Churchill's Abandoned Prisoners

Book excerpt: The dramatic account of 15 British soldiers abandoned in Bolshevik Russia during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. In Churchill’s Abandoned Prisoners, Rupert Wieloch details how the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 affected the Allied war effort. The threat drove the formation of an Allied force, including British, American, French, Czech, Italian, Greek, and Japanese troops, stationed across Russia to support the anti-Bolsheviks (the “White Russians”). But war-weariness and equivocation led Allied powers to dispatch just enough troops to maintain a show of interest in Russia’s fate, but not enough to give the “Whites” a real chance of victory. Among these troops is Emmerson MacMillan, an American engineer, who joins the British army in 1918. He becomes one of a select group of British soldiers ordered to “remain to the last” and organize the evacuation of refugees from Omsk in November 1919. After saving thousands of lives, they depart on the last train out of the city before it is seized by the Bolsheviks. But their mad dash for freedom through freezing temperatures ends when they are captured in Krasnoyarsk. Abandoned without communications, they endure a fearful detention and become an embarrassment to Prime Minister David Lloyd George and War Secretary Winston Churchill. After a traumatic incarceration, they survive against all the odds and are eventually released. As a new Cold War heats up, it is even more important to understand the origins of the modern relationship between Russia and the West. This stirring tale of courage and adventure only lifts the lid on an episode that sowed distrust and precipitated events in World War II and today.