Czechoslovaks take Kazan

Before noon on 7 August 1918 the last Red units were driven out of Kazan, a large city on the Volga. After two days of fighting it had been taken by soldiers of the anti-Bolshevik People’s Army of Komuch, the Samara government of the Socialist Revolutionaries, and two battalions of the Czechoslovak Legion, supported by armed river steamers. “After a two-day battle on 7 August units of the Samara group of the People’s Army and the Czechoslovaks, together with our combat flotilla, took Kazan. The booty cannot be counted; the gold reserve of Russia, 650 million, has been seized,” reported Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Kappel. The British chronology of the war records the capture of Kazan by the Czechoslovaks under 14 July, but in mid-July the front was still far from the city, and Kazan fell only at the beginning of August.

An expedition against orders

After the revolt of the Czechoslovaks and their capture of Samara in June, a front arose on the middle Volga on which the legionaries fought shoulder to shoulder with Komuch volunteers. The ablest commander of the Russian volunteers turned out to be Kappel, a 35-year-old General Staff officer. On 22 July the People’s Army and the Czechoslovaks took Simbirsk, today’s Ulyanovsk. Stanislav Čeček, commanding the Volga group, now wanted to strike south towards Saratov and, according to Russian accounts, allowed Kappel only a raid to the mouth of the Kama. Kappel and Captain Aleksei Stepanov argued that a rising was being prepared in Kazan and that huge stores lay in the city. They set off northwards on their own responsibility.

On 1 August the detachment, which according to Soviet calculations numbered about 3,000 infantry, 300 cavalry and 14 guns, set out along both banks of the Volga. The Czechoslovaks were commanded by Josef Jiří Švec, commander of the 1st Rifle Regiment. The Reds gathered about 10,000 men to defend Kazan, including the 5th Regiment of Latvian Riflemen, an international battalion of Austrian and Hungarian prisoners of war, and Tatar and Muslim units. The commander of the Bolshevik Eastern Front, Jukums Vācietis, was in the city.

The fight for the city

On the evening of 5 August the flotilla sailed past Kazan and landed Kappel’s men on the right bank of the Volga above the city, cutting the river route. The Czechoslovaks landed at the quays below Kazan and went into the attack, but the Latvians stopped them and even began to push them back. The issue was decided by treachery in the defenders’ ranks: about 300 Serbs of Major Matija Blagotić’s battalion, quartered in the kremlin, went over to the attackers and struck the Latvians in the flank. On 6 August Kappel crossed the river and entered the city from the north, and when the Reds threw their best units against him, the Czechoslovaks landed at another point and routed the weaker Red Guard detachments. A rising by an underground officers’ organisation broke out in the city. By the evening Kazan was surrounded on three sides. During the night some of the defenders broke out westwards to Sviyazhsk and northwards to Arsk. Vācietis barely escaped capture. Among those taken prisoner was the Tatar communist Mullanur Vakhitov, who was soon shot. Kappel reported a loss of only 25 men.

The gold and its consequences

Since 1915 gold had been evacuated to Kazan from Petrograd, out of the Germans’ reach, and later from other cities too, so that more than half of Russia’s gold reserve had been gathered here. The Bolsheviks managed to remove only about 100 crates. The victors captured gold coins and bars worth, by their own reckoning, more than 650 million roubles, as well as banknotes, platinum and other valuables. The gold was sent by steamer to Samara and in the autumn via Ufa to Omsk, where Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak took it over. Most of the staff of the General Staff Academy, which had been moved to Kazan, also went over to the Whites, and the news of the city’s fall helped to spark the rising of the Izhevsk and Votkinsk workers.

The fall of Kazan was the furthest-reaching success of the Bolsheviks’ opponents on the Volga and caused a shock in Moscow. Leon Trotsky arrived at Sviyazhsk in his train and restored the troops’ discipline by draconian methods. The Reds recaptured Kazan on 10 September.