General Denikin could not have expected to find himself supreme ruler of these territories. He had only been the Volunteers’ commander since Kornilov’s death — and Alexeev had remained the political leader of the movement. ‘Alexeev’s Army’ was how the Volunteers were still known. But Alexeev was a sick man, and he died in October, leaving Denikin the undisputed military and political leader of the counter-revolution in the south. The constitution of the Volunteer Army, drawn up after the occupation of Ekaterinodar, gave him the powers of a military dictator: Kornilov’s dream had been realized at last. But Denikin was no Kornilov: he lacked the character to play the part of a Generalissimo; and that partly explains the Whites’ defeat.
Denikin was a military man: he came from a soldiers’ family, and had spent all his life in the army. Politics was a foreign country to him, and he approached it from a narrow military perspective. The Academy of the General Staff had not encouraged him to think beyond the three basic articles of faith: Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationalism. ‘For the officers’, he recalled, ‘the structure of the State was a preordained and unshakeable fact, arousing neither doubts nor differences of opinion.’ The experience of 1917 — which taught him that the army fell apart when it dabbled in politics — strengthened Denikin’s apoliticism. It bred in him, as in many officers, a contempt for all politicians. He wanted, in his own words, to keep it immune ‘from the wrangling politicians’ and to establish his ‘own programme on the basis of simple national symbols that could unite everyone’.20
The constitution served Denikin’s aim. This verbose charter was a triumph of form over content, full of legal ideals that were quite impracticable in a civil war. It was, in short, just what one would expect from a constitution written by the Kadets. It promised everything to everyone; and ended up by giving nothing to anyone. All citizens enjoyed equal rights; yet ‘special rights and privileges’ were reserved for the Cossacks. The state was governed by law; yet there were no legal limits on Denikin’s dictatorship (they called him ‘Tsar Anton’). None of the basic political issues facing Russia was confronted seriously. What form of government should it have? Was the Empire to be revived? Were the rights of the landed gentry to be restored? All these questions were buried in the interests of the military campaign.
Perhaps this was understandable given the divisions at Ekaterinodar. A multitude of groups and factions, from the Black Hundreds on the Right to the radical democrats on the Left, vied with each other for political influence over the White movement. None had a base of popular support; yet all strove for a ‘historic role’. They bickered with each other and played at politics. The State Unity Council and the National Centre were the only two groups with any real influence, sharing the posts in Denikin’s government. The former was monarchist and denied the legitimacy of the February Revolution. The latter was Kadet and pledged to restore the Constituent Assembly. It is little wonder that Denikin chose to avoid politics. He saw himself surrounded by scheming politicians, each trying to pull him in one direction or another. He tried to steer a middle course, keeping his pronouncements open and vague so as not to offend anyone, and increasingly withdrew into his own narrow circle of rightwing generals — Romanovsky, Dragomirov and Lukomsky being the most crucial — where the main decisions were made. The Special Council was a sorry phantom of a government. It rubber-stamped decisions already taken by the generals, and buried itself under paper decrees on such vital matters as the postal service or the minute details of finance and supply. Much of its time was taken up with the burning question of whether schools should use the old or the new orthography — and of course it opted for the old spelling. Senior politicians, such as Shulgin and Astrov, would not demean themselves with such work; and their absence from the Special Council downgraded its effectiveness even further.21
During the early days this neglect of politics did not seem to matter. It was enough to place the military campaign before everything else, and to concentrate on promoting vague national symbols as an alternative to the Reds’ propaganda. But later on, when the Whites could aim not just to conquer Russia but also had to try and rule it, this neglect of politics became a disastrous weakness. Their politics lost them the civil war, at least as much as their reverses on the battlefield.
