The Allied Intervention in Russia: The Diplomacy of Chaos

Abstract

SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 376 Soviet Russia to reduce its support to the Reds and facilitated the German invasion which aided the Whites to victory in May 1918. Twilight of Europe is of high scholarly value and an important contribution to the history of international relations and revolutionary upheavals in East Central Europe at the end of First World War. Department of Philosophy, History, Culture Johannes Remy and Art Studies, University of Helsinki Moffat, Ian C. D. The Allied Intervention in Russia: The Diplomacy of Chaos. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2015. xiii + 317 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. The literature on Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War has developed substantially in the century since that conflict took place. While Soviet historians attributed the intervention primarily to a desire to crush the Soviet state (something attributed from the 1930s to the West broadly, and from the 1950s to the USA specifically), classic Western studies of Allied policy in Russia placed the war against the central powers and the desperate need to reconstruct some sort of eastern front at the forefront of their explanations. More recent studies of national policies have complicated this picture. David Foglesong argued for a much deeper hostility to Bolshevism on the part of the American government, and Woodrow Wilson in particular, than has been previously acknowledged. In the case of France, Michael Carley has interrogated the combination of politics and pragmatism at play amongst different elements of the policy-making elite. There is still plenty of scope for reconsideration of the intervention as an international endeavour, and one that involved nongovernmental organizations and individuals, and ordinary soldiers, as well as statesmen and generals. Ian Moffat’s new history of the Allied intervention is a curious and in many ways frustrating addition to this literature. Moffat does not position his book in relation to this large and complex historiography, or indeed mention it, except to acknowledge a couple of books that he found particularly useful. One of these is Richard Ullman’s three-volume history of Anglo-Soviet relations, still a seminal text on Britain and the intervention despite being written in the 1960s and ’70s and without access to many British official documents. Moffat’s book might have been pitched as an update to this classic work, in that it offers a close, archivally-based account of British decision-making in the period of the intervention. It does not draw directly on British archives, but makes substantial use of British documents held in Canadian microfilm collections REVIEWS 377 and Canadian documents. The author had originally intended to write a history of the Canadian contribution, and the book includes some interesting insights into the relationship between Britain and Canada as illuminated by the intervention. The book’s claim to be a study of the Allied intervention as a whole is more problematic. No French documents are consulted, and only published American documents. The sections on France are short and rely heavily on Carley’s work. Major texts on the Japanese intervention (Frederick Dickinson’s history of Japan in the Great War, or Paul Dunscomb’s work on the period of intervention) are not cited at all. The anti-Bolshevik Russians rarely appear as partners or actors in the intervention. Sections of text that deal with events in Russia are dependent on a curious mix of official British documents and a couple of favoured texts (Richard Debo, Martin Kettle, George Kennan). This makes the narrative about many events, including the 1917 revolutions, difficult to recognize, but it also means that there is no engagement with key reference points in the historiography. A section on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that makes no mention of John Wheeler Bennett’s classic work on that subject is a case in point (there is also a new reassessment of Brest-Litovsk by Borislav Chernev, but this came out after the publication of Moffat’s book). A twopage account of the Provisional Government’s conduct of the war on pages 12–13 draws almost entirely on one book (Bruce Lincoln’s Passage Through Armageddon) plus British War Cabinet minutes. One of the principal motifs of the...