After several weeks wandering across the steppe, fighting off the Reds with their last ammunition, Kornilov ordered the Volunteers to attack Ekaterinodar, capital of the newly established North Caucasian Soviet Republic. On 23 March they had been joined by the Kuban Army, some 3,000 Cossacks led by General Pokrovsky, which had fled Ekaterinodar and somehow stumbled across the Don marchers in the nearby Circassian Hills. At a surreal summit meeting in the hillside village of Shendzhii, with all the formal protocol of the old regime, Kornilov and Pokrovsky united their armies for the recapture of the Kuban. On 10 April, Kornilov, acting as the overall commander, ordered the combined force of 7,000 men to begin the attack on the capital. They met fierce resistance from the Reds, some 18,000 troops in all. Kornilov soon realized that the siege was doomed to fail, threatening the destruction of the whole army, yet still refused to retreat. That, after all, was not in his nature. ‘If we do not take Ekaterinodar,’ he told Denikin on the 12th, ‘there is nothing left for me to do but to put a bullet through my head.’15
In the event, Kornilov did pay with his life for his suicidal venture. Early on the following morning a chance shell landed a direct hit on his farmhouse headquarters, burying him in the rubble.fn3 General Denikin, who immediately took over the command, tried to keep the news of his death from the men. Kornilov, to them, was not just a commander, but the very symbol of their cause, and it was bound to shatter their morale at this critical point in the battle. The great White hero was buried in a modest churchyard in the village of Elisavetinskaya. But the Reds later found the grave and carried off his rotting corpse to Ekaterinodar, where they paraded it through the town before burning it in the main square.
Ironically, Kornilov’s death was probably the salvation of the Whites. Had he lived, he would undoubtedly have ordered a final attack on Ekaterinodar, which was almost bound to end in complete defeat. The night before his death, he had refused to heed the advice of his generals to leave the farmhouse, which had been heavily shelled for several days, because it was ‘not worth the trouble; tomorrow we’ll begin the final assault’.16 Denikin, who had never been keen on the idea of the siege, ordered the army to retreat quickly to the north, leaving behind some 200 wounded to speed up their march. If the Reds had made a serious effort to pursue them, instead of dancing on Kornilov’s grave, they might have won the civil war there and then. But the Volunteers were allowed to flee back to the Don, from where they had launched their grim march. Four thousand set out and at least that number returned. More importantly, they came back with their fighting spirit strengthened.
*
The Don to which they returned had, in the ten weeks of their absence, been terrorized by the Bolsheviks. The Don Soviet Republic managed to achieve what Kaledin had always tried but failed to do — to turn the Cossacks against the Reds. After the Bolsheviks captured Rostov, the Red Army rulers instituted a reign of terror over the Don. Soviets were imposed on the Cossack settlements and foodstuffs were requisitioned from them at gunpoint. Punitive levies were extorted from the burzhoois and hundreds of hostages were shot at random. The Red Guards, retreating from the German advance towards Taganrog and licensed by the Bolsheviks to ‘loot the looters’, roamed through the stanitsas, or Cossack settlements, reaping bloody havoc. Churches were attacked, priests were executed. One priest had his nose and ears cut off, and his eyes pulled out, in front of the worshippers at an Easter service.
The result was a wave of Cossack uprisings — as much out of fear of what the Reds might do as anger at what they had already done — starting in the villages near Novocherkassk. These had always been the richest in the Don and were thus the most exposed to requisitioning and the terror. The Cossacks were driven to revolt by the image of the ‘Bolsheviks’ as the incarnation of all their worst fears and prejudices about ethnic outsiders and the Russian state. Each stanitsa had its own insurgent army, usually organized by the officers and equipped by the Cossack farms. During April these converged on the stanitsa of Zaplavskaya, near Novocherkassk, where there was a strong force of officers and men, to prepare for the liberation of the capital. By the end of April, they had 10,000 cavalrymen. With the Reds distracted by the German advance from Taganrog to Rostov at the start of May, the Cossacks retook Novocherkassk without serious resistance from the exhausted Reds. There they elected a Krug for the Salvation of the Don, led by General Krasnov, their new Ataman, who had led the expedition against Petrograd to restore Kerensky’s rule during the October Days.17
