When the United States Invaded Russia: Woodrow Wilson's Siberian Disaster - Paperback

by Carl J. Richard (Author)

This fascinating history explores one of America's earliest counterinsurgency campaigns outside the Western Hemisphere. Few remember that shortly before the end of World War I, the United States sent thousands of troops to Siberia, who remained there for a year and a half to suppress the Bolshevik Revolution. Carl J. Richard convincingly shows that the intervention ironically enabled the survival of the emerging Soviet regime and influenced subsequent Soviet-American relations. The episode also teaches valuable lessons about the extreme difficulties inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns and about the absolute need to secure widespread support on the ground if such campaigns are to achieve success, knowledge that U.S. policymakers tragically ignored in Vietnam, and later struggled to implement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Author Biography

Carl J. Richard is professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is the author of several noted books, including Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts and Why We're All Romans.