White Terror

Scope and period

The term refers to the violence and mass killings carried out by the White movement and its governments, and more broadly by anti-Bolshevik forces, from the aftermath of the October Revolution to the end of the Civil War in 1922. Individual acts of terror against Bolshevik rule began already in late 1917; violence on a sizable scale began in early 1918 and continued until the Whites' defeat by the Red Army in 1920–1922. Unlike the Red Terror, which was officially proclaimed by a Council of People's Commissars decree on 5 September 1918, no single decree launched the White Terror. The phrase entered political terminology during the revolution and Civil War and remains a conventional, collective label, since the anti-Bolshevik camp included forces far more heterogeneous than the White movement alone.

Forms and agents

The White Terror unfolded in territories placed under military dictatorship. White governments executed people through judicial, state-security and interior bodies, military counter-intelligence, and field courts-martial, usually without trial or under simplified procedure, while detachments beyond the control of the military command and local Cossack atamans (warlords) committed widespread arbitrary violence. Kolchak's government amended the imperial criminal code on 3 December 1918 to impose capital punishment for attempts on the Supreme Ruler's life and for attempts to overthrow the authorities, and on 11 April 1919 adopted a regulation providing five years' imprisonment for persons deemed a threat to public order because of ties with the Bolshevik revolt. In Omsk more than 2,500 people were killed; according to the right-wing Socialist Revolutionary D. Rakov, carts of bodies were carried into the city. In the east, the Cossack atamans Semyonov, Annenkov, Dutov and Kalmykov became notorious for extreme cruelty.

Anti-Jewish pogroms

The most distinctive form of the White Terror was large-scale pogroms targeting Jews, violence fused with the "Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy" propaganda and continuous with the discriminatory repressions of the old regime. Between 1918 and 1921, 1,236 pogroms against Jews were recorded in 524 towns of Ukraine: 493 carried out by Ukrainian People's Republic soldiers under Petliura, 307 by independent atamans, 213 by Denikin's army, 106 by the Red Army and 32 by the Polish Army. Jewish deaths in these pogroms are estimated at 30,000 to 60,000. Ronald Suny attributes about 17 percent of the 35,000 to 150,000 Jewish deaths of the Civil War to the White armies, 40 percent to Petliura's Ukrainian forces, 25 percent to other Ukrainian forces and 8.5 percent to the Bolsheviks. In Fastov alone Denikin's Volunteer Army murdered more than 1,500 Jews, and the Yekaterinburg pogrom of July 1919 killed about 2,200 people, mostly Jews.

Death toll

Estimates of the White Terror's victims vary widely by source. Dietrich Beyrau puts them at 20,000 to 100,000 excluding pogrom victims; Jonathan Smele cites the Russian historian V. Erlikhman's figure of 300,000, against 1,200,000 for the Red Terror. Nikita Ratkovsky believes the total may exceed 500,000 excluding pogroms, and notes that by the Cheka estimate presented at the 1920 trial of Kolchak's ministers, at least 25,000 people were executed by the Kolchak regime in Yekaterinburg Governorate alone in 1918–1919. Suny held that casualties of White atrocities alone were probably lower than the Red Terror's (estimated at 50,000 to 140,000), but would exceed it once anti-Soviet popular violence and the Jewish pogroms are included. The 1985 UN Whitaker Report cited 100,000 to 250,000 Jews killed in more than 2,000 pogroms by a mixture of Whites, Cossacks and Ukrainian nationalists.

Historiographical dispute

The character of the White Terror remains sharply contested. Western historians such as Richard Pipes and Nicolas Werth contrasted the Red Terror, a systematic and organized political strategy aimed at whole social classes, with the White Terror as a restorative, arbitrary and temporary "repressive violence" meant to re-establish the old order. Werth wrote that the White Terror was never systematized in that fashion, was almost invariably the work of detachments out of control and, discounting the pogroms, was most often a series of reprisals by police acting as a military counter-espionage force. Peter Holquist and Joshua Sanborn refute this. Holquist argues that White violence, though less centralized and systematic, did not lack ideological underpinnings, and that anti-Soviet commanders and rank-and-file soldiers executed Jews, Balts, Chinese and Communists in groups under a process the Whites called "filtering." Sanborn holds that the terror of the Imperial Army and the Whites was as "revolutionary" as its Red counterpart. Russian historians are likewise divided: some stress the White Terror's disorganized, spontaneous character, noting that the Whites created no bodies analogous to the Cheka and revolutionary tribunals and that their leaders never openly called for mass terror; others point to orders by senior White figures and to legislation of White governments as evidence that repression was sanctioned and was the logical outcome of the military dictatorship. G. A. Trukan notes that Soviet authors over-focused on the White Terror while many modern authors sympathetic to the White movement do the reverse, and judges that atrocities in White-occupied territories were no fewer than in Soviet Russia. The White Terror thus sits between the characterization of spontaneous excess and that of organized ideological violence.