Piotr Nicolaïevitch Wrangel (ПётрНиколаевичВрангель): August 15th 1878, Novo-Aleksandrovsk (Gouvt. of Kovno, Russia, today Zarasaï, Lithuania) - April 25th 1928, Brussels (Belgium).
Russian general, commander-in-chief of the armies of the South, fought in the white armed during the Russian Civil war.
Beginning of career
Wrangel goes down from a famous family, attested in Estonia as of the XIIIe century, perhaps come from Lower Saxony. Various branches were established with 16th and 18th centuries in Sweden, Prussia and Russia, then with the the United States, France and Belgium after 1920. Several members were distinguished with the service from the king from Prussia and Sweden and from the tsars from Russia.The Wrangel young person studies initially at the École des Mines of Saint-Pétersbourg and obtains his diploma for the occupation of engineer in 1901. In 1902, it gives up this career and is registered at the school of cavalry of Saint-Pétersbourg where it is quickly promoted with the rank of officer. In 1904, it takes share with the Guerre Russo-Japanese woman.
In 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, he is captain of the horse Guard and is illustrated as of the first battles, while seizing a Prussian battery after a furious load.
In 1916, it is ordering division of the Cosaques of the Oussouri. In March 1917, it is one of the only commanders of the army to recommend the sending of troops with Petrograd to restore the order there. He believes that not only the abdication of the tsar will not regulate the problems but will multiply them on the contrary.
As he is only subordinate, it is not listened to. The provisional government, which hardly likes its points of view, dislocates it quickly its functions. Wrangel is withdrawn in the Crimea with its family.
The civil war
Shortly after the Russian Revolution, it is stopped by sailors Bolshevists with Yalta and owes the life only with its wife who beg them to save it. Released, he flees towards the Kouban where he finds the general Dénikine in September 1918. This one charges it with taking in hand a division of Cossacks on the point of mutiner. Not only manages he to put them in confidence but it makes a disciplined division able of it to gain successes over the battle fields.During the winter 1918 - 1919, it conquers the Kouban and the Terek, takes Rostov then seizes Tsaritsyne in June. Its rapids victories prove that it is very at ease in this new way of doing the war, trying to limit violences and prevailing hard against the flight and the exactions. In spite of a strict discipline, he manages to be made respect.
To the summer 1919, whereas Koltchak in the east and Ioudénitch in north attack Russia Bolshevik, Dénikine leads with the offensive by the south. Three armies, by different directions, must move towards Moscow. Wrangel is with the head of the one of them and Dénikine charges it with passing by Saratov and Nijni-Novgorod. Unfortunately, it underwent large losses at the time of the catch of Tsaritsyne and it must be satisfied to defend the conquered places.
Already, it is not obstructed to criticize the plan of Dénikine informant that a division of the forces of the white Armée would lead only to one series of defeats. He would have rather recommended a regrouping of all the armed forces then a joint attack on Moscow.
The army of Dénikine is finally crushed by the Red Army . Wrangel is sent to Kharkov to limit the disaster. When it arrives there, it can only note that the white Army does not exist any more.
At the end of 1919, the dissension between Wrangel and Dénikine bursts at the great day. Wrangel reproaches its chief his minimal implication in the policy like its lack of audacity, aggressiveness and charisma. He even plots to replace it but this one, informed, raises it of its command and returns it to the Kouban. Wrangel requires to be put at the retirement for health reasons, which is granted to him. It is exiled then with Istanbul, which is used as a basis back for the white army.
The new general-in-chief
In March 1920, the white Army sudden of new defeats and is driven back towards the the Crimea. Dénikine does not have any more the choice; it must resign. The April 4th, in Sébastopol, Wrangel takes part in the large Council of the white generals and receives the full powerss. With the head of the white Armée it fights the Bolcheviks with the Southern of the Russia.Wrangel, like later the general de Gaulle in France, tries to find solution not only military but such a political with the situation of its country. He believes in a republic having of a strong executive and a qualified leading class. In the Crimea, it creates a provisional republic which, according to him, pourait to attract the disappointed populations of the mode Bolshevik. Its political program consists in giving the grounds to those which work there and guaranteeing the occupational safety to most underprivileged.
In spite of the warning of the British announcing to him that they cease their assistance, it reorganizes the white Army of the Crimea, which includes/understands only 25.000 men. Moscow is then in war against the Poland of Pilsudski and it counts on victories of this last to consolidate its capacity.
The April 13rd, a first attack red on the isthmus of Pérékop is easily pushed back. It launches a counter-attack then and manages to seize Mélitopol and the Tauride of North.
Defeat and evacuation
In July, Wrangel manages to put in failure a new offensive of the Reds come from the the Caucasus but, in September, the end of the war with Poland sees flowing the troops of the Red Army in the Crimea. Their divisions include/understand 100.000 infantrymen and 33.600 riders. The power struggle is now of four against one and Wrangel knows it perfectly. The White evacuate the Tauride and reprocess towards the isthmus of Pérékop.A first offensive of the Red Army is stopped the October 28th but Wrangel understands that is to move back for better jumping. It starts to prepare the evacuation of its troops and the civilians who will want to leave. The November 7th, the Red Army enters in forces in the Crimea. While the troops of the general Alexandre Koutiepov manage to contain the attack, Wrangel begins an operation from loading in five ports of the Black Sea. In three days, it succeeds in evacuating 146.000 people including 70.000 soldiers, put on 126 boats. The French fleet of the Mediterranean even decided to help with the evacuation by sending the Waldeck-Rousseau . All these people are directed towards the Turkey, the Greece, the Yugoslavia, the Romania and the Bulgaria. Among the evacuees, civils servant, intellectuals, scientists, who found asylum with Gallipoli, then in Yugoslavia. Among exiled Russian which chose France, much settled with Boulogne-Billancourt.
Installed in Boulogne-Billancourt, the men of the Wrangel general entered to the factory Renault where they worked with the chain. Among the exiled workmen, one could recognize ex-diplomats, ex-soldiers of the Russian imperial army. In Boulogne-Billancourt, Wrangel lived in hutments occupied at the time of the First World War by Chinese replacing French mobilized on the face. The workmen in exile were framed by the officers of the general.
Wrangel decides to be established with Belgrade from where it directs the Russian emigration and tries to reorganize forces. It gives up the fight in 1925 and is established as engineer with Brussels. It dies out the April 25th 1928, perhaps poisoned by the Guépéou. It left its Mémoires published in 1930 at Taillandier.
The small orthodoxe church of Saint Nicolas's Day of Boulogne-Billancourt east one of last testimonys which remain in France, it is the single trace of the life of the Russian emigrants after the Revolution of October.
" évacués" soldiers
In spite of the growing number of work devoted to the history of the white Army in exile, the study of Paul Robinson brings, for several reasons, a new glance on becoming to it military emigrants since their departure of Russia in 1920 until the Second world war.As its title suggests it, The White Russian Army in exiles is conceived like a historical synthesis recalling, in turn, the geographical stages and the forms of establishment of the groups of the white Army abroad, the various aspects organisational, générationnel, sociocultural, ideological and policy of the military exile. Two great approaches emerge from the reading: one raises mainly of the social history of this community in the diversity of the external contexts met, the other milked primarily with the political history interns white emigration. The first more particularly holds the attention by the very many lightings brought throughout a historical screen good identified: collective evacuations in the south of Russia and orientation, by the French Army, from the troops towards Lemnos, Gallipoli and the camps located at the North-West of Constantinople; their redispersion towards Bulgaria and Yugoslavia mainly; the new departure, for some of the refugees, towards Czechoslovakia and France.
The reconstitution of these courses thus concerns the members of the white Army of the South evacuated towards the Bosphorus (and not troops having left the country via Poland or by the Far East). Among the many specificities attached to the history of the military “evacuees”, figure initially the durable concern of their last chief, the Wrangel general, to preserve at all costs the cohesion of its troops while maintaining as much as possible the men together, in spite of the adversity of a situation which implied, taking into account the reduced capacity of the States of reception, the dispersion of the refugees.
Starting from this objective, initially defined at ends of reconquest, the author analyzes how and up to what point the white high command managed indeed to avoid the dislocation of the army, which was the incidence of the control which he exerted on the trajectories of the military refugees and how this will of control changed, rather quickly, in a vast action of social assistance and humanitarian. The historian recalled, on the one hand, the negociations engaged by Wrangel with the governments of the countries of asylum, the resistances met at the same time on the political plan, logistics and material and, on the other hand, the courses of the troops, increasingly progressively fragmented of their redistribution starting from the territories Turkish where they had been already distributed between various places of reception. Robinson insists besides on this first experiment of the exile which, in Gallipoli especially, constituted one of the strong moments of the rebuilding of solidarity between these men after the distress which had accompanied the departure by Russia. Starting from the 100.000 men evacuated in 1920, the historian was thus brought to follow the trajectories of the various groups, parcelled out by geographical dispersion through Europe of South-east, but narrowly related by their lifestyles, their often precarious insertion in the work world, their modes of framing and collective organization. It is indeed by the maintenance of a military hierarchy within each group, the installation of regular connections with the Staff of the general Wrangel, the creation of various forms of solidarity, the such mutual relief funds, that the feeling of membership of the ex-army could be on the whole maintained, therefore preserved. While being based on an important consultation of files (in particular funds of the Russian military General union, ROVS, preserved in the collection Bahmetev, and the Wrangel funds preserved at the Hoover institute), the author reconstitutes the activity deployed by the high command collectively to place the various quotas in large building sites, of construction of roads in particular to industrial Yugoslavia, or centers like the field of Pernik to Bulgaria. He gives a report on some initiatives particularly successful like the engagement of the topographic service of the Russian army within the Yugoslav army (a hundred officers), and follows in a relatively detailed way the action developed for the reconversion of the men with the civil life, by the professional training or, better still, by the access to higher formations in the university centres of Prague, Belgrade or Brussels.
The objective of not-dislocation of the army, partially reached in the Balkan Peninsula, met many political and logistic obstacles. Robinson first of all recalls the very hostile reaction of the French government to the project of Wrangel and the analysis through the behavior of the French Staff in Turkey. The consultation of the files of the historical Service of the Army in particular enabled him to appreciate the diversity with which the French generals answered the injunctions of the government concerning the suspension of the assumption of responsibility of the military refugees and the encouragement with repatriations in Russia. The historian puts forward, for example, the relative temperance of the Charpy general whom he opposes to the zeal deployed by the Brousseaud general to encourage the return of the soldiers of the camp of Lemnos in Russia. Approaching the role held by the French in the waves of repatriations which followed the end of the civil war, it provides new elements to the assessments up to that point carried out.
The French Staff was not only external actors to have openly preached the return of the military refugees in Russia. In its chapter devoted to the reception of the ex-army in Bulgaria, Robinson analyzes all the ambivalence of the policy led by the authorities of Sofia in its connection in the years 1921-1923, according to the evolution of the power struggles on the Bulgarian political scene. Considered a long time, in the historiography of the Russian emigration, like privileged hosts of Bulgaria, the military refugees were in fact the object of various instrumentalisations by the government of Stamboulisky which quickly sought to disperse them while supporting, in particular, their repatriation by the means of Sovnarod, organization which it supported directly. To judge some according to the author, national political instability had, more than precariousness of the economic situation in the country, a dissuasive effect on the projects of installation of the refugees. Nevertheless, the veterans who remained in Bulgaria were among those which preserved the structures most durably and the frame of mind which had characterized the first years of the military exile.
Orchestrated by the white high command, the placement of the troops in Europe of South-east was reorientated from 1923 towards France, because of the absence of durable outlets in the first host countries. The role of the white generals in the organization of these new migrations, known up to that point in an anecdotic way, is the object in The White Russian Army in exiles of a very rigorous and convincing analysis which testifies to the extreme degree of control of the course of the veterans. Observable also with regard to the civilians, this one appears in a decisive way in the trajectories of the soldiers who, for the majority, did not cease being dealt with, since banks of the Black Sea to the mines of Decazeville or with the factories of Argentière.
The framing of the veterans did not only reside in the organization of transport and of the recruiting, it also consisted of an assistance moral, material, cultural, and Robinson analyzes of them the various articulations by the means of the history of the military General union (ROVS) which he reconstitutes through profiles and aspirations of its leaders, operating process and activities, financings, or networks and interlocutors, who they are external or Russian. While approaching this internal slope of the history of the military emigration, the historian comes from there to study ideological dimension and the various aspects of the political commitment of the White. He insists on the difficult search of a compromise between the posture of “not-predetermination” (on the form to come from the government of Russia) preached by Wrangel, under the terms of which the general proscribed any political activity in his rows, and the inclination, very largely widespread at the veterans, towards the monarchism. He reviews the various attempts at infiltration of the White to Russia and of the Soviets in the ROVS, the ideological print of Fascism analyzes and of the Nazism within the military refugees, the emergence of new currents recalls, in particular bringing invaluable lightings on the relations between the ROVS and the National union of new generation (NSNP, future NTS), in particular on the terrorist branch of this organization and its company of coring of the ROVS. The contribution of this section lies however less in the exposed facts that in the identification of their various actors and supporters, according to the generations, the experiments lived in Russia and exile - the underlining historian, for example, of the important shifts in mentalities and aspirations between Russian veterans of the First War, on the one hand (enough strongly represented in the associative universe of the emigration), and those of the civil war, other.
This work makes it possible to have a rather complete, moderate and distanciée vision of the history of the white Army in exile. It however remains to raise the “poor share” of the study, who returns to the principal dilemma met by the specialists in the Russian emigration: it relates to the sociocultural origins of these thousands of combatants that the historian, for lack of sources, can only approach with large features, but which definitely miss with the reconstitution trajectories refugees and, more generally, with the setting in prospect for the collective identities worked by the exile.
Sources
- Venner, Dominique. White and the Reds . 1997. Pygmalion.
- Extracts from Mémoires of exile of Frederic Mitterrand
- Catherine Gousseff, Paul Robinson, The White Russian Army in exiles, 1920-1945. Oxford, Oxford University Close, 2002,257 p., Books of the Russian world, 43/4
Internal bond
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