Today's New York Times Book Review includes a review of The Lenin Plot: The Unknown Story of America's War Against Russia by Barnes Carr. I would not have called the story unknown, but the reviewer seems to consider it so. The second paragraph of the review says
But one would be hard pressed to find anything about this conflict in official United States documents, or even American military history books, ....
Having read George F. Kennan's The Decision to Intervene, I thought that simply wrong. I find that the select bibliography to this work includes several volumes of The U.S. State Department's Documents Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, notably three volumes covering the relations with Russia in 1918, all available for viewing on-line:
- https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1918Russiav01
- https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1918Russiav02
- https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1918Russiav03
And it took little time to discover that in 2019 the U.S. Army's Center for Military History brought out The Russian Expeditions: 1917-1920, a concise pamphlet, freely downloadable.
Carr's book may be excellent, and the subtitle may be the work of his publisher's marketing department. Still, I think the reviewer was incautious in accepting its premise.
Ever since the end of WW2 and the Potsdam Conference, America was on notice: Russian Communists ought not be trusted. Of course, some like Sen. McCarthy became irrational witch hunters. My current reading about Truman has been most instructive on Soviet duplicity and American concerns.
ReplyDeleteThe book makes it very clear that there wasn't a whole lot of trust from the early days on. WW II could not have been won without the USSR, which for a while gave the USSR a better image in the US and UK. But mostly the western governments were quite realistic about the Soviet regime.
Delete