Germans occupy Rostov

On 8 May 1918 (25 April in the Julian calendar, which the Whites and the Cossacks still used) German troops entered Rostov-on-Don, one of the largest cities of southern Russia and a railway junction on the route to the Caucasus. They met no resistance. The Red command had already fled to Tsaritsyn and the Kuban, and the soldiers who had stayed in the city were disarmed by the Germans and let go. Thus the Don Soviet Republic, whose capital was Rostov, effectively ceased to exist. The date of 8 May is given by the British chronology of the war and most Russian studies; some authors put the Germans’ entry two days earlier. According to some accounts Cossack cavalry rode into the city together with the Germans.

The march to the Don

Rostov lay outside Ukraine, whose borders were set by the treaty it had concluded with the Central Powers. The German command paid no heed to this, however, just as in the Crimea. After taking the Donbas on 26 April its troops entered the lands of the Don Host Oblast from the direction of Luhansk, and on 1 May they took Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. The Bolsheviks proclaimed a “revolutionary war” and mobilisation, but the population, convinced that the Germans would soon arrive, no longer obeyed their orders.

The Reds were also weakened by the uprising on the Don. In February, when Ataman Kaledin shot himself, the Cossacks had not wanted to fight the Bolsheviks. In the spring, food requisitions, lynchings and the announced confiscation of Cossack land turned the mood. From April one stanitsa after another revolted, and as early as April the insurgents briefly entered the Cossack capital, Novocherkassk. On 6 May they took it again, this time for longer.

The Drozdovtsy at Rostov

Whites who had come from far away also took part in the fighting for the Don. Colonel Mikhail Drozdovsky had set out in March from the Romanian Front with a detachment of about a thousand volunteers, mostly officers, and marched across the whole of southern Ukraine to join the Volunteer Army. On Easter night, 4/5 May, his cavalry burst into Rostov and seized the station, and the Reds began to leave the city. After a few hours the Bolsheviks, helped by troop trains from Novocherkassk and two armoured trains, counter-attacked and drove the Drozdovtsy out. According to White accounts, at the critical moment officers of a German uhlan regiment approaching the city rode up to Drozdovsky and offered help. Drozdovsky refused and withdrew, and a few days later he helped the Cossacks drive the Reds back from Novocherkassk. He held up the Reds in Rostov only for a moment, but he drew their forces onto himself at the decisive moment of the uprising.

The Germans and the Cossacks

The German garrison remained in Rostov until December 1918. In the areas the Bolsheviks had left, Cossack leaders took power. On 11 May the Krug for the Salvation of the Don assembled in Novocherkassk, and on 16 May it elected General Pyotr Krasnov ataman. The same Krasnov who in the autumn of 1917 had led the Cossacks against Petrograd staked everything on cooperation with the Germans. He exchanged grain with them for weapons and ammunition, and in the summer he wrote to Emperor Wilhelm II asking him to recognise the independence of the Don. The Volunteers, loyal to the Entente, looked on this with disfavour. Yet they too benefited from the Don hinterland, held thanks to German bayonets.