For Denikin’s critics, this botched evacuation was the final straw. A generals’ revolt had been steadily gaining ground since the first reverses of the autumn, as it became clear that the Moscow Directive had been a strategic error. On arriving in the Crimea, they now demanded Denikin’s resignation. General Wrangel emerged as the clear successor from a poll of the senior commanders. Because of their repugnance at the idea of ‘electing’ a new leader — that would smack of the democracy that had destroyed the army in 1917 — they prevailed upon Denikin to resign and ‘appoint’ Wrangel as his successor. This was the final insult for Denikin, who had only recently discharged his rival. He was now obliged to recall him from Constantinople, where Wrangel had been in exile. The same British ship that brought Wrangel back to Russia took Denikin to the Turkish capital. He would never see his fatherland again.
Under General Wrangel the Whites made one last stand against the Bolsheviks. But it was obvious from the start that their task was doomed. The Soviet war against Poland, which diverted Red troops from the Southern Front, briefly enabled the Whites to gain a toe-hold in the Crimea. But it was only a matter of time before the Reds turned their attention to them again: and when they did so the outcome was never really in doubt. To all intents and purposes, the Whites were defeated in April 1920.
What were the fundamental reasons for their failure? The White émigré communities would agonize for years over this question. Historians whose views are broadly sympathetic to the White cause have often stressed the ‘objective factors’ that were said to have stacked the odds against them.46 The Reds had an overwhelming superiority of numbers, they controlled the vast terrain of central Russia with its prestigious capitals, most of the country’s industry and the core of its railway network, which enabled them to shift their forces from one Front to another. The Whites, by contrast, were divided between several different Fronts, which made it difficult to co-ordinate their operations; and they were dependent on the untrustworthy Allies for much of their supplies. Other historians have stressed the strategic errors of the Whites, the Moscow Directive foremost among them, and the Reds’ superior leadership, commitment and discipline.
All these factors were no doubt relevant — and in a conventional war they might well have been enough to explain the outcome. But the Russian civil war was a very different sort of war. It was fought between armies which could count neither on the loyalty of their mostly conscript troops nor on the support of the civilian population within the territories they claimed to control. Most people wanted nothing to do with the civil war: they kept their heads down and tried to remain neutral. As one Jew told Babel, all the armies claimed to be fighting for justice, but all of them pillaged just the same.47 By 1920, when Russia was reduced to the brink of starvation, many people would no doubt have welcomed any ‘tsar’ so long as he could provide them with bread. Both the Reds and the Whites were constantly crippled by mass desertion, by the breakdown of supplies, by strikes and peasant revolts in the rear. But their ability to maintain their campaigns in spite of all these problems depended less on military factors than on political ones. It was essentially a question of political organization and mass mobilization. Terror of course also played a role. But by itself terror was not enough — the people were too many and the regimes too weak to apply it everywhere — and, in any case, terror often turned out to be counter-productive.
Here the Reds had one crucial advantage that enabled them to get more soldiers on to the battlefield when it really mattered: they could claim to be defending ‘the revolution’ — a conveniently polyvalent symbol on to which the people could project their own ideals. Being able to fight under the Red Flag gave the Bolsheviks a decisive advantage. Its symbolic power largely accounts for the fact that the peasants, including hundreds of thousands of deserters, rallied to the Red Army during the Whites’ advance towards Moscow in the autumn of 1919. The peasants believed that a White victory would reverse their own revolution on the land. It was only after the final defeat of the Whites that the peasant revolts against the Bolsheviks assumed mass proportions. This same ‘defence of the revolution’ also helps to explain the fact that many workers, despite their complaints against the Bolsheviks, rallied behind the Soviet regime during Yudenich’s advance towards Petrograd.
