American Intervention in Russia: The North Russian Expedition, 1918–1919

Abstract

During the past sixty years, particularly in the recent era of the intensified Cold War, the tangled question of American participation in the Allied military intervention in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 has attracted much attention from scholars, both Soviet and Western. After some initial restraint on their part, Soviet historians have arrived at the more or less unanimous conclusion that the United States not only enthusiastically joined the other Allied powers in the intervention but also actually assumed leadership over a conscious and deliberate attempt to destroy the infant Soviet state at its inception.1 On the other side, Western scholars have proposed a wide variety of putative explanations for American intervention, ranging from considerations of contemporary power politics through an entire catalogue of sophisticated political and psychological analyses to outright accusations of malevolent ideological intent on the part of American decision makers.2