Amid this chaos, Kolchak and his staff proceeded slowly toward Irkutsk by train. On 4 January 1920, the admiral abdicated, passed supreme authority to General Denikin in South Russia, and somewhat bizarrely, named as commander of forces in the Far East none other than Ataman Semenov—whose appetite for warlordism remained unrivaled in the civil wars and who had caused nothing but trouble for the Omsk regime.66 Perhaps the admiral believed that his own presence in the region might temper Semenov’s penchant for brutality, for Kolchak believed (rightly) that he had secured Allied guarantees for the safe passage of his trains into Transbaikalia. At Irkutsk, however, he was treacherously betrayed by the Czechs, who handed over the erstwhile supreme ruler (and the remainder of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve that was on board his echelon) to the SR-dominated Political Center that had seized control of the city. The admiral was imprisoned, interrogated, and eventually, on 7 February 1920, executed by the Cheka, local Bolsheviks having removed the Political Center from power.67 Those remaining White forces who had survived what amounted to the longest military retreat in military history then skirted Red Irkutsk and, beyond Baikal, were mostly incorporated into Semenov’s Far Eastern (White) Army.
As Kolchak’s forces retreated in May–June 1919, the AFSR was preparing its own advance, having been delayed by having to subdue the remnants of the 11th and 12th Red Armies in the North Caucasus while fending off an advance of the Reds’ Southern Front that had recaptured Rostov in January 1919. On the other hand, during the first half of 1919 Allied aid was flowing into South Russia; it would eventually amount to 200,000 rifles and 500,000,000 rounds of ammunition, over 1,000 heavy guns and 6,200 machine guns, as well as around 60 tanks and 168 aircraft (together with vital training crews and engineers and spare parts). Also, a ruthless Red campaign of “de-Cossackization” had inspired another Cossack uprising on the northern Don in March, destabilizing the Red front, while to the west any meaningful pressure on Denikin’s left flank was dissipated when forces commanded by the anarchist Nestor Makhno and by Ataman Nykyfor Hryhoriiv, who were nominally allies of the Reds, both turned against Moscow.68 So, having cleared the Reds from the Don region in May–June 1919 (in a series of cavalry raids mounted by General V. Z. Mai-Maevskii), having welcomed into his ranks one of the most prominent of deserters from the Reds (Colonel N. D. Vsevolodov, commander of the 9th Red Army), and having finally captured Tsaritsyn on 30 June 1919, on 3 July 1919 Denikin issued one of the most fateful orders of the civil wars: his “Moscow Directive.” According to that order, the AFSR was instructed to move on to a general advance, along the network of railway lines converging on the ancient capital—a strategic offensive aimed at “the occupation of the heart of Russia, Moscow.” To that end, the Volunteer Army was to progress on a line through Kursk, Orel, and Tula to Moscow; the Don Army was to pass through Voronezh and Riazan′ to Moscow; and the Caucasian Army (of Kuban Cossacks) was to move in a loop from Tsaritsyn through Saratov, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Vladimir to Moscow.69 To some, including General Wrangel (who had overseen the Kuban Army’s capture of Tsaritsyn), an advance on such a broad front smacked of recklessness, but Denikin was probably right to gamble on a repeat of the sort of impulsive victory the Volunteers had already pulled off—by sheer force of will, time and time again, and against numerically superior forces—before the Red Army’s rich and populous base territory could produce numbers of recruits and weapons that no number of appeals to the “White idea” could outgun.
Interestingly, Denikin’s order made no mention of operations west of the River Dnepr, which he clearly intended to act as a defensive barrier on the left flank of the AFSR (and perhaps as a cordon against the Ukrainian anarchy that seemed to infect all who came in contact with it), but it was in the nature of the civil wars’ chaos that it was beyond the Dnepr, in right-bank Ukraine, that many initial AFSR successes actually came. As the Red Ukrainian Front shattered and the 14th Red Army disintegrated, White forces captured Poltava (29 July 1919), Kherson, and Nikolaev (both 18 August 1919). On 23 August 1919, assisted by marines landed by the Black Sea Fleet, White forces also captured the key port of Odessa and a week later entered the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.70
A second impressive White operation launched in these weeks was also absent from the Moscow Directive (which might suggest that Denikin’s control of the AFSR was less complete than he might have wished). On 10 August 1919, taking advantage of a gap in the Reds’ Southern Front at Novokhopersk between the 8th and 9th Red Armies, General K. K. Mamontov launched an immensely damaging excursion of Cossack forces (the 4th Don Cavalry Corps) into the rear of the Red lines (the “Mamontov raid”), capturing Tambov (on 18 August 1919, and almost netting Trotsky himself in the process); wrecking lines of communication to the Red’s Southern Front; and forcing the Soviet authorities to declare a state of siege across a broad region encompassing Riazan′, Tula, Orel′, Voronezh, Tambov, and Penza provinces. For one day (11–12 September 1919), Mamontov even occupied the city of Voronezh, where his larcenous troops made merry and looted everything they could carry, as they had throughout the operation.71 Rather less successful was the push north from Tsaritsyn of Wrangel’s Caucasian Army, which suffered from a lack of supplies and from the absence of a north–south railway along the Volga and soon had to retreat. That sector was also being rapidly reinforced by the Reds with units switched from the Eastern Front (notably, most of the complement of the former 2nd Red Army). Perhaps key here, though, was the reluctance of the Kuban Cossacks to deploy their forces in regions so far removed from their home territory, despite several personal appeals from Wrangel to the Kuban ataman, General V. G. Naumenko.72 This strained relationship with the Cossacks, whose interests remained local (when they did not stretch to pillage and rapine) was the Achilles’ heel of the AFSR. Meanwhile, Wrangel’s force’s intermittent contacts on the left bank of the Volga with outliers of Kolchak’s Urals Army only sharpened a bitter sense of what might have been had the southern and Siberian White armies been able to combine effectively (albeit that, as mentioned above, Kolchak’s Urals Army was, by this stage, entirely isolated from his retreating Russian Army).
With its left flank fanning out across Ukraine and its right flank stalled on the Volga, the AFSR’s double-pronged spearhead was now formed by the Volunteer Army and the Don Army. Their departure north was delayed by a series of Red counterattacks in August–September. Nevertheless, in late September, the great Moscow offensive of the AFSR got properly under way, with its spine along the Khar′kov–Kursk–Orel–Tula–Moscow railway and its mailed fist consisting of the crack divisions of the Volunteer Army—notably its “colorful units” (the Drozdovtsy, Kornilovtsy, and Markovtsy), named for the fallen heroes of 1918.73 Kursk was captured on 20 September 1919, with Red units deserting en masse to Mai-Maevskii’s forces, and on 14 October 1919, the city of Orel fell to the Kornilovtsy, placing the White vanguard just over 200 miles from Moscow, primed to advance farther and anticipating the opportunity to rearm en route, as their forces passed through the city of Tula, home of the arsenal founded by Peter the Great 200 years earlier. On the Volunteers’ right flank, meanwhile, General Shkuro captured Voronezh on 30 September 1919 and welcomed the Don Army into the city a few days later.