Russias 1917 revolution and 1918-1922 civil war in her Far Eastern provinces and the spillover into Mongolia and China are chronicled in this riveting, nitty-gritty history by Jamie Bisher.

White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian

Now available in paperback for $39.95!
Taylor and Francis, ISBN 0714656909,
552 pages, 20 photos and maps. Paperback available December 2009. Hardback on sale August 2005.

Cossack pirates and traditionalists fought Communist zealots for Russias soul aboard fleets of armored trains in a setting immortalized in Boris Pasternaks Doctor Zhivago, across forests, steppes and river valleys carved by epic mythological battles between Mongol gods and beasts, on the fault lines of the Russian, Chinese and Japanese empires... White Terror amends a history twisted by 70 years of communist propaganda and parroted by Western mainstream media and academia.

Jewish Cossacks, Tibetan cavalry, pressgang cannon fodder, rampaging anarchists, Serbian and Manchurian mercenaries, stranded regiments from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania and Italy, American railroad engineers and YMCA secretaries, military contingents from the U.S., Japan, China and Western Europe, Red internationalists recruited from POW camps, and legions of refugees, prostitutes and spies... Terror, torture and lost treasure worth billions that underlies political tensions to this day...

Bishers book builds around the biography of the most notorious warlord, Ataman Grigori Semenov, following his life from a small Cossack village to intrigue in Chinas rebellious Mongolian outback, through heroic Carpathian and Mesopotamian campaigns of the Great War, to the revolutionary chaos of Moscow, back to counter-revolution in the far-flung provinces of the Russian Far East, wandering the world in exile from Seoul to Tientsin to Vancouver to New York, then into the organized crime world of Japanese intelligence in Manchukuo. Semenovs associate warlords are also profiled, including Baron Roman Ungern-Shternberg and Ataman Ivan Kalmykov, whose names have become synonyms for sadism. Bisher describes in detail the Cossacks' armies, ever-changing orders of battle, key officers, armored trains, atrocities against prisoners and civilians, battles against Bolsheviks and even the Cossacks fellow Whites, dirty deals with the Japanese and conflict with the Americans. It's the story of a forgotten Russia in turmoil, when the line between government and organized crime blurred into a chaotic continuum of kleptocracy, vengeance and sadism.

Says Dr. Jonathan Smele, senior lecturer on the Russian Revolution at Queen Mary College, University of London and editor of the journal Revolutionary Russia, Historians have long recognized that Ataman Semenov and Company were a nasty lot. This book details precisely how nasty they were.

Rarely does a major publishing house like Taylor and Francis print such a scholarly work by a first-time author. Jamie Bisher lives near Washington, DC and is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, American University and the University of Maryland with 30 years experience in defense and international projects and dozens of non-fiction magazine and journal articles to his credit.