page_title: White movement
section_title: Ideology
hierarchical_section_title: White movement / Structure and ideology / Ideology
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Проект герба Российского государства, использовавшийся колчаковским и деникинским правительствами. English: Coat of arms project for the Russian State, used by the govenments of Alexander Kolchak and Anton Denikin.
context_page_description: The White movement and its military arm the White Army, also known as the White Guard, the White Guardsmen or simply the Whites, was a loose confederation of anti-communist forces that fought the communist Bolsheviks, also known as the Reds, in the Russian Civil War and that to a lesser extent continued operating as militarized associations of insurrectionists both outside and within Russian borders in Siberia until roughly World War II.
  During the Russian Civil War the White movement functioned as a big-tent political movement representing an array of political opinions in Russia united in their opposition to the communist Bolsheviks - from the republican-minded liberals and Kerenskyite social-democrats on the left through imperialist supporters of a united multinational Russia to the ultra-nationalist Black Hundreds on the right.
context_section_description: Above all, the White movement emerged as opponents of the Red Army. The White Army had the stated aim to keep law and order in Russia as the Tsar's army before the civil war and the revolution of Russia. They worked to remove Soviet organizations and functionaries in White-controlled territory.
  Overall, the White Army was nationalistic and rejected ethnic particularism and separatism. The White Army generally believed in a united multinational Russia and opposed separatists who wanted to create nation-states.
  
  British parliamentary influential leader Winston Churchill (1874–1965) personally warned General Anton Denikin (1872–1947), formerly of the Imperial Army and later a major White military leader, whose forces effected pogroms and persecutions against the Jews: 
  [M]y task in winning support in Parliament for the Russian Nationalist cause will be infinitely harder if well-authenticated complaints continue to be received from Jews in the zone of the Volunteer Armies.
  Many of the White leaders accepted autocracy while remaining suspicious of "politics," which they characterized as consisting of speeches, elections, and party activities. Aside from being anti-Bolshevik and anti-Communist and patriotic, the Whites had no set ideology or main leader. The White Armies did acknowledge a single provisional head of state in a Supreme Governor of Russia in a Provisional All-Russian Government, but this post was prominent only under the leadership in the war campaigns during 1918–1920 of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, formerly of the previous Russian Imperial Navy.
  The movement had no set foreign policy. Whites differed on policies toward the German Empire in its extended occupation of western Russia, the Baltic states, Poland and the Ukraine on the Eastern Front in the closing days of the World War, debating whether or not to ally with it. The Whites wanted to keep from alienating any potential supporters and allies and thus saw an exclusively monarchist position as a detriment to their cause and recruitment. White-movement leaders, such as Anton Denikin, advocated for Russians to create their own government, claiming the military could not decide in Russians' steads. Admiral Alexander Kolchak succeeded in creating a temporary wartime government in Omsk, acknowledged by most other White leaders, only for it to fall with the loss of his armies.
  Some warlords who were aligned with the White movement, such as Grigory Semyonov and Roman Ungern von Sternberg, did not acknowledge any authority but their own. Consequently, the White movement had no unifying political convictions, as members could be monarchists, republicans, rightists, or Kadets. Among White Army leaders, neither General Lavr Kornilov nor General Anton Denikin were monarchists, yet General Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel was a monarchist willing to soldier for a republican Russian government. Moreover, other political parties supported the anti-Bolshevik White Army, among them the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, and others who opposed Lenin's Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917.  Depending on the time and place, those White Army supporters might also exchange right-wing allegiance for allegiance to the Red Army.
  Unlike the Bolsheviks, the White Armies did not share a single ideology, methodology, or political goal. They were led by conservative generals with different agendas and methods, and for the most part they operated quite independently of each other, with little coordination or cohesion. The composition and command structure of White armies also varied, some containing hardened veterans of World War I, others more recent volunteers. These differences and divisions, along with their inability to offer an alternative government and win popular support, prevented the White armies from winning the Civil War.
caption: Coat of Arms of the Kolchak government
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