ration of food). It often happened that the opposing sides would unexpectedly run across each other in a village or some small town and, after a meeting, would agree to retreat rather than engage. The Red soldiers, in particular, would often run away in panic as soon as the first shots were fired; and although the Whites, as 'volunteers', had many fewer problems of this sort, there were many occasions when their officers were also forced to use terror against their own troops. On both sides, officers played down the failures of their men, whilst exaggerating their 'successes', in their operational reports. As Trotsky once complained, every town was captured, or so it was claimed, 'after a fierce battle'; while every retreat was 'only as a result of the onslaught of superior forces'. These absurd aspects of the civil war were best captured by Jaroslav Hasek in his comic novella
The growth of the Volunteer Army was largely due to the charismatic presence of General Kornilov. He and his followers had fled from the open jail at the Bykhov Monastery after Dukhonin had lost control of Stavka to the Bolsheviks in November. Since this ruled out the possibility of bringing down the Bolsheviks from inside Soviet Russia, and indeed put themselves at risk of execution, the Bykhov generals resolved to flee to the Don. Most disguised themselves and travelled by train through Bolshevik Russia. Lukomsky shaved off his beard and spoke in a German accent; Romanovsky masqueraded as an ensign; Markov as a common soldier. Denikin pretended to be a Polish nobleman and travelled third class: it was here that he witnessed for the first time the 'boundless hatred' of the common people for 'everything that was socially or intellectually higher than the crowd'. Proud as ever, Kornilov, however, refused to hide his identity and instead led his loyal Tekinsky Regiment on a forced march through hostile Bolshevik terrain. They were finally stopped and engaged in battle by a Red armoured train. Kornilov's white horse was shot from underneath him. He managed to escape, and reassembled most of his troops, but they were already too demoralized to go on, and Kornilov, realizing that he could make it only without them, decided to abandon them and complete his journey alone disguised as a peasant. Ironically, he travelled to the Don in a Red Guards' train.6
Novocherkassk, which Gul' reached on New Year's Eve, was a microcosm of the old Russia in exile. St Petersburg on the steppe. The fallen high and mighty thronged its muddy streets. 'Here were generals, with their stripes and epaulettes, dashing cavalry officers in their colourful tunics, the white kerchiefs of nurses, and the huge Caucasian fur hats of the Turkomen warriors,' recalled Gul'. Numerous Duma politicians had come to try and direct the White
movement: Miliukov, Rodzianko, Struve, Zavoiko, G. N. Trubetskoi, N. N. Lvov, even the SR, Boris Savinkov. Leading intellectuals also made the Don their home, both in the physical and in the spiritual sense. Marina Tsvetaeva, whose husband, Sergei Efron, was one of the first to join the Volunteers, wrote a series of poems,
White Guards: Gordian knot Of Russian valour. White Guards: white mushrooms Of the Russian folksong White Guards: white stars, Not to be crossed from the sky. White guards: black nails In the ribs of the Antichrist.
'White Guards', 27 July 19187
For Tsvetaeva, as for so many of her class and background, the Don represented the last hope of saving Russian civilization. It was, as she expressed it, the last dream of the old world'.
In Novocherkassk the official clock ran on St Petersburg time — an hour behind local Don time — as if in readiness to resume the work of government in the tsarist capital. Nothing better symbolized the nostalgic attitudes of the Whites. They were, quite literally, trying to put back the clock. Everything about them, from their tsarist uniforms to their formal morning dress, signalled a longing to restore the old regime. In later years, looking back on the civil war, all the most intelligent people on the White side, whether in south Russia or Siberia, acknowledged that this identification with the past was a major reason for their defeat. For however much the leaders of the Whites might have pledged their belief in democratic principles, they were much too rooted in the old regime to be accepted as a real alternative to the Bolsheviks; and this was even more true of the White officers and the local officials who came into contact with the ordinary people and formed their image of the White regime. Astrov, the Kadet who joined the Volunteers, wrote in 1920: 'We, with our dated ploys, our dated mentality and the dated vices of our bureaucracy, complete with Peter the Great's Table of Ranks, could not keep up with the Reds.' Shulgin, the Nationalist, wrote in 1919: 'The counter-revolution did not put forward a single new name ... That was the main reason for our tragedy.' Struve, writing in 1921, stressed how this 'old regime psychology' had
prevented the Whites from adopting the sort of revolutionary methods essential to win a civil war:
Psychologically, the Whites conducted themselves as if nothing had happened, whereas in reality the whole world around them had collapsed, and in order to vanquish the enemy they themselves had to undergo, in a certain sense, a rebirth . . . Nothing so harmed the 'White' movement as this very condition of psychologically staying put in previous circumstances, circumstances which had ceased to exist. . . Men with this 'old regime' psychology were immersed in the raging sea of revolutionary anarchy, and psychologically could not find their bearings in it... In the revolutionary storm that struck Russia in 1917, even out-and-out restorationists had to turn revolutionaries in the psychological sense: because in a revolution only revolutionaries can find their way.8
It was his dislike of this restorationism — and his wounded leg — which prevented Brusilov from coming to the Don, despite several appeals by his old friend Alexeev. While Brusilov was clearly sympathetic to the Whites, he was convinced that their cause 'was doomed to fail because the Russian people, for better or worse, have chosen the Reds'. There was no point, as he explained to a friend in early April, in trying to put the clock back. 'I consider the old regime as having been abolished for a very long time.' Kornilov's war against the Bolsheviks might have been, as he put it, 'brave and noble', but it was also a 'stupid act' that was 'bound to waste a lot of young men's lives'. No doubt there was a hint of his own dislike for Kornilov in this. But there was also a sense of resignation that made Brusilov reject a civil war — as if, in his mind, the revolution had been planned by God and was part of a divine comedy whose end was not yet clear. As a patriot, Brusilov thought that it was his 'duty to remain on the people's side' — which meant taking no side in the civil war, even if this also meant betraying his own social class and ideology. Meinecke's dictum of 1919 — 'I remain, facing the past, a monarchist of the heart, and will become, facing the future, a republican of the mind' — might just as well have been Brusilov's.9
The Volunteer Army was an officers' army. That was its major problem: it never succeeded in attracting the support of the civilian population, not even of private soldiers. When Kornilov was first shown the list of volunteers, he exclaimed in anger: 'These are all officers, but where are the soldiers?' Of
caused terrible headaches for the General Staff. Senior generals refused to serve under younger officers promoted strictly on merit; monarchists refused to obey commanders opposed to the Tsar. Some refused to serve below the rank they had held in the imperial army, thinking it beneath their dignity. The cafes were full of these idle officers. They dubbed the Volunteers 'toy soldiers'. Pride in their previous rank and status overcame their desire to fight.10
Even the two men at the head of the movement could not stop themselves from petty bickering. Kornilov had been given the command of the Volunteer Army, while Alexeev was placed in charge of political and financial matters. But the division never really worked and both men got in each other's way. Relations became so bad that routine communications between them had to be made through messengers, even though their offices were next door to each other. The atmosphere was poisoned by their continuous squabbles, as Roman Gul' discovered when he tried to enlist at the army's offices in Novocherkassk. Unaware that the enlistment bureau was run by Alexeev's
