From the BBC World Service, welcome to the latest edition of the documentary

podcast. Every week we bring you a range of stories from our presenters and

reporters across the world. Please do rate the documentary on your podcast app and leave a

comment. Let us know what you think. Hi I'm Lucy Ash. Thanks for downloading

this podcast from the BBC World Service. In the second part of the Red and the White, we revisit a story

long pushed under the carpet of history. Of course, I've read many accounts of the Soviet

Gulag,

but I was pretty shocked to find that Russia's first concentration camp

on an island in the White Sea was actually set up by the British.

So here's the story. I hope it interests you.

Would an overcoat. Wooden overcoats, slang for coffins is the title of this song from a popular Soviet film called

Intervention. In the Communist era anti-Bolshevik forces, the so-called whites, were invariably

portrayed as brutal and duplicitous, the types to offer you a cigarette and then take your life.

Those sneaky counter-revolutionaries weren't acting alone. This song is about a military intervention

by thousands of British and Allied forces in North Russia just after the revolution.

I'm Lucy Ash and in the second part of this BBC World Service series The Red and the White,

I want to discover more about this little known and ill-fated enterprise at the tail end of the First World War. It's a story about

what gets remembered and what forgotten. My producer Natalia Golicheva, a native of the

regional capital Arangelsk, says that many Russians, including

her own family, preferred not to talk about what happened up here near the Arctic Circle.

We're on a green boat called the Viesna, springtime. The last hour we've been going up the river Dvina past shipyards and sawmills, thousands of logs floating

in the water.

...