ABSTRACT
Gradually the Volunteers became an army. Volunteer funds officially came from three sources: the bourgeoisie, who consistently promised more than they gave; the Don Government, who proved no less unreliable; and the Allies, whose agents were now in contact with the Whites, and whose reactions were encouraging, though they also failed to produce, for the moment, any hard cash. During the last days of March the Volunteers pushed on southwards, through the rivers and marshes of the Kuban, the mud and ice of a thaw that had long begun but seemed never to be coming to an end. In the first Kuban campaign the Whites found themselves both as an army and as a movement, thereby doing something to close the gap that separated them from the Bolshevik party – which had been welded into a workable whole by the harsh necessities of a clandestine existence.
