From 4 March 1919 onward, with skis and sledges employed to make progress through the deep snow still lying in the Urals passes, the offensive commenced along the entire front and was initially successful during its first month: the Western Army took Ufa from the 5th Red Army by 16 March, then Sterlitamak, Belebei, and Bugul′ma (6–10 April 1919), bringing Khanzhin within striking distance of the Volga crossings at Samara and Simbirsk. Meanwhile, to the south Dutov’s Cossacks captured Orsk (9 April 1919) and pushed on toward Orenburg; in the north the Siberian Army captured Sarapul (10 April 1919) and closed on Glazov. At this point, however, impetuosity and hot-headedness took hold: instead of digging in on the river Ik and sitting out the worst of the spring thaw, when snowmelt transformed roads into rivers, the Western Army pushed on (taking Buguruslan on 15 April 1919), as Kolchak, on 12 April 1919, ordered that all Red forces east of the Volga were to be eliminated. By this point 180,000 square miles of territory (populated by some 5–7 million souls) had been engulfed by the Siberian Whites, together with at least 20,000 prisoners and many guns and armored trains.56 This seemed impressive, but not everybody was fooled: “Don’t think that our successful advances are a result of military prowess,” an officer warned the Siberian Kadet Lev Krol′, “for it is all much simpler than that—when they run away we advance; when we run away they will advance.”57 Moreover, Khanzhin’s vanguard had lost touch with its supply trains and commissaries and—forced to live off the land like occupiers, not liberators—were the living, breathing, and all-consuming contradiction of the crudely reproduced leaflets they distributed among the villages promising the hungry Urals that “Bread is Coming!” from Siberia.
It would soon be time, as Krol′ had been warned, for the Siberian Whites to run away. The Red Eastern Front, erroneously set up by its commander Colonel S. S. Kamenev to absorb a strong push from the Siberian Army (and in general deprived of manpower and other resources, as the Red command prioritized the Western Front and Ukraine over the winter of 1918–1919), had been forced to fall back before Khanzhin’s initially rampant Western Army (which had a 4:1 local advantage in men and artillery over the opposing 5th Red Army around Ufa). But in April 1919, new reserves (many of them from central Russian Bolshevik and trade union organizations) were poured into that sector, swelling a maneuvering group under the hugely talented Red commander M. V. Frunze that, as the spring floods receded in May, would push northward from Buzuluk to bite into the side of the White salient formed by Khanzhin’s overextended advance. Belebei was duly recaptured on 15 May, and on 7 June charismatic Komdiv V. I. Chapaev led the 25th Rifle Division in an audacious storming of the Belaia river to break into Ufa on 9 June 1919, where they found huge supplies of oil and grain. To the north, Gajda’s Northern Army was still advancing at this point, capturing Glazov in early June, but with its left flank now exposed by the sudden disintegration of the Western Army, it was forced to turn and flee, abandoning Glazov on 13 June, reaching Perm′ (their point of departure in March) by the end of June and surrendering the key Urals city of Ekaterinburg on 15 July 1919 to the vanguard of the 2nd Red Army, which had advanced 200 miles in less than four weeks.58 At this point, Trotsky and Glavkom Vācietis argued for calling a halt, but they were overruled by Lenin and, at the instigation of Eastern Front commander S. S. Kamenev, the pursuit of the Whites beyond the Urals was continued.59 Soon thereafter, in July 1919, Kamenev replaced Vācietis as Glavkom, and the latter was given three months in prison to reconsider his strategy.60
Over the coming months, Kolchak made several attempts to staunch the wounds inflicted upon the Russian Army, but to no avail. First Kappel′’s Volga Corps was thrown into the fray, followed by skeletal reserve formations from the rear; but both forces, utterly unprepared, melted away overnight, as thousands of White conscripts deserted to the oncoming Reds, many of them sporting their newly issued British uniforms and holding their newly acquired Remington rifles from the United States.61 Others went over to the partisan forces, which by the summer of 1919 had made much of the Siberian rear a no-go area for the Kolchak authorities beyond the narrow and fragile ribbon of the Trans-Siberian Railway (which was still policed by Czech and other Allied troops, though they were more motivated to protect it as their own escape route to the east than by any will to maintain Kolchak’s lifeline from the Pacific coast).
Having on 23 May 1919 added the portfolio of minister of war to his resumé, Colonel Lebedev next oversaw a complete restructuring of the remaining forces of Kolchak’s Russian Army into a White Eastern Front (consisting chiefly of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Armies) in June–July. Then in July, at Cheliabinsk, he attempted to set a trap for the Reds, but the pincers of his uncoordinated counterattack failed to meet, and the helter-skelter retreat was resumed.62 After this debacle—which was doubly embarrassing as it coincided with the Omsk Diplomatic Conference, at which Allied representatives gathered at Kolchak’s capital to consider how their governments might best aid the admiral—Lebedev was sacked as chief of staff and war minister in August, but this could not alter the verdict of the Allied delegates that Kolchak was now a lost cause. (For several of them, it was their first venture from Vladivostok into darkest White Siberia.) To confirm that conclusion, another effort to check the Red advance between the rivers Ishim and Tobol′, masterminded by Kolchak’s new commander in chief, General M. K. Diterikhs, was similarly botched in early September 1919, as key army groups (notably the Siberian Cossacks Corps of Ataman P. P. Ivanov-Rinov) failed to move on the field of battle quite as smoothly as they did on paper.63 Diterikhs’s services were then also briskly dispensed with, but Kolchak’s capital, Omsk, could not be saved by his pugnacious successor, General K. V. Sakharov, despite the latter’s fashioning of the optimistically monikered “Moscow Army Group” from the remnants of the White Eastern Front. Depleted forces of the Reds’ 27th Rifle Division, who had advance 150 miles in two days, entered and captured the city early on 14 November 1918, before half the defending garrison was even awake—or, rather, half of those garrison units that remained in Omsk, for by that point “the devil take the hindmost” had replaced “all for the Army” as the Whites’ slogan of the hour. Fleeing officers were particularly anxious to remove telltale signs of their status, in case they were apprehended by the Reds, with the result that Omsk’s streets “were so thickly littered with epaulettes as to suggest the idea of fallen leaves in autumn,” according to a British witness.64 Sakharov was then arrested by the exasperated General A. N. Pepeliaev on 9 December 1919 and replaced as commander by General Kappel′, but by then the remains of Pepeliaev’s own 1st Army had mutinied around Tomsk, while their former commander, General Gajda—who had been sacked in early July 1919 for having criticized Lebedev’s direction of the spring offensive—had placed himself at the head of a mutiny against Kolchak at Vladivostok (the Gajda putsch). Meanwhile, the remnants of the Southern Army and its Urals and Orenburg Cossack auxiliaries were by now entirely cut off from the main White force; some fled south toward the Caspian (and ultimately Persia), while others followed Dutov toward Semirech′e (and, ultimately, Chinese Turkestan).65