A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War

By Anna Reid

Basic Books 2024

The initial surprise in Anna Reid’s A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War is the sheer scope of the subject. Readers familiar with the First World War or the Russian Revolutions might have encountered this side-show mentioned more or less in passing, but in this book the “Intervention” conducted by some 180,000 French, the British, and the Americans shipped out to a wide variety of locations in order to turn back the surprising victories of the Bolshevik revolutionary forces had enjoyed in 1917. When the Bolsheviks made peace with Germany, the Allied governments concentrated a sliver of their resources on backing the “White” forces, sending troops under a motley collection of commanders in order to make common cause with the Russian forces fighting against the revolutionaries.

Reid wisely chooses to play to her own rhetorical strengths by placing personal portraits of this odd and mostly little-known characters at the center of her narrative, starting not with individuals but with a quick-brushed collective portrait of the British regular army officer that reads wonderfully, like something right out of Ford Madox Ford:

Though he had grown up in the age of Freud and Joyce, Gandhi and the Suffragettes, they touched his world-view not at all. Son of the most powerful nation of the day, his touchstones were Empire – an a priori Good Thing; country – foreigners were by definition funny; and faith – sincere, though best kept to oneself. His style – its understatement intended to convey natural superiority – was modelled on the heroes of John Buchan: decent, anti-intellectual, self-deprecating and eternally stiff upper lip.

This tendency to skilled dramatics suffuses the book; the reader gives a quiet little sign at realizing that while instructing, Reid will very much also delight. General Alfred Knox is described as “an Ulsterman of impressive, even terrifying appearance – hooded eyes, beak of a nose, implacable chin,” and the larger-than-life General Edmund Ironside, “the kind of man people love to mythologize” (the model for Buchan’s Richard Hannay), is promptly mythologized: “He was a descendant of Saxon kings, it was said, had been expelled from school for whipping a teacher, spoke seventeen languages, had disguised himself as an ox-cart driver during the Boer War.” 

But even in this gallery of memorable figures, one inevitably stands out: Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, “Supreme Ruler of Russia” from 1918 to 1920. As that job title accurately portends, Kolchak is a doomed figure in these pages, unknowingly possessing a gold-plated guarantee of an early and ignominious death (in Kolchak’s case, being shot and having his corpse shoved under black river ice). Kolchak led the White Russian forces against an opposition that was stronger and better organized than his Allied backers thought, all the while fighting himself: “Highly strung, and without any previous experience of politics or administration, he found his position overwhelming,” Reid writes. “In public he looked tense and unhappy, and in private suffered volcanic losses of temper, throwing things and tearing at upholstery with a knife.” 

Despite the men and machinery and money, and despite the fervent backing of enthusiasts in the West (foremost among them Winston Churchill, who would learn no lessons from this incident any more than he learned any lessons from any other fiasco he championed in a long life of almost never doing anything else), the Intervention failed and more or less quickly collapsed back upon itself. Readers of of A Nasty Little War will love the page-by-page experience (as when the steppe in Springtime is described as “now busy with bustards and bright with wild tulips”), but thanks to the clarity of Reid’s account, they’ll feel the failure of the Intervention coming almost from the first page. It adds a little shiver of predestined folly to an already-captivating narrative. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News