(Shitty review by Cold Warrior but the book's strengths shine through.)
NYT, Dec. 20, 2020
Did the U.S. Try to Assassinate Lenin in 1918?
By Victor Sebestyen
THE LENIN PLOT
The Unknown Story of America’s War Against Russia*
*By Barnes Carr
388 pp. Pegasus. $29.95.
In a famous speech shown on Russian television in 1984, President Reagan
spoke directly to the Soviet people. “Our governments have had serious
differences,” he declared. “But our sons and daughters have never fought
each other in war.” Just over two decades later President Obama said
almost the same thing when he was trying to “reset” relations with
Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
It is one of the myths the United States has maintained about its
relationship with Russia. Most Russian history textbooks contain at
least a brief mention of the invasion by American forces (along with the
British and French) of northern Russia in 1918, after the Bolshevik
Revolution. But one would be hard pressed to find anything about this
conflict in official United States documents, or even American military
history books, which makes Barnes Carr’s entertaining new study, “The
Lenin Plot,” a welcome corrective.
It is obvious why the American venture has been practically written out
of history, though nearly 600 soldiers were killed or went missing in
action. The war was a humiliating failure and not entirely legal.
President Woodrow Wilson, supposedly a pillar of moral rectitude, and
his pious secretary of state, Robert Lansing, lied about American
involvement. Then they conspired in a cover-up.
The story is vividly told by Carr, who has unearthed some fascinating
new archival sources to add to a sparkling narrative.
Russia fought together with the Western Allies in World War I, but huge
casualties led to extreme war weariness by the time the czar was deposed
in February 1917. Lenin’s promise to end the war was one of the main
reasons his revolution succeeded and was one of the few pledges he kept.
The trouble was they couldn’t agree on what to do or how to do it. At
first they sent spies to persuade or bribe the Bolsheviks into remaining
in the war — considered crucial by the Allies in order to keep the
Germans fighting on two fronts. This is the best part of the book, with
a cast list of colorful characters — spooks, crooked businessmen,
mountebanks, ideologues and opportunists. The American spymaster in
Moscow was a former tennis champion, DeWitt Clinton Poole, known to
friends and the Russian secret service as “Poodles”; his main field
officer was a Russian-born track star, Xenophon de Blumenthal
Kalamatiano — the first American spy to be swapped for a Soviet agent.
My favorite is the wonderfully named Charles Adolphe Faux-Pas Bidet, the
French spy in Moscow who as a police detective had led the case against
Mata Hari.
When persuasion failed, the Allies began plotting the assassination of
Lenin, which is where the book falters. Carr writes a rollicking spy
yarn, but there is no convincing evidence that the one serious attempt
on Lenin’s life, when he was shot in the neck and shoulder outside a
Moscow factory in August 1918, leads back to Allied intervention.
Western spooks talked about murdering Lenin, but it is not clear they
did much about it.
Then came military intervention. The United States paid vast sums to
support the White forces against the Communist Reds in the civil war. In
order to get around the law then forbidding the American government from
granting loans to independent armies or mercenaries, they laundered the
money, paying the British and French, who passed it on to the Whites.
Wilson denied it, but he fooled nobody, least of all the Russians.
To many anti-Communists, the worst thing about the American intervention
wasn’t that it was illegal; it’s that it was entirely ineffective. When
the Allies finally started fighting the Reds around the port of
Archangel with a multinational force of over 20,000 troops, including
nearly 4,500 Americans, their army was far too small to make any
practical difference. But it had a hugely significant future impact. The
Soviets never forgot, and for many historians this was the start of the
20th century’s longest war, the Cold War.
Victor Sebestyen is the author of “Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the
Master of Terror.”
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