This is a “Wai’, what?” moment here:
So, I’m doing research tied to an as yet unnamed (and for that matter, extremely nebulous for now) project, when I came across this.
Now, not everyone remembers that as World War I came to a close, the Allied powers sent troops to Russia to take a side in the Russian Revolution. The Allies wanted the Mensheviks to win, thinking that they’d be preferable to a Bolshevik victor taking over the Empire. (Spoilers: The Bolsheviks come out on top, and the U.S.S.R. came into existence, holding a grudge against the West for supporting the other side.)
Because it’s not something that’s in most American history syllabi, at any level, it’s easy to make some assumptions about what went on. You might think that we don’t talk about it because it was a small diversionary force that they tried to keep under the radar. Or maybe that the countries that won “the war to end all wars” were trying to aggressively get back to being at peace, and were ignoring this tiny war the same way they were ignoring the Spanish flu the global influenza outbreak.
Part of these mini-wars were deployments to Siberia as part of the bigger operation. Sure, it’s easy to ask why go somewhere that’s synonymous with empty unused land, if you forget that the Trans-Siberian Railway has to cut through there, linking Moscow to the Pacific. So it’s easy to assume if you’re in the mindset suggested above, that because this is an out-of-the-way place, it was just a few troops put in to try and nudge one side to victory over the other one.
The big discovery, though, was finding online a poster asking the folks back home to buy war stamps (small-scale war bonds for the individual to buy) to support the intervention:
This poster in the collection of the National World War I Museum and Memorial makes it harder to assume that. If this was a small op, an in-and-out intervention like way, way too many other American actions that come to mind, why would they be asking people to buy micro-war bonds to support them? How long did they intend to keep them there? Did they have plans that went beyond… Okay, what were they planning? That might be a better question, actually…
While what happened there doesn’t get as much attention as other American overseas actions, there are places to get more details about what took place. And learning about such actions may be helpful if you’re trying to make sense of it all, like where the beef between Americans and Russians started and why “Bolshevik” is considered an insult.
Which is part of the wider issue out there, about how little we think about history. With so much bad history being thrown around by so-called “Originalists” for the sake of their own ends, it can be hard enough to find perspective about the big historical events we’d learned (I hope) to help make sense of things. Which is why re-studying the history you know is not only a good way to keep you focused against all these distractions, it can lead you to find things you didn’t know before.
And to borrow an old set of sayings about bullets, it’s the stuff you didn’t know before that can kill you…
James Ryan 