REVIEW: Always With Honor – Pyotr Wrangel (Mystery Grove, 2020)
“What guarantee had we that those who needed us at this particular time would not abandon us at the critical moment? Had we the time to become strong enough to be able to continue the Struggle with only our own forces, if need be, when this moment came?
The future was still uncertain, and it was better not to investigate it too closely, we had no choice—we had to go on fighting as long as we had the strength.”1
So expresses Pyotr Wrangel, describing the situation of the White Russians in July of 1920. The situation was grim, despite some victories both politically and on the battlefield. His weariness, however, applies to the whole of the Revolution and subsequent Civil War. Indeed, where Wrangel and his compatriots spoke of that war in Russia deciding the fate of Europe, he spoke with a prescience that only an astute observer enthralled in the chaos of the Russian disintegration could.
Always With Honor is the culmination of that man’s experiences in the years between 1916 and 1922. Most of the book covers 1919-1920, in fact, with very little editorializing about the events at hand. This is somewhat impressive, considering that, as one of the more popular generals of the White Russian army first, and later, Commander-in-Chief of the entire effort, he was a pivotal figure in the Russian Civil War.
The book is succinct in its direction. Wrangel describes his experiences in the war with zero literary flourish and hardly dwells on descriptions of battle or the experience of command. Much of the book reads like a report, actually, lapsing into the territory of memoir and reflection only in stretches detailing his personal relationships with fellow generals or friends. He frequently includes letters, addresses, and correspondence in their entirety, finding it easier to simply copy them into the manuscript than to summarize their contents.
Amusingly, this makes the volume all the more relevant to today, as we watch the American Empire lurch with startling irreverence toward the sort of instability in Russia that characterized the days before Czar’s abdication in 1917. For this reason, this will be as much a review of Always With Honor as it will be a look at distilling Wrangel’s experiences in it into something of a takeaway for reactionaries going forward.
It is quite obvious that there are many differences between the state of Russia in January of 1917 and that of America in January of 2021; likewise are there differences in the nature of the revolution we’re watching unfold across the spectrum of American life. The Bolsheviks were not the same as the radical leftists we see today, although it could be argued that we simply haven’t seen the ascendancy of our own version. The Bolsheviks were, after all, a fairly obscure obscure group of radicals until only the year leading up to the October Revolution.
Nonetheless, the extent to which the American Empire has become a hollowed-out Frankenstein’s monster of international interests and global oligarchs makes it a very different place from Russia’s old world-style aristocratic monarchy, even as progressive as it was for its time. The revolution of 1918, like the Spanish Civil War some twenty years later, can be treated like historical road maps of what to expect in the coming years, but they aren’t direct analogues. Every revolution follows the same general template, but none of them unfold in identical fashion.
Revolution
The revolution in Russia began as, perhaps, most of them do: with a quiet, stunned, surreal sense of confused denial. Too often we are informed by history textbooks on the subjects of dramatic social upheaval, written with the benefit of hindsight, and which couch what occurs in epochal language. This can contort our vision of what revolution actually is, so that when one actually starts to get going, it’s confused as being anything other than what it is. “This can’t be happening,” a victim will say to himself as he stands before a firing squad, “revolutions are things that only occur in history books.” The lie of the end of history has lulled us moderns into a catastrophic false sense of security.
Although much closer to the revolutionary era of the nineteenth century than we are today, the sentiments of the ruling establishment in Russia were not altogether that different. When the violence actually began, few knew what was even going on, and most assumed it to have been a localized phenomenon in St. Petersburg and Moscow. One could be forgiven for intuitively assuming that the abdication of the Czar foreshadowed at least some of the calamity that was to follow, yet even officials in the army didn’t seem to think this was the case. Wrangel notes how, upon being informed of the news of the abdication, his colleague General Krymov “took an optimistic view of things, believing that we were on the eve of a renaissance and not a disaster.”2 Wrangel himself, of course, did not share the enthusiasm.
In the wake of the Czar, a liberal provisional government was somewhat infamously established as a means of transferring power. What this really meant was that the previously established bureaucracy now had no checks on it, and that the administration once distantly overseen by the authority of royalty was now subjected to the disorganized rule of a politically-motivated mob. And this was a problem at both the top and the bottom:
Those who had been forced to be silent for centuries now burned to make up for lost time. In the theatres and the cinemas there was invariably some babbler who would stand on a chair and harangue the audience during the intervals. The Press was overflowing with articles, and it was always the same old story, “the peaceful Revolution,” “the struggle for liberty,” “the safeguarding of the privileges already won.” There was no longer any mention of the welfare of Russia, only the welfare of the “conquests of the Revolution.”3
He continues, and this deserves to be quoted in full:
[The Revolutionaries] had seized the Hotel of the Dancer Kchesinkska in broad daylight, and were preaching peace from its balcony. The Government trembled and took no action. The old ministers and the former higher officials were in prison, not because they had been accused of sedition against the new Government, but simply because such was the good pleasure of the revolutionary democracy.
The Government, or rather the Soviet, suppressed the Conservative newspapers, whilst the Press of the Left continued its campaign against the Army.
[…]
And these gentlemen of the Government, who till recently had been reproaching the Czar for his weakness and despotism, now showed themselves to be far weaker, far more irresolute than he had been, and much more foolish than the high officials of the regime they had overthrown.4
Seizing buildings, pitching their cause as fundamentally peaceful, organizing political committees and meetings, destroying right-leaning press—sounds familiar! And this is after the breakdown had already started, but in that mysterious period before lines of supply and the overall sense of civic order had completely collapsed. Although the Czar’s abdication had marked a turning point in Russian history, those in power assumed that some mild restructuring would appease the radicals that stood on boxes in the streets and organized meetings in pubs. Obviously, it didn’t. Even when they took over buildings, the government did nothing; the obviousness of the situation was tempered by their own incredulity.
Where there was revolutionary fervor in the urban centers of Russian power, there was already a civil war beyond its immediate sight. Wrangel’s experiences in the capital harshly contrasted with the war on the frontier. The army had already begun to disintegrate, as the confusion at the upper echelons of Russian government quickly led to various segments of it pursuing their own agendas. The army, however, came under the gun of extremist elements of the government.
This confusion directly contributed to the relative ease with which the Bolshevists took power in November. The extremists having won, there was nothing stopping them from tearing the old army completely apart. “Most of the officers had been loyal to their duty and their colors until the last, and had been present at the dissolution of their regiments and the collapse of the Army,” Wrangel writes, as what was left of the army now existed as a collection of men in direct opposition to a radically Bolshevist government.5
The organization of the Volunteer Army under Denikin marked one of the beginnings of the Russian Civil War. Wrangel reports on the brief period of confusion between this event and the success of the October Revolution in chapter three: Under the Yoke of Bolshevism. Suffice it to say that the Bolshevists considered the Russian country not a land to be ruled, but a nation to be pillaged, raped, purged, tortured, and murdered.
At the beginning of the Civil War, before the Bolshevists had begun raising recruits, their army had been composed solely of escaped convicts, out-and-out riff-raff and the scum of the old Army. They had robbed and massacred the populace, killed off the wounded, and raped the women. When our units saw this, they could not be made to behave decently.6
This contrasts sharply with how the war unfolded two years later. Due to conscription, “the same elements were to be found in both armies,” Wrangel admits, “their presence in one or the other depended largely on chance geographical circumstances.”7 What it reveals is that the revolutionary vanguard is always started with the dregs first, but once it hits a certain critical mass, it gets stocked even with good men. Wholesale discrimination becomes more difficult the longer a counterrevolution is waged.
The first task of the new army was to restore order to a land lapsed into anarchy. His own men, a complicated multi-ethnic army of White Russians and Cossacks, could scarcely restrain dispensing a brutality upon the Reds as severe as that which the Reds dispensed on the populace. The Cossacks, in particular, having been among the groups singled out by Bolshevist enmity, had special cause for rancor. These factors, in addition to the crumbling infastructure of the army as it reorganized under Denikin, led to disciplinary problems within the Volunteer and other White armies early on—something that plagued the anti-Bolshevist forces throughout the war depending on which commander was in charge.
This all takes place within the first quarter of Always with Honor. The disintegration of the government, the war with the Reds, the retreat to Crimea, the alliance with the Cossacks, Wrangel’s resignation from the army, and his return to Russia at the army’s request cover about eighteen months and some hundred pages or so of the book. When he returns, after resigning due to the untenable requests and absurd strategies of General Denikin, it is because Denikin has agreed to resign his own post and the army—now something of a provisional government in southern Ukraine and Crimea—was looking for Wrangel to take over as Supreme Commander.
Administration
It is not enough to fight a resistance to evil. Wrangel knew this, but as a military man, he tended to limit his administrative efforts to the maintenance of order among his troops and their interactions with the population. It was not until he was brought in as Supreme Commander that he had to actually deal with civilian concerns and foreign policy. Chief among the former was, of course, securing food for the people of Crimea and for the army itself—no easy task, as controversial agricultural reforms loomed in the foreground of overcoming an issue that, due to the sheer size of the army, was ultimately insurmountable. We won’t dwell on the agricultural reforms that Wrangel implemented; suffice it to say that they were liberalizing measures that served two purposes: better direct control over the land by the peasant classes, firstly, and secondly, an obvious step toward more European-style mild egalitarianism—and in sharp contrast to the violently centralized (and famine-provoking) agricultural egalitarianism of their rival Bolshevists.
The reason that the second issue is key here is because of the foreign element to the Russian Civil War. By April of 1920, when Wrangel took over administration, talks with foreign nations for both military and civilian aid were already well underway. The English and Americans had already sent envoys and forces to assist in the fight, and the French were heavily in favor of South Russia’s cause as their fighting aided the Polish front, whom France valued as allies. Communist sympathies in England, however, gradually pulled the British out of the fight even as it encouraged the Americans.
There are a number of reasons this happened. The Reds controlled St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the corridor that connected the two—this, admittedly, was the deciding factor of the whole war. They also either directly controlled most of the press, or had enough sympathizers in other press outlets that their narrative became the more powerful one. And, as this was still in the earliest days of Soviet communism, the International element of communist infiltration was hard at work in other countries. But whether due to the influence of propaganda, sympathies, or simply unwillingness to fight the communist menace, it was under the guidance of Prime Minister David Lloyd George that England pulled out of assisting the Whites in Southern Russia in early spring of 1920.
This was not the most popular decision, neither on English shores nor on those of Crimea. Wrangel remarks upon this decision, and specifically the reaction to it by his English ally and friend in the conflict, Brigadier-General Percy:
General Percy said in reply that he regretted having to leave the Army which was struggling so heroically not only for the Russian cause but for the whole world. It deserved the highest respect of every impartial spectator. As a soldier, he had nothing to do with politics, but as an English citizen he hoped that the English people would not abandon their erstwhile ally, the Russian Army, in its heroic struggle. He and his officers considered it their duty to bear witness to the gallant exploits of the Russian patriots, who were so misunderstood in Europe. After dinner he told me that he was going to do his utmost to draw the attention of his Government to the fatal consequences which would ensue for all Europe if the abandoned Russian Army was definitely lost.8
While this sounds prescient, the truth is that the predictions of both the disastrous carnage of communism for Russia, as well as its likely spread across Europe, were self-evident to those who actually witnessed the revolution and the civil war for themselves. Those that witnessed the breakdown of order, destruction of Russian institutions, and of the countryside by the empowered classes understood exactly what communism was—and many of them recognized it even before the violence got bad, too.
The Reds had control of the press, however, which meant that they set the pace of the narrative both at home and abroad. But this wasn’t enough to explain why so many in the West were so soft on the Bolshevik menace, nor why so many openly sympathized with it. Communist narratives played on liberal sympathies already well-ripened—if shocked—by the time the First World War broke out. And for good reason: communist narratives were, in a certain direction at least, the elaboration and further development of those undertaken by liberalism.
But it wasn’t just the press of the communists that Wrangel found he had to wrestle with. In early 1920, he had to manage the right wing press as well:
A paper with monarchist leanings, the Rousskaia Pravda, which appeared in Sebastopol, published a series of articles wrongly advocating pogroms. Admiral MacCully, the American representative, and Major Etiévant, who was representing France now instead of General Mangin (he was equally well-disposed towards us), came to me one after the other, each with copies of the is paper in his hand, and warned me that the articles they had marked would produce a very bad impression on the public opinion of their country. I immediately gave an order censuring the censor and suspending the paper.9
Contemporary critics might find it in them to whine about how compromises for the sake of optics is disgraceful, but the reality of the situation is, of course, much different. Far from trying to appease certain factions within his own effort, or to compromise on fundamental cornerstones of the South Russia Government’s interests in order to pander to foreigners, Wrangel’s tactic here was a far more simple one: we could call it, informally, autism patrolling. It’s not a good idea to have those careless enough in their speech as to openly advocate pogroms taking part in your public relations, particularly when you’re fighting a menace that does all it can to prey on liberal faults and sympathies at your expense.
This does, however, highlight the dire straits that Wrangel’s government, and the entire White Russian cause, were in. The people heavily relied on imports of goods from Romania, Georgia, and Bulgaria just to survive. The government’s finances were running dry even as their currency’s value dropped through the floor. And worse still, there was an increasingly dire lack of men to fight. Those that could, even in the upper reaches of the military, treated their posts like salarymen and had lost the vigor and enthusiasm to tend to their posts effectively. Inclinations toward despair are not to be taken lightly; as with supply lines or food shortages, despairing leadership can cripple an army with just as much suddenness.
We all know how this story ends even before we open the book, so long as we’re aware of what conflict it’s about. Wrangel and his army lose the fight against the Bolsheviks, and his last act in Russia is to organize the evacuation of Crimea. He spends the rest of his life in exile, tending as best he can to those White Russians who followed him in retreat. The plan, perhaps, was to fight another day. It never came. Wrangel died—presumably murdered by a communist agent—within several years of leading his fellow nationals out the Red hell that consumed their countrymen.
Conclusion
Of the two armies fighting in Russia, the right to the name “The Russian Army” belonged to the one composed of men who had remained loyal to the national flag, sacrificing everything for the welfare and honor of their country. Obviously the name “Russian Army” could not be given to troops whose leaders had replaced the Russian tricolour with the Red flag, and the very name of Russia with the name International.10
Again, perhaps this sounds familiar. Our own country has been pillaged by oligarchs who sought to pacify us with cheap goods made overseas, and replace our labor with cheap workers from over the border. They regularly vilify those who cling without irony to our own stars and stripes, or find comfort in the traditions and ethos of American life. And as I frequently reiterate, they’ve created for themselves a vaguely zombie-like class of experts, academics, scientists, journalists, and politicians who, in turn, have matured into a competing polis.
Presently, we watch the real-time breakdown of the bitter consensus between the Regime of the oligarchs on the one hand and the tacit agreement of the self-styled American patriots on the other. GOP-voting Americans have awoken in enough numbers to the fact that their party is part of the Regime that is inimical to their interests. They’ve recognized, in enough mass, that the internationalist efforts of the liberal elite—who run their media, most of their corporations, and a majority of their legal institutions—are not only at variance with American interests, but directly at odds with them. They’ve recognized that the liberal elite have used both the education apparatus and the media to manufacture an entire country’s worth of propagandized drones, many of whom are their own children. And they’ve recognized that these drones have been weaponized in order to manufacture a consensus that has cowed these Americans into obscurity. That the oligarchs have done this while encouraging mobs of their delusional thugs to riot and burn cities is a testament to the overwhelming control they have over information.
In these ways, our situation parallels the disintegration of the Russian Empire in 1917. The circumstances were twofold: radicalization of certain minority groups—be they ethnic or otherwise—assisted by a complete mismanagement of information—be it deliberate or otherwise. Certain segments of the population simply refused to believe what was going on even after the violence had already begun. Other segments eagerly embraced criminality, which they were predisposed to already, in order to march in lock-step with Bolshevist radicals. If that doesn’t sound like our most recent Summer of Love, then you haven’t been paying attention.
While it would be a stretch of analogy, the increasingly obvious likelihood that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are taking the White House in two weeks (and as a result of blatant, unapologetic voter fraud in massive numbers, no less) could be taken as our neoliberal version of Czar Nicholas’ abdication. While in our case, it is the office that is surrendering rather than a man per se, it’s worth a mention. In any case, as Always With Honor details, that’s only the beginning of when things start to go mad. In less than a year’s time, normalcy in the Russian country would all but be abolished, famines begin, and civil war razes towns.
While it may not need to be said out loud, Always with Honor is not an uplifting book. Hardly a page can pass without a reminder of how dire the worsening situation for Wrangel and the Russian people really was. Even as the White army won its victories, and even as the disarray and poor quality of their Red opponents were made obvious again and again, there was no hope of a great political or military triumph. The best that Wrangel could hope for was a mutually-acknowledged plan of secession, and the guarantee—backed by the West—of an independent Crimea with surrounding lands. Even though it wasn’t a war of independence per se, the Bolshevist regime had already robbed Russia right out from underneath of its own people, and the Russians weren’t going to get it back. And interiorly, they all knew this. As mentioned above, hopes even for independence had evaporated by midway through 1920.
We should remember what the failure of the Whites resulted in for both Russia and the world, not that it’s difficult to forget it. The Soviet Union lasted seventy years and spanned four generations. The violence that characterized the first few years died down and was replaced by a more efficient secret police system, better social engineering, and tighter control. But the long night that fell upon Russia eventually ended. While the nation holds a controversial place in the world today, few knowledgeable about it would try to claim that it’s somehow worse than it was under Soviet rule.
But we are not to get out of this volume a pessimistic acknowledgment that the enemy was too strong. Nor should we dwell too long on the parallels between Wrangel’s time and our own—those, at least, that cast dark shadows across our futures. We should recognize them for what they are, to be sure; we should read the times, but we should not despair of them. We should recognize that there are things we can rely on, but they are not necessarily material.
It was not with irony that Wrangel named his book what he did. Always with Honor describes both his own experiences in the war as well as the dictum by which he lived; it was an organizing principle founded upon God and country. He kept discipline in his army because he himself could be disciplined; he commanded authority because this discipline was self-evident in his army. But this discipline came from both the honor due to those things and people he received as well as the honor by which he acted. A man can take few things with him into his grave, but his honor is one of them.
This is probably the most important takeaway from Always with Honor. There are many other pragmatic considerations to be found worth emulating, should one happen to be in a position to implement them: how Wrangel managed the press, how he led his troops, how he dealt with foreign relations, et cetera. But most of us are and never will be in positions powerful enough for these to be worthwhile lessons. Instead, how Wrangel treated people personally, even his enemies, how he carried out his duties, how he carried himself, his charity even in his pragmatism and discipline—these are what we should focus on. Perhaps you may consider it an overlong volume for its message to be simply “be a great guy,” but in truth, his testament of the war and his experiences in it display his model virtue with unimpeachable character.
“It is an order of knights,” Wrangel remarks of his army in exile in the closing pages of his book.11 Workers, civilians, military men, officers: all were bound by the same honor that guided Wrangel himself. From honor and virtue do all other actions of his spring; the same can and should be for us.
1208.
210.
317.
4Ibid.
538.
645.
7151.
8190.
9197-198.
10151.
11290.
