"A really nasty, dirty little war ... Waste of time, money and everything else" was the way Christopher Bilney, who served as a seaplane pilot in the Caucasus in 1919, remembered it in old age.
He was one of many British veterans whose memories of Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1918-20 were "uneasy, with guilt and a sense of failure lurking beneath surface jollity". The American veterans - who had less reason for guilt, given that their nation’s participation was relatively benign - sometimes retrospectively compared it to Vietnam.
In the diplomatic world, a Western consensus developed that the intervention was something best forgotten. Indeed, both Richard Nixon in 1972 and Margaret Thatcher twelve years later succeeded so well in this that they were able to assure Soviet interlocutors that their countries had never been at war with each other.
Fitzpatrick makes the book sound a good read:
The novelty of Reid’s approach comes largely from her generous use of participants’ diaries, letters and memoirs, mainly British, which makes her story unusually entertaining and takes us back into a world of British upper-class twits familiar from Evelyn Waugh, Osbert Lancaster and P. G. Wodehouse – at times, it reads almost like 'Bertie Wooster goes to Russia.'
But its story is a dark one. The White (i.e. anti-Bolshevik) Russians on whose behalf we had intervened had antisemitism as a central plank of their propaganda, and there were pogroms against the Jewish population of Ukraine while British troops were stationed there.
Mention of Ukraine suggests a worrying parallel, and Fitzpatrick concludes:
Perhaps the real takeaway from Reid’s history isn’t so much a lesson as a premonition: that not too far down the track, we could be witnessing a shamefaced withdrawal of Western support that leaves the Ukrainians - like the Russian Whites a century earlier - to sort out the mess with Moscow on their own.
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