Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

The sudden and disastrous White collapse sowed discord among the AFSR leadership and created a sense of disorientation, as participants in the retreat tried to keep track of kaleidoscopic changes in command—and even of where Denikin and his stavka were actually located, as headquarters shifted almost weekly (from Taganrog, to Rostov, to Tikhoretskaia, to Ekaterinodar, and finally to Novorossiisk in the first weeks of 1920). One of Denikin’s first reactions to the collapse was to replace General Mamontov at the head of the Don Army with General S. G. Ulagai, thus infuriating the Don Cossacks (who were already deserting en masse to the Reds, as the latter approached their home territories). In December 1919, Denikin then transferred General Wrangel to the command of the Volunteer Army (replacing the now permanently drunk Mai-Maevskii, who was retired). This was far too late for Wrangel to effect the sort of concentrated Cossack push against Moscow that he had long favored over Denikin’s multipronged Moscow Directive, and the baron was quick to remind Denikin of this—in a typically tactless letter that he sent to his commander in mid-February 1920. Although a recent biographer of Wrangel has highlighted that the baron subsequently censored the letter for publication in his memoirs, omitting passages that he deemed to have been too personal in their attacks on Denikin—expunging, for example, a description of Denikin as a man “poisoned by ambition and the taste of power, surrounded by dishonest flatterers” and one who was “no longer preoccupied with saving the country, but only with preserving power”85—Denikin would, of course, have seen the original version and was consequently enraged. Moreover, and most disloyally, the contents of the letter had been leaked by Wrangel to the press and were published widely. Rumours rapidly spread that Wrangel was about to stage a coup against Denikin, who dismissed Wrangel from his post on 2 January 1920. Such bickering, however, seriously undermined any attempt by the AFSR to hold a line along the River Manych.

There were feuds at this time within the Red ranks also: the burgeoning cult of Budyennyi sparked jealousies; Colenel V. I. Shorin was suddenly dismissed from the command of the South-East Front for having taken too long to recapture Tsaritsyn (which finally fell on 2 January 1920); and the charismatic cavalryman B. M. Dumenko, a rival to Budennyi as the “first saber of the republic” and chief inspirer of the liberation of the Don over the previous months, was arrested and shot for involvement in the mysterious death of his military commissar. Moreover, Red forces were now very far from their home territories, were occupying generally hostile Cossack lands (and were poised to attack more of the same), and were exhausted after their 450-mile counterthrust against the Whites. But the situation in the White camp was truly chaotic, with Cossack separatism once again raising its head in the form of the gathering of an All-Cossack Supreme Krug in January 1920 (with representatives of the Don, Kuban, Terek, Astrakhan, and other hosts).86 To make matters worse, just as Kolchak’s Siberia had sprouted a number of anti-White SR organizations as the Russian Army collapsed in late 1919, in early 1920 an unexpected second blossoming of the Democratic Counter-Revolution overran much of the rear of the AFSR, especially in the wooded hills of the coastal Black Sea region of the North Caucasus, where there lurked thousands of deserters and refugees from all sorts of civil-war armies that were being loosely organized by fugitive SRs. This self-styled “Green” movement was coordinated from November 1919 onward by a united Black Sea Liberation Committee.87