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the Germans only when in 1917 revolution had brokendown the army and navy. The treaty of Brest-Litovsk(March 1918) left the door wide open for German designsin the Baltic provinces, which the Bolshevik governmenthad to cede, and in Finland, where independence hadalready been proclaimed and German troops landed toaid General Mannerheim, the leader of the FinnishWhites, in implacable civil war against the Reds, in partRussians, but mostly Finns themselves.Defeat in the West ruined German designs in theBaltic lands, but the Bolsheviks now had to face nationalindependence movements and Allied intervention inplace of German. The Russian Whites in Estonia,assisted by British men-of-war, organized two mostdangerous attacks upon Petrograd at the height of theCivil War (1919). Allied forces under British commandwere in occupation of Murmansk (as well as Arkhangel),Russia's one ice-free port, and of the railway to it fromPetrograd, until early in 1920 they were forced toevacuate. The Finns strove to make good in borderwarfare their claims in Karelia, which at their maximuminvolved the cutting of the Murmansk railway (seemap 1).The Bolsheviks were too exhausted to continue theirefforts to enforce their own interpretation of selfdeterminationin the Baltic states and Finland, and theyrecognized their independence and the new frontiers in1920. The Soviet foothold on the Baltic was confinedto a narrow, ice-bound loophole at the eastern extremityof the gulf of Finland, all the more difficult to defendwith the rapid growth of air-power. The Estonianboundary was less than ninety miles from Petrograd,the Finnish but twenty-three. The Bolsheviks could notforget that it was first Germany that had split off theBaltic provinces and Finland and used them as steppingstones for the defeat of Russia and the Revolution, thenGreat Britain and France that had aided their independenceand used them as bases for counter-revolution orthe cordon sanitatre. They could not forget the dangersthat had beset Leningrad during the maelstrom years.Leningrad, thus renamed in 1924 on the death of251