The Southern Front was a military theater of the Russian Civil War.In the aftermath of the October Revolution, politicians and army officers hostile to the Bolsheviks gravitated to the Don Cossack Host after its ataman, General Aleksey Kaledin, publicly offered sanctuary to opponents of the Soviet regime.

[2] Among those seeking refuge in the Don was the former chief of staff of the tsarist army, General Mikhail Alekseyev, who immediately began organizing a military unit to oppose both the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers.

The two men, along with Kaledin, assumed top roles in the anticommunist White movement taking shape in the Don region during the winter of 1917 – 18.

[3] On paper, Kaledin held nominal command over tens of thousands of Don Cossacks but most of these were either unwilling to fight or were outright opposed to his rule.

To escape the Red onslaught, the Volunteer Army was forced to flee south into the lands of the Kuban Cossack Host while Kaledin remained behind and committed suicide.

In early May this so-called "Icy March" ended when the Volunteer Army returned to the Don Cossack Host, which by then was experiencing widespread revolts against Soviet occupation.

Meanwhile, the Volunteer Army in the Donbas region was also able to go over the offensive, managing to take Kharkov on 25 June, Kursk on 20 September and Oryol on 13 October.

[8] Despite the AFSR’s successes in the summer and autumn of 1919, its rear was beset by rampant corruption among administrators, anti-White revolts among various ethnic groups, anarchist uprisings, pogroms against Jews and political infighting between the White generals and Cossack leaders.

Amid a disastrous evacuation at Novorossiysk, tens of thousands of Volunteer and Don Cossack troops did manage to embark on ships that transported them safely to the Crimean Peninsula.

But due to insufficient tonnage, an even greater number of Cossack soldiers and civilians fleeing with the Whites were left behind at Novorossiysk where they were forced to either surrender or continue to retreat south.

[9] After reaching the Crimea in early April 1920 Denikin, the Commander-in-chief of the AFSR, passed all his powers to General Wrangel, who re-formed these units into his Russian Army.

By July 1920 Wrangel had 25,000 infantry, 5,000 cavalry, 13 tanks, 25 armored cars, 40 aircraft, 2 battleships, 3 cruisers, 11 destroyers, 4 submarines and 8 gunboats.

A raid into the Kuban area in August 1920 under the command of General Sergei Georgievich Ulagay failed to expand White-held territory.

The final assault on the Crimea by the Bolshevik re-constituted Southern Front (early November, 1920) under the command of Mikhail Frunze proved successful in defeating the last great White threat to the Reds.

With the defeat of Germany in the First World War, the pro-German Government, The Hetmanate, under Pavlo Skoropadsky was overthrown and the relative safety Ukraine had under German occupation and protection was gone.

With Denikin's defeat and the Ukrainians in severe trouble, they made an alliance with the Poles in April 1920, the combined Polish-Ukrainian forces pushed back the Reds, who occupied most of Ukraine.

The peace with Georgia, though initially supported strongly by Lenin, finally ended on February 11 when the Armenian and Georgian Bolsheviks organized a revolt in Lorri.

Leaders of the ADR either fled to Menshevik Georgia, Turkey and Iran, or were captured by Bolsheviks, like Mammed Amin Rasulzade (who was later allowed to emigrate) and executed (like Gen. Selimov, Gen. Sulkevich, Gen. Agalarov, a total of over 20 generals), or assassinated by Armenian militants like Fatali Khan Khoyski and Behbudagha Javanshir.