No, it's not about International Crisis Group's work after the breakup of the USSR, rather Frederick Stanwood's 1983 book, based on documents from the Foreign Office and other primary sources, explains Britain's policy in the Caucases and Turkestan roughly from 1914-1922. The war in the title is World War I, the revolution is the Bolshevik revolution, and British imperialism involved a very real British Empire (colored red on the maps).
That said, the fascination of this historical study is that it is demonstrates the cliche that even paranoids have enemies. For in the wake of World War I, not only did Britain peel off bits of the Ottoman Empire, drawing the lines in the map for today's Middle East and Balkans; Britain also had plans to break up the Russian Empire and take bits of it as well. The places mentioned in British policy memos from 1918 read like today's headlines: Georgia, Azerbaijan, Trans-Causasia (Chechnya), Dagestan, Armenia, Turkestan (today's Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, et al.), Persia (today's Iran), Siberia. As today Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Afghanistan play pivotal roles in the proposed forward strategy, designed to take advantage of Russia's weakness due to revolution and civil war. Russia itself was to be divided in two--an Eastern Siberian republic, with its capital in Omsk, intended as an ally of Britain against a Western Russia that stopped at the Urals. A series of British allies in Turkestan and the Balkans would form a "cordon sanitaire" around the Bolshevik revolution, containing it from spreading to other countries (George Kennan didn't come up with the strategy of containment, it turns out). Britain would obtain a League of Nations mandate to administer a protectorate in Georgia and other such small countries--eerily reminiscent of Lord Patten's position as UN administrator of Kosovo today (Patten is chairman of the International Crisis Group,). These small, weak buffer nations ringing Russia would have been dependent on British financial support. Muslim leaders and white Russians were seen as the natural allies of the British against the Bolsheviks.
Sound familiar?
Anyhow, the policy failed, in part because the British were outfoxed by Lenin, who offered national autonomy to the rulers of Turkestan; and later by Stalin who redrew the maps of both Turkestan and Eastern Europe. And in part because of America. And in part, the author argues, because they didn't know what they were doing. On the British side, only the Government of India (based in Delhi), which opposed the plans and advocated an alternate strategy that sounded a lot like "benign neglect," comes off looking good. One element that really struck this reader was that the British appeared to be equally opposed to both Leninist Bolshevism and "Wilsonian Idealism." They worried that American rhetoric of national self-determination might harm the British Empire, although they preferred an alliance with the US against their perceived enemies at that time: the French and Germans.
Indeed, one might conclude from Stanwood's account that in the aftermath of World War II, it was the the victory of America's Wilsonian Idealism and Lenin's Bolshevism that did cause the collapse of the British Empire. Now, with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it is almost as if we have returned to 1918, with everything in flux once more. No wonder the Russians are worried that the US and EU want to break up Russia. Because, as Stanwood documents, in the aftermath of WWI, that was indeed official British policy. Perhaps we in the West have forgotten what the Russians remember...
