Kharkov operation (1919)
하리코프 작전 (1919)
The operation of 24 November to 12 December 1919 in which the Red Southern Front under Yegorov pursued Denikin's retreating Volunteer Army and retook Kharkov. A pursuit that followed the Orel–Kromy and Voronezh–Kastornoye operations, it gave the main blow to Uborevich's 14th Army while the 13th Army and Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army swung round to Kupyansk in the east. When the Whites in Kharkov surrendered on 12 December, the Volunteer and Don Armies were split apart and the way into the Donbas lay open.
In depth
Kharkov had fallen to the Volunteer Army on 25 June 1919 and become a base for Denikin's advance on Moscow. On 24 November the Southern Front stood north of Sumy, Oboyan and Stary Oskol, and the Russian source puts the Reds at 58,000 infantry and 13,000 cavalry against 47,000 and 23,000 Whites. The 1st Cavalry Army took Novy Oskol on the 25th and the 14th Army took Sumy on the 28th. On 3 December the cavalry corps of Mamontov and Ulagay counterattacked at the junction of the 13th Army and the 1st Cavalry Army, but they were beaten in cavalry fighting that went on until the 7th. The 14th Army advanced through Akhtyrka, Krasnokutsk, Belgorod and Valki and took Merefa on the 11th, cutting the Whites' escape route to the south, and on the 12th the Latvian Division and the 8th Cavalry Division entered Kharkov. After the loss of Kharkov the Volunteer Army's retreat turned into a disorderly flight, and typhus spread through the retreating columns. The English source notes that the townspeople, above all the workers, who had welcomed the Whites in June had become disillusioned with White rule and received the Reds rather favourably.
Where to put the main blow of the Southern Front was argued over in the party leadership all through 1919. The high command held to a plan to strike from the Volga across the Don steppe towards the Kuban. Trotsky wrote in My Life that he had urged from the start that the main blow go "not from the Volga to the Kuban but from Voronezh to Kharkov and the Donets basin", to cut the Volunteers off from the Cossacks, and that through that belt, whose workers and peasants were with the Red Army, it would have gone in "like a knife into butter". He recalled that the plan was adopted only after Denikin threatened Tula, at the cost of several months. Stalin's letter to Lenin dated 15 October also called for moving the main blow "from the Voronezh area through Kharkov and the Donets basin to Rostov", while itself noting that the old plan to be replaced had "already been cancelled by practice". The Kharkov operation was the first large result of the advance along this axis.