“The Time You Sent Troops to Quell the Revolution”

The United States invasion of Russia remains a hidden dimension of U.S. policy in the Great War, marking the beginning of a long Cold War. In August 1918, three months prior to the Armistice, the Wilson administration sent several platoons of U.S. soldiers into Russia to aid in the overthrow of the new Bolshevik government, which had come to power in the October Revolution of 1917. The operation was carried out alongside British, French, Canadian and Japanese forces in support of White Army counter-revolutionaries whose generals were implicated in wide-scale atrocities, including pogroms against Jews. This “Midnight War” was carried out illegally, without the consent of Congress. The Commanding General in Siberia, William S. Graves thought that his mission was to protect a delegation of Czech troops and the Trans-Siberian railway and to serve as a mediator. He was disappointed to learn that in fact the United States was enmeshed in another country’s civil war and came to oppose the whole operation. In his memoirs, he expressed “doubt if history will record in the past century a more flagrant case of flouting the well-known and approved practice in states in their international relations, and using instead of the accepted principles of international law, the principle of might makes right.”

The Wilson administration’s war on Russian Bolshevism