Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
TURKISH JOURNAL OF HISTORY-TARIH DERGISI, ss.133-153, 2026 (ESCI, Scopus)
This article examines the Government of South Russia (Pravitel'stvo Yuga Rossii), established under General Pyotr Nikolaevich Wrangel in Crimea between April and November 1920, through the lenses of political legitimacy, land reform, and state-building within the broader context of the Russian Civil War. The study is centered on four research questions: why Wrangel's administration failed to generate durable popular support; what structural and administrative constraints limited the social impact of the land reform decree of 7 June 1920; why international recognition efforts collapsed in the face of British and French realpolitik and their evolving relations with Soviet Russia; and which organizational, logistical, and strategic factors led to the military defeat of the regime. The theoretical framework combines Max Weber's typology of legitimacy to assess authority-building practices and political discourse; Theda Skocpol's structural constraints approach to evaluate the military, economic, and social limitations of the regime; and Charles Tilly's war-state formation model to analyze the government's attempts to centralize administration and mobilize resources under wartime conditions. Together, these perspectives reveal that despite its short lifespan, Wrangel's regime pursued multiple, albeit uneven, experiments in counterrevolutionary state formation. Methodologically, the article adopts the historical analysis approach and evaluates primary sources-including decrees, administrative correspondence, statistical reports, implementation records of the land reform, British and French diplomatic telegrams, contemporary newspapers, legal documents, and Wrangel's memoirs-from State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), Russian State Military-Historical Archive (RGVIA) and Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) archives using internal and external criticism. These materials allow for a reassessment of certain widely repeated claims in the literature, such as the presumed total failure of the land reform or the notion that Western diplomatic engagement ceased entirely after mid-1920. The findings indicate that Wrangel's efforts to construct legitimacy were not limited to charismatic leadership; archival evidence shows that village committees were established in several regions and that the reform generated limited but observable local responses. Yet frequent policy revisions, administrative shortages, and the dominance of military imperatives undermined the formation of a stable social base. On the international level, British and French documents reveal that diplomatic contacts continued, though deliberately restrained, as both powers moved toward recognizing Soviet Russia. Militarily, the collapse stemmed not only from the Red Army's superior manpower and logistics but also from contracting supply lines, rising attrition, Crimea's structural defensibility limits, and coordination problems within the White administration. Ultimately, the article argues that Wrangel's regime should be understood not merely as a failed military enterprise but as a short-lived and structurally constrained attempt at counterrevolutionary state-building. By integrating archival evidence, the study offers a more comprehensive account of how legitimacy, reform capacity, and international alignment shaped state-building efforts under the extreme conditions of civil war.