White movement
백군 (러시아 내전)
The counter-revolutionary military and political movement, and its armies, that tried to overthrow the Bolsheviks and Soviet power in the Russian Civil War. Its main force was the conservative officer corps of the Imperial Russian Army, and under the slogan of a "united and indivisible Russia" it aimed to restore the borders of the old empire. From November 1918 it recognised Kolchak as Supreme Ruler, but Denikin and Wrangel in the south, Yudenich in the north-west and Miller in the north fought largely apart, and it was defeated in European Russia in 1920.
In depth
The name "White" evoked the white of the Bourbon royalists in the French Revolution, the tradition of monarchy and the white uniforms of the imperial army. The movement mixed republican liberals, monarchists and the far-right Black Hundreds and had no agreed doctrine, but the conservative military culture of the imperial officer corps held it together. Some historians separate from it the "democratic counter-revolution" of the Right SRs and Mensheviks, whose governments such as Komuch and the Ufa Directory lasted until November 1918. In the south the Volunteer Army and the Don and Kuban Cossacks merged into the Armed Forces of South Russia; in the east Kolchak governed from Omsk, in the north-west Yudenich led the Northwestern Army and in the north a government sat in Arkhangelsk. The Whites denied the right to national self-determination and are also remembered for pogroms, antisemitism and a White Terror aimed at non-Russian peoples.