FROM VICTORIA TO VLADIVOSTOK
Benjamin Isitt
Short, inglorious, hugely unpopular at the time and largely forgotten now: most Canadians probably have no idea that, once upon a time, this country invaded Russia. Perhaps it’s the mutiny that’s to blame. As a battalion of 898 men of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (Siberia) marched to a Victoria troopship on Dec. 21, 1918, dissent was very much in the air. The Great War had been over for six weeks but two-thirds of the marchers were conscripts still bound by the Military Service Act of 1917, and most of those draftees were from Quebec, where even the defence of France had found little traction. As for fighting Communism in Russia, the expeditionary force’s purpose, much of Canada’s working class looked on the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution with hopeful eyes. Victoria was full of protest meetings echoing with shouts of “Hands off Russia!” When the troops reached the corner of Fort and Quadra streets, a platoon of Quebecers refused to go further. Their colonel fired his pistol over their heads—in the main street of Victoria, no less—and ordered his more obedient soldiers, mostly from Ontario, to remove their belts and whip the mutineers along. “They did it with a will,” recorded a Toronto lieutenant, and backed by 50 other troops with fixed bayonets, forced everyone on board.
As it began, so the entire shambolic enterprise continued. Some 4,200 Canadians ended up in Vladivostock, where—because of the disorganized state of the railways and the anti-Bolshevik forces the Canadians had come to aid—they did little but garrison the town. By June 1919, the Canadians were home, save the 20 who died, mostly from disease. Isitt’s extensive analysis of why we were there—mostly trying to deprive revolutionary workers at home of an international beacon—is convincing, as is his ironic conclusion: the blatant class warfare of the expedition did more to incite radicalism at home than it did to suppress it in Russia. Less than six months after the Victoria mutiny, a rising tide of industrial unionism would spark the Winnipeg General Strike.
Maclean’s Magazine (Toronto), 28 June 2010, by Brian Bethune
