Only the officers — the landowners’ sons and students whose studies had been broken off by the war — hated the Reds with the sort of hatred that made them want to fight. These young men had fled their shattered regiments at the Front and risked their lives crossing the country to reach the cities of the south. By day, they roamed the streets penniless and unshaven; at night they slept on people’s chairs and floors, using their greatcoats as blankets. This was a dispossessed generation who had nothing to lose in a civil war. Many of them had already seen their families lose their landed estates to the peasantry, or had had their own careers, their hopes and expectations, ruined as a result of the revolution. They drank too much, seethed with anger and thought only of revenge.
One of these student officers, Roman Gul’, was passing through Kiev on his way to join the White Guards on the Don during the winter of 1917. In October he had received a telegram from his father: ‘The estate is destroyed, ask for leave.’ Since then he had been on the run from the Bolsheviks. Travelling through Russia in a third-class railway carriage, Gul’ was disgusted by the malice and mistrust on the faces of the peasant troops around him. ‘These are the people who smashed our old mahogany chairs,’ he wrote to a friend from the train; ‘these are the people who tore up my favourite books, the ones I bought as a student on the Sukharevka;fn1 these are the people who cut down our orchard and cut down the roses that mama planted; these are the people who burnt down our home.’ It was partly in order to avenge this loss that Gul’, like so many young men of his class, had resolved to join the Whites. ‘I saw that underneath the red hat of what we had thought of as the beautiful woman of the Revolution there was in fact the ugly snout of a pig. My heart was full of doubts and hesitations, but I convinced myself that in the end, to put all this right, one had to take responsibility, one even had to be prepared to commit the sin of murder.’3
Gul’s destination, Novocherkassk, was the headquarters of the fledgling Volunteer Army led by Alexeev and Kornilov. After the Bolshevik seizure of power, and Kornilov’s release from the Bykhov Monastery, both men had fled to the sleepy town on the steppe, where the Don Cossacks, thought by the Whites to be stalwart supporters of the old order, had recently elected General Kaledin as the Ataman of their traditional assembly, the Krug. Taciturn and gloomy, Kaledin was a typical Cossack general of the old school. During 1917 he had sided with Kornilov against the Soviet and at the Moscow Conference in August had called forthrightly for the abolition of all the democratic army organizations.
The Don Krug had declared its independence on 20 November. The basic concern of the Don Cossack leaders was to defend this, but the Volunteers had persuaded them that this could only be achieved by joining forces with them against the Bolsheviks. The latter had mobilized the support of much of the non-Cossack population in the Don — among the Russian peasants (inogorodnye), the industrial workers and the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet — for an offensive against Rostov, the major city of the Don. Hence, to begin with, Kaledin welcomed the arrival of the Volunteers — a mere forty officers, calling themselves Alexeev’s Organization — on 17 November. His own forces had been fast disintegrating, as the younger and more radical Cossacks, who were in no mood to fight the Reds, returned from the Front and began to campaign against his leadership. Many local Cossacks were afraid that the presence of the Volunteers might make Novocherkassk, the Don capital, a target for the Bolsheviks. Because of this Cossack mistrust of the Whites, Alexeev’s officers had had to be hidden in a hospital at first. But as the Reds approached, and it became clear that the Don could not be defended without their support, Kaledin was able to deploy them without serious Cossack objections. At the beginning of December the Red Guards finally captured Rostov. Kaledin imposed martial law and called on the Volunteers to retake the city (his own Cossacks had refused to fight). Alexeev’s army, which by this stage had grown to a force of some 500 officers, was quite sufficient to defeat the more numerous but hopelessly indisciplined Red Guards. The six-day battle began on 9 December — St George’s Day, the patron saint of Russia. It was the first major battle of the civil war.4
