cover image The Day They Almost Bombed Moscow: The Allied War in Russia, 1918-1920

The Day They Almost Bombed Moscow: The Allied War in Russia, 1918-1920

Christopher Dobson. Atheneum Books, $16.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-689-11713-8

Based on letters, diaries, interviews and official papers, this is an account by two British journalists of the Allied intervention in Russia that began as a desperate attempt to bolster Russian resistance to the Germans and later became an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Isolated sections of the book are interestingthe ordeals of individual soldiers, the exploits of secret agents, the mutiny of British units, the Royal Air Force's bombing of Tsaritsyn (later called Stalingrad)but the authors ultimately fail to find shape and coherence in the prevailing chaos. One fact may serve to illustrate the enormity of the problem they were unable to solve: at one time during the period of intervention there were some 30 governments functioning on Russian soil. If the book has an overall theme, it is the persistent lack of an Allied policy. (American troops, peripherally involved, never understood their mission.) Photos. (September 25)