 Starting in 1919, the French Navy joined the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War in the Black Sea to support the Whites against the Red Bolsheviks. Waldeck-Rousseau arrived in early 1919, flying the flag of Admiral Caubet. While in Odessa on 26 – 29 April 1919, sailors aboard Waldeck-Rousseau mutinied; the ship, which had just arrived from France with a fresh crew, had not yet had contact with Russian revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the crew had quickly grown weary of poor living conditions and wanted to return to France. After three days, the unrest was suppressed and she returned to service, though Caubet was relieved of command for failing to control his crew. The Vietnamese communist Tôn Đức Thắng, who was at that time serving in the French Navy, claimed to have participated in the mutiny, but French records do not list him as having been aboard Waldeck-Rousseau at the time. At the same time, the crews of other French ships in Constantinople became restive, and so Admiral Jean-Françoise-Charles Amet refused to allow Waldeck-Rousseau to join the rest of the fleet there, owing to her crew's earlier mutiny.
