Commons in March 1919, "Bolsheviks destroy wherever they exist but by rolling forward into fertile areas, like the vampire which sucks the blood from its victim, they gain means of prolonging their own baleful existence." In the spring of 1919, the army of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, organizer of the "White" resistance in Siberia had advanced to the Volga River. The forces of Russian general Yevgeny Miller were fighting the "Reds" as far as Petrograd. From the west, a small army under General Nikolai Yudenich had also advanced on Petrograd, while in South Russia, the forces of General Anton Denikin had begun to advance on Moscow. But by the summer, the advances of all the various White factions, and their fortunes, reversed almost simultaneously, except for those in South Russia that continued to advance into autumn. Seizing the opportunity to fill the void of the departed German army, newly independent Poland occupied parts of Lithuania, eastern Galicia and Ruthenia, before advancing into western Ukraine, where Nestor Makhno, an anarchist with a band of militarist peasants was attacking both Red and White troops. With the governments of Britain and America yielding to public pressure at home and withdrawing their troops from Archangel, Murmansk and Olonets, Miller's troops were left to face the Reds alone, and swift defeat. Yudenitch overreached his advance and the Reds repulsed his forces back to the Baltic states, where they disbanded. To the east, Kolchak's over-extended troops were trounced before they could reach the Volga and began a torturous retreat to Siberia, without supplies and forced to strip corpses for clothes and shoes. Denikin reached within 200 miles of Moscow, and filled with hubris, debated which horse he would triumphantly ride into the city, but over-extended and with broken supply lines, in October, the Reds pummelled his forces at Oryol and forced him to retreat with his disintegrating army. Driven southward, his troops surrendered Kharkov to the Bolsheviks on December 13, 1919. By the end of that year, the struggle between the Bolsheviks and the Whites had driven thousands of retreating White Army troops and civilian refugees to the northern shore of the Black Sea and into the Crimean Peninsula, where they could expect no mercy from the Bolsheviks. The Peace Commission concluded on December 10, and while the other American staff members returned to the United States, McCully was ordered to London as a representative on the