Francis McCullagh: Prisoner of the Reds

A prisoner of the Reds, the story of a British officer captured Siberia by Francis McCullagh

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


To be taken prisoner of war once is unfortunate. Three times (according to himself) begins to look reckless. Yet this was the fate of Francis McCullagh, a journalist by trade, who was serving as intelligence officer with the British intervention in Siberia in 1919. He was with a small left behind to watch developments as the bulk of the force retreated in the face of the Red Army offensive. They didn't get out quickly enough.
McCullagh, with the agreement of his colleagues, reverted to his civilian identity and made the journey under guard to Moscow, where he was able to see something of ordinary Russians' life in the freshly-minted Bolshevik state. Eventually the system caught up with him and he was pulled in by the Cheka, spending an uncomfortable few days in the Lubianka before being released and deported. In the meantime his place and uniform at Ekatarinberg had been taken by someone else who urgently needed to leave the country, so two Francis McCullaghs were eventually repatriated.
As we would expect the book is well written, given that the language is of its time. McCullagh is no fan of the Tsarist regime and open-eyed about the mutual incomprehension of capitalist and communist world-views. He writes,
'Seldom since the Crusaders came into conflict with the Saracens did two schools of thought more diametrically opposed to one another find themselves face to face. ... We had had a prejudice against people who ate with their knives, or had relatives in the tailoring business, or had been in jail, or had had a Board School education, or who, to put it briefly, were not Sahibs.'
And a little later, on meeting an Englishman in Moscow,
'... he expressed surprise at my having got a commission, though not belonging to any of the old county families.'
He sees the potential in the socialist approach but is horrified by the societal collapse he sees around him: starvation in a country where food is seized by the collective then wasted for lack of the means of distribution; absolute authority delegated on the basis of nepotism and political conformity rather than ability; world history rewritten from a single, blinkered point of view.
Somehow McCullagh also manages to investigate and produce a remarkably coherent account of the murder of the Tsar's family.
A word of warning: there is more than a hint here of the antisemitism that was to emerge in McCullagh's later writing. This would not have been controversial at the time and it took another twenty years for a different despot to show us where that road leads. Even so ....



View all my reviews