The genesis of the White movement can be found in the aforementioned Alekseev organization, formed in Petrograd and Moscow in September–October 1917. Over the following months, a stream of these young officers and officer cadets followed the Bykhov generals and other senior commanders of the Russian Army to the Don Cossack capital of Novocherkassk to form the Volunteer Army. More recruits were picked up along the way, and other volunteers were ferried toward the Don by a branch of the Volunteers that was established at Kiev, where the anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian Army of the UNR (and later the Hetmanate Army) acted as a magnet and a (rather unsatisfactory) sanctuary to disaffected officers from Russia. The welcome such a professedly Great Russian nationalist force found among the Don Cossacks, who from February 1917 had been avidly rebuilding their ancient rights of self-government, was not as warm as the White leaders had hoped. Indeed, many young and poor Cossacks who had served at the front (frontoviki) espoused pro-Bolshevik sympathies. So when Red forces overran the Don in early 1918, the Volunteers (numbering fewer than 3,500 men, one in ten of whom was a general) retreated south into the Kuban steppe, facing a freezing ordeal (the aforementioned First Kuban March) and constant battles against pursuing Red forces from the north and Red Guard units assembling in the south from the returning dregs of the Russian Army on the Caucasus Front. Their aim was to unite with forces of the Kuban Cossack Host and to capture the Kuban capital, Ekaterinodar. They achieved the first of these but not the second, with their commander in chief, General Kornilov, killed during the unsuccessful siege in mid-April 1918. With their charismatic icon dead, the Volunteers’ leadership in political affairs passed to General Alekseev, while General Denikin took command of the army.
Denikin soon had the main Volunteer force regroup back on the Don, where Cossack forces under Ataman P. N. Krasnov were clearing the Reds from the Host territory and were about to launch an advance on the strategically vital Volga port of Tsaritsyn.51 Denikin then directed the capture of the important industrial centers of Rostov-on-Don and Taganrog before initiating a Second Kuban Campaign. It commenced on 23 June 1918 and aimed, again, to capture Ekaterinodar, while at the same time conveniently quarantining the pro-Allied Volunteers from encountering the Austro-German interventionists, who were by then investing regions adjacent to the Don region. (German forces had entered Rostov-on-Don itself during the first week of May 1918.) This time, the southward advance of the Volunteers went well, with combined cavalry and infantry attacks snaring a string of railway towns from Rostov to Belaia Glina before finally securing Ekaterinodar on 15 August 1918 and the port of Novorossiisk (26 August 1918). The latter victory allowed scattered White forces in Crimea and South Russia to move across the Black Sea to reinforce the Volunteers. Among them was General P. N. Wrangel, who then led a grinding cavalry campaign across the Kuban and Terek regions to cut the local Reds’ rail communications with the north through the capture of the important junction at Tikhoretskaia (15 July 1918) and subsequently to annihilate pro-Soviet forces and institutions in the North Caucasus by mid-November.52 The victories, however, cost the Volunteers more than 30,000 casualties—among them two more of their totemic figures, General Markov and General M. G. Drozdovskii—while General Alekseev succumbed to illness and died in October.53 The prestige, power, and potential it brought them, however, were among the reasons the Cossacks of the region decided to bury (albeit for later disinterment) their aspirations for autonomy and, on 8 January 1919, to subordinate themselves to Denikin in a united Armed Forces of South Russia. To symbolize this new, pro-Allies partnership, Ataman Kaledin (who had in 1918 exchanged letters with the Kaiser) was replaced as leader of the Don Host by General A. P. Bogaevskii.
Despite the successes of the second half of 1918, Denikin subsequently faced criticism for securing his own rear in the North Caucasus—mopping-up operations that would continue for much of the first half of 1919—rather than deploying all his available forces northward to invest European Russia in what might have been a joint White strategic offensive against the Red center with the forces of Admiral Kolchak, which were advancing from the east. Whether this would have been feasible—or whether (as was to become the case in Siberia) failure to secure the rear would have resulted for the AFSR in an advance that would have misfired as much as that of Kolchak, rather than one that was, for Denikin, very nearly successful—must remain a matter of speculation.54 Nevertheless, with the benefit of hindsight we can at least say that the two major White offensives seem to have been remarkably uncoordinated.
The forces organized by Admiral Kolchak—or, to be more precise, by his advisors with greater experience of land warfare—had their origin in the Siberian Army that had been organized by the Provisional Siberian Government during the summer of 1918. This, in turn, to a significant degree echoed the structures and personnel of the West Siberian Military District of tsarist times—not least because far fewer officers of the Imperial Russian Army had fled to Siberia after the Bolshevik revolution than had fled to South Russia. On the other hand, Kolchak did enjoy the services of many members of the Academy of the General Staff (which had been relocated to Ekaterinburg by the Soviet government in March 1918) who deserted to the anti-Bolsheviks in the wake of the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion. Anti-Bolshevik forces in the east also had the advantage of open (if very distant) access to the outside world through Vladivostok. Allied technical support could be supplied from an early stage, therefore—notably in the shape of the Russian Railway Service Corps—as could military supplies, advice, and advisors. Of the latter, the most notable were General Alfred Knox from Britain and General Maurice Janin from France. Indeed, the latter had been named as commander in chief of all Allied forces (including Russian forces) in the east as early as August 1918 (although jealousies among Kolchak’s staff eventually blocked that posting).
Following a morale-boosting victory by the Siberian Army at Perm, in the northern Urals, in December 1918 (overseen by another foreigner, the mercurial General Radola Gajda of the Czechoslovak Legion) and an extensive recruitment campaign among the Siberian peasantry over the autumn and winter of 1918–1919 (which was intended to raise more than a million men but actually netted considerably less than a 10th of that), Kolchak’s newly dubbed Russian Army stood poised to begin a general offensive. Despite recruiting problems and desertions (notably of Bashkir units, who went over to the Reds en masse in February 1919), it was a much larger force than that of Denikin, mustering close to 700,000 men at its height, although fewer than 150,000 ever saw service at the front.
The order of battle of Kolchak’s forces in early March 1919 consisted of, from north to south: Gajda’s Siberian Army of around 45,000 men (supported by the makeshift Siberian Flotilla on the upper Kama river), with its headquarters at Ekaterinburg; General M. V. Khanzhin’s 42,000-strong Western Army, based at Cheliabinsk and containing units inherited from the People’s Army of Komuch, which was to be reinforced by a new corps under Colonel V. O. Kappel′ as the offensive progressed; and the Southern Army Group of Ataman Dutov (from May 1919 the Southern Army) of some 25,000 men, under General G. A. Belov. South of the Dutov–Belov group were stretched troops of the Orenburg and Urals Cossacks, numbering another 20,000 fighters, who were held up before the Red occupation of Orenburg but whose extreme left flank bulged forward almost to the banks of the lower Volga. Facing them along the Reds’ Eastern Front (again from north to south) were around 120,000 men of the 3rd, 2nd, 5th, 1st, and 4th Red Armies, who were numerically weaker but had many more artillery pieces, reinforced by the powerful Volga–Kama Military Flotilla, who could summon many more reserves from the Soviet center and had an ally in the forces of the Turkestan ASSR that were pushing north along the Orenberg–Tashkent Railway on the Aktiubinsk Front.55