Mikhail Vasilyevich Alekseyev

When World War I broke out in August 1914, Alekseyev was appointed chief of staff of the Southwestern Front under General Nikolai Ivanov. While Ivanov was the nominal commander, contemporaries recorded that Alekseyev made the de facto strategic decisions. The Galician offensive he planned (August–September 1914) was a massive envelopment operation employing four field armies; Russian forces routed the Austro-Hungarian army and occupied all of eastern Galicia, including Lemberg (Lviv). For this victory Alekseyev received the Order of St. George (4th class) and promotion to General of Infantry. He followed this with the Carpathian offensive in December 1914, which culminated in the capture of the besieged fortress of Przemyśl in March 1915.

In May 1915, after the German breakthrough at Gorlice, Alekseyev was appointed commander of the Northwestern Front and directed the strategic withdrawal known as the Great Retreat. Abandoning Warsaw and Brest-Litovsk, he kept his retreating forces in fighting order through disciplined rearguard actions, adhering to the principle: "keep retreating until the front can be stabilized." Under the constant threat of encirclement by the Central Powers, the Russian army avoided annihilation.

In August 1915, when Nicholas II assumed the supreme command, Alekseyev became chief of staff of the Stavka. The tsar delegated all military decisions to him, and for fifteen months (until March 1917) Alekseyev functioned as the de facto commander-in-chief of the Russian Imperial Army, overseeing operations, logistics, and strategic coordination with the Allies. Each morning he reviewed the front situation with the tsar for hours; every strategic order was issued under his direction. He approved the Brusilov offensive of 1916, repeatedly pressed the Allies for active operations on the Balkan front, and corresponded directly with General Joffre on coordinated Allied planning.

The intense workload of the war's first two years gravely damaged Alekseyev's health. Notorious for refusing to delegate even minor tasks, he handled all strategic work personally. In November 1916 he collapsed with kidney disease and spent the next three months convalescing in Crimea. When he returned to the Stavka on 19 February (O.S.) 1917, revolutionary ferment had already seized Petrograd.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in October 1917, Alekseyev was living in an apartment on Galernaya Street, already laying the groundwork for anti-Bolshevik resistance. On 22 October (O.S.) he wrote to his wife in Smolensk: "Never has such oppressive anguish gripped my soul as in these days… Betrayal, open and concealed, reigns over everything." On the day of the Bolshevik uprising, he went to the Mariinsky Palace for a session of the Pre-Parliament but was turned away by the Bolshevik guards; soon he learned that leaflets calling for his arrest had appeared across the city. With the help of friends, he disguised himself in civilian clothes: a threadbare dark-chocolate coat, black trousers, and a blue felt hat pulled low, and boarded a train for Rostov on the night of 12 November, traveling under the passport of a retired privy councillor.

Alekseyev arrived in Novocherkassk, capital of the Don Cossacks, on 15 November. Ataman Alexey Kaledin greeted him coldly, asking him "not to stay longer than a week," but Alekseyev set to work at once. On 2 November he had already published an appeal calling on officers to "save the Motherland." In a letter of 8 November to General Diterikhs, chief of staff to General Dukhonin, he laid out his vision: "As a spot of the desired substance begins to spread from a drop of oil… from this citadel must begin the struggle for our economic salvation from the German." His aim was to build a small but real armed force as the nucleus of nationwide resistance.

The first headquarters of the Alekseev Organization was Infirmary No. 2 at 39 Barochnaia Street in Novocherkassk. On 4 November the Composite Officers Company was formed, and volunteers signed a four-month service contract. The early recruits were overwhelmingly officers and cadets who had fought in the First World War, along with students; in the first months, some seventy-five to eighty new men joined each day. Initially the volunteers received only rations, but officers were soon paid 100 rubles per month (raised to 270 in March 1918). By mid-November the organization comprised the Composite Officers Company, a Cadet Battalion, the Mikhailovsko-Konstantinovskaya Battery, a Georgievskaya Company, and a Student Detachment. At the end of November this small force carried out its first combat operation, driving Red Guard detachments out of Rostov.

On 6 December (O.S.) General Lavr Kornilov and his fellow prisoners arrived in Novocherkassk from Bykhov prison. The Alekseev Organization was now reorganized as the Volunteer Army. Kornilov took military command, while Alekseyev became Supreme Leader, responsible for political oversight, finances, and foreign affairs; Anton Denikin commanded the 1st Division. The relationship between the two founders was tense from the outset. Alekseyev's arrest of Kornilov in September 1917 had left lingering bitterness, and their backgrounds, personalities, and followers were sharply different. As Denikin later wrote, "it was obvious from the first moment that cooperation between Alekseev and Kornilov would not be easy." Nevertheless, Alekseyev devoted his remaining months to sustaining the political foundations of the Volunteer Army and the wider White movement. In September 1918 the Ufa State Conference elected him in absentia as deputy to General Boldyrev in the emerging All-Russian Provisional Government (the Directory), but he died of pneumonia on 8 October before he could take up the post.