In his 1972 “Message of Friendship” broadcast from Moscow to the Soviet and American people via television, President Nixon averred that “most important of all, we have never fought one another in war.” Yet the truth is just the opposite, as we learn in Anna Reid’s book A Nasty Little War, the story of the 180,000 American, British, Japanese, French, and other Allied troops who intervened in the Russian Civil War.
Improbably, it was the Czechs who helped kick the intervention off. As Russia’s Eastern Front in World War I teetered on the brink in March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, giving way to the democratically oriented Provisional Government for several months before the Bolsheviks’ famous October Revolution. Lenin, trading on Russia’s war-weariness and mindful of the Eastern Front’s hopelessness, began maneuvering towards peace with the Central Powers. Meanwhile, massive power vacuums opened up across the expanse of the former empire as petty warlords and a kaleidoscopic array of ideological factions vied for control.
The seventy-thousand-strong Czechoslovak Legion had fought bravely for the tsar in a bid to liberate its homeland from Austria-Hungary. With a new, antagonistic faction in power, the Czechs could not stay put in Russia and faced charges of treason back home. They soon began a Xenophonic journey along the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Pacific port of Vladivostok and safe passage to Allied territory. By May 1918, the stateless army had swept aside warlord and Bolshevik alike to seize control over thousands of miles of Siberian territory.
Back on the Western Front, the Allies watched with fascination. Armistice was still months away, and America was only beginning to enter the trenches of France. Massive stockpiles of Western weapons and supplies languished in Russian ports; thus, the fear of supplies falling into Bolshevik or even German hands, the hope of reigniting the Russians’ war effort, and some concern for the beleaguered Czechs spurred the Allies to action.
Of the Allied leaders, Georges Clemenceau was the most ardently pro-intervention—ironically so, for France’s effort proved the shortest and the most shambolic. Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George were more skeptical and had to be coaxed over the edge by hawkish advisors, including Winston Churchill, for whom the intervention became a new raison d’être. In his tireless agitation for maximum engagement, one sees the reckless adventurism that was several times his downfall; one also sees the seeds of Britain’s victory against Hitler in World War II.
From the beginning to the end of 1918, Allied forces deployed alongside White (counter-revolutionary) Russian troops in a number of theaters: Siberia; Ukraine and southern Russia; the oil-rich South Caucasus; the Baltic; and the Arctic North, namely the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. To various degrees, Allied troops were restricted to limited advances or supporting roles. British soldiers were often bottom-of-the-barrel, having been gassed, maimed, or otherwise deemed unfit for service elsewhere. For the northern “Polar Bear Expedition,” American soldiers were mostly recruited from Michigan—wishful thinking that they would prove hardy in the Arctic cold.
Reid pores over hundreds of primary sources and diaries to weave together a rich, engaging narrative. At times, there are shades of comic opera: we meet happy-go-lucky doughboys and tommies, a gay commander of an armored train named for his lover, and none other than Ernest Shackleton coming to the rescue with sleds and polar equipment in tow. There are daring escapes aplenty, especially among the British, who seem to have a knack for finding opportunities for swashbuckling in any situation. In one fantastic episode, the brand-new technology of the speedboat is unleashed under cover of darkness on the unsuspecting Soviet fleet to devastating effect.
More often, of course, there is tragedy, as disease, war crimes on both sides, and the Red Terror take their toll. Allied commanders posted to Russia frequently misunderstood or belittled their Russian allies and the local populace. One very competent exception in Reid’s narrative is General Edmund Ironside, Britain’s commander in the north, who juggled military and political concerns with care and poured his heart into training a Slavo-British battalion. Granted private access to his archives and diary, Reid follows Ironside as his sincere hope for Russian liberation turns to despair: desertions spread like wildfire, White troops had to be forced to advance at bayonet point, and his Slavo-British battalion mutinied, slaughtering its British officers in their beds. Throughout, the reader of A Nasty Little War experiences a similar emotional trajectory to Ironside’s.
With domestic support flagging, France and America began to withdraw through spring and summer 1919. Britain clung on but began laying the groundwork for withdrawal as well, leaving White Russia in something of the position of South Vietnam in 1973. Though low on morale, the White Army was bolstered by Allied supplies and was led by trained tsarist officers. Amazingly, they reached a high-water mark in October 1919: from Ukraine, Generals Denikin and Wrangel pushed to within two hundred miles of Moscow; from Arkhangelsk, General Miller continued to wage a campaign of riverboat and armored train towards Vologda; and from Estonia, General Yudenich’s Northwestern Army came within eyesight of the domes of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in Petrograd. Yet within weeks, White forces collapsed across the board in the face of Red counterattacks; within months, the evacuation of the White Army was already underway.
In A Nasty Little War, Reid unfolds a scathing indictment of White incompetence and malfeasance: five-hour teas taken with the enemy at the gates; shipments of foreign aid whisked away to the black market; skepticism and ingratitude towards Allied help. Worst of all was a virulent anti-Semitism—Jews were indistinguishable from Bolsheviks in White propaganda—that fueled pogroms of terrifying thoroughness. Somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Jews were massacred in Ukraine during the Civil War; Reid fingers Ukrainian warlords as the worst perpetrators, but the White Army and its Cossack vanguards as the most systematic. In light of what Reid agrees was a “rehearsal for the Holocaust,” it is tough to stomach the tut-tutting of British officials, who summed up certain generals as “scallywags” or covered up White atrocities altogether—a proposal from none other than Chaim Weizmann to lead a monitoring mission to Ukraine was rejected. Reid also argues convincingly that defeated White émigrés helped stoke the fires of anti-Semitism in Weimar Germany. (With such a litany, one should still bear in mind that the Bolsheviks were simultaneously waging what Lenin proudly called “Mass Terror,” including pogroms, much of it beyond the purview of Reid’s book.)
Was the intervention worth it at all? Could a swifter and more decisive blow have caught the Bolsheviks off guard? Since the days of the communist-infiltrated “Hands Off Russia” movement, it has been difficult to get a clear picture. The views of both liberals and conservatives on the matter have likely shifted after several decades of failed Western intervention in the Middle East and renewed bloodshed on the fields of Ukraine.
Ultimately, it is all beside the point: as Reid makes clear, the horse that the Allies chose to back was lame from the start. At various junctures, large Estonian and Finnish armies operated near White Russian forces and were willing to cooperate. The Whites’ stubborn refusal to make territorial concessions to them in the name of Greater Russia was their undoing; had they shown the Bolsheviks’ (admittedly underhanded) canniness at the negotiating table, they could well have swept into Petrograd and Moscow. Like Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, White Russia’s leadership had a death wish, and it proved profoundly unappealing to the peasant or laborer who faced a choice between Red Army and White. Reid does justice to this oft-forgotten chapter of history, neglected to our peril.
