Pyotr Wrangel

Pyotr Wrangel commanded the last White army in southern Russia and evacuated it rather than let it be destroyed, which is the most competent thing anyone on that side did. He was a Baltic German baron with a mining engineering degree who joined the cavalry, won the Order of St George early in 1914, and finished the world war as a corps commander. Known as the Black Baron for the Cossack cherkeska he wore, he took Tsaritsyn for Denikin in 1919 and spent the rest of that year quarrelling with him about strategy: Wrangel wanted to link up with Kolchak in the east, Denikin drove on Moscow, and the Moscow offensive collapsed. He replaced Denikin in April 1920 with the war already lost. What he did with the remaining months is the interesting part. He conceded almost everything the Whites had refused for three years - a land reform giving peasants title to what they worked, recognition of Cossack autonomy, an attempt at an ordered administration in the Crimea - and it was far too late to change anything. Frunze forced the Perekop lines in November 1920. Wrangel had prepared for it: 146,000 soldiers and civilians left Crimea on 126 ships in good order, an evacuation carried out without panic and remembered as such. He organised the emigration afterwards through the Russian All-Military Union and died in Brussels in 1928, of tuberculosis by the death certificate. His family believed he had been poisoned by an agent, his butler's brother, who vanished immediately afterwards; the case has never been proved either way. The Perekop fighting is still taught in Russian staff colleges. The evacuation he ran is the reason a Russian emigration existed in Paris and Belgrade at all.

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