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Hi, I'm Lucy Ash and I've been covering Russia for most of my professional life, but it was only recently

that I heard about the Allied intervention there a hundred years ago. And to be honest with you,

most of my Russian friends in Moscow had never heard of it either.

There are quite a few military memoirs, but it didn't get much coverage from professional historians.

I struggled to find many books about it.

Since this ill-fated military adventure or escapade or whatever you want to call it got underway in the closing weeks of World War I,

it's been described described something like a

side show at a circus where they're already striking the tent. It got little attention.

So I was determined to find out more about it, but it was going to be tricky.

It's the first history dock I've made where all the firsthand witnesses are now dead.

Very luckily I got some help from a colleague here at the BBC, Natalia Golishova, who comes from the Arctic

port of Archangel or Arangask, and from a Moscow-based historian who specializes in the Russian north, Lude Milenovikava.

It's a war that history almost forgot and the Russians never forgave.

I hope you find it interesting.

Alexi just explain what you're doing? My companion, a bespectacled man in army fatigues,

says he's searching the ground with a metal detector to see what lies underneath.

That's a bit of a shell, yeah?

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