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My essay, “Early Failures,” appears at the Paris Review Daily.
Toward the end of 1918, infantry from the U.S. Army’s 85th Division occupied Arkhangelsk, a city in North Russia on the shore of the White Sea. They had come with other Allied troops to rescue the stranded Czechoslovakian Legion, forty thousand soldiers abandoned after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Although Josef Stalin—at that time the Commissar of Foreign Nationalities for the newly formed Soviet Russian Republic—had agreed to the evacuation, he also had demands about how it should be done, including the legionnaires’ unconditional disarmament.
Read about Woodrow Wilson’s plan to send thousands of Allied troops into Siberia in an effort to prop up a White Army against the Red Guard. During Russia’s civil war, which ultimately saw the rise of Bolshevism and the Soviet Union, America made the first, early failure it would see in terms of interventionism, a failure that would continue to go ignored for years.
If we had learned from our failed Siberian invasion, could we have changed history in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan?
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