A Memoir History of the Russian Civil War: Volume I: Birth of the Volunteer Army: Book 3: The Volunteer Soldiers in the First Battles for Rostov-on-Don Kindle Edition

The "Russian Civil War" (1916-1926) was really a series of wars, uprisings, and massacres between hundreds of political factions, nationalities, and ephemeral political entities that were thrown into chaotic internecine struggle following the implosion of the Russian Empire in 1917. Although popular histories often refer to a singular “Russian Revolution” that destroyed the Empire, this book will demonstrate that World War, Revolution, and Civil War were experienced in tandem and without pause for the participants on the ground.Unlike the first two books of the Memoir-History’s first volume, our final book includes no memoirs from the Volunteer Army’s leadership. Instead, Book 3 aims to present the perspective of the average junker and officer that fought in the Volunteer Army’s first engagements with the Bolshevik “Front Against the Counter-Revolution” led by Antonov-Ovseenko. By grouping the memoirs of the Volunteer Army’s soldiery in a single book, the tactical image of the Russian Civil War’s earliest battles emerges for the first time in the English language. Small detachments that consist of a few dozen well-organized men fight the greatly numerically superior but chaotic and leaderless opponent. Of all topics concerning the Russian Civil War, the classical “military history” that recounts the progression of campaigns on a tactical and operational level have proved the most elusive to find in print. Portraits of the high politics between nations or the experiences of competing partisan governments have been comparatively easy to reconstruct thanks to the abundance of writing and translation produced by the leadership of the Red and White civic-military governments. However, the actual experiences of the Red or White “soldier” have not been truly preserved in the polemical memoirs of their leaders. This book seeks to render the existing English-language discrepancy for translated primary sources. Chiefly, our third book will include memoirs that relate all the tactical details concerning the First Battles for Rostov, the 39th Infantry Division’s Storm of Bataysk, and the Junker-partisan expeditions in the Upper Don and against Tsaritsyn (modern-day Volgograd.) In a bizarre mixture of conventional and improvised asymmetrical warfare, the Volunteer Army soldiers attempted to stall for a political and social breakthrough that never came. They fought against a disorganized Red-Black-Gray enemy that was constantly on the threshold of overwhelming the paltry number of men within the Volunteer Army’s nominal units. Yet, the popular political program of the revolutionary defeatists had initially undermined the effectiveness of the Red not-yet-Army as a conventional force. What follows are dozens of first-hand accounts that combine hope with helplessness, victory and despair, and a sense of duty with the realization that there will be no final salvation from an inevitable total ruin.*Notice to Ebook customers, this series contains both footnotes and endnotes. Footnotes are numbered with Arabic numerals, and endnotes are numbered with Roman numerals. Footnotes concern details about the text that might be missed by casual reading, while endnotes serve as a dictionary of historical biography. Both sets of notes appear at the conclusion of the epub file. Read more