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About the time of the Bolo General's brilliant smash through our line and capture of Bolsheozerki, menacing Obozerskaya, a few little outbursts were put down in Archangel. A few dozen rusty rifles were confiscated. Major Young laid elaborate plans for the, to him, imminent riot at Smolny.
However, as a matter of history the facts must be told in this volume. "I" Company of the 339th Infantry, commanded by Captain Horatio G. Winslow, was on the 30th of March stationed at Smolny Barracks, Archangel, Russia. It had been resting for a few days there after a long period of service on the front.
A few days earlier Lenin left Finland and was hiding in the outskirts of the city, in the workingmen's quarters. On the evening of the 25th, he came secretly to the Smolny. According to newspaper information, it seemed to him that the issue would be a temporary compromise between ourselves and the Kerensky Government.
On the evening of the 5th of September, while the American soldiers were patrolling the Smolny area, near Archangel proper, this Col. Tschaplin executed his coup d'etat. He quietly surrounded the homes of Tchaikowsky and other members of the Archangel State Government and kidnapped them, hiding them away on an island in the Dvina River. Great excitement prevailed for several days.
December 18. The trail was an improved government road. The sun was on our right hand but very low. The fire station of Smolny at last dropped out of the rearward view. The road ran crooked, like the Dvina along whose hilly banks it wound. A treat to our boys to see rolling, cleared country. Fish towns and lumber towns on the right. Hay stacks and fields on the left, backed by forests.
Poor management by high American and British officers at one time, to the writer's knowledge, suffered American soldiers at Smolny to be actually endangered in health. As far as proper heating of quarters was concerned men at the front provided better for themselves than did the commander at Smolny, Major Young, provide for those fighters in from the fighting front for rest.
But on the whole the British ration did not satisfy the American soldier. This leads to a good story. One day during the Smolny riot-scare the writer with a group of non-commissioned officers in going all over the area to discover its possibilities for tactics and strategy, visited the Russian Veterinarian School.
On January 18th, 1919, a ward was opened at Olga Barracks which accommodated twenty-five patients. These patients were rationed by Headquarters Company and reported for sick call at the infirmary located in the same building. On March 11th, 1919, an Annex was opened at Smolny Barracks with eighty beds. For this purpose a barracks formerly occupied by enlisted men was remodelled.
Their leader, Kornilov, staff-commandant of the Red Guards of the Rojdestvensky quarter, made a speech to the delegates, in which he said that they were to go to the Smolny Institute, to the Bolshevist Congress, assuring them that they had come to this Congress by mistake; at the end he read a document ordering him to make a search of the premises, to confiscate all papers, and to arrest all who would offer resistance.
Meanwhile, without any chaos, without street fights, without firing or bloodshed, the government institutions were occupied one after another by severe and disciplined detachments of soldiers, sailors and Red Guards, in accordance with the exact telephone orders given from the small room on the third floor of the Smolny Institute.
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