When the United States invaded Russia

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With all the fear and paranoia going around, you'd think that the American people are traumatized from some memory of Russian soldiers invading and ransacking America.
How else do you account for irrational headlines like these?
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It's a weird reversal of reality. For example, we see headlines like Russia proved it is the greatest threat to our democracy , but the proven facts are that it is America that is a threat to Russian democracy.
The actual reality was contained in a 1959 speech by Nikita Khrushchev during his famous visit to the United States.

“Your armed intervention in Russia was the most unpleasant thing that ever occurred in the relations between our two countries, for we had never waged war against America until then; our troops have never set foot on American soil, while your troops have set foot on Soviet soil.”

August 16th will mark the 100th Anniversary of the failed U.S. military invasion of Russia.
I wonder if our politicians and news media will even mention it?

Our invasion of Russia began with troops landing in Vladivostok, alongside our always loyal allies - Imperial Japan. These troops were mostly veterans of slaughtering Filipino insurgents.
The primary aim was to protect the Trans-Siberian Railroad and to aid those Russian forces who were still interested in fighting the Germans. These troops stayed in Russia until 1920, but never actually fired a shot at the Red Army, since the Russian civil war was happening thousands of miles away.
Some 189 soldiers died from the cold or other causes, of the nearly 8,000 American soldiers in Siberia.
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On August 2nd, British troops landed on the opposite side of Russia at Arkhangelsk (Archangel). These troops would be joined by roughly 5,000 American troops on September 4, 1918.
The mission at Archangel was clearly the overthrow of the new Bolshevik government.

War opened on two fronts, one along the Dvina river and another along the Vologda Railroad. Here, they engaged and pushed back the Bolshevik forces for the next six weeks during their autumn offensive. The fronts were becoming too long and far too difficult to supply.... It was hard for the Americans to keep their front line and enemy raids began to disrupt their supply routes more frequently.

Then the winter came. The Allies took on a more defensive attitude. They failed to mobilize the local population against the Bolsheviks, so it became harder and harder to see how the link up with the Czechoslovak Legion could be achieved.

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks staged an offensive during the early winter months on the Dvina river front. They inflicted a severe blow to the Allied contingent, which caused the Allies to retreat and reorganize.

Morale at Archangel dropped through the floor, and the troops became mutinous. In mid-1919, after the Bolsheviks defied all predictions and began defeating it's countless internal and external enemies, America withdrew its troops.
There were 210 American casualties in the Archangel invasion, including at least 110 deaths from battle, about 30 missing in action, and 70 deaths from disease. It took more than a decade to repatriate the bodies of the U.S. soldiers.

“. . .there isn’t a nation on earth that would not resent foreigners sending troops into their country, for the purpose of putting this or that faction in charge. The result is not only an injury to the prestige of the foreigner intervening, but is a great handicap to the faction the foreigner is trying to assist.”
- General Graves, U.S. commander in Siberia in 1918

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This history is well-known by Russians, but Americans are almost entirely oblivious of it.
For most of the 20th Century the people of Russia were traumatized by the memory of American soldiers invading their country, burning their homes, and killing their neighbors.
Instead we invent a reality in which we are the victims and Russia is an irrational threat, always on the verge of sending tanks down our streets.

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JekyllnHyde's picture

... and "Spheres of Influence" were an integral part of the debate during the (almost) five decades-long period of the Cold War. For good reason, too.

Behind the White armies emerged a political movement, a loose coalition of anti-Bolsheviks comprised of monarchists, liberals, non-Bolshevik socialists and disgruntled peasants. These groups had very few shared values or objectives, other than their opposition to the Bolsheviks and their determination to overthrow the Soviet regime. Most White leaders were nationalist and imperialist: they wanted to retain the Russian Empire and restore it to a position of strength in Europe and Asia. Beyond that, however, they had little in common politically. They had no system of government in mind, no agreed foreign policy, no single leader or leadership group. Some wanted the tsar restored; some wanted a constitutional monarchy; some wanted a republic; some expressed no views on the matter...

With the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, the Bolsheviks appeared not only as traitors to the war cause, but an ideological threat to democratic, capitalist nations. Most foreign powers refused to recognise the legitimacy of the Bolshevik regime, dealing instead with White generals in exile. British, French and American units were all sent to various Russian ports to support White forces, while Japanese troops invaded in the east. Foreign military intervention was lukewarm at best; rarely did foreign units directly engage the Bolsheviks on their own. Some foreign powers were chiefly interested in protecting resources previously lent to Russia. By late 1918 World War I had come to an end and nobody wanted to commit large troop numbers to another major conflict. As a consequence, foreign troops began withdrawing from Russia in 1919.

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The above propaganda poster is a White Army pamphlet during the Russian Civil War following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It shows a white knight on horseback slaying the "red dragon."

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A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma

JekyllnHyde's picture

@JekyllnHyde

... Mikhail Gorbachev also brought up this Allied "intervention" to stifle the Russian Revolution in his meetings and summits with Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.

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A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma

Lookout's picture

Decades of propaganda have been effective. Normally rational friends have jumped the Russian shark. Let's see Russia has 5 foreign bases outside of their country, we have over 800. Our military budget is multiple times larger. Most of the world sees the US as the biggest threat to world peace....mainly because we are. History never learned doesn't need to be forgotten.

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

snoopydawg's picture

@Lookout

so there would be more money to fight poverty. Congress just increased ours so they could further their fight against the people in poverty.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@Lookout "It had already been the case that anti-Russian policy actions (e.g. sanctions) pass through the Congress with bipartisan greased lightening, and defense appropriations had exploded to the highest level in postwar history in real terms.

In fact, the $716 billion just approved for FY 2019 compared to a constant dollar level of just $550 billion (2018$) in FY 1990 – the final year before the Soviet Union with its 55,000 tanks and 9,000 nuclear warheads slithered off the pages of history.

So we are already spending 30% more than at the peak of the Cold War, but you haven’t seen nothing yet. Not now that Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper have become rabid war hawks, virtually begging for military confrontation with Russia and its pipsqueak economy and pint-sized military.

As we keep mentioning, the GDP of the NATO-29 is $36 trillion, and that is 26X that of Russia. Likewise, when you add the NATO-28’s military spending of $280 billion to Washington’s humungous defense budget, the total is nigh on to $1 trillion per year – or 16X Russia’s entire military expenditure of $61 billion per annum."
https://original.antiwar.com/David_Stockman/2018/07/19/the-new-handmaids...

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Lookout's picture

@aliasalias @snoopydawg

It is really scary scary US isn't it?

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

from General Graves,

“. . .there isn’t a nation on earth that would not resent foreigners sending troops into their country, for the purpose of putting this or that faction in charge. The result is not only an injury to the prestige of the foreigner intervening, but is a great handicap to the faction the foreigner is trying to assist.”
- General Graves, U.S. commander in Siberia in 1918

would be worth repeating to the people who support neocon regime change policy in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and those wanting to try it in Iran.

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detroitmechworks's picture

But then I mostly stuck to the western front in WW1... as pretty much all history books do. It's disturbing that this isn't a major issue, but then, Americans seem to be happier NOT really knowing where their military goes as long as they can wave a flag and "Support the Troops"

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

@detroitmechworks
about this before I told them.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

boriscleto's picture

@UntimelyRippd But I'm kind of a weirdo...

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" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "

@UntimelyRippd
but I studied that period of history in college.

What's important to know is that it was part of the corporate industrial assumption that all resources in the world were theirs to exploit and that governments, whether tzarist or socialist or Bolshevik, were theirs to control.

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because they tried to prevent his power grab, I know the US did not impose any penalties. Don't remember that there was any upset expressed at all -- maybe there was.

But before the shelling, is there any record of whether or not there was a wink to Yeltsin from the US?

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Orwell: Where's the omelette?

boriscleto's picture

@jim p Yeltsin made Putin and the Oligarchs.

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" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "

CB's picture

@boriscleto
Yeltsin made Putin who turned against the rampant rape of Russia by the oligarchs. Once Putin consolidated his power with the military and the people, he turned on the Yeltsin oligarchs who had moved untold billions out of the country w/o paying any taxes (and, in some cases, worker's wages), predominately to New York and London.

He gave them an ultimatum - pay taxes, don't asset strip, pay wages when due and stay the fuck out of politics. More than half left the country, taking as much money as they could, and went into exile in New York and London.

By 2004, Putin had the state security agencies, military, police and the Douma under his control. He then re-nationalized all the sectors of the economy that were absolutely essential if Russia was to become an independent nation again.

The US and UK were so focused on their manufactured War of Terror on Afghanistan and Iraq they failed to see Putin's remarkable success in undoing the shit that the US had put his country through. Another factor was the ginned up paranoia of domestic "terrorism". Eventually, the PTB started to believe this crap themselves which further enforced their myopia.

(There's an interesting BBC documentary that discusses this The Power Of Nightmares: Part 1 Baby Its Cold Outside (2004) which I highly recommend viewing.)

The unbelievable hubris of the neocon backed Deep State's almost religious belief in "The End of History" blinded them to reality. Twenty-five years later, 'History' continues in directions not dreamed at the time. 'Full Spectrum Dominance' was never attained and is currently receding at an ever increasing pace. Truth be told, The 'New' American Century was the 20th century. It will not be the 21th.

The question we are now faced with is: Will the US accept being an equal amongst equals or will it throw a tantrum and have to be forcibly restrained from destroying that which it cannot control? The discordance we are now seeing within the US is but a reflection of the discordance the country is having with the rest of the world.

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Man, google search is horrid. But I remember reading a historian who wrote about Chamberlain that he encouraged Hitler to invade the Soviet Union. In fact, Chamberlain was so anti-communist that he opposed an triple alliance with the Soviet Union to combat the Nazis. Seems he wanted an alliance with Germany to take on the Soviet Union. Here is something.

https://www.amazon.com/British-Political-British-Foreign-Colonial-ebook/...

Is it any wonder the Russian leadership is paranoid about Western elites.

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With my own two eyes, I have.

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@leveymg
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOZuLD1u_K4]

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.