How Britain tried to stop Communism – and failed
Between January 1918 and May 1925, various Allied powers sent 180,000 troops to intervene in the Russian Civil War, attempting to, in Winston Churchill’s words, “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle”. In A Nasty Little War, the former Economist journalist Anna Reid has written a devastating analysis about why they failed, rightly concentrating on the corruption, incompetence, war crimes and lack of coordination of the anti-Bolshevik ‘White’ forces, especially their leaders such as Anton Denikin, Alexander Kolchak and Nikolai Yudenich.
For all the huge numbers of troops sent to Russia, from countries as diverse as Japan, Greece, Poland, Serbia, France and Italy, only relatively small numbers of Allied combatants were killed: fewer than 1,400 from Britain and America, for example, which contrasts starkly with the losses on the Western Front in the previous four years of the Great War. Furthermore, the campaign did secure the independence of Latvia and Estonia.
A Nasty Little War is generally well-researched and well-written. Yet for all its admirable qualities in relating a struggle that stretched from the Caspian Sea to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific, Reid adopts an unrelentingly snarky tone when describing her chosen villain, who is not Lenin or Trotsky or any of the other Bolshevik mass-murderers of the day, but instead is Winston Churchill.
“Churchill’s own priority,” Reid alleges of his time as war minister in 1919, “was to retrieve his military reputation, and with the war proper over, the remaining field for achieving this was Russia.” In fact, Churchill’s anti-Bolshevism long predated his appointment as war minister, and it was his profound ideological opposition to Marxism-Leninism, not his personal ambition, that prompted his demands for intervention. Churchill knew that communism, once it controlled Russia, would unleash untold horrors on civilisation.
Reid quotes the many animal metaphors used by Churchill to describe the Bolsheviks in speeches, which included mangy hyenas, blood-sucking vampires, plague-bearing rats, tame cobras and mastermind crocodiles. His hatred was not self-interested. Reid’s jibes about Churchill “gloating”, “huffing and puffing”, showing “wiliness” and having “tantrums” are little more than revisionist bile, and her accusation that he timed his holidays to avoid taking difficult decisions is frankly beneath her. Communism killed over 100 million people in the 20th century, and Churchill had every right to try to strangle it in its cradle, even at the loss of 938 British soldiers killed and ￡100 million spent.
Reid is on stronger ground when she criticises the Western nations for not doing more to try to prevent White armies from massacring Jews in pogroms, and she considers it “shocking and shameful” that Britain did not end its military support for the Whites over it. Although she refuses to give him any credit for it, the lifelong philo-Semite Churchill was one of the few Allied leaders who did remonstrate with Denikin and Yudenich over their forces’ anti-Semitic war crimes, telling the latter that “anything in the nature of a Jewish pogrom would do immense harm to the Russian cause.”
A major problem that the Allies faced, when they arrived in the summer of 1918, was that there were two dozen separate governments in Russia. “Dictators,” a British aide quipped, could be received at headquarters “from 7 to 10; supreme rulers between 10 and 1; prime ministers could be admitted between 2 and 5.” The lack of a central White government with genuine authority over the whole scene was a severe handicap when fighting an enemy that had ruthlessly centralised Politburo decision-making and was generally operating militarily with the advantage of interior lines. There was no strategic leadership worthy of the name on the anti-Bolshevik side, while for all their hateful cruelty, the Bolsheviks did have acute strategic leaders in Lenin and Trotsky.
The overall sense that emerges from A Nasty Little War is that civil conflicts are often more vicious than state-on-state ones, and that they are best left up to the native belligerents themselves, rather than having foreigners intervene. The anti-Bolshevik intervention did much to fuel Russian paranoia about the West, with dangerous consequences that can be seen even to this day.
Andrew Roberts and Gen David Petraeus’s ‘Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare, 1945 to Ukraine’ is published by HarperCollins. A Nasty Little War by Anna Reid is published by John Murray at ￡25. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books