NASTY LITTLE WAR

'The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution' is the sub-title of this chillingly original depiction of a disastrous failure. In the closing months of the First World War, Britain, America, France and Japan sent arms and 180,000 soldiers to Russia with the aim of tipping the balance in her post-revolutionary Civil War. From Central Asia to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific, they joined anti-Bolshevik forces in trying to overthrow the new men in the Kremlin in an astonishingly ambitious military adventure known as the Intervention. Fresh, in the case of the British, from the trenches, they found themselves in a mobile, multi-sided conflict, criss-crossing the shattered Russian empire in trains, sleds and paddle steamers, they bivouacked in snowbound cabins and Kirghiz yurts, torpedoed Red battleships from speedboats, improvised new currencies and the world's first air-dropped chemical weapons, got caught up in mass retreats and a typhus epidemic, organised several coups and at least one assassination. Taking tea with warlords and princesses, they also turned a blind eye to their Russian allies' numerous atrocities. Two years later they left again, filing glumly back onto their troopships as port after port fell to the Red Army. This history draws on previously unused diaries, letters and memoirs. 366 page paperback, photos.