''Chillingly original'' Max Hastings
''Brilliantly depicts a disastrous failure'' Antony Beevor
''Witty and elegant . . . Excellent background to today''s events'' Anne Applebaum
''Britain''s most forgotten war, brilliantly remembered'' Simon Jenkins
''Vivid and remarkably timely'' Martin Sixsmith
From the bestselling author of Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine
The extraordinary story of the West''s intervention into the Russian Civil War
In the closing months of the First World War, Britain, America, France and Japan sent 180,000 soldiers to revolutionary Russia, in a doomed attempt to unseat the Bolsheviks. Entangled in what they termed a ''comic opera'' conflict, they crisscrossed the shattered empire in sleds, trains and paddlesteamers, bivouacked in log cabins and felt yurts, torpedoed warships from speedboats, improvised the world''s first air-dropped chemical weapons, and organise
