Denikin, Anton

Born Dec. 4 (16), 1872, near Warsaw; died Aug. 8, 1947, in Ann Arbor, Mich. One of the main leaders of the all-Russian counterrevolution during the Civil War (1918-20); lieutenant general (1916). Born into the family of an officer.

Denikin graduated from the Kiev Infantry Junker School (1892) and the Academy of the General Staff (1899). During World War I he commanded a brigade, a division, and from the autumn of 1916 the 8th Army Corps on the Rumanian front. In April-May 1917 he was chief of staff of the supreme commander in chief and then commanded the troops of the western and southwestern fronts. He was an active participant in the Kornilovshchina. On Nov. 19 (Dec. 2), 1917, along with L. G. Kornilov, he fled from the Bykhov prison to the Don River, where he took part in the creation of the Volunteer Army, which he headed after Kornilov’s death on Apr. 13, 1918. In the autumn of 1918, with the aid of the Entente, Denikin became commander in chief of the counterrevolutionary Armed Forces of the South of Russia and Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s deputy supreme ruler of Russia. In the summer and autumn of 1919 he led a campaign on Moscow. After the White Guards were routed in March 1920, Denikin and the remnants of the army evacuated to the Crimea. There on April 4 he turned over the command to General P. N. Wrangel and departed on an English destroyer for Constantinople.

In his political views he sympathized with the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets) and supported a bourgeois parliamentary republic. Although he remained an enemy of Soviet Power to the end of his life, in 1939 he appealed to White emigres not to support fascist Germany in the event that it fought a war against the USSR. He is the author of memoirs on the Civil War (Essays on the Russian Disturbances, vols. 1-5, Paris, Berlin, 1921-26; in an abridged version, The Campaign on Moscow, Moscow, 1928).