(Shekhtman,
seen as wealthy, alien and weak. But in a way that was more apparent than in the earlier pogroms they were also motivated by a racial hatred for the Jews and by a hatred of them, in the words of one White officer, as the 'chosen people of the Bolsheviks'. Whole Jewish towns were burned and destroyed on the grounds that they had supported the Reds (was it any wonder that they did?). Red stars were painted on the synagogues. Jews were taken hostage and shot in reprisal for the Red Terror. Jewish corpses were displayed in the street with a sign marked 'Traitors', or with a Red Star cut into their flesh.41
On seizing a town from the Reds, it was common for the White officers to allow their soldiers two or three days' freedom to rob and kill the Jews at will. This was seen as a reward for the troops and a just retribution for the part played by the Jews in supporting the Reds. There were no recorded cases of a White officer ever halting a pogrom, but several cases where even senior generals, such as Mamontov and Mai-Maevsky, ordered them. One of the worst pogroms took place in Kiev, right under the noses of the White authorities. From I to 5 October the Cossack soldiers went around the city breaking into Jewish homes, demanding money, raping and killing. The officers and local priests urged them on with speeches claiming that 'The Yids kill all our people and support the Bolsheviks.' Even Shulgin, an ardent anti-Semite, was disturbed by the climate of 'medieval terror' in the streets and by the 'terrifying howl' of the 'Yids' at night 'that breaks the heart'. Yet General Dragomirov, who ruled the city, did not order a stop to the pogrom until the 6th, the day after the orgy of killing had finally burned itself out.42
Many pogroms were accompanied by gruesome acts of torture on a par with those of the Red Terror. In the town of Fastov the Cossacks hung their victims from the ceiling, releasing them just before they choked to death: if their relatives, who watched this in terror, could not pay up the money they had demanded, the Cossacks repeated the operation. The Cossacks cut off limbs and noses with their sabres and ripped out babies from their mothers' wombs. They set light to Jewish houses and forced those who tried to escape to turn back into the fire. In some places, such as Chernobyl, the Jews were herded into the synagogue, which was then burned down with them inside. In others, such as Cherkass, they gang-raped hundreds of pre-teen girls. Many of their victims were later found with knife and sabre wounds to their small vaginas. One of the most horrific pogroms took place in the small Podole town of Krivoe Ozero during the final stages of the Whites' retreat in late December. By this stage the White troops had ceased to care about world opinion and, as they contemplated defeat, threw all caution to the winds. The Terek Cossacks tortured and mutilated hundreds of Jews, many of them women and young children. Hundreds of corpses were left out in the snow for the dogs and pigs to eat. In the midst of this macabre scene the Cossack officers held a surreal ball in the town post
office, complete with evening dress and an orchestra, to which they invited the local magistrate and a group of prostitutes they had brought with them from Kherson. While their soldiers went killing Jews for sport, the officers and their
Thanks to the newly opened archives, we now have a fuller idea of how many Jews were killed by pogroms in the civil war. The precise number will never be known. Even the pogroms by the Whites, which are the best known, raise all sorts of statistical problems; and there were many other pogroms against Jews (by the Ukrainian nationalists, by Makhno's partisans, by the invading Polish forces and by the Reds) whose victims were never counted at all. But one can say with some certainty that the overall number of Jewish murder-victims must have been much higher than the 31,071 burials officially recorded or indeed the estimates of 50,000—60,000 deaths given by scholars in the past. The most important document to emerge from the Russian archives in recent years, a 1920 report of an investigation by the Jewish organizations in Soviet Russia, talks of 'more than 150,000 reported deaths' and up to 300,000 victims, including the wounded and the dead.44
* * * The fleeing thousands of Denikin's regime all piled into Novorossiisk, the main Allied port on the Black Sea, in the hope of being evacuated on an Allied ship. By March 1920, the town was crammed full of desperate refugees. Dignitaries of the old regime slept a dozen to each room. Typhus reaped a dreadful harvest among the hordes of unwashed humanity. Prince E. N. Trubetskoi and Purishkevich died in the awful conditions of Novorossiisk. No one gave any more thought to the idea of fighting the Reds, whose cavalry encircled the town. Seven years of war and revolution had bred in these people a psyche of defeat — and they now thought only of escape. British guns were thrown into the sea. Cossacks shot their horses. Everyone wanted to leave Russia but not everyone could be taken by the Allied ships. Priority was given to the troops, 50,000 of whom were carried off to the Crimea on 27 March. That left 60,000 Whites at the mercy of the Reds. Amidst the final panic to get on board there were ugly scenes: princesses brawled like fish-wives; men and women knelt on the quay and begged the Allied officers to save their lives; some people threw themselves into the sea.45
For Denikin's critics, this botched evacuation was the final straw. A generals' revolt had been steadily gaining ground since the first reverses of the autumn, as it became clear that the Moscow Directive had been a strategic error. On arriving in the Crimea, they now demanded Denikin's resignation. General Wrangel emerged as the clear successor from a poll of the senior commanders. Because of their repugnance at the idea of 'electing' a new leader — that would smack of the democracy that had destroyed the army in 1917 — they prevailed
upon Denikin to resign and 'appoint' Wrangel as his successor. This was the final insult for Denikin, who had only recently discharged his rival. He was now obliged to recall him from Constantinople, where Wrangel had been in exile. The same British ship that brought Wrangel back to Russia took Denikin to the Turkish capital. He would never see his fatherland again.
Under General Wrangel the Whites made one last stand against the Bolsheviks. But it was obvious from the start that their task was doomed. The Soviet war against Poland, which diverted Red troops from the Southern Front, briefly enabled the Whites to gain a toe-hold in the Crimea. But it was only a matter of time before the Reds turned their attention to them again: and when they did so the outcome was never really in doubt. To all intents and purposes, the Whites were defeated in April 1920.
What were the fundamental reasons for their failure? The White emigre communities would agonize for years over this question. Historians whose views are broadly sympathetic to the White cause have often stressed the 'objective factors' that were said to have stacked the odds against them.46 The Reds had an overwhelming superiority of numbers, they controlled the vast terrain of central Russia with its prestigious capitals, most of the country's industry and the core of its railway network, which enabled them to shift their forces from one Front to another. The Whites, by contrast, were divided between several different Fronts, which made it difficult to co-ordinate their operations; and they were dependent on the untrustworthy Allies for much of their supplies. Other historians have stressed the strategic errors of the Whites, the Moscow Directive foremost among them, and the Reds' superior leadership, commitment and discipline.
All these factors were no doubt relevant — and in a conventional war they might well have been enough to explain the outcome. But the Russian civil war was a very different sort of war. It was fought between armies which could count neither on the loyalty of their mostly conscript troops nor on the support of the civilian population within the territories they claimed to control. Most people wanted nothing to do with the civil war: they kept their heads down and tried to remain neutral. As one Jew told Babel, all the armies claimed to be fighting for justice, but all of
