A Nasty Little War: The West’s fight to reverse the Russian Revolution

This article is from Military History Matters issue 138

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REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON

Throughout the Cold War, various American presidents liked to say that the West and the Soviet Union had never fought one another directly, with the obvious implication being that they wanted to keep it that way. But this was not strictly true: in the aftermath of the First World War, America, along with Britain, France, and several other Allied nations, sent troops to Russia in a half-hearted attempt to reverse the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The ‘Intervention’, as it was portentously called, is the subject of this new book by Anna Reid, author of previous histories of Leningrad and Ukraine.

As Reid writes, the memory of this ignominious little enterprise was erased almost as soon as it was over. No official histories were published, nor were any medals awarded or statues erected. The Intervention’s authors and key actors mostly omitted mention of it from their memoirs, while the list of the dead was lumped in with the many thousands of victims of the First World War.

The episode was further eclipsed by subsequent events, including the Soviet Union’s slow destruction of the Third Reich over a four-year period two decades later. With that war in mind, it seems laughable that the West ever seriously attempted to take on the Bolsheviks directly, especially with such small numbers of second-rate troops (left over from the trenches) and in a country so infamously vast and inhospitable.

But the situation in post-1917 Russia was volatile. The Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin were in government but not entirely in power, with no serious army to speak of and rebellions springing up everywhere. During the Civil War that followed, there were several periods – such as in late 1919 – when the Tsarist, counter-revolutionary forces, known as the ‘Whites’, seemed to be heading for victory. With a situation so fluid, it is understandable why scheming Western politicians thought they could shape the outcome for themselves.

‘Ferocious baboons’

But Reid makes it clear that the Interventionist powers never had the stomach properly to engineer a counter-revolution. They were as weary of war as the Soviets, and with the Treaty of Versailles and President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, there was a vague atmosphere of consensus around letting nations determine their own futures. However hypocritical this attitude may have been, it allowed British and American politicians to claim Russia’s business was none of their concern, and thus to back out of a campaign they’d largely stumbled into in the first place.

The Intervention had begun for a justifiable reason: to save Western diplomats trapped in Russia after October 1917, and then to prevent the Germans getting hold of Allied matériel following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, with which the Soviets pulled out of the war, the following April. But after Versailles, the Allied presence on the fringes of Russia mutated into supporting the resurgent Whites, hungry for revenge following their loss of power and the brutal murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family.

This act of regicide also seemed to boil the blood of Winston Churchill, then Minister of Munitions in David Lloyd George’s war cabinet, and the only politician among the Allies who was passionately pro-Intervention until the end. He despised Bolshevism, describing the Red forces as a ‘troop of ferocious baboons’, and blamed Lenin and Leon Trotsky (then responsible for military affairs) for reducing the country to an ‘animal form of barbarism.’

Many years later, in 1954, Churchill bemoaned the failure to strangle the Bolsheviks at birth. But that was after his legacy had been secured. At the time, along with his enthusiasm for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, Churchill’s support for the Intervention only added to his reputation as a blunderer, playing with other people’s lives from the comfort of a situation room. ‘The trouble with Winston’, wrote the novelist and civil servant C P Snow, ‘was that he would insist on getting out his maps.’

Reds versus Whites

Although Churchill hated Bolshevism, had the Whites won the Civil War Russia would merely have exchanged one form of ‘barbarism’ for another. Reid makes it clear throughout this book that their incompetence, savagery, and sheer criminality was in the end counter-productive to their cause.

Militarily, they were woeful. Reid describes various White initiatives, such as the assault on Red-held Petrograd, birthplace of the revolution, in the autumn of 1919. Like all the other offensives, the Whites began well, but failed hopelessly to build on their success. The Red forces soon regrouped and pushed them out of the city, in a turnaround similar in some ways to the defeat of the Nazis at the gates of the same city in the 1940s.

The Bolshevik victories at Petrograd and elsewhere were primarily down to Trotsky, a ‘shrewd, decisive, boundlessly energetic, and dashing figure’ (Reid is clearly a fan) whose part in saving the Russian revolution is still under-acknowledged by history. The Whites had nobody to match him. Certainly, neither ‘supreme ruler’ Anton Denikin nor the naval man Alexander Kolchak and were up to the task: both were insecure and inexperienced leaders, more concerned with massacring civilians than achieving solid victories.

Nor were they interested in advice from their Interventionist partners, who with traditional patrician arrogance viewed all the Russians – Red or White – as savage, uncultured people, liable to mutiny at any moment. Indeed, when the Interventionist forces were finally preparing for withdrawal, there were serious concerns that their nominal allies would rise up against them.

This atmosphere of revolt was frighteningly widespread: the French had to pull out from their activities along the southern Ukrainian coast when a bit of Bolshevism among some of their own sailors turned into a huge national embarrassment. The widespread chaos in the region – Ukraine went through around 14 different governments within the space of a year or so – allowed the Reds to sweep in and conquer the country. The Ukrainians were denied the Wilsonian dream of ‘self-determination’ for another 80 years.

The British, meanwhile, went from fighting the Bolsheviks to doing business with them. The Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement of April 1921 was a major coup for Lenin, the first piece of international recognition that his regime had won the Civil War. Lloyd George and a furious Churchill were both conveniently on holiday when the Intervention was finally wound up, while an ailing Wilson had been incapacitated by a stroke.

Most of the men on the ground themselves considered it an abject failure. The gruff, pessimistic Field Marshal Edmund Ironside, stationed in the far north around Murmansk and Archangel, scorned it as a waste of life and money, while Christopher Bilney, a young former seaplane pilot, wrote that the affair had ‘kept a few of us from cluttering up the employment bureau at home’, but otherwise achieved nothing. ‘It was an uncomfortable business really,’ he added. ‘A really nasty, dirty little war.’

toxic Legacy Although Reid supports the view of the Intervention as a failure, her account is balanced, and she even manages to find one achievement: the ‘Great White Train’, a kind of mobile sanitation facility developed by American doctor and missionary Rudolf Teusler, which helped tackle typhus. This had been pretty much endemic in Russia for centuries at that point. It had famously done more harm to Napoleon’s campaign in 1812 than the long distances or the cold.

Other historians have argued that the Intervention damaged relations between the West and the Soviet Union for decades, laying the ground for the Cold War and even the tensions of today. The Russian paranoia about Western ‘encirclement’ is something that persists, and even Vladimir Putin has expressed nostalgia for the White movement. Denikin’s bones were shipped back home to Moscow in 2006, having been buried for many decades in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of all places.

Reid doesn’t buy this view. She argues instead that the Intervention did more harm to European democracy in the inter-war period, and directly contributed to the rise of Nazism. The White leaders, she goes to great lengths to point out, were hysterically anti-Semitic. They equated Jews with Bolshevism and unleashed a ‘carnival of violence’ against them, killing an estimated 20,000, at the very least, in pogroms.

Copies of the notoriously anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were circulated widely among White troops, many making their way to Europe in the backpacks of the White-aligned German Freikorps, who later morphed into early Nazi militias. The existence of the pogroms was largely ignored or downplayed by Western leaders; Churchill saw reports of White atrocities as politically embarrassing, and even echoed some of their propaganda about Jews. It was this association, in Reid’s eyes, that truly discredited the whole Intervention as a worthwhile enterprise.

Given the topics covered – Russia and Ukraine, ‘humanitarian’ intervention, anti-Semitism, and geopolitics – the relevance of this book to modern readers is self-evident. It helps, then, that A Nasty Little War is well-written and accessible, and sometimes even grimly funny about the ludicrousness of the situation.

For instance, just as Allied troops were finally leaving, a new chemical weapon was developed that emitted an ominous green gas. But a frustrated Ironside complained that he didn’t get a chance to see it in action. Large stocks of the weapon were in fact not used, and instead dumped in one of Russia’s many lakes, where presumably, Reid says, ‘it has been poisoning the local marine life ever since.’ An apt metaphor for the whole story.

A Nasty Little War: The West’s fight to reverse the Russian Revolution
Anna Reid
John Murray, hbk (£25)
ISBN 978-1529326765