On 8 February, six days after a workers’ uprising in the city, the Reds captured Taganrog. They were now less than fifty miles from Rostov. Kaledin’s government was doomed. The Volunteers, seeing no reason to sacrifice their army in the defence of Rostov, prepared to abandon it and march south to the Kuban, where the Cossacks, worried by the Red advance, might be persuaded to join them. Kaledin resigned as Ataman. The same day he shot himself. Ten days later, on 23 February, the Red Army captured Rostov for the second time in three months. Novocherkassk, the Don capital, fell on the 25th. With the conquest of the Don, the Soviet control of Russia was virtually complete. Only the Kuban remained as a major pocket of resistance. Lenin pronounced the civil war over. But in fact it had only just begun.
*
The Ice March, as the Volunteers’ retreat from the Don to the Kuban came to be known, was the heroic epic of the Russian civil war.fn2 The drama of the Ice March became a legend among the Whites and was later retold in countless émigré memoirs. This was the defining moment of the White movement, the moment when the Volunteers became a real army, as if their very survival, against all the odds, bound them together and gave them a strength that far transcended their actual numbers.
On 23 February, as the Soviet forces entered Rostov, Kornilov led off his Volunteers, some 4,000 highly trained soldiers and officers, armed with no more than a rifle each and a few cannons, across the frozen steppelands of the Don. They marched in single file, a thin black line in the vast snow-covered steppe. Their long civilian tail — bankers, politicians, university professors, journalists, nurses and the wives and children of the officers — slowed them down. This was the bourgeoisie of Rostov on the run. They preferred this cruel journey to staying behind and running the risk of falling victim to the Bolsheviks. The Ice Marchers marched by day and night avoiding the railways and the settlements, where the population was likely to be hostile. The wounded and the sick were left behind. Many of them shot themselves rather than run the risk of being captured by the Reds.
General Lukomsky, whose group separated from the main column, was taken captive by the Russian villagers of Guliai-Borisov and brought before a Revolutionary Tribunal. Lukomsky tried to convince the villagers that he was a travelling businessman, but this was hardly likely to win him any friends, and they called for the burzhooi to be shot. But Lukomsky was able to escape in the confusion, when just before his scheduled execution the villagers beat to death two Volunteers and began to fight among themselves for their boots. Whilst waiting to be executed, Lukomsky had seen his own grave being dug, and had taken some cyanide pills which he had had with him since his imprisonment in the Bykhov Monastery. Luckily for him, they had no effect.13
The deeper the Whites moved into the steppe, the more they resorted to terror against a hostile population. Their Ice March left a trail of blood. It was perhaps unavoidable, given the Volunteers’ desperate need for food and the reluctance of the peasants to give it to them. The Whites were stranded in a Red peasant sea. But there was also an element of sheer class war and revenge in their violence, as in so many acts of the White Terror, which was a mirror image of the class resentment and hatred that drove the Red Terror. Terror lay at the heart of both regimes. The Whites were the avengers of those who had suffered at the hands of the revolution. As Wrangel later wrote, ‘we had not brought pardon and peace with us, but only the cruel sword of vengeance’. Most of the officers were landowners’ sons, who, like Gul’, had lost their inheritance to the peasantry. They had every reason to seek vengeance — not just against the despised peasantry but against the ‘Bolshevik’ Jews and intellectuals who had stirred them up. One of the worst White atrocities during the Ice March took place in the village of Lezhanka. It was inhabited by Russian peasants well known for their revolutionary sympathies. Roman Gul’ watched in horror as his fellow officers brutally slaughtered sixty peasants, many of them old men and women, in a reprisal for the Red Terror in Rostov. Hundreds of peasants were stripped bare and whipped while the Volunteers stood around and laughed. Gul’ met one poor peasant woman — she cooked him breakfast in her hut — who had lost her husband and three sons. All of them had been shot as ‘Bolsheviks’. This was a rude disillusionment for Gul’, who had joined the White movement under the illusion that it was fighting for democratic ideals betrayed by the Bolsheviks. He began to wonder if ‘the Whites were in fact any better than the Reds’.14
