Kolchak's Spring Offensive
콜차크의 춘계 공세
The great offensive of Alexander Kolchak's White armies from the Urals towards the Volga in March and April 1919. Mikhail Hanzhin's Western Army broke through the seam between the Red 5th and 2nd Armies and took Ufa on 13 March, while Radola Gajda's Siberian Army in the north took Osa, Okhansk and Sarapul. By the end of April the Whites stood before Kazan, Samara and Simbirsk, but with overstretched lines and the spring thaw they were broken by the Red counteroffensive that began on 28 April.
In depth
At the start of 1919 Kolchak's headquarters aimed both north, through Perm and Vyatka to join the Northern government at Arkhangelsk, and west, from Ufa across the Volga towards Moscow. The Whites fielded Gajda's Siberian Army (45,000 to 52,000 men), Hanzhin's Western Army (42,000 to 48,000) and Alexander Dutov's Orenburg Independent Army, while the Red 5th Army facing the Western Army had only 10,000 to 11,000 men. On 4 March Anatoly Pepelyayev's corps crossed the frozen Kama, and Osa and Okhansk fell on 7 and 8 March. The Western Army surprised Birsk on 10 March, swung round Ufa from the west and took the city on the 13th (English Wikipedia gives the 16th), and the 5th Army barely escaped encirclement and fell back westwards in disorder. In April the Whites took Sterlitamak (5th), Belebey (7th), Bugulma (13th) and Buguruslan (15th), while the Siberian Army took Sarapul with 2,500 Red prisoners on 11 April and the Izhevsk works on the 13th. With the fall of Chistopol on 25 April the Whites came within a hundred versts of Kazan and forty of the Volga.
Writing at Samara on 7 April in the appeal "To the Urals!", Trotsky admitted that after the victories on the Volga the centre had concentrated on the Southern Front and weakened the east, and declared: "The last card of the counter-revolution is Kolchak's army. This card must be beaten." When the rivers flooded in mid-April the White corps lost contact with one another as their supply and artillery sank in the mud, and the southern flank towards Orenburg lay open. Mikhail Frunze, commander of the Southern Group, did not rush to meet the collapse of the 5th Army but massed a strike force around Buzuluk. According to Russian Wikipedia the offensive won the Whites territory with more than five million inhabitants, donations poured in at Omsk under the slogan "All to help the army!", and Lenin declared Kolchak the republic's main enemy. Even the Soviet military historian Nikolai Kakurin conceded that this "flight to the Volga" drew Red reserves east and gave Denikin breathing space in the south.