The Last White Army: Pepelyayev's Ice Expedition and the Final Campaign of the Russian Civil War

In the winter of 1922, a White Russian general named Anatoly Pepelyayev led seven hundred volunteer soldiers from Vladivostok into the subarctic interior of Yakutia — the last armed expedition against Soviet authority on Russian soil. His target was a province in revolt. The Sakha people, driven to rebellion by the brutal grain requisitions of War Communism, had appealed to the remnants of the White movement for military support. Pepelyayev answered the appeal, crossing a thousand kilometres of roadless taiga in temperatures of minus fifty degrees to assault the gateway to Yakutsk. He came closer to success than history remembers.

What stopped him was a Latvian partisan commander named Ivan Strod, who held a frozen farmyard for eighteen days against seven hundred attackers, building his defences from blocks of frozen cattle manure when the permafrost defeated every shovel. The two men wrote honest letters to each other across the perimeter. Both were shot by Stalin's purges in 1938, within three weeks of each other.

The Last White Army reconstructs the final campaign of the Russian Civil War in full — the march, the siege, the surrender on a foggy June morning at the Sea of Okhotsk — and asks what it reveals about the war, the state it created, and the indigenous people caught between them.