After weeks of trench warfare, the Whites launched their decisive attack and finally smashed the Red defense on 5 April.

The Bolsheviks were concerned that the Finnish Whites and their ally Germany would launch an attack against the city along the Rautu railway.

[1] As the Reds took the Rautu station, it was held by only less than one hundred paramilitary White Guard members, led by the engineer Kyösti Kehvola.

They were now commanded by the Jäger captain Evert Ekman and since 8 March, as the Karelian Army arrived, by the rittmeister Georg Elfvengren.

[2] The Russian troops were under the command of the Bolshevik revolutionary M. V. Prigorovski, but the war plans were mostly made by the general K. M. Yeremeyev, head of the Saint Petersburg Military District.

Their units were composed of the railroad workers who had come to Rautu from other parts of Finland and the members of the Saint Petersburg Finnish Red Guard.

The Rautu offensive was stopped after just two days and the force of 1,000 Reds decided to pull back to the railway station.

Two days later, the Whites cut the railroad towards Saint Petersburg and derailed an armored train with a cargo of ammunition, machine guns, and artillery pieces.

The Red column headed south towards the Russian border but was soon caught in a crossfire of White machine guns in the nearby valley.

The Bolshevik commander Prigorovski, as well as several wounded Reds, killed themselves in order to avoid falling into the hands of the enemy.