Chelyabinsk operation
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The operation of 17 July to 4 August 1919 in which Mikhail Tukhachevsky's Red 5th Army took Chelyabinsk, the industrial and railway centre of the southern Urals, and beat off a White counterstroke that used the city as bait for an encirclement. When the 5th Army entered Chelyabinsk on 24 July, two White groups under Sergei Voitsekhovsky and Vladimir Kappel closed in from north and south the next day, but the 26th Division held Kappel's group and the ring never closed. The Whites lost 15,000 men as prisoners, and the Red Army took the whole of the Urals and opened the road into Siberia.
In depth
Beaten in the Zlatoust and Yekaterinburg operations, Kolchak's forces were unwilling to give up Chelyabinsk easily. The command of the White Western Army (renamed the 3rd Army on 14 July) under General Konstantin Sakharov planned to pull its main forces back behind the city, draw the Reds into Chelyabinsk and then encircle them from both flanks. The Red 5th Army (about 32,000 men and 100 guns) attacked on 17 July, broke the defence line between Lakes Chebarkul and Irtyash on the 20th and entered Chelyabinsk on the 24th. On the 25th Voitsekhovsky's northern group (about 20,000 men) cut the Chelyabinsk–Yekaterinburg railway and came out in the 5th Army's rear, while Kappel's southern group (about 10,000) closed in from the south. But while the 26th Division held off Kappel's group, the rest of the 5th Army regrouped and, together with 3rd Army units coming down from the north, broke Voitsekhovsky's group. On 4 August the 24th Division and partisans took Troitsk, and the 5th Army reached a line 25 to 30 kilometres east of Chelyabinsk. Russian Wikipedia (2025 revision) gives the forces as 32,000 Red against 27,600 White and the losses as 11,000 Red and 15,000 White prisoners.
The operation was the threshold at which the advance begun by the Eastern Front counteroffensive crossed the Urals into Siberia. At the height of Kolchak's Spring Offensive, on 7 April, Trotsky had written in "To the Urals!" that "through Chelyabinsk we must open for ourselves the gates to Siberia", and on 29 July, addressing party workers at Penza, he said that "after the taking of Chelyabinsk we shall go on further into Siberia". In the same speech he recalled that in spring the army on the Eastern Front had rolled back before Kolchak until it was stiffened with "energetic, firm communists". The dispute of June and July over pursuing Kolchak beyond the Urals had ended with the Central Committee choosing Kamenev's case for pursuit, and the victory at Chelyabinsk bore that judgement out. It opened the way for the Red Army towards Siberia and Turkestan.