Denikin’s now-converging thrusts toward Moscow seemed all the more inexorable because they coincided with another White advance, by the North-West Army on Petrograd—precisely the sort of combined and synchronous operations that had eluded the AFSR and Kolchak’s Russian Army six months earlier. The North-West Army was based around the Pskov Volunteer Corps, an officer-heavy detachment of perhaps 6,000 men that had, over the winter of 1918–1919, found itself in the rather embarrassing situation of fighting the Reds while being subordinated to the nationalist Estonian Army of General Johan Laidoner. Even more embarrassingly, it was largely armed and uniformed by the Germans. By May–June 1919, however, White forces in the Baltic theater had freed themselves from Estonian control and came under the command of General N. N. Iudenich, one of Russia’s most successful commanders of the world war, who had been confirmed as commander of the North-West Front on 5 June 1919 by Admiral Kolchak.74 An initial move against Petrograd, in May–June 1919, however, achieved little success, despite the arrival of Iudenich during its prosecution; this failure was caused chiefly by the grave distractions being created in the rear of the North-West Front by White units that were nominally subordinate to its command, notably the rogue Western Volunteer Army, which had been created by the unpredictable General P. R. Bermondt-Avalov, who preferred to ally with pro-German forces in attacking Riga (during the Landeswehr War) than risk his forces in an attack on Petrograd. Undeterred, however, Iudenich gathered a force of some 50,000 men (although only 18,500 were in the active army), one in ten of whom were officers (including 53 generals). Taking advantage of revolts in the rear of opposing Red forces (notably the uprising at the fortress of Krasnaia Gorka) and distractions provided by Royal Navy operations in the Baltic and even the Gulf of Finland,75 Iudenich was thus able to launch a strategic offensive on 12 October 1919, capturing Luga (16 October 1919), thereby cutting Red communications to Pskov (which Estonian forces, now commanded by the talented General Jānis Balodis, entered on 20 October), and even investing the Petrograd palace suburbs of Gatchina (16 October 1919) and Tsarskoe Selo (20 October 1919), which were only 25 and 12 miles respectively from Nevskii Prospekt and the beckoning Winter Palace itself. The commanders of the armies of both Kolchak and Denikin imagined at various points that they could hear the tolling of the Kremlin bells in Moscow, but Iudenich’s men really could see the autumn sun glinting off the great golden dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in central Petrograd, whose defenses had been depleted by the dispatch to other fronts of many of its Bolshevized workers and sailors.76
With the arrival of War Commissar Trotsky’s train in the revolutionary citadel of Petrograd on 17 October 1919, however, the Whites’ fortunes changed forever. In energetic collaboration with Colonel V. M. Gittis (commander of the Western Front) and komandarmy Colonel S. D. Kharlamov and General N. D. Nadezhnyi—all of them the sort of tough and experienced “military specialists” (voenspetsy) that Trotsky had long favored—a hurriedly reinforced 7th Red Army (with a strength of 40,000 men, 453 field guns, 708 machine guns, 6 armored trains, and 23 aircraft) was able to halt the advance of the North-West Army before it severed the vital artery of the Moscow–Petrograd railway. Soviet forces then initiated an immediate counteroffensive, on 21 October 1919, that rapidly overwhelmed their opponents, who were inferior in numbers and arms. As Iudenich’s shattered forces limped back across the Estonian border, they were disarmed and interned by their unwelcoming hosts.77 This final development coincided with the arrangement of a Soviet–Estonian cease-fire (5 December 1919) and formal armistice on 31 December 1919 (there had actually been no fighting to speak of between the two sides for six months), which led swiftly to the subsequent Treaty of Tartu (2 February 1920), bringing an end to the civil-war hostilities between the two countries and sealing the independence of Estonia. That settlement was, in turn, succeeded by the equally quite uncontentious treaties of the RSFSR with Lithuania (Treaty of Moscow, 12 July 1920), Latvia (Treaty of Riga, 11 August 1920), and Finland (Treaty of Tartu, 14 October 1920), which brought to a close the civil wars and wars of independence in the northwest.78
Iudenich’s efforts might have borne richer fruit had Petrograd been seriously and simultaneously threatened from the north in 1919. But although Allied forces and their Russian and Karelian allies were advancing down the Murmansk–Petrograd railway to Medvezhia Gora (Medvezh′egorsk), on the northern shores of Lake Onega, and then on toward Petrozavodsk by late May 1919; although a Finnish unit had at the same time crossed the border and was closing on the same city by June; and although (also in May–June) British marines (with a small fleet of well-armed monitors and gunboats) undertook offensives up the rivers Vaga and Northern Dvina toward Kotlas, as other interventionist forces (including U.S. detachments) sortied down the railway from Arkhangel′sk toward Vologda, none of this seriously threatened Petrograd or offered succor to Iudenich.79 Indeed, it was not intended to do so. The Finns (in their so-called Aunus Expedition, one of several campaigns known collectively as the Kinship Wars) were seeking to detach southern (Olonets) Karelia from Soviet Russia and knew that such an outcome would hardly be countenanced by the Whites, while the British offensives and the 8,000-strong North Russian Relief force that arrived in May–June 1919 were intended only to push the Bolsheviks back, so as to facilitate the complete withdraw of Allied forces. That withdrawal had been agreed upon in April 1919, got under way in June of that year, and was completed with the evacuation of Arkhangel′sk (26–27 September 1919) and Murmansk (12 October 1919).80
The last chapter of the northern saga of the civil wars closed with the evacuations of Arkhangel′sk and Murmansk by their last, desperate White defenders in early 1920, but it had always been the strangest of the theaters of struggle. It boasted by far the greatest concentration of Allied troops of the intervention (if one discounts the self-serving Japanese presence in the Far East), and White forces in the north were blessed with a capable and experienced commander, General E. K. Miller; yet in this sparsely populated polar wilderness, where many potential peasant conscripts were Karelians and shied away from the Russian incomers (or even sought union with Finland), Miller was all too often the epitome of the general without troops. Although the Whites’ Northern Army would claim a complement of more than 50,000 in late 1919 (that is, after the Allies had departed and the situation was rendered entirely hopeless), Miller’s force rarely mustered more than 5,000–10,000 volunteers, as men were rounded up and pressed into service, received their rations and uniforms, and then routinely disappeared back into the taiga. This necessitated such local innovations as the Slavo-British Legion, which is now chiefly remembered for the wrong reason: as the only unit of the civil wars in which Russian conscripts mutinied against and then killed four of their British officers.81
Had Petrograd fallen to the North-West Army or (more unlikely) the Northern Army, the strategic and morale-boosting effect upon the AFSR would have been incalculable. As it was, however, Trotsky’s successful defense of the Red citadel crushed White dreams.
What proved to be the turning point for the Reds on the Southern Front against Denikin came when the new Red main commander, Glavkom S. S. Kamenev, and Trotsky put together a new striking group, featuring strong contingents of the Red veterans of the Latvian and Estonian Riflemen, which drove into the left flank of the Volunteer Army, almost cutting off the Kornilovtsy and facilitating the Reds’ reoccupation of Orel on 20 October 1919, thereby denying White forces the opportunity of re-equipping at Tula. At the same time, the Volunteers were hit on the opposite flank by an impressive raid launched by a new Red phenomenon: S. M. Budennyi’s 1st Cavalry Corps (from 19 November 1919, the 1st Cavalry Army, or Konarmiia), the result of Trotsky’s summons of six weeks earlier, “Proletarians, to Horse!”82 This unexpected transformation of “Communists into cavalrymen,” as Trotsky put it (although, in truth, the cavalrymen themselves were overwhelmingly of Cossack, not proletarian, origin), forced General Shkuro to surrender the key city of Voronezh to Budennyi on 24 October 1919, effectively severing the Volunteers’ communications with the Don Army to their east and with their main fortified rear on the Don. When the Konarmiia then pushed on to capture the railway junction at Kastornoe (on the Voronezh–Kursk line), disaster loomed for the Whites—and loomed larger when Khar′kov fell as early as 11 December 1919. Until this point, the Volunteers’ 150-mile withdrawal had been relatively orderly, but beyond Khar′kov, with the railway lines crammed with typhus-ridden civilian refugees and military casualties, and a huge swathe of rear territory and key towns and railway junctions occupied by Makhno’s Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine, a further, headlong, 300-mile flight began, which by the first week of 1920 saw the remains of the force that just two months earlier had been so close to capturing Moscow streaming across the frozen river Don and once more into the North Caucasus.83