Informationen zum Autor Anna Reid is a historian and journalist. Her previous books are Borderland: a Journey through the History of Ukraine , now in its fourth edition, The Shaman's Coat: a Native History of Siberia , and Leningrad: Tragedy of a City under Siege, 1941-44, which was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and has been translated into eighteen languages. She is a former Kyiv correspondent for The Economist , and a trustee of the Ukrainian Institute London. Klappentext 'Reid brilliantly depicts the disastrous failure of our intervention in the "Russian" civil war. The atmosphere, the characters, the absurdity are all there' Antony Beevor 'Vivid and remarkably timely' Martin Sixsmith From the bestselling author of Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine The extraordinary story of how the West tried to reverse the Russian Revolution. 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 as different as possible from the grim stasis of the Western Front. Criss-crossing the shattered Russian empire in trains, sleds and paddlesteamers, 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. Later, American veterans compared the humiliation to Vietnam, and the politicians and generals responsible preferred to trivialise or forget. Drawing on previously unused diaries, letters and memoirs, A Nasty Little War brings an episode with echoes down the century since vividly to life. Vorwort The astonishing untold history of the Western invasion of Soviet Russia - and the tragedy it created. Zusammenfassung 'Reid brilliantly depicts the disastrous failure of our intervention in the "Russian" civil war. The atmosphere, the characters, the absurdity are all there' Antony Beevor 'Vivid and remarkably timely' Martin Sixsmith From the bestselling author of Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine The extraordinary story of how the West tried to reverse the Russian Revolution. 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 as different as possible from the grim stasis of the Western Front. Criss-crossing the shattered Russian empire in trains, sleds and paddlesteamers, 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 an...

Autorentext
Anna Reid is a historian and journalist. Her previous books are Borderland: a Journey through the History of Ukraine, now in its fourth edition, The Shaman's Coat: a Native History of Siberia, and Leningrad: Tragedy of a City under Siege, 1941-44, which was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and has been translated into eighteen languages. She is a former Kyiv correspondent for The Economist, and a trustee of the Ukrainian Institute London.

Klappentext

In the closing months of WW1, with the world exhausted and depleted by a long a brutal war, fifteen nations cobbled together an army of nearly 200,000 men and embarked on one of the most extraordinary and ambitious military ventures of the twentieth century. The Intervention in Russia's civil war was spearheaded by Britain, her colonial forces and allies. It was designed to stop the Bolsheviks in their tracks, reinstate conservative regimes in the Russian Empire and ensure that Germany did not fill the power vacuum which the Russian Revolution had created. Eighteen months later - after a long and bloody conflict between the Reds and the Whites, the execution of the former tsar and his family, and brutal famine - the British, American and French forces marched out again, surrendering to the unstoppable force of Soviet power. They sent thousands of White Russians into exile, and left death, starvation, destruction and mass pogroms in their wake.

Weaving the story together through the diaries, letters, and news reports of many of the participants this is a war of wildly contrasting fronts. A war of private armies and terrible communication, with participants freezing in bunkhouses or gorging on caviar at balls, riding into towns on steam trains or raiding naval bases in speed boats, inventing currencies, fishing for salmon and leading long straggling lines of typhus-infected refugees to safety, as well as bloody fighting.

Few have acknowledged the Intervention since. When the smoke had cleared, Soviet propagandists had a field day with it; mythologizing the arrogance and incompetence of the British alongside their fat and be-medalled White allies. For the two million White Russians who emigrated following the Revolution it was the great betrayal. In Western versions, it was easier to pretend the catastrophe had never occurred. A Nasty Little War sets history straight, peopling the battlefield with unforgettable character as it brings this tragic failure to life.