Man's World Issue 1

rescued Wrangel. The Bolsheviks fled, a lighthanded
foreign military occupation began.
Wrangel set out to join the White Army, a
loose coalition of anti-communist forces that
slowly formed more out of necessity than
anything else.
The course of the Russian Civil War is plotted
out in the bulk of Always with Honor.
Wrangel describes, in close detail, how the
various White leaders wasted their
advantages through poor planning, petty
infighting, unwillingness to maintain
discipline or public order, and general
despair. By avoiding these failures, and
achieving remarkable tactical successes,
Wrangel becomes beloved by the Russian
people and the military. Eventually, he
assumed the role of supreme commander of
anticommunist forces, though by that time
the war was effectively lost. Still, he did more
to defend his country than virtually any of his
contemporaries.
Although the history itself is interesting and
revealing, the most important element of
Always with Honor is how it describes
leadership in crisis. Many people, despite
their experience or high status, will fail to rise
to the occasion. This makes the few people
who combine competence, integrity, and
level-headedness that much more important.
Countries undergoing communist revolutions
were in a war to the death. Defeat meant a
total elimination of the existing upper class,
as well as any non-compliant elements of the
middle and lower classes. Despite the high
stakes, most of Russia’s leaders behaved in
an unserious or selfish manner. Wrangel was
a paragon of virtue and duty, whose unique
qualities revealed themselves in times of
extreme stress. His memoirs lay bare where
he succeeded and so many others failed.
The book was written in 1928, shortly before
Wrangel’s death. Despite its enormous value,
it was out of print for nearly half a century,
with the few remaining copies in existence
prohibitively expensive. Mystery Grove’s new
paperback rerelease makes this important
work available to a new generation of
readers. Given the enthusiasm with which the
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