.]
Wagner
Thankful for What at Home We Feed Pigs

Now, although Archangel was the chief port of entry for military
supplies to the new Russian government, the geographical situation of
the northern province, or rather state, of Archangel had left it rather
high and dry in the hands of a local government, which, so distantly
affiliated with Moscow and Petrograd, did not reflect fully either the
strength or weaknesses of the several regimes which succeeded one
another at the capital between the removal of the Czar and the machine
gun assumption of control by the bloody pair of zealots and tricksters,
Lenine and Trotzky. Consequently, when Kerensky disappeared the
government at Archangel did not greatly change in character.

To be sure, it had no army or military force of its own. The central
government sent north certain armed Red Guards, and agents of government
called "commissars," who were to organize and control additions to the
Red Guards and to supervise also the civil government of Archangel
state, as much as possible. These people of the northern state were
indeed jealous of their rights of local government. And the work of the
Red agents in levying on the property and the man-power of the North was
passively resisted by these intelligent North Russians.

All this was of great interest to the Allied Supreme War Council because
of the danger that the war supplies would be seized by the rapidly
emboldened Bolshevik government and be delivered into the hands of the
Germans for use against the Allies. For since the Brest-Litovsk treaty
it had appeared from many things that the crafty hand of Germany was
inside the Russian Bolshevik glove.

Moreover, there were in North Russia, as in every other part, many
Russians who could not resign themselves to Bolshevik control, even of
the milder sort, nor to any German influence. Those in the Archangel
district banded themselves together secretly and sent repeated calls to
the Allies for help in ridding their territory of the Bolshevik Red
Guards and German agents, using as chief arguments the factors above
mentioned. While the anti-Bolshevists were unwilling to unmask in their
own state, for obvious reason, their call for help was made clear to the
outside world and furnished the Allied Supreme War Council just the
pretext for the expedition which it was planning for a purely military
purpose, namely, to reconstruct the old Eastern fighting front.

In fact, when a surv