The day before the armistice on 11 November 1918, Winston Churchill told the British War Cabinet, ‘We might have to build up the German Army, as it is important to get Germany on her legs again for fear of the spread of Bolshevism.’ From the start Churchill had been appalled by the revolutionary movement that destroyed tsarism and convulsed Russia, regarding it as a reversion to bestial savagery that threatened to consume the world. ‘Civilisation is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas,’ he declared, ‘while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.’ Lloyd George reckoned that Churchill’s aristocratic blood revolted at the murder of so many grand dukes. Churchill himself coined the slogan ‘Kill the Bolshie. Kiss the Hun.’ 

In the aftermath of the armistice he moved heaven and earth to engage Britain in the civil war raging in Russia. His aim was to augment the small contingent of British troops guarding military stores in Murmansk and Archangel so as to tip the scales against the Red Army. And