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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.89: the Collapse of the Whites

The Russian Civil War began the moment the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. It was an inevitable result of October 1917. Now, this conflict had spent the six months after October taking the form of low grade skirmishes between armed factions before it really blew up in the spring of 1918, especially after the Czechoslovak Legion played their wild card at Chelyabinsk on May 14th. Now, since then we have seen massive armies rising and clashing and major battles in theater spread across thousands of miles, which involved every nationality in the former Russian Empire, as well as every great power in the world. Two years after the October Revolution, the Russian Civil War is now reaching a critical point of climax. In the autumn of 1919, the White forces that had been raised funded and equipped to oust Lenin, Trotsky, and the Communists threw everything they had at the Reds… and they would come up short.

The winter of 1919-1920 does not represent the end of the Russian Civil War, but it does mark a major turning point that we can say, from this point right here, the Whites are done. They are not coming back from this.

Now, we left things off last week with General Denikin’s most advanced forces having reached the city of Orel by mid-October 1919. They now stood just about 250 miles from Moscow. The communist capital was in a state of emergency, as workers were conscripted to dig defensive trenches and the Communist Party leadership made plans to possibly evacuate Moscow should it come to that. Had it come to that, the plan was to regroup on the Volga and up in the Ural Mountains. And the communist leadership had reason to believe it might very well come to that, because at that same moment in mid-October 1919, Petrograd, the birthplace of the revolution, stronghold of the revolution, was itself in imminent danger of falling to a White Army. It was not out of the question that within a matter of months, perhaps, even within a matter of weeks, the two major cities in Russia would be lost.

Now we have not talked at all about the Northwestern Army currently threatening Petrograd because it was never that big, nor a major player in the Russian Civil War, except for this one moment in the autumn of 1919. The first kernel of the Northwestern Army had been formed by reactionary officers under the auspices of the Germans back in the summer of 1918, who were looking for native forces to confront the Bolsheviks if they needed to confront the Bolsheviks. In October 1918, this group officially formed a small army of about 6,000 men based in Pskov, the city where Tsar Nicholas had submitted his abdication. But of course, this is all right as the German Empire is collapsing in defeat, and so instead of this Northwestern Army accepting promised munitions and supplies from the Central Powers, they were forced to fall back into Estonia, where they were tolerated with heavy reservations on account of the fact that the Red Army was trying to invade Estonia at that very moment.

So this little White Army plays a role in helping push the Russian Red Army out of Estonia by the spring of 1919, and then they advanced and established a territorial beachhead inside of Russian territory. The Northwestern Army’s administration of this newly conquered territory was terrible, as it was practically everywhere the Whites seem to go: they abused and exploited the local population, they unleashed a wave of White terror against anyone linked to the Communists, and, in particular, they persecuted the Jewish population.

So by this point in the conflict, the officer’s leading the Northwestern White Army recognized the ultimate authority of Supreme Ruler Kolchak. And while this recognition of Kolchak was necessary to win support and supplies from the British and other allies, it absolutely torched their ability to make local alliances. A real campaign to take Red Petrograd was probably going to need the participation of both the Estonians and the Finns, but their interests were no longer aligned with the Northwestern Army. Kolchak’s plan was to restore the Russian Empire, one and indivisible, and that meant absolutely reincorporating Finland and the Baltic states into that one and indivisible Russian Empire. So not only was getting tangled in a Russian civil war a dubious prospect for the Estonians and the Finns, they would find themselves doing so on behalf of political forces that promised to ignore their independent sovereignty. So both the Estonians and the Finns refuse to join this campaign. On the other hand, the Northwestern Army did not get much support from the Allies, despite the obvious geographic proximity to, like, the United Kingdom. The Allies saw this particular group of Whites as being closely linked to the Germans, and so they tended to direct their aid, munitions, and supplies to leaders who they believe to be their clients in Russia, rather than the old Kaiser’s, and that meant Kolchak and Denikin — though, as we’ll see in a bit, the Allies are souring mightily on them too, and they will soon be looking to quit the Russian adventure altogether.

Still, with Denikin’s Moscow Directive pushing up a huge array of forces from the south, the Northwestern Army advanced toward Petrograd at the end of September 1919. Mostly preoccupied with defending themselves against Denikin, the Reds suddenly had to scramble a defense of Petrograd. And while it might seem this is obviously something they would want to do, there was a great deal of argument inside the Communist Party about. Lenin, for one, appeared willing to abandon Petrograd rather than commit vital forces to defending it. There was, after all, a reason, he had moved the capital to Moscow in the first place. But the rest of his comrades were unwilling to just abandon Petrograd to its fate, and so even as Denikin’s forces neared Moscow, the Reds peeled off some key reserves to go shore up Petrograd, and they sent none other than Trotsky to personally see to the defense of the cradle of the revolution.

Trotsky arrived in the city on October 17th, and took over leadership from Zinoviev, who had remained in Petrograd serving as the party boss since March of 1918. He had very much enjoyed his time as party boss of Petrograd, and was among those Communist Party officials living extraordinarily high on the hog as he enjoyed the fruits of revolutionary victory. Trotsky, meanwhile, had spent the last several months enduring slights and critiques of his handling of the war, and was determined to save his flagging reputation by saving Petrograd. He came in and energetically reorganized and refocused the garrisons, oversaw the arrival of reinforcements, and laid plans to turn Petrograd into what he called “a stone labyrinth,” if the white Northwestern Army actually tried to take over the city. Despite the ongoing deep population of all the urban centers of Russia, Petrograd still had a population of about 600,000, and Trotsky laid plans to force the White Army to fight block by block, street by street, and house by house, turning Petrograd into one giant exhausting trap that would either destroy the army or force them to quit and leave.

But Trotsky never had to put this plan in motion, as the Northwestern army never attempted an attack. They got as far as the Imperial palaces at Tsarskoye Selo, but by then their supply lines back to the west were badly exposed, and they were badly outnumbered. Nobody was rising up to join them, the Estonians and the Finns absolutely refused to get involved, and support from the British was extremely minimal. The Reds around Petrograd commence to counter attack on October 21st, coinciding with events in the south that we’ll talk about here in a second and they just forced the Northwestern Army into a fighting retreat west, racing back towards the Estonian line. By the middle of November, the Northwestern Army was even further back than they had started, and they were trying to cross back into the safety of Estonia. But here they found themselves blocked and forbidden to cross the frontier until they disarmed. By this point, the Estonians determined it was in their interest to sign a treaty with the Reds, who appeared willing, at least on paper, to grant them terms that the Whites refuse to consider. And just to look ahead a little bit in February, the Estonians will be the first border state to conclude a formal treaty with the Russian Soviet Republic.

Simultaneous to all these battles around Petrograd, and the alarming thought of possibly losing the birthplace of the revolution, the Reds were also facing a threat to the present capital of the revolution. By mid-October, as we’ve said, the most advanced forces of the White Volunteer Army had entered the city of Orel. But this was as close as they’re ever going to get. Orel turned out not to be the final springboard towards the capture of Moscow, but the high watermark of the White Army. These advanced units had moved fast, their supply lines now stretched for close to a thousand miles, and their conduct ensured that territory they cleared and occupied would be hostile rather than friendly. When he issued the Moscow Directive, Commander in Chief Denikin had counted on something like a popular uprising creating a tidal wave that would bear down on Moscow. Instead, nobody joined up, and the army approaching Moscow looked like nothing so much as a thin trickle currently in danger of being cut off from its source. Coming under heavy Red counter attacks, they fell back within a matter of days, and the Reds retook around on October 20th. Nobody knew it at the time, but the Whites had already gone the furthest they would ever go. From here on out, it was no longer about advancing forward, but about falling back.

Now in the face of the advances made by the Whites through central Russia, the Red High Command improvised a whole new strategy to deal with it. Now you recall from last week that the plan was to direct their main attack down the eastern flank, down the Volga, but that strategy had to be abandoned in order to consolidate a defense against the White column coming up the middle. So as the Whites pull back from Orel, they were hit with a one-two punch that sent them absolutely reeling:

First, they got hit from the west by shock troops that included the core of the vaunted Latvian Rifleman, who were still the best and most reliable troops the Reds had. But even more devastating for the Whites was a sudden mass cavalry attack from the east that truly threatened to cut their lines and envelop all the forward groups.

Now, through mid-1919, the Red Army had shied away from building a cavalry corps as a matter of policy. Minister of War Trotsky associated the cavalry with retrograde politics. He called the cavalry “a very aristocratic family of troops commanded by princes, barons, and counts.” He believed that a modern communist army would be built around mass mobilization of the population, backed by the most advanced industrial weaponry they could build. World War I had amply demonstrated that cavalry, in addition to being a bastion of conservative politics, was a military anachronism. So while small units of Red cavalry did form in the spring of 1919, it was mostly over Trotsky’s objections. The great Cossack cavalry raid of August 1919, however — the one we talked about last week — convinced everyone in the Red High Command of the immediate practical necessity of a large mobile cavalry force in the field. So they aggressively recruited among World War I cavalry veterans, including Don Cossacks and Kuban Cossacks. There was something of a generational divide among the Cossacks, as the younger cohort was more sympathetic to socialism, and saw the advantage of allying with the Reds rather than the Whites. These new recruits and existing cavalry detachments were all merged together and formed the First Cavalry Army under the command of a guy called Semyon Budyonny. Budyonny had been born into a poor Russian settler family in the traditional Cossack regions, and was drafted into the Imperial cavalry back in 1903. He was a decorated soldier, who transferred from the disintegrating Imperial Army into the Red Army, and had been leading small cavalry units down in the southeast since the spring of 1918.

In the emergency chaos of late 1919, Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army made their most consequential and dramatic entrance into the civil war: in the third week of October, in conjunction with several Red rifle divisions, the First Cavalry Army fought the main force of White cavalry for control of the city of Voronezh, which was a critical regional capital and railway junction situated at a very strategically important spot on the upper Don River. When the Reds successfully captured the city on October 24th, the White Volunteer Army was truly exposed to encirclement, and was now effectively cut off from their Cossack allies. The First Cavalry Army was absolutely the difference in this fight. They forced the entire White line everywhere to retreat backwards in search of a safe place to regroup, with the Reds following in fighting pursuit.

Now, as the Whites fell back in late October and early November 1919, they staged various counter-attacks, and it was far more of a back and forth campaign than simply, the Whites fall back and the Reds advance, but if you plot a map through this period of who is where when, the story is: the Whites are falling back and the Reds are advancing. Morale among the White forces is absolutely collapsing as they stumbled backwards, they were unable to find a firm base they could defend long enough to truly regroup. The Reds had them on the run. With their forward detachments in full retreat, the Whites also faced major problems behind their lines. Ukraine was filled with antagonistic turmoil, and Nestor Makhno’s Black Army was making the whole region untenable for the Whites.

Now over the summer 1919, initial White ascendancy in Eastern Ukraine had forced Makhno’s insurgent army to relocate far to the west in the city of Uman. They arrived as a somewhat bedraggled mass of refugees and armed partisans, most of them wounded in one way or another over weeks of fighting, and plenty more sick from a raging typhus epidemic that was taking hold just about everywhere in mid 1919. The Blacks cut a ceasefire deal with the nationalist forces who control Uman, and they tended to their sick and wounded, but by early September 1919 the Whites decided they should launch an offensive and crush the Black menace. This was a decision that backfired spectacularly.

Makhno still had about 8,000 capable fighters, and at the Battle of Peregonovka on September 26th, the Blacks not only resisted the White attempt to annihilate them, but they turned the tables entirely. They broke the Whites, and sent them falling back in complete disarray with entire units being wiped out or disintegrating during their chaotic retreat. Makhno then spent 10 days leading a rapid advanced back east towards the Nepa River, and by the first week of October, they had reestablished control over the whole middle of the river. So just as the Whites’ leading edge was falling back in search of a safe base, the Blacks in Ukraine were there to ensure that they found no peace or rest inside Ukraine.

By November 1919, the Moscow Directive was an absolute dead letter, and the Whites were falling back in an unbroken retreat. In the west, Kiev fell to the Red Army on December 16th; in the east, the Red Army pushed south and recaptured Tsaritsyn on January 3rd. General Denikin tried to reform a line north of the Don River and hold on to Rostov, but frankly could not make his forces hold still, and of their own disobedient initiative, moved south of the river to put the natural barrier of the Don between them and the advancing Red Army. Rostov fell to the Red Army on January 7th.

But here, the lines did briefly resettle. Denikin managed to make a brief reorganized stand and repulsed the first Red Army’s attempt to cross the river. Now, despite Denikin finally holding this position, this is very much end game hours for the White movement on all fronts. Six months after issuing the Moscow Directive, Denikin’s forces had been pushed back not just to where they started, but even further south. The situation looked bleak on all fronts: rail lines and roads were choked with refugee streaming south to the black sea, hoping to be evacuated from what appeared to be inevitable Red Army victory. Soldiers deserted in droves. That major typhus epidemic was sweeping through everything and every body. The White High Command was at each other’s throats, assigning blame, resigning from the service, or being forced out. Pyotr Wrangel organized a group of high ranking officers to oust Denikin as commander in chief. The whole thing was falling apart.

Collapsing morale was then exacerbated by the news from everywhere else, which was all bad. As we’ll get to here in a second, the army and the government of Supreme Ruler Kolchak was, incredibly, somehow even worse off than the Whites were in the south. That little Northwestern Army that had threatened Petrograd was in a state of acute disintegration. They were being disarmed, all their officers were quitting, and perhaps most distressingly, representatives of the Allies indicated they were cutting off aid to the Russian Whites. Back on November 8th, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George gave a speech basically saying, we’re all done in Russia. The combination of White military failures, coupled with their inability to work together politically, coupled with their brazen corruption, coupled with general war weariness, equalled time to leave Russia to the Russians. Because at this point, salvaging the White armies would mean drastically ramping up Allied investment and involvement just to keep them afloat, and no one had any stomach for this, aside from some hard-line anti-Bolsheviks like Winston Churchill, but they were in a tiny minority. The British told their White allies in Southern Russia their last major contribution to the cause would be allowing British ships to ferry as many White refugees as possible out of the country, but that it. Faced with the decision to fish or cut bait in Russia in early 1920, the Allies cut bait.

Now this decision to cut bait was of course massively influenced by events in Siberia during this same period. The Allies had put a great deal of stock in Supreme Ruler Kolchak — they in fact presently recognized him as the sovereign head of Russia. But by the end of 1919, it looked as though the Supreme Ruler of Russia was in control of little more than his own immediate staff. With Denikin’s forces being pushed back away from Moscow, and that Northwestern Army being pushed back away from Petrograd, the Reds felt comfortable sending reinforcements across the Ural Mountains to take the fight to Supreme Ruler Kolchak, although there was practically nothing to take the fight to. By November 1919, Kolchak’s armies were falling apart, and his government, if it could even be called that, was an increasingly hopeless bunch of corrupt officials who didn’t really have power over anything. With very little standing between the Red Army and their capital at Omsk, they decided to just abandon the city and flee east towards Lake Baikal, maybe regroup in Irkutsk. They abandoned Omsk in a hurry, leaving behind tons of supplies and ammunition, which the Red Army gratefully absorbed when they captured the city on November 14th. Those officials and officers and troops who managed to get away then embarked on what is dubbed the Great Siberian Ice March, which is not to be confused with the first thing that is called the Ice March, which was the Volunteer Army wandering off into the wilderness in early 1918. This Great Siberian Ice March was a rolling and chaotic retreat 1500 miles east across the Siberian winter from Omsk to Lake Baikal.

The Great Siberian Ice March represents the disintegration of Kolchak’s forces in the east. Peasant soldiers who had been conscripted simply deserted and went home. Typhus raged through the ranks. Railroads were frozen and clogged with traffic as refugees and soldiers were trying to move in both directions. Local anti-White partisan groups all along the Trans-Siberian Railroad attacked them as they moved east, capturing some, killing some, wounding others, forcing them to remain behind, preventing trains from moving at all. As was happening down in Southern Russia, the senior leadership around Kolchak resorted to pointing fingers at one another, quitting in disgust, or just looking out for themselves. What was left of the political officials who had made up Kolchak’s quote unquote government made it to Irkutsk, where they tried to reestablish the government, but they had no authority whatsoever. Kolchak himself was separated from what was left of his main forces, but he would not be separated from the single most valuable thing in his possession: 36 freight cars loaded with gold.

This gold represented a large chunk of the tsar’s gold reserves, reserves which had been stashed in the city of Kazan on the Volga for safe keeping during World War I, and which were subsequently captured by Kolchak’s forces and taken into his possession the previous year, and as he claimed to be the sovereign ruler of Russia, he claimed control of the gold as his right, and as his responsibility. He was still making his way east with this gold when he got word that Irkutsk was probably not going to be a safe haven. In December 1919, a left-wing group of SRs and Mensheviks took control of the city, declaring themselves to be this new thing called the Political Centre, an anticommunist government which would replace Kolchak’s disintegrated and discredited officials. One of their first acts was to formally dismiss Kolchak from service, and when he received word of this dismissal on January the fourth, he himself submitted his resignation, becoming just a private individual, who just so happened to be in possession of Russia’s sovereign gold reserves.

Kolchak’s resignation coincided with what is probably the great disaster that befell the Whites on their Great Siberian Ice March. The city of Krasnoyarsk, which stood between them and Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian Railroad was taken over by anti-White partisans, mostly SRs backed by the local military garrison. With this city falling into the possession of his enemies, Kolchak and his forces would be unable to move forward. Kolchak himself was stuck on a segment of track controlled by the Czechoslovak Legion. Now, the Legionaries had been nominal allies of Kolchak and the Whites, but this had always been a marriage of political and military convenience. Most of the Czechoslovaks were ultimately sympathetic politically to the socialists, and they had frankly regretted the rise of the conservative Kolchak.

So with the road ahead increasingly in the hands of Kolchak’s enemies, the Czechoslovak Legionaries decided to hold his train. Now, what they wanted more than anything else at this point was to get out of Russia. Remember, they had negotiated an exit from Russia nearly two years earlier because they wanted to keep fighting the Central Powers in order to win independence for Czechoslovakia. But then, they had gotten sucked into the Russian Civil War, and in the meantime, the Central Powers had lost World War I, Czechoslovakia had declared its independence, and it looked like the Allies were going to make that independence stick. So here in January, 1920, we have all these Czechoslovak Legionaries still stuck in Russia and all they wanted to do was go home. They were happy to use any bargaining chip they might have on hand for safe passage out of Russia — including Admiral Kolchak, and especially his 36 train cars full of gold.

Now to ensure that they had no trouble with the Political Centre group that had taken control of Irkutsk, the Czechs agreed to hand Kolchak over to them. Now in these negotiations, it seemed like the idea was that Kolchak’s safety would be guaranteed — and for his part, Kolchak wanted what the Czechs did: safe passage to Vladivostok and a ticket out of Russia. But just six days after the Czechs transferred custody of the admiral to the Political Centre group in Irkutsk, a Communist aligned military revolutionary committee asserted its control of Irkutsk.

Between January 21st and February 6th, a group of interrogators questioned Kolchak at length, and by all accounts, he spoke honestly and with unapologetic, frankness about everything he had done, and everything he planned to do. He still hoped to be allowed to leave peacefully, but the orders from Moscow were to ship him back to the capital for trial. In any case, the orders were explicitly not to execute him, because the Reds did not want White leaders fighting to the bitter end on the assumption that if they fell into the custody of the Reds, they would be executed. But the leaders on the ground in Irkutsk made a different calculation, and I think this time it is different from when Tsasr Nicholas and Empress Alexandra and the family were killed. In that case, the leaders in Moscow almost certainly ordered the execution and only pinned it on the local guys after the fact, whereas in this case I think Lenin honestly did not want Kolchak to be summarily executed. But what was left of Kolchak’s White Army was closer to the city than the Red Army was, so in the wee hours of February 7th, allegedly out of fear that the admiral would be rescued by that White Army, they took them out back and shot him along with the guy who had been serving as his prime minister. Their bodies were then unceremoniously dropped in a river.

Admiral Kolchak was just 45, and he had been supreme ruler of Russia for 14 months. His body was never found.

With the Red Army advancing the Czechs decided to cut one last deal. They still had in their possession the tsar’s gold reserves, and they promised to hand it over to the Reds in exchange for free passage to Vladivostok. This was a very easy deal for the Red Army to make, as it would both bring the gold reserves into their possession and get rid of one of their most implacable opponents at the same time. So, they made the deal. On February 7th, 1920, the same day that Kolchak was shot, the Czechoslovak Legion signed an armistice with the Reds, promising to exchange the gold in exchange for safe passage out of Russia. When the armistice with the Communists was concluded, the last dozen or so Czechoslovak trains pass through Irkutsk on their way east. They would run into some trouble both from the remnants of the White Army, who were trying to keep up the fight, and the Japanese military, who had a huge presence in the region, but eventually they made it to Vladivostok, where they disembarked in waves over the next several months. They left behind about 4,000 dead, but more than two years after they commenced what they thought was going to be a journey home, the majority finally did complete this journey home. They practically circumnavigated the globe to return to what was now their independent homeland, where they would go on to form the core of a new Czechoslovak army.

As for the tsar’s gold, the reputable research I can find says that it was taken in full back to the city of Kazan by the Communists, but there are persistent local legends that one of the cars may be wound up falling into the ice of Lake Baikal, and another that the Czechs maybe helped themselves to a bit of gold on their way out the door — which, whether that’s true or not, I can’t say, but I can say, that I wouldn’t exactly blame them.

Rumors of Admiral Kolchak’s execution reached central Russia by mid-February, but they were not officially confirmed until March. By then, the White movement in southern Russia was in its death throes. General Denikin managed to stage one last counter-attack and actually recaptured Rostov on February 20, but by then he was being flanked on all sides and had to abandon the Don River and fall back even deeper into the south. As they fell back, refugees followed in a flood, and one White officer commented, “the exit of the Russian people reminded me of biblical times.”

Their final, final destination was the port city of Novorossiysk, from which they hoped to get passage out of the region — at a minimum, get ferried over to Crimea, which was about to be the last major stronghold of the White forces. But there was not enough time to get everybody on board a ship, nor space enough for everybody who wanted to leave. By the end of March 1920, about 34,000 people had been evacuated, but tens of thousands more were stranded. Some attempted to keep moving on foot, heading down the coast and trying to board anything that would float, some kept going until they had walked all the way to Georgia.

General Denikin understood that whether the Whites would ultimately come back from the disasters of late 1919 and early 1920 would not be his question to answer. In April 1920, he said he planned to drink from the bottom of the bitter cup of the Novorossiysk evacuation, and then resign. Despite his falling out with Pyotr Wrangel, the people around Denikin seemed to believe Wrangel was probably the only viable candidate left to take over the reins of what would be the last last stand of the Whites from their base in Crimea. So with the Red Army closing in in April 1920, Denikin formally transferred all his authority over to Wrangel and boarded one of the last ships departing Novorossiysk. But he was not bound for Crimea. His war was over.

He instead went first to Constantinople aboard a British destroyer. And he said, “When we put to sea, it was already night. Only bright light scattered in the thick darkness marked the coast of the receding Russian land. It grew dimmer and vanished. Russia, my motherland.”

Denikin never would see his motherland again. He spent the next several years bouncing around between England, Belgium, and Hungary, before finally settling in France in the mid 1920s. He wrote a bunch of commentaries on the Russian Civil War, including a highly regarded memoir that was surprisingly candid about the mistakes and failings of the Whites generally, and his own personal mistakes and failings specifically. He was still in France when the Nazis invaded in 1940, and despite his ongoing vehement hatred of the Communists, refused to lend his name or reputation to the Nazis. He ultimately died in New York City in 1947.

The great retreat of all the White forces meant that the spring of 1920 would dawn under entirely new military and political circumstances. Now, none of this marked the official end of the Russian Civil War, nor the wider conflict among the various nationality groups from the former Russian Empire.

Things were different, but it was still far from clear who would ultimately emerge victorious, who would control what territory, what ideology would reign supreme, and what exactly the Russian revolution actually meant.