Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

What proved to be the turning point for the Reds on the Southern Front against Denikin came when the new Red main commander, Glavkom S. S. Kamenev, and Trotsky put together a new striking group, featuring strong contingents of the Red veterans of the Latvian and Estonian Riflemen, which drove into the left flank of the Volunteer Army, almost cutting off the Kornilovtsy and facilitating the Reds’ reoccupation of Orel on 20 October 1919, thereby denying White forces the opportunity of re-equipping at Tula. At the same time, the Volunteers were hit on the opposite flank by an impressive raid launched by a new Red phenomenon: S. M. Budennyi’s 1st Cavalry Corps (from 19 November 1919, the 1st Cavalry Army, or Konarmiia), the result of Trotsky’s summons of six weeks earlier, “Proletarians, to Horse!”82 This unexpected transformation of “Communists into cavalrymen,” as Trotsky put it (although, in truth, the cavalrymen themselves were overwhelmingly of Cossack, not proletarian, origin), forced General Shkuro to surrender the key city of Voronezh to Budennyi on 24 October 1919, effectively severing the Volunteers’ communications with the Don Army to their east and with their main fortified rear on the Don. When the Konarmiia then pushed on to capture the railway junction at Kastornoe (on the Voronezh–Kursk line), disaster loomed for the Whites—and loomed larger when Khar′kov fell as early as 11 December 1919. Until this point, the Volunteers’ 150-mile withdrawal had been relatively orderly, but beyond Khar′kov, with the railway lines crammed with typhus-ridden civilian refugees and military casualties, and a huge swathe of rear territory and key towns and railway junctions occupied by Makhno’s Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine, a further, headlong, 300-mile flight began, which by the first week of 1920 saw the remains of the force that just two months earlier had been so close to capturing Moscow streaming across the frozen river Don and once more into the North Caucasus.83

In rapid pursuit was the Konarmiia, now boasting more than 15,000 horsemen, supported by eight armored trains and its own squadron of aircraft. It and other Red forces—by now vastly outnumbering and outgunning their opponents—captured Rostov-on-Don and Novocherkassk on the same day, 7 January 1920. Meanwhile, the left flank of the AFSR also recoiled from the 12th and 14th Red Armies, as Kiev fell on 16 December 1919 and Odessa on 7 February 1920. The attempted White evacuation of the latter—the third such awful hemorrhage the great port had suffered during the civil wars—was a shambles, with local commander General N. N. Shilling drawing universal criticism for abandoning tens of thousands of retreating AFSR forces and civilians to the Reds.84 The only saving grace for the AFSR was that General I. A. Slashchov’s 3rd Corps of the Volunteers had cut through Makhno’s insurgents in Northern Tauride to reach and then hold the Perekop isthmus, thereby safeguarding the Crimean peninsula as a haven for the fleeing Whites.