Foundations of Russian Military Flight, 1885-1925 by James K. Libbey

Author:James K. Libbey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2019-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

MAP 5. NORTH RUSSIA DURING THE CIVIL WAR

MAP 6. FROM OMSK, SIBERIA, TO UFA DURING THE CIVIL WAR

MAP 7. CRIMEA DURING THE CIVIL WAR

As the Soviet government began to address the obvious deficiencies in military aviation and at the same time fought the White Volunteer Army in Southeast Russia, it confronted another equally troublesome problem—the Ukraine. The Ukraine was not a White area that wanted to contest and compete with the Bolsheviks for control over Russia. Rather, the jurisdiction’s thirty-two million persons, who spoke an eastern Slavic dialect different from the Russian language, wanted separation. What made the situation especially interesting was that in urban areas such as Kiev, a substantial minority of Russians often constituted a majority of the population. And Kiev, of course, was Russia’s first capital city. Ukrainian peasants dominated rural sections, which helps to explain why Socialist Revolutionaries played such a prominent role in the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, which declared the Ukraine an independent country in January 1918. History and the northern need for Ukrainian grain convinced the Bolsheviks that Russia would not be whole without the Ukraine. The result was that Red Guards and the First Revolutionary Army moved into the rebellious territory by armored trains.21

The train carrying the First Revolutionary Army rode into southern Ukraine under the leadership of Aleksandr V. Polupanov. The force would have the assistance of a remnant of the Sixth Corps Aviation Squadron under the command of its former captain, Lev K. Grinshteii, a graduate of the Sevastopol’ Aviation School. Grinshteii was born to a humble family and raised in the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa. In February Grinshteii’s squadron did some scouting for the First Revolutionary Army in its successful battle against Rada troops near the town of Zhmerinka, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) south of Vinnitsa. Victory there prompted Mikhail A. Murav’ev, who commanded the Red Guards that took and occupied Kiev, to appoint Grinshteii as his commissar of aviation operations. Rada ministers, however, quickly undermined the Soviet victory. The ministers fled from Kiev to the west and negotiated a separate peace with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. Three weeks after the Red Guards conquered Kiev, German troops drove the Bolsheviks out of the city and, aided by Austrian soldiers, soon seized all of the Ukraine. Not long after that, the puppet (and German-friendly) regime of General Skoropadsky replaced the Rada.22

Thanks to the success of Rada ministers in hammering out a peace agreement with Central Powers, the occupation of the Ukraine began before the Germans approved it on March 22, 1918. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty, ratified six days earlier by the special Fourth Congress of Soviets, made Soviet Russia’s loss of the Ukraine official. At the end of the same month, Czech-Slovak leader Tomáš G. Masaryk secured an agreement with Lenin’s Soviet government that permitted Czech and Slovak soldiers who had primarily been prisoners of war (POWs) to leave Soviet Russia at Vladivostok via the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Masaryk and important colleagues such as Eduard Beneš wanted the soldiers in

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