Today at 01:09
By mid-January 1918, the Bolsheviks occupied Kharkiv, Poltava, and Katerynoslav along with the vital railway hubs of Lozova, Pavlohrad, and Synelnykove. They also established strongholds in the south, in Kherson, Mykolayiv, and Odesa.
Two armies of Bolsheviks moving from Kharkiv and Gomel approached Kyiv. After a battle in Bakhmach, the army of the Ukrainian National Republic had to retreat to Kruty railway station, 13 kilometers north of the Ukrainian capital.
“In the face of danger, the government desperately called for help from everyone, who still had hope in their hearts, who hadn’t given up – and the youth immediately responded to this call to protect their homeland,” Kruty participant Borys Wonkevych wrote in his memoirs.
On the 25th of January 1918, a train of volunteers, students of Kyiv’s Saint Volodymyr University and the Polytechnic Institute departed towards Kruty, where they joined students of the youth military school and free Cossack fighters – a few hundred men in total.
“On the nights of January 26 to 27, I talked on the telephone with Muravyov. His demand in the form of an order sounded like this, ‘Prepare to meet the victorious Red Army, prepare lunch. I forgive junkers’ mistakes, but I will shoot the officers anyway.’ I replied, ‘Everything is ready for the meeting,'” Captain Averkiy Honcharenko recalled in memoirs.
A battle plan for near the minor train station of Kruty was drawn up by student Mykola Oliynuk who fought in the battle. Muravyov’s combined Bolshevik was moving in from Bakhmach. Different estimates put its numbers between four and six thousand. The battle began around 9 a.m. and continued until dusk.
Muravyov’s forces had two well-constructed armored trains, a howitzer battery, up to a thousand infantry soldiers and up to 1,500 Baltic sailors.
The Taras Shevchenko unit remained in the rear. It was tasked with supporting the UNR forces near Nizhyn, but later decided to side with the Soviet regime. The volunteers in Kruty were ordered to retreat.
The boys’ commanders passed on an order to retreat, but somewhere on the way, it got mixed up, and the student platoon heard that they should attack the much larger forces.
The Bolsheviks captured 27 soldiers of the student unit.
All those captured were brutally killed – their heads smashed, teeth knocked out, eyes were gouged out. Several bodies could not be identified as they were so disfigured.
The battle of Kruty delayed the Bolshevik offensive on Ukraine’s capital by several days. This allowed the government in Kyiv to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and declare independence, which was recognized by all World War I parties.
On the 1st of March 1918, the Bolsheviks left Kyiv. Three weeks later the remains of those who perished defending Ukraine in Kruty were reburied in Kyiv.
