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100 years ago on Nov. 17, the last major component of the counter-revolutionary White Guards led by General Pyotr Wrangel left Crimea in steam ships, essentially marking the triumph of the Bolsheviks, three years after their coup, a disaster the world still hasn't recovered from.
The Allies supported the White Guards in #Russia from 1918 primarily as a means of pressuring the Bolsheviks into re-opening the Eastern Front against Germany, meaning the incentive collapsed once the Armistice in the Great War was signed, except with Winston Churchill.
Most of the Allies failed to recognise that the Bolshevik regime was a menace in and of itself, one far worse than the Kaiser, and thus the support for the White Guards was limited and listless. By the end of 1919, the counter-revolutionaries were in disarray.
In the east, the Bolsheviks captured and murdered Admiral Kolchak in February 1920. Shortly after that in the west, General Denikin resigned and left the Ukraine, where Wrangel did what he could in the circumstances but within six months it was over.
Some White Guards did fight on after 1920, but they were the more extreme religious elements and they were isolated in the east: Mikhail Diterikhs proclaimed a sobor in July 1922 that was defeated three months later, and Anatoly Pepelyayev managed to hold out until June 1923.
In exile, the White émigrés were hunted by the Soviet secret police: their organisations infiltrated, their leaders assassinated, many in Paris, and some of them lured back to Russia on promises of continuing the anti-Bolshevik war by cunning provocations like the TRUST operation
In case of interest, prior thread on the Allied intervention in the Russian civil war, the White Guards' defeat, and the continuation of war by other means in exile as the Bolshevik regime stabilised and sent its agents after the White émigrés in Europe. https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1004436157202038784
