Anton Denikin

Anton Denikin commanded the Volunteer Army in southern Russia and came closer than anyone else to taking Moscow from the Bolsheviks. He was the son of a serf who had been conscripted into the army and risen to officer rank, and a Polish seamstress, which made him an outsider in a corps drawn largely from the gentry. He was a competent staff officer and a published military writer before 1914, commanded the Iron Brigade with distinction in Galicia, and was arrested with Kornilov after the failed coup of August 1917. He escaped south to the Don and took over the Volunteer Army when Kornilov was killed by a shell at Ekaterinodar in 1918. His offensive in the summer of 1919 carried the Whites to Orel, some 250 miles from Moscow, and then broke: his lines of supply were impossible, his rear was in the hands of Makhno's partisans and of officers who plundered it, and his government's refusal to promise land reform or to concede anything to Ukrainian and Cossack autonomy cost him the population he was moving through. Pogroms carried out by units under his command killed tens of thousands of Jews, and he condemned them and did not stop them. He handed command to Wrangel in April 1920 and left Russia. He wrote five volumes on the collapse in exile, refused every German approach in the Second World War despite his hatred of the Soviet government, and reportedly sent a parcel to the Red Army. He died in Michigan in 1947. His remains were reburied in the Donskoy monastery in Moscow in 2005, at the invitation of a Russian government that had spent seventy years calling him a bandit.

• Lived: 1872 CE – 1947 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: military_leader