Anna Reid, A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War (London: Basic Books, 2024), 400 pages, $32, Amazon $27.45, Kindle $19.95, paperback $33.05. This article first appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 30 October 2023 and is reprinted by kind permission of the author and newspaper.

Failed strangulation

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.”¹ 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.

Huge numbers of troops were sent to Russia, from countries as diverse as Japan, Greece, Poland, Serbia, France and Italy. Relatively small numbers of Allied combatants were killed: fewer than 1400 from Britain and America, for example. This contrasts starkly with the losses on the Western Front in the previous four years of the Great War. Furthermore, the campaign did help 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. He is not Lenin or Trotsky or any other Bolshevik mass-murderer. He is Winston Churchill.

Reid gets Churchill wrong

“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 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. They 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.

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.

Dubious allies 

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. She considers it “shocking and shameful” that Britain did not end its military support for the Whites over this.

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. He told Yudenich that “anything in the nature of a Jewish pogrom would do immense harm to the Russian cause.”²

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. It faced a ruthlessly centralised Politburo decision-making body, operating militarily with the advantage of interior lines. There was no strategic leadership worthy of the name on the anti-Bolshevik side. Yet 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. 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.

Endnotes

¹ “I think the day will come when it will be recognized without doubt, not only on one side of the House, but throughout the civilized world, that the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race” (House of Commons, 26 January 1949). “The failure to strangle Bolshevism at its birth and to bring Russia, then prostrate, by one means or another, into the general democratic system lies heavy upon us today” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 31 March 1949). “If I had been properly supported in 1919, I think we might have strangled Bolshevism in its cradle, but everybody turned up their hands and said, ‘How shocking!’” (National Press Club, Washington, 28 June 1954). —Winston S. Churchill, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2016), 148, 381.

² WSC, War Office Departmental Note to General Haking, in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, vol. 9, Disruption and Chaos, July 1919 to March 1921 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2008), 934.

Further reading

Andrew Roberts, “Mannerheim, Churchill, and the Quandary of Two World Wars,” 2019.

Richard M. Langworth, “Churchill and the Baltic,” Part 1, 2017.

_____ _____, “Churchill: A Million Allied Soldiers to Fight for the White Russians?” 2019.

H. Ashley Redburn, “Remembering Richard Haking, the General Who Saved Churchill’s Life,” 2020.

Churchill Project; “Bolshevism: Foul Baboonery…Strangle at Birth,” 2016. 

The author

Andrew Roberts, Lord Roberts of Belgravia, is Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London; the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; and a regular contributor to the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. His Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018) was acclaimed as “undoubtedly the best single-volume life of Churchill ever written” (Sunday Times). His latest book, with General David Petraeus, is Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare, 1945 to Ukraine, (London: HarperCollins).