Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Denikin’s now-converging thrusts toward Moscow seemed all the more inexorable because they coincided with another White advance, by the North-West Army on Petrograd—precisely the sort of combined and synchronous operations that had eluded the AFSR and Kolchak’s Russian Army six months earlier. The North-West Army was based around the Pskov Volunteer Corps, an officer-heavy detachment of perhaps 6,000 men that had, over the winter of 1918–1919, found itself in the rather embarrassing situation of fighting the Reds while being subordinated to the nationalist Estonian Army of General Johan Laidoner. Even more embarrassingly, it was largely armed and uniformed by the Germans. By May–June 1919, however, White forces in the Baltic theater had freed themselves from Estonian control and came under the command of General N. N. Iudenich, one of Russia’s most successful commanders of the world war, who had been confirmed as commander of the North-West Front on 5 June 1919 by Admiral Kolchak.74 An initial move against Petrograd, in May–June 1919, however, achieved little success, despite the arrival of Iudenich during its prosecution; this failure was caused chiefly by the grave distractions being created in the rear of the North-West Front by White units that were nominally subordinate to its command, notably the rogue Western Volunteer Army, which had been created by the unpredictable General P. R. Bermondt-Avalov, who preferred to ally with pro-German forces in attacking Riga (during the Landeswehr War) than risk his forces in an attack on Petrograd. Undeterred, however, Iudenich gathered a force of some 50,000 men (although only 18,500 were in the active army), one in ten of whom were officers (including 53 generals). Taking advantage of revolts in the rear of opposing Red forces (notably the uprising at the fortress of Krasnaia Gorka) and distractions provided by Royal Navy operations in the Baltic and even the Gulf of Finland,75 Iudenich was thus able to launch a strategic offensive on 12 October 1919, capturing Luga (16 October 1919), thereby cutting Red communications to Pskov (which Estonian forces, now commanded by the talented General Jānis Balodis, entered on 20 October), and even investing the Petrograd palace suburbs of Gatchina (16 October 1919) and Tsarskoe Selo (20 October 1919), which were only 25 and 12 miles respectively from Nevskii Prospekt and the beckoning Winter Palace itself. The commanders of the armies of both Kolchak and Denikin imagined at various points that they could hear the tolling of the Kremlin bells in Moscow, but Iudenich’s men really could see the autumn sun glinting off the great golden dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in central Petrograd, whose defenses had been depleted by the dispatch to other fronts of many of its Bolshevized workers and sailors.76

With the arrival of War Commissar Trotsky’s train in the revolutionary citadel of Petrograd on 17 October 1919, however, the Whites’ fortunes changed forever. In energetic collaboration with Colonel V. M. Gittis (commander of the Western Front) and komandarmy Colonel S. D. Kharlamov and General N. D. Nadezhnyi—all of them the sort of tough and experienced “military specialists” (voenspetsy) that Trotsky had long favored—a hurriedly reinforced 7th Red Army (with a strength of 40,000 men, 453 field guns, 708 machine guns, 6 armored trains, and 23 aircraft) was able to halt the advance of the North-West Army before it severed the vital artery of the Moscow–Petrograd railway. Soviet forces then initiated an immediate counteroffensive, on 21 October 1919, that rapidly overwhelmed their opponents, who were inferior in numbers and arms. As Iudenich’s shattered forces limped back across the Estonian border, they were disarmed and interned by their unwelcoming hosts.77 This final development coincided with the arrangement of a Soviet–Estonian cease-fire (5 December 1919) and formal armistice on 31 December 1919 (there had actually been no fighting to speak of between the two sides for six months), which led swiftly to the subsequent Treaty of Tartu (2 February 1920), bringing an end to the civil-war hostilities between the two countries and sealing the independence of Estonia. That settlement was, in turn, succeeded by the equally quite uncontentious treaties of the RSFSR with Lithuania (Treaty of Moscow, 12 July 1920), Latvia (Treaty of Riga, 11 August 1920), and Finland (Treaty of Tartu, 14 October 1920), which brought to a close the civil wars and wars of independence in the northwest.78