On May 14 one of their detachments met a train-load of Austro-German prisoners being repatriated in accordance with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. A fracas ensued, with bloodshed which involved the local Red forces.
Moscow at once demanded that the Czechs fulfil their pledge to surrender their arms. They refused, and on May 29 forcibly resisted attempts to carry out the disarmament order. In June they fought the Bolsheviks openly throughout Siberia, and the local soviets were powerless against their disciplined troops. At the end of the month their Vladivostok contingent overthrew the soviet there and set up an anti-Bolshevik Government with the approval of the Allies. By July 31 almost all Siberia was changed from "Red" to "White" and the Czech forces were moving westward to attack the Soviet State.
Death of the Tsar.—The advance of the Czechoslovak and White Russian armies brought death to the ex-Tsar Nicholas II., who with his wife and family had been held under guard for some months at Ekaterinburg in the foothills of the Urals. The local soviet professed to believe that the imperial family was planning to escape to Omsk, where the "White" Admiral Kolchak had established a Counter-Revolutionary Government. Without a trial, the soviet voted to execute "Citizen and Citizeness Romanov, their son and four daughters." The sentence was car ried out on July 18, 1918. When the White forces occupied the city a few weeks later no trace of the victims was found. In burnt patches in the woods jewels belonging to the Tsaritsa were said to have been identified. According to the story current in Russia the bodies were stripped and buried in peat-bogs and their clothing, into which the jewels may have been sewn, burnt separately.
Intervention.—The month of August saw intervention in full swing. On the 2nd the British, who had already landed forces at Murmansk to prevent war supplies from falling into German hands, disembarked 2,000 men at Archangel, who overthrew the local soviet and set up a Provisional Government of the North.
A few days later British and French contingents landed at Vladi vostok, followed by a Japanese division on Aug. 12 and by two American regiments from the Philippines on the 15th and 16th. Western Siberia was already in the hands of the Czechs and a number of anti-Soviet Governments. On Aug. 24, Anglo-Japanese troops crushed Red resistance in the maritime provinces in a battle on the Ussuri River. Chita was captured on Sept. 6, and organized Soviet government beyond the Urals disappeared. The Czechs had seized the chief cities of the northern Volga and an anti-Soviet army was marching from the Cossack provinces of the Don. The British in the north were preparing to move southwards to join the Czechs and the Siberian Whites.
At the beginning of the autumn the tide turned. The Bolsheviks threw back the Czechs at the end of Sept. 1918, and halted the White advance from the Don. As Germany weakened on the western front, the Baltic provinces, Finland and the Ukraine lost her support. Turkey was on the verge of capitulation, and Turkish and German control over the Caucasus was vanishing. Lenin's prediction was coming true; the Central Powers and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk were crumbling together, and the European Revolution appeared to be at hand. When the German sailors in Kiel raised the red flag on Nov. 9, 1918, the Soviet Government saluted the event with triumph.
The Bolsheviks had still to reckon with the Allies. The autumn of 1918 saw the reinforcement of foreign forces on Russian soil. By the end of the year there were approximately 15,000 British and American troops occupying a fan-shaped area in northern Russia, not less than 70,000 Japanese holding the important strategic points of eastern Siberia and the maritime provinces, 7,00o Americans protecting the Trans-Siberian and Chinese East ern Railways, and about the same number of British supporting and instructing the armies of Admiral Kolchak, who had become dictator of the so-called "All-Russian Government" of Siberia by a coup d'etat at Omsk on Nov. 18. The Czechoslovak commander, General Gaida, upheld Kolchak, but the Czechs were disillusioned and soon ceased to be a factor in Russian affairs. The French had occupied Odessa with a powerful fleet and a mixed force from Salonika.