Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

WHITE insurGENT ARMY. This White force, created mostly from units that were formerly attached to the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov (until that force was driven out of Transbaikalia in September 1920 by the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic), was organized at Vladivostok on 25 June 1921. Its complement was ever-changing, in the confused conditions of the time, but as of 10 November 1921 included the 3rd Rifle Corps, the 1st Rifle Brigade, the Izhevsk-Votkinsk Brigade (veterans of the Izhevsk-Votkinsk uprising), the Volga Brigade, the 2nd Rifle Corps, and other units. In total the White Insurgent Army mustered some 6,000 men, most of whom were survivors of campaigns on the Volga, in the Urals, and in Siberia of the previous years. The force achieved notable success in an offensive down the Ussurii in late 1921, recapturing Amginsk (2 December 1921) and Khabarovsk (22 December 1921) from the People’s-Revolutionary Army. Early in 1922, however, the Reds drove them out of Khabarovsk (14 February 1922). The forces of the White Insurgent Army were subsequently dispersed, some joining the Zemstvo Host.

The commander of the White Insurgent Army was Major General V. M. Molchanov.

WHITES. This is the term that is properly used to denote the rightist and militaristic opposition to the Soviet government that came to the fore in South Russia, Siberia, the Baltic, and North Russia following the collapse of the Democratic Counter-Revolution during the summer and autumn of 1918. It should not be employed to denote all opponents of the Bolsheviks, most of whom abhorred the Whites.

The term has its immediate roots during the civil-war period in the move to establish a military dictatorship in Russia in the summer of 1917, during the Kornilov affair. Rightist forces during the Finnish Civil War of early 1918 were also called “White Finns.” In Russia, the movement’s foremost early leaders were Generals M. V. Alekseev, A. I. Denikin, and L. G. Kornilov; later Admiral A. V. Kolchak and Generals E. K. Miller and P. N. Wrangel headed White regimes (in Siberia, North Russia, and Crimea, respectively), although Soviet sources always tended to conflate the Whites (or “White Guards,” as they were often termed) with rogue elements of the anti-Bolshevik movement that might better be classified under the term atamanshchina. It is also worth noting that, although the Whites are often portrayed as aristocrats (and not only in Soviet histories), of the named figures only Wrangel really fell into that category; Alekseev, Kornilov, and Denikin were born into poorer families than almost any member of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in 1917, and their Weltanschauung had been molded not by social origins but by membership in the officer class of the Russian Army, wherein they had been isolated from politics and steeped in the army’s nationalistic code of honor.