Anna Reid A Nasty Little War - Review

 

There are people who reckon that war brings out the best in human beings; no one claims that for civil wars which unfailingly bring out the worst. Wars are orderly, conducted with etiquettes which often hold up, and historically they have usually been conducted intermittently as set-piece combats.  Civil war is unremittingly present and at its heart is always the fear and insecurity created by not being able to readily identify who around you can still be trusted and how close is the danger.

Anna Reid’s A Nasty Little War is a thoroughly researched, unsettling account of failed Western (Allied) intervention on the side of White forces in the Russian Civil War between 1917 and 1920 which ended in victory for the Red forces of the Bolshevik regime. A cover comment from Anne Applebaum that the book is “Witty and Elegant” seems misplaced; Reid quotes frequently from diaries and memoirs – usually American or British - which try to make light of things or are comically inept but they only add to the reader’s (or this reader’s) unease. The war was unspeakably cruel and merciless;  criminals and psychopaths, fanatics and sadists, had more or less unrestricted opportunity to loot, torture, rape (always including child rape) and murder – the victims casually and often mistakenly identified as enemies but sometimes systematically chosen, most obviously the Jews whose separate residential areas made it easy to conduct a pogrom.

The Romanovs who ruled Russia for three centuries were constantly enlarging their Empire by expanding the contiguous land mass they controlled; only Sakhalin and Alaska (plus some scattered islands) were sea crossings away unless you add northern California. To the west they expanded into what are now Finland, the three Baltic states, and half of Poland. To the east they not only went in a straight line to Vladivostok but occupied what are now the -stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan Uzbekistan). In addition, they pushed into Mongolia and northern China whenever possible and on the Pacific coast down to the border with Korea at Port Arthur (later Dairen, now Dalian). To the south there was all of what are now Ukraine and Moldova together with the Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia) reaching the border with Persia. As territorial gain from the First World War, Nicholas the Second’s governments had their hopes set on Austrian Galicia, the northern coast of Turkey, and Constantinople. The Greek isthmus of Mont Athos also featured in their thoughts as did Afghanistan and the North West Frontier of British India. At the same time, and hardly surprisingly, the government in far-away St Petersburg felt permanently insecure about its borderlands but seems to have believed that by constantly expanding the extraordinary length of its borders they would gain security not lose it.

The relationship of St Petersburg to most of its Empire was essentially colonial ; ethnically and linguistically hugely diverse, the empire was ruled over by Russians who spoke Russian and would not contemplate any other language. In contrast, both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires accepted linguistic diversity; the early Soviet Union took the same approach. The Romanovs were intolerant of all religions other than the compliant Russian Orthodox and discrimination against Jews was legally enshrined long after it had been removed in other European countries. And, of course, serfdom was not abolished until 1861. As is usual with empires, the relation of centre to periphery was extractive; wealth was piled up at the centre.

The fabulously wealthy Tsarist regime was harsh, incompetent and unfeeling; the lives of this Leviathan’s oppressed native and colonial peoples  nasty, brutish and short. But in the end the awful Nicholas II was brought down not by the Bolsheviks but by a coalition of his own army officers and powerful commercial and industrial interests with a liberalising agenda. By the time of their downfall, the Romanovs inspired no love or loyalty; even the White armies which fought against the Bolsheviks did not propose the restoration of the Romanovs. They had to wait for  Tsar Putin and his puppet Rolex-wearing Orthodox church to rehabilitate them and their ambitions.

No sooner had the Allies achieved victory in the First World War and divided the territorial spoils, which their populations were supposed to regard as compensation for all the dead young men, than they embarked on - albeit modest – adventurous interventions in support of those forces seeking to bring down the Bolsheviks. Only Finland did not deserve support: the victorious side in its own civil war sided with Germany as it did its government in World War Two.  But those who got support hardly had their credentials checked, something which still happens whenever the West decides to “intervene” and finds itself tied to some crook, psychopath or simple incompetent who has no popular support. The dishonesty about who they were dealing with (the reality of  anti-Jewish pogroms routinely denied by all the intervention commanders) and why is recounted in disturbing detail by Anna Reid. I shan’t try to summarise it; it’s worth reading in its own right.

Reading the book, it occurred to me that in civil wars everyday life does go on in the background of fighting and atrocities. Reid has something to say about this. In Russia from 1917 to 1920 various local and regional governments did function though only partially and never disinterestedly. If they received aid from well-meaning foreign relief organisations you could be sure that very little of it would reach the intended recipients; later, Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration which operated in early Soviet Russia insisted on control over distribution by its own representatives.

One indicator of “everyday life” a hundred years ago is provided by the post: could you send a letter and would it be received? This index produces a startling result which indicates the weakness of the Bolshevik regime at the height of the civil war.  From 1 January 1919 to early June 1920, it was not possible to send a letter abroad from any part of Bolshevik-controlled Russia. The Bolsheviks had no access to ports or only to blockaded ports, had no official relations established with immediate or distant neighbours, and probably  had no foreign currency to pay third-party costs. Going round the clock, they did not control Archangel, Vladivostok, the Black Sea ports or any of the Baltic ports; Petrograd was at least partially blockaded. In addition, since a lot of mail going abroad would probably be written by hostile elements mail censorship would need to be in place and for the Bolsheviks that meant a centralised organisation in Moscow or Petrograd. When postal services were restored in June 1920, foreign mail was always routed via the centre except in the Far East where there was still a notionally independent government in Vladivostok (the Far Eastern Republic). A large censorship office was created, its activity readily identified by special cancellations with three triangles at the base. At the height of the civil war period, it was in any case unrealistic to route mail through to Moscow or Petrograd since the constantly shifting front line would mean that mail would be endlessly delayed and subject to capture by White forces who might be able to glean significant information from reading it.

The Whites could get mail abroad thanks principally to the good offices of the warships of Britain, France,  USA and other intervention countries which did not charge for carrying it though they might require that it be franked with whatever stamps were locally in use. At the time the most popular indoor hobby in Western Europe and the USA was stamp collecting and stamp dealers did a good trade in the ports of Archangel, Odessa, Riga, Tallinn, and Vladivostok exporting whatever stamps were being locally produced to replace Imperial Russian ones. In some cases, the dealers were involved in the production of the stamps themselves and their names remain associated with those stamps. In contrast, the Bolsheviks issued no stamps of their own until 1921; they used up old Imperial ones and reprinted them as necessary on inferior paper and generally without perforations - the machines were out of use.

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A few picky points: The town of Valk /Walk  which straddles the Estonian/Latvian border is quite wrongly located on the Baltics map as inside Russia; page 228 “Bermondt-Avalov” was at the time, I think, more often referred to as “Avalov-Bermondt” though Wikipedia opts for the B-A order; transliteration rules change – at the time it was “General Wrangel” in both the UK and USA not the anachronistic “Vrangel” used by Reid; in the literature “Grigoriy Semyonov” is usually referred to  as “Ataman Semenov” though Wikipedia uses Reid’s version. The “Ataman” is a Cossack title he awarded himself.