How the Whites acquired their name is subject to debate. It is sometimes erroneously assumed to have been due to association with the Bourbons, deposed by the revolution in France in 1792, but the French royal standard was actually blue, with gold fleur-de-lis. The royalist rebels of the Vendée did adopt the White flag as their emblem, during their war against the republic of 1793–1796 (possibly to signal their purity in comparison to the blood-stained masters of the guillotine), but none of the above-named leading Russian Whites were monarchists; indeed, all had disavowed the monarchist cause in 1917 and had welcomed the February Revolution (although this was to a significant degree determined by their despair at the personal failings of Nicholas II), and in terms of their political beliefs tended to be in accord with the more right-wing elements of the Kadets. (The election to the Russian throne of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, by an assembly—the Zemskii sobor′—convened at Vladivostok, by the White General M. K. Diterikhs, in August 1922, should be regarded as a desperate aberration.) A perhaps more credible version has it that the term “Whites” was adopted to invoke the spirit and memory of the formidable General M. D. Skobelev, the hero of Russia’s war against Turkey of 1877–1878, and subsequent campaigns in Central Asia. Skobelev always went into battle on a white horse, wearing a white uniform, and was known to his men as the “White general.” His feats had been mythologized in late-tsarist Russia, and certainly no competitor to him as a symbol of imperial Russian military might had arisen during Russia’s generally miserable performance during the First World War.
What the Whites stood for is no easier to define precisely. The Beloe delo (“White cause”), however, certainly encompassed the aim of establishing a united Russia (a “Russia, One and Indivisible,” as the phrase went) that would have encompassed more or less all of what had been the Russian Empire (although most White leaders accepted the independence of Finland and the independence of Poland, albeit within very constricted borders) and in which the Russian Orthodox Church would play a prominent part. All this, of course, naturally put the White movement on a collision course not only with the Bolsheviks but also with non-Russian (and generally non-Orthodox) nationalists in Poland, Finland, the Baltic lands, Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and elsewhere. In South Russia, it also poisoned their relations with the Cossacks, especially the powerful Don Cossack Host, Kuban Cossack Host, and Terek Cossack Host, who supplied a significant proportion of the Whites’ fighting men but were committed to the autonomy of their territories. (Such factors as these, in the end, may have determined the Whites’ defeat in the civil wars as much as the challenge to them mounted by the Reds.) The Whites were also unabashedly anti-Semitic, and the more virulent Jew-haters among them engaged in pogroms. In this last respect, there is something to be said for General K. V. Sakharov’s assertion that the movement in which he had played a key role was “the first manifestation of fascism.” (Although this claim is complicated by the generally pro-Allied and anti-German orientation of most White leaders during the civil-war period, there was some cooperation between Whites in the Baltic theater—for example, the Western Volunteer Army of Major-General P. R. Bermondt-Avalov—and the proto-fascist German Freikorps in 1919.)
During the civil wars, the Whites also professed a commitment to “non-predetermination”; that is, to passing no permanent laws and signing no treaties or agreements that would determine the future constitution of Russia or what, geographically, belonged to “Russia.” All that was to be decided by a future national assembly. For some White leaders, this was clearly a convenient ruse to postpone the discussion of divisive social, national, and political issues. Also, the question remains unanswered as to what sort of national assembly White leaders might have summoned. (It was unlikely, for example, to have been one elected on such a broad franchise as to have repeated the results of the Constituent Assembly elected in November 1917, which was dominated by socialists; indeed, some Whites expressed themselves genuinely grateful to the Bolsheviks for having broken up that gathering.) Other Whites sincerely believed that priority had to be given to winning the war. Either way, it was not an approach likely to attract the support of those demanding immediate solutions to the blatant social, national, and political inequalities that characterized the former Russian Empire.
If anything, the “White cause” came only to be defined in a nuanced and positive manner (as opposed to meaning merely a desire to overturn the October Revolution) in the emigration (where many Whites ended up), by philosophers such as I. A. Il′in, who gave it a conservative, semimystical, and Slavophile tinge. (Beloe delo, it is worth noting, was the name of an important White émigré journal published in Berlin in the 1920s by General Wrangel’s collaborators in ROVS, Generals P. N. Shatilov and A. A. von Lampe, with the assistance of Il′in.) On the other hand, in the 1920s many other former Whites came to regard the Soviet government as being the legitimate bearer of authority (the “Russian Idea”) in Russia—after all, the Reds had won the civil wars and had largely reconstructed the Russian Empire in the form of the USSR—and cleaved to Smenovekhovstvo, the “Changing Landmarks” movement that sought accommodation between the Whites and the Soviets.
In contemporary Russia, however, Smena vekh has been almost forgotten, whereas the White generals are eulogized and have become the subject of many scholarly (and many more unscholarly) works, as well as works of fiction, feature films, etc. That many of the Whites collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War is, not surprisingly, also not a popular subject of investigation. But the fact remains that von Lampe recruited Russian volunteers for the Wehrmacht, General N. N. Golovin trained them, and General B. A. Shteifon commanded the Russian Corps that fought anti-Nazi partisans across the Balkans, while the former White generals A. P Arkhangel′skii, F. F. Abramov, A. G. Shkuro, and others were prominent in G. G. Vlasov’s collaborationist Committee for the Liberation of Russia.
WHITE SEA KARELIA, PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF. Also known as the Provisional Government of Arkhangelian Karelia, this nationalist, anti-Bolshevik, and (reluctantly) pro-Finnish authority was created on 21 July 1919 at the large Karelian village of Ukhta (now Kalevala) and claimed authority over the area of northern Karelia between the White Sea and the Finnish border (consisting of Kondokskoi, Ukhtinskoi, Voknabolokskoi, Tikhmozerskoi, and Kesmen′skoi volosti). The government initially had six full members and six candidate members and was chaired by S. A. Tikhonov (21 July 1919–25 March 1920), although it was reorganized in March 1920 and subsequently chaired by Kh. A. Tikhanov (25 March 1920–10 December 1920). It received financial subsidies (reportedly to the tune of 8 million Finnish marks) from the Finnish government, which also granted it full diplomatic recognition in May 1920, but was formally committed to independence for Karelia, not union with Finland. (It was the latter, however, that Helsinki desired, the landscape, language, and people of White Sea Karelia—supposedly free of Russian or Swedish “corruption”—having become a core motif of the more romantic brand of Finnish nationalism in the 19th century, as exemplified in Jean Sibelius’s Karelia Suite.) As Red forces marched into the region in March 1920 in the wake of the withdrawal of Allied and White forces from Murmansk and Arkhangel′sk, the regime summoned a regional congress (23 March–1 April 1920) and demanded that they withdraw. Negotiations broke down, however, and the Red Army continued to advance (capturing Ukhta on 18 May 1920); in late June 1920, the government fled to Finland, as the Soviet authorities established the Karelian Workers’ Commune. After the Finnish government had unsuccessfully attempted to utilize its existence as a bargaining chip in the negotiations that resulted in the Treaty of Tartu (14 October 1920), the existence of the Provisional Government of White Sea Karelia formally ended on 10 December 1920, when, with its members still in exile in Finland, it merged with the Olonets government to form the Karelian United Government.