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From: matthews@harvard.ARPA (Jim Matthews)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War
Message-ID: <17@harvard.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 6-Apr-85 23:41:25 EST
Article-I.D.: harvard.17
Posted: Sat Apr  6 23:41:25 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 9-Apr-85 00:22:22 EST
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Organization: Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard
Lines: 39

> Not at the request of the russian government.  By 1919, the Bolsheviks
> had been the government for nearly 2 years.  

	Dead wrong.  The original contingent of American and British
troops landed in Murmansk at the request of Leon Trotsky, the military
head of the Bolshevik regime.  Trotsky was afraid of the Germans marching
north to take the military stores there, as were the Allies.

> But the intervention was too little, and probably too late.  We were,
> in fact "imperialist aggressors" sending our troops to invade Russia
> and overthrow the Government (unfortunately, Russia is bigger than
> Grenada or the Dominican Republic).
> 
> Martin Taylor

	(1) There was nothing "imperialist" about it -- Russia could not
conceivably become part of any U.S. "empire."  If it's economic imperialists
you're talking about, then that charge should be leveled at the western
businessmen who rushed to trade with the Bolsheviks -- in contrast, there
was no interest on the part of Western industrialists in funding the White
armies.
	(2) We did not "invade Russia" -- we gave very limited support to
one side of a civil war.  There was no effort to take territory or extract
economic concessions, the common aims of invasions.

	(3) We didn't try to "overthrow the Government", partly because
Russia had several governments at the time.  If we had really wanted to
overthrow Bolshevik control of either Moscow or St. Petersburg it would
have been a very simple matter.  The Bolsheviks were on the edge of 
collapse.

	(4) It is unfortunate that Russia is so big, if only because it
magnifies the cruelty that its government can inflict on that country's
people.  But Russia's size does not mean that we were impotent to
effect any change in 1918-19.  What stopped us was not size, or the
Bolshevik's power, but rather a lack of forsight and will.

Jim Matthews
matthews@harvard