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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An important intelligent contribution, February 16, 2001
This review is from: America's Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1920 (Hardcover)
This is important book which shed much light on the origins of the cold war and will probably do much to hurt Wilson's reputation. Based on 128 sets of private and governmental papers, coming from archives from three countries, Foglesong's book show a story of deceit and self-deception. Wilson has sometimes been seen as sympathetic to the cause of Russian freedom; indeed he has been sometimes seen as sympathetic to the Bolsheviks(for example by Richard Pipes, in The Russian Revolution). Quite false, for Foglesong shows how Wilson combined his trademark moralism, no less sincerely believed in for being trite and shallow, with working with reactionairies and militarist whites to crush the revolution. Foglesong starts off with a chapter on Wilson's illusions in Mexico, during which American officials sought to use Japanese agents to poison Pancho Villa. The next chapter looks at the origins of American Anti-bolshevism; Foglesong looks at it a melange of Wilson, Lansing and the American elite's salon style anti-socialist chatter, its nativists prejudices, and its smug puritanism. We go on to see how this influenced American Anti-Communist propaganda, with its fatuous anti-atheism and its fear of racial equality. A passage on the State Department's susceptibility to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and choice comments from Lansing and Hoover are, as they, well worth the price of reading alone. But this is only the beginning. The United States completely failed to recognize that Russia had no choice but to leave the war; bullying the desperate Provisional Government was the last thing it needed and helped make its collapse inevitable. Wilson and Lansing supported the Cossack Kaledin, unaware that the cause of his Volunteer Army was hopeless. Wilson and Lansing constantly used secrecy and subversion, keeping the American public in the dark. The state department was contemptous of the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) the winner of the elections to the Constituent assembly and, as Geoffrey Swain has provocatively argued, the only group who could have possibly stopped the Bolsheviks. Instead Americans on the scene talked of favoring a "military dictatorship," and shed no tears when the SRs were overthrown by Admiral Kolchak, whose gross inadequacies as a leader have to be read in the invaluable monograph by Jon Smele to be believed. The Americans used food as a weapon, used the defeated Germans to prevent the Soviets from reoccupying the Baltic States, and indulged in further illusions about the incompetent and brutal Iudenitch. Foglesong writes in a dry matter, but he is well worth reading. In the end he is quite successful in showing that far from making the world safe for democracy and for open diplomacy, Wilson's activities were a major stage in the creation of "secret wars." Quite unsuccessful the first time, the same methods of secrecy, rhetorical support for democracy, hard support for vicious, reactionary and incompetent rulers would be used again and again in the future.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
America's Secret War Against Bolshevism, June 17, 2000
This review is from: America's Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1920 (Hardcover)
David Fogelsong has combined meticulous research with an easy-to-read writing style that accomplishes exactly what every well-crafted book should accomplish. By taking the reader deep into the seamy side of World War One politics, Fogelsong makes the reader question just about everything conventional wisdom preaches about the superior morality of the Woodrow Wilson presidency. Naming the players on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, Professor Fogelsong backs his conclusions with documented archival materials. He reveals for the first time precisely what political maneuverings took place when the allies decided that Bolshevism should be totally eradicated from the face of the earth. The intrigue of spy networks and the expenditure of millions of American dollars in this effort do not necessarily pale by today's standards when one considers these actions actually set the standard by which the American government operates today. Fogelsong repeatedly proves the correlation in this book which begs the question, "Why does America continue to send her sons (and daughters) into harms way and spend less on them than on the behind-the-scenes political posturing?" With this book, David Fogelsong has proven what many eastern Europeans steadfastly believe..."Where there ever was, or is now trouble in the world, there was, or is now, Great Britain." That the United States of America became, hesitantly at first, but later a willing accomplice in the intervention in the Bolshevik Revolution, set the bar at a new height which future administrations would continue to raise. Based on David Fogelsongs text the reader must conclude that Soviet-style thinking about America's efforts in Russia between 1917 and 1920 would indeed be reason enough for the Cold War. Some would argue this is oversimplification of a multi-faceted problem. Perhaps. The stories of the sons America sent to Russia may speak otherwise. Fogelsong has laid a most excellent foundation. The rest may well be for the grandsons to tell.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
sheds light on an unknown era in US history, March 1, 2008
Few outside the historical research community are even aware the US and other Allied nations were involved in Russian/Soviet affairs just after the Bolshevik revolution. At best it's a historical footnote. At worst, the history of this event has been intentionally neglected to preserve the image that the US has never lost a war.
It's time we acknowledge our attempt to destabilize the fledgling Soviet regime just after it took power during the latter stages of World War I. Given these events, later Soviet fear regarding the intentions of the US and other Western democracies is understandable. We'd tried to interfere in their affairs once, why wouldn't we try again?
Read the book and understand why America's actions haven't always been as clean and above board as its citizens have been led to believe.
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