"People's division" of West Siberian rebels (February - December, 1921)

The article is devoted to one of the most dramatic episodes of the West Siberian anti-communist uprising in 1921: folding in Priishimya cossack and peasant People division podhorunzhy S. G. Tokarev, its retreat across the Kazakh steppe to China, the insurgency in Xinjiang, Western Mongolia and Uryankhay region together with white Orenburg corps general A. S. Bakich. Particular attention is paid to the fact that the rebels many times disrupted enemy attempts to encircle and destroy them, as well as the most important battles. People division has shown exceptional perseverance and tenacity. The success of her campaign in Xinjiang is largely due to the fact that the siberian cossacks knew the conditions of movement and survival in the steppe. It is shown that the core division Tokarev served as a «working cossacks» those villages, which in 1919 did not want to defend the regime A. V. Kolchak. The practice of war communism has meant that during 1920, in the mood of the masses was a sharp turning point. On the other hand, White learned lessons from their defeats. In Xinjiang the White and the rebels entered into a political compromise inspired by the idea to return to Russia and raise the communists all the main strata of the population. From the facts resistance of the People division and subordination of its Bakich concludes unrealized social potential of the White movement in Western Siberia. Premature uprising Czechoslovak corps to speed up the full-scale Civil War and White helped to his feet, but it also deprived them of a broad social base in Siberia, as Siberians, unlike the Urals did not have time to become intimately familiar with the food dictatorship of the bolsheviks. The problem of non-social potential rests on the issue to be addressed: the ineffectiveness of the offensive strategy White, designed for short-lived (one - two campaigns) war with the help of allies in the Entente. Perhaps they should focus on three five-year struggle with reliance on domestic resources, and to go to war - with active defense outskirts of the Red Army, organizing them in the device management and coordinating activities of various White armies.