“Never have any of our soldiers been on American soil, but your soldiers were on Russian soil. These are the facts.”
When Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made that statement during a tour of the United States in 1959, he sent people scurrying to their history books.
Lost to American history, but never forgotten by the Soviets, the Allied incursion into Russia in late 1918 set the tone of future East-West relations throughout the Cold War. Perhaps it was an embarrassment of ineffectualness – if not outright failure – that caused the American Russia expeditionary forces to be largely forgotten by American history. Or, perhaps other theaters of the Great War overshadowed and overwhelmed their actions. But memories of Allied interference in the dawn of the Red revolution fueled the Soviets’ Iron Curtain paranoia.
