The result was a wave of Cossack uprisings — as much out of fear of what the Reds might do as anger at what they had already done — starting in the villages near Novocherkassk. These had always been the richest in the Don and were thus the most exposed to requisitioning and the terror. The Cossacks were driven to revolt by the image of the ‘Bolsheviks’ as the incarnation of all their worst fears and prejudices about ethnic outsiders and the Russian state. Each stanitsa had its own insurgent army, usually organized by the officers and equipped by the Cossack farms. During April these converged on the stanitsa of Zaplavskaya, near Novocherkassk, where there was a strong force of officers and men, to prepare for the liberation of the capital. By the end of April, they had 10,000 cavalrymen. With the Reds distracted by the German advance from Taganrog to Rostov at the start of May, the Cossacks retook Novocherkassk without serious resistance from the exhausted Reds. There they elected a Krug for the Salvation of the Don, led by General Krasnov, their new Ataman, who had led the expedition against Petrograd to restore Kerensky’s rule during the October Days.17
Krasnov looked every inch the Cossack Ataman. He came from a famous Cossack family and, being a great impresario of the ‘Cossack cause’, often played on this lineage. He had been a journalist before the war, and later, in exile, he would make a living as a novelist. Both personae were available to Krasnov the politician. There were no bounds to his historical imagination. He filled his speeches with archaic terms, designed to create the illusion of an ancient Cossack nationhood stretching back to the Middle Ages. By focusing on the glories of the Cossack past, he aimed to unite the Cossacks around the idea of their struggle against the Bolsheviks as a war of national liberation. It was a fancy-dress nationalism, based more on myth than on history, but it was powerful all the same. The ‘All-Great Don Host’, a title which had not been used in official documents since the seventeenth century, was restored on Krasnov’s orders. The personal rule of the Ataman, as well as the Cossacks’ rights and privileges over the non-Cossack population (now condemned as ‘Bolsheviks’ to a man), were upheld by the Don Krug’s Basic Laws. It was a kitsch attempt to return to the Cossack Golden Age of Russian fairy tales. Public buildings hung out the Cossack flag; schoolchildren were ordered to sing Cossack hymns; there was even a special Cossack prayer.18
With the Cossacks in control of the Don, supported by the Germans to the west and the Volunteers to the south, the stage was set for the antiBolshevik forces to consolidate their military hold over the whole of the region; this they did between May and August.
By the middle of June, Krasnov’s Don Army numbered 40,000 soldiers. It was armed by the Germans in exchange for Cossack wheat. With the Reds stretched on the Volga, it successfully completed the reconquest of the Don and created buffer zones in the north towards Voronezh and Tsaritsyn. Meanwhile, the Volunteer Army was reinforced by the arrival of 2,000 troops from the Romanian Front led by Colonel Drozdovsky. It was now in a position to launch a new offensive: but in which direction? Alexeev and Krasnov both wanted Denikin to strike north towards Tsaritsyn on the Volga: Alexeev to link up with the Czechs and the Komuch forces further up the Volga in Samara; Krasnov to lift the threat on the Don from the Red forces based in Tsaritsyn. Had this been done, the combined forces of the Volunteers, Krasnov’s Cossacks, the Czechs and the Komuch might have won the civil war by advancing on Moscow from the vital bridgehead of the Volga. But Denikin stubbornly refused and marched his Volunteers southwards into the wilderness of the Kuban steppe. He wanted to strengthen the White rear by building up an army of Kuban Cossacks. By doing so he missed a vital opportunity to link up with the other antiBolshevik armies. Krasnov’s Cossacks attacked Tsaritsyn on their own later in the autumn; but they could not take it. By the time Denikin finally reached the Volga, during the following summer, his eastern allies were in full retreat and the chance to combine forces had passed for ever.
On the face of it, the Volunteers should never have had the slightest chance of victory in this Second Kuban Campaign. There were only 9,000 of them, as opposed to 80,000 Reds at the start of the campaign in June. But the Reds were cut off from their depots in the north, surrounded by a largely hostile population, and as a consequence their conscript troops were demoralized. The Volunteers, by contrast, were highly disciplined and spurred on by the memory of the Ice March. One-third of their troops at the start of the campaign were exiled Kuban Cossacks fighting for the liberation of their homelands. This proportion grew as the Volunteers advanced into the Kuban, where the local Cossacks, who had suffered under the Reds, either joined the Volunteers or formed their own detachments to fight alongside them. On 18 August, after several weeks of fighting, they finally captured Ekaterinodar. The Reds fled south to Piatigorsk, in the Caucasian mountains, while the Whites extended their control throughout the northern and western Kuban. By November, they had seized control of Stavropol too. From a tiny force of officers during the Ice March, the Volunteers had grown to an army 40,000-strong with a rich territorial base the size of Belgium from which to launch their crusade against the Bolsheviks.19
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General Denikin could not have expected to find himself supreme ruler of these territories. He had only been the Volunteers’ commander since Kornilov’s death — and Alexeev had remained the political leader of the movement. ‘Alexeev’s Army’ was how the Volunteers were still known. But Alexeev was a sick man, and he died in October, leaving Denikin the undisputed military and political leader of the counter-revolution in the south. The constitution of the Volunteer Army, drawn up after the occupation of Ekaterinodar, gave him the powers of a military dictator: Kornilov’s dream had been realized at last. But Denikin was no Kornilov: he lacked the character to play the part of a Generalissimo; and that partly explains the Whites’ defeat.
Denikin was a military man: he came from a soldiers’ family, and had spent all his life in the army. Politics was a foreign country to him, and he approached it from a narrow military perspective. The Academy of the General Staff had not encouraged him to think beyond the three basic articles of faith: Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationalism. ‘For the officers’, he recalled, ‘the structure of the State was a preordained and unshakeable fact, arousing neither doubts nor differences of opinion.’ The experience of 1917 — which taught him that the army fell apart when it dabbled in politics — strengthened Denikin’s apoliticism. It bred in him, as in many officers, a contempt for all politicians. He wanted, in his own words, to keep it immune ‘from the wrangling politicians’ and to establish his ‘own programme on the basis of simple national symbols that could unite everyone’.20
The constitution served Denikin’s aim. This verbose charter was a triumph of form over content, full of legal ideals that were quite impracticable in a civil war. It was, in short, just what one would expect from a constitution written by the Kadets. It promised everything to everyone; and ended up by giving nothing to anyone. All citizens enjoyed equal rights; yet ‘special rights and privileges’ were reserved for the Cossacks. The state was governed by law; yet there were no legal limits on Denikin’s dictatorship (they called him ‘Tsar Anton’). None of the basic political issues facing Russia was confronted seriously. What form of government should it have? Was the Empire to be revived? Were the rights of the landed gentry to be restored? All these questions were buried in the interests of the military campaign.