Pyotr Wrangel


Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel was a Russian officer of Baltic German origin in the Imperial Russian Army. During the later stages of the Russian Civil War, he was commanding general of the anti-Bolshevik White Army in Southern Russia. After his side lost the civil war in 1920, he left Russia. He was known as one of the most prominent exiled White émigrés and military dictator of the South Russia.

Family

Wrangel was born in Novalexandrovsk, Kovno Governorate in the Russian Empire. The Baltic German noble Wrangel family was part of the Uradel, the family was of German origin, appearing in the old "Livland" with the German Order. It undoubtedly has a common origin with the noble family Levenwolde and von Engdes. Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel was only distantly related to the famed Arctic explorer Ferdinand von Wrangel and the Prussian Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich von Wrangel.

Early life

Of ethnic Baltic German roots, Wrangel grew up in the Russian Orthodox Church. His Lutheran grandfather, Baron Hans Georg Hermann von Wrangel, had married a Russian woman, and all of his descendants were baptized as Orthodox. This branch of the family was Russian Orthodox.
After graduating from the Rostov Technical High School in 1896 and the Institute of Mining Engineering in St. Petersburg in 1901, Wrangel volunteered for the prestigious Life Guards cavalry. He was commissioned a reserve officer in 1902 after graduating from the Nikolaev Cavalry School. He soon resigned his commission and traveled to Irkutsk, where he was assigned to special missions by the Governor-General.

Military career

At the start of the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904, he re-enlisted and was assigned to the 2nd Regiment of the Transbaikal Cossack Corps. In December 1904, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant.
After the war ended, in January 1906, he was reassigned to the 55th Finland Dragoon Regiment, which, under General A. N. Orlov, took part in pacifying rebels in Siberia. In 1907, he returned to the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment. In 1908, he married Olga Mikhaylovna Ivanenko in St. Petersburg, and they had two sons and two daughters. Wrangel graduated from the Nicholas Imperial General Staff Academy in 1910 and the Cavalry Officers' School in 1911.
With the start of World War I, Wrangel was promoted to captain and assigned command of a cavalry squadron. On October 13, 1914, he became one of the first Russian officers to be awarded the Order of St. George in the war, the highest military decoration of the Russian Empire. In December 1914, he was promoted to the rank of colonel. In October 1915, Wrangel was transferred to the Southwestern Front and was appointed commander of the 1st Regiment of the Transbaikal Cossacks.
The unit was very active in Galicia against the Austrians, and Wrangel distinguished himself especially during the Brusilov Offensive. He was promoted to the rank of major general in January 1917 and took command of the 2nd Brigade of the Ussuri Cavalry Division, which was merged with other cavalry units to become the Consolidated Cavalry Corps in July that year. He was further decorated with the George Cross for his defense of the Zbruch River in the summer of 1917.

Russian Civil War

After the end of Russia's participation in the war, Wrangel resigned his commission and went to live at his dacha at Yalta, in the Crimea. Arrested by the Bolsheviks at the end of 1917, he was released and escaped to Kiev, where he joined Pavlo Skoropadskyi's Ukrainian State. However, it was soon apparent to him that the new government existed only because of the waning support of Germany, and in August 1918, he joined the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army based at Yekaterinodar, where he was given command of the 1st Cavalry Division and the rank of major general in the White movement. After the Second Kuban Campaign in late 1918, he was promoted to lieutenant general, and his division was raised to that of a corps.
established in Sevastopol, Crimea in April 1920
As an aggressive commander, he won a number of victories in the north of Caucasus. In January 1919, his military force was renamed to the Caucasus Volunteer Army. Wrangel soon clashed politically with Armed Forces of South Russia leader Anton Denikin, who demanded a quick march on Moscow. Wrangel insisted that his forces should instead take Tsaritsyn first, to join up with the army of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, which his troops accomplished on June 30, 1919, after three previous attempts by Pyotr Krasnov had failed in 1918.
Wrangel gained a reputation as a skilled and just administrator, who, unlike some other White Army generals, did not tolerate lawlessness or looting by his troops. However, after he was unable to join forces with Admiral Kolchak and at the insistence of Denikin, he led his forces north towards Moscow on a failed attempt by the Whites to take it in autumn 1919. Continuing disagreement with Denikin led to his removal from command, and Wrangel departed for exile to Constantinople on February 8, 1920.
However, Denikin was forced to resign on March 20, 1920, and a military committee, led by General Abram Dragomirov in Sevastopol, asked for Wrangel's return as Commander-in-Chief of the White forces in Crimea. He assumed that post on April 4, 1920, at the head of the Russian Army, and he put forth a coalition government that attempted to institute sweeping reforms. He also recognized and established relations with the new anti-Bolshevik independent republics of Ukraine and Georgia, among others.
However, by that stage in the Russian Civil War, such measures were too late, and the White movement was rapidly losing support, both domestically and overseas.
Wrangel is immortalized by the nickname of "Black Baron" in the marching song The Red Army is the Strongest, composed as a rallying call for a final effort on the part of the Bolsheviks to end the war. The song was immensely popular in the early Soviet Union in the 1920s.
After defeats in which he lost half his standing army and, facing defeat in Northern Tavria and in the Crimea, Wrangel organised a mass evacuation on the shores of the Black Sea. Wrangel gave every officer, soldier, and civilian the choice to evacuate and go with him into the unknown, or to remain in Russia and face the wrath of the Red Army. Wrangel evacuated the White forces from the Crimea in 1920; the remnants of the Russian Imperial Navy became known as Wrangel's fleet. The last military and civilian personnel left Russia with Wrangel on board the General Kornilov on November 14, 1920.
dedicated to Wrangel in the village of Uljanowo in the Kaliningrad Oblast
Initially, Wrangel lived on his yacht, Lucullus, at Constantinople. It was rammed and sunk by the Italian steamer Adria, which had sailed from Soviet-held Batum. Wrangel, then on shore, escaped with his life in what was widely regarded as an assassination attempt.

Emigration

In 1922, he moved to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as the head of all White Russian refugees. He arguably was considered the most prominent of all White émigrés.
In 1924, in the Serbian town of Sremski Karlovci, he established the Russian All-Military Union, a civilian organisation that was designed to embrace all Russian military émigrés all over the world. He tried to preserve a Russian military organisation for another fight against Bolshevism.
In September 1927, Wrangel and his family emigrated, settling in Brussels, Belgium, where he worked as a mining engineer.
Wrangel published his memoirs in the magazine White Cause in Berlin in 1928.

Death and burial

Wrangel died suddenly on April 25, 1928. His family believed that he had been poisoned by his butler's brother, who briefly lived in the household in Brussels and was allegedly a Soviet agent.
He was buried in Brussels. More than a year later, his remains were transported to Belgrade. On October 6, 1929, in a formal public ceremony, his body was reinterred in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Belgrade, the Russian church, according to his wishes.
The town of Sremski Karlovci, which had served as his headquarters after he emigrated from Russia, erected a monument in his honour. At the time of his death, it was the location of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and the Russian Ministry of Culture.
Many Russian officers regarded Wrangel so highly that he had almost a semi-sacred status. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, some prominent military émigrés referred to the position that they believed Wrangel would have taken. For example, Major General Mikhail Mikhailovich Zinkevich said in mid-August 1941, "If General Wrangel were alive today, he would go unhesitatingly with the Germans".

Honours