The Perekop Isthmus was probably the most joyless place in Russia’s south. It was difficult to breathe there in the summer heat because of fumes from the dead waters of the Sivash, lagoons often referred to as the Putrid Sea. A wind would come up from time to time, rolling dried-out seaweed along salt-splotched soil but bringing no feeling of freshness. The wind became an utter disaster in the winter. It drove stinging drifting snow over an uninhabited icy expanse where there were not even any shrubs to stop it. The wind carried away all hope of warming up. It crept behind the lapels of army overcoats and froze fingers to gun barrels, extinguished campfires made from cart debris and strewed Perekop’s lunar landscape with ash. It is not surprising that territory of this sort made a most unfavorable impression on General Larionov. And so he decided not to defend it.
After familiarizing himself with the history of the defense of Northern Crimea, the military commander noticed that a common mistake of defenders each time was their absolute determination to stand firm on the Perekop rampart. Meanwhile, in light of the climatic conditions already described, simply being on the Perekop Isthmus sapped a huge amount of strength, resources, and morale because there is nothing more ruinous for an army than sitting in trenches in the bitter cold. The road to Crimea was opened after defenders were thrown from the Perekop ramparts. The resourceful general acted differently so as not to repeat his predecessors’ mistakes. He decided to grant his adversary this expanse drifted with snow and deprived of any form of habitation. They did not wait for the Reds on the Perekop Peninsula; only a small outpost was left there and its role boiled down to informing the main forces of an attack. They waited for the Reds at the exit from the isthmus.
The Red Army lived up to the general’s expectations. Their cavalry, reinforced by the infantry, was drawn onto the isthmus immediately after the White Army’s troops abandoned it. The Red Army soldiers began feeling anxious at sunset, after walking along the icy desert the entire day and not encountering an enemy with which to do serious battle. Advancing so late at night seemed dangerous to them. They thought they were choosing the lesser evil by deciding to spend the night on the frozen steppe.
Many researchers consider that as early as January 1920 the commander of Red troops in the Crimean zone was Dmitry Zhloba (1887–1938), the son of a peasant and a graduate of the Moscow Aviation School (1917). There is an opposing opinion, too, according to which, by January 1920, Dmitry Zhloba was still continuing his training because of his failure to complete his flight hours under the school’s program.
Everyone familiar with this aviator’s story, of course, also knows of the vexed relations that developed between him and the other students at the aviation school. On the whole, they were far younger than Zhloba and indulged themselves in mocking the peculiarities of his appearance (the nearly complete absence of a forehead plus the presence of two extra upper teeth) and kept him away from the flying machines however they could. Bullied by his younger comrades, the aviation school pupil only had the opportunity to fly at night, thus restricting his qualification. Night flights were not scored as flying time for Zhloba. As a result, it was recommended he fly the required number of hours again—now in the daytime—something he undertook with varying success until 1920. In the end, he was appointed commander of the First Cavalry Corps and ceased his dangerous experiments in aerial expanses.
Zhloba the cavalryman turned out to be more fortunate than Zhloba the aviator. He was able to exert his influence over the personnel of his corps, particularly the horses. The animals unquestioningly obeyed the peasant’s son’s booming voice, which was intolerable at close range, and rushed to attack at his first shout. As he charged to attack the enemy with his unsheathed saber, Dmitry Zhloba imagined that it was his former fellow pupils from the Moscow Aviation School before him. The frenzy he displayed in battle did not just make an impression on the adversary; after a certain point in time, it even began causing apprehension within the corps subordinate to him.
Nobody objected when Zhloba announced they would spend the night on Perekop. Even if another, more acceptable plan had existed, it is unlikely that anyone would have dared contradict the commander. There was no such plan, though, and there could not have been. Everything that happened with Zhloba’s troops after that hour was helping to realize General Larionov’s strategy. The Red forces spent the night under a chilly Perekop sky. And then another night. Their overwhelming numerical superiority went untapped. Without the opportunity to fully deploy their battle formations, they could not resolve to attack the Whites first. The longed-for battle seemed to have evaded Dmitry Zhloba.
After spending a third night on Perekop, half the corps’ personnel were sick and the aviation school alumnus realized he risked losing his troops without a battle. He decided to act. At dawn on the fourth day, the Reds moved toward the exit from the Perekop Isthmus and came under brutal fire to their flank, from the Yushun side. Their attack ended with a messy escape and the capture of prisoners. It should be noted that prisoners were the primary source of replenishment troops for the White Army. Those taken prisoner were placed on active duty again and began moving in the exact opposite direction. They fought with just the same inflexibility as before captivity. Such was this war.
Dmitry Zhloba left in order to return. After gathering his forces, he once again attempted to burst into Crimea but—just like the first time—did not succeed in moving further than Perekop. The White general had built lines of defense that seemed insurmountable. Larionov, however, knew that they, too, were vulnerable. According to the Russian battle captain, General Winter had rendered an invaluable natural service by freezing the Red attack but was now threatening to switch to the enemy side. The winter of 1920 was so harsh that something unexpected happened. The Sivash, which is as briny as a barrel of salted cucumbers, began to freeze. On the days when Dmitry Zhloba was stubbornly hitting at the isthmus’s stopped-up exit, General Larionov was sending men to the Sivash to monitor the formation of ice.
Initially, thin glass-like layers covered the gulf’s water in the mornings. The general grew anxious when it stopped thawing under the daytime sun. Only a few days later, the ice was so solid it could hold a lightly armed infantryman. The general began sending loaded carts to the Sivash to test the firmness of the ice at night, so as not to give away the object of his apprehensions. The general’s Thermopylae plan would crumble in an instant if the ice were to freeze a little more firmly, because the infantry and cavalry and all the Reds’ available heavy weaponry could cross over the Sivash’s ice. In fact, it appeared to have been frozen for several days but Dmitry Zhloba, distracted by yet another storm of the Perekop Isthmus, was paying no attention whatsoever.
The panic that began mounting in Crimea after the Reds’ occupation of the isthmus gradually subsided. Institutions unpacked the paperwork they had hastily tossed into plywood crates. Everything was prepared for evacuation in those days. Thousands of refugees from central Russia, who had broken free of the Bolsheviks and were deathly afraid of landing back there, were planning to evacuate with the army. ‘Deathly’ is what they said, and they were not far from the truth. Only a very few of those who were not able to join the evacuation to Constantinople survived.