I got this today, it’s Rutych’s life long effort at collecting biographical information from the Northwest Army in Immigration. It’s a historical dictionary with an introductory essay I’m going to share because it has information not in any English source.
Yudenich spent most of 1918-first half of 1919 in Finland lobbying Mannerheim to assist in a drive on Petrograd through Karelia. They had reached an agreement by June but Mannerheim withheld publicly announcing it because he wanted to win the July Finnish Presidential Election.
Mannerheim, however, lost this election to Ståhlberg, and left public life and Finland itself.
Yudenich, having his time in Finland rendered pointless, leaves the Day after elections for Estonia, where he had been absent until then (a fact that made some memoirists hostile.)
The (originally German organized) Northern Corps had now become the Pro-Entente Northwestern Army, and the goal was made for a definitive move on Petrograd.
Something in no English language account, Yudenich had been organizing an uprising within the city itself.
This attempt at recreating the Junker Uprising conditions of city instability is in no English source because, beyond it being an obscure subject already, the archives of the Northwestern Army’s intelligence headquarters was completely destroyed.
The story of this operation only survives because Admiral Plikin kept a diary about it that took nearly 100 years to be found by a historian abroad. Even then, the Admiral was only stopped in destroying his diary by his daughter.
As we can see from this text and the map, Petrograd was a single station away from being completely cut off. Tosno was the last station that any Red reinforcements could come in from. Though they had been promised tanks by the British, these were redirected to fighting in Latvia
In this position of a incomplete siege of Petrograd, the thin lines could not hold. But something else should be said, the director of the defense were S.S. Kamenev and the most important unit the shock group of S.D. Kharlamov. NOT Trotsky, and NOT “impromptu worker militias”
Rutych and a few other Emigres were able to get the rest of the notes and diaries of Admiral V.K. Pilkin, and they collected them into this book. But there is still a massive amount of his materials that went into the Columbia University Archives.
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