by a chauvinist government of complete militarist conviction". About the Japanese infantry, Krasnov wrote the "Japanese soldier is weak and an indifferent marksman, although amenable to training and able to discharge exactly and well what he has learned, regardless of the cost". Krasnov declared "the language of numbers is not my language", stating through the Japanese could mobilize 400,000 troops in 335 battalions and 104 squadrons with 1, 903 artillery guns. they would be little match against "European powers holding excellent positions on the Asian mainland". Krasnov had an equally low opinion of the Japanese cavalry, writing that the Japanese had "neither the horses nor riders to create cavalry". Krasnov declared "to destroy all 13 regiments of the Japanese cavalry would be a very easy task". He concluded that once the Japanese cavalry had been defeated "a deaf and blind Japanese army would become a plaything for an enterprising partisan commander" and "a detachment of 2, 000 cavalry easily might tire a Japanese division". Krasnov quoted a Frenchman who lived a decade in Japan as saying: "They are a people gone astray, the military deed is not in their nature", to which Krasnov added "I think that this minute they are contemplating the same thing in St. Petersburg". Through the Main Staff officers deplored Krasnov's article with his sweeping generalizations based upon superficial impressions, the Emperor Nicholas II was said to have read and enjoyed his article while Krasnov's articles about his trip through Asia were turned into a book with a grant from the War Ministry. During World War I he commanded a Cossack brigade, the 2nd Combined Cossack Division (1915-1917), and in August–October 1917, the 3rd Cavalry Corps. During the October Revolution of 1917, the deposed head of the Russian Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky appointed Krasnov commander of the 700 Cossacks who marched on Petrograd from Pskov () to suppress the Bolshevik revolt (see Kerensky-Krasnov uprising). On 15 November, Bolshevik troops surrounded Gatchina Palace, and took Krasnov prisoner, but he was soon released, whereupon he made his way to the Don. Russian Civil War Krasnov fled to the Don region. In May 1918, in Novocherkassk, he won election as the Ataman of the Don Cossack Host. The American historian Richard Pipes described Krasnov as an "opportunist and an adventurer", primarily interested in using the Civil War to advance his own interests. Though the White movement was officially committed