The White leaders — and this applies to Siberia as much as it does to the South — failed to adapt to the new revolutionary world in which the civil war had to be fought. They made no real effort to develop policies that might appeal to the peasants or the national minorities, although the support of both was essential. They were too firmly rooted in the old Russia. The vital importance of propaganda and local political structures passed them by almost completely: dominated by the narrow outlook of the army, they could not understand the need for mass mobilization in a civil war. It was not until 1919, and then only on the Allies’ insistence, that the Whites began to devote any real resources to their own machinery of propaganda. And even then the whole thing was approached in a low-key and amateurish fashion compared with the brilliant propaganda of the Reds. OSVAG, Denikin’s propaganda agency, was originally set up within the Department of Foreign Affairs: it saw its main aim as to convince the Allies, rather than the Russian people, of the merits of the White cause, and very little of its material ever reached the factories or the villages. It was grossly under-financed and under-valued by the White leaders, not least because it opposed their Rightist views, and for this reason the generals often claimed that it was staffed by ‘draft-dodgers’, ‘socialists’ and ‘Jews’.22
The Whites, in short, failed to understand the nature of the war in which they were engaged. They assumed that it could be fought in the manner of a conventional nineteenth-century conflict: by placing the army above politics. Yet this was to ignore the basic fact that in any civil or total war the ability of the armies to mobilize the population’s resources in the territories which they occupied was bound to determine the outcome of the struggle. Their capacity to do this was precisely a question of politics: terror alone was not enough; it was also a question of tapping mass support or at least exploiting mass opposition to the enemy. This was especially so in the major campaigns of the Russian civil war (in 1919) when both the Reds and the Whites grew from small partisan forces to mass conscript armies which depended on the mobilization of the peasantry and its resources. For neither side could count on the peasantry’s support, and they were both weakened by desertion and peasant revolts in the rear which were attributable as much to political failure as to military exactions.
The Whites failed to develop a viable politics for the task of democratic mobilization. On the major policy questions — land and nationalities — they drew up voluminous but non-committal bureaucratic projects for future debate. Everything was put off until the Constituent Assembly had been reconvened; and then, under the pressure of the Rightists, the Constituent Assembly itself was postponed. The Whites could not free themselves from the bureaucratic customs of the old regime. They adopted a dead and legalistic approach to a revolutionary situation that cried out for bold popular reforms. They saw themselves as the representatives of the old Russian state in exile and postponed all politics until military victory had returned them to the old capital; they never understood that victory itself was dependent on forging a new type of state.
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One of the Volunteers’ most pressing problems was their relationship with the Cossacks. The White generals were Russian centralists. But the Don and Kuban Cossacks both wanted to establish independent states. They even sent their own unofficial representatives to the Versailles Peace Conference in an unsuccessful effort to get the backing of the Western Powers. Given their military dependence on the Cossacks, the Whites should have tried to placate them. Yet they never even came close to satisfying their demands. They looked on the Cossacks as ordinary Russians and dismissed their nationalism as the work of a few extremists. The Kuban government, led in the main by chauvinists and demagogues, flexed its muscles in an effort to behave like a sovereign power. It banned Russian immigration to the Kuban, closed its borders to exports, and took control of the railways. Such actions were a constant thorn in the side of the Volunteers. To keep the army fed and equipped, the Whites were forced to requisition foodstuffs from Cossack settlements, riding roughshod over the local organs of self-rule, all grist to the mill of the Cossack national leaders.
