Siberia To-Day

In the frozen vastness of Siberia, an American intelligence captain documents the impossible mess the United States has stumbled into. Frederick Ferdinand Moore arrived in September 1918 as part of the Allied intervention, remaining through March 1919, and what he found was not the clean-cut expedition the American public imagined but a bewildering tangle of warring factions, shifting allegiances, and total policy confusion. Moore spent his days in Chita, navigating alcohol-fueled Cossack gatherings and meetings with local leaders whose loyalties shifted like the Siberian wind, while watching Bolshevism spread inexorably across the region. This is not a war memoir full of battles and heroics; it is something rarer and more valuable: a candid admission that the American mission had no idea what it was doing there, or what victory even looked like. Moore dissects the failures with quiet frustration - the chaos of post-revolutionary Russia, the inherent difficulties of the Siberians themselves, and above all, the tragic absence of coherent direction from Washington. A fascinating, frustrating, and ultimately tragic primary source that reads like a man watching history slip through his fingers.