Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

UNIVERSALS OF THE UKRAINIAN CENTRAL RADA.See UKRAINIAN CENTRAL RADA, UNIVERSALS OF THE.

Upper don rebellion.See veshensk uprising.

URALS ARMY. This White force was created as a consequence of the decision of a congress of the Urals Cossack Host, in December 1917, to refuse to recognize Soviet power on its territory, and the subsequent arrest (in January 1918) of the Bolshevik authorities at Ural′sk by a group of officers under M. F. Martynov. The rising spread rapidly, and by 1 April 1918, Soviet power had fallen across the entire Urals oblast′. In the process, a Host government formed, and the Urals Army was attached to it. Its major constituent parts were originally the 1st Urals Cossack Corps and the 2nd Iletsk Cossack Corps, but it was later (July 1919) reformed into three components: the Buzuluk, Saratov, and Astrakhan-Gur′ev Corps. The Urals Army fell, in turn, under the operational command of the Siberian Army (June–August 1918), the Volga Front (under General S. čeček, August–September 1918), the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (December 1918–July 1919), and the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) (21 July 1919–March 1920), and at its height (in June 1919) it numbered 25,000 men (under 600 officers) and had 174 machine guns and 52 guns.

In the summer of 1918, this force was responsible for clearing most of the southern Urals region of Bolshevik forces, from the Caspian to Samara and from Orenburg to Ural′sk, although the latter and much of the northern parts of the territory were lost to the Reds in the autumn and winter of 1918. During Kolchak’s spring offensive of 1919, the Urals Army marched on Ural′sk and, from April 1919, laid siege to the town, but could not recapture it, and the siege was broken by forces of the 4th Red Army under V. I. Chapaev on 11 September 1919. Although, following the capture of Tsaritsyn by the Kuban Army in late June 1919, some AFSR units had crossed the Volga and established contact with the left flank of the Urals Army (at which point operational command of the Urals Army passed from Kolchak to General A. I. Denikin), the army could not survive simultaneous attacks from the Red forces to the north and the Turkestan Red Army in its rear, as well as a major epidemic of typhus, and in October 1919 it disintegrated.

Following the Reds’ capture of Gur′ev on 5 January 1920, the army command and its staff retreated south along the eastern shore of the Caspian toward Fort Aleksandrovsk. They were accompanied by some 15,000 Urals Cossacks and numerous camp followers, of whom at least 13,000 perished in the course of a horrific, three-week, 200-mile trek through frosts of minus 20–25 degrees. Some of the survivors of this “ice march” subsequently crossed the Caspian to join the AFSR in the North Caucasus, but soon retreated into Daghestan. Others surrendered to the Reds’ Caspian Military Flotilla, which arrived at Krasnovodsk on 5 April 1920. Meanwhile, 215 (by some accounts 162) Cossacks and refugees moved further south, and on 20 May 1920, they crossed the border into Persia. There, some of the Cossacks enrolled in His Majesty’s, the Shah of Persia’s Cossack Division, but most were interned at Basra. In 1922, the British authorities in the region moved the latter group to Vladivostok, where they arrived just as the city was about to fall to the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic. After spending some time in China, in 1923 most of the survivors were then allowed to emigrate to Australia, where many of them worked in the sugarcane fields north of Brisbane.

Formal command of the Urals Army rested with General I. G. Akulinin, but the direct commanders of the army were Major General M. F. Martynov (April–September 1918); Major General V. I. Akutin (21 September–14 November 1918); Lieutenant General N. A. Savel′ev (15 November 1918–8 April 1919); and Lieutenant General V. S. Tolstov (8 April 1919–5 January 1920).