White movement is a beautiful myth. Brilliant Russian officers, Lieutenant Golitsyn, cornet Obolensky and all that … In fact, for a huge country of 150 million, which until recently had an army of 12 million, white heroes turned out to be negligible. The overwhelming majority of lieutenants and cornets cowardly evaded the fight or served with the Reds. And the Cossacks fought with the Bolsheviks for almost three years. If not for them, there would be no Civil War in Russia at all.
Disgusting shame
The brightest page in the history of the Volunteer Army was its Ice campaign, led by the icon of the White movement Lavr Kornilov (by the way, a Cossack). On February 9, 1918, about 3500 fighters, including 400 boys - cadets and students, took part in this thousand-verst, eighty-day march. These are all who responded to the numerous appeals of the white leaders (400 of them died in battles during the campaign, 500 were left wounded during the retreat and were stabbed with bayonets by the Red Army).
At the same time, the south of Russia was packed with officers who fled there, but they did not want to fight. At one of the officers' meetings in Novocherkassk, the well-known Don partisan, Colonel Vasily Chernetsov, addressed those present: “Gentlemen, officers, if it is necessary that the Bolsheviks hang me, then I will know why I am dying. But if they kill you, thanks to your inertia, then you will not know why. His words did not reach the officers' ears. Of the 800 participants in that meeting, 30 people actually joined the white units.
Vasily Chernetsov.
General Pyotr Wrangel recalled that only about 200 people came to the last meeting of officers in Rostov at the beginning of February 1918: “The newcomers had a strange appearance: few were in military uniform, the majority in civilian clothes, and then they were obviously dressed“like proletarians”… Shameful meeting … Several dozen entered the army. The rest … Flaunting yesterday on the crowded streets of Rostov in shiny shoulder straps, today crowds began to appear at the station without shoulder straps and badges, with gold buttons ripped off from their greatcoats, hurrying to leave the danger zone. The picture was disgusting."
Chernetsov turned out to be a prophet. He bravely fought with his Cossack detachment and died. And the commandant of Rostov, taken by the Bolsheviks on February 10, Comrade Kalyuzhny, complained about the terrible employment: thousands of officers rushed to him with statements that "they were not in the Volunteer Army" … Many were really shot, and they did not understand why …
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Hate born of envy
The position of the Whites was strengthened only when mass uprisings of the Cossacks broke out on the Don and Kuban. At first, they did not want to oppose the “working people”. They were lulled by the promises of the Bolsheviks. In November 1917, Lenin was ready to recognize the right of the Cossacks to self-determination. In December 1917, the new government, wishing to please the Cossacks, canceled compulsory military service for them, and therefore they did not have to serve for 18 years now and spend from 200 to 500 rubles on their own uniform and horse. In February 1918, the Bolsheviks began work to create an independent Don Soviet Republic. However, everything changed in March. The peasants began to seize the Cossack lands en masse. And the Cossacks immediately revolted.
It was an old bitter conflict. The tsarist regime strongly encouraged the resettlement of peasants to the Cossack regions (mainly from Ukraine). By 1917, there were fewer Cossacks on their territory than aliens. For example, on the Don, the ratio is 46 to 48 percent. But the Cossacks had more land - from 19.3 to 30 dessiatines per farm, the newcomers - 1.3 dessiatines. This gave rise to fierce envy. One of such settlers was the future General Nikolai Simonyak, whose division in January 1943 broke through the blockade of Leningrad. He recalled his childhood in one of the oldest linear villages in the Caucasus - Temizhbekskaya, whose population endured a century-long struggle with the Circassians. But the Simonyak family moved there already in calm times - in 1905.
Nikolay Simonyak.
Such grievances kindled the fire of hatred in 1918. The Cossacks invited the nonresident to join the Cossack estate and were ready to give them 3 million acres of land taken from the landowners. But this seemed not enough to those, and they demanded to divide the Cossack land as well! The Bolsheviks were on their side, and in order to further change the social composition in the troubled territory in their favor, they began to urgently resettle peasants from neighboring Russian provinces to the Don.
The overwhelming majority of nonresidents became red, and the Cossacks - white. According to the well-known statistician Fyodor Shcherbina, in 1917 and 1918 in the Kuban villages and settlements there were 3.2 percent of the Bolsheviks among the Bolsheviks and 96.8 percent of the nonresident.
The peasants against the Cossacks. "Nonresident" peasants who lived in the Cossack villages learned from childhood to hate their neighbors.
One in ten
In the spring of 1918, mass uprisings of the Cossacks began. The first broke out on March 21 in the village of Lugansk (later this oldest and largest Don village and a few more Bolsheviks will give to Ukraine). In March, the Don military circle elected General Pyotr Krasnov as ataman. He recalled that about a third of the insurgent Cossacks did not have boots, and most of them fought barefoot. Their Cossack officers treated ordinary soldiers like brothers, ate from the same pot and always walked in front in chains, and did not sit in the rear, because the Cossacks demanded so. Therefore, there were heavy losses among the command staff. For example, General Mamontov, who became famous for the famous horse raid on the red rear, was wounded three times and everyone was in chains.
The Cossacks demanded that their officers were always ahead.
Throughout the Civil War, the Reds had an overwhelming superiority over the Cossacks. Not surprising. The entire Cossack population of 150 million Russia was 4.4 million people. The Bolsheviks got the warehouses of the tsarist army with ammunition and weapons for 12 million people prepared for the big offensive. It was from there that the famous budenovka, designed by the artist Vasnetsov, and the leather jackets, in which the commissars were dressed (the property from these warehouses was used by the Red Army until 1930). The war demanded a tremendous effort from the Cossacks. In contrast to the officers, it rose without exception - from 16-year-old adolescents to 60-year-olds!.. The slightly wounded did not leave the battlefield. According to Krasnov's recollections, some had five or six wounds and still remained in the ranks. We fought the war in the old Cossack way. They usually attacked at dawn. A liquid chain was going forward in a frontal attack on the Reds, and the main force - the cavalry - at this time, in a roundabout way, entered from the flank or to the rear. Sometimes the Cossacks began the battle with a feigned retreat, the Reds followed in pursuit, and detour detachments attacked them from the rear. Thanks to such tactics, Cossack regiments of 2–3 thousand people destroyed and captured whole Red divisions, 10–15 thousand each. And in general, if the enemy was considered 10 times stronger than the Cossacks, then this was normal for a Cossack offensive. Thanks to such tactics, Cossack regiments of 2–3 thousand people destroyed and captured whole Red divisions, 10–15 thousand each. And in general, if the enemy was considered 10 times stronger than the Cossacks, then this was normal for a Cossack offensive. Thanks to such tactics, Cossack regiments of 2–3 thousand people destroyed and captured whole Red divisions, 10–15 thousand each. And in general, if the enemy was considered 10 times stronger than the Cossacks, then this was normal for a Cossack offensive.
The red budenovka and leather jackets came from the warehouses of the tsarist army.
It is not surprising that Denikin's Volunteer Army, having increased its strength to 9 thousand thanks to the influx of the Kuban Cossacks, with the support of 3.5 thousand Don Cossacks, was able in six months - from June to November 1918 - to defeat the 100-thousand-strong Red forces and clear them of the Kuban region, Black Sea region and most of the Stavropol province.
The workers and peasants for the most part were on the side of the Bolsheviks. As well as a huge part of the former Tsarist officers of the junior and middle rank. It turns out that the Cossacks were the only serious force that the whites could rely on. By January 1919, the Don Cossack army had already reached 76.5 thousand people and made up about half of Denikin's troops! The volunteer army numbered 40 thousand. Formally, it was not considered a Cossack, but 60 percent consisted of Kuban Cossacks. By that time, its famous officer regiments had already suffered colossal losses and were replenished with mobilized peasants and prisoners of the Red Army from a bad life.
And there were also Terek Cossack regiments scattered on different fronts. And most of the usual cavalry units were staffed by stanitsa. In total, 75-85 percent of the White combat units on the Southern Front consisted of Cossacks. And the Bolshevik leaders by the beginning of 1919 understood perfectly well who was opposing them. "The Cossacks only gave and still gives Denikin the opportunity to create a serious force," Lenin wrote. It is not surprising that on January 24, 1919, a secret directive was put into effect on mass terror against the Cossacks, which cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. Old people were exterminated without exception as carriers of customs and traditions.
They tried to destroy the old Cossacks in the first place.
Know what to die for
The Cossacks were for the white generals in their war against the Reds as a source of both strength and weakness. On the one hand, without the Cossacks, they would not have an army at all. And there would not have been a Civil War. It would boil down to the suppression by the Bolsheviks of several local White Guard revolts. On the other hand, the "white matter" was a stranger to the Cossacks. In this war, they defended their lands and their way of life. And they categorically did not want to decide the fate of the rest of Russia, let alone restore the monarchy. Denikin hardly forced the Don army to make maneuvers outside the Don region. And when they reached its borders, having cleared their land of the Reds, the Cossacks stopped - their military enthusiasm immediately disappeared. They did not want to go further to Moscow and fight the Russian people. They did not consider themselves a part of it. To this they were accustomed to the whole way of the previous century, rather closed life.
They had their own world, and they clung to it to the last. At the end of the Civil War, the retreating Cossacks, contrary to common sense, more than once tried to break through to their native places already captured by the Reds. Those who went abroad settled compactly, were engaged in military training, believed that one day they would return and liberate their homeland. By 1926, half of the pre-revolutionary Cossack population remained on the Don, and even less in other Cossack regions. The incipient collectivization led to new victims, repression, and deportations. But for a long time - almost ten years after the Civil War - resistance continued. Riots broke out, Cossack banditry flourished. It was the agony of the doomed, but not broken people who, unlike the lieutenants Golitsyns and the Obolensky cornets, knew what they were dying for.
Philip Mironov.
Isaac Babel.
Authors: Vladlen Chertinov, Vladimir Novikov