“Through a Looking Glass”: The United States Army Looks at the Red Army of Workers and Peasants 1919–1926

After the withdrawal of units of the U.S. Army from the Soviet Far East in 1919–20 in wake of the abortive anti-Bolshevik campaign launched by the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, the American military maintained a watchful eye on the growth and development of the Red Army. This interest in the Red Army can be seen in the articles that appeared in the Infantry Journal and other military journals during the 1920s that evaluated the capabilities of the Russian Army of the 1920s, the Soviet system of government, and Bolshevism in general. While the majority of Army leaders busied themselves with the absorption of the operational and tactical lessons of the recently concluded World War (1917–1918), other, more thoughtful officers wrote about and discussed both the Imperial Russian and Red [i.e., Soviet] armies in articles published in the Infantry Journal during the 1920s. 1 1 See Captain Daniel S. Appleton, ‘The Russian Army of Today’, Infantry Journal, 25 (October 1924) pp. 415–7. Hereafter cited as Appleton, Russian Army of Today.