Psychologically, the Whites conducted themselves as if nothing had happened, whereas in reality the whole world around them had collapsed, and in order to vanquish the enemy they themselves had to undergo, in a certain sense, a rebirth … Nothing so harmed the ‘White’ movement as this very condition of psychologically staying put in previous circumstances, circumstances which had ceased to exist … Men with this ‘old regime’ psychology were immersed in the raging sea of revolutionary anarchy, and psychologically could not find their bearings in it … In the revolutionary storm that struck Russia in 1917, even out-and-out restorationists had to turn revolutionaries in the psychological sense: because in a revolution only revolutionaries can find their way.8
It was his dislike of this restorationism — and his wounded leg — which prevented Brusilov from coming to the Don, despite several appeals by his old friend Alexeev. While Brusilov was clearly sympathetic to the Whites, he was convinced that their cause ‘was doomed to fail because the Russian people, for better or worse, have chosen the Reds’. There was no point, as he explained to a friend in early April, in trying to put the clock back. ‘I consider the old regime as having been abolished for a very long time.’ Kornilov’s war against the Bolsheviks might have been, as he put it, ‘brave and noble’, but it was also a ‘stupid act’ that was ‘bound to waste a lot of young men’s lives’. No doubt there was a hint of his own dislike for Kornilov in this. But there was also a sense of resignation that made Brusilov reject a civil war — as if, in his mind, the revolution had been planned by God and was part of a divine comedy whose end was not yet clear. As a patriot, Brusilov thought that it was his ‘duty to remain on the people’s side’ — which meant taking no side in the civil war, even if this also meant betraying his own social class and ideology. Meinecke’s dictum of 1919 — ‘I remain, facing the past, a monarchist of the heart, and will become, facing the future, a republican of the mind’ — might just as well have been Brusilov’s.9
The Volunteer Army was an officers’ army. That was its major problem: it never succeeded in attracting the support of the civilian population, not even of private soldiers. When Kornilov was first shown the list of volunteers, he exclaimed in anger: ‘These are all officers, but where are the soldiers?’ Of the first 3,000 volunteers, no more than a dozen were rank-and-file troops. There has never been such a top-heavy army in the history of warfare. Captains and colonels were forced to serve as privates. Major-generals had to make do with the command of a squadron. Constant squabbling over the command posts caused terrible headaches for the General Staff. Senior generals refused to serve under younger officers promoted strictly on merit; monarchists refused to obey commanders opposed to the Tsar. Some refused to serve below the rank they had held in the imperial army, thinking it beneath their dignity. The cafés were full of these idle officers. They dubbed the Volunteers ‘toy soldiers’. Pride in their previous rank and status overcame their desire to fight.10
Even the two men at the head of the movement could not stop themselves from petty bickering. Kornilov had been given the command of the Volunteer Army, while Alexeev was placed in charge of political and financial matters. But the division never really worked and both men got in each other’s way. Relations became so bad that routine communications between them had to be made through messengers, even though their offices were next door to each other. The atmosphere was poisoned by their continuous squabbles, as Roman Gul’ discovered when he tried to enlist at the army’s offices in Novocherkassk. Unaware that the enlistment bureau was run by Alexeev’s supporters, he named a relative of Kornilov as one of his referees. ‘The ensign made a grimace, shrugged his shoulders and said through his teeth: “Look, he doesn’t really belong to our organization.” ’ It was only later that Gul’ learned of the ‘covert struggle and the secret war between the two leaders’. The split had less to do with ideology than with tactics, style and personal rivalry. Both men had accepted the February Revolution and had pledged to restore the Constituent Assembly. But Kornilov was hostile to the Kadet politicians — and indeed to all politicians — whom Alexeev courted. He also favoured bolder tactics — including terrorism inside Soviet Russia — than the conservative Alexeev. ‘Even if we have to burn half of Russia and shed the blood of three-quarters of the population, we shall do it if that is needed to save Russia,’ Kornilov once said. Alexeev and the senior generals looked upon Kornilov as a rabble-rouser and a demagogue, who had only risen to the rank of general after the February Revolution. Yet it was precisely this image of the ‘self-made man’ — an image which Kornilov had cultivated — that made him the idol of the junior officers. It was a clash between the old tsarist principles of seniority and the mass politics of 1917.11
As an army of Russian officers, the Volunteers were always bound to have a problem with their Cossack hosts. The White leaders had made the Don their base because they had presumed the Don Cossacks to be stalwart supporters of the old order. But this owed more to nineteenth-century myths than to twentieth-century realities. In fact the Cossacks were themselves divided, both on regional and generational lines. In the northern districts the Cossacks were smallholders, like the local Russian peasants, and generally supported the ideas advanced by the younger and more democratic Cossack officers for a socialist republic that would unite them with the peasantry. The northerners resented the southern districts, both for their wealth and for the pretensions of their elders to speak for the territory as a whole. The younger and war-weary Cossacks from the Front — influenced by the officers risen from their ranks — were more inclined to find some accord with Bolshevik Russia than to fight against it. Thus it was really only in the southern Don — where the Cossacks were more wealthy and more determined to defend their historic landed privileges against the demands of the Russian peasants for land reform — that the Cossacks were prepared to fight the Bolsheviks. Most of the Cossacks of the northern Don, by contrast, rallied behind the Military Revolutionary Council in Kamenskaia led by the officer, Philip Mironov, who had organized the Don Cossack revolt of 1905–6. Mironov’s aim was an independent socialist republic uniting the Cossacks with the Russian peasants. But in effect his MRC was to serve as a fifth column for the Bolshevik troops as they invaded the Don from the eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, in the Don’s industrial cities the mainly Russian workers, who were generally supportive of the Bolsheviks, staged a number of protest strikes against the presence of the Volunteers. The workers massacred suspected supporters of the Whites — which in effect meant all the burzhooi — while the Whites carried out equally savage reprisals, putting out the eyes and cutting off the noses of hundreds of strikers. In short, there was a spiral of increasing terror as the cities of the Don descended into civil war.
To a growing number of the local Cossacks, all this appeared to be an alien conflict imported from Russia. The younger Cossacks who had spent the past three years at the Front were especially hostile to the idea of fighting for the Whites. So there was a growing split between Cossack fathers and Cossack sons, as the readers of Sholokhov’s novel And Quiet Flows the Don will recall, and Kaledin’s forces fell apart as the younger Cossacks turned their backs on war. The defence of the Don was thus left to the Volunteer Army and a dwindling number of mainly older Cossacks who remained loyal to Kaledin. Without proper supplies or finance — the Rostov middle classes were reluctant to support the Volunteers — they had little chance of holding off the Reds.12