During 1918 the British, with a diminishing naval presence in the Baltic Sea – diminishing to invisibility by April – saw the collapse of her two naval rivals in that sea. Russia had indeed begun to decline into confusion during 1917, and by 1918 was paralysed by internal disputes rising to civil war; Germany, having initially taken full advantage of this collapse to break up the Russian Empire, then itself suffered defeat and internal collapse. Of the Baltic navies, the Russian fleet remained theoretically powerful but was in disarray and crippled by political conflict and indecision; the German fleet was ‘interned’ in the British base at Scapa Flow, and eventually sank itself in 1919. In the meantime the armistice terms agreed in France in November 1918 included several items that opened the Baltic to Allied ships, and on 22 November the British sent a force of cruisers, destroyers and minesweepers, commanded by Rear-Admiral Edwyn Alexander-Sinclair, into the sea.

The political and military situation that this force found in the Baltic was confused in the extreme, so Sinclair’s orders were as vague as possible: ‘to show the British flag and support British policy as circumstances dictate’; the Admiralty added that ‘a Bolshevik man-of-war operating on the coast of the Baltic provinces must be assumed to be doing so with hostile intent and should be treated accordingly’. None of these instructions were at all clear, of course, and even the Admiralty’s apparent amplification of the Foreign Office’s original instructions was unclear, even ambiguous. From the beginning, therefore, Sinclair (and his successor) was operating in the same vague and woolly atmosphere as every other British commander in the Baltic.

The basic difficulty was that the British government was itself operating in a very confused situation. Not only did it suddenly have to cope with peace instead of war, but its allies were now seeking their own advantage much more openly than during the fighting, Ireland descended into civil war during 1919, and the members of the government were in disagreement over the government’s own intentions. This was all made worse by having to deal with the revolutionary situation in Russia. It is hardly surprising that Sinclair’s instructions were vague, since they were based on a toxic mixture of ignorance, anti-revolutionary fervour and disagreement in London.