Аннотация

An undercover RAF squadron prepares to bomb Moscow from a makeshift landing ground in the Steppes two hundred miles from the Russian capital ...Two British regiments land at Vladivostok ... The Japanese invade Siberia with 70,000 troops ... American infantrymen fight the Bolsheviks in a bitter winter war south of Archangel ... British spies in Moscow plot the overthrow of the Russian government ...

Thriller fiction? No. These events actually happened in a little known and much misunderstood war conducted in the early years of the twentieth century. The Allied intervention began in 1918 as a desperate attempt to maintain the Eastern Front against the Germans after Russia's decision to withdraw from the First World War. But it swiftly escalated into a haphazard and often chaotic offensive against Bolshevism itself that even included the spectacle of an undercover RAF squadron steaming through the heart of Russia with its aircraft strapped to railway flatcars. Its mission: to bomb Moscow.

Christopher Dobson and John Miller have based their account of this extraordinary and neglected episode on extensive research conducted in London and Moscow. The authors are experienced and award-winning foreign correspondents, with access to archives never before opened and to diaries and letters written by the men who were players in the drama. They have also interviewed the diminishing band of surviving veterans. Among them is one of the men who was eventually refused permission to bomb Moscow because Winston Churchill, then Minister of War, ruled that there was "no military value to the operation."

The result is a fascinating piece of modern history, grippingly revealed with accuracy and detail, that overturns a number of misconceptions and untruths that have shrouded the campaign over the decades. The Day They Almost Bombed Moscow also traces the origins of much of today's Superpower antagonism back to that bizarre and half-remembered clash of arms on the savagely contested soil of Revolutionary Russia, a clash that set the pattern for East-West relations which persists, with all its dangers, today.