The Allied Intervention In Russia 1918 1920

This work explores the reasons for the Allied intervention into Russia at the end of the Great War and examines the military, diplomatic and political chaos that resulted in the failure of the Allies and White Russians to defeat the Bolshevik Revolution.

This volume, originally published in 1990 and now with an updated Preface, gives an account of the Allies' last concerted attempt to destroy Russia's nascent Bolshevik regime. At the start, it looked like a threat that should be taken seriously, as the Reds' enemies both native and foreign combined with trained mercenaries under the leadership of a Tsarist admiral. But it finished with a firing squad on the ice, and a grisly end for the ill-fated Admiral Kolchak. With him died the last hope for the old order in Russia, and the future of the new Soviet state was secure. The skill of the author's narrative lies in his mastery both of the detail and of the wider implications of these epic events.

Magtbalance; Sibirien; Nordrusland; Den Hvide Hær

An account of the little-known involvement of Royal Marines as they engaged the new Bolsheviks immediately after the Russian Revolution. After three years of great loss and suffering on the Eastern Front, Imperial Russia was in crisis and on the verge of revolution. In November 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks (later known as “Soviets”) seized power, signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers and brutally murdered Tsar Nicholas (British King George’s first cousin) and his children so there could be no return to the old order. As Russia fractured into loyalist “White” and revolutionary “Red” factions, the British government became increasingly drawn into the escalating Russian Civil War after hundreds of thousands of German troops transferred from the Eastern Front to France were used in the 1918 “Spring Offensive” which threatened Paris. What began with the landing of a small number of Royal Marines at Murmansk in March 1918 to protect Allied-donated war stores quickly escalated with the British government actively pursuing an undeclared war against the Bolsheviks on several fronts in support of British trained and equipped “White Russian” Allies. At the height of British military intervention in mid-1919, British troops were fighting the Soviets far into the Russian interior in the Baltic, North Russia, Siberia, Caspian and Crimea simultaneously. The full range of weapons in the British arsenal were deployed including the most modern aircraft, tanks and even poison gas. British forces were also drawn into peripheral conflicts against “White” Finnish troops in North Russia and the German “Iron Division” in the Baltic. It remains a little-known fact that the last British troops killed by the German Army in the First World War were killed in the Baltic in late 1919, nor that the last Canadian and Australian soldiers to die in the First World War suffered their fate in North Russia in 1919 many months after the Armistice. Despite the award of five Victoria Crosses (including one posthumous) and the loss of hundreds of British and Commonwealth soldiers, sailors and airmen, most of whom remain buried in Russia, the campaign remains virtually unknown in Britain today. After withdrawal of all British forces in mid-1920, the British government attempted to cover up its military involvement in Russia by classifying all official documents. By the time files relating to the campaign were quietly released decades later there was little public interest. Few people in Britain today know that their nation ever fought a war against the Soviet Union. The culmination of more than 15 years of painstaking and exhaustive research with access to many previously classified official documents, unpublished diaries, manuscripts and personal accounts, author Damien Wright has written the first comprehensive campaign history of British and Commonwealth military intervention in the Russian Civil War 1918-20. “Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War remains forgotten. Wright’s book addresses that oversight, interspersing the broader story with personal accounts of participants.” —Military History Magazine

The triumph of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War was the first great crack in the system of international relations established by the victorious Allies. The presence of a powerful anti-Western Soviet regime not only undermined the liberal values binding the signatories and member states of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, but also helped to stimulate the rise of aggressive fascist dictatorships in Germany and Italy. Consequently, the failure of the Allies to intervene effectively against the Bolsheviks helped pave the way for both World War II and the human catastrophe of Soviet totalitarianism. Stillborn Crusade is a reinterpretation of the causes and consequences of that failure. In sharp contrast with previous researchers, Ilya Somin argues that the West's failure resulted not from constraints limiting the options of policymakers, but from ideological misconceptions, particularly those flowing from the "liberal" and "realist" theories of international politics. The liberal view, based on the right of national self-determination, was espoused by Woodrow Wilson, and David Lloyd George. While unsympathetic to Bolshevism, they remained wedded to preconceived ideas on revolution, intervention, and the efficacy of force. The realists thought that the opposing Whites might constitute a greater threat to Western interests; they discounted the role of ideology in Soviet foreign policy. Against these views, Somin sets the position of Winston Churchill, who repeatedly and unsuccessfully urged decisive action when the Soviet regime was militarily vulnerable. As a consequence of British and American policy failures, the entire course of European and world history was radically altered for the worse. Stillborn Crusade also considers why earlier scholars, most notably George F. Kennan and William Appleman Williams, have ignored the issues raised here, even though they and others have not hesitated to criticize Western leaders for similar errors in other instances, especially in the case of Nazi Germany. Somin links the errors of 1918-20 to broader issues relating to the morality, feasibility, and desirability of Western, especially American, intervention in foreign civil conflicts. As a volume with important lessons for our own time, Stillborn Crusade will be of interest to historians, political scientists, and foreign policy analysts.

A History of Russo-Japanese Relations offers an in-depth analysis of the history of relations between Russia and Japan from the eighteenth century until the present day, with views and interpretations from Russian and Japanese perspectives that showcase the differences and the similarities in their joint history, including the territory problem as well as economic exchange.

Stamping Out the Virus was a phrase used by Col. Fuller in an internal memeo in 1919 to describe Communism - to the Allies (French, British and U.S.) this is what the Russian Civil War was about. Thus, began a two year attempt to eradicate this virus. In 1918, over 15,000 Allied troops were sent and intervened in the Russian Civil war at Archangel on the White Sea (North Russia). This book covers the entire war in depth. Detailed text, battle maps, orders of battle, and rare photos provide a full picture of military operations.