Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

The genesis of the White movement can be found in the aforementioned Alekseev organization, formed in Petrograd and Moscow in September–October 1917. Over the following months, a stream of these young officers and officer cadets followed the Bykhov generals and other senior commanders of the Russian Army to the Don Cossack capital of Novocherkassk to form the Volunteer Army. More recruits were picked up along the way, and other volunteers were ferried toward the Don by a branch of the Volunteers that was established at Kiev, where the anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian Army of the UNR (and later the Hetmanate Army) acted as a magnet and a (rather unsatisfactory) sanctuary to disaffected officers from Russia. The welcome such a professedly Great Russian nationalist force found among the Don Cossacks, who from February 1917 had been avidly rebuilding their ancient rights of self-government, was not as warm as the White leaders had hoped. Indeed, many young and poor Cossacks who had served at the front (frontoviki) espoused pro-Bolshevik sympathies. So when Red forces overran the Don in early 1918, the Volunteers (numbering fewer than 3,500 men, one in ten of whom was a general) retreated south into the Kuban steppe, facing a freezing ordeal (the aforementioned First Kuban March) and constant battles against pursuing Red forces from the north and Red Guard units assembling in the south from the returning dregs of the Russian Army on the Caucasus Front. Their aim was to unite with forces of the Kuban Cossack Host and to capture the Kuban capital, Ekaterinodar. They achieved the first of these but not the second, with their commander in chief, General Kornilov, killed during the unsuccessful siege in mid-April 1918. With their charismatic icon dead, the Volunteers’ leadership in political affairs passed to General Alekseev, while General Denikin took command of the army.

Denikin soon had the main Volunteer force regroup back on the Don, where Cossack forces under Ataman P. N. Krasnov were clearing the Reds from the Host territory and were about to launch an advance on the strategically vital Volga port of Tsaritsyn.51 Denikin then directed the capture of the important industrial centers of Rostov-on-Don and Taganrog before initiating a Second Kuban Campaign. It commenced on 23 June 1918 and aimed, again, to capture Ekaterinodar, while at the same time conveniently quarantining the pro-Allied Volunteers from encountering the Austro-German interventionists, who were by then investing regions adjacent to the Don region. (German forces had entered Rostov-on-Don itself during the first week of May 1918.) This time, the southward advance of the Volunteers went well, with combined cavalry and infantry attacks snaring a string of railway towns from Rostov to Belaia Glina before finally securing Ekaterinodar on 15 August 1918 and the port of Novorossiisk (26 August 1918). The latter victory allowed scattered White forces in Crimea and South Russia to move across the Black Sea to reinforce the Volunteers. Among them was General P. N. Wrangel, who then led a grinding cavalry campaign across the Kuban and Terek regions to cut the local Reds’ rail communications with the north through the capture of the important junction at Tikhoretskaia (15 July 1918) and subsequently to annihilate pro-Soviet forces and institutions in the North Caucasus by mid-November.52 The victories, however, cost the Volunteers more than 30,000 casualties—among them two more of their totemic figures, General Markov and General M. G. Drozdovskii—while General Alekseev succumbed to illness and died in October.53 The prestige, power, and potential it brought them, however, were among the reasons the Cossacks of the region decided to bury (albeit for later disinterment) their aspirations for autonomy and, on 8 January 1919, to subordinate themselves to Denikin in a united Armed Forces of South Russia. To symbolize this new, pro-Allies partnership, Ataman Kaledin (who had in 1918 exchanged letters with the Kaiser) was replaced as leader of the Don Host by General A. P. Bogaevskii.