Pyotr Wrangel — _Always with Honor_

First published May 11, 2025.

Finished October 3, 2025.

If you want to buy the thing, read it yourself, and make up your own mind:

Passage Press, _Always with Honor: The Memoirs of General Wrangel_

I’m still trying to figure out how much I should be getting out of this. Books aren’t like video games — you can just keep on going without understanding what’s going on.

I’m reminded of “if you never miss a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports”:

Scott Aaronson, “Umeshisms”

…except here it’s “if you understand all the books you read, your reading selection isn’t ambitious enough”.

I’m continuing on even though I have half a mind to put the thing on my shelf and never read it again, or at least stick it in a Little Free Library around me.

Part I: The Birth of the Counter-Revolution

Chapter 1 — The Revolution and Collapse of the Army

I. On the Verge

(I read all of Chapter 1 without a text editor handy.)

Chapter 2 — The Provisional Government

Red ribbons are probably a Communist thing.

The next day the Soviet published a signed order forbidding the troops to leave their barracks without permission. On May 5 a demonstration was made by the troops which were still loyal to the Government, but that apathetic and impotent power did not know how to use them.
To be absolutely truthful, I must admit that almost the entire population of the capital remained quite passive in the face of everything that happened. They did not seem to notice anything. Some posed as conspirators and spoke of the necessity for organizing themselves, but no one ever dreamt of doing it.

II. The Revolutionary Army on the Offensive

III. Kornilov

III. The Last Days of the Provisional Government

(Yes. two threes.)

Both Wrangel and a General Krasnov have been appointed to the same post. Everything’s going to hell, so our narrator says this is to be expected.

[…] I was ordered to report at Supreme Headquarters immediately. There they offered me various appointments. I refused, realizing that I could be of no service to my country in the existing circumstances.

Chapter 3 — Under the Yoke of Bolshevism

On January 10 I was awakened by the sound of firing. The dragoons had come back from the mountains and were occupying a part of the town. I went out onto the balcony, where my brother-in-law, a former Captain of Hussars, joined me. The firing was in full swing, and soon the guns boomed out. Two shells fell in our garden.
At midday I was informed that half a platoon of Reds was stationed near our terrace. I went out to them.
“Which of you is in charge?”
“I am,” said a sailor.
“Good. Let me tell you that I am a General and this gentleman is a Captain. Understand that we are not hiding.”
“We are only fighting against Tatars”, said another. “The poor beggars belong to the age of Catherine the Great; they have sworn allegiance to Russia, and now they want to be independent.”
Many times since then I have thought of these words, spoken by an anti-nationalist and a conscious disciple of the International.

Later Wrangel is forcibly taken to a “torpedo-boat”. His wife tries, successfully, to accompany him. This does not appear to be a good idea, at least to me.

After a bit he manages to convince his wife to leave. He gives her his watch that he always wears. This changes her mind, and she stays.

During a tribunal she says she’s with her husband of her own free will. The tribunal guy, a Comrade Vakula, is impressed by this:

“Such women are not to be found every day. You owe your life to your wife. Go!”

However he’s still stuck there for another night. More than 100 people are executed.

Wrangel and his family and a few trustworthy servants then bug out to a flat in Miskhor, where he’s a “certified engineer”. His neighbors are Tatars (sworn enemy of the Reds) and mostly Muslim. They’re happy to give him early heads-ups.

II. In the Ukraine and Belarus

The Germans come in and clean up, scrubbing the Reds and sending their leaders back to Moscow.

“Ukranian”, the language, is in quotation marks here.

Kiev was packed full of officers, who had escaped death by some miracle. Almost the whole of my 7th division was there too. As I have already said, I had not been in at the final breakdown of the Army, and had only seen the beginning. I learnt from them how things had gone since I had left them. They told me of the outrages they had to endure, and of the life of martyrdom they had led. […]

This kind of thing doesn’t seem to happen in war anymore, at least not for us:

I will not say much more about my short stay in Belarus. The Germans were in occupation there too, and their discipline was much severer here than in the Crimea. The day after my arrival, Lieutenant Ohnemuller, the commanding officer of the platoon, which was quartered on us, presented himself to me. He was a young man of good family, intelligent, cultured, and very well bred. He noticed my setters, and asked me if I went in for shooting and if I expected to get any here. I told him I had hoped for some, but that it was impossible, as cartridges had been forbidden. The next day he brought me some cartridges. We went out shooting together more than once. I have never been able to understand those chauvinists who regard as an enemy every man belonging to the nation with which his country is at war. You fight your enemy’s Army, but you can respect the individuals who compose it.

Chapter 4 — The Liberation of Northern Caucasia

II. In the Nogai Steppe

Wrangel describes people. For some reason I’m under the impression that short takes in the modern era are one-sided. These are different:

I requested that Colonels Toporkov and Ulagay be promoted to the rank of General. Both were excellent officers. Toporkov, a simple Cossack, had begun his career as a private. Endowed with an innate flair for military matters, uncommon courage, elasticity and trustworthy steadiness, he lived the same life as his men, slept in the same room, and ate their mess. His every order had to be obeyed, and always was, cost what it might. But sometimes he expected too much, and sacrificed too many men to achieve his ends.

III. The Liberation of Terek

Chapter 5 — The March on Moscow

I. Hard at the Don

II. On the Volga

Chapter 6 — The Revolt in Kuban

Chapter 7 — Disaster

I. The Retreat from Kharkov to Rostov

II. With the Army in its Last Days

The end of this section directs the reader of this edition to Wrangel’s letter to Denikin, reproduced in Appendix I. It was moderately helpful to get a recap of the preceding events, especially since they’re largely a blur in my mind (I should be following along with a map in front of my face).

I summarize the preceding sections and chapters as “being in middle management stinks”.

III. In Exile

Wrangel goes to Constantinople. Denikin gets ousted.

Part II: On the Last Strip of Native Soil

Chapter 8 — The Change of Power

The non-Reds have basically lost. Wrangel says that victory is impossible, and so he cannot and should not promise that. All that he can promise is that his side doesn’t give up, and goes out fighting.

Denikin says “elect a successor to me”. Wrangel is chosen.

Much time is spent trying to figure just how over it is for the not-Reds. It’s hard for me to figure out what kind of end everyone in this sort of situation would want, both military men and civilians.

The Whites discover they have to do a thing:

General Makhrov proposed to use the least demoralized regiments of the Volunteer Corps for the projected operation.

Yeah, they’re struggling.

He knows he can’t promise victory when addressing a bunch of clergymen and political groups:

In these circumstances it would be dishonorable for me to promise you victory. All I can do is promise to save you from this dilemma without loss of honor.

“The agrarian question” comes up a lot. I’m not sure what it is. It seems to be a thing that the communists seem to be winning hearts and minds over.

Wrangel surveys the Crimean press at the time. This bit was interesting:

The censorship left much to be desired, its functions were nearly always discharged by assiduous officers who had neither the knowledge nor the requisite breadth of view for the work. Quite often absolutely harmless articles were censored, they had had the misfortune to arouse the suspicions of the censor simply because he had not understood them, whilst very provocative paragraphs often appeared in the daily columns.

Chapter 9 — Early Progress

Wrangel sets up a way to have court martials for soldiers acting like brigands. It’s a problem, and after changing things, he fixes it.

Much later, he renames the Volunteer army to the Russian army. “Volunteer” ended up being a loser term (when Denikin was running things) and Wrangel wants to make clear that he’s doing this for Russia, not some internationalist outfit.

Wrangel also notices that the communists aren’t all scumbags these days. Originally this was the case, but by now there were fine people on the other side who ended up on that side by accident of geography and also universal conscription. This meant that hunting men down on the other side like dogs wasn’t the winning play anymore.

Chapter 10 — The Agrarian Problem and the District Zemstvo

Nobody agrees on anything, and this is during a backdrop of what the Communists are doing. From what I gather, there’s a big question of what to do with ginormous landed estates with basically-serfs working the land.

Also, there’s definitely no going back to the old system.

We had to allay the peasants’ suspicion that our object in fighting the Reds was no other than to restore the rights of the great landed proprietors, and take reprisals against those who had infringed on their rights.

A ukaz goes out that says the Prikaz of the Regent gives the land to its cultivators, but they don’t get it free; they have to pay the state, and the state will reimburse the landowners.

A new idea is that private-property laws apply regardless of social class.

Chapter 11 — On the Eve of the Offensive

Chapter 12 — Forward!

The Whites start an offensive. It’s a winning play, so to speak, but they take heavy casualties in the officer corps. Now they need to rule the newly-acquired territory justly, and that’s a challenge. When it comes to counter-espionage, a lot of stuff gets put under the jurisdiction of what I’d think of as JAG types.

At this point the “Greens” (quotation marks in the original) are mentioned. I’d heard of the Reds and the Whites, but not of the Greens. Wrangel describes them as “the riff-raff of the population, deserters, common-law criminals, and Bolshevists who had been transported from Kharkov to the Crimea, but who had escaped from Simferopol prison during the winter”. Wrangel estimates there’s only a couple dozen men in these bands all together, but they serve as kind of an advance something that the Reds can supply to deepen an in-road into this or that place where there’s already a Green beachhead.

Multicultural armed forces can be bothersome sometimes:

The Commissions of Military Jurisdiction punished all cases of arbitrary requisitioning without mercy. In the majority of the cases the offender was a Don Cossack, for the Cossacks were unaccustomed to fighting on foot, and did their best to obtain horses without troubling very much about the means they employed. In the early days complaints about the Cossack troops had simply flowed in, but after two regimental commanders had been forcibly discharged and the Commissions of Military Jurisdiction had given several very severe verdicts, complaints ceased altogether.

Everything sounds pretty good at this point. As far as Wrangel can tell, they’re much better than the Bolshevists (this appears to not have been the case previously; the Russian army had a reputation for pillaging and looting) in the eyes of the civilians they’ve been fighting to reclaim.

The Poles need to be coordinated with, but Wrangel doesn’t want to get tied down with any kind of political agreement.

Chapter 13 — In Northern Taurida

Wrangel uses the strikebreaking method of “send the troublemakers to the front”. He says it works.

The People like the new Agrarian Law, but, surprise surprise, not all the landowners do. Work needs doing to not let the landowners creatively interpret the new law to benefit themselves. Wrangel declares that landowners can’t do law interpretation for their own districts, but I’m not too sure this is going to be sufficient. Class solidarity ain’t nothin’, and I assume they can talk to each other.

Northern Taurida has a lot of corn. The army is piss broke, and that corn could feed and pay for a lot. Nobody on the outside is willing to lend the Whites any money because they don’t think the Whites will win in the end.

Meanwhile, in Poland, the Reds have been winning big-league. This bothered France and the French, who tend to have a soft spot for the other Catholic country (consider the two ways one spells Chopin’s first name). A letter is sent on June 20, 1920. I’m too lazy to summarize it (I could really use something to hold this book open, but lack one), but in it a P. Struve tells some French guy that the peasantry doesn’t want the old order, but they don’t want the Communist order either.

England, of course, still wants the Whites to give up and lose. Wrangel maintains that this won’t end the fighting, but with 100 years’ hindsight I think he ended up being wrong about that.

Oh, and western Europe is still figuring out what to do about Germany with regards to reparations. From what I remember, England and France differed about that, too.

General Percy is still a fan of the Whites, but it’s not his call to make, and he’s getting recalled.

“I am hoping that my Government’s policy will change, and I have not abandoned all hope of returning to you here at the head of another Military Mission. If this does not come about, there will be nothing for it but to devote myself to my farm,”, he added, half jestingly.

>

I attached no importance to his last remark, but a few months later I received a letter from him. He wrote that, since he was convinced of the disastrous character of his Government’s present policy, he had left its service and refused the divisional post that had been offered him, he had gone to Canada, where he intended to devote himself to his farm. Later on, my English friends confirmed these facts.

Guess the not-jestingly half won out.

A secret strike happens. “Comrade” (parentheses in original, again) Zhloba’s forces lose big-time. The Whites keep northern Taurida.

The Cossacks now have horses. They’re very back, now.

Unfortunately, the Whites are running out of men. The back-office types are ordered to do tooth stuff and men unfit for active duty are supposed to take their places doing tail stuff.

Rations get cut. It’s still not enough. The Cossacks get horses, but more horses are still needed to haul stuff around.

The planes and armored cars are basically spent. Gas, oil, and rubber are all foreign exotic things, and not easy to come by.

All the officials who manage things who haven’t fled yet are family men or otherwise can’t leave. They’re, by and large, not energetic, creative go-getters (the kind Wrangel needs).

Oh, and it’s widely believed that the Whites are a lost cause at this point. Theoretically they could gain more territory and use their new territory to get money to pay for things, but they’d need a bigger army for that, and, well, their current army is undersupplied as it is.

What’s worse, the Reds are finishing up routing the Poles and now the Reds are showing up on the Whites’ western flank.

So. What do?

Wrangel figures the best idea is to expand into Cossack territory, get their support, and then go from there.

Of course, there’s a Cossack Question that needs solving. Wrangel wants to keep the higher levels of government in Russian hands, with lots of local Cossack autonomy for other stuff. Makes sense to me on paper, especially since the Cossacks don’t like the Bolsheviks much.

Some censors fail to do their jobs and news articles make it to the West that paint the Whites in a bad (i.e. reactionary) light. Wrangel puts out a few interview answers that try to turn things around:

(I’ve been reading AwH and arching an eyebrow occasionally because clearly this dates back to before constructs like “The _________ Question” were shoved out of polite society. The past is a foreign country, clearly.)

A convention happens between the Whites and the Atamans (Cossack bigwigs).

Wrangel and General Shatilov finally get stuff off their chests. Normally, they stick to business when discussing stuff and don’t unload their deepest feelings about how things are going.

A brief summary: “Shit, we’re not doomed anymore.”

But on the other hand, Wrangel knows the Whites are on a shoestring budget and everything’s broken and they’re running critically low on officers and if they get outside help, it’s going to come at a price (probably too high).

Chapter 14 — In The Kuban

Wrangel has a general plan. However, he leaves a lot of the planning of the specifics to his top men (Shatilov, Ulagay, and Dratsenko) while he’s mired in political questions. This turns out to be a mistake, fast. There’s no camaderie in a hastily-assembled group of men and world+dog seems to have heard about their mildly hush-hush battle plans.

Battles happen. The Whites win some and lose some. The wins tend to come at heavy costs.

General Slashchyov goes nuts. Like, his travelling carriage is full of birds and the guy’s wearing a dolman and he’s got empty bottles all around and dishes of hors d’oeuvres and guns and playing cards all scattered about.

Ulagay ought to be moving. He’s not. The Reds are amassing. This is bad. The Whites are going to surprise nobody, and Ulagay’s troops are outnumbered, or will be.

War math is weird. Here’s what happened to one division:

Leaves Feodosiya with 1,200 men      and 250 horses
Loses                   300 men      and 200 horses
Comes back with       1,500 Cossacks and 600 horses
All those who could were fleeing from the Red yoke.

Still, things are most emphatically not going well:

The expedition to the Kuban ended in failure.

On a positive note, Wrangel’s men were able to root out and squish the Communist agitprop bit in his corner of Russia. He notes in passing that two out of the two top men doing this are Jews.

Chapter 15 — “Concentrate on Wrangel!”

Lots of stuff happened but nothing that seems worthy of commenting on. I wonder if I’m losing my thirst for this kind of exposition.

Chapter 16 — Across the Dnieper

The Trans-Dnieper operation was over. It had been thought out carefully, prepared cleverly, and developed strictly according to plan, and yet it had ended in failure. Our failure was due party to that disastrous accident, the death of General Babiev, and partly and more importantly to the inept maneuvers of General Dratsenko, Commander of the 2nd Army. He acknowledged this himself with rare moral courage and quite winning honesty, and begged to be released from command.

Also, Poland caves and signs a peace treaty with the Bolshevists. That’s one big ally down. It’s looking very over.

Apropos of nothing, it’s weird that France has been an ally of the Whites while apparently the British government is full of commie simps. Wrangel explains that part of this is the Reds saying “once this civil war is over, we’ll be able to make loads of raw materials to help supplement yours that got smashed in WWI”, but it’s still weird.

Chapter 17 — The Last Venture

The troops are outnumbered by the Reds 3-to-1 and they’re not properly clothed for a surprisingly cold winter. Things are looking more over than they ever have been. Plans for retreats are made, especially for women, children, and the wounded. A shipment of winter clothes comes, but it comes too late.

Chapter 18 — Into the Unknown

In chapter 17, everyone thought that Perekop was impregnable. It wasn’t. Now it’s time to find out if anyone is willing to accept refugees who fought against the Reds or would be targeted especially hard by them.

A communiqué goes out. It boils down to “if you get on a ship as a refugee, there’ll be overcrowding and there’s no guarantee anyplace you go will let you in. Stay in Crimea if you can.”

The evacuation seems to go OK, though. The Reds don’t arrive before the ships all head out. People do need reminding that they defended against the Red menace, and that the Whites aren’t beggars but war heroes.

A footnote says that 145,693 men were evacuated on 126 ships (not counting the ships’ crews). Only one ship is destroyed in a storm en route to the common destination (Constantinople). In case you’re wondering, it’s 1920 as he’s writing this, and Constantinople was officially (re)named Istanbul in 1930 according to Wikipedia.

Part III: The White Armies: In Russia and Later

At this point I’m very much petering out in terms of interest and I’m doing all I can to wave this book through my stack and put it back on the shelf. As such, from here on out, I won’t be marking the chapters.

That said, there very much is something back here that’s interesting that I have something to say about. Appendix II contains an excerpt from _From Serfdom to Bolshevism_ by Baron Nikolai Egorovich Wrangel (the author’s father), and it contains an account of the “the Reds just won” party atmosphere as recounted in its chapter VIII (“1914–1918”).

In 2020, only weeks or days before this sort of thing was banned, Twitch had a stream or two of people restreaming video of what was happening at what would be euphemistically described by at least one news anchor as “mostly-peaceful protests” while buildings burned off in the distance, in full view of the reporter’s cameraman’s view.

I watched some of this unedited (but certainly curated) livestreaming, having some free time during the weekday and wanting to get an idea of what was going on so I could make up my own mind as to what was going on, how much of it was going on, and why.

There was a lot of aimless standing around in 2020, at least during the daytime. You couldn’t even call it “mostly-peaceful protesting” because there wasn’t protesting going on all during the day everywhere. Mostly, I saw people who, not unreasonably, just wanted to be outside on a nice day. Anything that would later be described as “firey, but mostly-peaceful protests” happened after sundown.

I’m tempted to bring up the Batman movie with Bane in it. My reaction at the time to the chaos was “this is what New York would look like if Occupy got their way”. I am not quite tempted enough to re-watch the movie, but I remember being moderately pleased that this was an instance where Tinseltown didn’t maximally whitewash left-revolutionary violence like I expect it to.

People steal cars and ride around in them. This being slightly over 100 years ago, cars are very much a novelty.

To declare someone a policeman is to declare that he is an outlaw in the new order, and may freely be killed to the accolades of his friends and comrades. This, of course, extends to his family:

A police officer’s family lived in a wing of our house. The man, of course, had fled. The comrades only found his wife there with three young children. The youngest was only a baby. The wife was seized and dragged off to show where her husband was hidden. The two elder children hung on to her skirts and were killed. The baby started crying. They took it by the feet and dashed its brains out against the wall.

The moral fashion dies down, though:

The police-hunting mania did not last as long as the motor-car mania. Next day policemen were at a discount. They were murdered when opportunity offered, but people didn’t trouble to hunt them out.

Things get worse, only for Wrangel père to say “they get worse later”.

Chapter IX (1918–1920) is also reprinted here.

The 19-teens were a wild time:

Before 1914 it was painful to see a dog run over. Then every day, one would see tens, hundreds, and thousands of men killed and mutilated, and amongst them friends, brothers, one’s own children, and one got used to it. It used to be thought horrible to spend the night in the company of a corpse but since then we have slept in barns containing many more than one corpse and sometimes we have taken one of them to serve as a pillow.

Things get quite unbelievable if you’re not in the middle of it:

I once met the son of one of my friends in Finland. I had known him well before the war. He was an educated young man, of a very gentle nature, and well balanced. He had since been a volunteer in the war, then he had been with Yudenitsh’s army, and according to his chief he was a brave and gallant soldier.

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In telling me of his experiences he told me that one day he had suddenly come into a district where he had found twelve Bolsheviks torturing a family. They had tied a pot with a rat in it to the mother’s stomach and the rat was gnawing her entrails. The hands of the wretched woman were nailed to a table, on which two young children of hers, who were still alive, were tied to a plate with a knife and fork through their bodies. They had already had their eyes gouged out.

A short while later he sums up and steps back for a bit:

I will spare you the details. They are too terrible and too repulsive. Men of today shrink from the hideous pictures of a Ribera, victims who skin is being taken off them like a glove, whose eyes are burnt with white-hot metal, martyrs whose entrails are wound on to reels like thread, men being flayed alive. We are too civilised for such revolting scenes. Today we want themes which are more noble, more amusing, and above all more refined […] Besides, people only have to believe in “these Russians who are eternally dying of hunger on their Volga without ever finishing the business, who begged for rations at Constantinople, who clutter up Europe, bother everybody for visas, never stop telling their depressing stories and are always exaggerating.“

>

One day I was rash enough to describe the horrible death of one of my relations who had been assassinated by the red guards to a charming Parisian lady, who was well read and of fastidious taste. I will tell you her reply.

>

“Your nerves are really getting into a very bad state. You see the dark side of everything.”

Eventually the elder Wrangel decides to flee and finally manages to find someone to help him do so, even though he’s 70 and having rheumatism flare-ups so bad he can’t even make tea whenever he sets his mind to do so. While his wife is set to go live with their one remaining son, the elder Wrangel gets on a train to head to Pskov and has to think fast to sneak past men who have standing orders to prevent men like Wrangel from leaving Russia. The adventures end with a lucky catch that bring to mind the opening scenes of Half-Life 2, provided one has already played it:

“You have been recommended to us by our Embassy. I must apologise for having had to be so rough. It was the only way of getting you out of their clutches. Luckily that man was a fool. If the other man had been there you would have been done for. Will you kindly go to the Kommandatur at Pleskau.”

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