Reasons for White's defeat

Question 1

Foreign help = unreliable

Answer 1

• ‘It was just enough to keep the Whites from defeat but insufficient to give them a real crack at victory. ‘ Figes
• French ships arriving in Odessa mutinied, had to be evacuated
• signing of Armistice undermined morale
• August 1919 aid reduced, much had been lost to corruption, chastened by Kolchak’s retreat
• Bols played on this
  leaflets dropped by aircraft, some written by Native english speakers

Question 2

Geography - spread between several fronts

Answer 2

difficult to co-ordinate operations
Moscow Directive = June 20, 1919
all White forces converge on the capital along the railways
Deninkin’s front had become overextended
Wrangel called “death sentence of White army”

Question 3

Failure to gain mass support - identification with the past

Answer 3

‘The counter-revolution did not put forward a single new name … That was the main reason for our tragedy. Shulgin
Nothing so harmed the ‘White’ movement as this very condition of psychologically staying put in previous circumstances, circumstances which had ceased to exist – Struve

Question 4

Failure to gain mass support - officers army

Answer 4

Voluntter Army - Of the first 3,000 volunteers, no more than a dozen were rank-and-file troops.

Question 5

Failure to gain mass support - didn’t recognize revolution on land

Answer 5

• This failure of the Whites to recognize the peasant revolution was the reason for their ultimate defeat. Figes
• eg Volunteer Army staffed by gentry

Land Commisions set up to Denikin
- Statisticians calculated that if a programme was introduced on the basis of the commissions’ proposals, the peasants would have had to give back three-quarters of the land they had seized from the gentry since 1917.

Komuch

• 22 July 1918 decree enabled the former landowners to reclaim any winter fields which they had sown.
• meant in effect reversing 1/3rd of the peasants’ requisitions
• Troops had to be called in to enforce
• Any future land law’, Kolchak’s land commission declared on 8 April, would ‘have to be based on the rights of private property’. Only the ‘unused land of the gentry’ would be ‘transferred to the toiling peasantry’,

Question 6

Failure to gain mass support - white terror

Answer 6

• Dons industrial cities - workers massacred bourgeois – Whites carried out savage reprisals, cutting out ars and eyes
  Ice March
  Kornilov led 400 across steppe of Don
  23 feb
  The deeper the Whites moved into the steppe, the more they resorted to terror against a hostile population. Their Ice March left a trail of blood.

100 000 Jews killed in Ukraine

Komuch conscription

• tried to stem the desertions by sending punitive Cossack detachments into the villages.
• made military field courts reminiscent of Stolypin’s
• peasants publicly folgged and hanged; villages burned
• To the peasants, all this must have seemed like a return of the old regime with a vengeance.

Cossacks
they were always inclined to degenerate into looting; and in Jewish settlements they often indulged in pogroms. a major reason for the White defeat: the plundering and violence of the Cossack cavalry in 1919 did more than anything to rally the population of central Russia behind the Reds

Question 7

Failure to gain mass support - nationalism

Answer 7

• failed to promise Cossack’s independence
  . ‘History will never forgive me if I surrender what Peter the Great won,’ Kolchak

Finland

• the success of Yudenich’s offensive against Petrograd would rest on the willingness of Finland to act as a springboard and supply base for his army.
• Bolsheviks had granted rcognition 18 months before, were offering a peace accord if Finland remained neutral
• By June 1919, there were up to 100,000 Finnish troops around Lake Lagoda. One quarter of them were facing Petrograd.
• price = a guarantee of its independence.
  wanted status resolved by CA
• Lenin considered it “completely certain, that the slightest aid from Finland would have determined the fate of Petrograd”.
• It was a crucial setback for the Whites, forcing them to advance on Petrograd by the longer and more hostile route through Yamburg and Gatchina.

Question 8

Failure to gain mass support - desertions

Answer 8

Of every five peasants forcibly conscripted, four would desert: many of them ran off to the Reds, taking with them their supplies.

• The closer the Whites moved towards central Russia the harder it became for them to mobilize the local peasantry. In the crucial Volga region, the furthest point of Kolchak’s advance, the peasants had gained more of the gentry’s land than anywhere else in Russia and so had most to fear from a counter-revolution
• The partisans’ destruction of miles of track and their constant ambushes of trains virtually halted the transportation of vital supplies along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Kolchak’s armies for much of the offensive.

Question 9

Reason for defeat - ineffective local government

Answer 9

Consumer goods and military supplies had to be brought in by rail from the Pacific, 4,000 miles away. Much of them were held up by bandits east of Lake Baikal, or by peasant partisans
failed to get zemstvo on side

corruption

• lack of supplies = resort to requisitioning
• nothing done to ressurect Siberian industries
• The staff of Gajda’s army was drawing rations for 275,000 men, when there were only 30,000 in his combat units.
• The offices responsible for supply were full of corrupt and indolent bureaucrats, who took months to draw up meaningless statistics, legislative projects and official reports that were then filed away and forgotten.