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White Army | |
|---|---|
| Белая армия | |
 | |
| Abbreviation | Whites |
| Founded | 25th December, 1917 |
| Dissolved | 25th October, 1922 |
The White Army, also known as the White Guard, is the collective name for the counter-revolutionary military forces that fought against the Soviet government and the Red Army of Workers and Peasants during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. The Whites were a union of tsarist officers, landlords, the bourgeoisie, right-wing nationalists, and reactionary Cossacks, backed by the military and financial intervention of the major imperialist powers such as Britain, France, the United States, Japan, Canada and smaller states within the imperial core.[1]
The White Army was born as a reaction of the bourgeoisie to the Bolshevik seizure of power on October 25, 1917. The overthrow of the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky, itself the last representative of a bourgeois order that had already exhausted its historical legitimacy confronted Russia's landlords, capitalists, and officer caste with expropriation, the redistribution of land, and workers' control over the factories. [1]
The White Army was systematically anti-Semitic. The Whites used anti-Semitic agitation as a weapon of counter-revolutionary propaganda, by painting the image of "Jewish Bolshevism" and claiming that the revolution was the work of an Jewish conspiracy in a weak attempt to discredit the revolution. Using mass rapes, sadistic torture and seemingly pointless killings which across Ukraine, Belarus, and other territories where the Whites and Ukrainian nationalists operated, an estimated 200,000 Jews were killed outright, with perhaps a million total victims when the wounded, raped, and orphaned are counted.[1]
History[edit | edit source]
Within days of the October Revolution, the first organized White force took shape in the Don region of southern Russia, Tsarist Generals Mikhail Alekseyev and Lavr Kornilov released from prison after the collapse of their coup attempt began recruiting, pulling tsarist officers, cadets, students, and Cossack elites and In December 1917 they seized Rostov-on-Don and when they did all Soviet organizations were violently dispersed, their headquarters ransacked, and Bolshevik workers murdered. [1]
Though, In February 1918, the Whites were forced to evacuate Rostov under pressure from the advancing Red Army and began retreating 1,000-kilometer retreat through the frozen steppes of the Kuban region and during this retreat, one of the generals Lavr Kornilov was killed by artillery fire during a failed assault on Yekaterinodar in April 1918, with the death of Lavr the command passed to Anton Denikin. In May 1918, a force of approximately 40,000 former prisoners of war on their way to the Trans-Siberian Railway clashed with the Soviet authorities and occupied vast stretches of the Trans-Siberian Railway. This opened the eastern front across Siberia and the Urals, amplifying the counter-revolution.[1]
The Whites seized Kazan in August 1918, which captured a portion of Russia's gold reserve and created a direct threat to Moscow and became one of the most serious crises of the early Soviet period though The Red Army recaptured Kazan in September 1918 was the first major Red Army victory and the turning point on the eastern front.[1]
During the occupation of the Trans-Siberian Railway by the Czech prisoners of war, imperialist powers invaded Soviet Russia. Britain, France, the United States, Japan, and a coalition of smaller states, including Canada, landed troops at Murmansk and Archangel in the north, Baku in the Caucasus, and Vladivostok in the Far East. Winston Churchill called it "cordon sanitaire", a ring of force designed to isolate and strangle the Soviet government with the Japanese occupying the key port facilities at Vladivostok in November 1917, and by 1918 had deployed 70,000 troops in Siberia. [1]
In November 1918, The White Army seized power in a coup at Omsk, overthrowing the SR-dominated Provisional All-Russian Government and proclaimed White Army Admiral Alexander Kolchak the "Supreme Ruler of Russia." The imperialists recognized Kolchak's government as the head of all White forces and poured material support into his army. 1919 was the peak of the White offensive and also the turning point of the Civil War in favor of the Red Army. Three major White offensives converged on the Soviet heartland. [1]
In the east, the Whites advanced westward across the Urals in the spring, at one point threatening to link up with Imperialist forces at Archangel. The Red Army launched a counter-offensive between April and June 1919, pushing the Whites back across the Urals and deep into Siberia, as they were pushed back Kolchak's army was dismantled as peasant uprisings broke out which reflected the hate of the rural population for Kolchak's regime. By the end of the year, Kolchak had been captured; he was executed by the Bolsheviks in February 1920.[1]
In the south, The White Army under Denikin launched an offensive in the summer of 1919 and pushed northward through Ukraine and toward Moscow, capturing Orel, within 400 kilometers of Moscow in October 1919. This was the closest any Whites came to overthrowing the Soviet. It was also the period of the most damaging anti-Jewish pogroms. As the Whites advanced and retreated through Ukraine, they carried out a genocide: in just six months, an estimated 50,000 Jews were murdered. But the Red Army's counter-offensive shattered their advance between October and November 1919. By early 1920, they had been driven back to the Caucasus and the Black Sea coast.[1]
In the northwest, the Whites under General Nikolai Yudenich reached Petrograd, coming within sight of the city's outskirts in October 1919, they were backed by British naval forces in the Baltic and received support from Estonian nationalist forces but the Red Army’s resistance drove the Whites back into Estonia, where their army was disarmed and dissolved. [1]
Denikin, discredited by military defeat and the atrocities committed by his army, resigned in April 1920 and was replaced by Baron Pyotr Wrangel who attempted to re-consolidate the remaining Whites in Crimea but failed as it was far too late but while the Soviets were facing the Whites they also faced war with Poland, whose ruler Józef Piłsudski launched an invasion of Ukraine in April 1920 in alliance with the remnants of Ukrainian nationalist forces. [1]
The Red Army suffered major setbacks, losing Kiev in May 1920, but launched a counter-offensive that drove into Poland before being turned back at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920, as Poland was saved by intervention of French military advisers and the failure of the Polish working class to rise against its own bourgeoisie. But by 1922 the workers' state had secured its survival. The Civil War had left a devastating loss. An estimated seven to twelve million people died from combat, famine, and epidemic disease. Industrial output had collapsed to a fraction of pre-war levels, specifically the fuel industry, metallurgy, mechanical engineering, and transportation were particularly hard hit. The working class was roughly halved. Agricultural production fell almost in half,[1]