ABSTRACT
In terms of political thought, the 30 years from the ending of the military intervention to the beginning of the Cold War proper saw the solidification of those anticommunist and anti-collectivist perspectives which had begun to be formed before the Russian revolution and into which the Bolshevik and liberal collectivist phenomena had been fed. In terms of policy, these decades consisted of a series of temporary and halting approaches to the several different anticommunist programmes which had been devised in the preceding debates. All British and American anticommunists of the pre-Cold War era could agree on the desirability of resisting Bolshevik military aggressions against foreign nations. The conservative view of formative containment, on the other hand, reflected those assumptions that had characterised the ascendant laissez-faire reaction to Wilsonian collectivism. The containment structure was nominally in place from the earliest moments of the anticommunist encounter.
