ABSTRACT
While deep February cold and heavy snow suppressed activity in the Urals, East Front had begun regrouping for a spring offensive in 1919 on its 1,100-mile-long front. Third Army and Second Army were to advance eastward from Perm and Votkinskiy to Ekatrinburg and Fifth and First Armies from Ufa and Orsk to Chelyabinsk. Fourth Army, already facing more south and east on the Ural River between Uralsk and Orenburg was to push southeastward to the Caspian Sea and into Turkestan. On 5 March, Headquarters, East Front had created the Turkestan Army out of detachments stationed around Orenburg and joined it with Fourth Army to form the South Group. A week later, Kolchak’s drive toward Ufa, that in a few more days would draw Trotskiy away from the Eighth Party Congress, had forced Kamenev to cancel the East Front offensive. Kolchak by then had the Siberian Army on the move against Third and Second Armies and the Western Army against Fifth and First Armies. Kolchak had about 117,000 troops; Kamenev had 104,000; but East Front had substantial superiorities in artillery, 362 to 210 pieces, and in machine guns, 1,882 to 1,330.1
Fourth Army had undergone a change of command during the winter, a common enough occurrence in the Red Army, but in that instance a singularly remarkable one. Having learned in the fall that the Yaroslavl Military District was about to be abolished in a reorganization, M. V. Frunze, who had been the district commissar since August, and ex-general F. F. Novitskiy, who had been the military director, had volunteered for front service. In December 1918, Trotskiy had appointed Novitskiy to command Fourth Army and had assigned Frunze as his commissar. Since the command authority in the military districts was vested in the commissars and the military directors were advisors (which was as the Left Communists and the military opposition,with both of whom Frunze was associated, thought it ought also to be in the field commands), the appointments would have substantially altered Frunze’s and Novistkiy’s positions vis-à-vis each other. However, although Frunze and Novitskiy were available well before then, the formal command change at Fourth Army had not taken place until 31 January, and when
it did, Frunze had emerged as the army commander. How Frunze had advanced to near the top of the military hierarchy in a matter of a few weeks is a question very seldom raised and never forthrightly answered in Soviet accounts.A. S. Bubnov, Frunze’s first biographer, credited Novitskiy with having possessed the prescience to recognize Frunze’s outstanding – although not yet wholly undemonstrated – military talent and voluntarily relinquished the command to him. Novitskiy wrote that the appointment as commissar ‘did not conform to M. V. Frunze’s personal qualities’.2 The creation of South Group on 5 March advanced Frunze another step upward.
