Volga Military Flotilla (Russian Civil War)
볼가 군사 소함대 (러시아 내전)
The river flotilla of the Red Navy that fought on the Volga and the Kama in the Russian Civil War. It was formed at Nizhny Novgorod in July 1918 from armed steamers and barges and joined by four torpedo boats brought from the Baltic Fleet through the Mariinsky waterway. Under Raskolnikov it helped retake Kazan in September 1918, and in July 1919 it merged with the Astrakhan-Caspian Flotilla to form the Volga-Caspian Flotilla.
In depth
The sailor-commissar Nikolai Markin, who arrived in Nizhny Novgorod in June 1918, organised it; at first it had eight river steamers turned into gunboats with guns and machine guns, barge-mounted floating batteries and an air detachment of four seaplanes. On 6 June Lenin ordered the Baltic Fleet torpedo boats Prytky, Prochny, Retivy and Porazhayushchy sent to the Volga; with their guns removed to reduce draught they set out on 2 August, reached Nizhny Novgorod on the 24th and were rearmed there. Raskolnikov took command on 23 August, and his wife Larisa Reisner led its reconnaissance. On 28–29 August the flotilla helped defend Sviyazhsk, and Trotsky recalled how Markin, on an improvised gunboat, stopped a regiment that had boarded a steamer to desert and forced it to surrender. On the night of 31 August, led by the Prochny with Trotsky on board, the flotilla ran dark past the White batteries at Verkhny Uslon and surprised the White flotilla in front of Kazan. Trotsky wrote that "the enemy flotilla was almost completely destroyed" and that "the word 'torpedo boat', on the Volga!, had the same effect on the Whites as the word 'tank' later had on the young Red troops near Petrograd". The Russian source notes that in this raid the flotilla too lost a gunboat, and two more gunboats and a torpedo boat needed long repairs.
On 9 September a landing party of 60 under Markin held the Kazan quay for an hour and carried off the breech blocks of the enemy guns, and on the 10th Kazan was retaken. The flotilla was then divided into a Volga and a Kama detachment, and Markin, leading the Kama detachment, was killed in an ambush at Pyany Bor on 1 October. It was commanded from November 1918 by Varvatsi and from April 1919 by Pyotr Smirnov-Svetlovsky, and in the spring of 1919 it supported the 2nd, 3rd and 5th Armies against Kolchak on the Kama, the Belaya and the Ufa, helping to retake Chistopol and Sarapul and to cross the Belaya. In July 1919, when the Whites had fallen back beyond the Urals, it was merged with the Astrakhan-Caspian Flotilla, and Raskolnikov took over the Volga-Caspian Flotilla. The Whites also had river forces on the Volga, the Komuch People's Army river fleet and in 1919 the Caucasian Army's Volga flotilla, and a flotilla of the same name was formed again in 1941 before the Battle of Stalingrad.