PLOTS AND SUBPLOTS

The Lenin Plot: The Unknown Story of America’s War Against Russia

400 pages. Pegasus Books, 2020. $29.95. Reviewed by Paul Starobin

In December 1917, President Woodrow Wilson approved a covert U.S.government initiative to help anti-Bolshevik Cossacks in the south of Russia topple Vladimir Lenin’s new Soviet regime and get Russia back into the war still raging against Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany. So began a series of efforts in this vein that author Barnes Carr collectively calls “the Lenin Plot” in his new book of that title. There was never a good chance that any of these ventures, some better baked than others, would succeed. The plotters on the whole were amateurish, without a keen sense of strategy and tactics, and their movements were easily detected by the Cheka, the Soviet secret police under the command of Felix Dzerzhinsky, known as “Iron Felix.” In fact, Edward M. House, a key Wilson adviser, opposed the Cossacks scheme: “Personally I consider it dangerous for the reason that it is encouraging internal disturbances without our having any definite program in mind,” he presciently told Robert