Ice March
얼음 행군
The march of February to May 1918 (22 February to 13 May) in which the Volunteer Army of Lavr Kornilov and Mikhail Alekseyev, driven out of Rostov-on-Don by the Red Army, went south into the Kuban and came back to the Don. Also called the First Kuban Campaign, it took the name "Ice March" from the fighting near Novodmitrievskaya at the end of March, when the troops crossed a swollen stream in freezing rain and frost. When Kornilov was killed by a shell during the attack on Yekaterinodar in April, Anton Denikin took command and brought the army out, and the march was remembered as the founding episode of the White movement in South Russia.
In depth
The Volunteer Army of former imperial officers that gathered in Novocherkassk in November 1917 failed to win the support of the Don Cossacks, and when the Red Army took Taganrog in February 1918 and closed on Rostov, the Don ataman Alexey Kaledin shot himself. Kornilov led about 4,000 troops and a thousand civilians south across the frozen steppe in the hope of help from the Kuban Cossacks, with Sergei Markov among the regimental commanders. The first battle was fought at Lezhanka on 6 March, after which the Volunteers shot more than a hundred captured Red Army soldiers. Learning on the way that Yekaterinodar had already fallen to the Reds, the army fought the battle of Novodmitrievskaya on 28 March and then absorbed Viktor Pokrovsky's Kuban force, doubling its strength.
The assault on Yekaterinodar from 9 to 13 April cost the Volunteers about 400 killed and 1,500 wounded, and on 13 April Kornilov was killed by a shell that hit the farmhouse he used as headquarters. Denikin, taking command, called off the attack that evening and broke out by forced marches; of the 252 wounded left behind at Yelizavetinskaya only 28 survived. Lenin, hearing of Kornilov's death, said that the civil war had in the main ended, but the army that returned to the Don border in mid-May numbered about 5,000, more than at the start, and the Don Cossacks had risen against the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile Colonel Mikhail Drozdovsky led a volunteer brigade from Iași on the Romanian front, setting out on 11 March and entering Novocherkassk on 8 May before joining the Volunteer Army. The survivors of the march, the pervopokhodniki ("first campaigners"), enjoyed a special standing among the Whites.