Intervention

CHAPTER 8 · 1918–1922 · The Russian Revolution, 1905–1924

Fourteen nations sent troops onto Russian soil — and the map shows how little and how much it meant. Trace the foreign zones: the British, Americans and French at Murmansk and Archangel in the frozen north; the French at Odessa on the Black Sea; British interest in the Baku oil; and, deepest and longest of all, the Japanese in the Far East around Vladivostok, where at one point 70,000 Japanese soldiers stayed until October 1922 with their own designs on Siberia. It looks, on the map, like an overwhelming coalition strangling the revolution in its cradle.

The turn: Vladivostok — the intervention that outstayed its purpose.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.