Paul Goble
Staunton, Mar. 3 – The last surviving general of the anti-Bolshevik White Armies of the Russian Civil War, Mikhail Khripunov, died in Jerusalem in 1983; but “many officers and soldiers of the White Guards lived long enough to see accomplished that for which they struggled, the end of Soviet power,” Russian journalist Yuliya Popova says.
That conclusion flows from an examination of the biographies of White Russian military figures in two fundamental Russian-language books, Yevgeny Aleksandrov’s Russians in North America and Sergey Volkov’s Participants of the White Movement, the Russian Seven writer says (russian7.ru/post/kakie-oficery-beloy-armii-eshhyo-pri-zhizn/).
Popova outlines the lives of two White Army colonels, Aleksandr Brazol who died aged 100 in the US state of New Hampshire in 1993 and Konstantin Reyngardt who also reached his 100th birthday and died in Detroit in 1991. A far larger number of more junior officers were still alive when the Soviet Union no longer was.
Among them was Boris Ivanov, a participant in the first Ice Campaign, who died in Detroit in 1993, Vasily Matasov, author of The White Movement in the South of Russia, who died in 1999, and Konstantin Svezhevsky, who became a bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church in Venezuela before retiring and dying in the US.
Thirty years later, all of these men are gone; but there is a debate about who was the last surviving White Russian soldier. Some argue that it was Ataman Nikolay Fyodorov who died in 2003 while others say it was Vasily Shostak, who died in Argentina in 2010 at 105. He fought against the Red Army in Poland in 1920.
Such people deserve to be remembered not only for what they fought to achieve but as a reminder that even those who appear to have lost at one point may by their actions set the stage for their ultimate victory, as the novelist Victor Serge pointed out in his sequence of novels about Russia in the 20th century.
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