Between 1917 and 1923, the anti-Bolshevik White movement waged a counter-revolutionary war across the ruins of the Russian Empire — and committed mass atrocities on a scale that history has never fully reckoned with. The Anatomy of the White Terror is the definitive narrative account of organized political violence conducted by the White armies: the filtration executions and death trains of Kolchak's Siberia, the apocalyptic pogroms of Ukraine in which up to 250,000 Jewish civilians were murdered, the warlord kingdoms of Semyonov and Annenkov where impunity produced barbarism of extraordinary elaboration, the Allied-run concentration camp on an Arctic island, and the founding Ice March whose no-prisoners order became the institutional DNA of the Volunteer Army.

Drawing on survivor testimony, military records, and the post-Soviet archival revolution, Denny Barry argues that the White Terror was not the aggregate of undisciplined excess but a structurally institutionalized instrument of counter-revolutionary pacification — systematic, ideological, and ultimately self-defeating. The terror that was supposed to save Russia destroyed the political foundations that might have made saving it possible.

Written with the narrative urgency of the best historical prose and the analytical precision of serious scholarship, this is the story of what the counter-revolution was willing to do — and what that willingness cost.