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Anna Reid, "A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution" (Basic Books, 2024)
00:53:43
An interview with Anna Reid
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because we get to talk about an interesting, intriguing book titled A Nasty Little the Western Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution. This book tells a pretty extraordinary story, honestly, of how a number of countries in kind of the category of the west, tried to reverse the Russian Bolshevik Revolution. Obviously, a lot happened that is relevant to that time period and has a lot of resonances for today. So I'm very pleased to welcome the author of the book, Anna Reid, to the podcast to tell us all about it. Anna, thanks so much for being here.
- [01:51]
C
And thank you very much for having me on.
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B
Could we start off with you telling us a bit about yourself and explaining why you decided to write this?
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C
Well, I'm a journalist turned historian. I was based in Kyiv for three years in the mid-90s, and I've since written four books on Ukraine and Russia, all historical, a couple of them with a bit of travel writing mixed in. And the Russian Civil War obviously was formative for the Soviet Union, you know. More. More. It was where the. You know, it was where the sort of Soviet Union was forged, really, you know, more than the revolution itself. So, you know, it militarized, it brutalized, you know, it brought about a mass typhus epidemic, mass famine. It also brought Stalin to the fore. So, you know, if, if, if one wants to understand the Soviet Union, you have to know about the Civil War. And when I was. I was researching a book on a colonial history of Siberia, it was a book about the indigenous peoples of Siberia. When I was researching that, I read a memoir written by General William Graves, who led American forces in Siberia during the intervention. And he didn't want to be there at all. He had been looking forward to going and commanding a division in France when the First World War was still going on. And then he got diverted very unwillingly to Siberia. And he loathed his Russian counterparts. He was supposed to be supporting, and he did his best to keep his troops out of fighting as much as possible. But his whole account of the period is so interesting because he's such an outsider. He's seeing it through completely out, outside arise. And the whole idea of these American doughboys sort of tooling up and down the Trans Siberian Railway on sort of peacekeeping duties, you know, in the middle of this chaotic civil war, was sort of so extraordinary and appealing. It's sort of, you know, sort of, you know, Frank Smith from Michigan, you know, sort of in the middle of Dr. Zhivago. And so I thought, you know, there are lots of good books already in English on the Civil War, and there are also some quite sort of specialist military history books, particularly on the campaign in the north. But there's nothing about the intervention per se, taking in all the, you know, the whole thing, and everywhere it happened. So, you know, Allied troops were sent to sort of five different places to the far north, Archangel and Murmansk, to Siberia, to the Caspian, to southern Russia and Ukraine, and also to the Baltic. So you've got this big military effort, very spread out, you know, covering a vast geographical area. And, you know, it was just a great. You know, it's a great subject. It, you know, it's very. It's important. I mean, you can talk about, you know, what it did to Western Soviet relations longer term. You can talk about it as a prototype for later interventions. You can talk about it as one of the causes of isolationism, American isolationism, British isolationism between the wars. But it's also just incredibly colorful and dramatic. You know, it's a story. It's full of sort of, you know, sled rides across the steppe, across the, you know, sort of Chinese border, you know, sort of fleeing the advancing Red Army. It's full of assassinations and coups and love affairs and, you know, sort of riding at midnight out of burning towns and, you know, sort of splacked out steam trains and ambushes. And it's, it's sort of, it's a fabulously dramatic story. So, you know, it was a lot of. It's a grisly story. You know, there's this background of atrocities and famine and typhus and everything, but. But it's also a story of sort of derring do and drama.
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B
Well, very dramatic, as you said, and useful as well to get that context in terms of kind of what's been written about already and sort of the many different moving pieces here. So to start to unpack, I mean, I think some of those pieces. Can you help us kind of poke at this idea of the Allied troops who wanted to invade Russia, who ends up being involved in this intervention and why?
- [06:37]
C
I'll backtrack a little bit into the Allied relations in general when Nicholas II abdicates in February of 1917, the first revolution of 1917, and is replaced by a center left civilian Provisional Government that is welcomed by Russia's allies. For them, the war with Germany, which is at its peak, is absolutely top priority. And the Russian army had been faltering, beginning to fray. It had been bled dry by three years of fighting already. Nicholas II had become incredibly unpopular, sort of desertions were rife and it was hoped that this new Provisional Government would pull the army back together again and re energize the Eastern Front. And you know, that of course didn't happen. It never really managed to take real power because this sort of parallel system of Soviets grew up alongside it. But so, you know, it. Fairly quickly it became obvious the Provisional Government didn't have much of a shelf life. But the fact that it was the Bolsheviks that took over in November of 1917 was a massive shock to everybody because they were this sort of unknown, you know, minor revolutionary group of, you know, what had been until recently, sort of exiled or imprisoned sort of pamphleteers. And the diplomatic corps in Petrograd have nothing to do with them at all. And everybody, mainstream Russian opinion included, assumed they wouldn't last. They did, however, thanks to support from the Petrograd Moscow garrisons, they hung onto the two biggest cities by far of the Russian Empire. Alternative governments, committees were formed, alternative governments were declared all around the peripheries, but they hung onto the heartland. And what was worse for the Allies, what was worst of all by far, was that they immediately started peace talks with the Germans. Now, you know, this was a necessity you know, an unpleasant necessity for them in reality. You know, Lenin had to. He had to give up terror. He had to make peace with the Germans. He knew he couldn't rebuild the army and it was, you know, he wasn't going to be able to hang on to power otherwise. But that Britain, France, America saw it as a heinous betrayal. And angriest of all were the French under Prime Minister Clemenceau, who had been. Who were suffering most in the First World War. They'd lost the most young men. That large chunk of France was under occupation. And not least, it was a massive economic blow to them because a lot of French small savers have put their savings into Russian government bonds and the Bolsheviks announced that they weren't going to be honored. So people lost their savings at a blow. And sort of at the other extreme was Woodrow Wilson of America. And he was, you know, by sort of nature and experience, anti military action. So he had been burned by an incursion into Mexico in his first term. He'd stayed out of the war against Germany as long as he could. And he generally regarded everybody and all. Everybody in Russia. Russia is a big mess. He talks about a lot of impossible folks. Later on, he's trying to decide what to do about Russia and he says, I've been sweating blood about this, but it goes to pieces like quicksilver under my hat. You know, he's never happy about it. And in between the two is Lloyd George, who basically havers. And so, you know, as the, as the Civil War, depending on what's happening in the Civil War, and if the whites are doing well, he's more positive about it. If they're doing badly, he goes off the idea again and he ends. What he does basically is put in small numbers of troops, but he keeps them there. So, you know, you feel if you. I think this was, you know, in the circumstances and given the knowledge of the time, this was quite a sensible policy. It was sort of, you know, a finger on the scales that might make the difference, but don't let yourself get sucked in too much. But for his opponents on both sides, on the left and on the right, it was no policy at all. It was just sort of indecision. You know, the right wanted him to send in big forces and the left saw Russian Revolution as a glorious new dawn and disagreed with the intervention entirely.
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B
Thank you for giving us that overview because it isn't a straightforward sort of why are people doing this? What are the different mix of motivations, really? And I think that also helpfully highlights how much sort of World War I plays into this calculus. So what then happens when World War I is over?
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C
The initial sort of practical rationale for the intervention, for sending troops to Russia at all is to guard stocks of military supplies which the Allies have been sending to the Russian Tsarist army and which are sitting in various ports. They were sitting awaiting distribution at the time the Bolsheviks took power. So Archangel up in the north on the White Sea north of Petrograd, Petersburg as it is again now, is chock blocked with military supplies. So is Vladivostok on the Pacific at the far end of the Trans Siberian. So right away, after the Bolshevik coup of November 1917, small forces are landed in both those places simply to keep an eye on things and make sure these supplies don't get handed by the Bolsheviks to the Germans. What changes Woodrow Wilson's mind is a completely unexpected and extraordinary event, which is something called the Czech rising. So about 50,000 Czech and Slovak soldiers in 1917 had been fighting with the Tsarist armies against the Austro Hungarians, who they see as their sort of imperial overlords. So when the Russian army starts to collapse through 1917, they stay organized, they stay with their units and they've got troop trains, they've got arms, and their one desire is to get back to Europe and if possible, join in the liberation of Czechoslovakia. And they can't go the short way home westwards because the war's still going on and you know, Germany and Austria are in the way. So what they do is start moving on their trains east, all the way 5,000 miles east towards Vladivostok, where they plan to take ship and sail home. Now, as they do this, and this is talking now sort of early spring 1918, they encounter more and more sort of lack of cooperation from these local red militias who've taken, who've got control of most of the railway towns along the route. And in May, Trotsky actually orders these red militias, these little Soviet so called governments in all these little towns to arrest the Czechs, disarm them and conscript them into this, you know, sort of nascent Red Army. The Czechs obviously are having absolutely none of that. They take up arms, they're well organized, they're experienced soldiers. They quickly knock over these scratch red militias and take control of the entire Trans Siberian Railway. And by July they've got control of the whole thing, including Vladivostok. And so this completely changes the strategic calculus about intervening in Russia. So for, for Wilson, the Czechs are one of his gallant small Self determining nations, as in the 14 points speech, the Western press take up the cause as well. They become immensely sort of, they're hailed as heroes in the West. It's a very romantic story. And more practically speaking, if you have American landings in Vladivostok, the troops will now be sure of a welcome with the Czechs in control. So still rather reluctantly, Woodrow Wilson says, yes, we will send troops to Vladivostok and sort of July, August, September of 1918, you've got quite substantial landings of British, French and American troops both in the north and on the Pacific coast of Russia. And that's where you stand as the First World War in the west draws to an end.
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B
And obviously we have to think about that impact, given the reasons you've told us about for why countries got involved. So if we move a few months from where you've just left off, how does the armistice at the end of 1918 impact this intervention?
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C
Well, again, it changes the strategic picture completely. So there's no longer an Eastern front to dream of rebuilding. There's no longer any need to worry about military supplies falling into German hands. However, the Allies have made promises to these various little anti Bolshevik governments in the towns and cities where they've got troops and leaving them in the lurch would look bad. There's the prestige argument. And in the north, the Allied troops can't come home anyway till the spring because Archangel is frozen up. You have to wait for the thaw. At this point, a new rationale for the intervention emerges, which is stopping Bolshevism spreading west. You know, it's hard to sort of imagine it now, but on the right there was genuine fear in the period 1918-1919 of revolution at home. There was trouble brewing in Ireland and in India. There were big demobilization riots in all the army, in the army camps in Britain and France. And there was a wave of strikes, you know, dock workers, miners, railway men and so on in France and Britain and America. And somebody. So Henry Wilson, for example, who was head of British armed forces, he was chief of Imperial General Staff. I mean, he had a plan, he formulated a plan to sort of flood London with tanks. You know, he had genuine fears that there'd be a mass insurrection. And so the intervention in Russia. Public opinion is always split on intervention in Russia. There's the hands off Russia movement, which is brilliantly against it and gets lots of followers in Britain and America. There are rallies in New York and rallies in the Albert hall and so on. But there's also a powerful Influential sort of right wing constituency for doing everything to try and overthrow Lenin and Trotsky.
- [18:57]
B
Thank you for explaining kind of how those elements develop. If we, however, think not just about kind of the perspectives from those doing the intervening. What about the claim made by Soviet historians since that this is a colonial war? How might we think about those claims and the interaction between kind of these big wigs on the other side and the people actually carrying this out?
- [19:25]
C
You're absolutely right. Soviet propaganda painted it as a sort of capitalist imperialist war. And there are lots of rather wonderful cartoons showing this sort of, you know, obese businessman with a sort of straining waistcoat and a top hat and a fat cigar, you know, so pulling the strings, you know, behind the puppet white generals. It certainly wasn't a colonial war in the sense that the west had any intention of permanently annexing Russian territory. They didn't. But they did use some of the techniques of colonial war. So they'd raise local levies, usually by, you know, by offering good rations to the sort of starving local population. And they would put sort of complaisant, you know, cooperative local leaders in place and then, and then get rid of them and replace them with somebody else if they stepped out of line. And at least twice the military men on the ground did this, you know, on their own initiative without sort of, without say so from London. The first example was in Archangel in the summer, a man called General Poole who cooperated with local Russians of right wing officers to get rid of a socialist civilian government that we'd been supporting. And that was actually reversed in a couple of days under diplomatic pressure because all the allied ambassadors were in Archangel, sort of perched there wondering whether to go home now. But then, much more importantly, General Knox, who was in charge, Alfred Knox, he was an Anglo Irishman, like right wing Anglo Irishman, you know, Anglo Irish, like lots of British top brass at the time, he was in charge of the British military mission in Siberia. And he was, he became very close with a cabal of right wing officers in Omsk, where again, we were notionally supporting a left wing civilian government. And he helped them overthrow that government and replace it with somebody called Admiral Kolchak, who was a youngish star of the old Tsarist navy and thereafter led white armies in Siberia. Not very well. He had no experience whatsoever of sort of politics or administration. They totally overwhelmed him. But the other thing which happens about the same time at the end of 1918 is Churchill is promoted back into the cabinet. Lloyd George brings back Churchill and Churchill is passionately anti Bolshevik. He's also extremely keen to rebuild his military reputation after the disaster of the Dardanelles and the remaining field for doing so. Now the war with Germany is over, is Russia. And thereafter he becomes the Intervention's chief cheerleader, not only at home, but also internationally, you know, sort of via all the peace conferences which are going on in Paris. So much so the British press calls it Mr. Churchill's private war. And very much at his behest, we send then in the spring of 1919, a new force down to the south, down to southern Russia and Ukraine to support Denikin and his volunteer army, which is the sort of conservative, the biggest of the conservative White Russian forces at play.
- [23:11]
B
So there's a lot going on then at the kind of high politics level, which I think most of the time we can generally say if Churchill's there, then that's very much what's going on. But what was it like on the ground? What was it like to be a foreign soldier, foot soldier, even in this conflict?
- [23:31]
C
Well, I was lucky. There are lots of people, great diaries, and there are letters home which tend to sort of paint. Sometimes they're very frank, sometimes it's sort of, you know, they're trying to reassure mum back home, so less so. But, you know, there are lots of terrific diaries, you know, many of which thankfully have now been digitized and online and, you know, they paint an extraordinary picture. So in Siberia and in the south, the Allies were chiefly training up Russian troops and supplying them with equipment, so sort of getting guns to the front and teaching Russians how to use them and sort of doing general liaison work. But in the north, around Archangel, they were deep into really nasty fighting, particularly through the winter of 1918-19. So the first general up there, this man called Poole, he overextends his forces. He sends them hundreds of miles south down the railway, the Archangel Petrograd Railway, and also down the River Dvina and its tributaries. So when winter sets in, they find themselves. You get these scattered troops defending little tiny villages in the middle of forests, in the middle of nowhere. And the temperatures plunge to minus 20 or below. You've got near 24 hour dark, you've got very poor communications, you get patrols constantly being ambushed. You never know whether the villagers who you're living alongside are loyal or not. And some very nasty battles and some very sort of narrow squeak retreats as well, particularly from a town called on the river Varga. It's a really lovely place. I've been there, hasn't changed much since. And you know The Americans in particular, you can see in the diaries, the American, just ordinary soldiers are particularly angry at being there. So unlike the Brits and the French who are sort of hardened soldiers, if you've seen service in France, these guys are essentially civilians. You know, they've had a few weeks training and back home in Michigan they've been brought over, been told they're going to be fighting the Kaiser and now they find themselves fighting as they see it, to resort, restore, you know, the sort of bloodstained autocratic czar. And they're extremely resentful of being there at all. And indeed that, you know, that. And it's very unpopular at home as well. Back in the States there's lots of bring up but boys home sort of demos. And so Wilson brings them back as soon as the, as soon as the ice melts in the spring of 1919. But the Brits and the French stay on and you know, they too are extremely resentful. You know, once they see this as a pointless sideshow, you know, the war's won, why can't we go home? And increasingly they mutiny. And they don't mutiny in the sense of actually sort of scragging their officers, they mutiny in the sense of refusing to obey orders so they won't get back in their trains. When they're being sent back to the front after some R and R in Archangel or they told to attack some village, they simply sit down and refuse to do it. And that whole Northern expedition is wound up in September of 1919.
- [27:22]
B
To be honest, reading the descriptions and of course you're giving us a very helpful highlights version of the book for anyone who wants to know more about those diaries, for example, that you found. There's loads of detail in the book and reading it, I can understand why they didn't want to be there. It doesn't exactly sound like a great experience. So thank you for telling us a bit about that. Is there something you'd like to add?
- [27:47]
C
Well, I was just going to say from the officer's point of view, they did actually have a lot of fun. You know, in the north there was nasty fighting, but elsewhere much less so. And you know, in the places they were billeted, in these towns and small cities where they were billeted, probably running a sort of machine gun training school or something like that, you know, they were feted by the local and sort of refugee middle classes, Russian middle classes, you know, first of all because it saw them as saviors and also as potentially if the worst came to the worst, as you know, tickets out of the country, you know, useful contacts to have. So read their diaries. And it's an absolute whirl of parties and picnics and outings and you know, so they go to the races, there are charity balls, they watch sort of, you know, Madame so and so's ballet school puts on a show for them. Everybody stands up and sings God Save the King. You know, they have a great time in between some sort of unpleasant episodes. And then at the very end you get these, you know, these sort of mass retreats down the railway lines, you know, which they're swept up in as well and they're back onto the troop ships. But they, you know, they have, they have in their memoirs there's, you know, there's a strong incentive to paint, to sort of, to give the whole thing a sort of light hearted jolly japes gloss because it minimises sort of the shame at having deserted allies and friends. And it does, it minimizes shame at the failure. But nonetheless, you know, when they talk about it as having been a picnic or something of a comic opera, that's a very common phrase, you know that there is an element of truth to that. You know, it wasn't, it was compared to the trenches, compared to being in France just carrying in a trench, being shelled, you know, it was, it wasn't, it was much, it was much, it was much less dangerous and it was much more exciting. You were sort of, I mean it's just was, it was, it was, it was a picnic in comparison. A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor. The colonel made his ten dollar Tuesday bucket so full with eight pieces of.
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A
Juicy crispy be chicken or tenders that it might just last you till Wednesday.
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C
If you've got that kind of self control. I mean some people want leftovers, others are more into right nowers. The Colonel lived so we could chicken.
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A
10 bucks, 8 pieces.
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C
One big deal with KFC$10 Tuesdays.
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A
Prices and participation may vary.
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B
Taxes, tips and fees extra. What an interesting kind of bit of context to think of, right? Oh wait, you could have been here but actually this is where you've ended up instead. So fascinating to kind of see that. And the phrase comic opera really does convey quite a lot. So thank you for adding that in. Can I ask you to tell us about something that we haven't touched on so far but is an important part of the book, an important part of what's happening here? Can you talk us through a bit? What role antisemitism played in this conflict?
- [30:51]
C
Yes. So this is, this is the really dark part of the book. So Russia has a long history of anti Semitism, obviously like the rest of Europe. However, whereas in the rest of Europe by the beginning of the 20th century, you know, the ghettos were, you know, long ago history in Russia still had in place this whole panoply of discriminatory laws against Jews. So there were, you know, you could only live in the Pale of Settlement, you couldn't live in the big cities, you were banned from any sort of government job, you couldn't own land. You know, it was very hard to get into university. There were quotas on numbers of Jews who were allowed into the universities and this and these, you know, one of the reasons for friction, one of the reasons Nicholas II was so disliked in America was that they even applied these rules to Jewish American citizens visiting Russia. Jews were also traditionally scapegoats in times of crisis. So there were pogroms in 1881 following the assassination of Alexander II and again 1904-5, you know, during those pro democracy demonstrations. And they were pogroms that, you know, there was some, there was violence, there was some killing, but it was mostly beating people up and destroying property. A new round of pogroms breaks out in 1919 during the Civil War on a totally different scale. We estimate. It's very hard to come up with firm estimates, but somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Jewish civilians were massacred. And there are also lots and lots of mass rapes. And this is in Ukraine. And all sides participated. So the Ukrainian national army, the various warlords, the Polish army, the Red army, but also the whites and we, the British forces on the ground turned a blind eye, turned a total blind eye. They were, on the whole, you know, they were shocked, you know, when working alongside their sort of white colleagues, they were shocked and disgusted really at the level of white antisemitism. They felt the Russians really obsessional about this. But for Russians in white propaganda, this Jew equals Bolshevik trope. The idea that the Jews made the revolution, it was all the Jews fault was a central message. And the slogans of Save Russia, Beat the Yids took the place of a real political program. And it also excused them from self examination, excused them from looking properly at why the old system was so unpopular, why it had collapsed so quickly and why they themselves now are having such difficulty attracting recruits. You know, but the Brits themselves were sort of casually anti Semitic. You read the diaries and letters and they're scattered with sort of witless jibes, but. And they, and they, they, they turned a blind eye, you know, that the mass, the massacres have happened off stage in the smaller towns, not in the bigger places where the British had headquarters, but they, but where they were, these bigger places were full of refugees from the shtetln where the atrocities were taking place. And, you know, nobody made any effort to find out what was actually going on. Nobody made any effort to restrain the, restrain the whites. And there's one exception. I found one young major in Odessa, and he was on a sort of diplomatic mission up to Vinnitsa, which is a sort of a town in sort of central western Ukraine. They were in talks with a West Ukrainian army to try and build an alliance between them and the whites. And he threw off his sort of Russian officer interpreter come minder and insisted on talking to Jewish representatives and pogrom survivors himself directly, doing best he could in French. And we only know he did this because the minder complained about it to his headquarters, to British headquarters, saying he's asking tactless political questions, he's harming Anglo Russian relations and he should be sent home. But this particular man was absolutely the exception that proved the rule. And this denialism, it was paralleled in London. So news of what was happening did get out via Jewish organizations. And so Jewish representatives in London would put together these dossiers, these data, saying so many people killed here and here and here and so on, and present them to the government. And they were invariably brushed off. They were told that these excesses, you know, excesses was the euphemism, were either untrue, a fabrication, or they were exaggerated, or Jews have brought it or, you know, brought violence on themselves by being pro the revolution or, you know, one, one source I found that talked about their nervous panicking, had fanned the violence. And in the House of Commons, Churchill evades questions and Lloyd George does nothing but make sort of one or two rather sort of peevish complaints to him, urging him to restrain his friends, as he calls them. But at no point do we tell Denikin, the head of White Russian forces in the south, that he, we will withdraw aid unless the massacres cease. And there's never even any discussion in cabinet about doing this. And, you know, I, I, I, I found that when I was, you know, this hasn't been written about much at all. And I was really shocked by it. I mean, obviously the 1919 pogroms are, you know, completely overshadowed since by the Holocaust. You know, what mustn't be ahistorical. One knows that antisemitism was Widespread at the time. But it, you know, it shocked me. And for me, it answered the question, was the intervention worth it at a stroke? No. It's something we should be ashamed of, you know, that we were arming, supplying, financing the armies that committed these massacres.
- [38:14]
B
It's extraordinary, a very important part of the book. So thank you for sharing that with us. And, of course, there's much more detail about the specifics of it in the book as well, for anyone who wants to learn this history that is so little talked about. So with all of these factors going on, in some ways, I was surprised to be reminded by your book that this war didn't last for, I don't know, five years, a decade. There's a lot happening here. But the war does end. When did the outcome of the conflict become clear?
- [38:49]
C
Let me think how much I would say for the Whites, you know, the point at which it looks as though they might actually win is October 1919. So Denikin advances from the south to within 250 miles of Moscow. He takes a town called Oryol, and the White General on the Baltic, Yudenich, he advances on Petrograd and gets to its outskirts, in fact, exactly the same spot that Hitler gets to 20 years later. But thereafter, it's all retreats. And in November, Kolchak abandons Omsk in Western Siberia, starts fleeing east along the Trans Siberian. In January, he's captured and then executed at Irkutsk about halfway along. So Denikin retreats south and he abandons Taganrog, his HQ, on 1 January, on New Year's Day. And at the end of March, he evacuates the remainder of his army, his collapsed army, from Novorossiysk in the northeastern corner of the Black Sea. And, you know, together with these flights along the two railways, you know, you've got. Together with the armies fleeing south and east, you've got massive civilian, you know, sort of refugee movements as well. And you get a horrible, you know, you've got these incredibly crowded conditions, these incredibly crowded refugee trains, incredibly crowded railway station buildings and so on. And all along these routes, you've got people dying of typhus, you know, sort of frozen corpses, you know, thrown out of the trains and just sort of sitting there in stacks alongside the track. Also starving horses, abandoned horses. And people. Lo. People lose each other. People, you know, lose, lose. Get sort of get separated in the crowds and lose touch with relatives. And something that a lot of the sort of Allied officers that are caught up in these refugee flights talk about is the Walls on railway stations being plastered with little handwriting, handwritten notes saying sort of, you know, Masha, if you see this, please meet me at the church in sort of Krasnoyarsk or something, the one with the red roof or you know, it'll sort of. Has anyone seen my little boy, age three, blonde hair, you know, I lost him at such and such place, you know, these heart rending little notes and sort of. So that is the end that, the evacuation from Novorossiysk in March of 1920. So all the Brits evacuate as well and they're all evacuated on British and sort of British chartered ships, the whole white army and then they're plonked in Crimea. That's the end of the intervention. It's not quite the end of the civil war because there's a, there's a sort of white last stand in Crimea under a general called, a very brutal general called Wrangel, but he evacuates to in November of 1920. So that is the very end of the civil war. At that point the Bolsheviks have conclusively won.
- [42:20]
B
Interesting to see the kind of different pieces here at the end. Just like at the beginning that it's not straightforward really at any point in this story. How then has it been remembered in various places across time. What has been the kind of longer term side of this?
- [42:40]
C
Well it was in, in the west, it was swept under the carpet because obviously it was a humiliating failure. So no campaign medals were issued, no official histories were written or published and the deaths which weren't very Many, only about 2,000 people and most many of those from, you know, disease or accidents. The deaths were sort of bracketed in with the, you know, the vastly larger death toll from the war against Germany. And if you look at British, you know, war, First World War memorials, amongst those sort of, you know, equal and so on, all the names from France and Flanders, you'll suddenly occasionally see Murmansk. There's just in there as though this person too had been fighting the Germans. In fact they were fighting the Bolsheviks. And the politicians involved distanced themselves. They blamed it on each other. Lloyd George blamed Churchill for pulling him into it. Woodrow Wilson, you know, died shortly afterwards of a stroke. But his biographers did the distancing for him. They sort of exaggerated how unwilling he had been initially to get involved. And the generals involved often just completely left it out of their memoirs. So for example, Knox, he publishes his wartime memoirs because he'd been with the, been with the Tsarist army, had been liaison with the Tsarist army through the First World War. But he breaks off his published diary at the end of 1917. He leaves out the intervention entirely. And you know, other generals, they just sort of give it a sentence or two in their memoirs before moving on to the next thing they were involved with. Now the exception to all this is of course Churchill, who defends the intervention to the end of his life. You know, he's still, he carries on making speeches saying if only the political will had been there, it could have been a success. You know, this horrible Soviet government could have been overthrown and history could have been different. So in Soviet Russia, in contrast, the intervention is a core part of history. You know, it's taught to every school child. You know, the imperialist west tried to strangle the revolution in its cradle. You know, the whites were traitors, puppets of foreign powers. And very good use was made of sort of intervention sites. Most notably an island north of Archangel at the mouth of the Dvina river estuary. It's about 40 miles north of Archangel, called Mudjug. It's basically just a sort of big sand spit, sort of big sort of, sort of slightly wooded sand spit. And at the beginning of the intervention in summer 1918, Poole created a prison camp there for civilian prisoners who were deemed politically dangerous. You know, the politicals and that over the subsequent winter we basically, the British forces there basically forgot about, was left in charge of a couple of sort of junior French officers who were sadistic and drunk and stole the prisoners rations, you know, beat them, put them in unheated underground punishment cells and sort of over a hundred, of about 300 prisoners there died. And you know, it was, it was, it was, it was a genuine war crime. It was, you know, rumors did begin to get to, to get to, to get through to Archangel that prisoners were dying of scurvy. But British command there never did anything about it or certainly nothing effective. And you know, this, this place was turned into a sort of cartoonishly, you know, propagandistic but you know, essentially fact based museum. And you can see it's all sort of semi collapsed now, but you can see the, you can see the displays and so on. And you know, for generations, you know, Russian school kids were toured around it and taught that, you know, this is, this is what, you know, this is what the intervention was about. This is what the white God, the anti Bolshevik forces were about. The sort of, the personal memoirs are very interesting. The British and American ones are noticeably different from each other, so that the British ones, there's a sort of palpable sense of Uneasiness of shame sort of lurking just underneath this sort of jolly japes surface. But the American ones are straight forwardly angry. You know, the intervention was a misbegotten waste of money and lives. America should never have been involved and interviewed. Later in life, veterans often compare the whole thing to Vietnam.
- [48:04]
B
What a comparison to make. Thank you for taking us through those different ways in which it's been remembered or not. Are there any lessons you think we can take from this war and your book?
- [48:19]
C
Yes, indeed. I mean, the very obvious one is the same one that Napoleon and Hitler learned. Don't invade Russia. But more broadly, be cautious about getting into other people's civil wars. It'll be more complicated than you think. Your allies may turn out to be as bad as the enemy. Your own troops will start asking why they, why they're there. And it won't be popular at home. And, you know, as I was writing it, you know, there was the American flight from Kabul and, you know, those pictures of Afghans sort of hanging onto the tail wing of, you know, departing aircraft. You know, it was absolutely reminiscent of what I was reading and writing about, about, you know, people and sort of trying to swim out to the, you know, the allied troop ships as they left Novorossiysk, you know, these sort of hysterical crowds all sort of left behind on the quaysides. What I really want to stress, though, can't do too strongly, is that the wrong lesson to draw is that because sending aid to Ukraine a century ago failed, it's going to fail again now. You know, the Ukraine war is not a civil war, and the Ukrainians are not the whites. You know, the Ukrainians are staunchly democratic, sort of, you know, coherent nation, have a strong liberal, democratic political program. You know, have proved, have proved their commitment to it again and again ever since the orange revolution in 2004. You know, the, the actual heir to the whites with his, you know, his ultra nationalism, his desire to rebuild the empire is Putin and cross fingers he'll fall for the same sort of reasons the whites did, you know, because he's grotesquely corrupt, his regime's grotesquely corrupt. Because his rules based on violence and because his promise of Russian greatness is hollow. It doesn't have any policies behind it. A century ago, the west should have got out of Russia quicker. All the intervention did was actually prolong a nasty civil war. But today we need to keep supporting Ukraine until Putin goes. If we want a stable Europe, in fact, we don't have a choice. And I hope and pray that America continues to lead the way in that.
- [50:58]
B
Some powerful way to end this interview. Thank you for finishing off with that. And for any listeners who want to get into all of these details and learn more about this history, again, the book is titled A Nasty Little the Western Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution. Anna, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast.
- [51:17]
C
Thank you very much for having me.