Reports of the capture of Birsk

The British chronology of the war records under 30 December 1918 that the troops of Admiral Alexander Kolchak occupied Birsk, referring in this connection to the news of the capture of Perm six days earlier. Birsk is a small district town on the river Belaya, about 80 kilometres north of Ufa as the crow flies. In the summer of 1918, after the revolt of the Czechoslovaks, it came, like Ufa, under the rule of the anti-Bolshevik Komuch. However, neither Russian studies of the Civil War nor the history of the region confirm that the Whites took the town in the last days of December.

The situation at the front suggests rather the opposite. At the end of 1918 the Whites concentrated their best forces on the Perm axis, while south of the Kama they were retreating before the Red 5th Army. As early as the beginning of November a Bolshevik partisan detachment operating in the Whites’ rear in the Menzelinsk district had seized the road to Birsk. On the day after the alleged capture of the town, 31 December, the Reds took Ufa itself. Studies of the history of Bashkiria list Birsk among the towns the Reds took during their offensive in the autumn and winter of 1918, though without giving an exact date.

The Whites took Birsk only in the spring of 1919, in March according to most studies, during the Spring Offensive, when General Mikhail Khanzhin’s (PL) Western Army also took Ufa. In June 1919 the 5th Army, by then commanded by Mikhail Tukhachevsky, crossed the Belaya near the town in the Birsk operation and recaptured it for good.

It is not known on what basis the British chronology recorded this report. News from the Siberian front reached the West late at the time and was often inaccurate. None of the available sources confirms that Birsk passed into White hands on 30 December 1918.