The speed of the VA's advance dictated the events that followed. Ekaterinoslav fell at the end of June, and Kharkov fell in mid-July. The Whites were making a general advance on Moscow from three directions - the VA northward through Kharkov and Kursk, General Siderin's Don Army via Voronezh, and Baron Wrangel's Caucasian Army up the Volga from Tsaritsyn. The main aim was to take Moscow, but the White generals could not agree to make any one army the main effort and persisted in dispersing across the countryside as they advanced. By the middle of October the VA would be in Orel, only 400 kilometers from Moscow, but the dissipation of their strength, poor coordination between armies and the unappealing political program they offered (Denikin, for example, always patronizingly referred to the Ukrainians as "Little Russians" and made no mistake that he wanted to bring the Ukraine back under Russian domination) made the White cause a doomed one. Makhno, now a wanted man, went to Alexandrovsk and set about raising a new army. In a few weeks he had assembled a new force of volunteers drawn from other partisan bands and peasants fleeing the White advance westward and northward across the Ukraine. He tried to hold against the Volunteer Army's advance, which had detached an army corps of 12 to 15 regiments against him, at the Kichkass bridge across the Dnieper River near Alexandrovsk. He was forced to retreat from that position and withdrew in the direction of Elisavetgrad with a large number of refugee peasants. This move brought him into an area under the control of Grigoriev, the same man who had driven the French and Greeks out of the Ukraine. Grigoriev had originally joined Petliura in 1918 to oppose Hetman Skoropadsky's government, then flipped his loyalty to the Reds in February 1919, then broken from them to strike out as an independent warlord in May. Makhno, who had refused Grigoriev's overtures for an alliance between them earlier in the year, arranged a political meeting for 27 July at Sentovo, a village near Alexandriya. Over 20,000 people attended, including large parts of Gregoriev's and Makhno's forces. Grigoriev was the first to speak and declared that the Bolsheviks should be driven out of the Ukraine, even to the extent of allying themselves with the Whites. When he was finished, Makhno personally shot him in front of the crowd and assumed command of Grigoriev's troops. Makhno's forces were further increased at the end of July when the Red Army units that had been left behind in the Crimea mutinied and joined the RIA en masse. Makhno reorganized his troops, now over 15,000 strong, into four infantry brigades, four cavalry brigades, an artillery regiment and a machine gun regiment. The infantry and machine gun units were carried on tatchankas and could travel just as fast as the cavalry. He turned around and began to fight the VA units in the Western Ukraine, as well as some Red troops moving north from Odessa (after Kharkov fell in mid-July, the Reds had evacuated from the rest of the Ukraine almost without a fight), but was slowly pushed back by the superior numbers of the Whites. At this time Makhno's sole source of ammunition, weapons and remounts was the enemy himself, and he often launched attacks with the objective of capturing enough material to fight his next battle. By mid-September 1919 Makhno's army was in the general area of Uman, where they met up with the reorganized units of Petliura's troops, who had been using Galicia as a base since the Red invasion in February. Petliura had declared his opposition to the Whites, but Makhno knew that this did not make him a friend. The two sides declared a pact of neutrality, from Makhno's perspective, would gain him some time to reorganize and get some of his 8,000 wounded into hospital before the next betrayal. Sure enough, within two weeks Makhno learned that the Petliurists were negotiating secretly with the Whites to allow them to surround and destroy his army. On 24 September, four regiments of White infantry appeared to the west of the RIA, neatly trapping it on all sides. They could only have gotten there by permission of the Petliurists. Makhno realized that both sides were at the end of their respective ropes. The Volunteer Army forces were weak because they were operating hundreds of kilometers from their bases in the Don region, and the RIA had simply run out of retreating room. He turned his entire army around and marched it straight east into the midst of the White forces. In the early morning of 25 September, he engaged them at the village of Peregonovka. By 0900 the main body of the Makhnovists, low on ammunition and outnumbered, were being forced back into the village when Makhno appeared on the Whites' flank with his personal guard of 200 cavalrymen. The First Officers' Regiment of Simferopol (so called because it was made up entirely of former officers in the Tsarist army), taken in the rear by Makhno's surprise move, panicked. As so often happened during battles in the Russian Civil War, the panic spread to other VA regiments and soon the whole corps was in retreat. Hundreds of troops were cut down in the pursuit phase of the battle: Makhno had bulled his way through another impossible situation. More Russian Civil War in the Ukraine Introduction The Civil War Begins The Whites Advance The Whites Retreat Betrayal An Anarchist Army? Armies of the Russian Civil War Summons (poem) Back to Cry Havoc #32 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com