Hey, Cypher here and boy do I have a show for you.
Today we talk about the true horrors of war in another Wars You've Never Heard of.
This time: the Russian Intervention!
Man, I've been wanting to do this for a long time.
The Russian Intervention is kind of my most studied subject in all of history.
Trust me when I say I can talk for hours on this, but I'm am going to try to keep it short.
So, most people have never heard of this war.
Most people don't even believe its true when they hear about it.
For instance, President Reagan, during a State of the Union address once said
"Tonight, I want to speak to the people of the Soviet Union, to tell them it's true that
our governments have had serious differences, but our sons and daughters have never fought
each other in war.
And if we Americans have our way, they never will."
Well, that is flat out false!
The US really did invade Soviet Russia.
Yes, we invaded Russia.
Not only did we do so, but we basically helped oppose the newly created communist state in
its formative civil war.
From 1918-1920, the US, France, England, and several other countries invaded and directly
fought Soviet Russia.
Crazy, right!?
I have a bibliography a mile long, so I'll include a few books in the description.
To start this story, we have to begin at the height of WWI, in Russia 1917.
The government was in turmoil.
They were losing the war and the people were out in the streets.
By November a coup took the government in what is called the October Revolution, creating
the first real communist government in world history.
After a few months of fighting WWI, they signed a peace treaty with Germany and left the war.
The remaining allies, including the newly joined United States were worried that Germany
would overwhelm them on the Western Front, since the Eastern Front no longer really existed.
They could not decide what to do about Russia leaving the war.
Now a few other problems existed in Russia at this time for the allies.
They had a whole lot of munitions that had been given to them during the war.
We wanted it back, or at least not to be used by the Soviets.
Also they had thrown out a democratically elected congress because it was not in agreement
with the ruling Bolsheviks.
Furthermore, this was communism, something that the world was not prepared to accept.
Things looked bleak.
Eventually it was decided to intervene in Russia by the British, and subsequently the
rest of the allies.
Trust me when I say this, the reasoning behind this is convoluted at best.
I wrote an article about this called "a Study in Confusion," and I did so for good reason.
After a lot of study into the British Cabinet's decision making process, I can firmly say
they did not know why the were doing this, or even what they were doing.
The just choose to invade for separate and personal reasons.
By July a full invasion was mounted into Russia.
Yes, the Allies invaded their former ally.
We took two northern provinces, three southern ones, and all of Siberia.
All be told the Allies (including the US) held more of the old Russian Empire than the
soviets did in 1918.
Look at this picture!
It is of the allies parading down a conquered Russian city.
There are a lot of ironies to be drawn by this.
Red Army troops engaging in a shooting war with the US in a way the Cold War after WWII
never saw - is probably the greatest though.
One battle in particular, which I talked about in the last video, signifies the worst of
it - called Peace Day's Bloody Battle.
You can click the corner to go see that.
We supported the white generals fighting the Soviets, as well as proping up other opposing
governments in the North.
The anti-communism purpose of the war was clearly violated since one of those governments
was communist itself.
In fact all the purposes of this war were violated horribly.
We held the munitions while we were there, but left them there when we left.
We never started another Eastern Front with Germany for WWI, and didn't even stop fighting
in Russia after WWI had long ended.
The troops fighting couldn't even figure what we were doing there.
One soldier wrote that: "We were forgotten by our own country, ignored
by the one for which we were fighting and drenched in belligerent blood for a thankless
people.
Over the frozen chaos of Russia, we carried our dead"
They had no clue, and the people making the decision to stay didn't either.
The whole thing became a bloody mess.
Battle after battle was waged in the frozen wastes, and nothing came of it.
No reinforcements and no meaningful purpose.
After a long time the US completely pulled out in 1920 (though the Japanese kept fighting
the Russians for a few more years).
There was no rhyme or reason to the retreat only leaving with our tails between our legs.
This was a defeat.
We lost this war in a more meaningful way than many talk of Vietnam.
I can do an episode on real US defeats, but suffice it to say, we were the losers in this
war.
The commies beat us back, and we ran away.
This war didn't just end with the US accepting soviet Russia.
We tried to deny they existed for years.
In fact, we didn't recognize the Soviets until 1934, 14 years after the war.
We also tried to create a trade embargo against them.
One of the original reasons for the creation of FBI was to stop communist movements within
America.
In many ways the Cold War started long before the end WWII as a response to this war.
We may forget this war, but in the words of Soviet Premier Khrushchev:
"[The Russian people] remember that in the hard time after the October Revolution, U.S.
troops led by their generals landed on Soviet soil to help the White Guards fight our Soviet
system.
And they were not the only ones to land.
The Japanese landed too, the French landed in Odessa and the Germans advanced as far
as the Soviet Caucasus.
The armed forces of bourgeois Poland seized Kiev.
The British, too, landed their forces to fight us.
Many European capitalist countries, as well as the United States and Japan, sent their
troops into an offensive against the young Soviet state in an effort to strangle our
Revolution."
So this small war determined the fate of US-Russian relations years before most US citizens even
think it mattered.
It was mired in confusion and dissolution.
One author used this famous poem to capture the true nature of this tiny little war.
It goes: "And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night"
So thanks for watching.
Tell me what you think about this subject.
Don't forget to like and subscribe.
I'll see you next time.