Suicide of Kaledin

On 11 February 1918 (29 January by the Julian calendar, still in force in Russia), in Novocherkassk, the capital of the Don Cossacks, the ataman General Alexey Kaledin convened a meeting of the government of the Don Host. He announced that 147 bayonets were left at the front to defend the province against the advancing Bolsheviks, and laid down his powers. When members of the government began to dwell at length on the situation, he cut them short, according to witnesses, with the words: “Gentlemen, be brief. Time does not wait. It was by talk that Russia perished.” After the meeting he went to his study and shot himself through the heart. In a letter to General Mikhail Alekseyev he explained that he was taking his own life because the Cossacks had refused to follow their ataman. A British chronology of the war records Kaledin’s suicide under 13 February, probably by the date on which the news reached the West.

The Don against the Bolsheviks

Kaledin, who in 1916 had commanded the 8th Army, which took Lutsk in the Brusilov offensive, was elected ataman by the Cossack Host Assembly in the summer of 1917. At the State Conference in Moscow he demanded the abolition of soviets and committees in the army, and after the collapse of the Kornilov putsch he narrowly escaped arrest. After the Bolshevik coup he declared Lenin’s seizure of power a crime and announced that until legitimate authority was restored in Russia the government of the Don Host would assume full power in the province. Novocherkassk became a refuge for opponents of the Bolsheviks. In mid-November Alekseyev arrived there and began recruiting officers for volunteer units, and in December, after the escape from Bykhov, he was joined by General Lavr Kornilov. At the turn of the year Alekseyev’s units grew into the Volunteer Army. In December the volunteers helped Kaledin to retake Rostov-on-Don from the local Bolsheviks.

The ataman’s strength, however, was illusory. In the towns of the province the incomer population, distrustful of Cossack rule, predominated, and the workers of the coalfield supported the Bolsheviks. The Cossack soldiers returning from the front were tired of war and had no intention of fighting a government that promised peace and land. Many of them believed that the Red units were coming only for the “outsiders”, that is the volunteer officers. From December Soviet troops under Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko were advancing on the Don and Ukraine, and on 23 January (10 January O.S.) a congress of front-line Cossacks in the stanitsa of Kamenskaya declared Kaledin deposed and recognised the authority of the Council of People’s Commissars. The ataman had at his disposal mainly volunteers and partisan detachments made up of schoolboys and cadets. On 3 February (21 January O.S.) the best known of their commanders, Colonel Vasily Chernetsov, was killed. On 10 February (28 January O.S.) the column of Rudolf Sivers took Taganrog. That same day Kornilov informed Kaledin that the Volunteer Army, threatened with destruction, would withdraw to the Kuban. For the ataman this was the last straw.

Errors in the British chronology

A British chronology of the war states that on 4 February the Don Cossacks under General Alekseyev set off for Moscow, and that on 13 February they were defeated by the Bolsheviks. Both pieces of information are inaccurate and probably reflect rumours then reaching the West. There was no march on Moscow. Alekseyev did not command the Cossacks; with Kornilov he co-founded the Volunteer Army, which then numbered only 3,000–4,000 men. In February it was not attacking but desperately defending the approaches to Rostov and Taganrog. Nor was there a single decisive battle on 13 February. Cossack resistance collapsed gradually: Taganrog fell on 10 February, Kaledin died the next day, and his successor, General Anatoly Nazarov, could no longer reverse the course of events. In the night of 22–23 February the volunteers abandoned Rostov and set off for the Kuban, and on 25 February the Bolsheviks took Novocherkassk.