Kazan operation (1918)
카잔 작전 (1918)
The fighting of August and September 1918 for the middle-Volga city of Kazan. On 7 August Vladimir Kappel's Komuch People's Army and the Czechoslovak Legion took Kazan and with it the imperial Russian gold reserve stored there, and Trotsky came to Sviyazhsk to the west and rebuilt the shattered Red forces with ruthless discipline. In the offensive that opened on 5 September, the 5th Army, Fyodor Raskolnikov's Volga Flotilla and Vladimir Azin's Arsk group retook Kazan on 10 September.
In depth
After the capture of Simbirsk on 22 July, the Czechoslovak commander Stanislav Čeček forbade a drive on Kazan, insisting on an attack towards Saratov, but Kappel and Stepanov ignored him and on 1 August marched north along both banks of the Volga with about 3,000 men. Kazan was held by some 10,000 men, among them Latvian Rifle regiments and Muslim communist units, yet after two days of fighting the city fell to the Whites on 7 August, and the Eastern Front commander Vācietis narrowly escaped capture. The Whites seized the imperial gold reserve, 650 million gold roubles in coin, 100 million in paper notes and bullion of gold and platinum, along with huge arsenals, and the General Staff Academy went over to them entire. The fall of Kazan opened the way for the Izhevsk–Votkinsk rising and cut the Soviet government off from the Volga granary and the road to Siberia.
Trotsky, who reached Sviyazhsk on 8 August, rebuilt the 5th Army with savage discipline: his Order No. 18 of 11 August declared that if a unit retreated without orders its commissar would be the first to be shot. On the night of 28 to 29 August Kappel's force landed in the rear at Sviyazhsk, cut the railway and nearly captured Trotsky, but was driven off by a Latvian counter-attack. Raskolnikov's Volga Flotilla, led by torpedo boats brought from the Baltic, raided the White flotilla's base before dawn on 31 August, and his wife Larisa Reisner, chief of the flotilla's intelligence section, scouted the enemy camp disguised as a peasant woman. In the general offensive from 5 September the 5th Army attacked along both banks of the Volga from the west and Azin's Arsk group from the north-east; on the morning of 10 September the People's Army announced its withdrawal and that afternoon the Reds entered an empty Kazan. The American historian Peter Kenez counts the fighting at Sviyazhsk among the decisive battles of the civil war.