Kolchak's spring offensive

On 4 March 1919 General Radola Gajda’s Siberian Army struck from around Perm at the Red 2nd and 3rd Armies and within a few days took the small towns of Okhansk and Osa on the Kama. So began the spring offensive of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, the Whites’ greatest attempt in eastern Russia to break the front and march on Moscow. Sources give the order of the first blows differently. According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Gajda moved on 4 March and the neighbouring Western Army of General Mikhail Khanzhin on 6 March. Some more recent Russian studies put it the other way round: on 4 March the Western Army delivered a supporting blow towards Sterlitamak, and Gajda moved two days later. What is certain is that in the first week of March the attack spread across the whole centre and north of the front.

Plan and forces

After taking Perm in December 1918 Kolchak halted operations for the winter, and on 15 February he ordered his troops to take up favourable positions for a spring attack. The Siberian Army was to advance west towards Vyatka and Kazan, in the hope of joining hands with the Allied forces in northern Russia. The Western Army was to strike at the centre of the front, at Ufa and on towards Samara, while the Orenburg Cossacks of Ataman Alexander Dutov and the Ural Cossacks operated in the south. According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Kolchak put as many as 143,000 men into the field against the Red Eastern Front, which numbered about 100,000. Modern Russian tallies give about 120,000 on the White side and 100,000–110,000 on the Red side. It did not help the Whites that in February the Bashkir corps had gone over to the Reds.

The march towards the Volga

The Western Army made the fastest progress. Against the Red 5th Army, which, as the Soviet encyclopedia admits, it outnumbered four to one in men and two to one in artillery, it broke the front and took Ufa on 13 or 14 March, depending on the source. A Red counter-attack south of the city failed. The Whites pressed on along the railway towards Samara: on 7 April they took Belebey, in mid-April Bugulma (PL), and on 15 April Buguruslan. In the north the Siberian Army took Votkinsk (PL) at the beginning of April, Sarapul on 11 April and Izhevsk (PL) on 13 April, whose arms works had been the centre of an anti-Bolshevik uprising only a few months earlier. In the south the Cossacks approached Orenburg and Uralsk.

At the end of April the leading units of the Western Army stood on the distant approaches to Samara and Simbirsk, by various estimates between a few dozen and more than a hundred kilometres from the Volga, and on 25 April the Whites took Chistopol on the Kama. They claimed to have taken an area of about 300,000 square kilometres with some five million inhabitants. Ataman Dutov urged that the main blow be turned south, to meet the armies of Anton Denikin, but Omsk did not adopt the plan.

The counter-blow

In Moscow the Eastern Front was recognised as the most important. On 12 April the “Theses of the Central Committee in connection with the situation on the Eastern Front”, written by Vladimir Lenin, were published, calling on the party to mobilise every resource against Kolchak. Volunteers, Communists and weapons were sent to the front. According to Soviet figures, by 1 May the front’s troops had grown to 143,000 men and the advantage had passed to the Reds. On 10 April the 5th and 1st Armies were placed under the Southern Group of Mikhail Frunze (PL). The plan was to strike from the south into the flank of the Western Army, stretched along a front some 450 kilometres long.

Spring also worked against the Whites. The thaw and flooding rivers held up the supply trains and artillery, units exhausted by the rapid march lost contact with one another, and the reserves were still being formed. On 28 April the Reds went over to the counter-offensive. In May they recovered Buguruslan and Bugulma, and on 9 June the 25th Division of Vasily Chapayev (PL) retook Ufa. Gajda, who did not want to give up forces to help his neighbours, still took Glazov on 2 June, but soon his army too had to fall back. On 1 July the Reds entered Perm, and by the beginning of August the whole of the Urals was in their hands. The spring of 1919 was the high point of Kolchak’s fortunes. His troops never again came so close to the Volga.