Wrangel's army evacuates the Crimea

On 14 November 1920 the last ships of the White fleet left the bay at Sevastopol. Throughout the evacuation General Pyotr Wrangel supervised the embarkation, sailing from port to port in the cruiser General Kornilov. The Whites were taken off from five towns: Sevastopol, Yevpatoria (PL), Yalta, Feodosia and Kerch (PL), where the last patrols went on board on 16 November. According to the most often quoted figures, 145,693 people, not counting the crews, were carried away on 126 ships, warships, tugs and launches, twice as many as had been planned. So ended the war of the Whites in southern Russia, which a handful of volunteers had begun in 1918 with the Ice March.

The fall of Perekop

Wrangel had taken over command from Anton Denikin in April 1920, when the remnants of the White armies had taken refuge in the Crimea. In the summer his Russian Army (PL) broke out of the peninsula, taking advantage of the fact that the main Red forces were fighting Poland. The situation was reversed by the Polish–Soviet armistice, which came into force on 18 October. On 27 October Mikhail Frunze (PL) took command of the Red Southern Front, with a numerical superiority of several times over. During the night of 7–8 November his troops, and with them the anarchist units of Nestor Makhno (PL), crossed the freezing marshes of the Sivash (PL), and during the night of 8–9 November they took the Turkish Wall on the Perekop Isthmus. The Whites held their positions at Ishun until 11 November, and then the front collapsed.

Wrangel’s order

On 11 November Frunze proposed by radio that Wrangel end his resistance and promised an amnesty to all who laid down their arms. Vladimir Lenin considered these terms too lenient and ordered that not a single ship be allowed to leave the Crimea. Wrangel had the radio stations on the peninsula closed down, except for one manned by officers, and issued the order to evacuate. In it he wrote that everything within human power had been done to fulfil the duty to the army and the population, and that the further fate of the refugees was unknown. The Government of South Russia warned that coal was short and that no country had agreed to take in the refugees, and advised everyone not in immediate danger to stay. The ships had been quietly prepared since the spring. That same day Wrangel asked the French Admiral Dumesnil for France to take the evacuees under its protection, in exchange for the Russian warships. The agreement was signed on 13 November. Order in the ports was kept by cadets and Cossacks. According to Russian estimates, up to 15,000 Cossacks, 12,000 officers, thousands of soldiers, officials and cadets, and more than 100,000 civilians went on board, among them about 5,000 wounded and sick.

The road to Constantinople

The ships sailed under the Russian St Andrew’s flag. The voyage on the overcrowded ships was hard. One vessel was lost, the old destroyer Zhivoi, whose tow line parted, and with her some 250 people. The transport Rion, carrying several thousand people, ran out of coal and was towed to her destination by the American cruiser St. Louis. By 18 November the fleet had reached the Moda roadstead off Constantinople. The troops were put into camps. The 1st Army Corps went to Gallipoli, the Don Cossacks to Çatalca and the Kuban Cossacks to the island of Lemnos. In December the warships sailed on to Bizerte in Tunisia.

Many of those who stayed behind fell victim to the Red Terror. On 16 November Felix Dzerzhinsky ordered that no White Guard be allowed to leave the Crimea, and from the following day former officers were registered. The first lists of those shot date from 22 November. In the months that followed thousands of people were killed in the Crimea.