A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention Into the Russian Civil War

Reid writes about the ill-fated intervention of Western countries, primarily France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, in Russia following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Western forces joined the White Russians in their civil war against the Bolsheviks. Reid’s lively narrative is based in large part on diaries, memoirs, and letters home written by Western soldiers, many of whom realized the futility of Western interference long before policymakers did. Support for the Whites was hard to portray as a righteous cause because of the Whites’ involvement in horrific Jewish pogroms. Their atrocities, such as the execution of civilians and prisoners, made them hardly different from the Reds. The rural population shared equally bad experiences of the Reds and the Whites, as both sides in the war confiscated the peasants’ livestock and grain. The Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky’s talent as a military organizer gradually turned the ragtag collection of volunteer Red militias into a regular conscript army, and by the fall of 1920, the Whites were thoroughly defeated and dislodged from most Russian territory. In their final act, Western interventionists helped evacuate the Whites from Crimea to Constantinople.