The Great White Train: typhus, sanitation, and U.S. International Development during the Russian Civil War.

In January 2009, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton stood before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during her confirmation hearing for the post of Secretary of State. Time and again, Clinton affirmed her belief that U.S. national security depends on balancing three ‘D’s: Diplomacy, Development, and Defense. ‘In order to protect and defend the United States of America, to advance our interests, and to further our values,’ she stressed, ‘we have to have all three of those elements of our power working in concert.’ In proclaiming a commitment to development, Clinton was attempting to set herself apart from her immediate predecessors in the State Department, whom she criticized for their failure to devote ample resources to foreign aid and assistance. Her multidimensional approach, however, was by no means a novel strategy of U.S. global engagement. Ninety years earlier, American policymakers were just as aware of the importance of each of these elements to their nation’s relations with the world. The winter of 1919 found the United States knee-deep in its intervention in Russia’s Civil War. Two years earlier, on November 7, 1917, Vladimir Lenin had led a successful armed coup in Petrograd, declaring Bolshevik control of Russia and sparking a protracted battle for control of the country. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, along with many American citizens, deplored this new, radical phase of the Russian Revolution and threw his firm support behind the anti-Bolshevik factions. In the summer of 1918, the United States joined Britain, France, Japan, and Italy in sending armed forces to Russia – a military commitment made for a number of reasons, but especially to sway the outcome of the Civil War against the Bolshevik government and to aid Czechoslovak forces then stuck in Siberia. From August 1918 through April 1920, roughly 12,000 U.S. troops occupied the northwestern city of Archangel, the pacific port of Vladivostok, and their surrounding environs as part of this international coalition. Although these efforts to influence the Russian Civil War in favor of the anti-Bolshevik forces ultimately proved futile, the intervention nonetheless represented one of the most important U.S. foreign relations issues of the early post-World War I period (Figure 1). While the defensive and diplomatic aspects of this story have received much scholarly consideration, historians have paid less attention to the Wilson Administration’s