A Nasty Little War by Anna Reid review: Churchill’s hour of shame
The British army tried to reverse the Russian Revolution by joining forces with opponents of the Bolsheviks who massacred civilians, prisoners and, above all, Jews
During a grotesque 1919 factional clash, a witness wrote home from Vladivostok: “The dead were lying thickly along the road and the ghastliness of the whole thing is indescribable.” This was a young Royal Engineer officer, one of thousands of foreign troops committed to Winston Churchill’s crusade to scupper the Bolshevik revolution.
“What struck me most,” he added, “was that both government troops and insurgents were wearing British clothing and boots, and firing British ammunition out of American rifles and Canadian machineguns. There you have in a nutshell the result of Allied ‘help’ in Russia.”
Western interventions in foreign struggles have been almost uniformly shambolic from the 19th century through to Iraq and Afghanistan. None surpasses the Russian imbroglio, however, which would seem the stuff
