The Denikins lived very close to poverty, with the retired major's small pension as their only source of income, and their finances worsened after Ivan's death in 1885.

However, to his misfortune, the academy decided to introduce a new system of calculating grades and as a result Denikin was not offered a staff appointment after the final exams.

After being offered a settlement according to which he would rescind his complaint in order to attain acceptance into the General Staff school again, Denikin declined, insulted.

Following the February Revolution and the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II, he became Chief of Staff to Mikhail Alekseev, then Aleksei Brusilov, and finally Lavr Kornilov.

[2] Following the October Revolution both Denikin and Kornilov escaped to Novocherkassk in the Northern Caucasus and, with other Tsarist officers, formed the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army, initially commanded by Alekseev.

Kornilov was killed in April 1918 near Ekaterinodar and the Volunteer Army came under Denikin's command thanks in part to the support of fellow general Sergey Markov.

Kornilov's disastrous attempt to take the city was finally cancelled and the army retreated towards the north-east, evading destruction and ending the campaign which would become known as the Ice March.

Makhno duly turned his Insurgent Army east and led it against Denikin's extended lines of supply, forcing the Whites to retreat.

Denikin's army would be decisively defeated at Orel in October 1919, some 360 km south of Moscow.The White forces in southern Russia would be in constant retreat thereafter, eventually reaching the Crimea in March 1920.

For example, a proclamation by one of Denikin's generals incited people to "arm themselves" in order to extirpate "the evil force which lives in the hearts of Jew-communists.

Many of them, intensely anti-Semitic, allowed pogroms under their watch, which turned into a method of terror against the Jewish population and served to earn the favour of the Ukrainian people for much of 1919.

[citation needed] Western sponsors were dismayed at the widespread antisemitism in the Whites' officer ranks, especially as the Bolsheviks sought to officially prohibit acts of anti-Semitism.

Winston Churchill personally warned General Denikin that: [M]y task in winning support in Parliament for the Russian Nationalist cause will be infinitely harder if well-authenticated complaints continue to be received from Jews in the zone of the Volunteer Armies.

They held that the whole cataclysm had been engineered by some great and mysterious secret society of international Jews, who, in the pay and at the orders of Germany, had seized the psychological moment and snatched the reins of government.

Many of them had persuaded themselves that Freemasonry was, in alliance with the Jews, part and parcel of the Bolshevik machine, and that what they had called the diabolical schemes for Russia's downfall had been hatched in the Petrograd and Moscow Masonic lodges.

[13]Facing increasingly sharp criticism and emotionally exhausted, Denikin resigned in April 1920 in favor of General Baron Pyotr Wrangel, who later established the Russian All-Military Union.

Although he remained bitterly opposed to Russia's Communist government, he chose to exist discreetly on the periphery of politics, spending most of his time writing and lecturing.

White Against Red – The Life of General Anton Denikin gives possibly the definitive account of the intrigues during these early Soviet "wet-ops".

Whoever may aid Russia's enemies cannot call himself a patriot, no matter what ideological excuse he may use for taking money to fight his own people.At the conclusion of World War II, correctly anticipating their likely fate at the hands of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, Denikin attempted to persuade the Western Allies not to forcibly repatriate Soviet POWs (see also Operation Keelhaul).

On 3 October 2005, in accordance with the wishes of his daughter Marina Denikina and by authority of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, General Denikin's remains were transferred from the United States and buried together with Ivan Ilyin's at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow.