Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

For the White movement in 1920, then, February may have been the cruelest month. On a single day, 7 February 1920, Supreme Ruler Admiral Kolchak was executed at Irkutsk while the last White toehold in Ukraine was lost with the botched evacuation of Odessa. Meanwhile, the internment of Iudenich’s forces in Estonia was completed. On 10 February 1920, Red forces captured Krasnovodsk (today’s Türkmenbaşy), on the shores of the eastern Caspian, consolidating Soviet power in Central Asia and forcing onward the withered remnants of the 15,000 Urals Cossacks who had departed from their base at Gur′ev on 5 January 1920. Finally, on 19–21 February 1920, a thousand White soldiers were evacuated from Arkhangel′sk, leaving tens of thousands more to their fate. Denikin did manage a brief resurgence, as Don Cossack forces recaptured Rostov on 20 February 1920, but it was a false dawn, and for the remainder of that bitterly cold and fateful month, his forces retreated toward the Kuban. Harried, however, by a newly reorganized, 160,000-strong Caucasian Front of the Red Army (commanded by the energetic M. N. Tukhachevskii), and with the 1st Cavalry Army pressing in along the Tsaritsyn–Ekaterinodar railway on their right flank, there was nothing Denikin’s forces could do when they got to the Kuban other than immediately abandon its capital, Ekaterinodar, without a fight, on 17 March and then make for the last remaining major port in anti-Bolshevik hands, Novorossiisk. Their fading hope was of evacuation by sea, before that city fell either to the Reds advancing on it along the Rostov railway from the north or to the SR-insurgent forces of the Black Sea Liberation Committee approaching it from the south (who had captured Tuapse, 75 miles south of Novorossiisk, on 17 February 1920). That dream was shattered by a shortage of shipping (although the Allies provided some vessels) and the all-pervading chaos. Novorossiisk in February 1920 was inundated by “a sea of wounded, sick and refugees,” according to one eyewitness: “Bodies lay in all sorts of corners, while the hospitals were besieged by sick, frozen and hungry people for whom nothing could be done, so that those stricken with typhus remained just where they happened to fall. . . . The whole foreshore was packed with people, carts and animals—whole families on their knees, praying for help, while the criminals of the underworld came out and in the confusion preyed on the elderly and defenceless.”88 About 35,000 White soldiers and casualties did eventually find berths on Russian and Allied vessels by the last days of March, but almost as many again (and untold numbers of civilians) were captured in the port when the Red Army arrived on 26–27 March 1920. This was only the beginning: 60,000 more Whites were surrounded and captured at Sochi in April 1920, by which time the SR–Green forces there had also been tamed by the Red Army, while a guerrilla war in the Kuban region—initiated by White fugitives, who adopted the grandiose title of the People’s Army for the Regeneration of Russia, commanded by General M. A. Fostikov—achieved little more than to provoke further Red retributions and massacres.89

The Red Army

The foregoing account of the 1919 campaigns concentrated on the White advances because the Reds tended not to make grand strategic decisions in that year.90 Rather, they reacted to the probings of their opponents and took advantage when the latter collapsed. That, however, is not to downplay the supreme achievement of the Soviet government in the civil-wars years: the creation of the Red Army. Much of the credit for this has, rightly, been apportioned to war commissar L. D. Trotsky.

The Red Army was born out of the disintegration of the Imperial Russian Army, which the Bolsheviks had done so much to foster (regarding the army as a nest of real and potential counterrevolutionaries). Prior to October 1917, the party’s propagandizing among troops fostered disorder and desertion; after October, Sovnarkom issued an avalanche of decrees canceling all ranks and titles, permitting the election of officers, expanding the competences of soldiers’ committees, and ordering the demobilization of successive classes of conscripts. All this culminated in the order for a general demobilization of the old army on 29 January 1918.91 However, the disintegration of the old army did not necessarily imply the creation of a new one.