A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention Into The Russian Civil War, Reid - B+

            "The operation was substantial. Some 180,000 Allied  troops from sixteen countries took part, in half a dozen theatres ranging from the Caspian Sea to the Arctic, and from Poland to the Pacific. It ended two years later with fewer than two thousand Allied lives lost and one not insignificant gain - independence for the Latvians and Estonians. But as to overthrowing the Bolsheviks, it completely failed." The war was not very bloody as battles were few and far between, but the violence perpetrated against civilians, particularly Jews, was extensive.

           Almost immediately upon assuming power, Lenin asked Germany for an armistice, and signed the Best-Litovsk Treaty in March, 1918. The Allies considered the treaty a "heinous betrayal and the Bolsheviks traitors in German pay." That summer, Wilson  agreed to Britain's and France's request to intervene in Russia. When the British landed in Baku and Archangel and the US and Japanese  in Vladivostok, the Bolsheviks realized the counter-revolution was at hand. Thousands of counter-revolutionaries were executed, and British and French diplomats were expelled. In the closing months of 1917, British and American forces moved south from Archangel and engaged the Russians in light skirmishing before winter set in. The British occupied Baku for six weeks before the Bolsheviks repulsed them. In Vladivostok, the Americans sat tight with no orders from home, the Japanese occupied Manchuria, and the White Russians formed a government under Adm. Kolchak. At war's end, the Royal Navy sailed through the Dardanelles to the Crimea bringing men, supplies and money for the Whites.

         "The 1919 campaigning season was when the Civil War reached its climax." Kolchak was the first to move, with 130,000 men, into western Siberia. He was spectacularly successful and by April was near theVolga. Just to his north in Perm, the Reds pushed back a British-Russian Brigade that retreated north on the Kama River. Both the US and UK concluded that there was no real strategic objective in the Arctic north and began withdrawing their troops from Murmansk and Archangel. General Denikin led the White forces in the south north to Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad, Volgograd), and to Kiev. As the Whites advanced, they sanctioned and participated in a vast number of pogroms labelling the Jews as Bolsheviks. "For the British government, Denikin's massacres and mass rapes were a side issue, only of serious concern in so far as they caused political embarrassment." 

           In the Baltics, the British asked the occupying Germans to stay on after the Armistice. Intervention came in the spring of 1919 as French, English, and Baltic Germans came together to fight the Reds.  They marched on Petrograd and reached to within twelve miles of the former capital. They were pushed back and fled south. Soon, Estonia and Latvia reached accords with the Bolsheviks and achieved their independence.

         At this point in 1919, the Whites still held all of Siberia and much of what had been the Russian Empire in the south. In September, Denikin began his bid for Moscow. His forces quickly ran out out of supplies, and began to fall back. Trotsky now had Kolchak retreating to the east and Denikin to the south. "The Whites were failing, the British could not support them forever." Kolchak's flight to Vladivostok ended in Irkutsk when the Reds captured and executed him. In the Russian heartland, the Whites and the remaining Allied troops fled to the Black Sea ports hoping for British evacuation. By March 1920, the Crimea was in Red hands. 

        The intervention was a colossal failure causing Churchill to lose his seat in Parliament in 1922, and was conceded by many to have contributed to the instability in Germany and Czechoslovakia. For the US, it is believed to have fed the appetite for isolationism and cemented the USSR in its anti-western beliefs.  It appears to me that it was a knee jerk reaction to communism, and that the US had no real sense of why it intervened and no strategy at all. At least we had the sense to not get as deeply committed as Britain. This author lambastes Churchill as borderline delusional in his enthusiasm. Interestingly, decades ago, George F. Kennan took Wilson to task.