As of: March 10, 2024, 9:15 a.m
From: Foreign Policy
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There is much to learn from the fight against the Bolsheviks for today.
The situation in Ukraine is better.
Does that mean better chances?
The Western intervention against the Russian Bolsheviks is an unmentioned yet instructive mistake.
There are some exciting parallels to the Ukraine War, comparing motivations, allies and ideology.
Conclusions can be drawn from them that cast an optimistic light on an intervention.
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by
Foreign Policy
magazine on March 3, 2024 .
Moscow - Northern Russia must have felt bitterly cold for the US soldiers, even though almost all of them were from Michigan.
On September 4, 1918, 4,800 U.S. soldiers landed in Arkhangelsk, Russia, just 140 miles (about 225 km) from the Arctic Circle.
Three weeks later, they marched alongside the British and French into battle against the Red Army amid towering pine forests and subarctic swamps.
Ultimately, 244 U.S. soldiers died in the fighting, which lasted two years.
Diaries of US soldiers paint a harrowing picture of first contact:
“We come across a nest of machine guns, we retreat.
[The Bolsheviks] are still firing at us heavily.
Perry and Adamson from my squad are wounded, bullets pierce my shoulder on both sides.
...I'm terribly tired, hungry and exhausted, just like the rest of the boys.
Losses in this attack: 4 killed and 10 wounded.”
These unfortunate souls were just a part of the extensive and ill-fated Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.
From 1918 to 1920, the United States, Britain, France and Japan sent thousands of troops from the Baltics to northern Russia, Siberia and Crimea - and millions of dollars in aid and military supplies to anti-communist Belarusians - in a vain attempt to crush Bolshevism to suffocate in its infancy.
Failure of Western intervention in Russia's civil war - mainly British involved
It is one of the most complicated and often forgotten foreign policy failures of the 20th century, retold in compelling, detailed, full-color detail by Anna Reid in her new book, A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention Into the Russian Civil War.
The details of the conflict, which Reid brilliantly interweaves with personal diaries of those involved, often seem otherworldly.
Japanese troops occupied Vladivostok in the Russian Far East.
The fickle French, who were initially the most pro-intervention of all the Allies, led the occupation of southern Ukraine and fought with the Reds over cities familiar to readers today: Mykolaiv, Kherson, Sevastopol, Odessa.
The British - who invested the most in the intervention with 60,000 men - crawled all over Russia's edges: they defended Baku from the advancing Turks, carried out naval sabotage against the Bolsheviks in the Baltics and finally evacuated the Whites from the ports on the Black Sea when they collapsed in the face of the Red Army's attack.
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Interventions in the Ukraine War: Does the West have to repeat its history?
The troubling question posed in Reid's excellent book is whether the West is doomed to repeat history.
The intervention failed, and if one looks closely, today's intervention in Ukraine may seem similarly hopeless in the face of a huge and determined Russia with a seemingly endless supply of materials, manpower and political will.
That's what the far-right wing of the Republicans in Congress, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and former US President Donald Trump want you to believe.
A feeling of hopelessness expressed by Edmund Ironside, the British commander of the Allied forces in northern Russia during the intervention: “Russia is so huge that you feel like you are crushing it.”
Yet despite the strong historical echoes, the differences between the two interventions are more revealing than their similarities.
Close examination perhaps raises an even more important question: what conditions are necessary for a successful foreign intervention?
Yes, the Allies screwed up, but to be fair, they failed mostly because of what was out of their control rather than what was within their control.
Circumstances more favorable: Ukraine under Zelensky determined its war against Russia
The most limiting factor was their inept (and damaging) Belarusian allies, a disparate group of anti-Bolshevik socialists and incompetent former Tsarist officers who were essentially Great Russian autocrats.
They had neither the support of the Russian population nor, most importantly, that of Tsarist Russia's ethnic minorities - from the Ukrainians to the Balts - whom they wanted to bring back under Russia's thumb.
Today the circumstances are much more favorable.
In Volodymyr Zelensky's Ukraine, the United States and Europe have a united and determined partner in a fight that is of blinding moral clarity.
Russia's economy may be at war, but the West as a whole has far more resources at its disposal.
And the task of defending a motivated Ukraine from enemy invasion is far less ambitious than trying to overthrow the government of the world's largest country.
A sober comparison of the two interventions should strengthen the West's determination to bring Ukraine through - provided that its own political will, which is waning today as then in Western capitals, does not get in the way.
The crucial ingredients for any foreign intervention are clear and achievable goals, reliable local allies, a vulnerable adversary, material resources, and the political will to get the job done.
The Allied intervention in Russia was lacking in almost all respects.
Lack of common strategy: Intervention in the Ukraine war requires a good plan beforehand
Perhaps what is most striking about Reid's narrative is that it is often unclear exactly what the Allied troops in Russia should be doing.
Yes, all Western governments loathed Bolshevism and feared its expansionist and contagious potential.
But beyond that, there was little common strategy or common goal.
In fact, Western troops were initially sent to guard railways and Allied military camps in northern and eastern Russia, which it was feared could fall into German hands.
However, this became somewhat complicated after Germany's surrender in November 1918.
As George F. Kennan writes in his magisterial work “The Decision to Intervene,” “American forces had barely arrived in Russia when history at a stroke overturned almost every reason Washington had conceived for their presence.”
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Zealous British officers on the ground - supported by stubborn ministers at home such as War Secretary Winston Churchill, who had almost exhausted his own political capital by advocating the quixotic Russian adventure - soon took the initiative to intervene actively and fight the Reds.
In other areas, including southern Ukraine, the mission was more clearly focused on supporting the white forces there - although France quickly lost heart and sailed home in April 1919 after a series of setbacks and mutinies.
Wilson confused by Washington's goals: Minimal interpretation bothered those willing to intervene in Russia
The instructions for U.S. military intervention were written down in July 1918 in a memo by President Woodrow Wilson himself, who characteristically agonized over the decision and “sweated blood over what was right and feasible to act in Russia.”
He opened the memo by warning that military intervention would “add to rather than resolve the current sorry confusion in Russia” — and then committed U.S. troops to support the Czech Legion operating in Siberia and in northern Russia to “make it for Russians “To make sure that bodies come together in organized associations in the north.” A statement that doesn’t clarify much.
The US officers received these instructions with astonishment.
General William Graves, who was in charge of the 8,000 soldiers in Siberia, was extremely skeptical about the United States' role in the conflict.
He interpreted Wilson's orders to mean that he was only allowed to guard the railway lines and not fight the Reds.
He later wrote in his memoirs that he had no idea what Washington actually wanted to achieve.
Much to the chagrin of his more interventionist British counterparts in Siberia, who instead supported the egregiously incompetent White “commander in chief,” Admiral Alexander Kolchak, a former head of the Russian Black Sea Fleet who found himself inconveniently deep inland Siberia.
(Incidentally, he was a spitting image of current Russian President Vladimir Putin.)
Historical experiences about allies on the ground: Needs loyalty, coordination and ideology...
Which brings us to the Belarusians.
The be-all and end-all of any foreign intervention, especially one as ambitious as the Western intervention in both Ukraine and the Russian Civil War, is allies on the ground.
That is the difference between the chaos that followed the Western intervention in Libya and the successful intervention in the Balkans.
On this point the whites have failed miserably.
It's hard to know where to start.
Aside from Kolchak, there was the overwhelmed General Anton Denikin, who led the White troops in southern Russia and concealed from the Allied governments the terrible pogroms against the Jewish population of Ukraine carried out by the Whites under his watch.
Aside from operating on an unimaginably large and disjointed front that spanned the entire periphery of Russia - a country with 11 time zones - the various white factions essentially acted like warlords, with no loyalty or coordination between them.
Equally fatal for whites was the lack of a coherent or convincing ideology.
Antony Beevor, in his fabulous new history of the Russian Civil War, blames both the lack of a political program and the disunity of the Whites for their defeat: “In Russia, a completely incompatible alliance of socialist revolutionaries and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against a single-minded communist dictatorship .”
...especially with a strong opposing pole: the motivated and ideology-driven Bolsheviks
The Reds stood in contrast.
They controlled the industrial heartland of Moscow and St. Petersburg and operated from the inside out with stronger internal lines of communication.
This allowed Commissar Leon Trotsky—who, as Reid notes, “blossomed into an almost genius war leader: sharp, decisive, and boundlessly energetic”—to jump on his tank train to shore up the weakening fronts as the Whites advanced from the east and south .
The Bolsheviks - although they pursued ruinous economic policies and unleashed the first waves of terror in their own country - were motivated and had a clear ideology that, at least at that time, had a certain appeal to the population.
And basically their will was much stronger than that of the whites or the West.
After the devastation of World War I, the Allied governments feared the spread of Bolshevism but were unable to carry their exhausted populations along with them.
Here the historical echoes are most disturbing.
Public support understandably waned and budgetary pressures increased.
Dissatisfaction with war after the First World War: Foreign policy considerations when intervening in war
As the British
Daily Express
put it in 1919, echoing today's republican rhetoric in the United States: “Britain is already the policeman of half the world.
It will not and cannot be the policeman of all of Europe.
… The frozen plains of Eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single British grenadier.” Rolling White reverses in Siberia and southern Russia were the nail in the coffin.
Then, as now in Ukraine, foreign policy support for intervention depended primarily on being able to prevail on the battlefield.
The task of foreign policy makers is to distinguish between what is under their control and what is beyond their control.
To the extent that they sense favorable conditions - allies, geography, the enemy's vulnerability - the task is to focus on and optimize the things they can control: strategy and objectives, mobilizing the political willing, providing materials to support the effort and coordinating with allies.
Favorable circumstances in Ukraine: Holds hope for further aid in the Ukraine war against Russia
Despite the pessimism currently prevalent in Western capitals, today's war in Ukraine offers some of the most favorable circumstances a policymaker could hope for - unlike those faced by the Allies during the Russian Civil War.
Ukraine is a worthy and capable ally fighting to defend its territory with a highly motivated population behind it.
The Steadfast Defender-24 exercise is designed to present and deter NATO defense capabilities.
© IMAGO / ZUMA Wire / Dominika Zarzycka
The Ukrainian cause is a just cause whose Manichaean quality is easily explained to the Western public.
While Vladimir Putin's personal will to win is strong, his actions and hesitation to fully mobilize Russian society make it clear that he senses a ceiling to what he can demand from his population.
Although Russia has more manpower and materiel than Ukraine, the amount needed to arm Ukraine and keep it fighting is entirely manageable.
An additional $60 billion in aid from the United States - currently blocked by the far-right Republicans in the House of Representatives - is a piece of cake compared to the benefits that will come from it: compliance with international norms, advocacy for the Ukrainians, and so on for Western values, keeping Russia in a strategic quagmire and reducing its ability to threaten the rest of NATO's eastern flank, and strengthening the transatlantic alliance.
Western capitals are much more united today than they were in 1918, and defense policy coordination between them is good.
While they may heighten a shared sense of an endgame in Ukraine, everyone knows the conflict will end in some sort of negotiated settlement - the question will be on whose terms.
If the United States and its allies can avoid the pitfalls of Western intervention in the Russian Civil War - develop a clear long-term strategy, continue to coordinate closely, and strengthen support at home by making the case to their own people – then they have a real chance of asserting themselves against Putin.
Given the favorable conditions, the most important and perhaps only obstacle to long-term success is the political will to complete the task.
To the author
Theodore Bunzel
is Managing Director and Head of Lazard Geopolitical Advisory.
He has worked in the political department of the US Embassy in Moscow and in the US Treasury Department.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” on March 3, 2024 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.