A NASTY LITTLE WAR

A thorough reconsideration of a conveniently forgotten “sideshow” to World War I: an ill-fated two-year attempt by the Allies to reverse the Bolshevik Revolution.

Historian Reid, author of The Shaman’s Coat, revisits a humiliating “little war” that ended with few tangible gains—other than independence for Latvia and Estonia—and did nothing to reverse the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. The fall of the tsarist regime at first came as a relief to the Allies then fighting Germany in WWI, yet when the ascendant revolutionary Reds, among the warring factions battling tsarist Whites, made the “outrageous” treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk in late 1917, the Allies grew alarmed. Up to that point, they had taken a “wait and see” attitude toward how the leadership would shake out in Russia—until they decided to secure the ports at Murmansk and Vladivostok. Reluctant U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was persuaded to send troops to help Czechs wipe out pockets of resistance and secure the Trans-Siberian railroad. Reid unearths significant information on the White-sponsored (and British-condoned) antisemitic pogroms across Ukraine and elsewhere that took place in 1919. “Even at the distance of a century, with 1919’s killings long overshadowed by the Holocaust,” writes the author, “the fact that Britain knowingly funded, supplied, trained and sent men to fight alongside the armies that committed them is shocking and shameful.” Reid also knowledgeably chronicles the work of various Allied officers and Russians involved in the war, including their somewhat comic interactions and clashes of culture. The intervention ultimately involved 180,000 Allied troops from 15 countries; by 1920, Britain and America had moved on to domestic crises. The author astutely points out that the intervention contributed to “Europe’s fragmentation between the wars”—and later fed the Nazi demonization of Jews.

An elucidating work of research that resonates amid another ongoing intervention involving Russia.