Battle of Pulkovo

On 12 November 1917 (30 October by the Julian calendar), on the heights at Pulkovo (PL), some fifteen kilometres south of Petrograd, the first battle in defence of Bolshevik power was fought. Several hundred Cossacks of General Pyotr Krasnov, with whom the overthrown Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky was marching on the capital, attacked the positions of Red Guards, soldiers and sailors of the Baltic Fleet. After a day’s fighting the Cossacks withdrew. The British chronology of the war records the defeat of Kerensky’s troops near Petrograd under 13 November. Early that morning Leon Trotsky announced the victory in a telegram to the capital, and the news went round the world. The battle itself, however, had been fought a day earlier.

The march on Petrograd

Kerensky had left the capital on 7 November to bring troops from the front. At Pskov, at Northern Front headquarters, he was received coolly. The front commander, General Vladimir Cheremisov (PL), cancelled earlier orders to send units to the capital and did not want to get mixed up in the “Petrograd brawl”. Only Krasnov, commander of the 3rd Cavalry Corps, answered the Prime Minister’s appeal. It was the same corps that Kornilov had sent against the capital in September. The general, a monarchist and supporter of Kornilov, had no regard for Kerensky, but considered it his duty to strike at the Bolsheviks. His units, however, were scattered among many garrisons. From Ostrov he managed to take only about 700 Cossacks of the 1st Don and the Ussuri Cossack Divisions, a few guns, an armoured car and an armoured train.

Even so, the expedition began well. On the morning of 9 November the Cossacks took Gatchina without a fight, and on 10 November, after a brief exchange of fire and long negotiations, Tsarskoye Selo. According to William Chamberlin, two shells from light guns were enough to scatter a detachment of Red Guards sent from Petrograd, while the town’s 16,000-strong garrison maintained a sullen neutrality. A handful of disciplined Cossacks stood at the gates of the capital. But there was no sign of the promised reinforcements from the front. The Cossacks, already disheartened after Kornilov’s defeat in September, began to grumble that they would go no further without infantry.

The cadets’ revolt

In Petrograd the opponents of the Bolsheviks gathered in the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution decided to support Krasnov from within. On the night of 10–11 November Colonel Georgy Polkovnikov, the already dismissed commander of the military district, led the cadets of the officer schools into action. Their centre was the Mikhailovsky Castle, seat of the Nikolaevsky Engineering School. The cadets seized the telephone exchange, cut off the Smolny and captured Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, who had come on an inspection. The Bolsheviks, however, knew the plan of the rising, because the previous evening their patrol had detained a Socialist Revolutionary who was carrying it. Red Guards and sailors moved against the cadets, and the garrison regiments did not join in. By the morning of 12 November the revolt had been crushed. The fighting was bloodier than on the day of the coup. According to Chamberlin, in the storming of the Vladimir Cadet School, which held out longest, about two hundred men on both sides were killed or wounded. Some of the captured cadets were lynched.

Krasnov meanwhile stayed in Tsarskoye Selo and let the Cossacks rest. He did not move to help the insurgents.

The fight on the heights

The Bolsheviks had gained a few days and used them well. The Military Revolutionary Committee ordered railwaymen to stop the Cossack trains, and on 10 November thousands of workers dug trenches and strung wire in the suburbs. The defence of the capital was commanded by Mikhail Muravyov, a former organiser of shock battalions who had gone over to the revolution. He was supported by Antonov-Ovseyenko, freed after the revolt collapsed. On the Pulkovo Heights, on the right flank near Krasnoye Selo, stood the sailors of Pavel Dybenko, in the centre workers’ units of the Red Guard from the Petrograd factories, and on the left flank soldiers of the garrison. According to Russian studies there were 10,000–12,000 men in the front line, supported by a battery at the astronomical observatory, several armoured cars and an armoured train from the Putilov Works.

On the morning of 12 November Krasnov, supported by artillery and the armoured train, struck the centre with his main force, counting on the untrained Red Guards not to withstand a cavalry attack. This time he met real resistance. The defenders beat off the attacks, and the sailors showed that they were willing and able to fight. Marshes slowed the Cossacks’ advance. In time ever larger Red forces began to appear on both sides of the small detachment, the Cossacks were running out of ammunition, and the Tsarskoye Selo garrison threatened to strike at their rear. Krasnov, with no reinforcements in sight, ordered a withdrawal to Gatchina. The Cossacks abandoned Tsarskoye Selo. There are no reliable figures for casualties.

Trotsky, who was at Pulkovo in person, gave much of the credit to Colonel Pavel Walden, an old, many-times wounded officer who took command of the Pulkovo detachment and directed the manoeuvre on the flanks. He wrote that Walden understood nothing of the revolution but hated Kerensky so much that for a moment he became an ally of the Bolsheviks. On 13 November (31 October Old Style) at 2.10 a.m. Trotsky sent a telegram from Pulkovo to Petrograd: “Kerensky is retreating, we are advancing.” In it he announced that the attempt to send the forces of counter-revolution against the capital “has met with a decisive rebuff”.

End of hope

The retreat, amid the Cossacks’ growing distrust of Kerensky, meant the failure of the whole enterprise. Reinforcements from the front did not come. Most of the units summoned refused to obey orders or declared neutrality. In the Petrograd Cossack regiments the Bolshevik agitators won. Chamberlin called the expedition “quixotic” and Kerensky’s last act on the Russian political stage. The Battle of Pulkovo was not large, but it was of great importance. It showed that the new government could defend itself, and that the Bolsheviks’ opponents had no armed force behind them willing to fight for the overthrown Provisional Government. In Gatchina the Cossacks began to consider handing the Prime Minister over to the Bolsheviks in exchange for a free return to the Don.