Anna Reid, "A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution" (Basic Books, 2024)

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Jan 28, 2026

Anna Reid, journalist-turned-historian known for her work on Russia and Ukraine, examines the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. She recounts sprawling campaigns from Siberia to the Arctic. The conversation highlights shifting Allied aims, soldiers’ harsh daily realities, complicity in pogroms, and how this forgotten adventure was later remembered or erased.

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INSIGHT

Civil War Built The Soviet State

The Russian Civil War forged the Soviet Union more than the 1917 revolutions did.
Anna Reid argues the war militarized, brutalized, and elevated figures like Stalin who shaped the USSR's future.

INSIGHT

Czech Legion Shifted Allied Strategy

The Czech Legion's seizure of the Trans‑Siberian Railway changed Allied calculations.
Their control of Vladivostok persuaded Woodrow Wilson to approve troop landings in 1918.

INSIGHT

Postwar Motives Replaced Wartime Logic

After WWI ended, the Allies lacked the original military rationale to stay.
New motives became prestige and stopping Bolshevism from spreading west during postwar unrest.

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In A Nasty Little War: The Western Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution (Basic Books, 2024), award-winning reporter Anna Reid tells 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.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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