Anton Denikin

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Anton Denikin
Антон Деникин
Portrait, c. 1918–1919
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of South Russia
In office 8 January 1919 – 4 April 1920
Preceded by	Office established
Succeeded by	Pyotr Wrangel
Personal details
Born	(1872-12-16)16 December 1872 Vlotslavek, Southern Russia (1917–1920)
Branch/service	Imperial Russian Army White Army
Years of service	1890–1920
Rank	Lieutenant general
Battles/wars	Russo-Japanese War World War I Russian Civil War Kuban Offensive Advance on Moscow (1919)

Anton Ivanovich Denikin (

.

Childhood

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Denikin was born on 16 December 1872, in the village of Szpetal Dolny, part of the city

In 1869, Ivan Denikin married Polish seamstress Elżbieta Wrzesińska as his second wife. Anton Denikin, the couple's only child, spoke both Russian and Polish growing up. His father's Russian patriotism and devotion to the Russian Orthodox religion led Anton Denikin to the Russian army.

The Denikins lived very close to poverty, with the retired major's small pension as their only source of income, and their finances worsened after Ivan's death in 1885. Anton Denikin at this time began tutoring younger schoolmates to support the family. In 1890, Denikin enrolled at the Kiev Junker School, a military college from which he graduated in 1892. The twenty-year-old Denikin joined an artillery brigade, in which he served for three years.

In 1895, he was first accepted into the

After being offered a settlement according to which he would rescind his complaint in order to attain acceptance into the General Staff school again, Denikin declined, insulted.

Denikin first saw active service during the 1905

By the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 Denikin was

Following the

In the summer of 1919, Denikin led the assault of the southern White forces in their

On 4 January 1920, with defeat and capture by the Bolsheviks in Siberia imminent, Admiral Alexander Kolchak named Denikin as his successor as Supreme Ruler (Verkhovnyy Pravitel), but Denikin accepted neither the functions nor the style of Supreme Leader.^[6]

Meanwhile, the Soviet government immediately tore up its agreement with Makhno and attacked his anarchist forces. After a seesaw series of battles in which both sides gained ground, Trotsky's more numerous and better equipped Red Army troops decisively defeated and dispersed Makhno's Insurgent Army.

Although Denikin refused to recognise the independence of Azerbaijan and Georgia, in maintaining friendly relations with Armenia he recognised their independence^[7] and supplied them with ammunition during the Muslim uprisings in Kars and Sharur–Nakhichevan.^[8]

During the

In the territories it occupied, Denikin's army carried out mass executions and plunder, in what was later known as the White Terror. In the town of Maykop in Circassia during September 1918, more than 4,000 people were massacred by General Pokrovsky's forces.^[12] In the small town of Fastov alone, Denikin's Volunteer Army murdered over 1,500 Jews, mostly elderly, women, and children.^{[citation needed]}

The press of the Denikin regime regularly incited violence against communist Jews and Jews seen as communists in the context of treason committed by Red agents. For example, a proclamation by one of Denikin's generals incited people to "arm themselves" in order to extirpate "the evil force which lives in the hearts of Jew-communists."^[13]

Religious and faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church, Denikin did not criticise the pogroms against the Jewish population until the end of 1919. Denikin believed that most people had reasons to hate Jews and wished to avoid an issue that divided his officers. Many of them, intensely anti-Semitic, allowed pogroms under their watch, which turned into a method of terror against the Jewish population and served to earn the favour of the Ukrainian people for much of 1919.^{[citation needed]}

Western sponsors were dismayed at the widespread antisemitism in the Whites' officer ranks, especially as the Bolsheviks sought to officially prohibit acts of anti-Semitism. Winston Churchill personally warned General Denikin that:

[M]y task in winning support in Parliament for the Russian Nationalist cause will be infinitely harder if well-authenticated complaints continue to be received from Jews in the zone of the Volunteer Armies.^[14]

John Ernest Hodgson, a British war correspondent with Denikin's forces, said the following of Denikin's and his officers' antisemitism:

I had not been with Denikin more than a month before I was forced to the conclusion that the Jew represented a very big element in the Russian upheaval. The officers and men of the Army laid practically all the blame for their country's troubles on the Hebrew. They held that the whole cataclysm had been engineered by some great and mysterious secret society of international Jews, who, in the pay and at the orders of Germany, had seized the psychological moment and snatched the reins of government. All the figures and facts that were then available appeared to lend colour to this contention. No less than 82 per cent of the Bolshevik Commissars were known to be Jews, the fierce and implacable 'Trotsky,' who shared office with Lenin, being a Yiddisher whose real name was Bronstein. Among Denikin's officers this idea was an obsession of such terrible bitterness and insistency as to lead them into making statements of the wildest and most fantastic character. Many of them had persuaded themselves that Freemasonry was, in alliance with the Jews, part and parcel of the Bolshevik machine, and that what they had called the diabolical schemes for Russia's downfall had been hatched in the Petrograd and Moscow Masonic lodges. When I told them that I and most of my best friends were Freemasons, and that England owed a great deal to its loyal Jews, they stared at me askance and sadly shook their heads in fear for England's credulity in trusting the chosen race. One even asked me quietly whether I personally was a Jew. When America showed herself decidedly against any kind of interference in Russia, the idea soon gained wide credence that President Woodrow Wilson was a Jew, while Mr. Lloyd George was referred to as a Jew whenever a cable from England appeared to show him as being lukewarm in support of the anti-Bolsheviks.^[15]

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Facing increasingly sharp criticism and emotionally exhausted, Denikin resigned in April 1920 in favor of General Baron

From 1926, Denikin lived in France. Although he remained bitterly opposed to Russia's Communist government, he chose to exist discreetly on the periphery of politics, spending most of his time writing and lecturing. This did not prevent the Soviets from unsuccessfully targeting him for abduction in the same effort that snared exiled General Alexander Kutepov in 1930 and General Yevgeny Miller in 1937 (both members of the Russian All-Military Union). White Against Red – The Life of General Anton Denikin gives possibly the definitive account of the intrigues during these early Soviet "wet-ops".

Denikin was a writer, and prior to World War I had written several pieces in which he criticised the shortcomings of his beloved Russian Army. His voluminous writings after the Russian Civil War (written while living in exile) are notable for their analytical tone and candour. Since he enjoyed writing and most of his income was derived from it, Denikin began to consider himself a full-time writer and developed close friendships with several Russian émigré authors—among them

Although respected by some of the community of Russian exiles, Denikin was disliked by émigrés of both political extremes, right and left. With the fall of France in 1940, Denikin left Paris in order to avoid imprisonment by the Germans. Although he was eventually captured, he declined all attempts to co-opt him for use in Nazi

From 1945 until his death in 1947, Denikin lived in the United States, in New York City. On 7 August 1947, at the age of 74, he died of a heart attack while on vacation near

On 3 October 2005, in accordance with the wishes of his daughter Marina Denikina and by authority of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, General Denikin's remains were transferred from the United States and buried together with Ivan Ilyin's at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow.^[18]

The importance of Denikin's diary for explaining the relationship between "Great and little Russia, Ukraine," was cited by Putin during his 24 May 2009 visit to the Donskoy Monastery. "He says nobody should be allowed to interfere between us. This is only Russia's right."^[19] Putin emphasized that Denikin's diary was worth reading, especially the passages in which he described Ukraine as an indivisible part of Russia.^[20]

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• Order of St. Stanislaus
  , 2nd degree with Swords (1904); 3rd degree (1902)
• Order of St. Anne
  , 2nd degree with Swords (1905); 3rd degree with swords and bows (1904)
• Order of St. Vladimir, 3rd degree (18 April 1914); 4th degree (6 December 1909)
• Order of St. George, 3rd degree (3 November 1915); 4th degree (24 April 1915)
• Golden Sword of St. George
  (10 November 1915)
• Golden Sword of St. George
  , decorated with diamonds, with the inscription "For the double release of Lutsk (22 September 1916)
• Order of Michael the Brave, 3rd degree, 1917 (Romania)
• Croix de Guerre, 1914-1918, 1917 (France)
• Sign of the 1st Kuban Ice Campaign [ru], 1918
• Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, 1919 (UK)
• Order of the White Eagle (Serbia)^[21]

Denikin wrote several books, including:

• Russian Turmoil. Memoirs: Military, Social & Political. Hutchinson. London. 1922. (only volume 1 of 5 has been published in English.)
  • Republished: Hyperion Press. 1973.
    ISBN 978-0-88355-100-4
• The White Army. Translated by Catherine Zvegintsov. Jonathan Cape, 1930.
  • Republished: Hyperion Press. 1973.
    ISBN 978-0-88355-101-1
    .
  • Republished: Ian Faulkner Publishing. Cambridge. 1992.
    ISBN 978-1-85763-010-7
    .
• The Career of a Tsarist Officer: Memoirs, 1872-1916. Translated by Margaret Patoski. University of Minnesota Press. 1975.

• Symon Petliura