The British "intervention" in Transcaspia, 1918-1919

Intervention by British-Indian troops in Transcaspia in 1918, and the temporary occupation of the great oil city of Baku by a British force from N.W. Persia, were to give rise to a controversy that continues today. This little-known military venture, hardly more than a sideshow of the First World War, has assumed considerable importance because of its use in Soviet Cold War propaganda in an area vital to the defense of the Western World. Colonel Ellis, who took part in the operations in Transcaspia and was an eyewitness of many key events, is the first to give a detailed authoritative account of what really happened. In the Soviet view, Britian, with the connivance of American "capitalism", perpetrated a delibrate act of aggression, as part of a long-term plan to seize and colonise Russian Central Asia: but from the British standpoint it was simply part of a hastily improvised plan to block a Turko-German advance through the Caucasus to India and Afghanistan. Colonel Ellis shows how the two contrasting versions arose, and throws light on the strange episode of the twenty-six Bolshevik Commissars supposedly shot on British orders, and in the presence of British officers, in the desert to the east of Krasnovodsk in 1918.