WHY WRANGEL FAILED.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 January 1921, Page 2

WHY WRANGEL FAILED.

ARMY WRECKED BY UNDESIRABLES. • In the following article published in a London paper, Mr A. Scotland Liddell, who had just returned from Russia, describes the forces which brought about Wrangel’s failure in the Crimea: Some weeks ago I wrote that force had failed in the fight Bolshevism. Force has proved and will prove futile. Consider for a moment the anti-Soviet groups. First, of course, there is General Wrangtl and the Volunteers. Wrangel is a brave and honest man; a patriot and a first-class military leader. But Wrangel is surrounded to day by tiie same undesirables who broughtabout Denikin’s fall. (with this I will deal presently). Then there are Petlura and his followers, and there are Makhno and his rebel bands, and now —the latest filibuster—Balakhovitch. Between Petlura, Makhno, and Co. and the Bolsheviks there is little, if any difference.

The truth about the Volunteer Army has never been told. When the real story is written it will be found to be, on the one hand, a record of courage and endurance, and, on the other, a shameful tale of bribery and corruption, of stupidity and blundering, and of cruelties and atrocities unsurpassed oven by Soviet troops. Denikin himself was a patriot and an honest man—that is all. But patriotism and honesty along do not make for leadership. Denikfn was weak, and at the same time he had all the pig-head-edness of his class. His chief misfortune was that he was surrounded by a band of some of the most undesirable elements of the old regime. After the death of Korniloff, the Volunteer Army, as it extended the' territory under its rule, gradually absorbed more and more of these undesirables. Russian merchants and manufacturers began to flock back from abroad and to acquire power in the various departments of the Government. The slogan of the Volunteer Army began to shed its glamour; the cry of a big and indivisible Russia, accompanied as it was by a recrudescence of all the old evils in a more aggravated form, alienated the sympathies of the proletariat and angered the Cossacks, who, while not free from grievous faults, were nevertheless alive to the fact that they were being used as pawns in the game, and doomed to suffer reprisals once Russia was free from Bolshevik rule. Meanwhile, the Volunteer Army administration became more and "more hopelessly encumbered by the corrupt methods pursued by the highest and lowest alike, military and civil. Even the few who uttered cries of warning did not themselves refrain from speculation for their own ends. And as far as the conduct of the troops at the front was concerned, the tragic truth is that there -was little difference in the Volunteer treatment of the Bolsheviks and the Bolshevik treatment of the Volunteers.

Now the Bolsheviks are threatening the peace of the whole of the Middle East. And now General Wrangel, with the remnants of Denikin’s forces—but without Allied support—is critically engaged on what is another woeful adventure. Reports from the Crimea are monotonous in their reiteration of the bribery and corruption which still prevail. Volunteer officers in the Crimea are still buying vodka, but the price per bottle is now 30,000 roubles. And 30,000 roubles are only worth about one English pound. And the solution ? Nothing is clear except that the Russian civil war must cease. Bolshevism is tyad, but there is for the moment no alternative. A change of Government to-morrow would not bring peace to Russia. The long Russian winter is at hand, and, willynilly, active operations by all sides must be postponed. Nature herself will call an armistice. But nature herself will not cease to wage relentless war on young and old, on workers and hourgeoise alike. Hunger and cold and disease will claim their victories.