Beginning in 1918 and ending around 1923, the Russian Civil War was a bloody and complex conflict that did much to shape the subsequent fate of Europe. It pitted the Soviets (the “Reds”) against an assortment of anti-Communist forces (the “Whites”). At one point, the White Army issued every soldier a rifle and the anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Isaac Sligh reviews a new book on this war by Anna Reid:
In A Nasty Little War, Reid unfolds a scathing indictment of White incompetence and malfeasance: five-hour teas taken with the enemy at the gates; shipments of foreign aid whisked away to the black market; skepticism and ingratitude towards Allied help. Worst of all was a virulent anti-Semitism—Jews were indistinguishable from Bolsheviks in White propaganda—that fueled pogroms of terrifying thoroughness. Somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Jews were massacred in Ukraine during the Civil War; Reid fingers Ukrainian warlords as the worst perpetrators, but the White Army and its Cossack vanguards as the most systematic.
In light of what Reid agrees was a “rehearsal for the Holocaust,” it is tough to stomach the tut-tutting of British officials, who summed up certain generals as “scallywags” or covered up White atrocities altogether—a proposal from none other than Chaim Weizmann to lead a monitoring mission to Ukraine was rejected.
Reid also argues convincingly that defeated White émigrés helped stoke the fires of anti-Semitism in Weimar Germany. (With such a litany, one should still bear in mind that the Bolsheviks were simultaneously waging what Lenin proudly called “Mass Terror,” including pogroms, much of it beyond the purview of Reid’s book.)
Read more on New Criterion: https://newcriterion.com/article/a-very-cold-war/