Start of the Ice March

On 22 February 1918 General Lavr Kornilov issued the order to abandon Rostov-on-Don. On the night of 22–23 February the main forces of the Volunteer Army left the city, crossed to the left bank of the Don and assembled in the stanitsa of Olginskaya. The next day they were joined by stragglers and by the units that had fallen back from Bataysk. The Whites, who had not accepted the Gregorian calendar introduced by the Bolsheviks a week earlier, dated this day 9 February Old Style. So began the First Kuban Campaign, which went down in history as the Ice March and became a legend of the Whites.

The volunteers were forced to retreat by defeat on the Don. Since January Red columns had been advancing on Rostov and Novocherkassk from several directions. On 10 February Taganrog fell, and the next day Ataman Kaledin shot himself when it became clear that the Don Cossacks did not want to defend their land. Rostov, surrounded by superior enemy forces, could not be held. The command considered various routes: winter quarters in the Don steppes, where the detachment of the Don field ataman Pyotr Popov was heading, a march beyond the Volga, or to the Kuban. The argument went on even after they had left the city. At a council in Olginskaya, with Alekseyev objecting to a flight into the steppe, the Kuban was chosen, because in Yekaterinodar the anti-Bolshevik government of the Kuban Cossacks was supposed to be still holding out. Kornilov reckoned that sooner or later the Bolsheviks would alienate the Cossacks, who would then join the volunteers. On 23 February the troops of Rudolf Sievers entered the abandoned Rostov.

According to a roll drawn up in Olginskaya, the army’s ranks included 36 generals, 242 staff officers, 190 of them colonels, and 2,078 junior officers. On top of that there were more than a thousand volunteers who were not officers: junkers, cadets, schoolboys and soldiers, as well as 168 medical staff, including 122 nursing sisters. Altogether there were about 4,000 people, with eight guns and a negligible supply of shells. The army was accompanied by a train of civilian refugees. Winter uniforms, horses and ammunition were lacking, and the treasury held a few million roubles. General Mikhail Alekseyev wrote to his family: “We are going into the steppe. We can return only if God grants us His grace.” General Anton Denikin, Kornilov’s deputy, later recalled that they set out from the dark night of spiritual bondage into the unknown, “in search of the blue bird”.

At Olginskaya Kornilov reorganised his small detachments into three infantry regiments: General Sergei Markov’s Officer Regiment, the Kornilov Shock Regiment and General Afrikan Bogaevsky’s Partisan Regiment. To these were added a junker battalion, artillery and two cavalry battalions. Despite its grand name, the whole army numbered roughly as many men as a single full-strength regiment of the World War.

The march was to last until mid-May. It owed the name “Ice” to the days in March when heavy rain was followed by frost and blizzards, and the soldiers’ greatcoats were coated with ice. Yekaterinodar turned out to be already lost, as the Kuban Cossacks had surrendered it to the Bolsheviks in mid-March. After joining forces with them, the volunteers stormed the city in April. On 13 April Kornilov was killed by an artillery shell, and Denikin led the remnants of the army back to the Don. The survival of this core marked the beginning of the White armed forces in southern Russia.