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and the Road to War, 1933-1941. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Roberts, Geoffrey. (2000). Victory at Stalingrad: The Battle That Changed History. London: Longman. Salisbury, Harrison. (1969). The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. London: Pan. Suvorov, Viktor [Vladimir Rezun]. (1990). Ice-Breaker: Who Started the Second World War? London: Hamish Hamilton. Urlanis, B. Ts. (1971). Wars and Population. Moscow: Progress. Volkogonov, Dmitri. (1991). Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. London: Weidenfeld amp; Nicholson. Weeks, Albert L. (2002). Stalin’s Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941. Lanham, MD: Rowman amp; Lit-tlefield. Wegner, Bernd, ed. (1997). From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the World, 1939-1941. Providence, RI: Berghahn. Weinberg, Gerhard L. (1995). A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Werth, Alexander. (1964). Russia at War, 1941-1945. London: Barrie amp; Rockliff.
(1878-1928), general and commander-in-chief of the anti-Bolshevik forces in South Russia and leader of the White emigrant movement.
One of the most talented, determined, and charismatic of the anti-Bolshevik generals (and one of the few who was authentically-and unashamedly- aristocratic), Peter Wrangel was born in St. Petersburg into a Baltic family of Swedish origin. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1901, but then joined a cavalry regiment as a private before volunteering for service at the front during the Russo-Japanese War, where he served with a unit of the Trans-Baikal Cossacks. In 1910 he graduated from the General Staff Academy and in World War I commanded a cavalry corps. He took no significant part in the events of 1917, but after the October Revolution he went to Crimea, where he was arrested by local Bolsheviks and narrowly escaped execution. He joined General Mikhail Alexeyev’s anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army in August 1918 and rose under General Denikin to command the Caucasian Army (largely made up of
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Kuban Cossacks) of the Armed Forces of South Russia. In that role he led a successful offensive against the Red Army on the Volga, capturing Tsaritsyn in July 1919. However, the haughty Wrangel never liked the plebian Denikin and, after a fierce quarrel with him over strategy during the Whites’ Moscow offensive of the autumn of 1919, he was accused of conspiracy, dismissed, and exiled to Constantinople. Following the collapse of Denikin’s efforts, Wrangel was recalled and found enough support among other senior generals to be chosen, in March 1920, to succeed Denikin as commander-in-chief of the White forces in South Russia, which were now largely confined to Crimea.
As a political leader, he was intolerant of opposition, distrusted all liberals, and remained a convinced monarchist, but he nevertheless promulgated a radical land reform in a belated attempt to win the support of the population (and the western Allies, who were by then despairing of the Whites). As commander, he was a strict disciplinarian, and he successfully reorganized the army (renaming it the Russian Army). However, a quarrel over command undermined a projected alliance with Pilsud-ski’s Poland. Although Wrangel’s forces managed during the summer of 1920 to pour out of Crimea into Northern Tauria, once the Bolsheviks had made peace with Poland in October, the Red Army was able to concentrate its vastly superior forces on the south and to drive the Russian Army back into Crimea. In November 1920 Wrangel organized a very remarkable and orderly evacuation of over 150,000 of his men and their dependents to Turkey, which was then under Allied control. They were poorly treated by the British administration of the Constantinople district and were subsequently scattered around Europe but remained unified through their shared experiences, their resentment of the Allies, and their veterans’ organization, the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS), forged by Wrangel in 1924. Through ROVS Wrangel hoped to offer financial and social support to his men and to keep the ?migr? soldiers battle-ready and pure of political affiliation, while striving to unite monarchists and republicans under the banner of non-predetermination (i.e., by not prejudging issues regarding the future, post-Bolshevik, government of Russia). However, in November 1924, he announced his recognition of the claim to the Russian throne of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich. Wrangel died in Brussels in 1928, just as he and his associates were planning the creation of terrorist organizations to
An experienced veteran of the Russian Imperial Army, Baron Peter Wrangel commanded the White forces during the civil war. © CORBIS be sent into the USSR. His children believed he had been poisoned by the Soviet secret police. He is buried in the Russian Cathedral in Belgrade. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; WHITE ARMY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kenez, Peter. (1971, 1977). Civil War in South Russia., 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robinson, Paul. (2002). The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920-1941. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wrangel, Alexis. (1987). General Wrangel: Russia’s White Crusader. London: Leo Cooper. Wrangel, Baron Peter N. (1929). The Memoirs of General Wrangel, the Last Commander-in-Chief of the Russian National Army, tr. S. Goulston. London: Williams amp; Norgate.
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Yabloko was one of the leading liberal opposition parties in the newly democratic Russia of the 1990s. Yabloko’s founder and leader was Grigory Yavlinsky, a liberal economist who had stayed aloof from the new democratic political movements being formed between 1989 and 1991. A strong critic of Boris Yeltsin’s privatization program, Yavlinsky condemned both the anti-Yeltsin rebellion by the Congress of People’s Deputies in September 1993 and Yeltsin’s use of force to suppress it in October.
In the wake of the October crisis, Yavlinsky teamed up with Yuri Boldyrev, an anticorruption campaigner, and Vladimir Lukin, ambassador to Washington until September, to form a bloc to run in the December 1993 State Duma election. Taking their three initials (Y, B, L), they named their alliance Yabloko (which means “apple”). Three small parties also joined Yabloko: the Republican Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Russian Christian- Democratic Union.
The three founders of Yabloko were allies of convenience: They had a liberal orientation but were not part of Yeltsin’s team. Lukin wanted a foreign policy that was less pro-Western than that pursued by Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, an aspiration that contradicted Yavlinsky’s pro-Western orientation. Boldyrev subsequently quit Yabloko in 1995.
Yabloko’s candidates were mostly young professionals and intellectuals. In the December 1993 election they won 7.9 percent of the vote and twenty seats in the national party-list race, and seven single-mandate districts. They were the sixth-largest party in the 450-seat Duma. Yabloko took up a position of principled opposition to the Yeltsin government. It opposed the new December 1993 constitution, refused to sign Yeltsin’s Civil Accord in May 1994, and repeatedly voted against government-proposed legislation.
Yavlinsky ran Yabloko as a tight ship. Deputies who did not vote the Yabloko line were expelled from the party. In January 1995 Yabloko formally converted itself from an electoral bloc into a party. It claimed branches in more than 60 regions of Russia, although its most visible strength was in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and, curiously, the Far East. Yabloko projected an image that was partly liberal and partly social democratic, but nearly always critical of the government. They competed
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for the liberal electorate with the pro-government reform party (at first Russia’s Choice, then Union of Right Forces). Party identification among Yabloko voters was rather weak, and surveys indicate that they were scattered across the entire political spectrum.
In the December 1995 Duma election Yabloko maintained its position, finishing fourth with 6.9 percent of the vote, thirty-one seats on the party list, and fourteen seats in single-mandate races. Yabloko established a visible
