A NASTY  LITTLE WAR : THE WEST’S FIGHT TO REVERSE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

By Anna Reid

John Murray. 366 pages. £12.99. ISBN 978-1-529-32678-9

Reviewed by Jim Burns

My father never said very much about his time in the Royal Navy (1913-1925) but he did once mention that he’d  been on a ship somewhere off the coast of  Russia.  And he said they had been shelling targets on shore. He wasn’t an educated man and he was vague on details of how and why his ship was where it was. It was some years later that I read about the Allied intervention in Russia between 1918 and 1920, and began to understand what he’d been involved in. I worked out as best as I could that he’d most likely been  somewhere around the Vladivostok area. But beyond that I admittedly didn’t pursue the matter as diligently as I should have done.

Had Anna Reid’s splendid history of the Intervention been available when my father was still alive I might have gained a better idea of what he and other servicemen like him were doing in Russia.  The ostensible reason when Russia began its slide into revolution in 1917 was to prevent weapons, ammunition, and various materials that had been supplied to Russia by Britain, France and other countries from falling into German hands. Following the February 1917 Revolution, when the Tsar had been deposed, Kerensky had promised to keep Russia in the war. When the Bolsheviks took over later that year it became obvious that they would negotiate peace terms with Germany. But then Germany surrendered to the Allies in November 1918 and the reasons for having a presence in Russia appeared to have changed.  As Reid puts it, after Germany was defeated the intervention “expanded, morphing into an explicit drive to replace the Bolsheviks with one of the conservative – nicknamed ‘White’ – regimes setting themselves up around the old empire’s periphery”.

There were various would-be leaders jockeying for positions of power, and the two main ones appear to have been Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak and General Anton Denikin. Reid names several more, including some warlords who controlled private armies, and it can occasionally be difficult keeping track of them all. They had one thing in common and that was a strong anti-semitic streak which often meant that wherever they were pogroms were part of their activities. It has to be said, also, that more than a few of the British officer class present in Russia shared their anti-semitic beliefs, even if they didn’t approve of them being used to justify murder, looting, rape and torture. But they did often turn a blind eye to what the Whites got up to.  The details of what troops fighting for the Whites did, both to Jews and to prisoners, are shocking, though to be fair Red Army soldiers were sometimes not much better in their behaviour.   

According to Reid, around 180,000 troops from sixteen countries were involved “in half a dozen theatres ranging from the Caspian Sea to the Arctic, and from Poland to the Pacific”. The dominant countries were Britain, America, France and Japan, and it’s not surprising that many of the rank-and-file wondered what they were doing in Russia. This was especially true after 1918 when, not unnaturally, conscripts who had been called up to fight the Axis powers in France or the Middle-East, suddenly found themselves digging trenches in the snow. There were rumblings of discontent and sometimes near-mutinies. One of the more serious examples was at Sebastopol where French sailors made it plain that they sympathised with Bolsheviks on shore, and were fired on by Greek troops led by French officers. All very confusing but, as Reid says, though there were  ideological elements in the actions of some of the more-militant sailors, most of the men were mainly agitating for demobilisation, not revolution.

If there was dissatisfaction among some of those serving in Russia it was matched by objections at home in Britain, France and the United States. In Britain a “Hands Off Russia” committee was formed, with names like E.M. Forster, Sylvia Pankhurst and H.G. Wells associated with it. There were, of course, those who were firmly in favour of intervention and of doing whatever was necessary to cause the collapse of the Bolsheviks. Prominent among them was Winston Churchill whose priority was, in Reid’s words, “to retrieve his military reputation” after being held responsible for the disaster in the Dardanelles when the Turks had defeated the British and Australian troops at Gallipoli. Russia seemed to offer the opportunity to do that, though it has to be said that Churchill did anyway have an often-expressed dislike of the Bolsheviks. He referred to them as “blood-sucking vampires” “plague-bearing rats”, and used other colourful terms to indicate how he viewed their leaders. And he wasn’t averse to linking Jews to Bolshevism,  terrorism, and plots for world revolution. Furthermore, he denied that Denikin’s soldiers had ever taken part in pogroms, despite all the evidence to the contrary. He wasn’t alone in what he said, and Reid points to British propaganda leaflets which drew attention to the presence of Jews among the Bolshevik leadership. 

As well as the soldiers from around the world who were present there were thousands of refugees on the move or crowded into cities along the coast. Reid describes them: “Odessa was dancing away her sorrows. Like Kiev, the city was filled with upper-crust refugees from Moscow. By day they traded away jewellery at commission shops, queued for visas at the Hotel de Londres or gathered in cold rented rooms to exchange rumours and gossip. By night they tried to forget, packing the casino” and similar places that provided some sort of distraction from their plight. It was the wealthy who, if they were lucky, could buy or bribe their way out of Odessa and onto a ship bound for Turkey or some other safe place. The poor and unfortunate were left behind to face the anger, mistrust and revenge of the victorious Reds : “After the evacuations in the South, the incoming Bolsheviks executed thousands in Odessa and Sebastopol”. And “Archangel province was made the site of the early Gulag”. 

Reid says, “Allied troops In the North were refusing to obey orders. It was not surprising. Though small in scale – (General) Ironside described it as ‘platoon fighting’ – combat through the second half of the winter was nasty and unrelenting”, and she adds that soldiers experienced “a snowstorm of skirmishes, ambushes, bad food, sleep deprivation and lice”.  Add to all that the frustration  felt by men who wondered why they were there and for what purpose, and how long it was all likely to last, and it’s easy to understand why they felt the way they did and could sometimes come close to mutiny. Reid provides details of what were termed “soldiers’ strikes” by Royal Marines and men from the Yorkshire Regiment.  There were even more disturbing incidents, especially in the ranks of the White Russian regiments the intervention forces were supporting. Bolshevik agitators were active among them.

It became obvious, as the fighting between the Reds and the Whites dragged on through 1919 and into 1920, that the ever-improving Red Army, under Trotsky’s leadership, was likely to carry the day. Preparations were made for the intervention forces to withdraw. Reid describes scenes that remind one of episodes like the American retreat from Saigon and the even more-recent withdrawal from Afghanistan. Equipment was abandoned or destroyed, and thousands of people who had good reasons to fear the arrival of the Bolsheviks were left to their fates. At the port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea the situation was chaotic. Warships took off military personnel and some privileged civilians, but there were too few ships for the mass of people. A paddle-steamer packed with men, women and children capsized, “tipping hundreds into the sea”. One eye-witness later said, “It was bloody awful. It really was. I think it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life”. Many White Russians felt betrayed by the British. Reid notes that while Novorossiysk was falling,  Churchill, the great advocate of intervention, “was vacationing on the French Atlantic coast, in a lodge borrowed from the Duke of Westminster. The weather, he wrote to Clementine, was ‘delicious’, and the dark green of pines and the gold of gorse perfect for painting”.

An Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement was signed in 1921 as countries faced up to the realities of Bolshevik rule in Russia and recognised the new government. The soldiers and sailors, and the few airmen,  who had served in the intervention forces might have wondered if it had all been worthwhile. Some, who did support going into Russia, probably put its failure down to the lack of ambition in terms of money, equipment, the numbers of the troops involved and their quality. However, there never had been a widespread consensus to the effect that Bolshevism presented a threat that had to be resisted. People in general, after the losses of the First World War, were tired of conflict. Most politicians dithered about what to do. It can be argued that the world would have been a different place had the Bolsheviks been toppled from power, but the fact is that they weren’t. We live with history as it was and not as it might have been.

A Nasty Little War is a thoroughly well-researched book and Anna Reid has thrown light on what is now a forgotten episode in twentieth century history. Out of necessity I’ve had to limit my comments, and in doing so have, for example, left out her fascinating account of the experiences of the Czech Legion as it crossed Russia on its way home. There is much in this book to grip the reader’s attention.