Michael Kettle – författare

The Road to Intervention (1988) uses rarely-seen British government papers to analyse the position of the Allied and Russian governments in the last year of the First World War, as the Russian revolution ended their participation in the war and the Western Allies feared a huge German offensive in France in consequence. The British government called for intervention in Russia; Trotsky played off the British against the Germans; the French and British were at loggerheads over the Czech Legion; and the Americans and Japanese argued over intervention in Siberia.

The Road to Intervention (1988) uses rarely-seen British government papers to analyse the position of the Allied and Russian governments in the last year of the First World War, as the Russian revolution ended their participation in the war and the Western Allies feared a huge German offensive in France in consequence. The British government called for intervention in Russia; Trotsky played off the British against the Germans; the French and British were at loggerheads over the Czech Legion; and the Americans and Japanese argued over intervention in Siberia.

This third volume in Michael Kettle''s series on Allied intervention in the Russian civil war, begins at the point when small-scale Allied intervention in Bolshevik-overrun Russia had failed, but had succeeded in covering the formation of some anti-Bolshevik White groups sympathetic to allied aid. Written on a panoramic basis which includes detailed documents from both sides, Kettle reveals what each side''s leadership had to face as the Russian kaleidoscope constantly changed. Kettle argues that British intervention was doomed to failure and that the White Russians became expendable British pawns in a temporary forward holding position, designed to contain the Bolshevik inferno within Russia. The strategic and military miscalculations of British medium intervention thus prolonged the Russian civil war, and caused a further 14 million Russian deaths. Using Churchill''s previously unpublished, last papers and recently available French documents, Kettle provides a fascinating and in-depth analysis of the `Archangel Fiasco''.