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From: orb@whuxl.UUCP (SEVENER)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War
Message-ID: <581@whuxl.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Apr-85 08:21:56 EST
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Posted: Tue Apr  9 08:21:56 1985
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Mr. Matthews: you certainly have an inventive mind to come up with
this amusing recreation of history.  Will the Holocaust be the
next "hoax" to be exposed?  Here is your fictional account:
> > From Martin Taylor:
> > Not at the request of the russian government.  By 1919, the Bolsheviks
> > had been the government for nearly 2 years.  
> 
    Jim Matthews reply:
> 	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.
> 
 
Leon Trotsky was the head of the Red Army.  He was not about to invite
Western capitalist armies to intervene in the Russian Civil War. Here is
a quote from "A History of the Modern World" on the Allied intervention:
   "Not only old tsarist reactionaries, and not only liberals, bourgeois,
    zemstvo men, and Consitutional Democrats, but all types of
    anti-Leninist socialists as well, Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries,
    scattered in all directins to organize resistance against the regime
    of soviets and people's commissars.  They found followers among the
    peasants and *obtained aid from the western Allies.*
    ..............
   "The Allied governments believed that Bolshevism was a temporary madness
    that with a little effort could be stopped.  They wished also to bring
    Russia back into the war against Germany.  So long as the war in Europe
    lasted, they could not reach Russia by the Black or Baltic Sea.  A small
    Allied force took Murmansk and Archangel in the North.  But for Allied 
    military intervention the best opening was in the Far East, through
    Vladivostock. .........
    It was agreed that an interallied military force should land at
    Vladivostock, cross Siberia, join with the Czechs, break up Bolshevism,
    and fall upon the Germans in eastern Europe.  For this ambitious scheme
    Britain and France could supply no soldiers, engaged as they were on
    the western front; the force turned out to be American and Japanese,
    or rather almost purely Japanese since Japan contributed 72,000 men
    and the United States only 8,000.
    The civil war lasted until 1920, or even later in some places. It
    became a confused melee in which the Bolsheviks struggled against
    dissident Russians and against foreign intervention.   They fought in
    the Ukraine first against the Germans, and then against the French, who
    occupied Odessa as soon as the war ended in Europe.......
    British, French, and American troops remained at Archangel until the end
    of 1919, the Japanese at Vladivostock until the end of 1922."
 
From "A History of the Modern World" by R.R. Palmer and Joel Colton
      Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1965

If people doubt this account, I suggest they look it up in any reputable
history book.
                     tim sevener    whuxl!orb