Lessons from America’s Forgotten War in Russia
Lessons from America’s Forgotten War in Russia
Why thousands of American troops were sent on a strange, snowy expedition in a coda to the First World War.
A Nasty Little War
The Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War
by Anna Reid
Basic, 366 pp., $32
IN EARLY 1919, AN AIDE to President Woodrow Wilson received a missive from struggling, scuffling Bolshevik chief Vladimir Lenin. The letter itself was straightforward, but the implications were breathtaking—especially looking back a century later. Lenin outlined a simple proposal: In return for American recognition—and Western aid to a Bolshevik regime that appeared on the brink of collapse—Lenin would grant recognition to all non-Soviet regions of the former tsarist empire.
Given that the Bolsheviks at the time held only a small territory connecting Moscow and St. Petersburg, Lenin was effectively writing off the majority of formerly Russian holdings—not just newly independent Poland and Finland, but the entirety of Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and more. All Wilson had to do was recognize Soviet sovereignty over the country’s main metropolitan areas, extending the American president’s own calls for self-determination to a new Soviet regime.
Wilson, though, demurred. He brushed off the offer, convinced the Soviet project was little more than a passing phenomenon, a gaggle of pamphleteers who’d accidentally toppled an empire. He and his allies in Paris and London never responded to the entreaty.
The story—and the contingency of such a monumental offer—is just one of the many moments of fleeting, forgotten history exhumed by British journalist Anna Reid in A Nasty Little War. Structured around the questions of how and why American and Allied troops swarmed across the collapsed Russian Empire in the late 1910s—the so-called “Polar Bear Expedition”—the book exposes myriad missed opportunities that could have thwarted Soviet revanchism toward lost Russian imperial possessions, and contains any number of lessons for Western policymakers trying once more to beat back a revanchist Moscow.
The presence of American and Allied troops in Russia during this period was a recurring theme of Soviet propaganda, portrayed as a predatory and imperialistic attack on the nascent Communist state. It largely escaped historic memory in the West, however, and that’s for a simple reason: As Reid, who’s written multiple books on Russian history, sums up, “It was a humiliation, and given all the Allied promises, a shameful one—best forgotten, or conveniently elided with the Great War.” The legacies are foggy, at best—phantasmic images of Americans snowshoeing through Siberia, or chaotic naval retreats from Crimea. Amid the bloodletting of first half of the twentieth century, the Western intervention in Russia is remembered as little more than a sideshow, a bungled blip as the world tilted back into exhaustion after the First World War.
But as Reid tells it, we do a disservice in overlooking the intervention. For one thing, it was, in many ways, monumental. Sparked by the Bolshevik Revolution and concerns about how the new Russian regime could help the kaiser’s Germany, nearly 200,000 Allied troops—12,000 from the United States, the rest from Britain, France, Australia, India, Japan, Senegal, and more—shipped off to points around Russia. In the American case, this included disembarking in the city of Archangel (Arkhangelsk) on the White Sea, where “on a bright June morning the light still bounces off the mile-wide Dvina,” Reid writes, and Vladivostok, 4,000 miles from Moscow but only 600 miles from Tokyo, a “colonial city of over one hundred thousand people, the majority Chinese or Korean,” that “had sprung up in the past twenty years, its architecture as assertively incongruous as that of Calcutta or Hong Kong.”
Despite the clear disdain for Lenin’s movement, the Americans’ preeminent goal was not to topple the Bolsheviks or decide the outcome of the civil war, but rather to prevent the Central Powers from gaining an advantage in the latter stages of the world war, as well as to aid the escape of the 10,000-strong Czechoslovak Legion. (Reading between the lines, Wilson may have also been pushed to send American troops to Russia to prevent the French, Japanese, and others from doing so unilaterally.) Reid notes that Wilson’s statement of the purpose of the intervention, an aide memoire dated July 17, 1918, “was not as meaningless as some critics pretend: its clear gist was that America was sending the smallest possible forces for the shortest possible time, and that the Allies should not ask for more. But its contradictions did reflect Wilson’s continuing uneasiness.”
Not that many Allied troops themselves were especially enthused about the prospect of intervention. “Americans and Canadians often felt tricked,” Reid writes. “Told they were going to Europe to fight the Kaiser, they now learned that they would be restoring, as they saw it, the equally despotic Tsar.”
Across northern Asia, local populations met Allied troops with a mix of antipathy with animosity. Rare were the communities that met Allied forces with open arms; more often, confusion reigned, often slipping into conflict. The intervention was a microcosm of the Russian Civil War itself, which turned Russia into a continent-wide abattoir, fracturing an entire land-mass—with a legacy that still remains blurred and unsettled, even for modern-day Russians. (As scholar Jonathan Smele noted in his 2016 book on the topic, it’s far more accurate to call them the Russian civil wars, given the fratricidal infighting among all of the nations and populations escaping tsarist control.)
Reid cogently unspools the narrative of the intervention itself, offering set pieces across Southern Russia and along the Trans-Siberian Railway to sate military historians, while detailing the backroom diplomatic decisions in a way that brings context to the confusion reigning across a shattered Russia. And she does so with a heap of creative imagery, such as when she writes of an officer who “resembled a disheveled stork.”
THE MUDDLE OF THE INTERVENTION—of Western troops not knowing where they are, or why they’re there—is matched only by the myopia of the policymakers in Western capitals. This is most especially true for Wilson, a president whose reputation has lately tumbled faster than any other. Reid’s book will only accelerate the nosedive. From the outset, Wilson had little interest in, or vision for, a post-tsarist Russia. Russia was the first place where Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points came into conflict with each other: He applied the principle of self-determination explicitly to Southern Europe and the Austro-Hungarian territories, but his vision for Russia never included self-determination for places like, say, Kazakhstan or Belarus. It also directly conflicted with the interests of other countries, with Wilson calling for “a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy.” Reid labels Wilson’s Russia policy—or lack thereof—“high-mindedness with evasion.” In practice, it was a tangle of contradiction.
For instance, Wilson opined that any invasion would only “add to the present sad confusion in Russia rather than cure it”—and then nonetheless proceeded to announce that American troops would enter Russia. While the Bolsheviks served as Wilson’s main foil in the region, he didn’t even mention them when announcing the intervention. Unsure of what to do, unsure of where to go, Wilson flailed his way toward any kind of policy. “I have been sweating blood over what is right and feasible to do in Russia,” he said. “It goes to pieces like quicksilver under my hand.”
Once on the ground, the American troops were immediately swept into a floodtide of competing forces—including among the Allies. (As the White House explained to the American commander in charge, “Watch your step; you will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite.”) The Czechoslovak Legion, then in control of Russia’s main rail artery, was more enthusiastic about getting out than staying in, and British policy immediately fell to pieces, undone by infighting that may well have tipped into treason.
The details of London’s role in the intervention present both the greatest strengths of Reid’s book, as well as the book’s ultimate, unfortunate shortcoming. Thanks to Reid’s archival research, we can learn that London quite nearly extended formal recognition not to the Soviets, but to the All-Russian Government, based in the central Russian city of Omsk. Shortly before British Prime Minister David Lloyd George signed off on recognition, however, one of the anti-Soviet forces’ tyrannical leaders, Adm. Alexander Kolchak, launched a coup against the All-Russian Government’s leadership, declaring himself Russia’s “Supreme Ruler.”
That’s hardly surprising for a figure like Kolchak, who was responsible for, among other things, antisemitic pogroms across the region. Far more surprising, however, was the role of the senior British commander, Gen. Alfred Knox, who viewed the All-Russian Government with “contempt”—and who, according to Reid, orchestrated Kolchak’s putsch. “Was Knox behind the coup?” Reid asked. “Almost certainly.” With the demise of the All-Russian Government, so went the chance to recognize any non-Bolshevik powers in the region—or, eventually, anywhere in Russia.
AMONG ALL THE ACCOUNTS of backbiting and butchery, Reid’s book is ultimately unable to answer one question: What did the Russians—including especially those populations long colonized by Moscow—make of the intervention? The book is unfortunately silent on the topic, overly reliant on the memoirs and missives from Western, and especially British, soldiers. Such an oversight is that much more surprising given Reid’s previous, potent work on Russia, such as her 2002 book The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia, arguably the single best book on the histories of North Asian nations long brutalized by Russian colonizers. It was that book that first introduced broader Western audiences to the nations of Sakha, Buryatia, Tuva, and more—including those who are now fighting on both sides of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But even with that silence, Reid’s reintroduction to the intervention contains numerous insights into our own day’s bloodletting in Ukraine, and the current sprint toward fascism in Russia. As Reid writes, at its broadest,
The lazy lesson from 1918–20—that Western meddling in the region failed then, and will again now—is completely mistaken. If the Intervention does have something to teach, it is that Putin will fail for the same reason that the [anti-Soviet] Whites did: because he underestimates the desire for freedom of the non-Russian nations, and because for his own people, he has no programme beyond the empty assertion of Russia’s greatness and right to rule.
More particularly, though, Reid’s book points blame directly at Western leadership—and toward the necessity of clear, and clear-sighted, policy. Muddled action, as Wilson learned in his intervention experience, was no substitute for strategy. Faced with the prospect of a unilateral Japanese intervention in Siberia in March 1918, Wilson asked, “What is it to effect and how will it be efficacious in effecting it?” It was the right question, but one he never answered.
If the current White House appears confused about how to address both Ukraine and Russia, the reason may be an inordinate focus on tail risks—catastrophic Ukrainian victory, a direct Russia-NATO war, or even nuclear armageddon. Wilson’s policy suffered from a similar befuddlement, and for a similar reason: He was so focused on what he wanted to avoid that he had no clear idea of what he wanted to achieve.
Wilson’s confusion extended not only toward Moscow, but also toward the nations long colonized by the tsarist regime. Rather than consider the potential independence of non-Russian polities—including places like Ukraine or Georgia, as well as Tatarstan, Sakha, and the other nations still under the Kremlin’s thumb—Wilson looked the other way, dedicated solely to the question of who would obtain power in Moscow. It was regionally illiterate and doomed to failure.
The Russian Civil War was the United States’ and the West’s best chance to secure a free Ukraine, decades earlier. The collective failure of the intervention condemned plenty of other nations to Moscow’s irredentism and imperialism, strengthening the Soviet Union and ultimately weakening the West. It was an inflexibility that today’s policymakers would, like much of the rest of Wilson’s legacy, do well to avoid.
 | A guest post by
|