news

Liberal historians are being weird again.

They correctly see certain facts (about the British intervention in the Russian Civil War):

There was plenty of reason to see the intervention as nasty – for starters, lack of clear war aims, atrocities on which the Allies turned a blind eye, half-hearted support of reactionaries followed by ignominious betrayal – but the real reason it was judged so harshly was that it failed. Nothing substantive was achieved, while, as the British commander of Allied forces in the north, Edmund Ironside, noted at the time of the British withdrawal from North Russia in the autumn of 1919, the cost was to incur ‘the everlasting enmity of both sides – the Whites for deserting them, and the Reds for opposing them’.

Exactly - it was hopeless and unnecessary.

Apart from getting rid of the Bolsheviks, the aims of the Western intervention were remarkably ill-defined. Sometimes it was to protect British interests and keep the Germans, Turks, Poles, or Japanese imperial or territorial ambitions in check; sometimes to support ‘democratic forces’ in Russia, notably the transient Czechs; and sometimes just to back up the (anti-democratic) Whites.

So the support of "democratic forces" was just posturing, in other words.

A national claim the Allies did not support, however, was the Ukrainian one, or rather, any of the various Ukrainian claims that were on offer.

the Allies essentially accepted the Poles’ argument that Ukrainian nationalism was German-inspired and incoherent, with little popular support. In Reid’s summation, although Ukrainians today ‘view the Allies’ failure to support them as a tragic missed opportunity’, ‘in truth the scoffers were probably right. Split, by the end of 1919, between two paper governments, one allied with the Poles against the Russians and the other the reverse, they did not have the leadership or unity to win power, even with outside military aid.’

Sounds about right

Reid’s encounter with widespread and virulent antisemitism – both as practised on the ground in Ukraine by Whites, Poles and Ukrainian nationalists, and as tacitly condoned by the Allies – was ‘one of the most jolting aspects of researching this book’. The first major pogroms of the Civil War were conducted in December 1918 by the Polish army after capturing Lviv from Ukrainian forces. The local British representative, setting a pattern that was often to be followed in subsequent months, ‘dismissed pogrom “rumours” as “grossly exaggerated”’. Antisemitism was a core component of White propaganda [..] Altogether, the pogroms of 1919 in Ukraine were on a scale ‘not seen since the Cossack rebellions of the 17th century’, but the Whites weren’t the only ones to blame: Symon Petilura’s and Nykyfor Hryhoriv’s Ukrainian forces, as well as Nestor Makhno’s anarchist ‘Greens’, were also heavily involved.

and so on and so on. But then.

Reid’s problem is that, recognising a degree of similarity in the two episodes of foreign involvement in war on Ukrainian territory, she holds diametrically opposed value judgments of them: the early 20th-century intervention on behalf of the Whites was pointless, but current Western support of Ukraine in a war started by the Russians is morally imperative and, in global political terms, necessary. Present-day Ukraine is a democratic or democratically aspiring country that ‘for all its faults ... really does deserve the world’s help’, she writes in the recent second edition of Borderland. ‘Betraying the country would be moral and strategic failure on a par with the crushed Hungarian Rising or Prague Spring – and with much less excuse.’

It is so weird that liberals have this fundamental premise that Western powers have both the moral superiority and the means to sort out conflicts in far away lands. How is this different from the early XXth century British conception of a benign civilizing Empire? What kind of mental gymnastics they need to perform so that their heads don't split from the cognitive dissonance? How come they don't see the similarities that the Western powers are willing to support any kind of reactionary force so long as it is in their geopolitical interest? That they didn't give a shit about pogroms, because the main concern was to own the ‘the blood-stained, Jew-led Bolsheviks’? That they are supporting Azov just to hinder Putler?

Perhaps the real takeaway from Reid’s history isn’t so much a lesson as a premonition: that not too far down the track, we could be witnessing a shamefaced withdrawal of Western support that leaves the Ukrainians – like the Russian Whites a century earlier – to sort out the mess with Moscow on their own.