BARON PYOTR NIKOLAYEVICH WRANGEL
NICKNAMED ‘THE BLACK BARON’ BY THE BOLSHEVIKS, WRANGEL SHOT TO FAME IN 1919, FIRST AS A CAVALRY COMMANDER THEN AS THE LEADER OF THE LAST SERIOUS MILITARY OPPOSITION TO THE BOLSHEVIK REGIME IN 1920
Wrangel was born into an aristocratic Balticgerman family that had served the Russian monarchy for centuries. He was educated and spent much of his youth in Rostov-ondon, qualifying as a mining engineer in 1901. Volunteering for military service the same year, he joined the elite Life Guard Cavalry Regiment. When war with Japan broke out in 1904, Wrangel volunteered for active service and joined a local Cossack regiment as a junior officer. He was decorated for bravery and decided to follow a military career, re-joining the Life Guard Cavalry Regiment. He remained there, gaining further promotions and awards for bravery, until late 1915 when he was appointed to command another Cossack regiment with the rank of colonel.
Following the revolution of March 1917 he was promoted to the command of the Seventh Cavalry Division. Accepting the abdication of the tsar, he did his best to ameliorate its effects on his men and maintain discipline, which he appears to have done through sheer force of personality. During that summer he was appointed to lead III Cavalry Corps near Petrograd, but he found that another officer had been given the post before him.
Unable to find another suitable command he left the army and took himself and his family to their estate in Crimea.
In early 1918 he was arrested by revolutionary sailors but released due to the intervention of his wife. While visiting Kiev, the capital of the German-dependency of Ukraine, he refused appointments in the Ukrainian and Red Army, opting instead to join Denikin’s Volunteer Army, which was on campaign in the Kuban region of the Caucasus. Denikin gave Wrangel command of the First Cavalry Division and was promoted to lead the newly formed Caucasian Volunteer Army in May 1919. Unfortunately, despite his victories over the Red Army, Wrangel and Denikin disagreed over strategy – particularly the Moscow Directive. The failure to take Moscow in late 1919 led to Wrangel’s dismissal in December 1919.
Denikin was relieved of his command in April 1920 and Wrangel accepted an invitation to replace him as the head of what was now termed the
Russian Army. The army numbered just 50,000 men and was holed up in Crimea, without foreign support and facing a hugely superior Red Army across the ditch that separated the Crimean peninsula from Russia.
Despite several months of successful campaigning, the Red Army broke into Crimea in early November 1920, forcing Wrangel to move his forces to Turkey in a superbly managed evacuation across the Black Sea. From Belgrade Wrangel saw his followers disperse across the world, but to ensure they kept in touch he established, in 1924, a veterans association, the Russian All-military Union. Moving to Brussels in 1927, he worked as an engineer until his death from tuberculosis a year later. Naturally, given his high profile, Soviet agents were suspected of poisoning him. He was reburied in Belgrade in 1929 with full military honours.