WITH THE DIE-HARDS IN SIBERIA

Colonel John Ward , author of this account, commanded one of the heroic but doomed attempts by the British – and other western allies to aid the White forces and defeat the Reds – Lenin’s Bolsheviks, – in 1918-1919, during the Civil War that followed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Unpopular at home, where war weariness and left-wing sympathy for the revolution were strong, Britain’s intervention in Russia was never going to be a walkover, and Ward’s account tells a tale, in the words of military historian Cyril Falls ‘of gallantry and endurance in frightful conditoons’. The conditions in question, the wintery and barren landscape of Siberia in wartime, were bleak beyond belief. The efforts of Ward’s ‘Die-Hards’, in alliance with their Russian, Czech and Polish anti-Bolshevik allies, were fatally undermined, in his view, by the Allied failure to make good their promises to support Admiral Kolchak, the White Commander in Siberia who set up a White Government in Omsk. In a bitter foreword to his account, Ward particularly blames the Americans and the Japanese for failing to recognise the peril posed by the Bolsheviks and acting to prevent it. The book is illustrated by eleven photographs, and will be of interest to anyone concerned with the history of the Russian revolution, its Civil War, and allied intervention.