If you haven't read up on the Russian Revolution and Russian Civil War, you may not have heard
of the White movement and White Army nor the Russian Liberation Army. Basically,
the White movement and its combined arms, known as the White Army,
stood in opposition to Bolsheviks in the Revolution and Civil War,
and after the Bolsheviks took root and established the Soviet Union, many former members of the White
movement and Army formed smaller anti-Soviet organisations, such as the Liberation Army.
Along with many other anti-Soviet forces, the Liberation Army force fought against the USSR in
the Second World War, mostly under Nazi flags. In this video, we'll discuss this in greater detail.
So, before we discuss the Whites, just what was this "Revolution"?
The Russian Revolution was a period of social and political upheaval in what was then the Russian
Empire, and the Russian Civil War was the violent conflict which ensued. In 1917, the final year of
the Great War, two marked revolutions occurred -- one in February and the other in October.
In the February Revolution, Russians massed in the capital city Petrograd, now Saint Petersburg,
and protested the Russian monarchy, inciting Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate, and ending the Romanov
dynasty and Russian Empire. In the monarch's place, a provisional government was established.
As this government favoured aristocracy and capitalism, the soldiers and working-class
weren't satisfied, and they stirred unrest in a network of socialist political organisations
known as "Soviets." One of such organisations were the Bolsheviks, which was spearheaded by Vladimir
Ilyich Ulyanov or "Lenin," a revolutionist who fought to pull Russia out of the Great War.
After the provisional government chose to keep fighting the war,
against Lenin's behest, the Bolsheviks transformed their workers' militias into
a paramilitary volunteer force known as the Red Guards and later the Red Army,
and in October 1917, they overthrew the provisional government and pulled Russia
out of World War I with the signing of the Russo-German Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
The Bolsheviks enforced their rule with violence, and this incited counter-revolutionary
organisations to step up. There were many such organisations, each with varying
political stances. Some favoured monarchism, others republicanism, liberalism, capitalism,
alternative forms of socialism, and a range of other isms. But most of them fed into the stream
of the big-tent "White movement" and its army, which was reinforced by
Bolshevik-fearing foreign nations, including the Allied forces of the now-ended Great War.
The Civil War which ensued resulted in the defeat of the Whites by the Reds,
and the maturation of Bolshevism in the form of the Soviet Union,
and by 1923, between 7 and 12 million people had become casualties of this devastating revolution.
So who exactly were the Whites, what did they want, and what happened to them?
Well, it's important to understand that the White movement was first and foremost
a political movement without unified leadership. Basically, anyone who wanted to shut down Soviet
and Bolshevik organisations and return some semblance of order to Russia was for the Whites.
But this doesn't mean to say the Whites were leaderless and entirely scattered.
Each of its constituent political organisations had its own form of leadership,
cooperating with one another and foreign nations to varying degrees,
and leadership within the White movement's various forces was often assumed by former
military personnel and, thus, reasonably strong. Its major military forces were the
Volunteer Army (which operated in South Russia alongside various other forces,
such as the Don Army, under the "Armed Forces of South Russia" or AFSR) and the Siberian
Army (which fought on the Eastern Front and in Siberia). Though, other forces -- such
as the Northern Army, the Northwestern Army, the West Russian Volunteer Army,
and the People's Army of Komuch -- also fought under the loose banner of the White Army in
the various fronts of the Russian Civil War. Alliances and leadership changed a fair bit,
but in September 1918, after Minister of War Alexander Kolchak was proclaimed
the "Supreme Ruler of Russia," most White Army forces united as the "Russian Army."
Unfortunately, this new army was relatively short-lived. The ASFR, the Russian Army's
largest constituent, was defeated on the Southern Front throughout 1919 and 1920, and between
1920 and 1922, the White Army in Siberia suffered a similar fate,
with Supreme Ruler Kolchak ultimately getting arrested and shot. But these defeats,
the dissolution of the Russian Army, and the White's loss in the Civil War were sort of
preordained. Unlike their Red Army counterparts, they didn't share one single ideology nor goal,
and unification under the late Supreme Leader was not enough.
At its peak, in June 1919, it's estimated that the White Army boasted some 680,000 combat personnel.
But what happened to the remnant organisations of the White movement
after they were defeated and the Bolsheviks established the Soviet Union?
Well, there were hundreds of thousands of them, millions, and many fled Russia and congregated
elsewhere on the continent, such as in Serbia, Yugoslavia, Turkey, China, Germany, and France,
where new anti-Bolshevik and, more broadly, anti-Communist organisations and networks
were formed. Some of these organisations -- such as the Russian All-Military Union,
the Brotherhood of Russian Truth, and the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists -- harried
the Soviet Union with guerilla warfare, to little effect, but some more military-minded
organisations established cadet corps and such to prepare for a larger-scale assault,
a proper military campaign. With that said, some Whites sort of "looked at the bight side"
of the Revolution, establishing movements and organisations such as Eurasianism, Smenovekhovsty,
and the Union of Mladorossi -- the latter being a group which sought a hybrid system of government,
somewhere between a Tsar monarchy and the Soviet Union. But as we said at the start,
there were those who fought the USSR under Nazi flags during the Second World War.
Some of these people were the volunteers of the Russian Liberation Army.
Funnily enough, the Russian Liberation Army or ROA was led by a defected Red Army general
by the name of Andrey Vlasov, with the force often referred to as "the Vlasov army." While it served
the Germans prior to 1944, it wasn't until late in that year that it became an official organisation,
representing the military army of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia
or KONR, which was comprised of anti-Soviet Nazi collaborators
from states now melded into the USSR. Not all of these people were ex-Whites,
however; the majority of them were Soviet POWs who joined the army to avoid rotting in German camps.
Obviously, the Germans could only trust them so much, so at the start, they were
deployed in small units tasked with fighting Soviet partisans and given support duties,
such as driving vehicles or removing the wounded from the battlefield.
By early 1945, however, the ROA earned some trust, and it was soon under the direct command
of KONR. Of note, some ROA soldiers fought the Red Army by Europe's Oder River on April 1945,
but they were ultimately forced to retreat. Then things went south for Germany, and Vlasov was
looking to surrender the ROA to the Allies instead of the Red Army. While a division of the ROA was
marching towards said surrender, they stopped at Prague and helped Czech partisans fight off their
Germans occupiers. The ROA fought Waffen-SS units in the city alongside the partisans,
saving Prague from utter destruction, and after this, Vlasov finally got them to the Allies,
only to be met by US General Patton, who accepted their surrender but handed them over to the
Soviets anyway. Many members of the ROA, including Vlasov, were executed as traitors back in Russia.
Now, the Russian Liberation Army was but one of many anti-Soviet forces which fought alongside
Germany against the USSR in World War II. Indeed, there was an entire Russian Liberation
Movement, whose numbers were attributed to by many ex-Whites. The Liberation Movement,
like the White movement before it, was a loose collective, and the closest it came to formal
unification was the aforementioned Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia
or KONR. With that said, around one million people from states consumed by the USSR
followed the movement, fighting alongside the Germans in auxiliary volunteer units
known as Hilfswilliger or Hiwi. While some 50,000 ended up under the banner of Vlasov
and his Liberation Army, the majority ended up in forces scattered throughout Europe,
with the First Russian National Army, the Russian Protective Corps, and the Russian
National Liberation Army or SS Sturmbrigade RONA being among the more organised of these forces.
One of the few anti-Soviet organisations which didn't seek German sponsorship
was the aforementioned National Alliance of Russian Solidarists or
NTS. When deciding with whom they would side, the NTS's leader, Sergei Baidalakov, said,
"Not with Stalin, not with foreign conquerors, but with the entire
Russian people." The NTS, conceived by White movement veterans from the early 1920s,
persisted as an underground revolutionary movement until the fall of the USSR in 1991.
Overall, both the White movement and the Russian Liberation Movement were loose movements towards a
plethora of similar but by no means identical goals, and without unified, clear goals,
they were both predestined to fail. With that said, the Soviet Union did ultimately dissolve,
and at least some of the ideologies for which these movements stood -- and some of their
constituent organisations, such as the NTS -- contributed to said dissolution to some degree.
Though what do you think? Had you heard about the White movement Army and Liberation Movement
and Army before this? Can you think of any notable battles in which the White
Army or Liberation Army fought? Can you think of any organisations conceived by White veterans
which impacted the dissolution of the USSR? Please share your thoughts in the comments.