About the book: 2014 / In the eyes of many contemporaries and historians of the Russian Civil War, the White movement was the work of the former imperial elites, who did not understand and did not accept revolution. The Whites wanted to return the old Russia. This was emphasized both by Tsvetaeva’s sublime image of the “holy White Guard army” and by the not at all poetic white “counter-revolution” that Soviet historians wrote about. But what were white governments really aiming for? How did the whites govern the territory under their control and mobilize their armies? How did the population feel about the white governments and the Entente expeditionary forces that came out in support of the whites? And why did residents of the Russian outskirts often fight together with the whites against the Bolsheviks? Lyudmila Novikova's research on the history of the anti-Bolshevik Northern Region is an attempt to provide answers to these questions. Based on materials from Russian and foreign archives, the book focuses on the political paradoxes of the White movement, as well as the provincial context of the White struggle, which largely determined the course and outcome of the Russian Civil War.