A Historian in a Military Overcoat of a Volunteer

Abstract

The article is a review of the monograph by the St Petersburg historian A. S. Puchenkov “The first year of the Volunteer Army: from the emergence of the Alekseevskaia organization to the formation of the Armed Forces in the South of Russia (November 1917 — December 1918)” (St Petersburg: Vladimir Dal, 2021. 813 p.). The main task of the book is to present the most comprehensive chronology of events. The conclusions of the monograph about the role of key events and figures during the initial stage of the existence of the Volunteer Movement — M. V. Alekseev, A. M. Kaledin, V. V. Shulgin, A. I. Denikin, ataman P. N. Krasnov — are of the greatest interest for the review. This article focuses on the author’s position on debatable issues: on the correctness of choosing the Don as a springboard for gathering the future army;
on the consequences of the decisions concerning the directions and goals of the First and Second Kuban campaigns; on the influence of relationships between leaders on the fate of the movement; on the results of military and state building for the first year of the existence of the Volunteer Movement. The review also makes critical remarks regarding the methods of working sources, too heterogeneous and contradictory to be used as a single explanatory basis. The approach of the author of the monograph is also characterized by his selective attitude to the opinions of eyewitnesses, in particular, more favourable to representatives of the mainstream, pro-Denikin, direction of white émigré literature.

Keywords:

Civil War in Russia, 1918, Volunteer Army, Cossacks of the South of Russia, memoirs of white emigration