Anton Denikin

Biography

Anton Ivanovich Denikin was born on December 16, 1872, in Szpetal Dolny, near Warsaw, the son of a serf who had been conscripted into the Imperial Army, served for twenty-two years, and risen to the rank of major. The story of his father's rise from serfdom to officialhood shaped Denikin's own sense of what Russia could be: a meritocracy in which talent and service, not birth, determined a man's worth. Denikin entered the military through the Infantry Junker School and rose through the ranks by sheer ability. He distinguished himself in the Russo-Japanese War, and by 1914 was a brigadier general commanding with particular brilliance during the First World War, earning the St. George's Cross multiple times. He served as Chief of Staff to the Supreme Command under Kornilov and barely escaped Bolshevik arrest after the failed Kornilov Affair in September 1917. With Lavr Kornilov and Mikhail Alekseyev, he co-founded the Volunteer Army in Novocherkassk in December 1917 — the nucleus of the White movement in south Russia. Denikin commanded the First Kuban ('Ice') March in early 1918 — a desperate winter retreat with 4,000 men through the frozen steppes, fighting almost daily while temperatures dropped to minus forty degrees. Kornilov was killed during the march; Denikin took command and led the shrunken force back to the Don, where Cossack allies and new volunteers allowed it to rebuild. His great offensive of 1919 came agonizingly close to success: his Armed Forces of South Russia swept through Ukraine, capturing Kiev, Kursk, Voronezh, and Orel, and came within 250 miles of Moscow by October — the closest any White force came to the capital. But Denikin faced insuperable difficulties: the non-Russian peoples he needed as allies were alienated by his insistence on 'one indivisible Russia'; his forces' brutal anti-Semitic pogroms alienated potential Jewish support and outraged Allied opinion; Makhno's anarchist army cut his supply lines from the rear. When the Red counter-offensive came, his armies collapsed with terrifying speed. He resigned command to Wrangel in April 1920 and sailed to exile, eventually settling in France. During the Second World War he refused all collaboration with Nazi Germany and actually encouraged Russian POWs to fight for the Allies. He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1947 while writing his memoirs.

Key Battles