A hundred years ago, in 1918, the Civil War began in Russia - one of the most tragic pages in the entire long history of our country. Then it seemed surprising, but after several years of bloody battles and complete chaos in certain territories of the former empire, the Red Army defeated its opponents. Despite the fact that the White movement was led by renowned Russian generals, the Whites were supported by almost all countries of the world - from the USA and Great Britain to Japan, the opponents of the Bolsheviks never managed to regain the power they lost in October 1917. How did it happen that the whites suffered a crushing defeat in the Civil War?
Foreign intervention in Russia
One of the key reasons for the defeat of the White movement was its alliance with foreign states. Almost from the very beginning of the Civil War, white leaders secured the support of most of the then independent states. But this was not enough for them. When British, American, French, Japanese troops landed in the ports of the Russian North, Crimea and the Caucasus, the Far East, the Whites established close cooperation with them. It is no secret that numerous formations of whites received financial, military-technical and organizational assistance from foreign powers, not to mention comprehensive information support.
Of course, the Western powers were deeply indifferent to the political future of the Russian state. The intervention in Russia was carried out by the countries participating in it exclusively in their own political and economic interests. Great Britain, France, Japan, the USA and other countries, which sent their troops to Russia, counted on their "piece of the pie" when dividing the collapsed empire.
For example, the Japanese, who worked closely with Ataman Semyonov and supported the Semyonovites with money and weapons, did not hide their expansionist plans in the Far East and Eastern Siberia. Whites who collaborated with the Japanese command thus turned into guides of Japanese interests. This, by the way, was later perfectly demonstrated by the fate of Ataman Semyonov and his closest entourage, who after the Civil War ended up in the service of the Japanese militarists and were used by the latter to carry out provocative and sabotage activities against the Soviet state.
While Semyonov openly collaborated with the Japanese, Kolchak and Denikin preferred to interact with the Western allies in a less pronounced manner. But, nevertheless, it was already clear to everyone that the White movement received money and weapons from the Western allies. And it was also not without reason - it was not for nothing that Winston Churchill once said that "we did not fight in the interests of Kolchak and Denikin, but that Kolchak and Denikin fought in our interests." The longer the Civil War in Russia lasted, the more our country weakened, young and active people perished, and national wealth was plundered.
Naturally, many true patriots of Russia, including tsarist officers and generals, who had never before been seen in sympathy for the left, were well aware of the threat posed to the country by the intervention, the Civil War and the activities of numerous white directories, rulers and chieftains. Therefore, it was the Bolsheviks and the Red Army that soon became associated with a force capable of reassembling Russia, crumbling at the seams. All true patriots who loved Russia understood this.
Even the Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich Romanov, whose relatives died from the bullets of the Bolsheviks in the Yekaterinburg mansion, wrote in his "Book of Memoirs":
The Russian national interests were guarded by none other than the internationalist Lenin, who in his constant speeches spared no effort to protest against the division of the former Russian Empire, appealing to the working people of the whole world.
Cooperation with the interventionists in the eyes of many Russian patriots looked like a real betrayal. Many military officers and even generals of the old Russian army turned their backs on the White movement. Today, opponents of the Bolsheviks accuse the latter of having made a revolution with the money of the Kaiser, and then Lenin made a separate peace with Germany. But peace is one thing, albeit a separate one, and quite another thing is to call on the Russian land of foreign invaders and actively cooperate with them, while perfectly understanding that foreigners are guided by their own geopolitical and economic interests and in no case want the revival of a strong and a unified Russian state.
Social politics
The February and then the October Revolution were caused by the deepest crisis in social relations, which by that time had matured in Russian society. The second decade of the twentieth century was drawing to a close, and class privileges were preserved in the Russian Empire, the land and the bulk of industry were in private hands, and a very ill-considered policy on the national question was pursued. When revolutionary parties and movements raised slogans of a social nature, they immediately met with support from the peasantry and the working class.
However, after the outbreak of the Civil War, the White movement practically missed the social component. Instead of promising the peasants land in the same way, declaring the transfer of property into the hands of the working people, the whites acted very vaguely on the social issue, their position was vague, and in some places openly antipopular. Many white formations did not disdain looting, had a negative attitude towards the workers and acted very harshly towards them. Much has been written about the massacres of the Kolchak and Semenovites against the civilian population in Siberia.
It was the social component of the Bolshevik Party's policy that was one of the main factors in the coming of the Bolsheviks to power and their ability to keep power in their hands. The bulk of the ordinary population of Russia supported the Bolsheviks and this is an indisputable fact. Moreover, if we look at the map of the events of the Civil War, we will see that the epicenters of the White movement were located on the periphery of the former Russian Empire - in the North Caucasus, in Eastern Siberia and Transbaikalia, in the Crimea, in addition, anti-Bolshevik resistance was very strong in national regions, primarily in Central Asia.
In Central Russia, the whites never managed to gain a foothold. And this was not accidental, since, unlike the peripheral regions where the Cossack population lived, who enjoyed great privileges under the tsars, in Central Russia the whites were virtually deprived of a social base - they were not supported by either the peasantry or the urban working class. But even in those regions where the whites controlled the situation until 1920, numerous partisan formations operated. For example, in Altai, in the Far East, whole rebel armies operated, which ultimately contributed to the defeat of the local White Guard formations.
Personnel problem
In the philistine consciousness, the White movement is invariably associated with the officers of the old Russian army, with "lieutenants and cornet" who fought against the outnumbered commoners. In fact, during the First World War, there was a total personnel renewal of the officer corps of the Russian imperial army. The old cadre officers, almost all of whom came from the nobility and received a high-quality military education, for the most part went out of order in the first months and years of the war.
Further, a serious personnel shortage arose in the army. The shortage of officers was so colossal that the command went on to significantly simplify the assignment of officer ranks. As a result of this personnel renewal, the bulk of the junior officers of the Russian army by 1917 had a bourgeois and peasant origin, among them there were many lower ranks or graduates of civilian educational institutions who had undergone accelerated training as officers. Among them were very many people of democratic and socialist views, who themselves hated the monarchy and were not going to fight for it.
During the Civil War, up to 70% of the officer corps of the old Russian army fought as part of the Red Army. Moreover, in addition to numerous junior officers, many senior and senior officers, including officers of the General Staff, went over to the side of the Reds. It was the active participation of military specialists that allowed the Red Army to quickly turn into a combat-ready armed force, build its own system for training command personnel and technical specialists, and establish control over all kinds of troop services.
The civil war brought forward a lot of new talented commanders in the ranks of the Reds, who either had not previously served in the army at all, or served in the lower or junior officer ranks. It was from these people that the famous galaxy of the famous red commanders of the Civil Army emerged - Budyonny, Chapaev, Frunze, Tukhachevsky and many others. In the White movement, there were practically no talented commanders "from the people", but there were more than enough all kinds of "extraordinary" personalities like Baron Ungern von Sternberg or Ataman Semyonov, who with their "exploits" rather discredited the White Idea in the eyes of the common people.
The fragmentation of whites
Another major reason for the defeat of the White movement was its complete fragmentation, the inability of the majority of white commanders to agree among themselves, to compromise, to form a centralized structure - both military and political. In the White movement, rivalry, the struggle for power and financial flows did not stop.
In terms of the centralization of leadership, the Bolsheviks differed from whites like heaven and earth. Soviet Russia immediately succeeded in building a fairly effective organizational structure for both civil and military control. Despite numerous cases of arbitrariness of commanders, the manifestations of the so-called. "Partisans", the Bolsheviks had a single Red Army, while the Whites had many formations that were loosely connected to each other, and sometimes openly hostile to each other.
The odiousness of the leaders also played a role. The White movement did not put forward a single political and military figure who, in terms of its level and scale, could become a serious competitor not even to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, but also to any of his closest associates. The status of field commanders remained the "ceiling" of white leaders, none of them were attracted to serious politicians.
Lack of ideology and political center
Unlike the Bolsheviks, united by a single and well-developed ideology, who had their own theoreticians and publicists, the White movement was completely amorphous in ideological terms. Its ranks united supporters of mutually exclusive views - from Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks to monarchists and even to such bizarre characters as Roman Ungern von Sternberg, whose political views are generally a separate song.
The lack of a unified ideology had a very detrimental effect not only on the internal situation in the White movement, but also on its support by the population. People simply did not understand what the whites were fighting for. If the Reds fought for some new world, not always and not completely understandable, but new, then the Whites could not clearly explain their position and people were convinced that they were fighting to "live as before." But after all, not everyone, including the well-to-do categories of the population, liked living in tsarist Russia. However, whites did not bother to develop a coherent ideology. Moreover, their environment did not give birth to worthy civil politicians, publicists who could compete with representatives of the Bolsheviks.
The tragic finale of the White movement was, to a large extent, prepared by the Whites themselves, more precisely by their leaders and commanders, who were not able to correctly assess the situation and develop a strategy of action that would be adequate to popular demands.
