A Memoir History of the Russian Civil War: Volume I: Birth of the Volunteer Army

Book 2: Organization, Espionage and the Struggle for Leadership in the Don Cossack Host

By: Ignatius Hannula, Anton Denikin, Alexander Lukomsky, Boris Suvorin, Afrikan Bogayevsky, Ilya Opritz, Maria Nesterovich-Berg, Nikolai Melnikov, Lvov Polovtsov, Lavr Kornilov

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The "Russian Civil War" (1916-1926) was really a series of wars, uprisings, and massacres between hundreds of political factions, nationalities, and ephemeral political entities that were thrown into chaotic internecine struggle following the implosion of the Russian Empire in 1917. Although popular histories often refer to a singular “Russian Revolution” that destroyed the Empire, this book will demonstrate that World War, Revolution, and Civil War were experienced in tandem and without pause for the participants on the ground.

After the officers and junker-cadets had fled from the revolutionary chaos that had annihilated their command at the front, they found themselves in the presumed safe-haven for the Russian counter-revolution: the Don Cossack Host. Yet, no one who arrived in the two main cities of the Host-Oblast, Rostov and Novocherkassk, found a pre-built force that was ready to be deployed against the politically victorious Bolsheviks. Instead, the officers and junkers who arrived in the Don found that nothing had been prepared, and that all potential leaders of a counter-revolutionary force had become refugees like themselves. This book primarily contains the memoirs of the political and military organizers who arrived at Novocherkassk with nothing and had to fight civic battles merely to remain within the Don Host’s borders.

Book 2 of volume one details the struggle that the leaders of the White movement underwent to establish even rudimentary leadership amongst the civic and social chaos of revolution. Time was limited for the would-be saviors of Russia to act before the Bolsheviks, who were better organized and had centralized leadership, destroyed the nascent army before it could even resist. Book 2 provides the top-down review of how the Volunteer Army was created in its earliest days, and the memoirs chiefly concern the political and supply-side aspects of creating the infant force.



*Notice to Ebook customers, this series contains both footnotes and endnotes. Footnotes are numbered with Arabic numerals, and endnotes are numbered with Roman numerals. Footnotes concern details about the text that might be missed by casual reading, while endnotes serve as a dictionary of historical biography. Both sets of notes appear at the conclusion of the epub file.