Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

How the Whites acquired their name is subject to debate. It is sometimes erroneously assumed to have been due to association with the Bourbons, deposed by the revolution in France in 1792, but the French royal standard was actually blue, with gold fleur-de-lis. The royalist rebels of the Vendée did adopt the White flag as their emblem, during their war against the republic of 1793–1796 (possibly to signal their purity in comparison to the blood-stained masters of the guillotine), but none of the above-named leading Russian Whites were monarchists; indeed, all had disavowed the monarchist cause in 1917 and had welcomed the February Revolution (although this was to a significant degree determined by their despair at the personal failings of Nicholas II), and in terms of their political beliefs tended to be in accord with the more right-wing elements of the Kadets. (The election to the Russian throne of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, by an assembly—the Zemskii sobor′—convened at Vladivostok, by the White General M. K. Diterikhs, in August 1922, should be regarded as a desperate aberration.) A perhaps more credible version has it that the term “Whites” was adopted to invoke the spirit and memory of the formidable General M. D. Skobelev, the hero of Russia’s war against Turkey of 1877–1878, and subsequent campaigns in Central Asia. Skobelev always went into battle on a white horse, wearing a white uniform, and was known to his men as the “White general.” His feats had been mythologized in late-tsarist Russia, and certainly no competitor to him as a symbol of imperial Russian military might had arisen during Russia’s generally miserable performance during the First World War.

What the Whites stood for is no easier to define precisely. The Beloe delo (“White cause”), however, certainly encompassed the aim of establishing a united Russia (a “Russia, One and Indivisible,” as the phrase went) that would have encompassed more or less all of what had been the Russian Empire (although most White leaders accepted the independence of Finland and the independence of Poland, albeit within very constricted borders) and in which the Russian Orthodox Church would play a prominent part. All this, of course, naturally put the White movement on a collision course not only with the Bolsheviks but also with non-Russian (and generally non-Orthodox) nationalists in Poland, Finland, the Baltic lands, Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and elsewhere. In South Russia, it also poisoned their relations with the Cossacks, especially the powerful Don Cossack Host, Kuban Cossack Host, and Terek Cossack Host, who supplied a significant proportion of the Whites’ fighting men but were committed to the autonomy of their territories. (Such factors as these, in the end, may have determined the Whites’ defeat in the civil wars as much as the challenge to them mounted by the Reds.) The Whites were also unabashedly anti-Semitic, and the more virulent Jew-haters among them engaged in pogroms. In this last respect, there is something to be said for General K. V. Sakharov’s assertion that the movement in which he had played a key role was “the first manifestation of fascism.” (Although this claim is complicated by the generally pro-Allied and anti-German orientation of most White leaders during the civil-war period, there was some cooperation between Whites in the Baltic theater—for example, the Western Volunteer Army of Major-General P. R. Bermondt-Avalov—and the proto-fascist German Freikorps in 1919.)

During the civil wars, the Whites also professed a commitment to “non-predetermination”; that is, to passing no permanent laws and signing no treaties or agreements that would determine the future constitution of Russia or what, geographically, belonged to “Russia.” All that was to be decided by a future national assembly. For some White leaders, this was clearly a convenient ruse to postpone the discussion of divisive social, national, and political issues. Also, the question remains unanswered as to what sort of national assembly White leaders might have summoned. (It was unlikely, for example, to have been one elected on such a broad franchise as to have repeated the results of the Constituent Assembly elected in November 1917, which was dominated by socialists; indeed, some Whites expressed themselves genuinely grateful to the Bolsheviks for having broken up that gathering.) Other Whites sincerely believed that priority had to be given to winning the war. Either way, it was not an approach likely to attract the support of those demanding immediate solutions to the blatant social, national, and political inequalities that characterized the former Russian Empire.