Ukraine war is replay of Russia’s 1919 atrocities

“Russia,” predicted a British statesman, “will certainly rise again, perhaps very swiftly, as a great united empire determined to maintain the integrity of her dominions and to recover everything that has been taken away from her. While this process is going on Europe will be in a perpetual state of ferment.”
Those warning words were written not in the wake of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, but in February 1919, by Winston Churchill, after the Russian Revolution and end of World War I.
When the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in 1918, enabling their precarious regime to escape from the war, there were 30,000 Allied troops in the country, half British and others American, Canadian and French. They had originally been sent to guard stores shipped to aid Tsarist Russia’s war effort and to conduct training.
Churchill, then Britain’s secretary for war, wanted these men, plus 70,000 Czech troops bizarrely stranded in Siberia, to turn their efforts to aiding anti-Bolshevik Russian forces.
After World War I ended in the West on November 11, he told Prime Minister David Lloyd George that his chosen policy, had the premier not vetoed it, would have been “peace with the German people, war on the Bolshevik tyranny.”
Churchill said the choices were either to allow the Russians “to murder each other without let or hindrance” or for the Allies to intervene “thoroughly, with large forces, abundantly supplied with mechanical contrivances.” Churchill’s became the most powerful Western voice supporting the so-called White Russian cause in the nation’s civil war, which cost up to six million lives between 1917 and 1921. That fragment of history assumes a new relevance and indeed fascination today, as the West once more strives to thwart the ambitions of a brutal master of the Kremlin; as the world once more stands amazed by the incompetence and cruelty being displayed by a Russian army.
In most societies, leaders aspire to rule by securing respect. Russia, however, has always exalted fear. A British officer posted to St Petersburg just before World War the author was quizzed by a tsarist counterpart about the customs of his service. The Russian was shocked to be told that the British, while off duty, abandoned their uniforms and even their swords in favour of civilian clothes. “But people will not be afraid of you!” he exclaimed. The writer Ivan Mazhivin, who had been a friend of Tolstoy’s, wrote about Russians’ behaviour to each other in the Civil War.
On both sides bitterness has reached an extreme, inhuman scale. The stories are among a mass of chilling contemporary testimony in a new history of the 1917-21 Russian experience, written by British historian Antony Beevor, who is winning plaudits around the world. The catalogue of muddle, massacre, treachery and suffering in “Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921” highlights realities about Russia that have been manifested through the ages. While Churchill’s 1919 denunciation of what he called “the foul baboonery of Bolshevism” was intemperate, it was not unjust, given the record established by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and their cohorts. Yet his efforts to launch an anti-Bolshevik crusade seemed futile to many of his contemporaries, including US President Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George.

—Bloomberg