The King of Karelia. Col P.J. Woods and the British Intervention in North…

Dr. Nick Baron is Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham in the UK, specializing in Russian, Soviet and East European cultural, social and political history and historical geography. The genesis of “The King of Karelia” was Dr. Baron’s discovery at the Imperial War Museum of the unpublished two-volume typescript memoir of Colonel Philip J. Woods recounting his experiences in Karelia along the Russo-Finnish border during 1918-1919. Moreover, having discovered this typescript, Dr. Baron then added to the published version the answer to the obvious question of who was Colonel Woods and what background and experience did he bring to Karelia. As a former intern in the Naval Archives, I really appreciated that process of discovery that led Nick Baron to produce this book. Every archive collection seems to have some unnoticed and untold or forgotten story waiting for recognition by someone willing to take up the often hard and tedious work required to turn that story into a published work.

Having ordered this book knowing little beyond the title and general subject matter, I found that I had in fact picked up a little gem. Instead of the simple account of the Allied Intervention in Russia during and after the First World War, I found a book that provided new insights into the stories of pre-First World War Ireland and Ulster, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the 36th Ulster Division and the Royal Irish Rifles, the British Army of the First World War, Oswald Mosley and the Fascists in Britain, as well as the observations of one British officer into the events relating to the Allied Intervention and the Bolshevik Revolution in Tsarist Russia. For me, it is this combination of biography and memoir – along with the social and political history surrounding Colonel Woods – that real lifts the finished book out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, I must emphasize that this is still a book not aimed at the general reader but that will be an interesting read for those interested in the history of Ireland and especially Northern Ireland as well as a must read for those interested in the Allied Intervention and the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War. Personally, having lived in both Belfast and Moscow, there was almost no way this book would not be more interesting than I expected before realizing it was more than a memoir of one winter in Karelia. ( )