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

by Barnes Carr

Overview

It remains the most audacious spy plot in American history—a bold and extremely dangerous operation to invade Russia, defeat the Red Army, and mount a coup in Moscow against Soviet dictator Vladimir Ilich Lenin. After that, leaders in Washington, Paris, and London aimed to install their own Allied-friendly dictator in Moscow as a means to get Russia back into the war effort against Germany. The Lenin Plot had the “entire approval” of President Woodrow Wilson. As he ordered a military invasion of Russia, he gave the American ambassador, the U.S. Consul General in Moscow, and other State Department operatives a free hand to pursue their covert action against Lenin. The result was thousands of deaths, both military and civilian, on both sides. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand the true beginning of the Cold War, The Lenin Plot tells the shocking story of this untold episode in American history in fascinating and striking detail.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643133997
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Barnes Carr was for many years a journalist for daily newspapers in Mississippi, Memphis, Boston, Montreal, New York, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C. He was trapped in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the short story he wrote about the experience was awarded a William Faulkner Gold Medal. His first book, Operation Whisper: The Capture of Soviet Spies Morris and Lona Cohen, was published by the University Press of New England. Barnes lives in Houston, Texas.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Part I The First Attempt 1

1 A Forgotten Man 3

2 The Chicago Group 7

3 Agents of Influence 11

4 Go See the Elephant 17

5 Xenophon the Terrible 22

6 Washington Napping 27

7 A Last Hurrah 34

8 Who's in Charge? 39

9 Lenin's German Key 45

10 The Yanks are Coming 55

11 Send in the Spies 63

12 Indoor Minds 72

13 Wanted: One Dictator 80

14 Money, Guns, Chaos 88

Part II Victory or Death 97

15 A Remarkable American 99

16 A Confederate at Court 107

17 Headhunters and Moles 114

18 The Invasion of Russia 125

19 First Shots Fired 134

20 The Savinkov Method 141

21 Murder Them All 148

22 Gentleman and Hustler 153

23 Pariahs of the World 163

24 Everything on the Dot 175

25 Security Breakdowns 186

26 A Traitor Exposed 194

27 "They Shot Lenin!" 200

28 Death Watch 212

29 A Terrorist's Story 218

30 Black Saturday 228

31 No Mercy for Enemies 234

32 Caught in a Trap 246

33 The Sting 254

Part III Snow Trenches 265

34 Where Is The Front? 267

35 Sanity Arrives 276

36 To the Wall 285

37 Risky Mission 295

38 A Poisoned Apple 300

39 Fighting for What? 306

40 Famine and Freedom 317

A Final Word 327

Selected Bibliography 339

Endnotes 347

Acknowledgments 377

Index 379

Editorial Reviews

…Barnes Carr's entertaining new study, The Lenin Plot, [is] a welcome corrective…The story is vividly told by Carr, who has unearthed some fascinating new archival sources to add to a sparkling narrative.

The New York Times Book Review - Victor Sebestyen

08/10/2020

Journalist Carr (Operation Whisper) delivers a lively, if somewhat speculative, account of the U.S.-concocted plot to remove Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and install an “Allied-friendly dictator” in Russia during WWI. Shortly after the October Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power in 1917, the U.S. Consul General in Moscow, DeWitt Clinton Poole, left the city on a covert mission to hire a Cossack army to overthrow the new government. The plan, which had the approval of President Woodrow Wilson and the backing of France and Britain (all of whom wanted to draw Russia back into the Allied war effort), also involved American-Russian tractor salesman Xenophon Kalamatiano, who recruited the Red Army’s head of communications as an informant, and a French saboteur hired to blow up Soviet bridges, airfields, and ammunition dumps. Piecing together the increasingly convoluted and elaborate scheme through newspaper accounts, archival records, letters, and biographies, Carr contends that it failed because of a lack of funds and disagreements among Cossack leaders, though he admits some pieces of the puzzle are still missing, including whether the plotters were behind Fanny Kaplan’s attempted assassination of Lenin in summer of 1918. Fluidly written and impressively researched, this espionage tale delights. Agent: Andrew Lownie, Andrew Lownie Literary. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

The author’s key thesis is that the Cold War started with the Bolshevik Revolution rather than after World War II. Today, there are quite a few historians and political scientists who agree with this thesis, also citing hostile statements, from that time, about the Bolshevik Revolution, coming from Winston Churchill.

Prof. Pyotr Eltsov

"This is a worthwhile read about little-known history."

Historical Novel Review

This book fills in a gap in the annals of Soviet espionage. Goes to show you that the old saying ‘Don't judge a book by its cover’ is very true. Those (honestly) nice people served an evil cause. As much as it might pain one to say that, consequently, they were evil themselves, it is the hard truth.

Jack Barsky

Illuminating and utterly enthralling. This is the first full biography of Morris and Lona Cohen, the New York couple who became the Soviet Union’s most devastating illegal spies.

Vin Arthey

"Carr's revealing book upends notions of the Cold War, showing that it began earlier than assumed — as soon as the Bolsheviks took over — and that it wasn’t always cold: In 1918, America led a failed military intervention to oust the Communists. 'One would be hard pressed to find anything about this conflict in official United States documents, or even American military history books, which makes Barnes Carr’s entertaining new study, The Lenin Plot, a welcome corrective,' Victor Sebestyen writes in his review. 'The story is vividly told by Carr, who has unearthed some fascinating new archival sources to add to a sparkling narrative.'

An Editors’ Choice The New York Times Book Review

Barnes Carr’s Operation Whisper reads like a thriller but is also a fact-filled, illuminating, and sometimes surprising study of real-life atomic spies Morris and Lona Cohen. A must for anyone interested in the history of Cold War espionage.

Richard B. Spence

"Takes us back to the golden age of Soviet spies in America, when the ideology was stark, the tradecraft basic, and the stakes were as high as they come: the Atomic bomb."

Naveed Jamali

"A swift narrative that transports the reader through wars, revolutions, and major espionage operations of the twentieth century. An outstanding achievement."

Gary Kern

[A] forensically researched and at times gripping new contribution to the annals of twentieth century espionage.

History of War

"Carr's revealing book upends notions of the Cold War, showing that it began earlier than assumed — as soon as the Bolsheviks took over — and that it wasn’t always cold: In 1918, America led a failed military intervention to oust the Communists. 'One would be hard pressed to find anything about this conflict in official United States documents, or even American military history books, which makes Barnes Carr’s entertaining new study, The Lenin Plot, a welcome corrective,' Victor Sebestyen writes in his review. 'The story is vividly told by Carr, who has unearthed some fascinating new archival sources to add to a sparkling narrative.'

An Editors Choice The New York Times Book Review

"Carr's revealing book upends notions of the Cold War, showing that it began earlier than assumed — as soon as the Bolsheviks took over — and that it wasn’t always cold: In 1918, America led a failed military intervention to oust the Communists. 'One would be hard pressed to find anything about this conflict in official United States documents, or even American military history books, which makes Barnes Carr’s entertaining new study, The Lenin Plot, a welcome corrective,' Victor Sebestyen writes in his review. 'The story is vividly told by Carr, who has unearthed some fascinating new archival sources to add to a sparkling narrative.'

An Editors’ Choice The New York Times Book Review

2020-07-08
Deep dive into an episode of history that is little known but deserves more exposure.

In 1918, Lenin withdrew Russia from the war against the Triple Entente, having agreed secretly with Germany to do so. U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, “a bored pacifist who doodled and daydreamed in Cabinet meetings until Lenin seized power,” concocted a plot to overthrow Lenin, install a leader friendly to the Allies, and bring Russia back into the war. Woodrow Wilson, writes journalist Carr, overcame his scruples about self-determination and signed off on the plan. Soon, Allied spies were in Moscow gathering information and concocting schemes; one of them, the author suggests, served as the model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. At the same time, an Allied expeditionary force landed in Archangel, in the Russian Arctic, and engaged with Bolshevik forces, who fought vigorously across a broad front. On the military front, the author shows, the Allied effort was doomed for many reasons: Americans were under British command, never a good formula given national resentments; Allied soldiers of all nations questioned what they were doing in Russia, a former ally, especially when Germany and its allies surrendered; mutinies sprang up along the Allied lines; and when the soldiers finally returned, the U.S. and U.K. governments took pains to sweep the whole thing under the table, undervaluing the efforts of the blameless fighters. Carr’s cast of characters includes some improbable figures: a prison interrogator who later moved to France and invented Chanel No. 5 “to capture the essence of snow melting on black earth”; an American journalist who served two separate prison terms in Russia and then teamed up with filmmaker Merian C. Cooper to make the vaunted documentary Grass; and a “hardened terrorist” named Fanny Kaplan who resisted first the czar and then the Bolsheviks, plotting an almost successful assassination of Lenin. Some reads like history, some like a spy novel, and it’s always eye-opening.

A well-crafted exposé that suggests that the Cold War began half a century earlier than we’ve been told.

Kirkus Reviews