The career of a Russian officer, General Anton Ivanovich Denikin: An annotated translation from the Russian

Abstract

These memoirs of General Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947), his last work, extend to 1916. Supplementing his civil war opus, Ocherki russkoi smuty, they provide social and intellectual background to describe the conditioning of the Russian officer corps which enabled them to continue the fight for a unified, non-Bolshevik Russia even after the tsar was dead and the cause obviously lost. Denikin's descriptions of his typical middle class public education and the influence of his father, a retired major born a serf, provide a rare insight into the making of the Great Russian mind, even in a boy who was half Polish. His military education in the Kiev Cadet School and the General Staff Academy in St. Petersburg illustrates the alienation of the Russian military from intellectual trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet Denikin was more objective than most Russian military men of his time due to his literary inclination, an inquiring mind, his personal acquaintance with officers who were to take both sides in the civil war, and access to confidential records during his brief tenure as Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Through his eyes one may see the efforts of Russo-Japanese War participants to renovate the Russian army in the interwar period, their recognition of the growing threat from Germany as well as from the revolutionaries, and the futility they felt as they marched prematurely into World War I knowing that no provision had been made to replace initial supplies and arms. Under ignorant and supercilious leaders, Denikin was forced in both wars to direct his men into impossible situations, only to withdraw before the determining point had been reached. Denikin did not gloss over the weaknesses of Old Russia; neither did he ever despair of the Russian people. But he wasted no time on histrionic recriminations. His memoirs are marked by openness and a common sense approach, providing a welcome balance between reactionary and revolutionary views.