official is carefully watched. As long as they serve their Soviet masters the "employee's" condition is good, in fact in many ways his position is better than on the White side, for besides sufficient food and comfort for his family, officers are given absolute power over the soldiery; flogging and shooting are the only punishments. They realize, too, the hopeless and heart-breaking conditions under which their former brother-officers on the White side tried to lead an army under impossible conditions. The Whites, of course, were far too "democratic" to be either disciplined or efficient. Far too much a pot-pourri of incompatible and irreconcilable elements vainly trying to find a compromise, united only by a common hostility to another régime which does at any rate know what it wants, to be either thorough or purposeful.
VI. The Collapse of the "Whites."
How can an army in the field fight an enemy, “when their division commander is arrested within an hour of the time fixed for their offensive, and his chief of staff has to be shot for being a Bolshevist intelligence officer? How can an offensive be carried out when a general who has given written assurances of his loyalty, and has undertaken certain important co-operation, makes an attack on the forces of his commander-in-chief instead?"[1] How can a commander-in-chief expect to maintain discipline when he fails to suppress the open sale to civilians of military stores at his own headquarters by his own officers? Yet all these incidents took place in Yudenitch's Army before it collapsed.
- ↑ From the letter of a British official who chooses to remain anonymous.
