Nikolai Yudenich

Nikolai Yudenich got closer to a Russian capital than any other White commander and was stopped in the suburbs of Petrograd. He was the most successful Russian general of the world war, which is not a crowded field but was earned: commanding in the Caucasus he destroyed an Ottoman army at Sarikamish in the winter of 1914 and took the fortress of Erzurum in 1916 in a mountain offensive conducted in February. He resigned after the February revolution rather than serve the Provisional Government's policy and lived quietly in Petrograd under a false name before escaping to Finland. In 1919 he assembled the North-Western Army in Estonia, some 17,000 men, and in October launched a sudden offensive that covered the distance to Petrograd in eleven days. His troops reached the Pulkovo Heights and could see the city. It failed for reasons he had been warned about: he had no reserves, the British fleet did not intervene as he expected, the Estonians distrusted him because he refused to recognise Estonian independence, and Trotsky arrived and organised the defence personally. The army was driven back into Estonia, where it was disarmed and interned by the government whose independence he would not concede, and a typhus epidemic killed thousands of them. He was arrested briefly by his own subordinates over the army's funds. He lived out his life near Nice, taking no further part in emigre politics, and died in 1933. His refusal to recognise Estonian and Finnish independence is the clearest single instance of the problem that lost the Whites the war. They needed allies on the borderlands and could not offer them the one thing those allies wanted, because Russia one and indivisible was the whole of what the movement stood for.

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