The Cuban Invasion Was Not The First Such Fiasco

RARELY does a work of historical scholarship dealing with a small and relatively unknown segment of international relations become an exciting personal drama for the reader. Richard Ullman's Intervention and the War, a history of Anglo-Soviet relations from November 1917 to November 1918, is such a drama--one whose characters include British diplomats, Japanese generals, Czech troops and Bolshevik leaders. Its setting stretches from London to Tokyo, from Archangel to Baku.

The central theme of the work is the reaction of the British government to the November Revolution of 1917 which brought the Bolsheviks to control of central Russia. During that winter the British attempted to revitalize the Russian war effort. Following the treaty of Brest-Litovsk they resorted to direct military intervention in order to reestablish an Eastern Front which they thought absolutely necessary for victory. As Ullman points out, these attempts were based on an assumption and a hope:

The assumption was that there did in fact exist a community of interests between the Allies and the Soviet regime which made it advantageous to the latter to continue fighting the Germans, the hopw was that the Bolshevik leaders could be made to see this.

The author proves the assumption to have been incorrect and the hope vain. After the British government realized that it could not persuade the Bolsheviks to reopen the war, it conducted military operations in the outer parts of Russia to protect its interests against future German advance. Yet as the author states, the Germans were too concerned about the military situation in the West to penetrate further into Russia. Thus, after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, the British were left with small forces in North and Central Russia who attacked a mission. Ullman leaves the second stage of British intervention, this time against the Bolsheviks, to an as yet unpublished second volume.

This general outline fails to convey the book's real interest, which lies in the misconceptions, contradictions, misinformation and blunders with which Britain and her allies approached this crucial period in Russian history. British policy was based on fundamental misconceptions from start to finish. Most blatant was the assumption that the Bolsheviks would profit from a renewed war effort: the resting period provided by Brest-Litovsk was vital to the consolidation of the Soviet regime and Lenin and Trotsky had no desire to involve themselves with one of the "bourgeois" alliances.

The belief in a new Eastern Front was even more ludicrous. The British wished to ship a large Japanese army into Western Siberia in order to combat imaginary German forces. Not only did they blind themselves to Japanese imperialist designs on Eastern Siberia and Manchuria but failed to see that it would take years to transport an army of any size to Omsk which, once it got there, would be a thousand miles from the nearest German army.

British diplomatic efforts in Moscow and British military forces in the outer provinces continually worked at cross-purposes--the former attempting to win over the Bolsheviks, the latter supporting anti-Bolshevik groups against the Germans. Suspicion between London and Washington was matched by suspicion between the British War Office and Bruce Lockhart, Lord Balfour's personal representative in Moscow. To top it off, British officers continually involved themselves in local politics, often with disastrous effect.

One can have no objections to the way in which the author approaches his job. The scholarship of the work is impeccable; the text is a carefully woven fabric of diplomatic cables, memoranda, personal memoirs and previous historical writings. Ullman's selected bibliography includes well over a hundred titles, not to mention manuscripts, papers and unpublished documents. The chapters follow a careful chronological pattern. The only difficulty with the book is that the reader occasionally loses the main thread of events amidst a welter of seemingly unconnected incidents. He feels as if he were viewing a kaleidoscope--at one moment he is reading about negotiations in Moscow and at the next about Czech troops in Chelyabinsk. Yet this disconnectedness gives an accurate impression of the complexity of the Russian situation and the confusion of British policy in dealing with it. The six-page epilogue draws together the main themes of the work in a beautiful summary.

Mr. Ullman performs a vital service to historical scholarship by providing a companion volume to George Kennan's two-volume work on Soviet-American Relations 1917-1920. Valuable to the scholar, Intervention and the War is also stimulating reading for anyone even slightly interested in this vital segment of modern history.