Clash on the Caspian Sea

At dawn on 8 December 1918, off Chechen Island in the north-western Caspian Sea, roughly halfway from Baku to the mouth of the Volga, the first clash took place between the British Caspian flotilla and Bolshevik vessels. Two armed ships under British command, Zoroaster and Alla Verdi, exchanged fire for more than an hour with auxiliary cruisers of the Red flotilla from Astrakhan. Neither side lost a ship. The British chronology of the war records the clash under that date, and the date of 8 December is also given by Soviet sources and the memoirs of participants.

A flotilla of merchant ships

The British flotilla had no real warships. From August 1918 the British had been arming Caspian merchant ships at Enzeli and Baku, mostly freighters and tankers, by mounting guns on their decks. According to the British official history (F. J. Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. IV), they were commanded by British officers and their guns were manned by British sailors, but the masters, helmsmen and engine-room crews were almost exclusively Russians, and the ships sailed under the old Russian naval ensign. After an accident to Commodore David Norris, the flotilla was commanded from October by Captain B. G. Washington. The Admiralty instructed him to maintain such control of the Caspian that hostile forces could not move troops across it. On 17 November the flotilla returned to Baku with General Thomson’s troops, from where it had had to flee in September after the fall of the city.

The British now faced a new enemy, no longer the Turks but the Bolsheviks, who held Astrakhan and the Volga delta and were building their own flotilla there. At the beginning of December four British ships went out on patrol to the north. According to John Guard, historian of the British flotilla, two ships of the White Centro-Caspian flotilla from Baku were to have accompanied them, but their crews refused. British intelligence reported that the Bolsheviks intended to establish a base in Staro-Terechnaya Bay, on the mainland opposite Chechen Island. And indeed, on 2 December a detachment of the Red flotilla left Astrakhan under the acting commander Kronberg: the auxiliary cruisers Kolomna, armed with four 100 mm guns, and Makarov I, and the armed steamer Sevsk, covering transports carrying a landing force.

Battle at dawn

On the night of 7–8 December Zoroaster and Alla Verdi lay at anchor off Chechen. Zoroaster, a converted tanker with two 120 mm guns, had engine trouble and, to the horror of the officers in Alla Verdi, stood all night with her lights burning. Kronberg, who on the evening of 7 December had left Staro-Terechnaya with Kolomna and Makarov I heading for Petrovsk (today Makhachkala), spotted the lit ships at about two in the morning and cruised nearby, waiting for daylight. At about 6.40 a.m. Kolomna opened fire. According to the memoirs of a Russian officer in Alla Verdi, quoted by the historian Aleksandr Shirokorad, the ship’s British commander, Snow, then ordered the British ensign to be hoisted in place of the Russian one. Alla Verdi manoeuvred between the island and the shore, shelling Kolomna, while Zoroaster managed to weigh anchor only after some time. Fire was exchanged at ranges of 35 to 50 cables, roughly 6.5 to 9 kilometres. Alla Verdi fired 49 rounds in the whole action.

The two sides describe the course of the fight differently. According to Guard, the Bolshevik ships, though more numerous, withdrew, one of them on fire, and Zoroaster was hit three times but suffered no casualties. The Russian officer in Alla Verdi wrote that the British saw a great cloud of steam on Kolomna, and that on Zoroaster one sailor lost both legs and soon died. Kronberg, on the other hand, reported that it was the enemy who had fled. At about 7.40 a.m. further ships appeared on the horizon behind the Bolshevik vessels: the destroyer Deyatelny and three armed steamers. The British drew off to the north-east and the fight ended at a quarter past eight. The Reds did not pursue them and returned to Astrakhan, on the way destroying with their own guns a paddle steamer that had run aground. In the evening Washington’s flagship Kruger joined the British, and on 9 December another armed ship. They later learnt from fishermen that during the battle two Bolshevik destroyers sent from the Baltic had been lying off the coast and had taken no part in the fight.

Aftermath

The British had used up a great deal of ammunition that was hard to replace, but according to Guard they had gained a moral ascendancy that they kept for a long time. On 29 December they destroyed with gunfire the beginnings of the Bolshevik base at Staro-Terechnaya. In mid-January the northern part of the sea froze, and the flotilla returned to Baku for the winter. The December patrols also brought another discovery: intercepted wireless messages indicated that the ships of the White Centro-Caspian flotilla were communicating with the Bolsheviks in Astrakhan. In the spring of 1919 the British disarmed it and took its best ships into their own flotilla, which hoisted the British White Ensign. The struggle for control of the Caspian Sea went on for more than another year.