Churchill wryly told his World War II ally Stalin, after the Red Army had stopped Hitler’s invading army in its tracks: “I’m lucky I didn’t kill you back in 1919.”
In 1919 Churchill had been in charge of invading forces from 14 capitalist countries attempting to overthrow the new Soviet government and to put in power the generals of the counter-revolutionary “White” Russian army fighting a civil war against the “Red” Soviets. From 1918 to 1922, troops from the U.S., Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Serbia, Poland, Rumania, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and China intervened on the side of the “Whites” in the civil war which killed over seven million Soviet workers and peasants. Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn wrote the book The Great Conspiracy (1946), our main source here, about this now little-known invasion of the young Soviet Union. It shows the lengths world capitalism will go to to prevent the loss of its profit system. Revolution, and counter-revolution, are not a tea party! But in this epic test of its strength, the first workers’ state triumphed.
The First Plot Is Hatched—and Defeated
The WWI Allies (Britain, France, Italy, and the U.S.) feared in 1917, as the German army was pressing the Russian army to near collapse, that Germany would gain control of the vast natural resources of Russia (oil, coal, wheat, and timber, much of it owned by Allied capitalists), and be free to concentrate their forces against the Allies on the Western front.
Rebellious Russian troops were deserting in the tens of thousands, having fought for three years against superior forces and suffered more casualties than all the Allies combined, and many were joining the revolutionary committees known as Soviets. As one soldier said:
Show me what I am fighting for. Is it Constantinople or is it free Russia? Is it democracy or is it the capitalist plunderers? If you can prove to me that I am defending the Revolution, then I’ll go out and fight without capital punishment to force me. When the land belongs to the peasants, and the factories to the workers, and the power to the Soviets, then we’ll know we have something to fight for, and we’ll fight for it.
A U.S. spy on a mission to keep Russia in the war, Raymond Robins, reported from a Russian village that when he asked to see the local government official, he was told to see the chairman of the Soviet, the workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies. “But that’s some sort of revolutionary organization!” Robins protested. “I want the regular civil power.” “Oh that!” the peasants laughed. “That doesn’t amount to anything. You had better see the chairman of the Soviet.”
Robins’ reports from the field favored reaching terms with the coming power in Russia, the Bolsheviks, but the decision of the Western capitalists went the other way. Sir Samuel Hoare, chief British spy, said a military dictatorship in Russia (replacing the first post-Tsar elected government of Kerensky) was the solution. The Allies planned this putsch before the Soviets’ revolution, hoping to install the Russian army head Lavr Kornilov as dictator on September 6.  Kornilov on September 8 called for the overthrow of the Kerensky provisional government and marched on Petrograd with 20,000 troops, accompanied by French and British officers in Russian uniforms. But the Petrograd Soviet mobilized armed workers (Red Guards), soldiers, and sailors, who defeated the plotters’ forces in four days. A Soldiers’ Committee secretly formed by the Bolsheviks within his own army arrested Kornilov. The first plot actually strengthened the Soviets.
The World-Shaking Bolshevik Revolution
Still underground, Lenin called for “All Power to the Soviets! Down with the Provisional Government!”  On November 7 the Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd:
To the Citizens of Russia!
The Provisional Government is deposed. The State Power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies…
The cause for which the people were fighting: immediate proposal of a democratic peace, abolition of landlord property rights over the land, labor control of production, creation of a Soviet Government—that cause is securely achieved.
That night the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies met in the Smolny Institute, the mud of the trenches still on the soldiers’ clothing, and a short, stocky man in a baggy, unpressed suit declared: “We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order.” It was Lenin, who headed the first Soviet government formed that night.
As he later told Robins,
We are going to challenge the world with a producers’ republic. We are not putting in the Soviet anybody who simply owns stock, and simply has ownership. We are are putting in the producers. The Donets coal basin will be represented by the producers of coal; the railroad by producers of transportation; the postal system by producers of that system of communication, and so on.
The working class had taken state power. But the counter-revolution was about to begin.
Secret Diplomacy
The invasion to crush the Soviet workers’ state was set in motion by secret diplomatic moves among the Allies. Though Robins still, after meeting with Lenin, recommended relations with the Soviets, the U.S. was plotting to overthrow them.
On December 2, 1917, Ambassador Francis sent Washington his first confidential report on the activities of General Alexei Kaledin, Ataman of the Don Cossacks. Francis described the General as “Kaledin, commander-in-chief of the Cossacks, numbering 200,000.” General Kaledin had organized a “White” counterrevolutionary army among the Cossacks in southern Russia, proclaimed “the independence of the Don,” and was preparing to march on Moscow to overthrow the Soviet Government. Secret groups of Czarist officers in Petrograd and Moscow were acting as anti-Soviet spies for Kaledin and were maintaining contact with Ambassador Francis.
The U.S. recommended a secret loan to Kaledin via the British or French, then publicly denied it, but on December 23, 1917, the British and French met in Paris and secretly concluded an agreement to dismember Soviet Russia. England was to receive a “zone of influence” in Russia, giving her the oil of the Caucasus and control of the Baltic provinces; France a “zone” giving her the iron and coal of the Donets Basin and control of the Crimea. This secret Anglo-French treaty shaped these two nations’ policy towards Russia.
It took until 1922 for the eventual triumph of the Soviet people over the Whites and the Allied troops.