Like a stretched rubber band that has been cut, the Whites began a headlong retreat to the east. Makhno's forces moved ahead against almost no resistance, so that within ten days the advance guard of the RIA was nearing Mariupol. As stated earlier, by mid-October the VA had reached Orel, but this was to prove the high-water mark of the White offensive. Their forces were too thinly spread out and exhausted to move further, and the Reds, having the advantage of interior lines, were gathering strength for a counterattack. Makhno's strike towards their undefended base area threatened the whole campaign. The best regiments of Don Cossack cavalry bolted southwards to protect their homelands, followed by the rest of the VA. Throughout October and November, as both the VA and Makhnovists concentrated in the eastern Ukraine, the struggle escalated and important towns changed hands on a daily basis. Towards the end of November the Caucasian regiments in the VA, especially the cavalry units from Chechnya, deserted the VA and went home, forcing Denikin to suspend the offensive. As 1919 drew to a close and winter approached, the tempo of operations did not slacken for the Makhnovists. A country-wide epidemic of typhus had placed half the army on the sick list, and the Red Army's return to the Ukraine on the heels of the retreating Whites did not bode well. At the end of December, the advance elements of the 14th Army made contact with the main body of the RIA at Alexandrovsk. The two forces struck another formal alliance but it lasted only one week before the staff of the 14th Army, at the direction of Trotsky, issued orders for Makhno's troops to march to the Polish frontier. Superficially, this made sense as Poland was receiving larger and larger amounts of support from the French and British who had given up on the VA as a lost cause. However, it is more likely that Trotsky wanted Makhno's army out of the way in order to cut it off from its main sources of recruits, supplies, and political legitimacy - that is, the peasants of the southern Ukraine - and so bring this region solidly under Red control. Makhno refused to obey, and would have done so even if he and half his army were not in hospital due to disease. Consequently, the Makhnovists were declared counter-revolutionaries and outlaws in January 1920. This began a six-month period of nomadic wanderings for the RIA, as they shuttled back and forth across the Ukraine dodging the Red Army. As when fighting the Whites, the superior mobility of the Makhnovists saved them again and again as they fought a series of running engagements with several Red divisions sent to surround and eliminate them. Meanwhile, the VA had been pushed further back into the Don and Kuban regions. Soon it was confined to the area around Novorissysk, which was evacuated at the end of March 1920. The troops were transferred to the Crimea and Baron Wrangel received command of all White forces in southern Russia as General Denikin sailed into exile. Wrangel improved the defences across the Perekop Isthmus, the only way into the Crimea, into a strong triple belt of fieldworks. The situation changed again with the outbreak of the Russo-Polish War. On 24 April 1920, Petliura signed a treaty with the Polish government granting that country title to eastern Galicia and Volhynia in exchange for military support in fighting the Bolsheviks. Four Polish field armies invaded the Ukraine and Kiev fell on 7 May. The Bolshevik counterattack began two weeks later. Petliura's forces melted away and the Polish had to abandon Kiev on 10 June. (Petliura left the Ukraine after this and was assassinated in Paris in 1926.) On 17 July the Red armies crossed into Poland and advanced on Warsaw. Five weeks later, after the climactic battle called "the Miracle on the Vistula", the Reds were forced back out of Poland and peace talks began. Wrangel saw a chance to expand out of the Crimea while the majority of the Red armies were busy in Poland. on 6 June he pushed out into the Tauride region, securing badly-needed food and peasant conscripts, and pushed eastward hoping to re-enter Don Cossack territory and begin the revolt anew. His offensive did not make much headway - he had only about 35,000 troops at his disposal and many of them deserted the first chance they got. He also no longer had logistical support from the British, still less the detachments of British tanks and aircraft that have allowed the Whites to advance so far the previous summer. By October the Bolsheviks had concluded a peace treaty with Poland and their armies were again free to use against Wrangel's breakout. Trotsky realized that the battered Red Army could not do the job alone and agreed to Makhno's overtures to suspend hostilities between them in order to defeat the Whites once and for all. He concluded another formal alliance with Makhno and even sweetened the pot by declaring this as the first step toward and individual amnesty of Anarchists and a legalization of the Anarchist movement as a whole. On 20 October 130,000 Red troops, including about 15,000 Makhnovists, advanced against Wrangel. Within two weeks had that forced them back into the fortified lines in the Perekop Isthmus. While the Red Army troops engaged the Whites frontally, several Makhnovist cavalry regiments and the RIA machine gun regiment outflanked the fortifications by crossing the frozen Sivash Strait thirty kilometers to the west of the Isthmus. This risky operation resulted in many casualties - in fact, the Makhnovists took most of the losses in this campaign - but it made the Whites break and run. For the next three weeks a fleet of 126 French, British, and White ships ferried over 150,000 refugees from Sevastopol into exile in Constantinople. Wrangel was one of the last to be evacuated, on 14 November. 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