During March and April, at the height of the Kolchak offensive, Denikin’s forces broke out from Rostov to occupy the crucial Donbass coal region and the south-east Ukraine. Some historians have seen this as a critical strategic mistake. Denikin’s original plan had been to strike towards Tsaritsyn in order to link up with Kolchak’s forces. But this plan was abandoned in late March, when the Reds, who were desperate for coal, invaded the Donbass and the northern Don. Faced with the choice between saving the Don or linking up with Kolchak on the Volga, Denikin opted for the former. He had always given top priority to the defence of his Cossack strongholds. That had been the reasoning behind his preference the previous summer to launch a Second Kuban Campaign rather than attack towards Tsaritsyn; and now those same priorities came into play. Denikin’s decision was bitterly opposed by several leading generals, notably Baron Wrangel, the lofty six-foot-six leader of the Caucasian Army, who constantly intrigued against Denikin. Wrangel denounced the decision not to advance towards Tsaritsyn as a ‘betrayal of Kolchak’s troops’, allowing the Reds ‘to defeat us one by one’. Given that Kolchak’s troops in March were barely 200 miles from Tsaritsyn, perhaps Denikin was wrong not to run the risk of losing the Don to link up with them. The Reds were certain that they would be defeated if the two White armies combined. However, it must be said in Denikin’s defence that he was responding to what can only be called a war of genocide against the Cossacks. The Bolsheviks had made it clear that their aim in the northern Don was to unleash ‘mass terror against the rich Cossacks by exterminating them to the last man’ and transferring their land to the Russian peasants. During this campaign of ‘decossackization’, in the early months of 1919, some 12,000 Cossacks, many of them old men, were executed as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ by the tribunals of the invading Red Army.18
It was the spontaneous Cossack uprising against this terror which enabled Denikin to break through. Thousands of Cossacks joined his troops as they advanced northwards in the spring. The main White force in the Donbass was led by General Mai-Maevsky. A chubby pear-shaped man with small piggy eyes and a pince-nez, he was the most unlikely military hero. ‘If he had not worn a uniform,’ Baron Wrangel wrote, ‘you would have taken him for a comedian from a little provincial theatre.’ Mai-Maevsky was notorious for his drunken orgies: by the end of the civil war there were few brothels in southern Russia where he was not known. Yet he was also one of the Whites’ most able generals — a brilliant tactician, physically courageous and idolized by his 12,000 ‘coloured troops’ (so-called because of their multi-coloured caps). Under his command the Volunteer Army advanced from the Donbass into the south-east Ukraine, easily defeating Makhno’s Red partisans on the way. Kharkov was captured on 13 June, Ekaterinoslav on the 22nd, as the Red peasant conscripts ran away at the first sight of these crack White forces. Meanwhile, in one of the most remarkable campaigns of the civil war, Wrangel’s Caucasian Army marched for forty days across the sun-baked south-eastern steppe — and at the end of it captured Tsaritsyn against superior forces on 19 June. The Red defenders of the Volga city fled in panic as soon as they saw Wrangel’s British tanks approach. Forty thousand Reds were captured by the Whites along with a huge store of munitions.19
