Perm operation (1918–1919)
페름 작전 (1918–1919)
The fighting west of the Urals on the Perm axis from 29 November 1918 to the end of January 1919. The White Siberian Army, spearheaded by Anatoly Pepelyayev's 1st Central Siberian Corps, broke the Red 3rd Army and took Kungur on 21 December and Perm on 24 to 25 December; the Red counteroffensive that began on 19 January stalled without retaking Perm. The name "Perm catastrophe" stuck after the party commission of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky that investigated the defeat used it.
In depth
In November 1918 the Red 3rd Army held a 400-kilometre front short of food, winter clothing and boots, in frosts down to minus 30 degrees and with little fuel or transport. The White Yekaterinburg group attacked on 29 November, a day ahead of the planned Red offensive, broke through the 3rd Army's front, took Kungur on 21 December and entered Perm on the night of 24 to 25 December (English Wikipedia gives 24 December). The Reds abandoned Perm without a fight, the Perm gun works at Motovilikha and large stocks of ammunition and food fell to the Whites, and locally raised Red units deserted or went over to the enemy as soon as they were armed. English Wikipedia puts Red losses at 18,000 men. On 24 December Kolchak merged the Yekaterinburg and Prikamye groups into a new Siberian Army under Radola Gajda, but when the Red 5th Army retook Ufa in the south on 31 December he ordered the Siberian Army on 6 January 1919 to go over to the defensive. The Red 2nd and 3rd Armies counterattacked separately on 19 and 21 January but by the 28th had advanced only 10 to 40 kilometres.
Right after the defeat the commander-in-chief Ioakim Vatsetis ordered the whole Revolutionary Military Council of the Eastern Front to be put on trial, and one of its members, Sergei Gusev, complained in turn to the Central Committee about Vatsetis and Trotsky's Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. On 1 January 1919 the Central Committee and the Defence Council formed a party commission of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, who reached Vyatka on 5 January and named the 3rd Army's broken supply, the collapse of its rear and White agents inside its staff as the causes. Their report to Lenin at the end of January blamed the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic for failing to coordinate the 2nd and 3rd Armies and proposed that the Defence Council supervise Trotsky's department. Trotsky himself, writing at Kursk on 7 January 1919, put it this way: "On the Eastern Front we have lately had one big failure, the loss of Perm, and one big success, the taking of Ufa. On the whole the situation on the Eastern Front is favourable for us." Soviet histories of the 1930s and 1940s inflated Stalin's role and presented the defeat as a "Perm catastrophe" of the whole Eastern Front, but the Great Soviet Encyclopedia later corrected this, noting that by the time Stalin arrived the White operation at Perm had already stopped and the Whites were regrouping towards Ufa.