A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution

In the final months of World War I, the West sent troops and weapons to Russia to support anti-Bolshevik forces in their fight against the new Kremlin government. The Intervention was a massive military adventure that saw British, American, French, and Japanese troops travel across the Russian empire, engaging in battles and atrocities. The book "A Nasty Little War" uses previously unused diaries, letters, and memoirs to bring this episode to life, highlighting the bravery and sacrifice of the troops but also the political and moral complexities of the intervention.

Format: Hardback
Length: 384 pages
Publication date: 09 November 2023
Publisher: John Murray Press

The BBC History Magazine Book of the Year is a meticulously researched, stylish, and entertaining work. The Financial Times praised it as a "vivid and sparkling account, full of color and dark drama." The Observer described it as "brilliantly depicting a disastrous failure." Antony Beevor called it "chillingly original," while Max Hastings praised it as "witty and elegant." Anne Applebaum, the bestselling author of Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine, praised it as an "extraordinary story of how the West tried to reverse the Russian Revolution."

In the closing months of the First World War, Britain, America, France, and Japan sent arms and 180,000 soldiers to Russia, with the aim of tipping the balance in her post-revolutionary Civil War. From Central Asia to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific, they joined anti-Bolshevik forces in trying to overthrow the new men in the Kremlin, in an astonishingly ambitious military adventure known as the Intervention.

Fresh, in the case of the British, from the trenches, they found themselves in a mobile, multi-sided conflict as different as possible from the grim stasis of the Western Front. Criss-crossing the shattered Russian empire in trains, sleds, and paddlesteamers, they bivouacked in snowbound cabins and Kirghiz yurts, torpedoed Red battleships from speedboats, improvised new currencies and the world's first air-dropped chemical weapons, got caught up in mass retreats and a typhus epidemic, organized several coups and at least one assassination. Taking tea with warlords and princesses, they also turned a blind eye to their Russian allies' numerous atrocities.

Two years later, they left again, filing glumly back onto their troopships as port after port fell to the Red Army. Later, American veterans compared the humiliation to Vietnam.

Dimension: 240 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781529326765