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 the first 3,000 volunteers, no more than a dozen were rank-and-file troops. There has never been such a top-heavy army in the history of warfare. Captains and colonels were forced to serve as privates. Major-generals had to make do with the command of a squadron. Constant squabbling over the command posts 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 cafés 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
