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 supporters, he named a relative of Kornilov as one of his referees. ‘The ensign made a grimace, shrugged his shoulders and said through his teeth: “Look, he doesn’t really belong to our organization.” ’ It was only later that Gul’ learned of the ‘covert struggle and the secret war between the two leaders’. The split had less to do with ideology than with tactics, style and personal rivalry. Both men had accepted the February Revolution and had pledged to restore the Constituent Assembly. But Kornilov was hostile to the Kadet politicians — and indeed to all politicians — whom Alexeev courted. He also favoured bolder tactics — including terrorism inside Soviet Russia — than the conservative Alexeev. ‘Even if we have to burn half of Russia and shed the blood of three-quarters of the population, we shall do it if that is needed to save Russia,’ Kornilov once said. Alexeev and the senior generals looked upon Kornilov as a rabble-rouser and a demagogue, who had only risen to the rank of general after the February Revolution. Yet it was precisely this image of the ‘self-made man’ — an image which Kornilov had cultivated — that made him the idol of the junior officers. It was a clash between the old tsarist principles of seniority and the mass politics of 1917.11
As an army of Russian officers, the Volunteers were always bound to have a problem with their Cossack hosts. The White leaders had made the Don their base because they had presumed the Don Cossacks to be stalwart supporters of the old order. But this owed more to nineteenth-century myths than to twentieth-century realities. In fact the Cossacks were themselves divided, both on regional and generational lines. In the northern districts the Cossacks were smallholders, like the local Russian peasants, and generally supported the ideas advanced by the younger and more democratic Cossack officers for a socialist republic that would unite them with the peasantry. The northerners resented the southern districts, both for their wealth and for the pretensions of their elders to speak for the territory as a whole. The younger and war-weary Cossacks from the Front — influenced by the officers risen from their ranks — were more inclined to find some accord with Bolshevik Russia than to fight against it. Thus it was really only in the southern Don — where the Cossacks were more wealthy and more determined to defend their historic landed privileges against the demands of the Russian peasants for land reform — that the Cossacks were prepared to fight the Bolsheviks. Most of the Cossacks of the northern Don, by contrast, rallied behind the Military Revolutionary Council in Kamenskaia led by the officer, Philip Mironov, who had organized the Don Cossack revolt of 1905–6. Mironov’s aim was an independent socialist republic uniting the Cossacks with the Russian peasants. But in effect his MRC was to serve as a fifth column for the Bolshevik troops as they invaded the Don from the eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, in the Don’s industrial cities the mainly Russian workers, who were generally supportive of the Bolsheviks, staged a number of protest strikes against the presence of the Volunteers. The workers massacred suspected supporters of the Whites — which in effect meant all the burzhooi — while the Whites carried out equally savage reprisals, putting out the eyes and cutting off the noses of hundreds of strikers. In short, there was a spiral of increasing terror as the cities of the Don descended into civil war.
To a growing number of the local Cossacks, all this appeared to be an alien conflict imported from Russia. The younger Cossacks who had spent the past three years at the Front were especially hostile to the idea of fighting for the Whites. So there was a growing split between Cossack fathers and Cossack sons, as the readers of Sholokhov’s novel And Quiet Flows the Don will recall, and Kaledin’s forces fell apart as the younger Cossacks turned their backs on war. The defence of the Don was thus left to the Volunteer Army and a dwindling number of mainly older Cossacks who remained loyal to Kaledin. Without proper supplies or finance — the Rostov middle classes were reluctant to support the Volunteers — they had little chance of holding off the Reds.12
