Formation On 17 November 1919, by the orders of People's Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs
Leon Trotsky, the 1st Cavalry Army was formed. The Army was created on the basis of
Semyon Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Corps with its three divisions (the 4th, 6th, and 11th) remaining under his command. Essential to the ascent of Budyonny's unit and command to that of an army was the patronship of Commissar of Nationalities
Joseph Stalin. The two met during
battles at Tsaritsyn in 1918 along with Commander
Kliment Voroshilov, the three of them forming a long-lasting alliance and Stalin using his position as a member of the Red Army Southern Front to advance Budyonny's career. In December, Stalin brought in Voroshilov and Shchadenko, another Tsaritsyn veteran, to chair the 1st Cavalry Army's revolutionary military council along with Budyonny.
Southern Front: the destruction of the AFSR (1919–1920) It was December 1919, and the 1st Cavalry Army was on the pursuit, chasing down an enemy now reduced to a fighting retreat all the way from
Kastornoye south to the
Azov Sea. Earlier in 1919, the
Armed Forces of South Russia had been making progress on their
march north on Moscow however, by October this was no longer the case. The advance, over extended and slowed down by attacks on supply lines by
Makhno's Red-aligned anarchist partisans, had stalled and now the Red Army was primed for a counter-offensive. In October the Cavalry Army, still in its previous form as a cavalry corps, attacked along the eastern flank of the AFSR's line with the support of the
8th Army on a trajectory for
Voronezh, the railway junction at Kastornoye, and ultimately
Kursk. Opposing them was the depleted 1st Corps made up of cavalry that stood between the 1st Cavalry Corps and the sweeping of the front east. For the first time in massed battle was
White cavalry bested by their
Red counterparts. The red cavalry took Voronezh on 24th and then, through a blizzard, took Kastornoye on 15th, catching the 1st Corps between the anvil of the infantry on its left and on its right the hammer of the Red cavalry. The AFSR's 1st Corp had no choice but to retreat in fighting order to Kursk. After taking Kursk on 17 November, the now christened 1st Cavalry Army continued pushing south through
Kharkov, taking
Taganrog on 6 January and then
Rostov two days later. The overwhelming advance into
Novocherkassk would have continued if not for the thaw. The melting snow had made the
Don marshlands impassable, where it would not freeze again until 15th. Having no bridging equipment, Budyonny's men would take to burning down Rostov's hospital in the meantime, presumably with wounded White officers inside. On 17 January Budyonny was ordered by his superior, Caucasian Front Commander-in-chief
Vasily Shorin, to lead his men in a head-on attack across the river against the
Volunteer Corps in
Bataysk. Budyonny had instead suggested taking his 9,000 sabres and 5,000 bayonets further east to cross, flanking and then striking the Volunteers from the rear but Shorin refused. The assault, even with the support of the 8th Army, failed as did the second attempt the next day. When ordered to do so a third time, Budyonny had lost his patience citing the local bogs as unacceptable for an army on horseback. Shorin responded by blaming Budyonny with the 8th Army siding with Shorin, accusing Budyonny's men of 'manifesting an extreme lack of combat resilience'. This gave the Whites the time they desperately needed to recuperate. Shorin insisted on more direct attacks on 20th and 21st with the Red Army High Command (Stavka) insisting that this would be a 'knowingly impossible offensive' and so intervened on 24th. Budyonny now got his way, crossing further east and seeing success on 28 January where they put White Cavalry to flight and captured a dozen field guns and thirty machine guns. On the next day however
Mamontov's Don Cossacks struck back, besting the Cavalry Army's 11th Division. This led to a new series of spats amongst the Red commands with Budyonny blaming his once superior now turned cavalry rival,
Dumenko for charging ahead without the support of the Cavalry Army with the backing of his commissar, Voroshilov. Budyonny more and more insisted that the Red cavalry should be amassed under his command, and with his souring relations with Shorin,
Sergey Kamenev and the Stavka sided with him, bringing in
Mikhail Tukachevsky as the new front commander. At this point operations ceased so that Tukachevsky could prepare for the Front's next major attack: a strike force made up of the 9th, 10th, and 1st Cavalry Armies would deal a lethal blow to the AFSR at the point of least resistance, the point at which the White Volunteer Corps and
Don Army met. They would attack from the River Maynch towards the key junction of Tikhoretskaya splitting and threatening the rear of each enemy army. Here the 1st Cavalry would be key, playing 'the role of a surgical knife, which was to forever separate the
Kuban and
Don counterrevolutions from each other'. The IV Don Cavalry Corps, now the last line of defence against the severing of the AFSR, were to counter the Red's now growing cavalry horde. On 17 February, they attacked '[breaking] up the cavalry charge of the Reds and [began] to chase them' but reinforcing divisions did not make it to the battle in time or never showed up at all and they had to fall back, allowing the 1st Cavalry to advance. Now split from their Cossack allies in the east, the Volunteers had no choice but to retreat to
Novorossiysk where they would evacuate by boat to the
Crimea on 26 March 1920; there the AFSR would be disbanded and its remnants formed into
Wrangel's Russian Army.
South-Western Front: the war against Poland (1920) The Polish-Soviet War had started earlier in February 1919, at that point not being much more notable than gunfights between irregulars but by May 1920, the situation had changed severely. A Polish offensive stretching eastwards had reached the banks of the
Dnieper and taken
Kyiv on 7th, sweeping aside Red troops with minimal losses. Now with the southern counterrevolution licking its wounds, the west could be reinforced and so to the South-Western Front was sent the 1st Cavalry Army in April 1920. On 27 May the Cavalry Army, now a force of 16,700 sabres with a great many
tachankas, attacked the Polish Sixth Army's 13th Division in the direction of
Zhitomir, south-west of Kyiv, in an attempt to outflank the Kyiv line. No progress was made however with its 4th Division facing defeat at the
Battle of Volodarka (29–31 May) which prompted the 3rd Don Cossack Cavalry Brigade to defect to the Poles; the 6th Division would also lose a battle, south of
Volodarka, at
Uman on 31st. After these failures however, Budyonny got his breakthrough. On 5 June, the Sixth was pushed aside at Samhorodok with the 1st Cavalry reaching Zhitomir two days later, although momentarily being pushed back to
Kozystyn by the Polish Cavalry Division; blinded by the setting sun, the Division's vastly inferior numbers were obscured to Budyonny's men. The
Polish Army, having now reached the pre-Kyiv offensive line, stopped their retreat to face the enemy, but Budyonny would break through their lines again on 26 June, forcing a further retreat to the
River Horyn in central
Volhynia. The reinforced Second Army would attack the 1st Cavalry on 2 July, but the outcome was Budyonny's capture of
Riwne from the
3rd Legion Division. The Reds would be pushed out of Riwne by the Second Army but simply retook it on 11th when the Second had abandoned it in order to regroup. The 1st Cavalry Army, now having entered
Galicia, began to advance on Lviv with the 14th Army on 25 July. Once Budyonny had reached
Dubno however, they met resistance from the Polish 18th Infantry Division which, along with the Second and Sixth Armies and the 1st Cavalry Division, forced the Cavalry Army back at
Brody (29 July–2 August). After a pause of action, the Cavalry Army would take Brody on 13th, continuing the thrust to
Lviv. Now lacking the support of the defeated 12th Army, the 1st Cavalry Army reached the outskirts of Lviv on 16 August. The city was held by both regular and volunteer troops including the 54th, 238th, 239th, and 240th Volunteer Infantry Regiments as well as the 2nd Cavalry Division. In one battle north of the city on 17th, a volunteer youth battalion and the 1st Battalion of the 54th would fight to the man against the 6th Cavalry Division. With little progress being made and Tukhachevsky's Western Front now in full retreat, Budyonny gave the order to abandon the siege. On 25 August, the now worn 1st Cavalry Army went north in an advance towards
Lublin. With the Red Army now in flight on both fronts, there was little reason for this besides a petty attempt by Kamenev to make up for his previous lack of stern authority and the Tsaritsyn men now feeling a greater obligation to follow orders. With Polish supremacy in the north, parts of the Fifth Army were now free to join the Third Army in hunting the much maligned 1st Cavalry Army. The Third Army, by chance, trapped the Cavalry Army in front of the walls of
Zamosc on its march to Lublin, forcing it into battle with its 2nd Legion and 10th Divisions and the Sixth Army's 1st Cavalry and 13th Divisions from 29th–30 August.
Southern Front: the destruction of Wrangel's Russian Army and beyond (1920–1923) Once the 1st Cavalry had come under heel, they were sent once again south to face an old enemy: In Crimea, Wrangel had reformed the devastated AFSR into a new army which had advanced into the Northern
Tauride during the Polish War. The Cavalry Army was placed on the western end of the line, along with the 6th Army, intending to sweep behind the enemy to Salkovo and cut them off from the easily defended Crimea, trapping them in the Northern Tauride. The Whites would avoid this fate, retreating into Crimea on 2 November. Wrangel's Army was likely aided in this by the slow progress of Budyonny's men; they seemed much more interested in abusing the locals for cooperating with the Whites than anything else. Although Wrangel in the end had been defeated, enemies still remained amongst the Reds. It was time to do away with the libertarian politics represented by Mahkno's anarchists and so both of the Red's cavalry armies were set upon them in August 1921, eventually destroying them. A similar fate would be met by the remnants of the White movement, reduced to petty partisans. The 1st Cavalry Army would be disbanded on 11 October 1923. The Bolsheviks, as ever, saw things in terms of class and so to them the idea of reviving the originally aristocratic cavalry was inconceivable, whilst their military specialists saw cavalry as of little potency on a post-world war battlefield. The 1st Cavalry was a defining factor in Soviet success on the battlefield. Amongst a sea of poorly trained conscripts, the Cavalry Army was one amongst few Red Army units that could be considered 'elite' and one amongst even fewer that could provide the necessary mobility to so utterly defeat the counterrevolution. One potential reason for the 1st Cavalry Army's military prowess was its internal sense of community. Many of its squadrons were simply renamed partisan groups who were each raised from a single village. Beyond just having a personal connection with their fellow fighters, many soldiers had brought their families with them to the front. A village on horseback would be an apt description of the wagon trails filled with cavalrymen's families. Each soldier in the 1st Cavalry wasn't just fighting for political aims but the immediate lives of his friends and loved ones. == Order of battle ==