Forgotten Freedom Fighters - Pyotr Wrangel
Stories of Men of Great Character
Your email provider may not show this entire article. Also, if you are are reading this on Telegram, or other locations, it may not display the article correctly, and may interfere with the videos. If so, read the original at Liberty Uncensored Substack.
If you’re just following, you’re only seeing a fraction of what I write. Hit Subscribe (free) and it’ll come straight to your inbox. Take our Survey.
Telegram Main Channel ///// Telegram Meme Channel ///// Telegram Movie Channel Twitter ///// Instagram ///// Signal
FREEDOM ISNT FREE, IT REQUIRES VIGILANCE
History provides innumerable examples of heroism shining forth from the moments of greatest tribulations. It is a failure of the education of the youth that the names of these heroes are either disregarded, forgotten, or defamed in the standardized and bastardized state imposed history. Credit is given to false heroes and heroines like Albert Einstein (false genius/thief), Martin Luther King (civil rights defying homogeneity of culture and constitutional/Common Law dominance) or Edward Jenner (father of vaccines) or Margaret Sanger (Planned Parenthood founder and adamant eugenicist, culpable for millions of aborted children, the greatest genocide the world has ever known).
But we can correct this great failure. We can highlight the great people that have lived and often died in their efforts to safeguard the highest virtue of humanity. We can right the wrong, and remember the worthy. We will start with Pyotr.
Pyotr
Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel, (Пётр Никола́евич Вра́нгель) often referred to as the "Black Baron," stands as a bastion of virtue amidst chaos, particularly for his steadfast resistance against Bolshevik forces during the Russian Civil War. He was flawed, certainly, as we all are. But his efforts, his motivations, and his results speak for themselves.
Wrangel was born 15 August 1878 in Novoalexandrovsk, Kovno Governorate (now Zarasai, Lithuania). He was born into the noble Wrangel family, which had produced generals and military leadership for Sweden and Russia for generations. He did not himself enter into military service directly though. Rather, he graduated as a mining engineer in 1901, in service to his nation and his Tsar in the effort to modernize Russia.
In the same year, he enrolled in the St. Petersburg Cavalry school, and afterward joined the Life Guards Horse Regiment, of the Imperial Guard. He volunteered and served in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905, where he was able to sharpen his talents in combat operations, showing leadership skill as well as combat proficiency.
After his return, he enrolled, and graduated from the prestigious Nicholas General Staff Academy. By 1912, Wrangel had earned the title of Staff Captain. He also had sired four children with his wife by this time. He was a successful Aristocratic Commander, primed for higher command positions and tested in the field. Even so, he remained a relatively unknown officer in the whole.
Setting the Scene
In the early 20th century, Russia was far behind the Western European nations in industrial progress, constitutional evolution, agricultural efficiency, literacy rates, military capability and technology, as well as in the sciences and in academia in general.
It was in need of change and the Romanov Monarchy under Tsar Nicholas II, was not succeeding all that well in its efforts to make those changes, despite the intention.
Despite all of these impediments, Russia had the ability to field enormous amounts of manpower to tasks. They had the defensibility that no other European nation could claim in Siberia.
While backward compared to the West, Russia’s industrialization was picking up speed before 1914. The empire’s economy was growing rapidly in the two decades before WWI with expanded railways, coal and steel production increases, and St. Petersburg and Moscow beginning to resemble modern industrial cities.
Foreign investment (particularly French loans) poured into Russia, strengthening its military infrastructure. After France was defeated in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 they formed the Franco-Russian Alliance (1894) to respond to the heavily German leaning imbalance in power in Europe. Bismarck’s Germany had created the Triple Alliance, with Austria-Hungary and Italy by 1882, and France feared the might of the Alliance. Since both Russia and France had disputes and fear of the might of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Italian combined might, they formed their alliance which meant the encirclement of the Triple Alliance.
As an excuse to become involved in the Franco-Russian faction despite selling its citizens on the premise of isolationism, Britain joined the Triple Entente on the premise that Germany was threatening Britain by pushing further in Naval build-up and exploration, as well as their minor colonial exploration.
In reality, the driving forces behind the creation of the Triple Entente was the Jewish influencers of finance in France like Horace Finaly (1871–1945), the managing director of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (Paribas). Paribas was one of the principal underwriters of Russian state loans that were used to fund the industrialization and militarization of Russia, to prepare for the war that was being planned by the internationalists. Finaly positioned Paribas as both a commercial and geopolitical tool, ensuring that Russian loans had prestige placement on the Paris Bourse.
Émile Ullmann, senior director at Paribas, Acted as a bridge between the Russian Finance Ministry and Parisian investors. Alfred Neymarck was an immensely influential financial journalist, statistician, and publisher of Le Rentier, a widely read investment journal. He promoted Russian bonds aggressively, portraying them as stable, patriotic, and lucrative investments for the French middle class. French “rentiers” (small savers who lived on bond interest) relied on his reports. He effectively acted as a public-relations engine for Russian debt.
The bank underwriters structured the loans, negotiated with Russian finance ministers (notably Sergei Witte), and marketed them through syndicates of Parisian banks while publicists like Neymarck convinced ordinary Frenchmen that Russian bonds were a safe way to secure a modest income. His authority lent credibility to risky foreign issues.
Between the 1880’s and 1914, at least 11 billion Francs were sent to Russia, financing railways, heavy industry, and the military infrastructure that France counted on when the war came. That was roughly half of France’s annual economic output. That would be roughly $13.5 trillion in the US today. The French Jews and Jesuits and the rest of the parasites funded the war machine of Russia to prevent the Germans from growing into a real “superpower.” Incidentally, they killed the Tsar and massacred the Christians they had given all that money to shortly after in the Bolshevik Revolution.
Anywho…
Russia, for the Russians, experienced a rapid transition from the 3rd world, to being shot from a barrel into the industrial world. By 1914, the country was, if not a peer technologically, certainly a peer in overall capability with their own, often unique, strengths.
By the time the Black Baron, Pyotr Wrangel came into the picture, the stage had already been set for a world war. He was neither a major player in that agenda, nor was he particularly important to that agenda. He was a pawn. A pawn that ended up carrying enormous weight in the game that played out.
While the Alliances were concretizing their relations, the Ottoman Empire was in collapse. The Russians and the Austro-Hungarians both laid claim to the Slavs there, but Serbia was particularly favorable to Russia and hostile to Austro-Hungarian control. In 1908 Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbs, outraged, instigated the Balkan Wars (1912–13), wherein Serbia doubled in size, and grew in confidence and defiance. Austria began to see Serbia as a mortal threat.
On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and the greatest friend to the Slavs in the nation, was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist tied to secret Serbian groups. The insensible nature of this assassination leads one to feel a level of confidence in thinking that it was a false flag. What else could serve as a spark to ignite a world war, but the death of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by the very Serbs that he was allowing into Austria just like Brittan is allowing Muslims in today. In whatever the Austro-Hungarian response would be, Kaiser Wilhelm II gave the assurance that Germany would support in any degree of retaliation from other nations.
Austria-Hungary sent a harsh ultimatum Serbia on the 23rd of July 1914, which was denied by the Serbs. On the 28th, Austria Declared War on Serbia and began shelling Belgrade. On the 30th, Russia, as the supposed protector of the Slavs and ally of Serbia, begins mobilizing its army. Germany gave an immediate warning to Russia demanding it stop mobilization, which was ignored.
Refused, Germany declared war on Russia on the 1st of August, and on the 3rd, declared war on France. On the 4th, Britain entered the fray, declaring war on Germany, and Germany engaged the Schlieffen Plan, swinging through Belgium to rapidly knock France out of the picture.
Wrangel, back in Russia, was serving the Reserves as a cavalry captain.
WW1 and Revolution
At the start of WWI, Wrangel was a reserve captain in the cavalry. He quickly changed that status by rejoining active duty in the Imperial Army and serving in the 1st Nerchinsk Regiment of the Transbaikal Cossacks. He was sent to Galicia, in the modern day Ukraine/Poland border, where over 2 million men were fielded to battle between both sides.
In Lemberg (Lviv), Wrangel began to make his name. He led courageous cavalry charges under fire against the Austro-Hungarians, framing his upward career as a bold and intelligent officer.
During the Gorlice–Tarnów Offensive, from May to June of 1915, German forces smashed through Russian lines and forced a massive retreat. The Carpathians became an attritional battle in the mountains, fighting under snow and mud, often with cavalry pressed into dismounted roles. Recognizing that cavalry charges were obsolete where modern firepower could cut swathes out, Wrangel adapted his regiment for raids, reconnaissance, and shock maneuvers in vulnerable areas of the enemy lines. He led his men in forays, slipping through forested terrain, striking supply columns, and vanishing before the enemy could respond.
Due to his successes, Wrangel was given command of a cavalry regiment, far in advance of the normal progression of officer advancement. His training regimen for his troops emphasized strategic flexibility and rigorous exercises. For his frontline valor, he received the St. George’s Sword for Bravery, a rare decoration. His reputation grew from both his exploits and his rewards recognizing his skill.
The Brusilov Offensive in June 1916, where Russia launched its greatest offensive of the war, under General Aleksei Brusilov, had Wrangel and his 1st Transbaikal Cossack Regiment, composed of elite Siberian Cossacks, running shock campaigns that would flood breaks in the enemies lines and cause havoc. These deep penetration raids seized villages, cut communications, and took prisoners, all leading to disfunction within the operations of the Austrians.
While leading a charge to clear enemy machine-gun nests, Wrangel was struck by shrapnel in the leg and side and thrown from his horse. Rather than accept a long recovery from command, he returned to the saddle and the front lines within weeks saying officers must “lead from the front, not from headquarters.” He was one of very few officers respected for enduring the hardships of the field and going through the same conditions as the rest of the men. His reputation grew enormously and he became a symbol of proper leadership. Besides the Order of St. George, he was also rewarded with the Order of St. Vladimir, the Order of St. Anna, and the Order of St. Stanislaus propelling him into the highest circles in the military.
But this was all overshadowed by a tumor growing in the heart of the nation. Not only was the chaos present at the front, but also behind the lines and back home. Russian casualties had reached several million, and the shortages in food and material, along with transportation failures and general hardships for the Russian populace, the momentary success of the Brusilov campaign was waning and the the shine was wearing off of the war effort.
Worker strikes in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) were causing unmitigable deficiencies while the Duma was openly criticizing Tsar Nicholas II’s rule. The army faced growing desertions, insubordination and mutinies. This is the same tactics the Jewish Communist leadership was using and would use in Germany as well.
The imperial ethos embodied by Wrangel of discipline, hierarchy, loyalty to the Tsar, were growing in disfavor. While he demanded order, and while his troops yet remained loyal to their leader, who had proven his virtue to them, the strain was beginning to show even within his Brigade.
From March 8th, 1917, to the 15th, the February Revolution took place, altering the composition of Russia forever. Women workers marched for bread in Petrograd, Strikes escalated to the hundreds of thousands filling the streets, and general disfunction took root. The Tsar sent troops to suppress the crowds, but the troops mutinied and joined the demonstrations.
Before the end of the week, the Tsar had abdicated, a Provisional Government was formed of socialist politicians, and the Petrograd Soviet was formed of the workers and soldiers council. The Provisional government and the Petrograd Soviet were oppositional forces, which formed a Duel Power, dvoevlastie, with both claiming legitimate authority.
On April 3rd, Lenin was restored to Russia, where he incited the population and insisted that no Russians support the Provisional Government, and that all power was to be given the Soviets. He demanded the war be ended immediately.
Within days, the Soviet issued Order No. 1, giving soldiers the right to form committees, elect representatives, and challenge officer authority.
In April 1917, when Wrangel was only 38 years old, he was promoted to Major General. He was given command of the Cavalry Brigade of the Ussuri Division, an elite cavalry formed during in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War. Deployed on the Romanian Front, providing a crutch to the defeated Romanian forces, Wrangel’s Brigade faced extreme logistical nightmares. Shell, rifle and food shortages drained effectiveness while exhaustion and demoralization was rampant amongst his troops.
The discipline that Wrangel was trying to uphold in his Brigade came crashing down with the advent of the Soviet Order No. 1. His soldiers now had license to question orders and refuse missions. They even arrested and killed officers at times. To Wrangel, this was the pinnacle of catastrophe. He was firmly convicted of the fact that the military required strict and clear hierarchies to function. Now, those of the lowest ranks and least informed and educated backgrounds could challenge the orders of those who were superior in every facet of warfighting. Rather than executing orders, his troops would debate their validity in councils until the orders were no longer useful or even possible to execute. Wrangel considered this the ultimate breaking point between old Russia and the new monster that had been created.
Despite his concerns and tribulations, he maintained his post and continued to fight the war against Germany and Austria, as a man of duty and responsibility above all. His promotion to Major General meant little now, in command of troops who no longer served their commander. This was what influenced Wrangel to later become a key actor in the White movement, which he considered to be the only way to ensure Russia would return to disciplined order and hierarchy. The saving grace of an empire destroyed by notions of Freedom masking tyranny by chaos and dissolution of Russian virtue.
In July, armed workers and soldiers in Petrograd rise up and are crushed by loyalist troops. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, being accused of being German spies by the Duma, fled Russia to avoid being killed as traitors and spies. In August, General Lavr Kornilov, Commander-in-Chief, marches on Petrograd to restore order to the city, only to be betrayed by the Duma, who had armed the Petrograd Soviet’s Red Guards, a militia, to stop Kornilov. Prime Minister Kerensky, in Petrograd, effectively signed his own death warrant, by stupidly creating a viable military force of Bolsheviks within the capital.
By September, the Bolsheviks had gained a majority in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets and their leaders, like Leon Trotsky, had begun to return to Russia. Trotsky quickly became the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. The Bolsheviks by this time were in control of the militias, the garrisons, and the media, while the provisional government remained dedicated to an unpopular war and nonsensical policies.
During this period, the Bolsheviks were working incessantly. They incited mob violence, mutinies at the front and executions of officers, as well as encouraging and leading assaults and murders of “counterrevolutionaries and looters”.
The October Revolution of November 7, 1917 proved fatal to all resistance to Bolshevik political and de facto power. Having prepared an armed insurrection under Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee, the Red Guards, soldiers, and sailors seized bridges, telegraph stations, railway stations, and government offices with ease. That night, they took the winter palace, the seat of the Provisional Government. Prime Minister Kerensky was able to escape, but the ministers of the government were arrested without a fight.
The Bolsheviks now had power of the government of Russia.
The following weeks saw brutality, including mass executions, of vast proportion against former police, officers, and “bourgeois enemies” in Petrograd and Moscow. The Bolsheviks encouraged looting and mob justice under the revolutionary banner.
During all of this, Wrangel was still out on the front, fighting for his nation and serving in the best capacity that he could. The moment the Bolsheviks seized power on November 7, he resigned his commission and refused their authority, calling them “traitors and usurpers.”
Wrangel was not interested in joining resistance efforts off the bat. Rather, he simply wanted to escape from the chaos and observe from the outside until he knew the next moves he ought to make. The winter of 1917 saw him travel to Crimea, to his family estates. There he witnessed the anti-Bolshevik resistance that was forming there. From Crimea, he moved to the Don, where the Cossacks were in open resistance to the Bolsheviks under General Alexei Kaledin amongst others. As of this point, there was no White Army, but rather many different groups operating in resistance, mostly regionally, and mostly defensively.
Disillusioned and very a-politically interested, Wrangel remained independent, even into 1918. He was not motivated to engage in the factionism war that was developing. Rather he was only interested in the national fate of Russia, only willing to fight for Russia itself, and not some party or another.
He watched the Volunteer Army of Generals Lavr Kornilov, Mikhail Alekseev, and Denikin rally officers and cadets in the Don and Kuban. This was the first attempt at a serious resistance force. At the same time, the Bolsheviks had created the Cheka (Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya, or Extraordinary Commission) and were pushing further into the regions that still had not fallen under their control.
The Cheka was the first Soviet secret police, and a precursor to the NKVD and later the KGB. It was established by a decree of Lenin’s Council of People’s Commissars. Its full name was the “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.” It used surveillance, arrests, and elimination of “class enemies” and “counter-revolutionaries” to bolster and secure Bolshevik power across Russia. It had no legal boundaries and was above criticism, only accountable to Lenin and few other Bolshevik leadership. With the authority to arrest, interrogate, imprison, torture, and execute without trial, the Cheka leveraged fear and overwhelming manipulation and force to secure region after region.
The creation of the Cheka and the resulting brutality and disgusting actions and methods served to motivate Wrangel to eventually join the White Army. He was particularly in danger from the Cheka, as a prime target of their efforts to assassinate or otherwise eliminate the officers, nobles, and generally bourgeois class. Seeing as he was all three, he faced serious danger himself, as well as did his family from the vile Cheka.
In march of 1918, the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ceded huge territories to Germany. Russia fractured into many different autonomous zones, operated in the chaos by local governments. Ukraine, the Don, Siberia, and the Caucasus broke away, into anti-Bolshevik forces, or German-occupied areas.
Wrangel saw this as the ultimate national humiliation. The nation that he’d served his entire life was being intentionally and internally demolished.
The Black Baron and Civil War
By Spring of 1918, Wrangel found himself incapable of remaining free from the conflict. The threat of the Bolsheviks had grown such that nothing was beyond their efforts of control. He joined the Volunteer Army and was assigned a command of cavalry units in the Kuban campaigns. Even during this, the most distressing period of his life, Wrangel refused to act in dishonor, and despite the fact that other officers would plunder civilian populations, he refused. He operated just as he always had, with honor and dignity, strict discipline and dauntless courage. His reputation became nationally recognized. Even those in the population opposed to his efforts respected him as a gentleman and a great leader and, even more importantly for the time, someone they could trust.
Wrangel was never concerned or interested in the political affairs. He saw himself, and acted as such, as a man of military professionalism, serving his nation in the effort to restore the dignity of that nation. The corruption of other leaders in the White Movement never touched him. His moral code combined with his strong capacity as a military commander made him a force of reckoning.
It was such, that by entering into the direct conflict, and by his very virtue, he became a source of ridicule and fear in the Bolshevik camps, and a source of inspiration and symbolic of Russian dignity amongst the Whites. The Bolsheviks even point him out particularly as the symbolic enemy in the song “The Red Army Is the Strongest.”
“White is the Army and Black the Baron
That want to restore the old Tsar’s throne
But from the taiga to British seas
The people’s Red Army’s at the peak of strength!”
The Black Baron did not give that name to himself. Rather, it was the Bolsheviks who bestowed him with that name that eventually worked against them. Black was representative of the Monarchy, and naming him the Black Baron made him a symbol of the ultimate enemy the Bolsheviks were fighting to destroy. This eventually was a name used by the Whites and all opposed to the Bolsheviks to refer to the grand person that was Pyotr Wrangel. His ever present image of the noble man, in title and in action, presented in black Cossack-style Circassian coat (cherkesska) with silver cartridge loops, and a tall black fur papakha (hat), and often a black cloak. Admired by his men, and all who witnessed his carriage, he was truly the symbol of Russian heritage and dignity in the face of the brutality of the cancerous Bolshevism.
The First Kuban Campaign, the first mission given Wrangel, between March and April, 1918, he led his roughly 1000 cavalrymen on a 90-day, 400-mile retreat through crippling weather and constant fights with Bolshevik forces. His unit was used to cover retreat and to engage in ambushes against the Reds, where he always rode at the front, saber drawn.
In April, General Kornilov was killed and was succeeded by General Denikin. After swearing his allegiance, Wrangel was elevated as one of the most significant leaders of the Whites.
Kornilov wasn’t the only major loss to Whites in this time. The ultimate blow to those like Wrangel, who served in honor, true to the Monarchs of his nation and in service to that nation despite the removal of those monarchs.
After Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March of 1917, the Provisional Government had him placed under house arrest at Tsarkoye Selo. In August, they were moved to Tobolsk in Siberia, and finally they were moved to Ekaterinburg in the Spring of 1918 in response to the increasing intensity of the Civil War. As the Whites advanced on Ekaterinburg in the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks feared that the Romanovs would be liberated and ignite further resistance against them and mitigating their legitimacy.
On July 16th, at the Ipatiev House, “House of Special Purpose”, Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, their daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and 13 year old Tsarevich Alexei, the monarchical heir, were all brutally and sadistically murdered.
The executioners were of the Ural Regional Soviet, a Cheka squad. When the order was received from Lenin directly to execute the royal family, commandant and Jew Yakov Yurovsky and his squad including Grigory Nikulin, Mikhail Medvedev, Peter Ermakov, Pavel Medvedev, Stepan Vaganov, Andrei Strekotin, Ivan Kabanov, Alexei Kabanov, Pyotr Startsev, Konstantin Mikhailov, Sergei Vaganov, Pyotr Yermakov, conducted the grotesque assassination.
Told they were being moved for their safety, the royals were brought into the basement, under the pretext of taking a family portrait. Upon gathering in the basement, Yurovsky read a sentence of death on behalf of the Ural Soviet, and before Nicholas could respond to the order, he was shot. The rest of his family followed, though due to jewels in their dresses deflecting bullets, several of the daughters were stabbed with bayonets and shot at point-blank range. After the murder, the squad mutilated the royal bodies, burned them with acid, and buried them secretly in hidden pits in the forest.
See more at https://www.romanovs.eu/
The murder of the entire royal family was a symbolic act as well as a tactical decision for the Jew Bolsheviks. They hated what the Tsar stood for, a bastion for European Christianity and sovereign, proud, amd unencumbered cultural, racial, and reglious hegemonic nationality. A symbol of opposition to the internationlist Judean Nation. Where Wrangel became a symbol of aristocratic vestiges to be eradicated, the Tsar represented the very heart of the hated monarchy. The death of the royal family was a ritual sacrifice, an explosive moment in history that has left its mark on all of us ever since. It was the mark of the beast. It was the raising of the flag of the the Judaic/Babylonian Death Cult declaring that it wasn’t going to live in the shadows as states within states any longer, but would conquer whole nations and wage war on the entire world with every effort. It was a defining moment in human history, outshining almost every other effort made by the Judaic cult before that, and setting the world on the path that has been seen over the past century. Wrangel never publicly let any knowledge of this be known, and even defended the proper treatment of every community, even Jewish ones, even in the lowest moments of the Civil War. He was noble, even to his enemies, whether he knew them or not.
A quick sideline on the Cheka…
The peasant uprisings of May and June of the same year gave rise to increasing authority delegated to the Cheka. Grain requisitions were violently opposed leading to an explicit order from Lenin in August:
“Hang no fewer than 100 kulaks… publish their names… take hostages… do this in such a way that for hundreds of versts around the people see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle the bloodsucking kulaks.”
After being accused of selling out Russia to the Germans in the Brest-Litovsk by Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, and after they had assassinated German ambassador Mirbach in Moscow on July 6th to sabotage the accord, the Cheka were called in to crush the ensuing revolt, and led to their executing and imprisoning hundreds. No longer were the Bolsheviks interested in allyship with the LSR. Along with the execution of the Romanovs, these increasingly public affairs provided a view into the mind of the Bolsheviks. They were going to crush anyone in their way, by public military campaigns, or by the use of secret police above the rule of law, and operating against publicly defined friend or foe.
On August 30th, Lenin was shot and wounded by Fanya Kaplan, a Soviet-Revolutionary. The same day, Moisei Uritsky, head of the Petrograd Cheka, was assassinated. This led the Bolsheviks to proclaim a state of emergency, triggering the Red Terror.
In the Decree of the 5th of September, 1918, Sovnarkom declared the need for “mass terror against enemies of the revolution.” This decree gave the Cheka carte blanche to shoot on sight anyone suspected of counterrevolution. In Petrograd’s Peter and Paul Fortress, Moscow’s Butyrki Prison, and in provincial towns thousands were shot and killed. In Nizhny Novgorod, the entire local bourgeoisie was targeted. In total, there were roughly 15,000 Russians executed across the nation, all within a couple months.
By 1919, the Cheka had escalated its hostage policy. Whites were considered “class enemies” and were shot without any respect to their prisoner status, violating basic rules of warfare common in Europe and beyond. In Kiev in the first few months of 1919, before evacuating the city, the Bolsheviks executed over 1,000 hostages.
Beyond 1919, the Cheka only increased in villainy and terror, shooting “enemies of the state” or otherwise executing nigh on indiscriminately anyone who appeared to be so. Even calling in the Red Army to use poison gas at moments. In response to the Kronstadt Rebellion in 1921, the Cheka executed thousands and deported survivors to Solovki, the first “model” concentration camp. The ultimate targets of the Terror were the Nobility, gentry, and especially the Orthodox clergy as well as pretty much any Christian or anti-Bolshevik commoner they came across. Thousands of priests, monks, and nuns were executed while churches were looted and desecrated. Ex-Tsarist officers recruited into the Red Army were executed under any reasonable or unreasonable pretext. Socialist-Revolutionaries were purged, and often tortured first. Mensheviks were exiled. Anarchists were branded bandits and exterminated. Anyone striking, refusing requisitions, or trading privately were tried for crimes or simply killed. The Cheka evolved in 1922 into the GPU (State Political Directorate) under the NKVD of the RSFSR, but the purpose and authority and behavior remained unchanged. GPU a year later become the OGPU, directly under the USSR’s Council of People’s Commissars, expanding its powers to international espionage and labor camps, but then became the NKVD (1934–1946), then the MGB (1946–1954), the KGB (1954–1991), and the FSB (1991–present). The Cheka was the beginning of the tale of over a century of secret policing, espionage, assassinations and sabotage, and every other nefarious activity.
Just between 1918 and 1922, the conservative estimate resolves around 140,000 shot by the Cheka, while the émigré community estimates range into the hundreds of thousands. Including deaths from famine caused by requisitioning, suppression of peasant revolts, and concentration camps, the real number of those murdered by the Cheka is 200,000–300,000 at minimum and perhaps up to a million.
See more of this by reading:
During the Summer and Autumn of 1918, Wrangel found himself commanding cavalry in the Second Kuban Campaign. This time, the Whites were advancing into Kuban with 9,000 men. By the end of the campaign, the Volunteer Army numbered over 40,000. Wrangel harried the Bolshevik retreat and captured key towns like Stavropol amongst others.
By November, the Germans were withdrawing from Ukraine. They had surrendered the fight of the world war. As such, the Whites began to move north. In January of 1919, Wrangel was promoted to Lieutenant General in command of the Caucasian Volunteer Army’s Cavalry Corps, tasked with clearing the Donbass and the road to Tsaritsyn, the “Red Verdun,” leading to the Campaign for Tsaritsyn from March to June.
During the campaign, Wrangel used rapid cavalry raids, circling behind the Bolshevik positions to rout them. Tsaritsyn (Volgograd) was captured on June 30, 1919. The fact that Stalin himself as well as Voroshilov had fortified the city, and Wrangel had broken through those defenses, made Wrangel’s reputation as a genius commander grow further. Every Russian knew his name.
During July and August Wrangel advanced northwards, crossing the Don and Volga steppe and threatening Saratov while severing Bolshevik communications. Simultaneously, Denikin ordered all white armies to converge upon the north, in the Moscow Offensive. The action began in September and October, where Wrangel’s Caucasian Army formed the right wing, and partly the left wing, of the offensive and advanced through Orel-Kursk, reaching within 200 miles of Moscow.
Despite the motivation and early advances of the offensive, Wrangel had warned Denikin of overextended lines and exhaustion amongst the soldiers. He also tried to press the issue of the massive Bolshevik reserves forming in their front. Despite his efforts, Denikin was dismissive and arrogantly ordered the offensive to proceed onward.
November saw Trotsky and his commanders, Tukhachevsky and Budyonny, begin their counterattacks. Trotsky countered the White forces by mirroring Wrangel’s shock tactics. The Red cavalry struck deep into the White rear, while their infantry attacked the flanks, including Wrangel’s right., and held the main line. Hit with a multi-axis front, the White Army was not able to sustain a cohesive defense. These offensives were planned to cut White communications, break the Volunteer Army’s shock groups, and drive the Whites off the central steppe.
Red units seized key junctions with ease, such as Livny, Kastornoye, while horse columns then cut the White rail links that fed their advance. This disruption of the rail and telegraph traffic turned a hard-pressed but intact front into a fractured and confused one. Red raids, such as Primakov’s dash into the White rear, captured supply trains and junctions and injected chaos into the White Army.
Between the 15th and the 18th of November, Kursk fell to the Reds while White formations were driven back. Reds were rolling up White positions toward the Don and the North Caucasus as the counteroffensive advanced as much as 200–250 km in places. Strategically, the result was the reversal of the White advance on Moscow.
Wrangel’s corps was wholly dependent upon long rail lines back to the Don–Kuban. While his columns were highly mobile and flexible, they were also frail in the lines. When the Reds successfully severed those lines, they effectively isolated the forward White columns from the reserves and artillery, and stripped away the necessary routes for supplies for creating defensive long-term positions. The encroachments made by the Red shock groups and cavalry raids threatened to encircle the White shock groups, including Wrangel’s. When the rear is cut, mobile cavalry cannot be resupplied and is forced either to fight a costly breakout or withdraw to conserve its core. The stress placed upon these groups ripples into the main body of the army, which relies on the front-line skirmishers to disrupt solid enemy columns and lines.
Wrangel’s army was forced into southern retreat. Even during this retreat, Wrangel maintain superior military precision and order amongst his troops. He ordered successive delaying actions, such as fast cavalry screens, local counter-raids, and armored-train thrusts where available. This bought time for the infantry to make an ordered retreat, rather than a broken rout.
Wrangel didn’t focus on territorial gains at all, especially with winter on the horizon, and rather ceded territory to preserve the most combat-worthy elements, such as elite cavalry regiments, horse artillery, staff, and command cadres. In a pattern of morning engagements and night withdrawals, he moved them south towards more defensible lines in the Don/Kuban axis and, later, into Crimea. He effectively preserved the core of the army while the lower-quality and overstretched units were dissolved by their dispersal or were captured by the Reds. All the White troops were composed of exhausted men who had been tasked with forced marches advancing upon Moscow, making a stand against overwhelming odds, and then making an orderly retreat under fire. Wrangel’s cavalry was especially worn from 3 forced marches, constantly under fire, and being responsible for the rearguard actions protecting the core for its retreat.
By November 30, Wrangel’s cavalry was the only part of the Volunteer Army in ordered withdrawal. When Wrangel reached Novocherkassk in the Don he was witness to the utterly catastrophic logistical breakdown that had begun there. Requisition trains had been pillaged, units left burdened with hundreds of wagons, and peasants were turning hostile to the Whites due to the rampant plundering that had ravaged the population.
On the 9th of December, Wrangel drafted a memorandum for Denikin, wherein he criticized the Moscow Campaign in bitter terms and detailed the conditions of the current state of the rear and the strategic situation. In the opening line, he said, “The continual advance has reduced the Army’s effective force.” What followed was blistering critique, including the vastness of the Rear for supply, leaving ridiculously fragile lines open to the enemy shock troops, the HQ’s negligence in re-quipping troops, and the very same equipment being left open to theft by disillusioned troops. He described the stupidity of the forced requisitions of local populations alienating peasants and undermining recruitment and the hundreds of wagons being carted behind each regiment turning them into slow targets. He put forward a plan to redeploy the troops on a new strategy.
This report was received by Denikin with repugnance. He viewed it as an attempt by Wrangel to vie for political position, rather than read it as a clear, though humbling, report of the state of the Army. Wrangel, as any Noble man ought, described what he saw and the conditions that had led to it with the candor of a gentleman in great distress over what he saw as unrighteousness.
After Denikin demanded a retraction, and Wrangel refused, he was relieved of command of the Caucasian Army and sent into retirement in Constantinople. Being that Wrangel was the only commander who had preserved his army in fighting capacity during the November retreat, his dismissal was seen as, and truly was, the loss of the unity of the purpose that held the Whites together. Wrangel never claimed nor desired political capital, and did not understand the political falling out that would occur with the memo criticizing the leadership of the Moscow Campaign. The top brass having to be both politician and commanders of armies, they read the memo not as a simple, clear, and obvious critique of the situation and decisions made, but as political gambit for power. They belonged to a world that Wrangel despised, that of the political infighting.
By the end of December, the White command was falling apart. Denikin remained Commander-in-Chief, but the Volunteer Army had lost its most capable general and most inspiring symbol. Denikin resigned after only three months without the ability to return the fight to the Bolsheviks on any front, militarily or politically.
When Wrangel returned, it was as the new commander-in-chief.
The Black Baron, Commander-in-Chief
Between February and March 1920, the Reds had crushed the Don Cossacks, overran Rostov-on-Don, and drove the Whites south toward the Black Sea. Under pressure from his own generals, especially the Don and Kuban Cossacks, Denikin resigned on April 4. The same day, the Military Council of the AFSR recalled Wrangel from Constantinople and unanimously elected him Commander-in-Chief.
As the Supreme Commander “Glavnokomanduyushchiy”, he brought the army headquarters to Sevastopol in Crimea, and took stock of the situation. By April 1920, the Whites had been reduced to 35,000–40,000 men. This included roughly 10,000 cavalry, 150–200 guns, a handful of armored trains, and some naval vessels.
He immediately set to shutting down the looting and requisitions, and instituted land reforms in which peasants could retain the land they worked, but leaving the right of landlords to sell lands. He disbanded the endless wagon trains and formed light mobile formations. Discipline improved with public punishment of profiteers and speculators.
In May, Poland, under the leadership of Józef Piłsudski, the Polish Chief of State, initiated the “Kiev Offensive” and thus the Polish-Soviet War. The Poles pushed deep into Ukraine and seized Kiev by the 7th of May. Wrangel saw the opportunity here, and placed his strategy on the assumption that the Reds would have to fight on two fronts, northern and southern, providing opportunity to divide their forces and drive wedges into their lines.
Wrangel proposed to Piłsudski that the Whites would recognize Polish gains in the east if they would coordinate their efforts, but it fell on suspicious ears. Piłsudski despised the Russian White Monarchists, and distrusted the offer as a ploy. Again, the political aspect was a failure of Wrangel’s. He was a forthright man. He thought on terms that did little to alleviate the distrust of the political mind. For this reason, no alliance was formally signed, though an atmosphere of collaboration did exist.
By mid-May, the Poles were aligned along a 500 km front in Ukraine. They were pressing the Bolsheviks hard. Wrangel saw this as his opportunity. Thinking that Crimea would be unable to fight only on a defensive line, ion the 6th of June, he launched the Tavria Offensive, seizing Melitopol, Aleksandrovsk, and northern steppe breadlands in the mainland steppe north of Crimea. He continued onward toward the Dnieper line. The result of the campaign was the inclusion of grain, coal and the railways of Tavria. He also was able to recruit several thousand troops from these territories.
The Reds were under dual pressure with the Poles in the north and Wrangel in the south. While Lenin and Trotsky considered Wrangel the greater threat overall, they knew that to get to him, they first had to crush the Poles first. Knowing this, Wrangel was hoping that the Reds would direct their efforts against the Poles, leaving his way open to sweep north into Ukraine and connect with Polish and Ukrainian forces, and reopen the “two-headed” anti-Bolshevik front.
The Red Armies under Tukhachevsky in the north and Budyonny’s Cavalry in Ukraine, launched massive counteroffensives against this plan, leading to the Polish chaotic retreat from Kiev by mid-June. August came fast, with Wrangel still expanding carefully into Tavria, despite the Polish failures. Seeing this, and having been given some breathing room, the Reds began shifting their focus to him. The Reds reached Warsaw by mid-August bringing Poland to near collapse. Turning the tide once more, Piłsudski counterattacked at the Battle of Warsaw, completely destroying Tukhachevsky’s Western Front and driving the Reds back east, saving Poland from Bolshevik dominion. Pilsudeski completely retreated from the collaborative effort with Wrangel, and began to focus solely on the shoring up of Poland’s borders. In September, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with Poland in Riga. Thousands of Red Army troops were now free to join in the fight against Wrangel in the South. Had Poland joined forces with Wrangel in full, it is very likely that the Reds may have been pushed back into a defensive position and collapsed through attrition or direct onslaught on the two fronts. That not happening, Wrangel stood alone in Crimea, facing Frunze’s 150,000-strong Southern Front in October–November 1920.
In a particularly insightful political move, Wrangel reformed his Army into the Russian Army to present it as the legitimate national army of Russia rather than a warring faction. By late June, his forces had grown to 40,000 to 45,000 strong. He attempted to push into the Donets Basin (Donbass) in July and August and seize coal and industrial zones, but was repelled by Red reserves.
He furthered other political moves by creating the Government of South Russia in Sevastopol. It was composed of moderate conservatives and some liberal émigrés. Through this new government, he continued to press land reform to soften peasant hostility and regain the trust of the people.
By October, the Red forces that were freed from the Polish front were facing down Wrangel, along with the regulars and reserves that were already competing with the White army. Under Frunze, about 155,000 Reds were launched into a massive campaign against Wrangel’s 40,000 across the Dnieper. While Wrangel led his forces with extreme proficiency and his troops fought valiently, the numbers were against him. Despite counterassaults, like that at Kakhovka and along the steppe the White army was being reduced piecemeal. On November 7-10, Wrangel saw his line collapse when the Reds advanced into the Perekop isthmus which led into Crimea, and broke through the White defenses. Wrangel had no choice but to order the retreat to the Crimean Ports.
In proper Wrangel fashion, the well structured retreat was orderly and relatively bloodless. Between the 13th and the 16th, Wrangel oversaw the evacuation of around 145,000 people, including 40,000 troops and over 100,000 civilians. Leaving from Sevastopol, Yalta, Feodosia, and other ports the evacuees found rescue in the form of the Russian ships as well as French and Greek warships that lent their assistance. They were received at Constantinople and Lemnos.
Wrangel has been most rewarded in the record of history for this achievement. Logistically, the evacuation was enormously complex, and yet, Wrangel pulled it off with the appearance of great ease. A mark of a truly great commander, to say nothing of the fact that he remained humble throughout this and after the success.
Exile, Death and the Legacy of the Black Baron
Initially, upon landing at the island of Lemnos in Greece, Wrangel regrouped his army under the French oversight there. Disease, hunger, and despair were rampant, and despite months of efforts in holding together the troops, for fear of losing the cause altogether, he eventually had to alter course. In 1921, he moved the official HQ of the White Army to Sremski Karlovci, in the Serbian Kingdom (Yugoslavia). The Serbian monarchy was sympathetic to the Whites and to the Orthodox Church, and allowed Wrangel to establish Russian schools, churches, and an officer corps. Thousands of émigrés looked to him as the symbolic head of the true Russia. His humility and simple living became a symbol of moral authority in the exiled community.
The Black Baron found himself a refugee, and an exiled Russian National. One of Russia’s greatest commanders; loyal, noble, and honorable to the end. Wrangel was filled with the conviction that the Bolsheviks were a temporary blight upon Russia and that one day they would be rousted or fail out of their sheer stupidity. He believed that Russia would, on that day, need a cadre of proper officers to take command and restore Russia.
In 1924, Wrangel founded the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS), which organized émigré veterans into a military and political community with branches across Europe and even in the Americas. The goals of the ROVS was to preserve White Russian cohesion, maintain military tradition and readiness, and to be a moral and political counter-weight to Bolshevik propaganda internationally. The ROVS become the largest émigré military organization with strict heirarchies and discipline, and above all an emphasis on the unity of the community, despite political or otherwise opinions such as those between the monarchists, liberals, and Cossack separatists.
In the late 1920’s Wrangel moved to Brussels and relocated the HQ of the ROVS there as well. Living with his wife, Olga Mikhailovna, and their children, he was able to provide a relatively normal life for his family, while operating ROVS in close proximity to the many émigrés who had settled in Western Europe, and especially France. It was here he authored his memoirs “Always with Honour”, which told of his service and his philosophy of duty and loyalty. and nationality.
On April 25, 1928, Wrangel died in Brussels, at 49, possibly of tuberculosis, though émigré circles posited the likelihood of his being poisoned. The fear was valid as the Bolsheviks were not desirous of having any oppositional character with the influence the Black Baron had of surviving, whether inside or outside of Russia. They wanted total hegemonic power over the narrative they were weaving. Wrangel stood against that as the most significant opponent with the most valid perspective.
Though he was buried in Brussels, in 2007, his remains were removed and interred at the Russian Orthodox Church of All Saints in Belgrade, in recognition of his role as the last commander of White Russia and the greatest of the Russian defenders against Bolshevism.
Wrangel was and is remembered not only as iconic of military resistance to tyranny, but also as a perfect example of loyalty to the end. He died having never surrendered or compromised his virtue to Bolshevist manipulation and assaults. He worked tirelessly, not to enthrone himself or be bathed in laurels, but to serve the interests of his people, his nation. Even after his death, the émigré community saw him as the man who bore their honor intact despite military defeat. The ROVS continued to exist after him, under the leadership of General Alexander Kutepov (1929–1930), then General Yevgeny Miller (1930–1937), despite being plagued by divisions and NKVD infiltration.
The Soviet secret police, the OGPU, which replaced the Cheka, and later become the NKVD recognized ROVS as the greatest threat to Bolshevism from exiles. They formed false underground monarchist networks inside Russia, such as “The Trust”, and utilized these to ensnare ROVS officers who thought they were communicating with loyalists in Moscow. It was not uncommon for émigrés to be lured back into Russia and captured or executed. After Wrangel’s death, the NKVD increased their efforts and even kidnapped General Kutepov in 1930, in Paris. He was likely murdered. In 1937, General Miller was also abducted in Paris and executed in Moscow.
At the outbreak of WWII, the ROVS became fragmented. Members were split between support for the Wehrmacht, who they believed would crush Bolshevism, and the fear of Hitler being just another tyrant. The German occupation of Western Europe, especially, further fractured the émigré community. The community melted into the host countries, assimilating and growing less cohesive and unified.
After the war, the ROVS headquarters moved to Munich, then Paris, and finally New York. The membership coninued to dwindle away, but was yet held together by the older members, those with the direct experience and shared memories. When the Cold War sprang up, the ROVS was given new inspiration to oppopse the USSR internationally. They published media, and maintained veteran groups, and maintained a general staff in exile. Leaders came and went, from General Anton Turkul to General Georgy Skorodumov.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, the ROVS were finally able to operate openly in Russia for the first time. General Igor Borisovich Ivanov and others attempted to reestablish branches in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Rostov, though they still faced the underbelly and vestiges of the enemy. In the 1990s, ROVS members involved themselves in Russian nationalist and monarchist politics, often clashing with liberal democrats. Some ROVS branches even sent volunteer fighters to conflicts like Transnistria (1992), Abkhazia (1992–93), and the Balkans, continuing the fight of the White Russian mission.
Today, the ROVS yet exists, as a veterans’ and nationalist organization, though it is a shadow of its former self in both influence and number. Several hundred members exist. It maintains memorial services for Wrangel and Denikin, ceremonies at White graves in Belgrade and Paris, and publications on military history. It aligns itself with Russian monarchist, Orthodox, and nationalist movements while staying out of the political spotlight. It exists both in Russia and internationally and is led by émigré descendants who keep alive the memory of the White Army.
It remains a symbol of the struggle that never ended. That of the fight against Bolshevism, which ultimately is the fight against the Judaic agenda for global dominion through the deconstruction of Nations and the implementation of international unions controlled by Jews.
While Wrangel never named his true enemy, the Talmudic Jews, he did name the Bolshevik’s as the cancerous growth upon the Nation and his people. His lifelong loyalty to his nation stands as a symbol of what all men ought aspire to, that being steadfastness to virtue and the protection of one’s family, tribe, nation and race.
When the Bolsheviks had nearly broken through the Perekop isthmus, and Wrangel knew for certain that any further attempt to defend Crimea would meet with failure, he gave the order to retreat not in some chaotic mass, but an ordered retreat, where the troops would cede ground in sections, breaking the stride of the Reds moment to moment in defensive positions. This allowed him to load the 100,000+ civilians into ships first. He was, even in total military defeat, in care of his people. There was no panic, but rather an acceptance of circumstance and the guiding hands of an orderly and composed commander and his dutiful troops. When the civilians were loaded, Wrangel loaded his men. Only after every single civilian and soldier had been loaded into the ships, did Wrangel lift his foot from the dock and embark.
Wrangel held every bit of ground that he could in every moment, ceding only that which would protect the lives of his countrymen and allow them to live and fight another day. That is the story of a leader whose measure is not written in land conquered but in lives saved. In contrast with Bolshevism, a revolution promising liberation, but only giving famine, terror, secret police, and the destruction of entire communities… the same ideology that claimed to speak for the worker, yet sent millions into gulags and to their brutal deaths through executions and starvation… the same leaders shouting about freedom but delivering only utterly devastating enslavement and repression…. The contrast can be no more severe.
Wrangel fought a losing war with honor, never selling his soul when almost all of his contemporaries did so without hesitation and out of self-preservation or greed. In victory, heroism is easily recognized. Wrangel shows us what it looks like in defeat. Resistance, even when doomed, still has value, and principle is not something that can be bartered for convenience. Wrangel proves that leadership is measured by responsibility, not power.
How many leaders in this century can be measured as equal to Pyotr Wrangel? How many can be weighed against the virtue of a man of true Nobility and courage, who fights at the front, facing all danger, and ensures the security of his people before his own, even to the last? How many leaders have urged unity despite their personal beliefs, and brought their nations into greater homogeneity? The memory of true leadership as embodied by Wrangel must not be allowed to be forgotten, despite their conspicuous absence from government approved textbooks. He is an example of the most dangerous man to despots, as he represents the constant will of man against tyranny, such that even in defeat they resist.
Wrangel didn’t conquer Bolshevism, he exposed it. He died, but his spirit outlives his body in our collective resistance to tyranny. He shows us all that even in the darkest storm, there are still men who refuse to bend.
While his defeat was inevitable considering all the factors beyond his control, he never wavered, never surrendered, and never gave up the goal. He died with freedom on his lips, justness in his heart, and a legacy that would live on to inspire others to challenge the foe that we collectively must confront. A truly noble man, he has inspired me.
Freedom is a duty.
You are the only one that can act upon that duty.
Gather→Organize→Strategize→Act
LUNP Issues: December—January—February—March—April—May—June—July
You can TIP ME with $1, (Tip me $2), (Tip me $3), etc. with further value exchanges as well. Right now you can use BUYMEACOFFEE to tip a couple bucks for this article you appreciated and Get MR Zine. You can also support with CashApp, PayPal, or Crypto.
If you’re just following, you’re only seeing a fraction of what I write. Hit Subscribe (free) and it’ll come straight to your inbox. Take our Survey.
Telegram Main Channel ///// Telegram Meme Channel ///// Telegram Movie Channel Twitter ///// Instagram ///// Signal ///// Email Me
While I highly suggest operating entirely out of courtrooms, I also highly suggest getting familiar with courtroom operations and how to understand what is happening. How to Win in Court is one of the best resources I have found to understand court procedure and tactics.
After this, I suggest familiarizing yourself with The American Union, The Colorado Republic and People's Awareness Coalition.
If you aren’t using Presearch yet, it’s time to start. Get off Google and Bing, and use a search engine that serves your best interests and pays you Crypto for using it.
Dive into the content of our friends on and off Substack: Ernest Hancock, Etienne de la Boetie2, Dave Scotese, Geopolitics & Empire.
We need your help to bring it to the next level!
Blessings!
Another awesome article from the king 💯💯💯