White movement
White movement ( Russian Бе́лое движе́ние , also Белое дело "white thing" or Белая идея "white idea") was a military-political movement of various forces and groups that fought against the Bolsheviks in the course of the Russian civil war from 1919 until their destruction in 1922 and formed the young Soviet power . Colloquially they were mostly simply referred to as the whites .
The armed arm of the White Movement was formed by the White Army , the nucleus of which was the so-called volunteer army .
During its existence, the White Army carried out numerous pogroms , especially against the Ukrainian-Jewish civilian population , in which around 60,000 people died. The background to this was the anti-Semitism , which has also been widespread in Russia for centuries, and the pejorative general equation of Jews with communists and Jewish culture with the ideas of communism (cf. “ Jewish Bolshevism ”).
Monarchists, who wanted to reestablish tsarism , but also moderate socialists and republicans, who were against all Bolshevik ideas, united under the name whites . They all united as the principle of their actions: "Russia - united, powerful and indivisible". A claim that was later largely realized by the Red Army .
The White Movement was de facto the strongest anti-Bolshevik military-political force during the Russian Civil War. This was based on monarchist, nationalist and, furthermore, democratic interests, plus the separatist aspirations in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and Central Asia.
After the successful October Revolution , the whites who formed against the revolution were supported by troop invasions by the Entente and their allies up to around 1922 at the end of the First World War to maintain or expand the sphere of influence of Western European states . More important for the civil war, however, were the massive deliveries and aid to the white troops in Siberia and southern Russia. Winston Churchill wrote in a memorandum of September 15, 1919 that in 1919 England had spent the enormous sum of 100 million pounds and France between 30 and 40 million pounds on the white troops in Russia.
→ See also: Intervention by the Entente Powers
The term of the White Movement was born in Soviet Russia and was based on the white uniforms of officers and cadets . It continued to cover the Turkic peoples of the Russian Empire in the 1920s .
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ Winston Churchill: The World Crisis. The aftermath . London 1929, Volume 4, p. 256; Online under Memorandum written by Winston Churchill 9/15/19 quoted in "The World Crisis The Aftermath"
- ↑ WS Zwetkow: The White Movement . In: The Great Russian Encyclopedia . В 30 т. Т. 3, [place?] 2005, p [?].