White Terror (Russia)

• 1. Introduction

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  The White Terror in the former Russian Empire unfolded across a landscape already torn apart by revolution and civil war, from 1917 through 1923. Unlike the Red Terror, which the Bolshevik government formally proclaimed on the 5th of September 1918, the White Terror had no founding decree, no official starting pistol. Individual acts of anti-Bolshevik violence, including assassinations, were documented as early as the end of 1917. Large-scale killing by the Whites began in earnest in early 1918 and continued until the Red Army's final victories over White forces between 1920 and 1922. What historians still argue about is whether that violence was calculated policy or the chaos of armies beyond anyone's control. The answer, it turns out, depends heavily on whose bodies you count and whose commanders you scrutinize. In the Far East, warlords like Grigory Semyonov and Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg became synonymous with its most acute expression. The question the documentary will explore is not simply how many died, but why the killing took the forms it did, who ordered it, who resisted it, and how a civil war's violence left monuments across Russia nearly a century later.

• 2. Policy or Chaos

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  Historians have never reached consensus on whether the White Terror was deliberate state policy or the byproduct of armies that no government could control. Some Russian historians argue the killings were premeditated and directed from above; others insist they were spontaneous and disorganized. Nicolas Werth, writing in The Black Book of Communism, put the contrast with the Red Terror sharply. He described the Bolshevik campaign as systematic, better organized, and aimed at entire social classes, with its doctrines worked out before the civil war began. The White Terror, in his view, was almost invariably the work of detachments operating without authorization. Western scholars Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest made similar distinctions, framing the Red Terror as ideologically driven transformation and the White as a temporary, restorative repression. Peter Holquist and Joshua Sanborn pushed back against that framing. Holquist argued that White violence, though less centralized, carried its own ideological foundation, something closer to an ethos than a doctrine, and compared it to the German Freikorps. He pointed to the White practice of "filtering" prisoners, where commanders sifted through captives and separated out those deemed undesirable, including Jews, Balts, and Chinese, before executing them in groups. Sanborn went further, arguing that the terror carried out by the Russian Imperial Army and the Whites was as revolutionary in character as the Red Terror, particularly in its treatment of Jewish populations. Doctor of Historical Sciences G. A. Trukan offered a blunt assessment: in territories under White control, atrocities and outrages were no fewer than in Bolshevik-held zones.

• 3. Death Toll Debates

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  Dietrich Beyrau estimated between 20,000 and 100,000 victims of the White Terror, excluding pogrom deaths, compared to what he put at up to 1.3 million for the Red Terror. Jonathan Smele cited the figures of Russian historian V. Erlikhman, who arrived at 300,000 White Terror victims against 1,200,000 for the Red. Smele himself cautioned that an exact count will probably never be known, though he believed the toll to be lower than the Red Terror's, largely because the Bolsheviks controlled larger populations. Russian historian Nikita Ratkovsky placed the number above 500,000, again excluding pogrom deaths. His estimate drew partly on Cheka figures presented at the 1920 trial of Kolchak's ministers, which recorded at least 25,000 executions by the Kolchak regime in Yekaterinburg Governorate alone, between 1918 and 1919. Ronald Suny added another layer of complexity. If the count is restricted to violence directly carried out by White military forces, the toll is probably lower than the Red Terror's estimated 50,000 to 140,000 dead. But once anti-Soviet popular violence and Jewish pogroms are included, the number climbs past it. British historian Ronald Hingley argued separately that Red Terror casualty figures had been inflated by White Army propaganda, suggesting a lower estimate of 50,000 was closer to reality than the figure of 1,700,000 that sometimes appeared in White-aligned sources.

• 4. Pogroms and Jewish Victims

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  Between 1918 and 1921, a total of 1,236 pogroms were committed against Jews across 524 towns in Ukraine. Estimates of the dead in those attacks range from 30,000 to 60,000. The 1985 Whitaker Report of the United Nations put the full death toll across the civil war at between 100,000 and 250,000 Jews, killed in more than 2,000 pogroms by a mixture of Whites, Cossacks, and Ukrainian nationalists. Of the 1,236 recorded attacks, 493 were carried out by soldiers of the Ukrainian People's Republic under Symon Petliura, 307 by independent Ukrainian warlords, 213 by Denikin's army, 106 by the Red Army, and 32 by the Polish Army. Ronald Suny estimated that Jews accounted for 35,000 to 150,000 deaths during the civil war, with the White armies responsible for about 17% of those, compared to 40% for Petliura's Ukrainian forces, 25% for other Ukrainian factions, and 8.5% for the Bolsheviks. After Lavr Kornilov was killed in April 1918, command of the Volunteer Army passed to Anton Denikin, under whose regime the press regularly incited violence against Jews. A proclamation by one of Denikin's generals called on people to arm themselves against what it described as the evil force in the hearts of Jew-communists. In the small town of Fastov alone, the Volunteer Army murdered more than 1,500 Jews, the victims consisting mostly of the elderly, women, and children. In Transbaikalia, Semenov's forces shot more than 1,600 people, and he personally supervised torture chambers where some 6,500 people were murdered. Peter Holquist noted that the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews by anti-Soviet armies could not have occurred without the virulent linkage drawn between Jews and Communists that ran through White ideology.

• 5. Warlords in the East

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  Admiral Alexander Kolchak seized power in Siberia in November 1918 and immediately moved to criminalize political opposition with sweeping breadth. His government issued a decree on the 3rd of December 1918 revising the criminal code of Imperial Russia to protect the rule of the Supreme Ruler. Bureaucratic sabotage became punishable by 15 to 20 years of hard labor under Article 329. On the 11th of April 1919, Kolchak adopted Regulation 428, which imposed five years of prison on individuals considered a threat to public order because of any ties with the Bolshevik revolt. Unauthorized return from exile carried a sentence of four to eight years at hard labor. General Sergey Rozanov, commanding in Yenisei county, ordered that villages whose populations met troops with arms should be burned, and that adult males should be shot without exception. A member of the right-wing Socialist Revolutionary Central Committee, D. Rakov, described Omsk as frozen in horror, with at least 2,500 people killed and entire carts of bodies carried through the city. Even the Czechoslovak forces who had helped launch the anti-Bolshevik uprising in Siberia grew appalled. On the 15th of November 1919, they delivered a memorandum to Allied representatives in Vladivostok condemning the burning of villages and the daily shooting of hundreds of people suspected of disloyalty. Two days later, General Radola Gajda led a revolt in Vladivostok against Kolchak's authority. In September 1918, Cossack warlord B. Annenkov suppressed a peasant uprising in Slavgorod county and tortured and killed up to 500 people. The village of Black Dole was burned, and girls from Slavgorod and surrounding areas were brought to Annenkov's train, raped, and then shot. Ataman Dutov's executive order of the 4th of August 1918 imposed the death penalty for evading military service and for even passive resistance to his authority.

• 6. Major General Graves Testifies

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  Major General William S. Graves commanded North American occupation forces in Siberia and watched conditions from the inside. His testimony described soldiers under Semyonov and Kalmykov, operating with Japanese protection, roaming the country like wild animals, killing and robbing civilians. He said those murders could have been stopped any day Japan chose to act. When questioned about the deaths, the reply he received was that those killed had been Bolsheviks, and that explanation, as he put it, apparently satisfied the world. Graves was unsparing in his conclusion. He stated that he was well on the side of safety in saying that anti-Bolshevik forces killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia for every one killed by the Bolsheviks. His account came from a witness with no Bolshevik sympathies, which made it harder to dismiss as propaganda. In the Don Province, the Cossack regime under Pyotr Krasnov executed between 25,000 and 40,000 people before the Red Army ended his rule by taking Tsaritsyn. In the Northern Territory, which held a population of about 400,000, more than 38,000 people were sent to prison in 1918 while the Whites held the region. Of those, about 8,000 were executed, and thousands more died from torture and disease.

• 7. Memory in Stone

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  Soviet-era memorialization of the White Terror left a physical record across Russian cities. Since 1920, the central square in Tsaritsyn has been called the Square of Fallen Fighters, where the remains of 55 victims are buried. A monument erected there in 1957 in black and red granite bears an inscription honoring the heroic defenders of Red Tsaritsyn who were brutally tortured by White Guard butchers in 1919. In Vyborg, a monument erected in 1961 near the Leningrad Highway commemorates 600 people shot by machine gun. In Voronezh, the In Memory of Victims of the White Terror monument stands in a park near the regional Nikitinskaia libraries, unveiled in 1920 on the site of public executions carried out in 1919 by the troops of Mamantov. In Sevastopol on the 15th Bastion Street, a Communard Cemetery marks the graves of Communist underground members killed by the Whites in 1919 and 1920. In Slavgorod in Altai Krai, a monument stands for participants of the Chernodolsky Uprising and their families who fell victim to Ataman Annenkov. In literature, Nikolai Ostrovsky's autobiographical novel How the Steel was Tempered documented White Terror episodes in western Ukraine. Leon Trotsky, in Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky, argued that the reign of terror began with the Whites and that the Red Terror was a response. The argument has never been settled, but the monuments, legal records, and eyewitness testimonies left enough evidence for historians to keep working on an answer.