Bolsheviks retake Ufa

On 31 December 1918 units of the Red 5th Army, commanded by the Latvian Jan Blumberg, entered Ufa, capital of the Ufa governorate in the western foothills of the Urals. The city, which in July had been seized by the Czechoslovaks and the troops of Komuch, had for several months been one of the main centres of anti-Bolshevik Russia. In September it hosted the conference that set up the Provisional All-Russian Government, known as the Ufa Directory. The British chronology of the war records under the same day the capture of Sterlitamak, more than 100 kilometres south of Ufa. According to Russian accounts, the cavalry of Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s 1st Army had already entered it on 29 December.

On this sector of the front things had gone badly for the Whites since the autumn. After the loss of Kazan and Samara, Komuch’s People’s Army was retreating east and falling increasingly apart. The volunteers were exhausted, the mobilised peasants deserted, and the Czechoslovaks, until recently its firmest support, were withdrawing from the front. The coup in Omsk and the seizure of power by Alexander Kolchak deepened the split still further. The Socialist Revolutionaries who made up Komuch regarded the coup as a betrayal. On Kolchak’s orders, on 2 December officers arrested some 25 deputies of the Constituent Assembly dissolved by the Bolsheviks in Ufa and took them to Omsk. On the night of 22–23 December, after a Bolshevik uprising in Omsk had been suppressed, White officers murdered without trial one of them, Nil Fomin, together with several other imprisoned Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. At this time the Bashkir government, in which Zeki Velidi Togan played the leading role and which had until then been allied with the Whites, began seeking an understanding with the Bolsheviks.

The Reds attacked while the Whites’ best forces were fighting in the north. The Whites had concentrated them on the Perm axis and a week earlier had taken Perm, but at Ufa they no longer had any reserves. The Volga group of the remnants of the People’s Army left the city on 31 December. Some sources, Soviet ones included, date the Reds’ entry into Ufa to 29–31 December or, more generally, to the beginning of January 1919. Soon afterwards the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, a former legionary who was now working in the political department of the 5th Army, arrived in Ufa and published newspapers for the soldiers in the city.

The loss of Ufa upset Kolchak’s plans. Instead of advancing further west from Perm, on 6 January 1919 the Siberian Army was ordered to go over to the defensive and transfer part of its forces to Ufa. The Reds pressed on. On 22 January the 1st Army and the Turkestan Army linked up at Orenburg, the capital of the Cossacks of Ataman Alexander Dutov, and two days later the Reds took Uralsk. In February the Bashkir troops went over to their side. Ufa changed hands twice more: in March 1919, during Kolchak’s spring offensive, it was taken by the Western Army of General Mikhail Khanzhin (PL), and on 9 June the Reds retook it for good.