In Rupert Brooke’s best-known poem, a soldier says that if he dies, there will be "some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England." As I discovered nearly 30 years ago, such corners, dating from 1918 and 1919, can be found in a cemetery in Archangel (Archangelsk) in Russia’s far north. In her latest book, British journalist and historian Anna Reid explains how they came to be there.
A Nasty Little War (adjectives borrowed from one of its participants) is a vivid, beautifully written history of the Allied "intervention" in the war(s) over the territories that, before 1917, had made up the Russian Empire. It was nasty, but not so "little." Beginning in 1918, it stretched over thousands of miles and ended in 1920, with a Japanese coda in Siberia that lasted until 1922. Some 180,000 troops from 16 countries took part, but even if they suffered losses slightly higher (as I suspect) than the fewer than 2,000 deaths cited by Reid, it would still show their intervention in conflicts that cost the lives of millions was at a certain distance. Mostly: For example, that was not the case in Archangel, nor was it so with the Czechoslovak legion, key players in this drama well before Czechoslovakia came into being.
While Reid offers an excellent overview of the whole intervention, the tale that she tells is skewed toward the British, as is her prose. American readers may wonder who or what is a "Rugbeian" or struggle to understand the subtlety underpinning Reid’s argument that "the third son of an Anglo-Irish earl" was an inspired choice to take charge of a "blood-soaked" Baltic militia: "He had the same sort of ethnic tension-infused, Big House, boggy-acres background as the Landeswehr’s own Baltic barons, and got on with them famously."
That this third son, a veteran of the Western Front, could be running a Germanic battalion less than a year after the Armistice is surprising, but no more so than the campaign in which British troops fought alongside the Reds against anti-Communist Finns. Both are just two indications—there are plenty more—of the complexities of a story Reid unravels with a deft touch and flashes of humor, the latter also evident in her selection of quotations from contemporary accounts. The towering, extravagantly polyglot Edmund Ironside, the best of all the British generals in Russia, takes a dislike to a French journalist "with a nasty artistic look about him." Quite right.
The intervention began as an extension of the world war that continued to grind on into 1918. Newly in power, the Bolsheviks had signed a humiliating separate peace with Berlin and its allies. The British were determined to stop materiel destined for Russia’s pre-revolutionary army and stored in the country’s north from falling into German hands. The United States wanted to do the same in Vladivostok, where large quantities of American supplies were held.
But the Allies were increasingly concerned by the nature and ambitions of Russia’s new revolutionary government. Nevertheless, in the first half of 1918, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson rejected repeated requests for an Allied offensive from Manchuria. This was, Reid believes, a missed opportunity, and reasonably so. The Bolsheviks were still very weak, although she asks what the Allies would have done when they arrived in Moscow. Given what the Bolsheviks were already doing (and planning), that uncertainty was a risk worth taking.
Toward the end of 1918, Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat—a discreet description—who understood both Russia and the Bolsheviks recommended that London should either abandon intervention or engage in it on a "proper scale"—at least 100,000 troops. Reid regards this as "good advice." But time had moved on. Once the Great War had ended, Britain’s soldiers were impatient to come home. There was, moreover, considerable popular sympathy for what was seen by too many as a well-intentioned, even noble revolution. Sending a large expeditionary force to crush it could have led to domestic political turmoil. Maintaining a small presence in Russia, supplying the White armies, and waiting to see what happened was probably the best that the British government could do.
Other than the Japanese, dreaming imperial dreams about Russia’s far east, and the Czechoslovaks who were on an odyssey of their own, the other interventionists, in varying ways, by and large followed this approach. This could have worked had the White leaders been up to the task. They were not. Admittedly, they faced one major disadvantage which, as Reid points out, was that the Bolsheviks held Russia’s center. This put the Reds at "the heart of the railway network, enabling quick movement of troops from front to front." But that did not mean the Whites’ defeat was inevitable. Their armies were more geographically dispersed than those of their foes, but they controlled vast areas of the old empire and enjoyed the backing of the West.
They proved, however, incapable of adjusting to the military, social, and political realities of post-revolutionary Russia. They failed to coordinate their scattered armies, squabbled among themselves, antagonized potential allies in the newly independent states by refusing to accept their break from Russia, and had no program to win over those with no nostalgia for the old days. Bolshevik cruelty won them fewer converts than it should have. For the Whites too descended into the abyss, if not perhaps so far as the Reds, something hard to discern in a book on an intervention in which those involved were better placed to witness the conduct of their allies than on what went on behind Bolshevik lines.
And one thing they witnessed was anti-Semitic savagery, particularly in regions of heavy Jewish settlement. Red units were guilty of this. But the tally of their victims was massively exceeded by the terrible toll taken by the Whites, within whose ranks ancient hatreds were inflamed by the widely believed and widely disseminated notion that "the Jews" were behind the revolution. The near programmatic atrocities that ensued were, as Reid demonstrates, largely ignored by the Whites’ Western allies, a reflection of indifference or an icy realism—what could we have done to stop it—made easier by prejudice.
In the end, despite some remarkable triumphs, the Whites were crushed. The intervention ended with retreats and, for luckier Russians, evacuation. It was (and is) typically seen as a humiliation and, apart from the critical role it played in the establishment of an independent Latvia and Estonia, a comprehensive failure.
But was it? Clearly it did not succeed in helping overthrow the Reds. But without the intervention and the flow of arms and equipment that went with it, the Whites would have succumbed sooner. The Bolsheviks, possessed by their millenarian vision of worldwide revolution, could then have pushed harder, earlier, and deeper into a febrile, fissile, and weakened Europe. As it was, with the Whites in terminal decline, the Red Army had reached the edge of Warsaw—the gateway to Berlin—by August 1920, only to be seen off by a reborn Poland (with the help of some Allied aid, mainly from France). If not for that, said Marshal Tukhachevsky, who had led the Bolshevik attack, "the revolution would have set the whole continent … on fire."
A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War
by Anna Reid
Basic Books, 400 pp., $32
Andrew Stuttaford is the editor of National Review’s Capital Matters.