In rapid pursuit was the Konarmiia, now boasting more than 15,000 horsemen, supported by eight armored trains and its own squadron of aircraft. It and other Red forces—by now vastly outnumbering and outgunning their opponents—captured Rostov-on-Don and Novocherkassk on the same day, 7 January 1920. Meanwhile, the left flank of the AFSR also recoiled from the 12th and 14th Red Armies, as Kiev fell on 16 December 1919 and Odessa on 7 February 1920. The attempted White evacuation of the latter—the third such awful hemorrhage the great port had suffered during the civil wars—was a shambles, with local commander General N. N. Shilling drawing universal criticism for abandoning tens of thousands of retreating AFSR forces and civilians to the Reds.84 The only saving grace for the AFSR was that General I. A. Slashchov’s 3rd Corps of the Volunteers had cut through Makhno’s insurgents in Northern Tauride to reach and then hold the Perekop isthmus, thereby safeguarding the Crimean peninsula as a haven for the fleeing Whites.
The sudden and disastrous White collapse sowed discord among the AFSR leadership and created a sense of disorientation, as participants in the retreat tried to keep track of kaleidoscopic changes in command—and even of where Denikin and his stavka were actually located, as headquarters shifted almost weekly (from Taganrog, to Rostov, to Tikhoretskaia, to Ekaterinodar, and finally to Novorossiisk in the first weeks of 1920). One of Denikin’s first reactions to the collapse was to replace General Mamontov at the head of the Don Army with General S. G. Ulagai, thus infuriating the Don Cossacks (who were already deserting en masse to the Reds, as the latter approached their home territories). In December 1919, Denikin then transferred General Wrangel to the command of the Volunteer Army (replacing the now permanently drunk Mai-Maevskii, who was retired). This was far too late for Wrangel to effect the sort of concentrated Cossack push against Moscow that he had long favored over Denikin’s multipronged Moscow Directive, and the baron was quick to remind Denikin of this—in a typically tactless letter that he sent to his commander in mid-February 1920. Although a recent biographer of Wrangel has highlighted that the baron subsequently censored the letter for publication in his memoirs, omitting passages that he deemed to have been too personal in their attacks on Denikin—expunging, for example, a description of Denikin as a man “poisoned by ambition and the taste of power, surrounded by dishonest flatterers” and one who was “no longer preoccupied with saving the country, but only with preserving power”85—Denikin would, of course, have seen the original version and was consequently enraged. Moreover, and most disloyally, the contents of the letter had been leaked by Wrangel to the press and were published widely. Rumours rapidly spread that Wrangel was about to stage a coup against Denikin, who dismissed Wrangel from his post on 2 January 1920. Such bickering, however, seriously undermined any attempt by the AFSR to hold a line along the River Manych.
There were feuds at this time within the Red ranks also: the burgeoning cult of Budyennyi sparked jealousies; Colenel V. I. Shorin was suddenly dismissed from the command of the South-East Front for having taken too long to recapture Tsaritsyn (which finally fell on 2 January 1920); and the charismatic cavalryman B. M. Dumenko, a rival to Budennyi as the “first saber of the republic” and chief inspirer of the liberation of the Don over the previous months, was arrested and shot for involvement in the mysterious death of his military commissar. Moreover, Red forces were now very far from their home territories, were occupying generally hostile Cossack lands (and were poised to attack more of the same), and were exhausted after their 450-mile counterthrust against the Whites. But the situation in the White camp was truly chaotic, with Cossack separatism once again raising its head in the form of the gathering of an All-Cossack Supreme Krug in January 1920 (with representatives of the Don, Kuban, Terek, Astrakhan, and other hosts).86 To make matters worse, just as Kolchak’s Siberia had sprouted a number of anti-White SR organizations as the Russian Army collapsed in late 1919, in early 1920 an unexpected second blossoming of the Democratic Counter-Revolution overran much of the rear of the AFSR, especially in the wooded hills of the coastal Black Sea region of the North Caucasus, where there lurked thousands of deserters and refugees from all sorts of civil-war armies that were being loosely organized by fugitive SRs. This self-styled “Green” movement was coordinated from November 1919 onward by a united Black Sea Liberation Committee.87
For the White movement in 1920, then, February may have been the cruelest month. On a single day, 7 February 1920, Supreme Ruler Admiral Kolchak was executed at Irkutsk while the last White toehold in Ukraine was lost with the botched evacuation of Odessa. Meanwhile, the internment of Iudenich’s forces in Estonia was completed. On 10 February 1920, Red forces captured Krasnovodsk (today’s Türkmenbaşy), on the shores of the eastern Caspian, consolidating Soviet power in Central Asia and forcing onward the withered remnants of the 15,000 Urals Cossacks who had departed from their base at Gur′ev on 5 January 1920. Finally, on 19–21 February 1920, a thousand White soldiers were evacuated from Arkhangel′sk, leaving tens of thousands more to their fate. Denikin did manage a brief resurgence, as Don Cossack forces recaptured Rostov on 20 February 1920, but it was a false dawn, and for the remainder of that bitterly cold and fateful month, his forces retreated toward the Kuban. Harried, however, by a newly reorganized, 160,000-strong Caucasian Front of the Red Army (commanded by the energetic M. N. Tukhachevskii), and with the 1st Cavalry Army pressing in along the Tsaritsyn–Ekaterinodar railway on their right flank, there was nothing Denikin’s forces could do when they got to the Kuban other than immediately abandon its capital, Ekaterinodar, without a fight, on 17 March and then make for the last remaining major port in anti-Bolshevik hands, Novorossiisk. Their fading hope was of evacuation by sea, before that city fell either to the Reds advancing on it along the Rostov railway from the north or to the SR-insurgent forces of the Black Sea Liberation Committee approaching it from the south (who had captured Tuapse, 75 miles south of Novorossiisk, on 17 February 1920). That dream was shattered by a shortage of shipping (although the Allies provided some vessels) and the all-pervading chaos. Novorossiisk in February 1920 was inundated by “a sea of wounded, sick and refugees,” according to one eyewitness: “Bodies lay in all sorts of corners, while the hospitals were besieged by sick, frozen and hungry people for whom nothing could be done, so that those stricken with typhus remained just where they happened to fall. . . . The whole foreshore was packed with people, carts and animals—whole families on their knees, praying for help, while the criminals of the underworld came out and in the confusion preyed on the elderly and defenceless.”88 About 35,000 White soldiers and casualties did eventually find berths on Russian and Allied vessels by the last days of March, but almost as many again (and untold numbers of civilians) were captured in the port when the Red Army arrived on 26–27 March 1920. This was only the beginning: 60,000 more Whites were surrounded and captured at Sochi in April 1920, by which time the SR–Green forces there had also been tamed by the Red Army, while a guerrilla war in the Kuban region—initiated by White fugitives, who adopted the grandiose title of the People’s Army for the Regeneration of Russia, commanded by General M. A. Fostikov—achieved little more than to provoke further Red retributions and massacres.89