Dutov Revolt

a counterrevolutionary uprising raised by Colonel A. I. Dutov, the ataman of the Orenburg Cossack Host and head of the military government, in the southern Urals from November 1917 to April 1918.

On Nov. 1 (14), 1917, Dutov issued an order declaring war on Soviet power. On the night of November 15 (28), White Cossacks arrested the members of the Orenburg Soviet, broke up the Military Revolutionary Committee, and announced a mobilization, of the cossacks. By January 1918, the rebels, numbering about 7,000 men and supported by Bashkir and Kazakh bourgeois nationalists, had captured Orenburg, Troitsk, and Verkhneural’sk and broken rail communications between the center of the Soviet republic, Siberia, and Middle Asia.

Leadership of military action against the Dutov revolt was entrusted to P. A. Kobozev, the commissar extraordinary of Orenburg Province and Turgai Oblast. The combined Northern Flying Detachment of Revolutionary Soldiers of the 17th Siberian Regiment and of Baltic Sailors, under the command of Warrant Officer S. D. Pavlov, was transferred from Petrograd to the southern Urals. The Red Guard detachments of Samara (V. K. Bliukher), Ekaterinburg (P. Z. Ermakov), Perm’ (A. L. Borchaninov), Ufa, and other cities of the Urals were sent against the insurrectionists. The cossack poor rose up in opposition to the Dutov revolt. On Jan. 16 (29), 1918, the Dutov rebels suffered a serious defeat near Kargala, and on January 18 (31), revolutionary detachments, aided by rebelling workers, liberated Orenburg. The insurrectionists fled to Verkhneural’sk, where Dutov began a new mobilizaion of cossacks. White Cossacks again threatened Orenburg in February.

In March-April 1918, Soviet detachments under the command of Bliukher unleashed an offensive and crushed the Dutov rebels, who fled to the Turgai steppes. The revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, which began at the end of May, stirred the forces of counterrevolution in the southern Urals into action. Dutov captured Orenburg for a second time on July 3, 1918. In November 1918 his troops became part of the army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. After the defeat of Kolchak’s White Guard forces at the end of 1919, the remnants of Dutov’s forces fled to Semirech’e and from there to China (Sinkiang).