A Nasty Little War — when the west tried to overturn the Russian revolution

Despite supporting Ukraine with arms, military expertise and money, western governments are not at war with Russia. Just over 100 years ago, however, British, French, Japanese, US and other forces were spread across Russia from the far north and the Black Sea to the Pacific coast.

It was a misguided, badly executed effort to overturn the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. In A Nasty Little War, Anna Reid has written a thoroughly researched, stylish and entertaining account of a military intervention that has — in comparison with the two world wars and other conflicts — largely disappeared from western memory.

When the intervention began in 1918, it made a certain sense. Russia’s withdrawal from the war against Germany after the Bolshevik seizure of power raised the danger that large amounts of western war supplies, sent earlier to Russia for the tsarist armies, would fall into German hands. A large-scale, initially successful German offensive on the western front in early 1918 made it important to secure these supplies.

By November, however, Germany had surrendered and the justification for keeping Allied forces in Russia morphed into something different — an attempt to topple Vladimir Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries.

‘It kept a few of us from cluttering up the unemployment bureaux at home, but that’s about all . . . A really nasty, dirty little war’

As Reid underlines, western countries had every reason to dislike the Bolsheviks. They shut down Russia’s elected Constituent Assembly, murdered Tsar Nicholas II and his family, set up the Cheka secret police and created the Comintern, a body dedicated to world revolution. But the White anti-revolution forces that the Allies supported in the Russian civil war were led by nationalist arch-reactionaries with no more enthusiasm than the Bolsheviks for democracy and human rights.

Both sides committed atrocities. “On the Red side, mutilation of corpses was common, and on the White, killing of prisoners,” Reid writes. However, “the great stain on the White movement and the Intervention in general” was the White massacres of Jews in 1919-20 in Ukraine and southern Russia, and the connivance in them of the British in particular.

Other forces, notably Ukrainian nationalists, Poles and Reds, engaged in pogroms. But the Whites were aligned with the British, and too many officials in London and commanders on the ground “managed not to notice” what was going on, Reid says.

The basic problem was that they associated Bolshevism not just with prominent Jewish revolutionaries such as Leon Trotsky but with Jews in general. By making use of private diaries and other contemporary documents, Reid shows that some British officers even referred to Andrei Shkuro, a notoriously bloodstained White Cossack general, as a “scallywag” or “a bit of a brigand”.

Reid’s book is filled with distressing accounts of barbarities, such as those committed in north-western Russia by Finnic-speaking Karelian fighters who dealt with Reds by “skinning scouts’ corpses, then stuffing the skins with leaves and hanging them from trees as warnings”.

It is a relief that at times she lightens her narrative — for example with a description of how British soldiers in Baku, stumbling to pronounce the Russian “ya lyublyu vas” (“I love you”), rephrased it as “yellow-blue vase”.

Reid takes her book’s title from a 1972 interview, held in the archives of London’s Imperial War Museum, with Christopher Bilney, who saw action in Russia as a seaplane pilot. His verdict: “Waste of time, money and everything else. I suppose it kept a few of us from cluttering up the unemployment bureaux at home, but that’s about all . . . A really nasty, dirty little war.”

Does it have lessons for the west today? Only in a limited sense, Reid says. The crucial difference is that Ukraine is defending itself against a Russian assault on its independence and identity. Still, the west’s judgments of Vladimir Putin’s intentions and Russia’s fighting capacity matter a lot. The intervention a century ago, Reid says, is “a reminder of how often we get Russia badly wrong”.

A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution by Anna Reid John Murray £25/Basic Books $32, 400 pages

Tony Barber is the FT’s Europe comment editor

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