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ConsitutionalHistory t1_j38ypiz wrote

I wrote a paper on this back in grad school. Operation Polar Bear...an epic failure.

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rockrnger t1_j39a84x wrote

Russian civil war is so crazy it sounds made up.

Dozens of countries involved and Czechoslovakia controlling half of russia with the noted handicap of not existing.

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Discount_gentleman t1_j39xugg wrote

"Got caught up in" is kinda odd language. They were sent there as part of the war.

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BlishBlash t1_j39yy1z wrote

"Got Caught Up in"??? That is borderline whitewashing history.

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pablonieve t1_j3a85cm wrote

Replying to rockrnger (#1,298,707)

The Czechs just wanted to get out of Russia so they could help with the independence movement back home. But the Communists kept making their passage more difficult because they were so distrustful of them (per usual).

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Wax-Johnson t1_j3ae5za wrote

Canada sent troops as well, they got to a town east side of russia and stayed there. Most danger was walking back from bar.

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Kered13 t1_j3aeaky wrote

Replying to VoiceOfTheSoil40 (#1,299,792)

They were primarily sent to recover Allied supplies that had been sent to Russia before it withdrew from the war and to aid the Czechoslovak Legion, who were trying to escape Russia (which is an amazing story of it's own).

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Dr-P-Ossoff t1_j3agybw wrote

I learned this from the SPI game. To represent the stunning chaos, a player does not take a side. You can earn points for having you red and white armies attack each other.

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BusinessPenguin t1_j3aifqu wrote

"Got caught up in" is a funny way to describe what was an unjustified invasion of a foreign nation.

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TheEmperorsWrath t1_j3aixym wrote

"Caught up" - Ah yes, the "American Expeditionary Force, Siberia" just accidentally ended up in Siberia. Poor bastards lol.

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ironroad18 t1_j3akheh wrote

Replying to rockrnger (#1,298,707)

Yeah, the international expeditions into Russia, really shed light onto the Lenin's and later Stalin's hyper paranoia towards the West and Japan. In addition to the ever present worry of an internal party coup or another popular uprising.

After WW2, it seems like Soviet Russians were obsessed with creating a physical buffer between them and the West at all costs due to what happened during the civil war. Even if it meant using the spent remnants of the Red Army to subjugate Eastern Europe by force.

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royiroyi t1_j3amdbe wrote

My Grandpa was an engineer in the US Army with the Polar Bear unit and kept a journal while he was in Russia. He and his engineer unit were mainly from Michigan. He referred to the enemy as “Bolos” too if anyone might find that interesting.

Also his Russian Mosin Nagant rifle was actually made in the US. Something about how the US was contracted to make Russian rifles for the Tsar, and the unit he was in at least had them.

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sarpon6 t1_j3aomv5 wrote

My grandfather was born in an area that was Ukraine or Russia or Poland depending on the year, immigrated to the US as a teenager, volunteered for the US Army and was sent to Siberia to be a translator. In September 1919, he and a captain were captured by Cossacks. The captain escaped. My grandfather was turned over to General Kalmykov. He was flogged before being released.

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TheBalrogofMelkor t1_j3aonpa wrote

The Russian civil war famously had the Reds (communists) and Whites (monarchists), but also the Blacks (anarchists) and the Greens (peasant armies). The Reds used the Greens and Blacks to fight the Whites and then backstabbed them to win, notably in Ukraine where they were the biggest factions.

Pretty much everyone would massacre the jews, and there were hundreds of pogroms.

At one point, a White general converted to a militant sect of Buddism and led an army of mounted Mongols who captured Ulaan Battar (capital of Mongolia).

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cfrey t1_j3aqgi4 wrote

The Western war against Russia is over 100 years old, and still going strong.

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mustard-plug t1_j3au5hc wrote

Lions Led By Donkeys podcast has a terrific 4 part episode on this expedition

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Attygalle t1_j3b5bf8 wrote

Replying to TheBalrogofMelkor (#1,300,428)

Reminds me of China where the great CCP let the KMT and local warlords do all the fighting against the Japanese in WWII only to backstab them when the war was basically won and then “win” the civil war. It’s a very effective tactic.

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Lev_Davidovich t1_j3b619t wrote

Replying to TheBalrogofMelkor (#1,300,428)

I think it was only the Whites massacring Jews. Emma Goldman, an American anarchist who was deported to Russia during the civil war for speaking out against WWI, has an account of visiting Fastov, a predominantly Jewish Ukrainian city, that had been ravaged by pogroms where they prayed for Lenin because the Red Army securing the region had stopped the pogroms:

>We had heard and read of ghastly anti-Jewish pogroms, but we had never before come face to face with their ravages. On our way to the town we met neither human being nor beast until we reached the market square. A dozen stands displayed a miserable assortment of cabbages, potatoes, herring, and cereals. Their owners were mostly women. Instead of showing some animation at the sudden avalanche of so many customers, they hurriedly pulled their handkerchiefs over their foreheads and shrank back in fright. But their eyes remained riveted in terror on the men with us, consisting of Sasha, Henry, and our young Communist collaborator. We were completely nonplussed. Being the best-versed in Yiddish, I addressed an old Jewess near by. Except for our woman companion, I told her, we were the children of Yehudim, and we had come from America. Would she not tell me why the women acted so strangely? She pointed to the men. “Send them away,” she begged. The men withdrew. I remained with our secretary, Shakol, and the women approached nearer. Soon the whole group surrounded us, each competing with the rest in their eagerness to tell us the story of their tsores (troubles).

>
>Our three male companions joined us in the synagogue. The whole assembly tried to tell us the tragic story of their town, all at once. We suggested that they choose a committee of three, each in his turn to relate to us what had happened. In that way we were able to get a coherent account of one of the worst pogroms that had taken place in the Ukraine. Fastov had repeatedly been the scene of Jewish massacres, perpetrated by the hordes of every White general who had invaded the district. They had suffered from Denikin, from Petlura and the other enemy forces. But the pogrom organized in 1919 by Denikin had been the most fiendish one. It had lasted a whole week and had taken the lives of four thousand persons outright and of several thousand more that had perished while escaping to Kiev. But death had not been the worst infliction, the rabbi said in a broken voice. Far more harrowing had been the violation of the women, regardless of age, the young among them repeatedly and in the presence of their male kin, whom the soldiers held pinioned. Old Jews were trapped in the synagogue, tortured, and killed, while their sons were driven to the market square to meet similar fates.

>
>The old rabbi being too shaken to continue, the narrative was taken up by another of the committee. Fastov had been, he said, one of the most prosperous cities in the south. When the Denikin hordes tired of their blood orgy, they pilfered every home, demolished the things they could not carry away, and set the houses on fire. The larger part of the town was destroyed. The survivors, a mere handful, most of them old women and small children, were now doomed to slow extinction unless help quickly came from somewhere. God had heard their prayers and had sent us at the moment when they had almost despaired of the Jewish world’s learning of their great calamity. “Borukh Adonai!” he cried solemnly, “blessed be Thy name.” And everyone repeated after him: “Borukh Adonai!”

>
>In the whole gruesome picture of Fastov two redeeming features stood out. The Gentiles of the town had had no share in the massacres. And no pogroms had taken place since the Bolshevik forces had entered the district. Our informants admitted that the Red soldiers were not free from anti-Semitism, but the establishment of Soviet authority in Fastov had lifted the dread of new massacres, and the villagers had been praying for Lenin ever since. “Why only for Lenin?” we asked; “why not also for Trotsky and Zinoviev?” “Well, you see, Trotsky and Zinoviev are Yehudim,” an old Jew explained with Talmudic intonation; “do they deserve praise for helping their own? But Lenin is a goi (Gentile). So you can understand why we bless him.” We too felt grateful that the goi had at least one saving grace in his régime.

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Dung_Buffalo t1_j3b7xwz wrote

Replying to TheBalrogofMelkor (#1,300,428)

It should be noted that only the red and black armies actually stopped pogroms. The greens, and especially the whites, were horrific and essentially were the precursors to the SS in their behavior.

It's no wonder so many former whites (and probably greens though I'm less familiar with any of their exiles after the war) joined the next Nazis as a foreign legion. It was like that with many such groups, the Lithuanians stick out in this regard. Nationalists today try to paint the nazi collaborators, including Stepan Bandera (oooh spooky scary, a putinbot saying mean things about Bandera) as just patriots who took help to "liberate" their lands from anyone who offered, and so pinched their noses and sided with the Nazis. This was not the case, they were enthusiastic mass murderers. Not just of Jews but of poles and anyone who happened to be a minority in their lands, as well as many of their own people.

Any attempt to make the reds and blacks equivalent to the whites and greens is a similar level of historical revisionism, I hate to say. It was not "pretty much everyone" doing these pogroms, it was almost entirely the whites and greens. Any time it did happen among the reds and blacks it was severely punished. There is a reason that millions of formerly apolitical peasants wound up siding with the communists, the whites arriving in your town was a horror.

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Loves_His_Bong t1_j3b97jy wrote

Replying to Attygalle (#1,300,962)

The CCP did not “backstab” the Kuomintang lmao. And the red army had 60,000 thousand soldiers compared to the KMTs 2 million. The terms of the United front stipulated as much that the CCP was responsible for Guerilla warfare and sabotage operations against the Japanese.

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CaptainDaveomedes t1_j3bagcy wrote

Replying to Loves_His_Bong (#1,301,058)

If there was backstabbing it was from the KMT about-facing on their first United Front and tried to massacre all the Communists. Then a second United Front had to be FORCED on Chiang Kai-Shek by his own command structure because he obsessively overcommited to fighting the CPC over the Japanese.

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ggaggamba t1_j3belek wrote

Replying to ironroad18 (#1,300,278)

Didn't the USSR have the buffer of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland prior to the start of WWII? All these countries were declaring neutrality and bending over backwards to avoid offending both Berlin and Moscow, which were both trying to sway the neutral states one way or another. Kind of weird the Kremlin would conspire to eliminate the buffer to sit beside arch enemy Nazi Germany.

Also kind of weird the USSR would abandon the Franco-Soviet Mutual Defence Pact ratified in early '36 - a pact that freaked out Hitler - in favour of teaming up with the arch enemy.

Kind of weird to conspire with the German military (that had only just finished invading Russia) to provide it the secret bases to develop the technologies and tactics of combined-arms manoeuvre warfare in violation of Versailles.

Kind of weird for Lenin to orchestrate the 'Social Fascist' argument and propaganda attack on Social Democrat Parties in Germany and elsewhere. The SPD was more hated by the KPD than the NSDAP. The KPD considered the Nazi rise to power a mere temporary event, one to pave the way for the communists' assumption of the reins of the state. They were right; just had to have a second world war to accomplish it. What's a few million deaths to accomplish an objective?

And weird for Stalin's Comintern and the USSR to accuse Britain and France of starting WWII after Germany invaded Poland.

On 7 September 1939, Stalin spoke to Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov, a member of his inner circle, who was dealing with the disbelief and upset of many European communists about the Soviet-German Non-aggression Pact. (Why communists were in 'disbelief' seems peculiar to me. Stalin had signed the Italo-Soviet Friendship, Neutrality, and Nonaggression Pact in 1933 with Mussolini, the first fascist. Until '41 fascism was a minor concern. Enemy #1 was the Social Democrats.) 'A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries. Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system. We can manoeuvre and pit one side against the other to set them fighting with each other as fiercely as possible,' said Stalin. This conflict offered expansion: 'What would be the harm if, as a result of the rout of Poland, we were to extend the socialist system onto new territory and populations?' Sergo Beria, Lavrentiy Beria's son, remembered this as the time of the Soviet leaders talking about how they pitted Germany against France and Britain and that this aligned with Lenin's goal of a second world war. The first birthed the USSR; the second would birth worldwide revolution. In July 1940, Stalin reiterated the aforementioned ideas in a conversation with the British ambassador to Moscow Stafford Cripps. The Soviet leader said that before the outbreak of WWII no Soviet-British rapprochement was possible as his country focused on the demolition of the 'old' balance of powers built after WWI without the USSR, whilst Great Britain fought for its retention. 'The Soviet Union wanted to change the old equilibrium, while England and France wished to preserve it. Also, Germany wanted to make a change in the equilibrium and this common desire [with the USSR] to do away with the old equilibrium became the basis for the rapprochement with the Germans.'

>the spent remnants of the Red Army to subjugate Eastern Europe by force.

The Red Army had about 11.3 million personnel serving in '45. That's quite a 'remnant'.

In the end, the 'shed light on' apologia isn't very illuminating. The imperialism of USSR-based International Socialism was its feature. War and mass death was a price they were willing (for others) to pay.

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RelevantFill6649 t1_j3bqquj wrote

Canadian troops were also sent into the fray, and since the White Russians lost, Canada technically has lost a war before…

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royiroyi t1_j3bvcsp wrote

Replying to J_Bard (#1,300,869)

Unfortunately not, he died when I was really young. I’ve only heard and learned just from what I’ve heard from my dad and the journal.

My Grandpa told my dad he didn’t like how the British officiers in charge kept putting either Americans or Canadians at the front. At one point he said there was a situation of a British commander telling subordinates to shoot at retreating Americans and Canadians who were refusing on of those “death trap” type orders by the Brits. I believe the orders were refused thankfully.

My Dad tried to verify the events but ended up coming empty minus for one historical employee from the Museum in Michigan who heard something similar once, my dad said my Grandpa was never one to lie and never spoke much else about his time served.

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LoveScoutCEO t1_j3ca0s7 wrote

I knew an old man when I was a kid who was sent to Murmansk in 1918. He was pretty funny about it. He thought it was all nuts.

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Discount_gentleman t1_j3cfh3n wrote

Replying to ggaggamba (#1,301,187)

Guy reads a story about US and European invasions of Russia as part of an intervention in the Russian Civil War and concludes: Isn't it weird that Russians were skeptical of placing all their trust in European security guarantees?

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katamuro t1_j3dn76n wrote

Replying to Dung_Buffalo (#1,301,031)

this is really something a lot of people don't know, don't bother to know and try actively to distance themselves from knowing that Bandera was an actual real nazi who murdered people before WW2 based on his nazi views and then in the war the organisation that he was a leader of helped and participated german nazis kill jews in both the western ukraine and poland. So any glorification of this guy by ukrainains clearly say that they are nazis.

What would we call someone who glorified Hitler or Gimmler or that nazi propaganda guy? A nazi.

And people really underestimate the level of sheer horror that was the revolution, civil war and then ww2. The people who lived through it had fought for their lives for years from almost every side. They fought against germans, the white army, the international helpers of the white army, japanese.

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katamuro t1_j3dqc3q wrote

Replying to cfrey (#1,300,486)

it's actually older. Read about the life of Ivan The Terrible and then the period that followed. The "west" be in germans, polish-lithuanians, swedish or anyone else have been in conflict with russia in one form or another since the 16th century.

Reading the difference in how certain events are described between western historians and others is clear.

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Skeptical-_- t1_j3dspj6 wrote

Replying to PrusPrusic (#1,301,056)

"Taking into account the awful performance of the Western Allies against the Nazis on the western front it is entirely justified to consider the Soviet Army superior in the immediate post-war period to any other army in the world.Conflating the Soviet Army in 1945 with the Russians in 2022 is so stupid that I will, sadly, have to assume that you are terminally American." - PrusPrusic reply which seems gone now... I replied but also don't see that so here it is

wow you really don't know some basic ww2 stats if that's your argument. The Soviets killed a lot of Germans but for everyone killed they lost a (2-4 maybe more) of their own. They were also on the defensive taking the majority of these losses….Yes soviets/russia killed a lot of germans no is saying they did not but it was anything but performant and left them drained with major negative effects on the population still seen to this day. To claim they were somehow the best/strongest in the world right after taking such losses is crazy and ignores basic realities inside and outside of the USSR.

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PrusPrusic t1_j3duxab wrote

Replying to Skeptical-_- (#1,304,508)

So basically you're trying to tell me that an army's greatness is measured in K/D ratio? That's so silly that I don't really feel the need to continue this discussion. The Red Army could've rolled into Lisabon in the autumn of '45.

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Skeptical-_- t1_j3e70z7 wrote

Replying to PrusPrusic (#1,304,574)

>So basically you're trying to tell me that an army's greatness is measured in K/D ratio?

Not at all.

You're the one who brought up performance. Which I called out as that’s an odd approach considering the well known performance issues of the soviets. So it pointed to extreme bias and or misinformation.

My original comment also included “By war's end the Soviet armed forces numbered 11,365,000 officers and men” - "In 1945 as the defeat of Germany and Japan neared, U.S. military personnel numbered 12,209,238”. That’s just pure numbers of people when you factor in equipment/training/allies the difference is stark.

"The Red Army could've rolled into Lisabon in the autumn of '45." 👀

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royiroyi t1_j3hbajg wrote

Replying to Mypantsareblue (#1,300,946)

That’s funny, that’s him :) Him and Marie (my grandmother who is mentioned in the notes) ended up getting married when he returned and raised 12 kids in Michigan’s UP.

Thanks for the share, I hadn’t read it in quite a while.

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