Carve-Up

• The Allies and the Russian Collapse: March 1917-March 1918 by Michael Kettle
  Deutsch, 287 pp, £14.95, March 1981, ISBN 0 233 97078 9

The Allied intervention in the Russian civil war had far more important consequences than the events of this comic tragedy deserved. If it had little influence on the outcome of the First World War or on events within the Soviet Union, it left memories which shaped the Cold War and have not been totally effaced even to the present day. The intervention was to intensify the Soviet belief that their country was a beleaguered state faced by hostile forces, particularly after the hopes for a European revolution faded. On the Allied side, the feeling that the Bolsheviks represented a new kind of threat to the social and economic fabric was confirmed, without correcting the illusions which led them to send money, agents and finally troops into Russian territories.