BOLSHEVIKS IN THE BALTIC:
The forgotten story of World War 1.
So, here we go then, into what looks like 4 years of centenary commemoration for ‘the war to end all wars’. All the major TV historians will be working flat out on commissions for programmes which will tell us all about the horrors Tommy Atkins had to face, and expand in detail on such disasters as the Somme and Passchendaele. No doubt they’ll be looking at Gallipoli and Scapa Flow.
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| Russian Navy Sailors re-name their ship Pamyat Azova during the revolution in Reval (Tallin) in 1917. |
And in the midst of all this, will we be looking at the biggest social upheaval during this tragic conflict - the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which saw a battered, disintegrating Russia pull out of the war, opting for a challenging peace, thus leaving the rest of us with no ally in the east? I hope so. Then again, some will ask if this had anything to do with Britain’s part in the war. The answer is yes.
For 200 Royal Navy Sailors who served in the Baltic Submarine Flotilla between 1914-1918, life may not have been as excessively grim as it was for those poor souls in the trenches. Yet the combination of submarine warfare, the vicious frozen Baltic winters and, in 1917, the outbreak of the Revolution, which saw their Russian allies suddenly turn on their Tsarist officers in a murderous mass mutiny, all contributed to a complex, hidden chapter of the Great War which has always been overlooked.
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| Cromie's sub HMS E19 in the frozen Baltic ... would you like ice with that? |
NEGLECTED HERO
The central figure in this story is Captain Francis Newton Allen Cromie, CB DSO RN, who took over command of the Baltic Flotilla from Commander Max Horton in 1915. Cromie remains a true British hero, yet today he is largely forgotten. The next four years may offer a chance for this situation to be rectified. Teetotal, fluent in Russian, he had been in command of a submarine at the age of 24. He’d fought with the Naval Brigades as an 18 year old Midshipman in the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and received the China Medal. He also received the Royal Humane Society’s Bronze Medal for risking his own life to save a drowning sailor in the Channel. He was a skilled watercolour artist, a great orator and raconteur, and his skills as a mediator earned him the sobriquet among some sailors and diplomats as ‘the Navy Blue Pimpernel’.
He stepped in on various occasions and, by power of persuasive argument, saved the lives of numerous Russian sailors who fell under the threat of the commissars of the new, fledgling Soviet Navy. He was decorated by Tsar Nicholas II with the equivalent of the Russian VC, the Order of St. George, received the Legion of Honour from the French, and is the only man to receive a posthumous CB from George V. On one day in October 1915, in charge of his submarine, HMS E19, he sank five enemy vessels. He also sank the German cruiser, the Undine. Cromie was respected by Trotsky and Lenin, but when the Russians pulled out of the war and succumbed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, one of the conditions was that Cromie’s subs were to be surrendered to the Germans. Yet although Cromie was offered massive personal sums by the White Finns for his 7 submarines, he remained loyal to the Admiralty, took the boats out into the Gulf of Finland and scuppered them all.
Cromie could have come home with his men, but he opted to stay behind in Russia, ostensibly to carry on his war. The upper-class staff at the British Embassy had fled back to the UK in the face of the revolution, so Cromie, designated ‘Naval Attaché’ took over the Petrograd embassy building as de-facto representative of the crown. Yet his real reason for remaining in Petrograd was his love affair with Sonia Gagarin, a beautiful Petrograd socialite. Once Cromie had becomed entangled with an allied plot in 1918 to ferment counter-revolution against the Bolshevik government, he found himself out of his depth, dealing with the cream of British Military Intelligence, such as Ian Fleming’s original inspiration for James Bond, the so-called ‘Ace of Spies’ Sidney Reilly, and the British envoy Robert Bruce-Lockhart. Tricked into a compromising situation by wily Bolshevik agents, who knew of the allied plans to land troops in Murmansk in an attempt to unseat Lenin, Red Guards invaded the British Embassy in Petrograd on August 31st 1918. Cromie, a hero to the end, died from a bullet to the head, fighting on the embassy’s grand staircase, pistol in hand. He is buried in an un-marked grave in St. Petersburg’s Lutheran cemetery.
When his cortege passed along the banks of the Neva, the somewhat slovenly revolutionary sailors of the fledgling Soviet Navy, lounging on moored destroyers along the embankment, spontaneously formed disciplined ranks and gave him a final salute. Above all else, he had been a fellow sailor, a fair man, respected by all, no matter what their politics.
Back in England Cromie’s wife, probably unaware of his romantic dalliance in Russia, collected his posthumous CB from King George. Churchill referred to him as ‘a man of great ability’. And then, he became little more than a footnote in British history. Hopefully, this will change.