Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

35. On these events see Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 13–33. The history of the Provisional Siberian Government is now fully traceable in V. I. Shishkin, ed., Vremennoe Sibirskoe Pravitel′stvo, 26 maia–3 noiabria 1918 g.: Sbornik dokumentov i materialy (Novosibirsk: Sova, 2007).

36. On the genesis of these organizations, see Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 50–62; and G. Z. Ioffe, Kolchakovskaia avantiura i ee krakh (Moscow: Mysl, 1983), 39–55.

37. Smele, “Russian” Civil Wars, ch. 2.

38. On the fate of the reserve, which initially amounted to just over 650,000,000 gold roubles, see Jonathan D. Smele, “White Gold: The Imperial Russian Gold Reserve in the Anti-Bolshevik East, 1918–? (An Unconcluded Chapter in the History of the Russian Civil War),” Europe–Asia Studies 46, no. 8 (1994): 1317–47; and Oleg Budnitskii, Den′gi russkoi emigratsii: Kolchakovskoe zoloto, 1918–1957 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008).

39. L. D. Trotsky, My Life: The Rise and Fall of a Dictator (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 396–400; Jan M. Meijer, ed., The Trotsky Papers, 1917–1922 (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), 1: 69–71; L. D. Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, vol. 1, 1918 (London: New Park Publications, 1979), 313. Also, Geoffrey Swain, “Trotsky and the Russian Civil War,” in Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia: Essays in Honour of James D. White, ed. Ian D. Thatcher (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 86–87. For a colorful firsthand account of the fighting at this crucial juncture, see Larissa Reissner, “Sviajsk,” Cahiers Leon Trotsky 12 (1982): 51–64.

40. On Murav′ev, see Geoffrey Swain, “Russia’s Garibaldi: The Revolutionary Life of Mikhail Artemevich Muraviev,” Revolutionary Russia 11, no. 2 (1998): 54–81; and V. A. Savchenko, “Glavnokommanduiushchii Murav′ev: ‘. . . Nash lozung—byt′ besposhchadnymi,’” in V. A. Savchenko, Avantiuristy grazhdanskoi voiny: Istorischeskoe issledovanie (Khar′kov: Folio, 2000), 44–64.

41. Geoffrey Swain, “The Disillusioning of the Revolution’s Praetorian Guard: The Latvian Riflemen, Summer–Autumn 1918,” Europe–Asia Studies 51, no. 4 (1999): 667–86.

42. On Savinkov, see Richard B. Spence, Boris Savinkov: Renegade on the Left (Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 1991), 209–16; and Karol Wedziagolski, Boris Savinkov: Portrait of a Terrorist (Clifton, N.J.: The Kingston Press, 1988), 53–65. The genesis and course of the Iaroslavl′ Revolt is adumbrated in E. A. Ermolin and V. N. Kozliakov, eds., Iaroslavskoe vosstanie, 1918 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnoe Fond “Demokratiia,” 2007).

43. See P. N. Dmitriev and K. I. Kulikov, Miatezh v Izhevsk-Votkinskom raione (Izhevsk: Udmurtiia, 1992).

44. On the background to and events of the Omsk coup, see Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 50–107.

45. C. H. Ellis, The Transcaspian Episode, 1918–1919 (London: Hutchinson, 1963); and Lt. Col. D. E. Knollys, “Military Operations in Transcaspia, 1918–1919,” Journal of the Central Asian Society 13, no. 2 (1926): 88–110.

46. On events in North Russia, see V. I. Goldin, Kontrrevoliutsiia na severe Rossii i ee krushenie, 1918–1920 gg. (Vologda: Vologodskii ped. inst., 1989); V. I. Goldin, ed., Belyi sever, 1918–1920 gg.: Memuary i dokumenty, 2 vols. (Arkhangel′sk: Pravda Severa, 1993); Liudmila G. Novikova, “A Province of a Non-existent State: The White Government in the Russian North and Political Power in the Russian Civil War, 1918–20,” Revolutionary Russia 18, no. 2 (2005): 121–44; and Liudmila G. Novikova, Provintsial′naia “kontrrevoliutsiia”: Beloe dvizhenie i Grazhdanskaia voina na russkom Severe, 1917–1920 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011).

47. The Don Cossack territory had been overrun by Red forces in January 1918 and a Don Soviet Republic proclaimed. However, a rising of the Cossacks turned the tables in May, and a Don Republic, dominated by the Cossacks, was established. The latter initially sought the protection of Germany, but as we shall see, entered into an uneasy alliance with the pro-Allied Whites when the Central Powers collapsed.

48. The 26 Commissars were subsequently executed in mysterious circumstances by forces of the democratic counterrevolution in Transcaspia. See below.

49. Peter Kenez, “The Relations between the Volunteer Army and Georgia, 1918–1920: A Case Study in Disunity,” Slavonic and east European Review 48 (1970): 403–24. In one more twist to the tangled events in Transcaucasia, during the bloody Armenian–Azerbaijan War that rumbled on through 1918 to 1920, the Allies tended to favor the Muslim Azeris (who had collaborated with Turkey in 1918) over the Christian Armenians (who had been fighting the Turks since the formation of volunteer detachments within the Russian Army in 1915) for fear that Yerevan’s ambitions to incorporate much of eastern Anatolia into its own domains might drive postwar Turkey into the arms of the Bolsheviks. For the British, an added concern was to pacify hostile Muslim feelings in its own Asian territories and protectorates. Realpolitik also guided Allied relations with Finland: General Mannerheim, elected regent of his country in December 1918, enjoyed good relations with London and Paris because, despite accepting German assistance to do so, he had at least fought and defeated the Reds in the Finnish Civil War of January–May 1918.

50. For detailed accounts see Mawdsley, Russian Civil War; and Smele, “Russian” Civil Wars.

51. Tsaritsyn not only barred the path of any union between White forces in the South and those in Siberia but also guarded Soviet Russia’s supply of oil, along the Volga, from the North Caucasus and its communications with the remaining Red forces in that region (notably, at this stage, the Taman Army). As such, the Reds made superhuman efforts to defend it, until it was overrun by White forces in June–July 1919). It was also in the furnace of Tsaritsyn that the first major clashes emerged between Josef Stalin and Trotsky over the employment of ex-tsarist officers as military specialists. See Richard Argenbright, “Red Tsaritsyn: Precursor of Stalinist Terror,” Revolutionary Russia 4, no. 2 (1991): 157–83.

52. The White victories were in part facilitated by what was to become a common feature of the civil wars: a mutiny. On 21 October 1918, the commander of the Red Army of the North Caucasus, the former Left-SR I. I. Sorokin, ordered the execution of much of the Reds’ political and military leadership in the region, thereby disorganizing resistance to the Whites.

53. Drozdovskii had attained cult status for leading a 1,000-strong column of men on a 1,000-mile march from the Romanian Front to the Don in February–April 1918. He, Alekseev, Kornilov, and Markov all had Volunteer units (the “Colorful Units”) named in their honor.

54. The most revealing study of the White movement in South Russia remains Peter Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971–1977).

55. In weighing the Russian Army’s chances of success in the forthcoming operations, it might have been of significance that of Kolchak’s chief commanders, only Khanzhin was a full general of anything but the most recent vintage. Gajda had the rank of lieutenant-general (since January 1919), but only 18 months earlier could boast only of the rank of captain in the army of Montenegro; Dutov had the rank of major-general, but had commanded only a regiment in 1917 (albeit with some distinction); Belov had gained the rank of major-general only as recently as 15 August 1918; and the hapless D. A. Lebedev had been made major-general by Kolchak only in January 1919 (having, according to some sources, been dismissed from the Volunteer Army in 1918). Of course, the introduction of new blood into the commanding staff was not necessarily a bad thing, and some of these men were of proven talent—Gajda, for example, had greatly distinguished himself in the Battle of Zborov (1–2 July 1917) against the Austrians, and as commander of the Eastern Group of the Czechoslovak Legion had performed miracles in clearing the Bolsheviks a region stretching from Omsk beyond Lake Baikal in 1918—but time would tell that they were not necessarily the best new blood the Siberian forces had to offer and that commanders overlooked by Kolchak because of their previous associations with Komuch (notably Colonel V. O. Kappel′) might have been wiser choices to lead the advance.

56. Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 308–12.

57. L. A. Krol′, Za tri goda: Vospominaniia, vpechatleniia i vstrechi (Vladivostok: Tip. T-va izd. “Svobodnaia Rossiia,” 1921), 172.

58. The best treatments of these events were penned by a Red commander of the time: G. Kh. Eikhe, Ufimskaia avantiura Kolchaka (mart–aprel′ 1919g.): Pochemu Kolchak ne udalas′ prorvat′sia k Volge na soedinenie s Denikinym (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1960); and G. Kh. Eikhe, Oprokinutyi tyl (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1966). A generally reliable account is L. M. Spirin, Razgrom armii Kolchaka (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1957).

59. Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 315–17.

60. Vācietis was released from prison in October 1919, but never returned to a command post.

61. General Knox received a sarcastic telegram from the Red command, thanking the British for this unexpected contribution to the defense of the Soviet republic. See L. H. Grondijs, La Guerre en Russie et en Sibérie (Paris: Éditions Bossard, 1922), 528.

62. Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 481–84.

63. A general problem for Kolchak, which manifested itself in the failed Ishim–Tobol′ operation, was that he could not draw on the phalanxes of Cossack cavalry that were available to Denikin in South Russia. In the world war, the Don Cossack Host had mobilized 100,000 fighters, the Kuban Host, 89,000 and the Terek Host, 18,000. By contrast, the Siberian Cossack Host had mobilized only 11,500 men. The Orenburg Host and Urals Host had mobilized more (30,000 and 13,000 men, respectively), but remained isolated from Omsk throughout 1919 and were only loosely incorporated into the Russian Army and the White Eastern Front. (Indeed, so distant were they from Kolchak’s capital that the Urals Army passed into the operational control of General Denikin from June 1919.)

64. Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 597.

65. Ibid., 521–70.

66. On warlordism and its effects, see Jamie Bisher, White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian (London: Frank Cass, 2005); and Canfield F. Smith, “Atamanshchina in the Russian Far East,” Russian History 6 (1979): 57–67.

67. On the betrayal and execution of Kolchak, see Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 626–48.

68. Not that Makhno and Hryhroriiv were allies: Makhno had Hryhroriiv executed in July 1919, in retribution for his pogromist activities and for having considered an alliance with the Whites.

69. Denikin’s order is reproduced in P. N. Vrangel′, Vospominaniia (Frankfurt: Posev, 1969), 1:160–62.

70. Forces of the Ukrainian Army had actually moved into Kiev a day before the Whites arrived, but immediately withdrew. Aware that a Denikin victory would be fatal to the cause of Ukrainian independence, in these same days Petliura’s mission in Warsaw was arranging an armistice with Poland regarding the ongoing Ukrainian–Polish War over the fate of Western Ukraine/Eastern Galicia.

71. On the “Mamontov raid,” see Erik Landis, A Civil War Episode: General Mamontov in Tambov, August 1919 (Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies/University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2002). It was at this point that peasants began to refer to the southern Whites as the Grabarmiia (from Grabovaia armiia, the “Pillaging Army”)—a play on the proper abbreviated name of the Drobrovol′naia armiia (Volunteer Army), the Dobrarmiia.

72. Anthony Kröner, The White Knight of the Black Sea: The Life of Peter Wrangel (The Hague: Leuxenhoff, 2010), 171–72.

73. On these units, see R. G. Gagkuev, ed., Drozdovskii i Drozdovtsy (Moscow: Posev, 2006); R. G. Gagkuev et al., eds., Markov i Markovtsy (Moscow: Posev, 2001); and E. E. Messner, Kornilovtsy: 1917–10 iuniia 1967 (Paris: Izd. Ob″edineniia chinov Kornilovskogo Udarnogo polka, 1967).

74. On Iudenich’s career, see A. F. Medvetskii, General ot infanterii General N. N. Iudenich v gody obshchenatsional′nogo krizisa v Rossii (1914–1920 gg.): Monograficheskoe issledovanie (Samara: PGATI, 2005); N. Rutych, “Iudenich Nikolai Nikolaevich: General ot infanterii,” in Belyi front general Iudenicha: Biografii chinov Severno-Zapadnoi armii (Moscow: Russkii put′, 2002), 18–118; and A. V. Shishov, Iudenich: General suvorovskoi shkoly (Moscow: Veche, 2004).

75. Including the audacious raid on the Baltic Fleet at Kronshtadt mounted by Captain Augustus Agar in August 1919, which saw the sinking of the battleship Andrei Pervozvannyi. See Augustus Agar, Baltic Episode: A Classic of Secret Service in Russian Waters (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1963); and Harry Ferguson, Operation Kronstadt (London: Hutchinson, 2008).

76. If the Whites had actually been able to hear the Kremlin bells, they would have been enraged: in 1918, those in the Spasskaia tower, which had formerly pealed “God Save the Tsar,” had been reset to play “The Internationale.”

77. On Iudenich’s advance and defeat, see Karsten Brüggermann, Die Gründung der Republik Estland und das Ende des “Einem und unteilbaren Rußland”: Die Petrograder Front des Russischen Bürgerkrieges, 1918–1920 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004); N. A. Kornatovskii, Bor′ba za Krasnyi Petrograd, 1919 (Leningrad: Izd-vo “Krasnoi gazety,” 1929); and A. V. Smolin, Beloe dvizhenie na severo-zapade rossii, 1918–1920 gg. (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999). White views critical of Iudenich’s generalship include the memoirs of the man he ousted as commander of the North-West Army: A. P. Rodziainko, Vospominaniia o Severo-Zapadnoi Armii (Berlin: Presse, 1920); and Hilja Kukk, “The Failure of Iudenich’s North-western Army in 1919: A Dissenting White Russian View, Journal of Baltic Studies 12, no. 4 (1981): 362–83. The latter cites the debilitating internecine rivalries that bedeviled a force top-heavy with tsarist generals, but crucial to the North-West Army’s failure were local variants of the atamanshchina, which more famously damaged White efforts elsewhere: Colonel Bermondt-Avalov, as we have seen, crowned a long career of insubordination by refusing to divert his Germanophile Western Volunteer Army from its efforts to conquer Latvia to join the advance on Petrograd, while as the advance collapsed, the equally ungovernable General S. N. Bułak-Bałachowicz attempted a coup against Iudenich at Tallinn. On Bułak-Bałachowicz, see Richard B. Spence, “Useful Brigand: ‘Ataman’ S. N. Bulak-Balakhovich, 1917–1921,” Revolutionary Russia 11, no. 1 (1998): 17–36. An additional factor was that the Finns remained neutral. Had General Mannerheim not been defeated by Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg in independent Finland’s first presidential election in July 1919, this might not have been the case.

78. The Bolshevik Central Committee had agreed as early as 11 September 1919 that formal peace terms should be proposed to Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania. See Alfred E. Senn, “The Bolsheviks’ Acceptance of Baltic Independence, 1919,” Journal of Baltic Studies 26, no. 2 (1995): 145–50.

79. Equally, that on 21 March 1919 a North Russian patrol under Captain Alashev encountered units affiliated with Admiral Kolchak’s Northern Army at the unfeasibly remote village of Ust′-kozhva, near Pechora (about 750 miles north of Ekaterinburg), did not presage the union between the Whites in Siberia and those in the North, of which General Knox and others had long had dreamed.

80. British forces were withdrawn at the same time from Transcaucasia (19–20 October 1919), leaving only a token contingent at Batumi. A month later, on 29 November 1919, the Soviet diplomat M. M. Litvinov met the British representative James O’Grady in Denmark, initiating the discussions (buttressed by an agreement on 20 January 1920 by the Allied powers to lift their economic blockade of Soviet Russia) that would lead, through an agreement on the exchange of prisoners of war (the Copenhagen Agreement, 12 February 1920), to the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement of 16 March 1921 and, in due course, to London’s full recognition of the Soviet government on 1 February 1924.

81. They killed four Russian officers, too. See Christopher Dobson and John Miller, The Day We Almost Bombed Moscow: The Allied War in Russia, 1918–1920 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986), 210–12. On events in North Russia, see sources cited in note 46.

82. “Proletarians, To Horse!” (11 September 1919), in Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, vol. 2, 1919, 412–14.

83. With Trotsky preoccupied in Petrograd and Kamenev sometimes sidelined by the Soviet leadership (among which were many who still harbored suspicions about the employment of former tsarist officers as voenspetsy), much of the initial impetus for this can be credited to Stalin, as chairman of the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front, and to front commander A. I. Egorov. See Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 203–4.

84. See F. Shteinman, “Otstuplenie ot Odessa,” Beloe delo (Moscow: Rossiiskii gos. gumanitarnyi un-t, 2003), 10:313–29.

85. Anthony Kröner, The White Knight of the Black Sea: The Life of Peter Wrangel (The Hague: Leuxenhoff, 2010); Vrangel′, Vospominaniia, 1: 296–302.

86. This despite—or perhaps because of—Denikin’s attempt to rein in Kuban separatism in November 1919, when he had arrested 10 members of the Kuban Rada and forced Ataman A. P. Filimonov to resign.

87. See Erok C. Landis, “Who Were the ‘Greens’?,” Russian Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 43–46; Rudolf Karmann, Der Freiheitskampf der Kosaken: Die weiße Armee im russischen Bürgerkrieg 1917–1920 (Puchheim: IDEA, 1985), 549–52; and Swain, Russia’s Civil War, 128–32.

88. H. N. H. Williamson, Farewell to the Don: The Journal of Brigadier H. N. H. Williamson (London: Collins, 1970), 276–81.

89. E. Zhulikova, “Povstancheskoe dvizhenie na Severnom Kavkaze v 1920–25 godakh (dokumental′nye publikatsii noveishaia otchestvennaia istoriografiia),” Otchestvennaia istoriia, no. 2 (2004): 159–69.

90. The major exception was the decision to advance into western and southern Ukraine in the first half of 1919, in an attempt to forge a union with Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic—an initiative that ended in disaster with the aforementioned Hryhroriiv uprising.

91. On the end of the old army, see M. Frenkin, Russkaia armiia i revoliutsiia, 1917–1918 (Munich: Logos, 1978), ch. 7. On the early days of the Red Army, see John Erickson, “The Origins of the Red Army,” in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Richard Pipes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 224–56; and David Footman, “The Beginnings of the Red Army,” in Civil War in Russia (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), 135–66. For two very insightful firsthand accounts, see M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, From Tsarist General to Red Army Commander (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966); and A. F. Ilyin-Zhenevsky, The Bolsheviks in Power: Reminiscences of the Year 1918 (London: New Park Publications, 1984).

92. N. N. Movchin, Komplektovanie Krasnoi armii (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1926), 36.

93. Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, vol. 1, 1918, 19–23 (emphasis in original).

94. Ibid., 43, 47.

95. On the service of the officers of the Academy of the General Staff (genshtabisty) in Red forces, see A. V. Ganin, “O roli ofitserov General′nogo shtaba v grazhdanskoi voine,” Voprosy istorii, no. 6 (2004): 98–111; V. V. Kaminskii, “Vypuskniki Akademii gereral′nogo shtaba na sluzhbe v Krasnoi Armii,” Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 8 (2002): 54–61; V. V. Kaminskii, “Russkie genshtabisty v 1917–1920: Itogi izucheniia,” Voprosy istorii, no. 12 (2002): 40–51; V. V. Kaminskii, “Brat protiv brat: ofitsery-genshtabisty v 1917–1920gg.,” Voprosy istorii, no. 11 (2003): 115–26; and Steven J. Main, “Pragmatism in the Face of Adversity: The Bolsheviks and the Academy of the General Staff of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, 1918–1921,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 8, no. 2 (1995): 333–55. The background of the genshtabisty’s willingness to serve in the Red Army is expertly traced in Matitiahu Mayzel, Generals and Revolutionaries: The Russian General Staff during the Revolution—A Study in the Transformation of a Military Elite (Osnabruck: Biblio-Verlag, 1979).

96. See S. M. Kliatskin, Na zashchite Oktiabria: Organizatsiia reguliarnoi army i militsionnoe stroitel′stvo v Sovetskoi respublike, 1917–1920 (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 160–61.

97. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1957–2009), 1: 356–57; cf. Erich Wollenberg, The Red Army: A Study of the Growth of Soviet Imperialism (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1973), 365 (app. 1, “The Scheme for a Socialist Army”).

98. The oppositionists’ ire that Sovnarkom seemed intent on reducing commissars to the status of functionaries, despite their rapidly expanding command experience—most eloquently distilled in a speech to the Eighth Congress of 20 March 1919 by V. M. Smirnov—was salved by the replacement, on 18 April 1919, of the somewhat haphazardly functioning All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars (Vsebiurvoenkom, created by the People’s Commissariat for War on 8 April 1918) with the more robust and active Political Administration of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (Politicheskoe upravlenie RVS Respubliki). The latter, generally known as PUR, was chaired by the Leftist I. T. Smilga. See Francesco Benvenuti, I bolscevichi e l’armata rossa, 1918–1922 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1982), 135–82; and Francesco Benvenuti, “La ‘Questione militaire’ al’VIII Congresso della RKP(b),” Studi Storici 35, no. 4 (1994): 1095–1121. Also, for the stenographic records, see “Deiatel′nost Tsentral′nogo Komiteta partii v dokumentakh (sobytiia i fakty): Mart 1919g. VIII s″ezd RKP(b): Stenogramma zasedenii voennoi sektsii s″ezda 20 i 21 marta 1919 goda i zakrytogo zasedenii s″ezda 21 marta 1919 goda,” Izvestiia TsK KPSS 1 (1989), much of which is summarized in V. P. Bokarev, VIII s″ezd RKP(b) (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), 53–77. On Smilga and PUR, see Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 67–181.

99. Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, vol. 1, 1918, 199–210.

100. A. V. Ganin, “Workers and Peasants Red Army ‘General Staff Personalities’ Defecting to the Enemy Side in 1918–1921,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 26, no. 2 (2013): 259–309. In this article, Ganin also offers numerous interesting suggestions as to why some officers deserted and some did not. On officers’ decisions to join the Reds, see also the superb article by David R. Jones, “The Officers and the October Revolution,” Soviet Studies 28, no. 2 (1976): 207–23.

101. Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, vol. 1, 1918, 557–58.

102. The key figure in the institution was its director, the former tsarist officer Major-General M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, who was Trotsky’s closely trusted aide.

103. Like most voenspetsy, Bonch-Bruevich regarded the Western Front (euphemistically termed a “screen” as long as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was in place), against Germany, as the priority and had somewhat neglected the emerging Eastern Front, on the Volga, which was to become the crucible of the civil wars in 1918.

104. Movchin, Komplektovanie Krasnoi armii, 52–53. In Russian military terminology, “front” implies an army group rather than a geographical region.

105. For an appreciation of this inheritance, see N. E. Kakurin, Kak srazhalas′ revoliutsiia, 1917–21 (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1925), 1:135.

106. For the decree “On the Formation of the Council of Defence,” see Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, 4:92–94.

107. Thomas H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–1922 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 76, 84.

108. M. A. Molodtsygin, Krasnaia Armiia: rozhdenie i stanovlenie, 1917–1920 gg. (Moscow: RAN, 1997), 134.

109. Landis, “Who Were the ‘Greens’?,” 31.

110. Orlando Figes, “The Red Army and Mass Mobilization during the Russian Civil War, 1918–1920,” Past and Present, no. 129 (1990): 168–211.

111. Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, 2:541–44. See Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 45.

112. Very important here was the creation by VTsIK, in late December 1918, of a Central Anti-Desertion Commission. M. A. Molodtsygin, Raboche-krest′ianskii soiuz, 1918–1920 (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), 138.

113. Sanborn, Drafting the Nation, 50.

114. S. P. Olikov, Dezertirstvo v Krasnoi armii i bor′ba s nim (Moscow: Izdanie Voennoi tipografii Upravleniia delami Narkomvoenmor i RVS SSSR, 1926), 39. “Women, Throw Out the Deserter!” urged Bolshevik propaganda posters of the time. David King, Russian Revolutionary Posters (London: Tate, 2013), 35.

115. Sanborn, Drafting the Nation, 51–52.

116. Ibid., 54.

117. Movchin, Komplektovanie Krasnoi armii, 100–101.

118. The political presence of the North-West Army (the Government of the North-West Russian Region) and, at Arkhangelsk, the Provisional Government of the Northern Region, was nugatory. Iudenich and Miller tended merely to reproduce the pronouncements of Kolchak, were forced to focus on immediate military concerns, and were constrained in their actions by the considerable Allied presence in their domains.

119. And, after all, Kolchak was “supreme ruler,” a position recognized by Denikin’s Order no. 145 of 30 May 1919: A. I. Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty (Paris/Berlin: Povolzky, 1921–1926), 5: 97–98. See also N. I. Astrov, “Priznanie gen. Denikinym adm. Kolchaka: Prikaz 30 maia 1919g.—no. 145,” Golos minuvshago na chuzhoi storone 14, no. 1 (1926): 210–21.

120. The best work on the subject—William G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974)—demonstrates that, as the parties of the Right disintegrated in 1917, the once radical-liberal Kadets shifted their center of gravity to the right and became the “leadership corps” of the White regimes. The most accomplished Soviet work on the subject went so far as to conclude that their rightward progress was so extreme that the Kadets completely forfeited their liberal credentials: N. G. Dumova, Kadetskaia kontrrevoliutsiia i ee razgrom (Moscow: Nauka, 1982). Members of the party were certainly deeply involved in bringing Kolchak to power in 1918 and in sustaining the supreme ruler in 1919. On 7 February 1920, it was more than symbolic that the most senior Kadet in Siberia, V. N. Pepeliaev, was executed alongside Admiral Kolchak at Irkutsk.

121. Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 256.

122. United States Department of State, Documents Relating to the Foreign Policy of the United States: 1919 (Peace Conference Papers) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939–1940), 5:497–98, 528–30; 6:73–75. Although, tellingly, these considerations were also in large part prompted by the success on the field of battle that Kolchak’s forces were enjoying in April–May 1919: Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 211–13.

123. It is worth recalling here that Kolchak and Denikin hailed from relatively lowly backgrounds, as had Alekseev and Kornilov before them; none of them were of noble birth—indeed, Denikin’s father had been born a serf—none of them had a vested interest in property, and all owed their military positions to the relatively meritocratic ethos of the late Imperial Russian Army and Navy.

124. Williamson, Farewell to the Don, 63–67. Precisely parallel scenes were witnessed by British officers in Siberia in October 1918, where the scandals usually involved Ataman I. N. Krasil′nikov of the Siberian Cossack Host (one of those subsequently responsible for the arrest of the Directory and the elevation of Kolchak): Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 82.

125. This was admitted by Denikin’s closest advisors; compare the generous terms of Denikin’s decrees on land and labor policy (available in English in William H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 [London: Macmillan, 1935], 2:482–84) to the reports of their implementation recorded in A. S. Lukomskii, Vospominaniia (Berlin: Otto Kirchner, 1922), 2:185–92. For a fuller discussion of how Denikin’s policies were frustrated by his subordinates, see Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920, 86–109. Prize here was that Denikin would introduce a law on the eight-hour-day only on 12 December 1919, as his forces were in full flight from the industrial centers of Ukraine and Russia.

126. Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 274–89. Also, Stolypin’s minister of agriculture, A. V. Krivoshein, was influential among the Whites in South Russia in 1919. See A. K. Krivoshein, Aleksandr Vasil′evich Krivoshein: Sud′ba rossiiskogo reformatora (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1993).

127. Jonathan D. Smele, “‘What Kolchak Wants!’ Military Versus Polity in White Siberia, 1918–1920,” Revolutionary Russia 4, no. 1 (1991): 52–110. It should also be mentioned here that the impressively successful manifestation of the democratic spirit that pertained among Siberia’s peasantry, the almost universally engaged cooperative movement, was treated with self-defeating hostility by Kolchak’s government. See Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 424–49.

128. Ibid., 289–96. It is now possible to trace in precise detail the political discussions within the White camps and their legislative outcomes, through E. V. Lukov and D. N. Shevelev, eds., Zakonodatel′naia deiatel′nost Rossiiskogo pravitel′stva admirala A. V. Kolchaka: Noiabr′ 1918 g.–ianvar′ 1920 g., 2 vols. (Tomsk: Izd-vo Tomskogo universiteta, 2002–2003); and Zhurnaly zasedanii Osobogo soveshchaniia pri Glavnokomanduiushchem Vooruzhennymi Silami na Iuge Rossii A. I. Denikine: Sentiabr 1918-go–dekabr 1919 goda (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008). See also O. A. Kudinov, Konstituttsionnye proekty Belogo dvizheniia i konstitutstionno-pravovye teoriu rossisskoi beloemigratsii (1918–1940 gg.), ili Za chto ikh rasstrelivali i deportirovali (dlia tekh, kto khochet poniat′ smysl prava): Monografiia (Moscow: Os′-89, 2006), 12–25.

129. It is nowadays almost impossible to find new works published in Russia that are anything but worshipful of Kornilov, Kolchak, Denikin, and the other White leaders. One notable exception is P. A. Golub, V zastenkakh Kolchaka: Pravda o Belom admirale (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Patriot, 2010).

130. Kenez, “The Relations between the Volunteer Army and Georgia.”

131. See Anna Procyk, Russian Nationalism and Ukraine: The Nationality Policy of the Volunteer Army during the Civil War (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1995).

132. Peter S. Wandycz, “Secret Soviet–Polish Peace Talks in 1919,” Slavic Review 24, no. 3 (1965): 425–49.

133. Alex Marshall, The Caucasus under Soviet Rule (London: Routledge, 2010), 51–128. Moreover, the direct corollary of this was to cement (on 16 June 1919) a full military alliance against the AFSR between the Azeri and Georgian republics, who felt themselves to be next in line. Harun Yilmaz, “An Unexpected Peace: Azerbaijani–Georgian Relations, 1918–20,” Revolutionary Russia 22, no. 1 (2009): 37–67.

134. Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 296–301.

135. G. K. Gins, Sibir′ soiuzniki i Kolchak: Povorotnyi moment russkoi istorii, 1918–1920gg. (Vpechatleniia i mysli chlena Omskogo pravitel′stva) (Peking: Izd. “Obshchestva Vozrozhdeniia Rossii v g. Kharbine,” 1921), 2: 375.

136. On the Weltanschauung of the Whites and its origins in the prerevolutionary military caste, see Peter Kenez, “The Russian Officer Corps before the Revolution: The Military Mind,” Russian Review 31, no. 3 (1972): 226–37; Peter Kenez, “A Profile of the Pre-Revolutionary Officer Corps,” Californian Slavic Studies 7 (1973): 128–45; Peter Kenez, “The Ideology of the White Movement,” Soviet Studies 32, no. 1 (1980): 58–83; and Leonid Heretz, “The Psychology of the White Movement,” in Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and the Civil Wars, ed. Vladimir N. Brovkin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 105–21. Also illuminating in this regard is Paul Robinson, “‘Always with Honour’: The Code of the White Russian Officers,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 41, no. 2 (1999): 121–41.

137. N. A. Andrushkevich, “Poslednaia Rossiia,” Beloe delo, no. 4 (1928): 109; Gins, Sibir′, soiuzniki i Kolchak, 2: 61–62; D. B. Filat′ev, Katastrofa belogo dvizheniia v Sibiri, 1918–1922gg. (Vpechatleniia ochevidsta) (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1985), 116.

138. K. S. Burevoi, Kolchakovshchina (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1919), 20–21.

139. Gins, Sibir′, soiuzniki i Kolchak, 2: 88.

140. On the Bullitt Mission, see The Bullitt Mission to Russia: Testimony before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate (New York: W. B. Heubsch, 1919).

141. Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, 2: 493. On the Nansen scheme, see Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover (London: Macmillan, 1952), 1: 411–20.

142. Although even here, urban centers, with a large and sometimes predominant Russian presence, might sustain powerful Bolshevik organizations (in Riga, Kiev, Baku, and Tashkent, for example).

143. Roger Pethybridge, “The Bolsheviks and Technical Disorder, 1917–1918,” Slavonic and East European Review 49 (1971): 410–24. According to one carefully researched account, half of the fall in production of Russia’s industry during the period 1913 to 1919 took place in 1918: Andrei Markevich and Mark Harrison, “Great War, Civil War, and Recovery: Russia’s National Income 1913 to 1928,” Journal of Economic History 71, no. 3 (2011): 687. Facing starvation, city dwellers left the cities in droves; the population of Petrograd, for example, fell by around two-thirds (from 2,500,000 to 750,000) between 1917 and 1920 and of Moscow by more than one-third: Daniel R. Brower, “‘The City in Danger’: The Civil War and the Russian Urban Population,” in Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History, ed. Diane Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, and Ronald G. Suny (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 58–80.

144. Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also S. A. Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm: Vlast′ i massy (Moscow: RKT-istoriia, 1997).

145. Alexander Rabinowitch, “Early Disenchantment with Bolshevik Rule: New Data from the Archives of the Extraordinary Assembly of Delegates from Petrograd Factories,” in Politics and Society under the Bolsheviks, ed. Kevin Mcdermott and John Morison (London: Macmillan, 1999), 37–46. See also D. B. Pavlov, ed., Rabochee oppozitsionnoe dvizhenie v bol′shevistskoi Rossii, 1918 g. Sobraniia upolnomochennykh fabrik i zavodov: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006).

146. Vladimir Brovkin, “The Mensheviks’ Political Comeback: Elections to the Provincial City Soviets in the Spring of 1918,” Russian Review 42, no. 1 (1983): 1–50.

147. Fedor Stepun, Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1990), 2: 221.

148. On 23 September 1919, alone, it was reported that the prominent Kadet N. N. Shchepkin and 67 other “counterrevolutionaries” had been executed in Moscow in relation to this affair. O. V. Volobuev, ed., Takticheskii tsentr: dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2012). On the Cheka and the Terror, see Lennard D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin’s Russia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976); George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford; Clarendon, 1981); and G. P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work, vol. 1, The Leninist Counter-Revolution (Orkney: Cienfuegos Press, 1979).

149. On the Kronshtadt events, see Paul Avrich, Kronstadt, 1921 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970); and Neil Croll, “The Role of M. N. Tukhachevskii in the Suppression of the Kronstadt Rebellion,” Revolutionary Russia 17, no. 2 (2004): 1–48.

150. Israel Getzler, Kronstadt, 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 210–11. For Trotsky’s views, see Barbara Mutnick, ed., Kronstadt, by V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky (London: Monad Press, 1979), 124–41. Getzler’s findings were largely supported by materials from the Soviet archives that were published after the fall of communism: V. P. Naumov and A. A. Kos, eds., Kronshtadt, 1921: Dokumenty o sobytiakh v Kronshtadte vesnoi 1921 g. (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 1997); and V. P. Kozlov et al., eds., Kronshtadtskaia tragediia 1921 goda: Dokumenty v dvukh knigakh (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999). In the aftermath of the uprising, the Soviet government launched a new wave of assaults against their anarchist critics, imprisoning and executing dozens, while yet more were sent into exile abroad. Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov, A Grand Cause: The Hunger Strike and the Deportation of Anarchists from Soviet Russia (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2008); and Paul Avrich, ed., The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 228–33.

151. Incomplete and somewhat provocative surveys of this peasant war are provided in English in Taisa Osipova, “Peasant Rebellions: Origin, Scope, Dynamics and Consequences,” in The Bolsheviks in Russian Society, ed. Brovkin, 154–70; and V. N. Brovkin, “On the Internal Front: The Bolsheviks and the Greens,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 37, no. 4 (1989): 541–68. See also Mikhail Frenkin, Tragediia krest′ianskikh vosstanii v Rossii, 1918–1921 gg. (Jerusalem: Leksikon, 1987).

152. Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 337–38; and Aaron B. Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 243.

153. Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 205, 324–34. The course of these and other rebellions in the Volga region can be traced in V. Danilov and Teodor Shanin, eds., Krest′ianskoe dvizhenie v Povolzh′e, 1919–1922: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002). See also V. V. Kondrashin, Krestʹianskoe dvizhenie v Povolzhʹe, 1918–1922 (Moscow: Izd-vo Ianus-k, 2001); and V. K. Vorobev, Chapannaia voina v Simbirskoi gubernii: Mify i realnost′. Zametki kraeveda (n.p.: Vector-C, 2008).

154. Osipova, “Peasant Uprisings,” 163.

155. On Tambov, see Erik C. Landis, Bandits and Partisans: The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). On the events in Western Siberia, see V. I. Shishkin, ed., Za sovety bez kommunistov: Krestʹianskoe vosstanie v Tiumenskoi gubernii 1921 g. (Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 2000); and V. I. Shishkin, ed., Sibirskaia Vandeia, 2 vols. (Moscow: Demokratiia, 2000–2001).

156. Jan M. Meijer, ed., The Trotsky Papers, 1917–1922 (The Hague/London/ Paris: International Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 1964–1970), 2: 495.

157. Ibid., 2: 519.

158. Landis, Bandits and Partisans, 209.

159. Ibid., 214–26.

160. B. V. Sennikov, Tambovskoe vosstanie 1918–1919 gg. i raskrest′ianivanie Rossii 1929–1933 gg. (Moscow: Posev, 2004), 161–64.

161. Ibid., 86–88.

162. For a well-informed survey of the historiography of the Makhno movement, see Serge Cipko, “Nestor Makhno: A Mini-Historiography of the Anarchist Revolution in Ukraine, 1917–1921,” The Raven 4, no. 1 (1991): 57–75. Although partisan, also extremely useful (and very extensive) is The Nestor Makhno Archive, http://www.nestormakhno.info/. Relevant documents are now usefully collected in V. P. Danilov et al., eds., Nestor Makhno: Krest′ianskoe dvizhenie na Ukraine, 1918–1921; Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006).

163. The classic works on the Makhnovshchina were penned by two Nabat members: Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921 (London: Freedom Press, 1921); and Voline, The Unknown Revolution (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1975).

164. On the Makhnovshchina, see also Michael Malet, Nestor Makhno in the Russian Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1982); Michael Palij, The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno, 1917–1921: An Aspect of the Ukrainian Revolution (Seattle: Washington University Press, 1976); and Alexandre Skirda, Nestor Makhno, Anarchy’s Cossack: The Struggle for Free Soviets in Ukraine, 1917–1921 (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004).

165. The best study of the war remains Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish–Soviet War, 1919–1920 (London: Macdonald & Co., 1972).

166. The Poles and Lithuanians were already in dispute over the Suwałki (Suvalkai) region, and some in Warsaw harbored ambitions to snatch Vilnius, which would indeed fall into Polish hands later in 1920 and remain there until the Second World War.

167. “Speech Delivered at a Conference of Chairmen of Uyezd, Volost and Village Executive Committees of Moscow Gubernia, October 15 1920”: V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960–1978), 31: 321.

168. On Wrangel, see Kröner, The White Knight of the Black Sea; Nikolai Ross, Vrangel′ v Krymu (Frankfurt/Main: Posev, 1982); and Donald W. Treadgold, “The Ideology of the White Movement; Wrangel’s ‘Leftist Policy from Rightist Hands,’” Harvard Slavic Studies 4 (1957): 481–97.

169. A. S. Bubnov, S. S. Kamenev, and R. P. Eidman, eds., Grazhdanskaia voina, 1918–1921 (Moscow: Voennyi vestnik, 1928), 3: 513.

170. V. A. Zolotarev et al., eds., Russkaia voennaia emigratsiia 20-kh–40-kh godov: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Geia, 1998), 1: 23–24. A similar fate awaited several thousand Don Cossacks, who soon afterward returned to Soviet Russia rather than face a life in exile as stateless soldiers of Wrangel’s Russian All-Military Union (ROVS). On the Whites in exile, see Paul Robinson, The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002).

171. Direktivy Glavnogo kommandovaniia Krasnoi armii (1917–1920): Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1969), 736–37.

172. L. B. Krasin, People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade, arrived in London for the first round of talks in May 1920; the last contingent of British forces in the region left Batumi on 7–9 July 1920. On the trade talks, see M. V. Glenny, “The Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, March 1921,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970): 63–82. On Curzon and the great importance he ascribed to the Batumi mission, see John Fisher, “‘On the Glacis of India’: Lord Curzon and British Policy in the Caucasus, 1919,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 8, no. 2 (1997): 50–82; and John D. Rose, “Batum as Domino, 1919–1920: The Defence of India in Transcaucasia,” International History Review 2, no. 2 (1980): 266–87. Moscow’s willingness to make territorial and political sacrifices in the interest of broader geopolitical concerns was marked also by its abandonment of the Soviet Republic of Gīlān, which had been proclaimed in northeast Persia in June 1920, in order to secure an alliance with Tehran (the Soviet–Persian Treaty of Friendship, 21 February 1921).

173. A. V. Kvashonkin, “Sovetizatsiia Zakavkaz′ia v perepiske bol′shevistskogo rukovodstva 1920–22gg.,” Cahiers du monde russe 38, nos 1–2 (1997): 187–89.

174. The Georgian regime had been refused entry into the League of Nations in November 1920 (largely because its 1918 alliance with Germany still rankled with Britain and France, who led the campaign against the admission of Georgia), but it did achieve de jure recognition by the Allies on 27 January 1921, and subsequently two League of Nations resolutions (of 1922 and 1924) recognized the sovereignty of Georgia. See Zourab Avalishvili, The Independence of Georgia in International Politics, 1918–1921 (London: Headley, 1940), 216–26, 281–86.

175. Raymond Duguet, Moscou et la Géorgie martyre. Préface de C. B. Stokes (Paris: Tallandier, 1927); David M. Lang, A Modern History of Georgia (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962), 243–44; Ronald G. Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989), 223–34; and Markus Wehner, “Le soulèvement géorgien de 1924 et la réaction des bolcheviks,” Communisme, nos. 42–44 (1995): 155–170.

176. Meijer, The Trotsky Papers, 2:41.

177. On the FER and events of this period in the Far East, see Henry K. Norton, The Far Eastern Republic of Siberia (London: Allen & Unwin, 1923); and especially, Canfield F. Smith, Vladivostok under Red and White Rule: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the Russian Far East, 1920–1922 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975).

178. On Ungern, see William Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak: The Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Yale University Press, 2014). On the Iakutsk Revolt, see Ivan Strod, Civil War in the Taiga: A Story of Guerrilla Warfare in the Forests of Eastern Siberia (London: Modern Books, 1933).

179. White forces had been present there—centered on the Semirech′e Cossack Host under the tyrannous Ataman B. V. Annenkov and augmented by Orenburg Cossacks who had retreated into the region in late 1919, but most of them had fled into Chinese Sinkiang by the summer of 1920. See P. I. Pavlovskii, ed., Annenkovshchina (po materialam sudebnogo protsessa v Semipalatinsk 25.vii.1927–12.viii.1927 (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1928). On the leeching into China of the Russian conflict, see Michael Share, “The Russian Civil War in Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang), 1918–1921: A Little Known and Explored Front,” Europe–Asia Studies 62, no. 3 (2010): 389–420.

180. The Turkestan Red Army was interesting, however, as it had a higher proportion than any other Soviet force of internationalists, drawn from the 200,000 or so chiefly Austrian and German prisoners of war who had been held across Central Asia since 1914. On this phenomenon, see A. M. Matveyev, “Foreign Prisoners of War in Turkestan, 1917–1918,” Central Asian Review 9, no. 3 (1961): 240–50.

181. Lt.-Colonel F. M. Bailey, Mission to Tashkent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), 92–103. See also Paul Nazaroff, Hunted through Central Asia (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1932), 19–48.

182. On British intervention in this region, see Sir Wilfred Malleson, “The British Military Mission to Turkestan, 1918–1920,” Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society 9, no. 2 (1922): 96–110; and T. R. Sareen, British Intervention in Central Asia and Trans-Caucasia (New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 1989). The Transcaspian government was routinely (and predictably) vilified in later Soviet histories, as it was regarded as being complicit, under British guidance, in the infamous execution of the “Twenty-Six Commissars.” They were the group of Bolsheviks, Dashnaks, and Left-SRs, the former leaders of the Baku Commune, who, following the collapse of that regime on 26 July 1918, had been imprisoned on 14 August 1918 by the succeeding SR-Menshevik- and Dashnak-dominated Central Caspian Dictatorship. They escaped during the siege of Baku by the Ottoman Army of Islam in August 1918, but were shot on the orders of the Ashkhabad regime in Transcaspia the following month. The sizable holes in the case presented by Moscow are explored in Brian Pearce, “The 26 Commissars,” Sbornik of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution, nos. 6–7 (1981): 54–66; Brian Pearce, “On the Fate of the 26 Commissars,” Sbornik of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution, nos. 6–7 (1981): 83–95; Brian Pearce, “More about the 26 Commissars,” Sbornik of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution, no. 9 (1983): 83–85; and Brian Pearce, “A Falsifier of History,” Revolutionary Russia 1, no. 1 (1988): 20–23. The most recent study of these events also concludes, convincingly, that the British representative in Ashkhabad, Reginald Teague-Jones, was not at all culpable for the fate of the 26 commissars: Taline Ter Minassian, Reginald Teague-Jones: Au service secret de l’Empire britannique (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2012).

183. On the tendency of historical accounts to overstate the unity of purpose and organization among the Basmachi, see William Myer, Islam and Colonialism: Western Perspectives on Soviet Asia (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), 79–83. On the Basmachi in general, see Marie B. Broxup, “The Basmachi,” Central Asian Survey 2, no. 1 (1983): 57–81; Joseph Castagné, Les Basmatchis: Le mouvement national des indigenes d’Asie Centrale depuis la Révolution d’octobre 1917 jusqu’en 1924 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1925); Glenda Fraser, “Basmachi,” Central Asian Survey 6, no. 1 (1987): 1–71 and no. 2: 7–42; Martha B. Olcott, “The Basmachi or Freemen’s Revolt in Turkestan, 1918–1924,” Soviet Studies 33, no. 3 (1981): 352–69; and William S. Ritter, “The Final Phase in the Liquidation of Anti-Soviet Resistance in Tadzhikistan: Ibrahim Bek and the Basmachi, 1924–1931,” Soviet Studies 37, no. 4 (1985): 484–93.

184. Baymirza Hayit, Turkestan im XX. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt: Leske, 1956), 173 (emphasis added).

185. Elikhman, Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke, 19; and G. F. Krivosheeva, ed., Grif sekretnosti sniat: Poteri vooruzhennykh sil SSSR v voinakh, boevykh deistviiakh i voennykh konfliktakh (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1993), 62.

186. See Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996).

187. Hence the title of one early study of the Soviet–Polish War: Viscount E. V. d’Abernon, The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World: Warsaw, 1920 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1931).

188. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (London: Faber, 1937).