Capture of Perm

On the night of 24–25 December 1918 White troops entered Perm, a large industrial city on the Kama at the western foot of the Urals. The Reds gave it up almost without a fight: according to Russian accounts there were only brief clashes around the Perm II railway station. The British chronology of the war records the capture of the city under 24 December, while some sources give 25 December, because the troops were entering Perm throughout the night. It was the greatest White victory in eastern Russia since the coup in Omsk, after which Admiral Alexander Kolchak took power. The Red 3rd Army, which had been defending the city, ceased to exist as a fighting force, and in Moscow the defeat was soon called the “Perm catastrophe”.

An offensive in thirty degrees of frost

The attack on Perm had been planned at the beginning of November by General Vasily Boldyrev, the commander-in-chief of the Directory, and Kolchak approved the plan after taking power. The main role was to be played by the Yekaterinburg group of the Siberian Army under General Radola Gajda, a Czech legionary who had entered Russian service. Its core was the 1st Central Siberian Corps of General Anatoly Pepelyayev, who at 27 was one of the youngest generals in Russia. Czechoslovak units still took part in the first phase of the fighting, but the weight of the offensive fell on the Russians, because the weary legionaries were less and less willing to go to the front.

The Whites forestalled their opponent. The Reds were themselves preparing to attack Yekaterinburg, but the 3rd Army of Mikhail Lashevich was in poor shape. It held a front about 400 kilometres long, it lacked food, winter uniforms and boots, and the frosts reached minus 30 degrees. According to the Soviet military encyclopaedia it numbered fewer than 25,000 bayonets and about 3,600 sabres. On 29 November, the day before the planned Red attack, Gajda went over to the offensive and broke through the front. The Reds fell back along the railway to Perm, losing men in the fighting, to the cold and through desertion. Some of the recently mobilised soldiers went over to the Whites. The neighbouring Red 2nd Army of Vasily Shorin tried to help by attacking towards Krasnoufimsk, but advanced too slowly to draw off the enemy’s forces. On 15 December the Whites took the stations of Kalino and Chusovaya, and on 21 December they entered Kungur, abandoned without a fight.

The fall of the city

At Perm the 3rd Army no longer put up any defence. Its remnants were retreating by rail westwards, towards Glazov and Vyatka. An assault battalion of Pepelyayev’s corps seized the station, with many trains full of equipment, and the railway bridge over the Kama, which the Reds had prepared for demolition but had not managed to destroy. The Whites crossed the Kama on the march and took a bridgehead on its right bank. The armament works at Motovilikha fell into their hands, along with huge stocks of ammunition and food and, according to Smele, about 260 locomotives and several thousand wagons.

Sources give different numbers of prisoners. Most often about 20,000 are mentioned, and the British historian Jonathan Smele even writes of 31,000. The fate of the prisoners is also disputed. According to accounts favourable to the Whites, Pepelyayev had most of them sent home; according to Smele, many were shot or locked up in camps, where they died of typhus. By the Julian calendar the capture of Perm coincided with the anniversary of Alexander Suvorov’s storming of Izmail on 11 December 1790, and the soldiers called Pepelyayev the “Siberian Suvorov”. Gajda received the Order of St George, 3rd class, for Perm.

On the same day, 24 December, Kolchak merged the Yekaterinburg and Kama groups into a new Siberian Army and gave its command to Gajda. For the Whites the capture of Perm opened the way further west, through Vyatka towards Kotlas, from where they could join hands with the Allied and White forces operating in northern Russia, around Archangel. Euphoria reigned in Omsk, and at Kolchak’s headquarters there was talk of a spring march on Moscow.

The “Perm catastrophe”

In Moscow the defeat came as a shock. The day before the fall of the city, the Defence Council chaired by Vladimir Lenin had already heard a report by Joseph Stalin on the situation at Perm. After the city fell, the commander-in-chief of the Red Army, Jukums Vācietis, ordered the whole revolutionary military council of the Eastern Front to be put on trial, and its members responded with complaints about chaotic orders from the centre. The dispute quickly became part of the struggle for influence between Leon Trotsky, who directed the army, and his opponents in the party, and some historians believe that the subsequent investigation was largely a political manoeuvre.

At the beginning of January 1919 the party’s Central Committee and the Defence Council sent a commission consisting of Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky to the front. In its reports to Lenin it blamed the defeat on poor supply, the breakdown of the rear, the lack of reserves, the treason of a group of former tsarist officers on the 3rd Army staff, and the mistakes of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, headed by Trotsky. The very term “Perm catastrophe” came from the report. The commission carried out arrests and purges, and Cheka detachments were used to stop fleeing soldiers.

A victory without a sequel

The Whites were unable to exploit their success. The winter made a rapid advance impossible, the Siberian Army was exhausted, and on the southern flank of the front the Red 5th Army was approaching Ufa, which it took on 31 December. On 6 January 1919 Kolchak ordered the Siberian Army to go over to the defensive and to transfer part of its forces to the Ufa area. In the spring of 1919 the Whites set out from Perm on a great offensive, but in the summer the Reds recaptured the city, which remained in their hands until the end of the civil war.