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

Jan 24, 2026

Anna Reid, journalist-turned-historian and author of A Nasty Little War, explores the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War through diaries, letters and memoirs. She traces who intervened and why. She recounts soldiers’ daily lives, mutinies and retreats. She examines pogroms, political maneuvering and how the campaign was remembered and forgotten.

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INSIGHT

Intervention Was Dispersed And Disjointed

The Allied Intervention covered multiple, widely separated theatres across Russia rather than one coherent front.
Anna Reid argues this geographic spread made the effort disjointed and hard to coordinate.

ANECDOTE

An American General's Reluctant Posting

General William Graves felt he was an unwilling outsider, diverted from the Western Front to Siberia.
His memoirs show the oddity of American doughboys tooling on the Trans-Siberian Railway amid the Civil War.

INSIGHT

Czech Legion Changed The Calculus

The Czech Legion's seizure of the Trans-Siberian Railway suddenly made Allied landings in Vladivostok strategically viable.
Anna Reid credits the Czech Rising with changing Woodrow Wilson's reluctance into a decision to send troops.

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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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