As the First World War was coming to a close, a new existential threat faced Europe: Bolshevism. Standing in the way of the 'Reds' were the 'White' Russians: a jumbled amalgamation of monarchists, republicans, conservatives, liberals and leftists. Already bruised and bloodied from the trenches, British, American and French troops were thrown into this chaotic civil war that could not have been further from the grinding stalemates of the Western Front.

In 2023, Anna Reid released her work on the intervention in the Russian Civil War, A Nasty Little War, now in paperback. Reid spoke to History of War magazine on intervention troops’ experiences of the conflict, their exposure to the White Army’s anti-semitism and how intervention contributed to interwar European instability. She also shares her reflections on the current Russo-Ukraine War and the lessons from the civil war.

What was the impact of Allied intervention on the balance of power and instability in Europe?

It gave a boost to the far-left. For example, French sailors mutinied at Sevastopol in the spring of 1919. The French had occupied Odesa the previous December and high-tailed it away only a few months later because a Ukrainian warlord was about to take the city.

A couple of weeks after that, the sailors on the French battleships mutinied, locking their officers in the cabins, hosing down the most unpopular ones and replacing the French tricolour with the red flag. Some of them even rowed ashore to join a pro-Bolshevik demonstration. They were brought back under control by Greek troops and sent back to France.

Two of the mutinous sailors went on to be French Comintern representatives and they got seats in the National Assembly. One of them joined the Red Brigades in Spain. They were the leading lights of French communism between the wars.

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Another destabilising element to the intervention was the Freikorps. The Allies came to an agreement with Germany that they would leave their troops in the Baltics to stop the Red Army from taking over. The German general up there, Rüdiger von der Goltz, was a real imperialist with dreams of seeing the Reich rebuilt in the Baltics.

He called up demobilised soldiers to join him, forming the irregular Freikorps, who were extremely brutal and ill-disciplined. They rampaged around the Baltics, burning, looting and killing until they finally went home to Germany, by which time they were nihilistic, fighting for fighting’s sake.

The Freikorps drifted into the various far-right militias like the Brownshirts and Blackshirts. They tried to launch coups against the fragile new Weimar Republic and remained a destablising force throughout.

Is there a comparison between Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and the West’s position in the Ukraine War?

I don’t think there is. The lazy lesson to draw would be we shouldn’t mess around in that part of the world at all and military intervention in the former Russian Empire is a bad idea. That’s not true, and the West ought to support Ukraine with everything it has. Ukraine is not White Russia. It is a good and viable cause, a democratic country with values we share. Over the last two years, Ukraine has shown how incredibly united, brave and strong it is.

The true heir to the hopeless, ghastly Whites is Vladimir Putin. He’s the same sort of old-fashioned Russian nationalist who uses all the iconography, like the double-headed eagle and the Russian tricolour. That’s what he harks back to and he has said explicitly that he’s trying to build the Empire and reconquer a bit of the world he believes belongs to Russia, irrespective of what the Ukrainians think. That’s the same sort of blinkered and irrational imperialism that the Whites displayed.

The primary reason the Whites failed was that they would not make any concessions to the non-Russian nationalities. At various points, they could have cooperated with the Finns, Georgians and the Ukrainians, and the Allies were always urging them to do so. In that case, they would very likely have taken Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as the Finnish Army was the greatest force in the region.

But whenever the intervention asked the Whites to do this, the response would be: ‘Finland, who do they think they are?’ There was this extraordinary chauvinism and it’s exactly what Putin is displaying now. He simply doesn’t understand what Ukrainians are and he’s living in this dream world, which I think will eventually be his undoing.

The one big win from the intervention, which had a positive long-term effect, was independence for Estonia and Latvia, which was helped by a British squadron in the Baltic Sea and some soldiers on land. Those countries hung on to their independence before the war and you can see how that brief period of independence made a difference.

They were able to get their economies back on track [after the fall of the Soviet Union] much quicker than the other Soviet republics and are now members of NATO and the EU. This is the kind of help we need to be giving Ukraine today and not get distracted and turn a blind eye to what Russian occupation means as the intervention did with the pogroms.

To read the full interview with Anna Reid, pick up History of War issue 136