A serious comic opera: Whites versus Reds

From 1918 to 1920 sixteen Allied countries and 180,000 troops took part in the Intervention, the military invasion to replace the revolutionary Red Bolsheviks with the reactionary White Russian regime.  The constantly shifting fronts of the six major campaigns ranged from the Arctic Circle to the Caspian Sea, from Archangel on the White Sea to Vladivostok, 6,000 miles away, on the Pacific Ocean.  America sent only 7,000 troops, far too few compared to their 1.5 million in World War I, and the only time their soldiers have ever fought in Russia.  After defeating the Kaiser, they were now trying to restore the equally despotic Tsar.

Anna Reid has written an excellent history of this forgotten campaign: A Nasty Little War: The West’s  Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution (John Murray, 366 pp, £25). In her well-written narrative and mastery of complex material, Anna Reid tells the story from below, using soldiers’ letters and memoirs rather than the standard histories.  One British artilleryman condemned his Russian allies as inefficient, “lazy, untidy, pessimistic, boastful, ignorant, untruthful and dishonest.”  The Russians justly felt that “the Allies were not coming in overwhelming strength to Russia’s aid.  Instead, she was being fobbed off with token forces, sub-standard army surplus” and incompetent officers.  The British, who neither intervened on a proper scale—they needed at least 100,000 troops and sent only 32,000—nor withdrew their inadequate force, suffered a disastrous defeat.

In sharp sketches, Reid describes the political leaders as canines: “Wilson lanky and long nosed, a nervy greyhound; Lloyd George bouncy and twinkling, an eager terrier; Clemenceau white-haired and shaggy, a cunning old sheepdog.”  She also spices her story with morbid details.  One White general, “a psychopathic cocaine addict, rode about with a caged crow attached to his saddle.”  Fanatical Finns stuffed skins of corpses with leaves and hung them on trees as warnings to their enemies.  More subtly, a terrifying-looking Latvian won a medal “she wore on her ample bosom, by poisoning eight German officers at a dinner-party in Riga.”  No one knows what happened to the £65 million of bullion, the remnant of the Tsarist gold reserve, seized by a White general and captured by the Czech Legion.

Many colorful, adventurous characters swirled around this “nasty little war”.  Russians: the terrorist Boris Savinkov, the spy Sidney Reilly, the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov; British: the diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart, the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, the model for Kipling’s Stalky General Lionel Dunsterville, the authors Arthur Ransome and William Gerhardie; Americans: the  journalist Lincoln Steffens, who blindly prophesied that in Russia he had seen “the future and it works”; and the young English naval lieutenant Charles Drage, who later became the biographer of a Jewish warlord in China.  (When I met Drage in London in 1973 he showed me tiny shoes for Chinese bound feet.)

At first, before the Reds were well organised, the White Allies expected an easy victory.  If the Americans had immediately intervened, many believed they could “have marched on Moscow‘ like a knife through butter’. ”  The powerful 70,000-man Czech Legion achieved major victories, and the Whites could have arrested the Bolshevik leaders and seized power.  In November 1918, just before the Armistice ended the Great War, Lenin feared the Allies might come through the Dardanelles and asked: “What can we put up against them, if they really send them, and if the Allied soldiers really obey their rulers and march?”  An intelligence report stated that Lenin was about to fall and if the British intensified their drive, victory was assured.  In October 1919, as the Whites approached Moscow from the south and Petrograd from the east, Lenin thought the former would have to be abandoned.  In early 1920 the Poles defeated the Soviets at Warsaw and gravely weakened the Red Army.

Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War, was the only political leader who realised that the Allies were at a crucial turning point in world history.  He always felt that great opportunities were “dangling at our fingertips” in Russia.  Despite setbacks, the White Russian Admiral Kolchak still held three-quarters of Russia, from the Urals to the Pacific, and General Denikin controlled huge territory in Ukraine and from Odessa to the Volga in the South.  Unfortunately, Churchill was stigmatised by his disastrous Gallipoli campaign in 1915, and by opponents who thought Intervention for him was an obsessive and redemptive private war.  Still, he never gave up, and even as the Whites suffered defeats he “mounted a rearguard action to prolong the Intervention”.  Until the end of his life Churchill rightfully insisted that “the Bolsheviks could have been overthrown easily if only the political will had been there, and that the Whites had been a good cause”.

The war was indeed “nasty”, being marked by atrocities on both sides.  Both armies massacred thousands of POWs and civilians, looted houses, burned villages and tortured captives.  Reid records that in one town more than 200 women and girls were violated: “In the presence of mothers, fathers and dozens of strangers, victims were pushed to the ground and raped, even right on the street, by 15 to 20 men each.  The cries went on for hours.”  The Cossacks lived up to their reputation for cruelty.  They hanged and strangled victims without a drop, and cut off their arms and legs while they were still alive.  Lice-borne typhus killed many more people.  In one hospital there were 500 beds for 5,000 patients: “A few nurses were going about in a daze, with an expression on their faces that made one fear for their sanity.  They could do nothing as there were no medicines available.”

As usual, the Jews suffered the most, and the British were complicit in massacres by soldiers on their side.  The Jews were associated with the Bolshevik leaders Trotsky and Kamenev, and also victimised by the prevailing anti-Semitism of the Allies.  All the Jewish towns were plundered during the armies’ advance and again during their retreat.  The Russians often forced Jews into buildings and burned them to death.  In Fastov, near Kyiv, Cossacks stopped people on the street, asked “Are you a Jew?” and shot them in the head before they could answer.  More often they would search them, strip them naked and then shoot them.

Anna Reid does not supply an essential conclusion that explains why the Whites lost, why the Reds won and the consequences of their victory.  The Whites had poor pay, poor rations, low morale, slack discipline and massive corruption.  They were ill-equipped and had broken-down railways.  Mutinies and desertions plagued the army.  The foreign generals, with poor interpreters, were unfamiliar with the Russian language, customs, weather, vast taiga and steppes.  The Russians loathed the weak coalition leaders, who had no coherent policy nor effective strategy.  Led by foreigners, the Russians had to fight against their fellow countrymen.  The war was a “strange mixture of intense seriousness and comic opera”.

Leon Trotsky, with no previous military experience, created and commanded the victorious Red Army.  Though fighting on twelve shifting fronts, it was highly motivated, well disciplined and effectively mobilised, and eventually amounted to three million soldiers.  Trotsky appointed political commissars to ensure the loyalty of 2,500 former high-ranking Tsarist officers.  The Red Army had survived two severe winters, and had grown from “a collection of volunteer militias into a full-scale, professionally officered conscript army.”  Reid writes that Trotsky became “a war leader of near genius: shrewd, decisive and boundlessly energetic, dashing from front to front in a much-mythologised armoured train.”

When the British, retreating south, lost their last port, the Reds relentlessly drove them into the Black Sea.  Cossacks tried to swim out to the British ships on their horses.  Artillery and trucks were pushed into the water, and tanks squashed flat a row of airplanes “before trundling into the sea with their own mighty splash”.  The leading British generals were devastated.  The massive Edmund Ironside confessed that the whole expedition “had been a failure, and it would have been better ‘never to have started the show at all.’ ”  Alfred Knox also admitted that “he had completely failed; that he had done nothing for Russia, for his own country or himself.”  The American commander William Graves mournfully agreed that it was “a fiasco and a fundamental error, and America should never have got involved.”  All concurred that it was a disaster in conception, execution and ideas.  Russia was a dangerous quicksand that had devoured great armies and empires in the past.  The many serious mistakes and fatal decisions—especially George V’s refusal to grant asylum to the Tsar’s family and save their lives—were tactfully covered up in postwar memoirs.

A White victory and reformed monarchy or a republic in Russia—possible, as Churchill had urged, with a more forceful Intervention—would have radically changed twentieth-century history.  It would have saved millions and millions of Russian lives, and prevented Stalin’s totalitarian regime, the gulags, the Ukraine famine, the Purge Trials, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the postwar occupation of Eastern Europe, the Cold War — and Vladimir Putin.

Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist on February 7.  His Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath will appear on July 3, 2024.  His book, 45 Ways to Look at Hemingway, will be out in July 2025, all with Louisiana State University Press.

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