Background
Nikolai Yudenich was born July 30, 1862, into a family of hereditary noblemen in Minsk Province.
Nikolai Yudenich was born July 30, 1862, into a family of hereditary noblemen in Minsk Province.
He graduated from the Aleksandrovsky Military College in 1881; his first assignment was to the elite Litovsky Guards Regiment in Poland. After completing the General Staff Academy with honors in 1887, Yudenich filled a series of staff assignments in Poland and Turkestan, 1887-1904.
During the Russo-Japanese War, then a colonel, he distinguished himself as a combat leader, fighting at the head of a regiment, then a brigade, of infantry. His coolness under fire and, in particular, his initiative in the fighting at Sandep and Mukden, marked him off from most of his contemporaries.
Rewarded by promotion to major general, Yudenich began a tour in the Caucasus that lasted from 1907 throughout most of World War I. Deputy chief of staff of the Caucasus Army in 1907, he was promoted lieutenant general and made chief of staff in 1912. He was serving in that capacity when war broke out between Russia and Turkey in early November 1914. Isolated from the large-scale fighting against the Central Powers, the Caucasus front was drained of its best units and relegated to a defensive posture. The entire front was endangered in December when a flanking maneuver by the Turkish Third Army reached Sarikamish; large portions of the Caucasus Army were isolated from their base at Tbilisi.
Yudenich became the man of the hour. He resisted the efforts of the commander of the Caucasus Army, General Myshlaevsky, to order a precipitate general retreat, successfully defended Sarikamish, and administered a stinging defeat to the Turkish Third Army. Yudenich, then elevated to general of infantry, took official command of the Caucasus Army in January 1915. Unflappable, innovative, and daring, he transformed his subordinate and distant front into a source of continual good news and made himself a popular hero. In July/August 1915, the IV Caucasian Corps on the Russian left was defeated west of Lake Van and driven into headlong retreat northward across the Plain of Eleskirt. Contrary to the customary practice of the Russian army, Yudenich refused to reinforce these broken units. Instead he secretly formed a strategic reserve, held it back for the opportune moment, then crushed the advancing Turks with a flank attack.
The defeat of Serbia in October 1915 and the impending Allied withdrawal from Gallipoli threatened to confront Yudenich with powerful, well-equipped Turkish reinforcements. He blocked this danger by a series of spoiling operations in 1916: the Caucasus Army struck at Erzurum (January/February), Trebizond (April), and Erzincan (July). The fall of Erzurum, allegedly an impregnable stronghold, brought Yudenich lasting popular and professional esteem. Nonetheless, his main goal was to weaken and disconcert his opponents, not to seize Turkish territory.
In March 1917, Yudenich replaced Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich as supreme civil and military commander in the Caucasus. Yudenich himself was soon relieved by the provisional government and recalled to Petrograd. There he resided until the November Revolution caused him to go into hiding. He left for Finland in November 1918 to join the anti-Bolshevik White movement. The hero of the Caucasus participated in the Russian Civil War in 1919 as commander of the northwestern front. His miniscule White force reached the suburbs of Petrograd in October 1919 before being compelled to retreat to Estonia in the face of the enemy's massive numerical superiority.
Yudenich went into exile in France in 1920. He died in Nice, October 5, 1933. Two years before his death, the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation from the Aleksandrovsky Military College occasioned celebrations in Russian émigré communities from Shanghai to Paris: Yudenich was hailed as the only undefeated Russian general of World War I.