Battle of Sviyazhsk
스비야시스크 전투
The fighting of August 1918 at Sviyazhsk, the station town in front of the Volga railway bridge west of Kazan, where the Red Army rebuilt its shattered front and held after Kazan had fallen to the Komuch People's Army and the Czechoslovak Legion. The war commissar Trotsky came by train and stayed there, punishing unauthorised retreat with the firing squad and drawing in communists, a river flotilla and an air group; on 28 and 29 August a raiding force under Vladimir Kappel reached the very edge of Sviyazhsk and was driven off. The rebuilt 5th Army opened the offensive on Kazan on 5 September and retook the city on 10 September.
In depth
In his memoir My Life Trotsky wrote that he left Moscow on 7 August, learned on the way that Kazan had fallen, and halted his train at Sviyazhsk, the nearest large station before Kazan (Russian Wikipedia gives 10 August as the date of arrival). He recalled that the army there was a set of detachments that had fallen back from Simbirsk and Kazan, each living its own life, with nothing in common but "a tendency to retreat", and that the fate of the revolution "depended on one battalion, on one company, on the firmness of one commissar, that is, it hung by a hair". The order he had printed in the train's press and read out to every unit ran: "I warn you: if any unit retreats without orders, the first to be shot will be the unit's commissar, the second its commander. ... Cowards, self-seekers and traitors will not escape the bullet" (Russian Wikipedia dates it as Order No. 18 of 11 August). A Petrograd regiment that abandoned its positions and seized a steamer to sail to Nizhny Novgorod was surrounded by armed boats and surrendered, and a field court sentenced its commander, its commissar and a number of soldiers to death. The number shot differs between accounts: 41 (Russian Wikipedia), 27 according to Larisa Reisner, every tenth man according to Sergei Gusev and a White memoir. Meanwhile the party sent thousands of communists from Moscow and Petrograd to the Kazan front, torpedo boats brought from the Baltic by the Mariinsky canal system and armed steamers formed Fyodor Raskolnikov's Volga Flotilla, and a dozen or so aircraft bombed Kazan daily.
Kappel's force, brought up from Simbirsk on 27 August, landed at Nizhny Uslon to seize Sviyazhsk and the Volga bridge and cut the Red line of retreat. On the night of 28 to 29 August the raiders took Tyurlema station, cut the railway and telegraph and moved on Sviyazhsk, but were stopped by the crew of Trotsky's train, armed down to the cook, and by a Latvian Rifle counterattack, and fell back towards Kazan. Trotsky recalled that the fight lasted about eight hours, and an editor's note in his military writings How the Revolution Armed itself states that the victory at Sviyazhsk on 29 August "predetermined" the taking of Kazan. One night at the end of August the flotilla, led by the torpedo boat Prochny with Trotsky and Raskolnikov aboard, slipped past the batteries on the Uslon heights with lights out and set the White vessels and an oil barge at the Kazan quays on fire. On 24 August Trotsky announced that Azin's 2nd Army troops had come within twelve versts of Kazan from the north-east and issued the order "Kazan must be taken!". He wrote that "no more than 25 to 30,000 men" fought on the Red side and that "the small war was a great school"; according to Russian Wikipedia the 5th Army and the Arsk group that opened the offensive on 5 September numbered about 11,000. The American historian Peter Kenez counted the fighting at Sviyazhsk among the decisive battles of the civil war.