Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site spar.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!ihnp4!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!hplabs!hpda!fortune!amdcad!decwrl!spar!baba
From: baba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War
Message-ID: <168@spar.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Apr-85 01:18:06 EST
Article-I.D.: spar.168
Posted: Tue Apr  9 01:18:06 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Apr-85 00:37:37 EST
References: <314@ssc-bee.UUCP> <567@whuxl.UUCP> <921@ihuxk.UUCP> <mhuxt.733> <1514@dciem.UUCP> <17@harvard.ARPA>
Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA
Lines: 35

> > 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.

Well, the way I heard it was that the *British* had indeed landed at Murmansk
with the consent of the Bolsheviks before the outbreak of civil war.  The
initial objective of the subsequent US intervention against the Reds was to 
aid in the escape of some 30,000 Czechs who found themselves on the wrong 
side of both the Civil War and the Volga, while appeasing the anti-Bolshevik
lobby at home.  President Wilson had resisted earlier demands for action
against the Communists.  I really don't know how much US intervention was 
motivated by ideology and how much it arose from anger over the Lenin's 
separate peace with the Central Powers.  Both seem to have been factors.

> 	(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

It is not entirely clear what ultimate benefit we would have had
from overthrowing the Bolsheviks in 1919.  The first World War was
over.  We would very probably have found ourselves in conflict 
with Russia as a power by midcentury regardless of who ruled it, or, 
if the old Russian Empire had been somehow dismembered in 1919, the 
outcome of Hitler's war in Europe could have been quite different.

					Baba