Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

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aaltonen, ali (Aleksi) (1884–August 1918). Lieutenant (1905). The most prominent commander of Red Finnish forces during the Finnish Civil War, Ali Aaltonen was born at Jämsä, in western Finland, and attended school at Jyväskylä. Having dropped out of school in 1903 to join the imperial army, he saw action in the Russo–Japanese War, but was demoted and imprisoned due to his association with socialist groups during the 1905 Revolution. He worked subsequently as a journalist in Finland, writing for left-wing newspapers under the pseudonym “Ali Baba.” In 1917, he was active in creating Red Guard units at Helsingfors, leading them in battles against the Whites during the Finnish Civil War, notably at Näsilinna and Tampere. He was subsequently removed from his command (allegedly because of alcoholism) and was later taken captive by White Finnish forces at Villähde railway station. Aaltonen was held at the Hennala prison camp, near Lahti, where he was soon thereafter executed by an Estonian officer, Hans Kalm, who was serving with the White Finns.

ABKHAZI, KONSTANTINE (“KOTE”) (17 November 1867–19 May 1923). Colonel (8 November 1915), major general (1916), general (Georgian Army, 1918). A leading figure in Georgian military and political affairs of the civil-war period, Prince Kote Abkhazi was born into an ancient and influential noble family at Kardenakhi (in the Kakheti region of eastern Georgia) and was a graduate of the Tiflis Cadet Corps and the 1st Pavlovsk Military School (1886). He joined the Russian Army in 1890 and rose to the command of the 4th Battery of the Caucasus Grenadiers Artillery Brigade, but later concentrated on public affairs and economic development in Georgia (having retired from military service on 21 March 1911). On 13 January 1913, he was elected as marshal of the Georgian nobility, but he was remobilized in 1914, and during the First World War he served on the Eastern Front before transferring to Tiflis, on the orders of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, to organize support for the war effort among the Georgian nobility. He was reelected as marshal of the Georgian nobility on 4 June 1916, and in 1917 he helped found the liberal National Democratic Party of Georgia (becoming its leader in 1920, following work on its central committee).

In May 1918, Abkhazi was actively involved in the declaration of Georgian independence and was subsequently elected to the Georgian Constituent Assembly, but he is best remembered for the key role he played as one of the founders of the army of the Democratic Republic of Georgia. Following the Soviet invasion of Georgia in February 1921, he joined the Committee for the Independence of Georgia and, as head of its Military Center, helped form anti-Soviet guerrilla groups, including some of those involved in the Kakhet–Kevsureti rebellion. In March 1923, alongside 14 other members of the organization, he was captured by Soviet forces, condemned to death by the local Cheka, and subsequently executed at a location on the outskirts of Tiflis. In 2008, Lezilidze Street, in central Tblisi, was renamed Kote Abkhazi Street in his honor.

Abkhazia, Socialist Soviet Republic of. This short-lived Soviet polity, with an area of some 6,000 square miles and its capital at Sukhumi (and which had previously been, formally, a semiautonomous province of the Democratic Republic of Georgia), was established on 31 March 1921, at the conclusion of the Soviet–Georgian War, following a declaration of the Bolsheviks’ Abkhazian Revolutionary Committee summoned by G. K. Ordzhinikidze. The Abkhazian SSR never obtained full, union-level republican status (although it was sometimes erroneously referred to as such even in official documents). Rather, it had a special (and somewhat ambiguous) “treaty republic” status, through which it was associated (from 16 December 1921) with the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (and was subordinate to it in some areas, including military affairs) and thus (from 12 March 1922) the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, making it (from 30 December 1922) part of the USSR. On 19 February 1931, the republic’s status was clarified when it was downgraded to an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Georgian SSR.

Above-Party Democratic Union. Formed on 26 July 1920 in Paris, this short-lived, anti-Bolshevik émigré organization united Mensheviks and nonparty figures but was dominated by centrist and right-leaning members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (such as A. F. Kerensky, V. M. Zenzinov, and I. M. Brushvit). Its stated aim was to prepare for and to assist anti-Bolshevik rebellions in Soviet Russia and to develop the nucleus of a national “insurgent army” on Soviet territory that might fight to reestablish a new Russian federation uniting most of the territories of the former Russian Empire. The union received clandestine financial assistance from the Czechoslovak government (and may also have obtained subsidies from France and Great Britain), as it established branches in all European states bordering Russia. In the dying days of the civil wars, it paid particular attention to developments in the North Caucasus and along the shores of the Black Sea, where pockets of armed resistance to the Soviet government endured. However, its greatest success was in the sphere of publishing: it founded and initially financed the influential émigré journals Sovremennye zapiski (“Contemporary Notes,” Paris, 1920–1940) and Volia Rossii (“The Will of Russia,” Prague, 1921–1934) and was responsible for numerous other publications. Divisions soon opened, however, between its Rightist (Paris) and Leftist (Prague and Tallinn) tendencies, while suspicions were also aroused among members that Kerensky was using the union to promote himself as the figurehead of the democratic emigration. The organization dissolved in April 1922, when its funding dried up.

Abramov, Fedor Fedorovich (23 December 1870–8 March 1963). Colonel (December 1905), major general (10 January 1914), lieutenant general (November 1916). One of the most senior and distinguished White generals during the civil wars in South Russia, F. F. Abramov was a graduate of the Petrovsk-Poltava Cadet Corps, the 3rd Military Aleksandrovsk School, the Nicholas Engineering School. and the Academy of the General Staff (1898). He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War, as a staff officer with the Manchurian Army and was then on the directorate of the quartermaster general of the commander in chief in the Far East. In 1912, he was placed in command of the 1st St. Petersburg Uhlan Regiment; during the First World War he served as head of the Tver′ Cavalry School, then as quartermaster general of the 12th Army (from 22 January 1915), and was then, successively, in command of the 15th Cavalry Division (from 9 September 1915), the Voisko Staff of the Don Cossack Host (from 1 January 1917), the 3rd Don Cossack Division (from March 1917), and the 1st Don Cossack Corps (from September 1917).

In late 1917, in the aftermath of the October Revolution, Abramov made his back way to the Don and commanded a partisan unit against the Reds. Following the rising of the Don Cossack Host against Soviet power, he was named commander of the 1st Don Cavalry Division (April 1918). In that capacity, he successfully defended Novocherkassk against Red Army advances in early 1919. From November 1919 to March 1920, he was inspector of cavalry of the Don Army of the Armed Forces of South Russia, and in April 1920 he was named by General P. N. Wrangel as commander of the Don Corps, consisting of those Don Cossack troops that had managed to pass into Crimea. He led this force in the major battles in the northern Tauride from August to November 1920 and was evacuated with his men from Kerch on 4 November 1920. He remained with his men in the camps at Çatalca (Chatalja, near Constantinople) and then (from 25 March 1921) on Lemnos, before leading them into Bulgaria. On 11 October 1922, he moved to Wrangel’s headquarters at Sremski Karlovci, near Belgrade, as assistant commander in chief of the Russian Army. In 1924, he returned to Bulgaria as commander of all Russian forces in that country and chief of the 3rd Section of ROVS. In 1930, Abramov became deputy chairman of ROVS and briefly led the organization (September 1937–March 1938) after the abduction of General E. K. Miller. According to some accounts, he was either wittingly or unwittingly used as an agent of the NKVD, as his son (Nikolai Fedorovich) had been recruited by the Soviet security services before escaping from the USSR to join his father abroad in 1931. During the Second World War, he collaborated with the Germans, was engaged in the formation of Cossack units to fight against the USSR, and was a member of General A. A. Vlasov’s Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia. As such, he was a signatory of the “Prague Manifesto” (14 November 1944) that called for the overthrow of J. V. Stalin and the establishment of a democratic Russia in alliance with Nazi Germany. In 1948, Abramov moved to the United States, where he was killed in a car accident on 8 March 1963. He is buried in the St. Vladimir Cemetery in Jackson, New Jersey.

ACADEMY OF THE GENERAL STAFF. Founded in 1832, in St. Petersburg, as the Imperial Military Academy, this institution (known, formally, from 1855 to 1909 as the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff and from 1909 as the Imperial Nicholas Military Academy) for training elite officers of the Russian Army supplied many of the commanders of both the Red and the White armies of the civil wars. As might be expected, virtually the entire senior command staff of the major White armies (the Armed Forces of South Russia, the North-West Army, the Northern Army, the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, and the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel) were graduates of the academy. But so too were many Red Army commanders: notably, the successive main commanders of the Red Army Jukums Vācietis and S. S. Kamenev. Indeed, surprisingly, the academy may have supplied more Red commanders than White; according to some estimates, 75 percent of General Staff officers who fought in the civil wars served the Reds (although other sources indicate a figure closer to 50 percent). However, few genshtabisty remained prominent in the Soviet military establishment after 1921—those who did were generally removed from command posts and assigned to teaching work in the Red Military Academy and elsewhere—and most would fall victim to the first wave of purges in 1930–1931 (Operation “Spring”). (Exceptions included M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, S. S. Kamenev, B. M. Shaposhnikov, V. N. Egorev, A. E. Snesarev, and A. I. Kork). The academy also trained many of the military leaders of regions of the former Russian Empire that sought to break away from Russia during the civil wars: notably, the Ukrainians Alexander Andronikashvili, Marko Bezruchko, Oleksandr Hrekiv, N. L. Iunakov, Mykola Kapustianskiy, Mykhailo Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko, Oleksandr Oset′skii, Aleksandr Ragoza, I. V. Safonov, Vladimir Sinkler, and Oleksandr Udovichenko, as well as Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii; the Estonians Andres Larka, Johan Laidoner, and Jaan Soots; the Armenian Tovmas Nazarbekian; and the Georgians Alexander Andronikashvili, Giorgi Kvintadze, and Ilia Odishelidze; as well as G. V. E. Mannerheim and J. K. Piłsudski of Finland and Poland, respectively. Entry to the academy was very competitive and was based on merit, not social status, with the consequence that many of its graduates were of relatively humble social status (not least the White commander General A. I. Denikin). Each year, during the last few decades prior to the First World War, some 1,500 officers were nominated for entry to the academy by their superiors and sat the entrance examination, but only about 150 gained entry, only about 100 would complete the course, and only 50 would be appointed to staff duties.

Taken over in late 1917 by the Soviet government, from March 1918 the institution was formally based at Ekaterinburg (although its staff, library, and other resources were not fully removed to the east until 1 July of that year), and on 3 May 1918 it was renamed the Red Military Academy. Following the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion in late May 1918, however, it was decided that the academy (and its 300 or so registered students) should be relocated again in the summer of 1918 to Kazan′. However, as Soviet power collapsed east of the Volga and the Democratic Counter-Revolution flared (Ekaterinburg was captured by Czech forces on 20 July 1918), many academicians and students took the opportunity to desert. (Only 33 full-time students and 93 registered in abridged courses arrived at Kazan′.)

The academy’s operations were then transferred first to Omsk and then to Tomsk, where the institution was renamed the All-Russian Academy of the General Staff (from 30 March 1919, the Military Academy) and was subordinated to the chief of staff of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. At Tomsk, in May 1919, it graduated 158 officers. In October–November 1919, the academy was evacuated to Russian Island, off Vladivostok, where it remained until its dispersal during the Whites’ abandonment of the port in late October 1922. In 1923, what could be salvaged of the academy’s library and other resources were sent to the Red Military Academy in Moscow.

Commanders of the Academy of the General Staff were General A. I. Andogskii (July 1917–23 October 1922) and General A. I. Medvedev (acting, from 23 October 1922).

ACT OF ZLUKA. Signed on 22 January 1919 on St. Sophia Square in central Kiev, by representatives of the Ukrainian National Republic and the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Act of Zluka (“Act of Unification”) symbolically united all allegedly “Ukrainian” territories in a “great, united Ukraine” (although both signatories retained their separate armies and governments, and some of the territories claimed were not under Ukrainian control at that moment). On 22 January 1990, some 300,000 Ukrainians formed a human chain from Kiev to L′vov to mark the anniversary of the agreement, and on 21 January 1999, the president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, decreed that henceforth 22 January would be celebrated as a national holiday, the “Day of the Union of Ukraine.”

ADMINISTRATION FOR WESTERN ARMENIA. See WESTERN ARMENIA, ADMINISTRATION FOR.

ADMINISTRATIVE COUNCIL. Formed at Omsk on 24 August 1918, on the initiative of the center-right elements of the Provisional Siberian Government (notably G. K. Gins, P. V. Vologodskii, I. I. Serebrennikov, and G. B. Patushinskii), this body was an important tool in their undermining of the more radical ministers of that government (chiefly members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries and adherents of Siberian regionalism), who understood their authority as deriving from their earlier election to the Siberian Regional Duma and/or to the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia. The council included the heads of all governmental departments and had the authority to discuss all draft laws. It also reserved for itself the deciding vote in the filling of senior administrative positions. Its members spoke out against the reconvention of the Siberian Regional Duma in August 1918, supported the candidature of A. N. Grishin-Almazov as head of the Siberian Army in early September 1918, and later that month, finally marked the Right’s ascendancy in the power struggle within the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia when the regionalist ministers were forced to resign during the Novoselov affair.

ADZHAR AUTONOMOUS SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. This Soviet polity, covering some 2,000 square miles, with its capital at Batumi and a population consisting largely of Georgian Muslims, was established on 16 July 1921, following the conclusion of the Soviet–Georgian War and the Georgian–Turkish War. Adzharia, which had been ceded to Russia by the Ottoman Empire in the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878, had been overrun by Turkish troops in mid-1918 and was subsequently occupied by a British force, but was reunited with the Democratic Republic of Georgia in late 1920. Its territory was formally ceded to the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic by Article VI of the Treaty of Kars (13 October 1921).

AFANAS′EV, Fedor Mikhailovich (27 February 1883–1935). Lieutenant colonel (15 August 1916), colonel (1917). Of middle-class background, F. M. Afanas′ev, who became one of the most prominent military specialists serving with the Red Army during the civil wars, was a graduate of the Kazan′ Infantry Officers School (1904) and the Academy of the General Staff (1913). He fought in the Russo–Japanese War and during the First World War rose to such posts as chief of staff of the 3rd Infantry Division (5 February–3 November 1916), chief of communications of the 11th Army (3 November 1916–25 August 1917), quartermaster general of the 11th Army (25 August–3 November 1917), and chief of staff of the 11th Army (from 3 November 1917).

Afanas′ev volunteered for service in the Red Army in February 1918, initially occupying senior staff positions as assistant chief of the Operations Section of Main Directorate of the General Staff (16 February–26 May 1918) and then chief of the General Section of Vseroglavshtab (1 August–5 October 1918), before transferring to the active army on the Eastern Front to become chief of communications (5 October–1 November 1918) and then chief of staff of the 2nd Red Army (1 November 1918–1 October 1919). He then moved to the Caucasian Front, as its chief of staff (1 October 1919–23 February 1920) and then its deputy commander in chief (23 February–20 April 1920). Finally, he saw service as chief of staff to the commander of Red forces in Siberia (20 April 1920–30 June 1921) and as temporary assistant commander (4 May 1921), then temporary commander (from 25 November 1921), of Siberian forces. On 2 August 1922, Afanas′ev was named as assistant head of the Red Military Academy. He retired in 1924.

Afandiev (Efendiev), Sultan Majid (14 May 1887–21 April 1938). A founding member of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, Sultan Afandiev was born into the family of a small merchant at Shemakha (Şamaxı, west of Baku) and trained as a doctor at Kazan′ University, graduating in 1915. He was active in the revolutionary movement in Transcaucasia from 1902, and in 1904 he became one of the organizers of the Hummet party. Following the February Revolution he was elected to the Baku Soviet and was elected also to the organizing committee of Hummet.

In August 1918, with the invasion of Azerbaijan by the Turkish Army of Islam, Afandiev retreated with Red forces from Baku to Astrakhan, where he participated in the defense of that city. Subsequently, from 1920 to 1921, he served in the Muslim Affairs Department of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and as deputy chairman of the Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East of the RKP(b), before returning to Azerbaijan, where he was appointed to numerous senior party and governmental posts, notably People’s Commissar for Agriculture (1921–1924) and People’s Commissar for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection and chairman of the Central Control Commission of the Azerbaijan SSR (1924–1927), rising to chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Azerbaijan SSR (from 15 December 1931). Afandiev was arrested during the purges on 24 June 1937 and was subsequently executed at Baku. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

Agar, Augustus Willington Shelton (4 January 1890–30 December 1968). Lieutenant commander (Royal Navy, 1920), commander (Royal Navy, 1925), commodore (Royal Navy, 1943). The bane of Red naval forces in the Baltic, the British naval officer Augustus Agar was born at Kandy in Ceylon, the son of an Irish tea planter. He became a naval cadet on HMS Britannia, at Dartmouth in Devon, in 1904, and specialized in small boats. During the First World War, he served aboard HMS Hibernia, seeing action at Gallipoli in 1915–1916, and in March 1917 went to North Russia aboard HMS Iphigenia with a minesweeping flotilla. In late 1918, he accepted a mission from the intelligence services to ferry British agents (including Paul Dukes) in and out of Petrograd on coastal motorboats (CMBs) and set up a base at the Imperial St. Petersburg Yacht Club at Terijoki (Zelenogorsk), Finland.

In June 1919, Agar masterminded and led a Royal Navy CMB attack on the Red Baltic Fleet during the Krasnaia Gorka uprising that sank the cruiser Oleg, and he was subsequently (22 August 1919) awarded the Victoria Cross “for conspicuous gallantry.” He also participated in a similar attack on Kronshtadt in August 1919 that sank, among other vessels, the battleship Andrei Pervozvannyi and the submarine depot ship Pamiat Azova, and for this he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.

Agar remained in the Royal Navy between the wars (at one point serving on the royal yacht Britannia) and in the Second World War commanded vessels in the North Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean. On 5 April 1942, he was in command of HMS Dorsetshire when it was attacked and sunk by Japanese dive bombers off Ceylon. Agar was badly wounded and damaged his lungs by swallowing oil in the water before he was rescued. He was then placed on the retired list, but in 1943 he achieved the rank of commodore when he was appointed president and captain of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, London. He retired in 1946, and for the rest of his life ran a strawberry farm at Alton in Hampshire, England, where he is buried in the local cemetery. Agar’s Victoria Cross is on display at the Imperial War Museum, London, alongside his telescope. One of the CMBs from his squadron is preserved at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford, alongside other materials relating to his exploits in the Baltic.

AGITPROP. The agitation (speech) and propaganda (print, film, and the visual arts) campaigns that became a prominent feature of life in Soviet Russia were born in the course of the civil wars and usually referred to by the acronym “agitprop.” They were initially organized by a variety of Soviet institutions, but from August 1920 were coordinated under the general direction of the Agitation and Propaganda Section of the Central Committee of the RKP(b), which was first headed by R. P. Katanian. The department was responsible also for establishing the curricula of party schools, publishing Central Committee works, and other tasks.

Among the most innovative of the techniques of agitprop developed at this time were public spectacles and posters (including the famous ROSTA windows), while materials (usually filmic, theatrical, or pictorial, as a consequence of widespread peasant illiteracy) would be delivered to the countryside by the unique agit-trains of the period and assembled at agit-stations. The first agit-train, which was named after V. I. Lenin (and was at one point commanded by M. I. Kalinin), went into service on 13 August 1918; later additions to the fleet included The October Revolution (at one point commanded by G. I. Petrovskii) and The Red East, The Red Cossack and The Soviet Caucasus, whose names reflected their fields of operation. There was also at least one Soviet agit-ship, The Red Star (at one point staffed by Lenin’s wife, N. K. Krupskaia), which made summer voyages along the Volga in 1919 and 1920, towing a barge that contained an 800-seat cinema. The images and methods used in Soviet agitprop of the civil-war era combined a peculiar and uniquely effective mixture of the revolutionary modernism of artists such as V. V. Maiakovskii with elements of Russian folk art.

Agoev, Vladimir Konstantinovich (4 April 1885–12 August 1920). Colonel (1917), major general (1 March 1919). The son of an uriadnik (NCO) of the Terek Cossack Host, V. K. Agoev was a graduate of the Moscow (later Alekseev) Military School (1909) and during the First World War rose to the command of a regiment. Following the October Revolution, he returned to the Terek and was badly wounded in action against Red forces near Piatigorsk during the Terek Cossack uprising against Soviet power of June 1918. He survived, however, and in the Armed Forces of South Russia commanded the Terek-Astrakhan Regiment (December 1918–November 1919). Having distinguished himself in battle during the Mamontov raid, he was subsequently placed at the head of the 1st Terek Cossack Division of General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army (April–August 1920). Agoev was killed in action north of Seragoz during Wrangel’s advance into the northern Tauride in the summer of 1920.

AHARONYAN, AVETIS (1866–20 March 1948). A prominent Armenian author and activist in the national movement, Avetis Aharonyan became the first leader of his country during its brief independence in the civil-war period as premier of the Democratic Republic of Armenia. He was born at Iğdir, in Yerevan guberniia, and was a gradate of the Kevorkian School at Echmiadzin. After some years spent as a teacher (1886–1896), he traveled to Switzerland, where he studied history at Lausanne University (graduating in 1901) and became active in émigré Armenian circles as a journalist. Following a brief period studying literature at the Sorbonne, he returned to the Caucasus in 1902 and became editor of the newspaper Moujr (“The Hammer”). In 1906, he was appointed to the board of Droshak (“The Flag”), the official journal of the Dashnaks. He also worked as a headmaster at the Nersissian Academy in Tiflis, from 1907 to 1909. In 1909, he was arrested and imprisoned by the tsarist authorities and was subsequently reincarcerated on numerous occasions, but in 1911 he was able to bribe his way out of prison and returned to exile in Western Europe, settling in Switzerland.

Aharonyan returned to Transcaucasia in 1917 to become chairman of the Armenian National Council (30 May–1 August 1918). In that capacity, he proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Armenia (28 May 1918) and was one of the signatories of the Treaty of Batumi (4 June 1918) between Armenia and Turkey. In 1919, he led the Armenian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, signing the Treaty of Sèvres on behalf of Armenia (10 August 1920). Following the collapse of the Armenian republic, he lived in exile in Marseille. Aharonyan suffered a devastating stroke in 1934 and remained paralyzed until his death in 1948. He was the subject of the film Les Obsèques d’Avetis Ahronian (dir. Henri Verneuil, 1948).

AIRCRAFT. See AIR FORCES (RED); AIR FORCES (WHITE).

AIR FORCES (RED). The Soviet government, which was already temperamentally predisposed toward the use of modern technology, inherited much of the rudimentary stock of aircraft and air-war facilities of the old regime (although Soviet sources claim that only 33 of 97 tsarist squadrons fell immediately into their hands). These were overseen by the All-Russian Aviation Board (attached to the Commissariat for War) from 20 December 1918, the Central Directorate of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Air Fleet (commanded by K. V. Akashev and attached to the Supreme Military Council) from May 1918, and ultimately, the Field Administration of Aviation and Airships (subordinate to the Revvoensovet of the Republic) from September 1918. Airship formations took virtually no part in the civil wars, but by late 1918 the Red Army had a frontline strength of some 350 aircraft. These included various French Caudrons and Moranes, Italian Ansaldos, and British Napiers, as well as some Albatrosses, Fokkers, and Halberstadts left behind from the Austro-German intervention. Soviet forces also had use of more than 100 Grigorovich float planes; a handful of Russian Lebeds; and a division of about 25 Muromets, four-engined bombers that were manufactured in Russia. These would be supplemented by some Sopwiths, Spads, and de Havillands (DH-4s, DH-9s, and DH-11s) captured from White forces in 1919 and 1920.

Most pilots of the tsarist service fought for the Whites, so to make good the pilot shortage on Red territory, young Bolsheviks were handpicked and rapidly taught how to fly (unknown numbers were killed in training). Red squadrons tended to be small (usually consisting of just six planes), were spread thinly around the fronts, and were frequently and heavily outnumbered by their opponents. In North Russia, for example, Soviet air units mustered only about a dozen planes in early 1919, while their White and interventionist opponents deployed at least 100. Around Astrakhan, the Red Army had one supporting squadron (no. 47), with only one or two of its planes being airworthy at any one time, while the crack 1st Cavalry Army controlled some 15 planes but never had more than a dozen pilots available to fly them.

Policy changed in late 1919, with the meager resources of aircraft available to the Reds being concentrated into more powerful and effective formations. For example, nearly 30 aircraft were gathered to harry White forces during the Mamontov raid in September 1919; more than 50 were deployed around Petrograd to support Red forces in their thwarting of the advance of the White North-West Army in October 1919; and over the following summer the first Sturmovik ground-attack air unit of 40 modernized Muromets bombers (relabeled Red Muromets), with a 10-strong fighter escort, was used to make low-level raids on the White forces of General P. N. Wrangel, dropping 10-pound fragmentation bombs on them. Red balloon detachments, directly subordinate to ground forces or military flotillas, were also formed during the civil wars, with 25 of them in existence by late 1920s, each containing two balloons (of 1,000–12,000 cubic meters), one balloon car, and gas-producing equipment. These were often transported on armored trains, as also aircraft could be.

Research and development of Red air forces was also concentrated, from as early as 1 December 1918, in the Central Institute of Aerodynamics and Hydrodynamics (TsAGI) under Professor N. E. Zhukovskii, who also founded the Air-Technical College in Moscow (renamed the Institute of Red Air Fleet Engineers in 1919). By 1920, the first Soviet-built, 200 horsepower aero-engine was produced in Moscow, and by 1922, under the auspices of TsAGI, A. N. Tupolev had designed the groundbreaking, metal-built ANT-1 aircraft. Also, by late 1920, seven aviation parks were in existence for serious repair work (at Petrograd, Iaroslavl′, Kazan′, Nizhnii Novgorod, Kiev, Tver′, and Samara). As a consequence of the improvements made in late 1919, more than 10,000 sorties were made by Red aircraft from 1920 to 1921, compared to fewer than 3,000 in the earlier period of the civil wars (even though at all times more than one-third of the total air strength of the Red Air Fleet was under repair). However, the contribution made by air forces to the Soviet victory in the civil wars was minimal in comparison to the part played by ground forces.

AIR FORCES (WHITE AND INTERVENTIONIST). As was the case with tanks and armored trains, the anti-Bolshevik forces in the “Russian” Civil Wars inherited comparatively few of the air forces and depots of the tsarist army (although they did attract more trained pilots than the Reds) and lacked the industrial capacity to construct aircraft. They therefore relied almost entirely on machines imported by the Allies, or on (usually damaged) aircraft captured from the Reds.

The Czechoslovak Legion was the exception, having taken with it into Siberia a number of Russian biplanes built at Odessa. These were later supplemented by aircraft donated to the legion by the United States. The Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak had a small number of French and British aircraft, which were shipped to the Urals front from Vladivostok. In North Russia, an RAF flight (equipped with de Havilland DH-4 day bombers) that landed at Murmansk on 22–23 June 1918 was supplemented the following month by the seaplane carrier HMS Nairana, carrying Fairey Campania, Sopwith Baby floatplanes, and a single Sopwith Camel fighter. These assisted White forces in the capture of Akhangel′sk from the Reds on 2 August 1918 and were the spearhead of a considerably larger force that came to be deployed in the region over the coming months. Britain also provided significant air assistance to the forces of General N. N. Iudenich in northwest Russia (as well as to his Estonian allies in the Estonian War of Independence), although efforts by Iudenich to purchase surplus aircraft from the United States in late 1919 came too late (the more than 1,000 surplus U.S. aircraft in France having already been sold).

Particularly large numbers of Allied and White aircraft were in operation in South Russia, notably, on land the RAF’s no. 47 squadron (of DH-9s and Sopwith Camels), which was transferred from Greece to support the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) in April 1919, and no. 17 squadron; and at sea no. 266 squadron (consisting of Short-184 seaplanes), deployed on the carriers HMS Alexander Youssanoff and HMS Orlionoch. Officially, the British planes were meant to support the Whites but not fly combat missions, but no. 47 squadron participated effectively in the siege of Tsaritsyn (raiding river barges and Red military flotillas and bombing troop concentrations). Using a consignment of aircraft from demobilizing British units in the Middle East, the mission also helped to train some Russian pilots and ground crew before being disbanded and withdrawn from Russia in October 1919, leaving its planes (including a consignment of RE8s, which had finally arrived in the region) for the Whites. Most of the aircraft controlled by General A. I. Denikin were lost to the Reds or were destroyed before they could be captured during the collapse of the AFSR in early 1920 (several were deliberately crushed by a tank and shoved into the harbor at Novorossiisk), and according to General P. N. Wrangel, his forces had the services of only some 20 or 30 aircraft in Crimea (it is uncertain whether this figure included the few Albatrosses left behind at Sevastopol′ by the Germans, also mentioned by Wrangel). These were organized into six squadrons under General V. M. Tkachev.

Finally, Poland deployed a considerable air force against the Reds during the Soviet–Polish War, including the famous Kościuszko Squadron, which was crewed by American volunteer pilots, among them Captain Merian C. Cooper. He was shot down by Red forces on 26 July 1920 and spent nine months in a prison camp before escaping via Latvia. In later life, Cooper would cowrite, codirect, and fly a plane in the famous closing scene of the feature film King Kong (1933).

AKASHEV, KONSTANTIN VASIL′EVICH (22 October 1888–9 April 1931). Akashev, a proponent of anarchism who supported the Bolsheviks (and became the first commander of Soviet air forces), was born at Liutinsk in Vitebsk guberniia and was educated at a gymnasium in Dvinsk. He joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries in 1906 and conducted agitation among the Belorussian peasantry before moving to St. Petersburg in 1907 and joining the anarchists associated with the newspaper Buntar (“The Rebel”). He was arrested on 14 April 1907, at Kiev, and in May 1908 was sentenced to four years in exile at Turukhansk, northern Siberia. He escaped in March 1909 and fled to Munich (after spells in Algeria and Berlin). In August 1910, he moved to Italy, where he enrolled in the G. B. Caproni flying school at Taliedo in Milan, receiving his pilot’s license in June 1911. He subsequently studied at the Higher Institute of Aviation and Mechanics in Paris, receiving an engineer’s diploma in 1914. Despite reports to the Okhrana that Akashev was involved in a plot to construct an anarchist squadron of light aircraft that was intended to bomb Nicholas II’s private yacht in the Gulf of Finland, he adopted a defensist line during the First World War, volunteered for the French army, attended a French military aviation school, and served briefly with the French air force on the Western Front. He returned to Russia in May 1915 and was promptly arrested. He was subsequently released, but his political unreliability made it impossible for him to find a post in the Russian Army, although he did eventually find a role as a test pilot near Petrograd and then as a technical advisor in an aviation factory in the capital.

Despite these activities, Akashev maintained contact with revolutionary organizations and was secretary of the Petrograd Anarchist-Communist Club from 1916. In 1917, he was an active anarchist agitator and during the October Revolution was a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Thereafter, he served the Soviet government as commissar of the Military Air Fleet (from December 1917), chair of the All-Russian College of Air Fleet Management (from 20 December 1917), commander of the air forces of the 5th Red Army (from September 1918, assisting in the Red Army’s recapture of Kazan′), and commander of aviation and the air fleet of the Southern Front (from December 1918). In August to September 1919, he was commander of the special air detachment that was directed against the Mamontov raid, personally piloting an Il′ia Muromets bomber in raids against enemy cavalry.

From March 1920 to February 1921, Akashev was again commander of Soviet air forces, but as the civil wars wound down, he was transferred to technical roles (attending international aviation conferences in London and Rome in 1922 and serving as chief aviation advisor to the Soviet mission at the Genoa Conference). He later worked in aviation factory management in Leningrad (the “Bolshevik” factory) and in Moscow. Akashev was arrested in 1929 and accused of counterrevolutionary activity but was subsequently released, only to be rearrested on 3 March 1930 and subsequently executed. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 1 September 1956.

Akintievskii, Konstantin Konstantinovich (14 October 1884–17 March 1962). Lieutenant colonel (15 August 1916), colonel (March 1919), major general (21 September 1919). A scion of the gentry of Chernigov guberniia, the White commander K. K. Akintievskii was a graduate of the Constantine Artillery School (1905) and the Academy of the General Staff (1913). During the First World War, he rose to senior adjutant of the Operations Section of the Staff of the 2nd Army (October 1917) before being sent to Khabarovsk Military District as its chief of staff.

Refusing to recognize Soviet power, Akintievskii moved to Harbin in January 1918 and worked there on the staff of General D. L. Khorvat’s anti-Bolshevik forces. In 1919 he moved to Omsk, as chief of the Quartermaster Section of the Main Staff (from May 1919) of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, then served as chief of the General Section of the Staff of the Supreme Commander (June–July 1919), chief of the Field Staff of the Supreme Commander (July 1919), and chief of staff of the 2nd Army (22 July–12 November 1919). Following the collapse of the White movement in Siberia, he moved to Chita and became quartermaster general and then assistant chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Commander of the Russian Eastern Region (Ataman G. M. Semenov). On 30 April 1920, he was named chief of staff to General N. A. Lokhvitskii and subsequently held the same post under General G. A. Verzhbitskii (3 May–28 July 1920). Following the collapse of Semenov’s hold on Transbaikalia, he moved to the Maritime Province and then, in 1922, went emigrated to Harbin. In September 1935, Akintievskii was expelled from the area for his criticisms of the Japanese occupiers, moving first to Shanghai and then to the United States.

AKTIUBINSK FRONT. This Red front was created on 24 April 1919, on the orders of the Revvoensovet of the Turkestan ASSR. It was renamed the Northern Front of the Turkestan ASSR on 29 May 1919, and from 1 June 1919 became the North-Eastern Front of the Turkestan ASSR. It was created to oppose advancing forces of the Southern Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, which was operating along the Orenburg–Aktiubinsk railway; indeed, operations on the Aktiubinsk Front chiefly had the character of a railway war. Despite attempts at counterattacks, Red forces were driven back along the railway to Chelkar, just north of the Aral Sea. Only in September 1919 was the situation reversed, when forces of the 1st Red Army broke through from Orenburg and Orsk. Forces of the Aktiubinsk Front were then absorbed into the 1st Red Army.

Commanders of the Aktiubinsk Front were N. F. Seliverstov (25 April–8 May 1919); M. M. Krasnoshchekov (8–27 May 1919); G. A. Koluzaev (27 May–24 June 1919); A. I. Astrakhantsev (24 June–19 August and 8 September–3 October 1919); and D. E. Konovalov (acting, 19 August–8 September 1919).

Akulinin (akulin), Ivan Grigor′evich (12 January 1880/1883–26 November 1944). Colonel (8 August 1916), major general (1 October 1918). Born into a Cossack family at Urliadinskii stanitsa, Orenburg guberniia, I. G. Akulinin was second in command of his native Orenburg Cossack Host for the Whites for much of the civil wars. He had volunteered for military service in 1900 and, after graduating from the Orenburg Cossack Officer School (1903), saw action in the Russo–Japanese War and served in the 14th Orenburg Regiment and the Independent Cossack Regiment from 1905 to 1910, before entering the Academy of the General Staff, from which he graduated in 1913. Thereafter he was engaged by the academy in writing a history of the Orenburg Cossack Host and taught at the Officer Cavalry School in St. Petersburg. After serving as a senior adjutant with the 3rd Don Cossack Division (from 2 February 1915), for most of the First World War (October 1915–October 1917) he worked as a teacher of tactics at the Vladimir Military School Corps of Pages, but left his post and headed to the Orenburg Host territory after the October Revolution.

Back at Orenburg, Akulinin was chosen as assistant to Ataman A. I. Dutov, with whom he worked closely during the Red Army’s siege of Orenburg (January–July 1918) and was a member of the Host government (August 1918–February 1919). He subsequently was made commander of the 2nd Orenburg Cossack Corps (February–July 1919) and later the 1st Orenburg Cossack Corps (August–September 1919), as part of the reformed Southern Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. As the White forces in the east collapsed, in September 1919 Akulinin led an isolated, 2,000-strong contingent of Cossacks that found its way westward to unite with the remains of the Urals Army. In November 1919, however, he was removed from his command posts by General V. S. Tolstov and moved on again, with a small contingent of his men, sailing across the Caspian from Fort Aleksandrovsk to Daghestan (February 1920) to unite with the remaining forces of A. I. Denikin. Arriving at the point of the destruction of the Armed Forces of South Russia, however, and being unable to secure evacuation from Novorossiisk, Akulinin was forced to lead his men across the border into Georgia, where they were briefly disarmed and interned before being allowed to sail from Batumi to join General P. N. Wrangel in Crimea. This Orenburg Cossack contingent was placed in the reserve of Wrangel’s Russian Army, and even before the evacuation of Crimea, Akulinin settled down to the literary and historical work with which he was to be engaged for much of his life after emigrating to Serbia and (from 1928) France; he was involved with the editing and writing of numerous Cossack publications. On 16 February 1923, he was elected ataman of the Orenburg Cossack Host, and he subsequently served as chairman of the Cossack Union. He is buried in Paris, in the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.

AKUTIN, VLADIMIR IVANOVICH (13 June 1861–27 December 1919?). Esaul (1 July 1897), colonel (6 December 1910), major general (16 May 1915), lieutenant general (14 November 1918). The White Cossack commander V. I. Akutin was born into the family of an officer of the Urals Cossack Host and was a graduate of the Orenburg Cossack School (1880) and the Nicholas Cavalry Officers School (1901). Prior to the First World War, he commanded several Cossack formations, rising to the post of ataman of the 2nd (Lbishchensk) Section of the Urals Host (from 29 January 1913). During the First World War, he commanded the 4th Urals Cossack Regiment (from 9 August 1914) and from 1916 was commander of the 1st Brigade of the Urals Cossack Division.

Following the collapse of the Imperial Russian Army and the October Revolution, Akutin led a troop of Urals Cossacks back to their Host territory, arriving at Ural′sk on 29 December 1917. There he joined the Host government and, following the rising against Soviet power, was placed in command of the Urals Army (21 September–14 November 1918), but he was removed from that post by a decision of the Host congress. He was also a candidate for the post of ataman of the Urals Cossack Host but was not elected. He then commanded the Saratov group of forces of the Urals Army but, after the fall of Ural′sk to the Reds in January 1919, left the front and went to Kalmykov (Taipak) in Kazakhstan. He later returned to active service and from 14 June 1919 commanded the 2nd Iletsk Corps of the Urals Army, chiefly in its defense of Gur′ev. He was captured by Red forces (although some sources indicate that his captors were loyal to Alash Orda) on 27 December 1919 and, according to most sources, was executed that same day at Kyzyl-Kuga (although others have it that he was taken to Moscow and shot in 1920).

Alad′in, Aleksei Fedorovich (15 March 1873–1927). Born into a peasant family at Novikovka, Samara guberniia, the Populist A. A. Al′adin entered the Natural Sciences Faculty of Kazan′ University in 1892, but was expelled in 1896 for participating in illegal revolutionary organizations. After nine months in administrative exile in northern Russia, he escaped abroad. He returned to Russia in 1905 to help organize the All-Russian Peasants’ Union and was elected by the peasant curia of Samara guberniia to the First State Duma, where he became a leading member of the Trudovik faction (although he often supported the Kadets). In July 1906, he was sent on a mission to London by the Duma, and he remained abroad following the dispersal of the Duma by Nicholas II, returning only after the February Revolution (having served in the British army during the First World War). In the summer of 1917, he became an advisor to General L. G. Kornilov and was one of the inspirers of the Kornilov affair. He was arrested by the Provisional Government in September 1917, but escaped and, having resolved to join the Whites, made his way to Novocherkassk, where he became a political advisor to the Volunteer Army and liaised with foreign missions. In November 1920, he was evacuated from Crimea with the remnants of the Russian Army and emigrated, settling in London, where he died.

ALAFUSO, MIKHAIL IVANOVICH (31 December 1891–13 July 1937). Komkor (25 November 1935). The Soviet military commander M. I. Alafuso was the son of a naval officer and was raised at Nikolaev, Kherson guberniia. He was a graduate of the Academy of the General Staff and served in the First World War as a senior adjutant on the staff of the 62nd Infantry Division (12 April–October 1916) and as a senior staff officer with the 38th Army Corps (October 1916–5 October 1917).

Alafuso joined the Red Army in early 1918 and served as chief of the operational department of the forces of the Dno–Pokhrovsk region (February–March 1918); from 28 June 1918 he held an identical position with the 3rd Red Army. From 31 August 1918 to 26 October 1919 and from 7 October to 9 November 1919, he was chief of staff of the 3rd Red Army, between those times serving as its acting commander. Following a period as a member of a special registration commission of the Red Army (from December 1919), he served as chief of staff of the 13th Red Army (20 June–13 October 1920) and then chief of staff of the South-West Front (December 1920). He then became chief of staff of the Kiev Military District (28 December 1920–4 March 1921), chief of staff of the Moscow Military District (4 March 1921–April 1924), chief of staff of the North Caucasus Military District (from April 1924), deputy commander of the North Caucasus Military District (from May 1925), and chief of staff of the Red Banner Caucasian Army (February 1927–1935). From 1935, Alafuso was head of the mobilization department of the Red Military Academy. He was arrested on 15 April 1937 and, having been found guilty of espionage and membership in a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization, on 13 July of that year was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. He was executed that same day. Alafuso was buried in a mass grave in the Donskoi cemetery in Moscow. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 12 November 1960.

ALASH ORDA. Named after Alash (the mythical founder of the Kazakh people) and Orda (the governmental structure of the Mongols and their Kazakh successors), Alash Orda was the politically moderate party of mainly upper-class Kazakh nationalists that was founded in March 1917. The party was close to the Kadets on many issues, but also had links to (and adapted or adopted many of the policies of) the Mensheviks and the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries. Its crowning achievement was the proclamation of Kazakh autonomy at the Third All-Kazakh Congress at Orenburg on 5–13 December 1917 (attended by delegates from the eight provinces of Russian Turkestan).

Alash Orda then also became the name of the Kazakh provisional government, largely based on that party, that ruled parts of the Steppe region between December 1917 and May 1920. The first capital was Semey (Semipalatinsk), which was renamed Alash, and where sat a 25-man governing council, in which 10 places were reserved for non-Kazakhs, while local councils were established at uezd level. The authority of the government was proclaimed over the Bukeev Orda and the Ural, Turgan, Akmolisnsk, Semipalatinsk, Semirechensk, and Syrdar′insk oblasti, as well as those areas of the Samarkand, Transcaspian, and Ferghana oblasti and Altai guberniia that were dominated by Kazakhs. Discussions with the Soviet authorities having yielded little by way of compromise on the part of Moscow, during the spring and summer of 1918, Alash Orda made contact with a number of anti-Bolshevik forces, including the Orenburg Cossack Host, Komuch, and the Provisional Siberian Government, eventually signing a series of political and military agreements with the last of these, among which was one placing its armed forces (the 1st Alash Mounted Regiment) under the operational command of the Siberian Army. Subsequently, in August 1918, all Soviet laws were said to be revoked on the territory of Alash Orda. However, on 11 September 1918, developments in the fighting of the civil wars (as well as the impossibility of establishing a single administration across a region populated by so many mutually hostile groups) forced the division of the regime into a Western Alash Orda (at Zhambeitu, Urals oblast′) and Eastern (formerly the main) Alash Orda, with the latter having also to transfer its capital from Semipalatinsk to Zhana Semei. On 4 November 1918, Kazakh autonomy (like that of other regions and peoples) was annulled by the Ufa Directory.

Finally, the rise of the White government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak at Omsk in November 1918 put an end to any hope of assistance from Russian anti-Bolsheviks; consequently, between May and November 1919, having obtained guarantees about the autonomous future of Kazakhstan and an amnesty for their troops, most of the leaders of Alash Orda (including Ahmet Baytursynov, Ali-khan Bukeykhanov, and Mirjaqip Dulatuli) accommodated themselves to one degree or another with the Soviet authorities. In March 1920, the latter abolished the institutional structures of Alash Orda and on 26 August 1920 proclaimed the Kazakh ASSR. In the absence of a strong cadre of Kazakh Bolsheviks, many of the leaders of Alash Orda remained influential under the Soviet regime of the 1920s, but they then fell victim to the purges of the 1930s, accused of “bourgeois nationalism” and pan-Turkism, and the movement was extinguished. After 1990 the name “Alash” was resurrected as the title of a small Kazakh pan-Turkic and Pan-Islamic (formally “National Patriotic”) party and its journal.

Alekseev, Mikhail Vasil′evich (3 November 1857–8 October 1918). Major general (28 May 1904), lieutenant general (7 October 1908), general of infantry (24 September 1914). One of the founders of the White movement and one of the most accomplished Russian officers of his generation, M. V. Alekseev was born at Tver′, the son of an army captain (and veteran of the siege of Sevastopol′). He was a graduate of the Moscow Infantry Officers School (1876) and the Academy of the General Staff (1890), fought in the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–1878 as a junior officer, taught at the academy for some years at the turn of the century, and during the Russo–Japanese War served as quartermaster general of the 3rd Manchurian Army. From 1906 to 1908, he was quartermaster general of the Main Directorate of the General Staff; from 1908 to 1912 was chief of staff of the Kiev Military District; and from 1912 to 1914 was commander of the 13th Army Corps. Upon the outbreak of the First World War, he was made chief of staff of the South-West Front (August 1914–March 1915) and was then commander of the North-West Front (22 March–18 August 1915). When Nicholas II took personal command of the army, Alekseev was named his chief of staff and in that capacity had effective direction of all Russia’s military operations (August 1915–March 1917).

After Nicholas’s abdication (which Alekseev had counseled), he was named main commander in chief of the Russian Army (3 March–22 May 1917), but was replaced by the more attack-minded General A. A. Brusilov prior to the June offensive. Alekseev had also been openly critical of the government’s democratization of the army in a speech he made to the First Congress of the Officers’ Union (of which he was honorary president). Following the Kornilov affair, he became chief of staff again (30 August 1917) and arrested the main alleged conspirators, including General L. G. Kornilov (as well as Generals A. I. Denikin, A. S. Lukomskii, S. L. Markov, and others), but in effect took them under his protection, seeking to save them from indictment as a traitors. As soon as he had safely incarcerated the men who would become the founding fathers of the White movement at Bykhov, Alekseev resigned in protest against the policies of Prime Minister A. F. Kerensky (11 September 1917) and went to join his family at Smolensk. He traveled to Petrograd on 7 October 1917, to speak at the Council of the Republic, and used the opportunity of his presence in the capital to begin the organization of a secret officers’ group. As head of this Alekseev organization, he could lay claim to have founded what became the nucleus of the White armies.

Following the October Revolution, Alekseev made his way to the territory of the Don Cossack Host and, with General Kornilov, began to build the Volunteer Army at Novocherkassk (from 2 December 1917). Alekseev left operational matters to Kornilov (and later, following Kornilov’s death, to General A. I. Denikin) and concentrated instead on developing the financial resources and organization of the volunteers. To this end, in August 1918 he established the Special Council as the government of the White forces in South Russia. However, Alekseev was not a well man by 1918, and his health declined further following his participation in both the First Kuban (Ice) March and the Second Kuban March. He was the favored candidate of the National Center and the right wing of the Kadet Party to lead a united all-Russian government, possibly as a military dictator, but was too ill to travel to the Ufa State Conference in September 1918. He died early the following month, either of a heart condition or pneumonia (sources differ) after a prolonged fight against cancer, at Ekaterinodar, and was buried there in the crypt of the (Kuban) Host Cathedral. Alekseev’s name was immediately immortalized by a regiment of the volunteers, who were rechristened the Alekseevtsy. In February 1920, following the collapse of the Armed Forces of South Russia, his remains were taken by his family to Serbia for reburial there in the New Cemetery, Belgrade.

ALEKSEEV ORGANIZATION. The embryo of the White movement in South Russia, this secret officer organization was created by General M. V. Alekseev in Petrograd in the aftermath of the Kornilov affair in late August 1917. The aim was to establish a network uniting all patriotically minded officers in military units, schools, and other establishments in the capital, in order that, should “extremist elements” attempt to seize power, a military formation could be put into the field to oppose them. By 25 October 1917, several thousand officers and officer cadets were affiliated with the organization, some of them being accommodated in disused factories, but only around 100 men, led by Staff Captain V. D. Parfenov, actually attempted to oppose the Bolshevik seizure of power by force during the October Revolution. On 30 October 1917, Alekseev gave the order for the organization to scatter and to regroup on the Don. The first of its members arrived at Novocherkassk on 2 November 1917, the date that may be considered the foundation day of the Volunteer Army.

ALEKSEEVSKII, ALEKSANDR NIKOLAEVICH (24 November 1878–?). A prominent figure in the Democratic Counter-Revolution in the Far East, A. N. Alekseevskii was born into a well-to-do family at Blagoveshchensk and was a graduate of the St. Petersburg Seminary (1903). He subsequently taught at a seminary in Blagoveshchensk but was dismissed for his radical beliefs. From 1905, as a member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) and an adherent of its terrorist wing, he was under constant police surveillance and was frequently arrested and imprisoned. He fled abroad to France in 1907 and became associated with the Ukrainian group of SRs before returning to Russia in 1917, to be elected mayor of Blagoveshchensk in August of that year, and was named commissar for the Amur region by the Provisional Government. He was also elected as a member of the Constituent Assembly, on the SR list for the Amur oblast′.

When Soviet power was proclaimed in the Far East following the October Revolution, Alekseevskii fought against it and was imprisoned by the local Bolsheviks in March 1918. He was released only in September of that year, with the arrival of Japanese forces in the area and the success of the anti-Bolshevik Gamov uprising, and subsequently established and led the Provisional Government of the Amur Region. When that authority was supplanted by the claims to all-Russian authority of the Omsk government, Alekseevskii became chairman of the regional zemstvo board and, after initial collaboration, offered resistance to the Whites. In late 1919, he joined the Political Center as it seized power at Irkutsk and subsequently served on the Extraordinary Investigatory Commission that interrogated the captured Admiral A. V. Kolchak in that city in January–February 1920. Alekseevskii then emigrated. He is known to have attended a meeting of members of the Constituent Assembly in the French capital in January 1921, but his subsequent fate is unknown.

ALEKSEEVTSY. This was the name given to one group of the colorful units of the Volunteer Army, the Armed Forces of South Russia, and the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel. It was named in honor of General M. V. Alekseev. The Alekseevtsy wore forage caps with a blue band and a white crown and blue epaulettes with white piping; caps and epaulettes featured a white badge with the letter “A.” The force had its origins in a partisan unit of young officers, cadets, and other volunteers formed at Ol′ginskaia stanitsa on 23–24 February 1918, as the Volunteer Army retreated from Rostov-on-Don at the commencement of the First Kuban (Ice) March. The majority of its early members were killed during the failed White assaults on Ekaterinodar and Stavropol′ during the spring of 1918. Its initial commander was General A. P. Bogaevskii (12 February–mid-March 1918); followed by General B. N. Kazanovich (mid-March–early June 1918); Colonel (later Major General) P. K. Pisarev (early June–15 December 1918); Colonel E. F. Emel′ianov (acting; October 1918); Colonel A. A. Gagarin (17 January–summer 1919); and Captain (later Colonel) P. G. Buzin (summer 1919–November 1920).

During this period, the partisan regiment was attached to several larger formations, including (from 1 September 1919) the 1st Infantry Division. It adopted Alekseev’s name following his death on 8 October 1918 and from 27 November of that year was formally the Partisan General Alekseev Infantry Regiment. From 14 February 1919, it was the 1st Mounted General Alekseev Regiment. From 14 October 1919, the regiment was combined with several other units (including the 9th Infantry Division and the Samurskii Regiment, the Independent Alekseev Engineering Regiment, and the Alekseev Artillery Brigade) to form the Alekseev Division, commanded by Major General A. N. Tret′iakov and Colonel M. A. Zviagin (from April 1920). Its chief of staff was Colonel V. K. Shevchenko (from 30 November 1919). As the defeated Whites fled into Crimea in 1919–1920, the Alekseevtsy were again reformed into the Independent Partisan General Alekseev Infantry Brigade (from 25 March 1920), which subsequently lost almost all its men during Wrangel’s disastrous attempt to send forces to the Kuban in August 1920. Nevertheless, many hundreds of survivors endeavored to maintain their organization and identity after emigrating, meeting regularly to reminisce and to sing their regimental song, “The March of the Alekseev Regiment.”

ALEXANDROPOL, TREATY OF (2 December 1920). This agreement ended the Turkish–Armenian War. Under its terms, the border between the two states returned to that defined by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). That (Soviet–Ottoman) settlement had been denounced by Democratic Republic of Armenia, which, despite having signed the Treaty of Batumi (4 June 1918), had subsequently sought to regain its “lost” territories (which in the meantime had been incorporated into the South-West Caucasian Republic) and had taken the opportunity to occupy them in 1919, after Turkey’s defeat in the First World War and its occupation by the Allies. Under Article X of the treaty, the chief Armenian signatory, Alexander Khatasian, also renounced the Treaty of Sèvres, according to which Erzurum, Bitlis, and the Van provinces of Ottoman (Western) Armenia, as well as the port of Trabzon, would have been granted to Armenia. However, the occupation of Armenia by Soviet forces in December 1920 meant that the treaty was not ratified by the Armenian Republic, and it was subsequently superseded by the Treaty of Moscow (16 March 1921) and the Treaty of Kars (23 October 1921).

Aliev, Osman. See Muetdin-bek (ALIEV, OSMAN).

ALIYEV, ERIS KHAN SULTAN GIREI (20 April 1855–1920). Major general (6 December 1903), lieutenant general (6 December 1907), general of infantry (6 December 1913, converted to general of artillery on 19 March 1914). The Chechen commander and politician Eris Khan Sultan Girei Aliyev was born in the Terek region and was a graduate of the Stavropol′ Classical Gymnasium, the 2nd Constantine Military School (1876), and the Mikhail Artillery School. He joined the Russian Army in 1873 and fought in both the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–1878 and the Russo–Japanese War. As the latter conflict wound down, on 13 August 1906 he joined the staff of the commander in chief of Russian forces in the Far East. From 16 May 1906, he commanded the 5th East Siberian Rifle Division and from 14 August 1908 the 2nd Siberian Corps. From 8 February 1914, he commanded the 4th Army Corps, participating with that force in most of the major operations in East Prussia and Poland in 1914 and 1915 and on the Romanian Front in 1916 and was much decorated.

Following the October Revolution, Aliyev was briefly pressed into the service of the Red Army, as an advisor to the Main Field Staff, but he deserted and made his way to Chechnia, arriving there in May 1918, and offered his services as a military specialist to the anti-Bolshevik Mountain Republic. In November 1918, he joined the Volunteer Army, but in March 1919 was named by a people’s congress in Groznyi as supreme ruler of Chechnia. He subsequently found himself in an invidious position, regarded by some Chechens as a White stooge for his attempts to curb excessive separatism among the mountain peoples, while the White command of General A. I. Denikin regarded him as a separatist. However, he soon tendered his resignation from that post in protest at the cruel treatment of the mountaineers by the White forces of General I. G. Erdeli. Sources indicate that when White forces in the region were replaced by the invading Bolsheviks in early 1920, Aliyev was arrested by the Cheka, imprisoned at Groznyi, and later executed. However, some believe he managed to evade arrest and made his way via Georgia to Turkey.

ALIZ-BEG-OGLI, MESHADI. See AZIZBEKOV (ALIZ-BEG-OGLI), MESHADI (MESHALI).

ALLIED BLOCKADE. The Allied blockade of Soviet Russia was introduced in the aftermath of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and (initially and formally) was an extension of the economic blockade of the Central Powers that had been a feature of Allied policy during the First World War. By the summer of 1918, all financial transactions with the new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic had been banned, and no goods were permitted to move either to or from Soviet Russia. Initially, food and medical supplies were exempted, but as the civil wars escalated and Allied military intervention expanded, these too came under the terms of the blockade.

Following the armistice with Germany of 11 November 1918, it was decided to maintain the blockade of Germany and its allies until the signing of a full peace treaty. This enabled the blockade of Soviet Russia to be completed, as Allied forces occupied major ports on the White, Baltic, and Black Seas and in the Far East. With the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919 the situation changed, and in order to continue the blockade and to assist the White forces to whom direct military support was by then being wound down, Great Britain led the way in calling for a continued system of international sanctions against Soviet Russia. Consequently, in October 1919 the Allied powers called upon all countries to join in an embargo of all trade with Moscow and a physical blockade of all land and sea routes into Russia. Most other powers (except Germany and Sweden) agreed to these proposals to legitimize Soviet Russia’s continued isolation.

By the end of 1919, however, David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, had become convinced that the blockade was counterproductive, causing economic problems at home while merely exacerbating Soviet hostility to the Allies and at the same time hampering postwar European reconstruction and increasing the likelihood that Germany would assume a dominant position in the Russian market. Consequently, on 14 January 1920, he persuaded most members of the Allied Supreme Council in Paris (but not the United States) to end the blockade. It was announced two days later that trade was to be resumed with “the Russian people” (not the Soviet state) through the intermediary of their cooperative movement. There was no mention of the Bolsheviks in the Allied declaration, and it was insisted that “these arrangements imply no change in the policy of the Allied governments towards the Soviet government.” But the extent to which Lloyd George knew that Russian cooperative organizations were already almost entirely under the control of the Soviet government and was dissembling so as to boost the British economy (and the popularity of his government) remains a moot point.

ALLIED INTERVENTION. In classical Stalinist historiography, the entire Russian Civil War was reduced to the Red Army’s successful repulsion of the “three Entente campaigns,” in which the White and other nationalist armies (Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, etc.) were merely puppets of the Allied leaders. That was a gross exaggeration—indeed, there is a case to be made for ranking the Austro-German intervention as the more consequential foreign involvement in the conflict—but the Allied intervention was not insignificant. The British, French, Japanese, Czechoslovak, and other Allied forces that were sent to Russia, and the matériel and logistical support their governments supplied to the Whites and other forces, may not have been sufficient to enable them to defeat the Bolsheviks, but it can be argued that they were sufficient to have driven the Red Army to the point of exhaustion by 1920 and to have denied Soviet Russia victory in the Soviet–Polish War, which would have enabled it to export the revolution into central Europe.

Although it was to assume a counterrevolutionary guise, Allied intervention in the “Russian” Civil Wars had its roots in the various military missions that were dispatched to the Eastern Front during the First World War to offer advice to and to liaise with the tsarist army, as well as to conduct pro-war propaganda. (Attached to Allied missions and embassies, it is worth noting, were men who would play an important role in the intervention, such as Generals Maurice Janin and Alfred Knox. It is also significant that even in July–August 1917, the latter proved very willing to intervene in Russian politics and to offer his support to those who promised to restore “order” in Russia during the Kornilov affair.) One of the least remembered but most effective elements of the intervention, John F. Steven’s Russian Railway Service Corps, was also a product of negotiations that predated the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. Of interest too is that some of the personnel and armored cars employed by Dunsterforce in 1918 had previously been attached to the British Armored Car Expeditionary Force (or the Russian Armored Car Division), commanded on the Eastern Front by Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson in 1916–1917. Conversely, it is also worth remembering that one of the first postrevolutionary landings of Allied forces in Russia—the disembarkation at Murmansk of British marines on 6–8 March 1918—occurred at the invitation of the local soviet and with the blessing of L. D. Trotsky, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. At that point it was far from clear that the Soviet government would sign a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers, and Allied agents such as Robert Bruce Lockhart were hopeful that the Bolsheviks could be persuaded to accept Allied assistance to oppose the Germans and the Austrians (thereby keeping the Eastern Front active and preventing the Central Powers from transferring troops to the Western Front to face the newly arrived American armies), although that did not prevent Lockhart and other Allied agents from simultaneously offering financial support to clandestine anti-Bolshevik organizations such as the Union for the Regeneration of Russia and B. V. Savinkov’s Union for the Defense of Fatherland and Freedom.

At the very least, London and Paris wished to deny the Central Powers (via their White Finnish allies) access to the thousands of tons of military supplies that had built up at Murmansk and Arkhangel′sk, as did the Bolsheviks. Similarly, British and Japanese vessels had been docked at Vladivostok since December 1917, seeking to forestall an anticipated move against the port and its stockpiles from the hundreds of thousands of Austrian and German POWs expected to be released from camps in Siberia if Soviet Russia unilaterally withdrew from the war. Meanwhile, from January 1918 a column of British and Commonwealth soldiers, Dunsterforce, was formed in Persia and then sent to Baku to attempt to deny its oil supplies to the advancing Army of Islam and the German Caucasus Mission. Once the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) had been ratified, however, there was no doubt that the intervention, though still formally described as being anti-German, was anti-Bolshevik in effect—although some Allied leaders, notably the British prime minister, David Lloyd George (unlike his war minister, Winston Churchill), were never convinced that the Soviet government could be ousted by foreign forces.

As tensions between Moscow and the Allies built up over the course of 1918—over the peace treaty, Sovnarkom’s renunciation of tsarist debts and its confiscation of property within Russia, the execution of the Romanov family, the onset of the Red Terror, and the arrest of Allied citizens (including those diplomats implicated in the Lockhart Plot)—increasing numbers of Allied forces were landed in Russia (at Vladivostok from April and at Arkhangel′sk from August 1918), often on the grounds of providing assistance to the newly established regimes associated with the Democratic Counter-Revolution. Such an intervention had, in fact, been requested by moderate socialist leaders in Russia since the spring of 1918, and the call would be repeated at the Jassy Conference in November of that year. Also cited, notably by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson (who reluctantly agreed to join the intervention on 17 July 1918, after months of fending off requests from the British and the French), was the desire to assist in the evacuation from Russia of the Czechoslovak Legion. Of course, few Allied leaders were motivated solely by altruism—it is notable, for example, that the British and the Canadians both sent extensive economic missions to Siberia in 1918–1919 to survey the postwar opportunities for boosting their trade in northern Asia—but it was only the Japanese who seemed unconcerned with hiding the naked self-interest that led them to flood the Russian Maritime Province and the Russian railway zone through Manchuria with tens of thousands of troops (followed by hundreds of merchants) over the summer of 1918, while deliberately nurturing the atamanshchina (in the shape of G. M. Semenov and I. M. Kalmykov) that was so damaging to the anti-Bolshevik cause. Indeed, a deciding factor in initiating American intervention in Siberia may have been President Wilson’s concern to prevent the Japanese from closing the “Open Door” for trade in China that was so advantageous to the U.S. economy.

The Allied victory in the First World War in November 1918 facilitated access to Russia and, specifically, to centers of anti-Bolshevik activity in the emerging Baltic States, South Russia, and the North Caucasus, as, following the armistice, the previously closed Baltic and Black Seas were reopened. Consequently, a royal naval squadron was immediately sent into the Baltic in November 1918 to assist and supply arms to the nationalist forces in the Estonian War of Independence and the Latvian War of Independence, while on 18 December 1918, French and Greek forces landed at Odessa and began to move into Ukraine. The situation in South Russia was politically complicated for the Allies, however, as some of the major anti-Bolshevik polities had, in the eyes of London, Paris, and Washington, compromised themselves by their previous dealings with the Germans; this included the Ukrainian National Republic, the Don Cossack Host, and the Democratic Republic of Georgia. Consequently, Allied support went primarily to the Whites, in the shape of the Volunteer Army, as it emerged from the Second Kuban March in November 1918.

Not all Allied leaders found the Whites’ politics palatable, but at least General A. I. Denikin (like his predecessors Generals M. V. Alekseev and L. G. Kornilov) had shunned all approaches from Berlin. Moreover, the Allied leaders were not unattracted to the Whites’ commitment to reestablish a “Russia, One and Indivisible,” fearing that if the Russian Empire disintegrated into a group of smaller polities, there would be no counterweight to German influence in eastern Europe. Besides, there seemed to be no viable moderate alternative: center-left and liberal anti-Bolshevik regimes all across Russia were tumbling as right-wing White authorities established themselves in Siberia (the Omsk government), at Arkhangel′sk (the Provisional Government of the Northern Region), and in South Russia (Denikin’s Special Council). (Although critics of the intervention could quite properly point out that British officers had actively encouraged the makers of the Omsk coup that brought Admiral A. V. Kolchak to power on 18 November 1918, just as they had encouraged the coup launched by Captain G. E. Chaplin at Arkhangel′sk in September 1918, which had undermined the moderate regime of N. V. Chaikovskii.)

Consequently, by early 1919 there were approximately 4,500 U.S. and 8,000 British forces in North Russia, together with smaller contingents of British colonial forces (including Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians), Serbs, Italians, and others, while in Siberia, in addition to 40,000 men of the Czechoslovak Legion, 9,000 men of the American Expeditionary Force (Siberia), commanded by General William S. Graves, were disembarked, together with 4,000 Canadians; 1,500 British and colonial troops; and several thousand diverse French, Polish, Chinese, and other Allied forces (including the Italian Legion), all of them dwarfed by the 70,000-strong Japanese force. In South Russia, nearly 60,000 French forces (most of them Senegalese or Algerian) were based at Odessa, with a smaller contingent of Greeks. British and American forces saw action in North Russia in 1919 in advances down the Northern Dvina and along the Arkhangel′sk–Vologda and Murmansk–St. Petersburg railways, while Franco-Greek forces moving north from Odessa also engaged with elements of the Red Army. In the Baltic, Allied forces did not land in any numbers, but offered important naval and logistical support to anti-Bolshevik forces; Agustus Agar also masterminded two audacious attacks on the Red Baltic Fleet; and Allied military missions sought to curb the ambitions of the Baltische Landeswehr and other Freikorps elements. In Siberia, though, apart from the Czechoslovak Legion (which withdrew to the rear in January 1919, to be replaced by domestic forces of the Russian Army along the Eastern Front), Allied forces remained chiefly in the rear; indeed, the overwhelming majority of them remained in or around Vladivostok, while General Graves was operating under orders from President Wilson to the effect that the AEF should avoid at all cost becoming involved in any military campaign.

As might be expected, the possibility or actuality of having to continue fighting after the armistice was far from universally popular among Allied soldiers sent to Russia, and there were several notable mutinies: among Canadian forces at Victoria on 21 December 1918, on the point of their being dispatched to Vladivostok; among French soldiers on board vessels in the Black Sea in late April 1919; and among British and American units in North Russia on a number of occasions. Military reverses also took their toll: by April 1918, the French had been forced out of Odessa, while in North Russia, after initially pushing the Bolsheviks’ Northern Front south by 70 miles, Anglo-American forces had been forced to withdraw to within 35 miles of Arkhangel′sk. “Hands Off Russia” campaigns, protesting against the intervention, were also organized in Britain, France, and the United States by leftist parties and by the families of those men who had been sent to Russia. All of this, together with growing concerns about the reactionary policies of the Whites—news of the Omsk massacre and other examples of White terror was received with alarm in London, Paris, and Washington—might have been sufficient to persuade Allied leaders that the intervention was unsustainable, even without the fact that from January 1919 they were preoccupied with the refashioning of postwar Europe at the Paris Peace Conference. Thus, as early as 16 February 1919 President Wilson directed his War Department to begin planning the withdrawal of American forces in North Russia. A series of similar decisions was taken over the next few months (beginning with London’s resolution in March 1919 to withdraw its forces from North Russia and Transcaucasia by September of that year), while with the Prinkipo Proposal and the Bullitt Mission the Allies sought a negotiated ending to the conflict in Russia, and the intervention petered out as Allied forces were withdrawn. The Allied blockade of Soviet Russia was lifted from 16 January 1920; prisoners began to be exchanged following the Copenhagen Agreement of 12 February 1920; and the last British and American troops left North Russia on 19 February 1920 and Vladivostok on 1 April 1920 (although most had left months earlier). The Japanese, on the other hand, remained in occupation of northern Sakhalin until 1925.

Far more important than manpower, however, were the supplies of uniforms and weaponry sent to the Whites by the Allies: Britain alone gifted Kolchak and Denikin arms and clothing (worth £100,000,000) to equip forces numbering 200,000 men in 1919, while the numerous tanks and aircraft sent to Russia (as well as the instructors to train their crews and technicians to maintain the machines) were invaluable to the Bolsheviks’ enemies. Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury allowed B. A. Bakhmet′ev to utilize credits extended to the Provisional Government to send $50,000,000 worth of supplies to White forces in Siberia and South Russia. On the other hand, the presence of “rapacious foreign imperialists” on Russian soil undoubtedly supplied the Soviet government with a propaganda theme that was useful in motivating its own forces and in winning political sympathy, both at home and abroad (and even from elements that would not normally have been attracted to Bolshevism). Finally, it is arguable that in creating a morale-sapping climate of dependency, in deflecting White leaders from the task of building popular support, and in encouraging anti-Bolshevik forces into launching advances (in the hope of securing more assistance and official recognition) before their armies were ready, Allied intervention may have had some negative impacts on the Whites’ efforts.

All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars. See Vsebiurvoenkom.

ALL-RUSSIAN CENTRAL COUNCIL OF TRADE UNIONS. See trade unions, all-russian central council of.

All-Russian Central Executive Committee. See VTsIK.

All-Russian Main Staff. See VSEROGLAVSHTAB.

All-Russian Peasants’ Union. See peasants’ union, all-russian.

All-Russian Zemstvo and Town Council Committee. See ZEMGOR.

Altai, Confederated Republic of. This short-lived polity was proclaimed by Altai Turks in southwestern Siberia in the aftermath of the October Revolution (although resistance to central Russian control had begun in 1916 in response to tsarist mobilization drives in the area). Its creators, who were inspired by the legacy of the Altai being part of the Mongol Empire, declared that this was the first step toward the formation of the new state of Karakorum (named after the capital of Genghis Khan), which would also include Tuva (Urankhaiskii krai) and other Mongol regions. However, for the next two years power in the region was actually contested by White forces and Red partisans. The latter were joined by forces of the 5th Red Army in January 1920, although sporadic outbreaks of armed resistance to the Soviet government continued until at least 1922.

Al′tfater, Vasilii Mikhailovich (4 December 1883–20 April 1919). Rear admiral (1917). Born in Warsaw into the family of the artillery officer (later a general) and state councilor M. G. Al′tfater, V. M. Al′tfater was one of the comparatively few senior officers of the tsarist fleet to serve the Soviet government. A graduate of the Military Kadet Corps (1902) and the Hydrographical Department of the Nicholas Naval Academy (1908), during the Russo–Japanese War he participated in the siege of Port Arthur, and in the First World War he was chief of the Military-Naval Directorate of the Staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army.

In October 1917, Al′tfater entered the service of the Red Fleet, and from December 1917 to February 1918 participated in the negotiations for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), as the chief naval expert of the Soviet delegation. From February 1918, he was assistant chief of the Naval General Staff and subsequently worked also as a member of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Naval Affairs (5 May–10 October 1918). From 12 October 1918, he was a member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic and became at the same time also the first commander of the naval forces of the republic. In these roles, he played a notable part in preparing the naval defenses of Petrograd and in organizing the transfer of vessels from the Baltic Fleet to the Eastern Front, where (during the summer of 1918) they were fashioned into the highly effective Volga Military Flotilla. He died suddenly of a heart attack on 20 April 1919 and was buried in the Novodevich′e cemetery in Moscow. Al′tfater was highly valued by L. D. Trotsky, who praised him as “a tireless, competent, energetic and honest worker,” and after his death a number of ships were named in his honor, as well as the Military Fleet of the Astrakhan Region.

American Relief Administration. An outgrowth of the Committee for Relief in Belgium, which had offered aid to civilians on the Western Front during the First World War, operating under the aegis of the Geneva-based International Committee for Russian Relief, and directed by Herbert Hoover (the future American president), the American Relief Administration (ARA) oversaw a humanitarian mission that delivered food supplies to 23 countries in postwar Europe but reserved its greatest efforts for assisting those struck by the Soviet famine of 1921–1922. The ARA had had its requests to begin work in Soviet Russia repeatedly turned down by the Soviet government in 1919 and 1920, but following negotiations at Riga an agreement was signed on 21 August 1921 that allowed the organization to extend its operations from Poland onto Soviet territory. Initially, ARA kitchens were opened in Petrograd and Moscow before spreading to the provinces.

Within a few months, there were more than 300 ARA personnel in Russia (led by Colonel William N. Haskell), employing 120,000 Russians and feeding 10,500,000 people per diem in the famine zones, as well as offering medical assistance, overseeing relocation services, and providing other aid. It was estimated, for example, that the ARA provided about 8,000,000 vaccinations between 1921 and 1923. However, many Bolsheviks regarded the organization with suspicion and resentment, and in September 1922 the chairman of the All-Russian Famine Relief Committee, L. B. Kamenev, announced that the services of the ARA were no longer required, despite evidence that the famine was worsening in some regions. Subsequently, the Soviet government attempted to marginalize the operations of the ARA, although they only ceased on 15 June 1923, after it was discovered that Soviet Russia had begun to export grain.

AMUR COSSACK HOST. Created in 1858, from Cossacks relocated from Transbaikalia and freed miners from the exile community at Nerchinsk, the Amur Host was one of the newer and smaller Cossack groups in Russia and was traditionally subordinate to the governor-general and commander of forces of the Amur Military District. The Host occupied some 120 settlements, centered on the regional capital, Blagoveshchensk, and had a population of around 50,000 by the revolutionary period (20 percent of the region’s population). During the First World War, it mobilized 3,600 men in two cavalry regiments and seven cavalry sotni that saw action in the Polish, Carpathian, and Romanian sectors of the Eastern Front. In 1917, Amur Cossacks formed part of the force under General A. M. Krymov that moved on Petrograd during the Kornilov affair.

Following the seizure of power in the region by the Bolsheviks in late February 1918, the Host Authority, headed by Host Ataman (April 1917–1920) I. M. Gamov, continued to operate, and in September 1918, following the collapse of Soviet power east of Lake Baikal (notably the Amur Workers’ Socialist Republic), it assumed military authority in the Amur region. Amur Cossacks then began to enter a number of anti-Bolshevik formations, including the Composite Amur and Ussurii Cossack Force of the 5th Pri-Amur Independent Corps, and were active in battling Red partisans along the Amur and in the Maritime Province until the evacuation of the latter region by White forces in late 1922 (although the Host itself was formally disbanded by Soviet forces on 3 March 1920, following their occupation of the Amur region in February 1920). Many Amur Cossacks then emigrated to China, with their activities initially centered on an Amur Cossack stanitsa established near Harbin in 1923.

AMUR FRONT. This front of the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic was formed, based on the partisans of the former Eastern Transbaikal Front, on 22 April 1920. With its headquarters at Blagoveshchensk, its operational area included the towns of Nerchinsk, Onon, and Khabarovsk. The Front included the 1st Transbaikal (Korotaev) Cavalry Corps (later Division), the 1st Amur Infantry Division, the 2nd Amur Infantry Division, and the 1st Amur Cavalry Brigade. These forces repulsed an attack in the spring of 1920 by the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov and, following the cessation of hostilities with Japanese forces in the region (under the Gongota Agreement), launched their own offensive in the autumn, driving Semenov from Chita on 22 October 1920 and forcing him to retreat into Manchuria by early November 1920. At the height of its activities, the Front had 38,000 men, 60 field guns, 6 armored trains, and 10 tanks. Commanders of the Amur Front were D. S. Shilov (22 April–18 August 1920) and S. M. Seryshev (18 August–24 November 1920). On 24 November 1920, the Front was reformed as the 2nd Amur Army.

AMUR REGION, PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE. Established at Blagoveshchensk, under A. N. Alekseevskii (a member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries), on 18 September 1918, as local Bolsheviks fled the Gamov uprising and Japanese contingents of the Allied intervention entered the town, this short-lived manifestation of the Democratic Counter-Revolution declared the annulment of all Soviet laws and enforced the return of private property seized by or at the instigation of the Bolsheviks. Encouraged by the renegade ataman I. M. Gamov, however, it ignored the annulment of the authority of all regional regimes announced by the Ufa Directory on 4 November 1918, and only collapsed later that month when subjected to an economic blockade instituted by Omsk.

AMUR WORKERS’ SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. This Soviet polity, with its capital at Blagoveshchensk, was created in the Amur oblast′ in Transbaikalia on 25 February 1918, in response to a decision of the 4th United Regional Congress of Peasants and Cossacks and Soviet Deputies. A subsequent 5th Congress (1–10 April 1918) saw the issuing of decrees nationalizing mines and factories and calling for the summoning of an army. This congress also elected an executive committee, led by the Bolshevik F. N. Mukhin (with deputies S. F. Shadrin and T. S. Iatsenko) and subsequently formed a Sovnarkom (under M. E. Del′vig) and other institutions of Soviet power.

The republic faced an initial threat from the uprising of the Amur Cossack Host, led by I. M. Gamov in March–April 1918 and, having overcome that, over the summer of 1918 was challenged by the forces of Ataman G. M. Semenov, the Czechoslovak Legion, and Japanese contingents of the Allied intervention. Soviet leaders were forced to evacuate Blagoveshchensk on 17 September 1918, fleeing into the forests to join the partisans, and the following day White forces entered the town as the Workers’ Republic collapsed. Soviet rule was not reestablished in the region until February 1920, and in August of that year the Amur oblast′ was incorporated into the Far Eastern Republic.

Anarchism. Anarchism had a long tradition in Russia, dating back at least to the writings of M. A. Bakunin of the 1840s to the 1870s, while the immensely popular writings of the novelist Lev Tolstoy also propagated the doctrine, albeit in a nonviolent form. Also, elements of the left-wing and terrorist factions of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries were almost indistinguishable from anarchists. Finally, the self-governing peasant commune (the mir or obshchina) that oversaw village life across much of the old empire prior to (and during) the Russian Revolution could be held to have reflected the innate anarchism of the Russian peasant. The movement had suffered badly in the aftermath of the revolution of 1905, with most of its leaders arrested or exiled, but had begun to rebuild prior to the outbreak of the First World War, with the “free communistic” anarchism of Prince P. A. Kropotkin proving dominant. However, when Kropotkin adopted a defensist stance during the war, the movement split.

In 1917, anarchists were active in the factory committees that sprang up in the wake of the February Revolution, and the doctrine also gained a strong following among the sailors of the Baltic Fleet. Anarchist federations were established in both Moscow and Petrograd, and national congresses were held from July 1917 onward. It has been estimated that there were some 10,000 anarchist activists in Russia by early 1918, with organizations in more than 40 towns and around 40 anarchist journals and newspapers being published, but precise figures remain elusive.

Although anarchists generally supported the October Revolution for its destruction of the “liberal-bourgeois” Provisional Government (and some, e.g., K. V. Akashev, E. Z. Iarchuk, and A. G. Zhelezniakov, took a direct part in it), many soon voiced hostility to the Soviet government and began to call for a “Third Revolution” to overthrow it and all state authority. Like the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries, anarchists were particularly critical of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and promoted partisan warfare against the Austro-German intervention. They also denounced the “statization” of industry and the privileges enjoyed by the new “commissarocracy” and the Bolsheviks’ dispersal of Black Guards units. Consequently, from April 1918 the Soviet government launched counterattacks on anarchist centers, particularly in Moscow, where, in a raid on the House of Anarchy, the headquarters of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Organizations, about 40 anarchists were killed and some 500 arrested on 11–12 April 1918.

Subsequently, many anarchists (notably those of Khar′kov’s Nabat organization, such as Voline and Peter Arshinov) fled to southeast Ukraine and South Russia, where they forged strong links with and provided ideological leadership for the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine of Nestor Makhno. Some Russian anarchists, though, considering the Soviet government to be the lesser of two evils in the civil wars, continued to help organize resistance to the Whites (e.g., Gregory Maximoff and V. S. Shatov), as did anarchists who came to Soviet Russia from abroad (including Victor Serge and, for a time, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman). Some even had influence on Soviet policy; it was Kropotkin’s protests, for example, that seem to have led V. I. Lenin to revoke the right of local Cheka organs to execute suspects without trial in November 1918. Even members of the persecuted Nabat organization continued to argue that the anarchists’ first duty was to defeat the Whites, not to fight the Reds. Others, however, remained unremittingly hostile (and dubbed those who collaborated with the Bolsheviks “Soviet anarchists”), including the Underground Anarchists organizations (led by Kazimir Kovalevich and Petr Sobalev) that emerged in Moscow, Samara, and Khar′kov during the spring of 1919. The latter, whose rallying cry was “Death to World Civilization!,” was responsible for throwing a bomb into the meeting of the Moscow Committee of the RKP(b) on 25 September 1919, killing 12 people and injuring 55 (among them N. I. Bukharin). This led to a further crackdown on anarchist organizations across the country—even those of the previously tolerated “Soviet anarchists”—while Kovalevich, Sobalev, and others were executed.

The last permitted anarchist demonstration on Soviet soil took place to accompany the funeral of Kropotkin, who was buried alongside his princely ancestors in Moscow’s Novodevich′e cemetery on 13 February 1921, with a eulogy delivered by Emma Goldman. This was an occasion for which many anarchists were released from prison on their word of honor that they would return. Two weeks later, the Kronshtadt Revolt erupted, occasioning the suppression of most forms of political dissent. Anarchists suffered particularly badly: Lev Chernyi, former head of the Moscow Federation, and Fania Baron were shot in 1921, and on 5 January 1922, 10 anarchists were expelled from the country (including Voline, Maximoff, and Iarchuk). The black flag of anarchism had been raised for the last time in Soviet Russia during the laying to rest of Kropotkin, an event that can be regarded as the funeral of anarchism in the country. Russian anarchists, however, remained influential in exile, notably in Germany, France, and the United States.

ANDOGSKII, ALEKSANDR IVANOVICH (25 July 1876–25 February 1931). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1912), colonel (6 December 1914), major general (1918). An influential military scientist and head of the Academy of the General Staff in imperial Russia, under the Soviet government, and under the Whites, A. I. Andogskii was the son of a nobleman from Novgorod guberniia and a graduate of St. Petersburg University (1897), the Pavlovsk Military Gymnasium (1899), and the Academy of the General Staff (1905). He began the First World War as an officer on the staff of A. V. Samsonov’s 2nd Army and ended it as (from July 1917) head of the academy, a role he continued to fulfill after the Bolsheviks took power, even being selected as a member of the Soviet delegation that signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918).

When, in March 1918, the academy was evacuated to Ekaterinburg and then later to Kazan′, Andogskii remained in charge; when most of its members deserted to the anti-Bolsheviks in June 1918, he followed suit. Having been confirmed as head of the academy and as a permanent professor by an order of the Siberian Army of 18 September 1918, he continued to run the Academy, first at Omsk and then at Tomsk, but his service under the Bolsheviks had aroused hostility and suspicions of disloyalty among many of his peers. He had a powerful ally in Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s minister of finance, A. I. Mikhailov (and was apparently privy to the plans of the latter that sparked the Omsk coup), but made an enemy of the equally influential D. A. Lebedev, whom he challenged for the post of chief of staff to the supreme ruler. Consequently, on 26 January 1919, he was removed from the academy to work in the army reserve in Irkutsk Military District. Eventually, however, Andogskii managed to convince the White military authorities that his actions under the Bolsheviks had been justifiable (in that he had at least preserved the academy), and having been officially rehabilitated by Kolchak, from 18 June 1919 he was promoted to 1st quartermaster general to the supreme commander and was at the same time returned to the headship of the academy. From 12 August 1919, he served as 1st assistant chief of staff to the supreme commander and from 1 October 11, 1919 as chief of staff. On 7 October 1919, he was charged with overseeing the evacuation of the academy to Vladivostok, where he remained as its head until 23 October 1922 (when the port city fell to Red forces).

After emigrating, Andogskii lived at first in Tokyo and then in Harbin, working as a highly respected writer and lecturer on military affairs at a number of institutions. (Among his private pupils was the Japanese crown prince, the future Emperor Hirohito.) He seems to have died as a consequence of heart disease (although according to some sources he committed suicide) and is buried at Harbin, in the New Cemetery. Andogskii was the author of a large number of published works in the fields of military history and military science.

ANDRANIK, GENERAL. See Ozanian, Andranik toros.

Andronikashvili (Andronikov), Alexander (7 October 1871–19 May 1923). Colonel (6 December 1911), major general (10 June 1917). One of the leaders of the armed resistance to Soviet rule in Georgia, Alexander Andronikashvili was born into a princely family of the Kakheti region of eastern Georgia and was a graduate of the 2nd Constantine Military School (1891) and the Academy of the General Staff (1905) and taught military science at the Alekseevsk Military School (1 September 1912–1914). During the First World War, he served as chief of staff of the 75th Infantry Division (31 December 1914–1916), commander of the 298th Mstislavskii Regiment (5 May 1917–3 January 1917), and chief of staff of the 177th Infantry Division (3 January–8 February 1917), and on 10 June 1917 was named chief of staff of the 20th Army Corps.

From 1918, Andronikashvili served with the army of the Democratic Republic of Georgia. Following the Soviet invasion of Georgia in February 1921, he became one of the leaders of the underground resistance movement and in May 1922 joined the Committee for the Independence of Georgia (becoming its chairman in March 1922, following the arrest of Nikoloz Kartsivadze). A year later, he was arrested by the Cheka and, alongside 14 of his colleagues, was executed on the outskirts of Tblisi.

ANGLO-RUSSIAN BRIGADE. Formed at Ekaterinburg in early 1919 (and subsequently at other Siberian centers), on the model of the North Russian Slavo-British Legion, this unit was made up of Russian volunteers but was trained and staffed by British officers and NCOs. About 1,750 men were trained—or, rather, partially trained—at Ekaterinburg, and some hundreds more elsewhere. However, the brigade was regarded with hostility by local Russian military and political authorities, who, in June–July 1919, as the Red Army crossed the Urals into Siberia, took the first opportunity to disband it and to use its men as drafts for the front. The plans of General Alfred Knox to organize another Anglo-Russian Brigade at Vladivostok were never realized.

ANGLO–SOVIET TRADE AGREEMENT (16 March 1921). This agreement, signed in London by the representatives of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (chiefly L. B. Krasin) and Great Britain (Robert Horne, chancellor of the exchequer), marked a key stage in the end of the Allied intervention in Russia and entailed de facto recognition of the Soviet government by Britain. It was the culmination of negotiations stretching back to Krasin’s arrival in London in May 1920 and to feelers on both sides stretching back into the previous year (the Prinkipo proposal, the Bullitt mission, etc.). On the British side, Lloyd George saw the advantages (in the long term) to be gained for British trade and the opportunity (in the short term) of curtailing Bolshevik activity “in parts of the world important to us” (chiefly Persia, Afghanistan, and India). The Soviet government calculated that through trade concessions it could buy time, rebuild its shattered economy—the agreement can be regarded as the foreign arm of the New Economic Policy—and stave off further armed intervention. Negotiations stalled several times, as the two sides argued over details and over the repercussions of the Soviet–Polish War and the Red Army’s thrusts into Transcaucasia and against the forces of General P. N. Wrangel, but eventually agreement was reached and a treaty was signed.

The agreement consisted of a preamble (in which both parties agreed not to take part in hostile actions or propaganda against the other country or its institutions), 14 articles, and an annex entitled “The Declaration of Recognition of Claims.” The main body of the agreement forbade either side to blockade the other, guaranteed the diplomatic immunity of each side’s representatives, and removed various other barriers to trade. In the annex, the Soviet government declared that, pending “a general peace settlement” at an unspecified date in the future, it recognized “in principle” that it was “liable to pay compensation to private persons who have supplied goods or services to Russia for which they have not been paid,” but no mention was made of the much larger sums owed to the British government (chiefly for loans granted during the First World War), debts that had also been repudiated by the Soviet government in February 1918.

ANISIMOV, NIKOLAI SEMENOVICH (18 December 1877–8 April 1931). Sotnik (18 January 1906), podesaul (1 July 1908), colonel (4 May 1919), major general (June 1919). The White Cossack commander A. S. Anisimov was born at Iziak-Nikitinskii, into a noble family of the Orenburg Cossack Host, and was a graduate of the Orenburg Cossack Officer School. He served with forces of the Transbaikal Cossack Host during the Russo–Japanese War and by 20 September 1912 had risen to the post of assistant senior adjutant on the staff of the Orenburg Host. He was wounded in 1915, during the First World War, and was subsequently assigned to staff posts with Orenburg Cossack forces.

In June 1917, Anisimov was elected chairman of the Union of Cossacks at the stavka of the main commander in chief. In August–September 1918, he served as a representative of the Orenburg Host at the Ufa State Conference and was subsequently the plenipotentiary of the Orenburg Host to the staff of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak at Omsk. With the collapse of Kolchak’s efforts, Anisimov led Orenburg Cossack forces in the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov in Transbaikal (from March 1920). He subsequently emigrated to Harbin, where he was acting ataman of the Orenburg Cossack Host from March 1921 to 16 February 1923. He left office under a cloud, accused of embezzling the Host’s funds, and in 1925, beneath a red flag, led a group of émigré Cossacks onto Soviet territory. He subsequently moved from Vladivostok to Moscow, where he found employment in a timber yard at the Park of Culture and Rest. Anisimov was arrested by the Soviet security forces on 15 August 1930, and on 3 April 1931 was found guilty of espionage and of organizing a counterrevolutionary Cossack force. He was soon thereafter shot and buried in a mass grave at the Vagan′kovo cemetery in Moscow. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 16 January 1989.

Annenkov, Boris Vladimirovich (9 February 1889–25 August 1927). Voiskovoi starshina (28 July 1918), major general (25 November 1918). One of the most notorious and reviled figures of the civil wars, the Central Asian exemplar of the atamanshchina, B. V. Annenkov was born into an impoverished noble family in Volynsk guberniia and was a graduate of the Odessa Cadet Corps (1906) and the Moscow Military School (1908). In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, he was among 80 members of the 1st Siberian (Ermak) Regiment sentenced to 16 months’ imprisonment for mutiny (following a protest against the dismissal of a popular commander), but the sentence was commuted to dispatch to the front. He subsequently commanded partisan detachments of the Siberian Cossack Division that undertook extensive operations in the enemy rear (1915–1917).

Following the October Revolution, Annenkov refused to recognize the Soviet government and led a group of his Cossacks back to Western Siberia. There, during the first months of 1918, alongside V. I. Volkov, he was active in organizing anti-Bolshevik partisan units of the Siberian Cossack Host around Sharapovsk stanitsa, attacking Red forces at Omsk on at least two occasions. In March 1918, at an underground (and to some Cossacks, illegal) Krug of the Siberian Cossack Host (held at Atamansk stanitsa, near Omsk), he was elected campaign (Voiskovoi) ataman.

Following the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, his unit grew to a strength of some 1,500 men and was formally incorporated into the Siberian Army of the Provisional Siberian Government. Annenkov led this force in battle against Red insurgents across Western Siberia over the summer of 1918. It was at this time, during the suppression of peasant rebellions in the Savoured district of the Altai region, that Annenkov and his men gained a reputation for savagery and cruelty against the local population, notably carrying out a mass execution of suspected partisans at Slavgorod on 15 September 1918.

On 23 October 1918, Annenkov’s group (now dubbed the Partisan Ataman Annenkov Division) was subordinated to the ataman of the Semirech′e Cossack Host and moved through Kazakhstan to Semirech′e. There, Annenkov replaced the incumbent ataman, A. M. Ionov, at Semipalatinsk; instituted a reign of terror over the local population (the Annenkovshchina); and intermittently engaged with Red forces on the Semirech′e Front. In August 1919, he was named by Admiral A. V. Kolchak as commander of the Semirech′e (Independent) Army, which was subsequently merged with the remainder of the forces of the Orenburg Army that was retreating into the region.

When his army was smashed by Red attacks in March–April 1920, Annenkov led the remains of that force into Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang/Sinkiang) in May 1920, to occupy the town of Guchen. There, his units were eventually disarmed and dispersed by the Chinese authorities, while Annenkov and his staff were arrested in March 1921 and imprisoned at Ürümqi (Urumchi) until February 1924. The subsequent events in Annenkov’s life remain murky, but it appears that he then became the subject of an elaborate “sting” operation that was launched by the Soviet security services. In April 1926, he was arrested at the head of an armed detachment that he had been tricked into leading onto (or, according to some sources, toward) Soviet territory by NKVD agents. This occurred either (sources vary) on Soviet territory or as he passed from China through Mongolia into Russia or on Chinese territory, from where he was then smuggled into the USSR. Most sources have it that Soviet agents made the arrest, but some mention agents of the local Chinese authorities, who then handed him over to the Soviets. What is known for certain is that, after lengthy interrogation in Moscow, Annenkov was placed on trial at Semipalatinsk (25 July–12 August 1927), alongside his former chief of staff, General N. A. Denisov, and sentenced to death “for atrocities carried out during the Civil War.” He was executed by firing squad a few days later. On 7 September 1999, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation turned down a petition to have Annenkov rehabilitated.

ANTHEMS. The tsarist national anthem “God Save the Tsar,” with words by V. A. Zhukovskii and a melody by A. F. L′vov, had been in use in Russia since December 1833, but was dropped following the February Revolution. Among monarchist circles in the White forces and the emigration, however, it continued to be used both during the civil wars and afterward. Among those anti-Bolsheviks of the political Right who were not monarchists, the hymn written by D. S. Bortnianskii in the late 17th century, “Glory to the Lord” (or “How Glorious Is Our Lord in Zion”) was enduringly popular and for many emigrants it became an unofficial anthem.

In 1917, “The Marseillaise” became associated with the Provisional Government and was sometimes used in the civil wars by authorities controlled by the Mensheviks or the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, usually with the lyric composed by the famous Populist P. L. Lavrov (the “Workers’ Marseillaise”). All parties of the Left also used the “Internationale,” composed by Eugene Pottier in 1871 for the Paris Commune (with a melody by Pierre Degeyter of 1888). In July 1918, “The Internationale” became the official anthem of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Its lyrics were a translation of those composed in 1902 by A. Ia. Kots, but with a slower and more solemn tempo and with one altered line in the lyric: “It will be our last and decisive battle” was changed to “It is our last and decisive battle” to reflect the (alleged) significance of the Russian revolutionary moment. By October 1918, for the first anniversary of the October Revolution, the bells of the Kremlin that had played “God Save the Tsar” and “Glory to the Lord” had been reset to play “The Internationale.”

ANTIKAINEN, TOIVO (8 June 1898–4 October 1941). One of the founders of the Communist Party of Finland and an active participant in both the Finnish Civil War and the “Russian” Civil Wars, Toivo Antiainen was born into a working-class family in Helsingfors (Helsinki). He joined the Finnish Social Democratic Party in 1915 and, as a leader of its Leftist faction, in 1917 became a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Union of Young Workers of Finland. The following year, during the Finnish Reds’ failed struggle with the Finnish Whites, he became secretary of the Executive Committee of the Workers’ Seim (Soviet) and participated in the work of the founding congress of the Finnish Communist Party (August 1918). Having by then settled in Soviet Russia, in November 1918 he participated in the First All-Russian Congress of the Komsomol in Moscow (October 1918). He subsequently worked as an organizer of Finnish units in the Red Army and in 1921 participated in the suppression of the Kronshtadt Revolt. In 1921–1922, he commanded Soviet operations during the Soviet–Finnish conflict over Karelia.

A member of the Central Committee (from 1923) and Politbiuro (from 1925) of the Finnish Communist Party, Antikainen subsequently organized underground operations in his homeland but was arrested on 6 November 1934 and, following a trial that captured international attention, was sentenced to imprisonment and exile for life. On 3 May 1940, he was liberated as part of the terms that brought to an end the Soviet–Finnish Winter War and returned to the USSR, where he was elected to the Supreme Soviet and again joined the Red Army. The following year, Antikainen was killed in a plane crash near Arkhangel′sk, where he is buried in the Kegostrov cemetery. It has been suggested that he was assassinated on the orders of the head of the Karelian Komsomol, Iu. V. Andropov (later head of the KGB and, from 1982 to 1984, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union).

ANTONOV, ALEKSANDR STEPANOVICH (26 July 1889–24 June 1922). One of the leaders of the Tambov Rebellion against Soviet power, A. S. Antonov was born into the family of a former NCO in the Russian Army in Moscow but raised at Kirsanov, in Tambov guberniia, where his father worked as a tinker. He attended the Tambov Realschule, but was expelled from a higher school in Kirsanov in 1904 for distributing revolutionary propaganda on behalf of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR), having joined the party that same year. He subsequently worked in a carriage-repair shop in Tambov, but on 20 February 1909, he was arrested for participation in SR “expropriations” (including several bank robberies and the holdup of a mail train). He was held in the Schlüsselburg fortress and then at Vladimir Central prison. He returned to Tambov following the amnesty of March 1917 and, as an associate of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries, became head of militia in the town, displaying an innate talent for military organization in that post.

Antonov cooperated uneasily with the Soviet authorities following the establishment of Soviet power in the region in early 1918, but in May of that year he began to form his own anti-Bolshevik partisan detachments around Kirsanov (where he had transferred to the post of head of the district militia in late 1917), reportedly arming them with weapons confiscated from the Czechoslovak Legion. Antonov was formally dismissed from his post in August 1918 and went underground. By early 1919, he was at the head of a small detachment of partisans (10–15 men) who were involved in a variety of attacks on Soviet institutions. Initially, these mostly took the form of “expropriations,” to enable the group to survive, but they gradually developed into assassination of Bolshevik officials (over 100 in all, by the end of 1919). By 1920, this band had become one element of the Insurrectionary Army of the Tambov Region, and Antonov became head of its Main Operational Staff. As such, he was one of the key figures in what became one of the most serious internal fronts ranged against the Red Army (although it can be argued that the central figure in the movement was actually P. A. Tokmakov, and that the Soviet characterization of the movement as the “antonovshchina” was erroneous—perhaps deliberately so, to allow emphasis to be placed on Antonov’s SR past). When Red forces deployed under M. N. Tukhachevskii crushed the revolt in April–June 1921, Antonov evaded capture and again went underground, taking to the forests of his native region, but he was eventually ambushed in June 1922 in the village of Nizhnii Shibriai, having been betrayed to the authorities by a former SR pharmacist from whom he had attempted to procure quinine. He died, alongside his brother Dmitrii, in a shoot-out with a Cheka detachment and was buried beneath the walls of Kazan′ Monastery in Tambov. Unlike Nestor Makhno, Antonov was never widely adopted or mythologized thereafter as an anti-Soviet rebel-hero, although a small monument now stands near his grave.

antonov-ovseenko, vladmir aleksandrovich (9 March 1883–9/10 February 1938). One of the most active and talented of the Bolsheviks’ military organizers, V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko was born in Chernigov (Chernihiv) guberniia, the son of a Ukrainian junior officer. He completed a course of studies at the Voronezh Cadet Corps, but in 1901 was expelled from St. Petersburg’s Nicholas Military-Engineering School for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the tsar. As a revolutionary youth, he associated with members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, but after moving back to St. Petersburg he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). There he also resumed his military career (graduating in 1904 from the Vladimir Infantry Cadet School) and was posted to Warsaw, where he created an RSDLP military committee and established links with the Bund. During the 1905 Revolution, he was active across Russia, from Kronshtadt to Sevastopol′, was arrested several times and was ultimately condemned to death (commuted to 20 years’ imprisonment) in 1907, but made a spectacular escape when a group of comrades blew a hole in the wall of the prison in which he was being held. He then lived in Russia illegally for three years, before moving to Paris in 1910. There, he gravitated from a Plekhanovite Menshevik position to an internationalist one, close to the Bolsheviks, during the First World War.

After returning to Russia in May 1917, Antonov-Ovseenko associated with L. D. Trotsky in the social-democratic Inter-District Group (the Mezhraionka) and then, in July of that year, joined the Bolsheviks, becoming a member of the party Central Committee and joint chairman of the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b). During the October Revolution, he was a central figure in the organization of military activities in the capital, including the seizure of the Winter Palace, and was made one of the commissars for military affairs and head of Petrograd Military District. During the civil wars, he was initially made commander of Soviet forces in his native Ukraine (5 December 1917) and in March–May 1918 at Khar′kov was commander of the Southern Group of the Red Army in its battles with the Cossacks of Ataman A. M. Kaledin and the Ukrainian Central Rada, but his forces (including the Red Cossacks he had mobilized) were eventually driven out of Ukraine. He had more success the following year, as commander of the Ukrainian Soviet Army (from 30 November 1918) and commander of the Ukrainian Front (January 4–15 June 1919), in which capacity he was instrumental in securing the Soviet government’s alliance with the forces of Nestor Makhno. At least part of his success was attributable to his reversal of previous Bolshevik policies in Ukraine; he ended food requisitions and cooperated with Ukrainian socialists. He was also a leading member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (30 September 1918–10 May 1919 and 4 August 1919–2 May 1924). In mid-1919, after failing to prevent the Armed Forces of South Russia’s advance into Ukraine, he was transferred to economic work as chairman of the executive committee of Tambov guberniia Soviet, but in that capacity he had also to devote considerable energies to the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion. Then, from 1921 to 1922, he was involved in the administration of famine relief on the Volga.

From August 1922 to January 1924, Antonov-Ovseenko occupied the important post of chairman of the Political Administration of the Red Army (PUR) but, as a leading Trotskyite and a member of the Left Opposition, his influence waned as the group around J. V. Stalin triumphed. In 1924, he lost his military positions and was sent into “diplomatic exile,” as ambassador successively to Czechoslovakia (from 1924), Lithuania (from 1928), and Poland (from 1930). In 1928, he formally renounced his earlier association with Trotsky, but his sympathies remained unorthodox, as was demonstrated during the Spanish Civil War, when, as Soviet consul general in Barcelona, he enjoyed unusually good relations with Catalan syndicalist and anarchist elements of the Republican movement. In August 1937, he was recalled to the USSR. Subsequently, he was arrested (13 October 1937) and sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR (8 February 1938) for membership in a “Trotskyist-terrorist-espionage organization.” Antonov-Ovseenko was shot two days later. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 25 February 1956.

ANTONOVSHCHINA. See Tambov rebellion.

ANTONOVYCH, DMYTRO (15 November 1877–12 October 1945). The Ukrainian politician and art historian Dmytro Antonovych, the son of a professor of history at Kiev University, was one of the founders of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Party in 1900, and from 1905 was a member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party. From 1912, he combined his political activities with a teaching post at the Lysenko School of Music and Drama at Kiev.

In 1917, Antonovych was elected to the Ukrainian Central Rada and subsequently served as minister for naval affairs of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) in cabinets headed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko (15 June–24 October 1917) and Vsevolod Holubovych (24 October 1917–22 January 1918). Following the uprising against the Ukrainian State and the reestablishment of the UNR, he found a more natural home as minister of culture in the cabinet of Volodymyr Chekhivsky (26 December 1918–13 February 1919), before accepting a post as the UNR’s representative in Rome. Following the collapse of the UNR in 1920, he emigrated, settling in Prague, where he became rector (and professor of art history) of the Ukrainian Free University. He also served many years as the director of Prague’s Museum of Ukraine’s Struggle for Independence and was president of the Ukrainian Historical-Philological Society and director of the Ukrainian Studio of the Plastic Arts in Prague from 1923 to 1945. Antonovych was the author of numerous works on Ukrainian art and culture.

ANVELT, JAAN (18 April 1884–11 December 1937). Born into a peasant family in Livland guberniia and a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1912), Jaan Anvelt was the most prominent Estonian Bolshevik of the civil-war years. He joined the social-democratic movement in 1907 and operated under a series of pseudonyms (among them Eessaare Aadu, Jaan Holm, Jaan Hulmu, Kaarel Maatamees, Onkel Kaak, and N. Al′t′). In August 1917, he chaired the Executive Committee of Estonian Peasants’ Soviet and, active in the overthrow of the authority of the Provisional Government in Estonia (leading the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power at Revel on 23–24 October 1917, a day before the revolution in Petrograd), he became chairman of the Executive Committee of the putative Soviet government of Estonia.

With the German occupation of Estonia, Anvelt fled Revel and from February 1918 acted as the Soviet government’s military commissar of the North-West Region and was subsequently People’s Commissar for Nationalities of the Northern Region. From November 1918 to June 1919, he acted as chairman of the Estonian Workers’ Commune, as well as head of its Military Directorate. Following the collapse of the Commune and the victory of the nationalists in the Estonian War of Independence, he was from August 1919 a member of the Foreign Bureau of the Central Committee of the Estonian Communist Party and from February 1920 to February 1921 headed the Petrograd Fortified District. From 1921, he was a member of VTsIK, but spent the next four years underground in Estonia, leading the failed Communist coup there on 1 December 1924 and narrowly escaping with his life by seeking refuge in the Soviet embassy.

After his return to the USSR, Anvelt occupied numerous governmental and party posts, including work in the administration of the civil aviation industry and (from 1925) representing the Communist Party of Estonia at meetings of the Komintern. From 1935, he chaired the International Control Commission of the Komintern. In 1937, he was arrested (together with most Estonian Communist leaders) by the NKVD. According to some sources he was executed; according to others, he died under torture during an interrogation. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957. Anvelt was the author of a number of published works on Party history.

ARALOV, SEMEN IVANOVICH (17 December 1880–22 May 1969). Staff captain (1917), colonel (194?). The founder of the Soviet military intelligence service, S. I. Aralov was the son of a Moscow merchant and was privately educated in commercial schools in that city. He was called up to the army in 1902 and saw action in the Russo–Japanese War from the summer of 1905, but deserted and returned to Moscow later that year to become active, chiefly as a propagandist, in the Military Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), which he had joined in 1903. He subsequently worked as a teacher in Moscow, but was recalled to the army during the First World War. By February 1917, he was serving as senior adjutant on the staff of the 174th Infantry Division. Later in 1917, he would be placed in command of a regiment, and in June of that year he was elected chairman of the Soldiers’ Committee of the 3rd Army. At this time Aralov was a supporter of Iulii Martov’s Mensheviks-Internationalists, but he joined the Bolsheviks in early 1918.

From 2 February 1918, Aralov was head of the Operational Staff of the Moscow Military District and from 11 May–September 1918 was chief of the Operational Department of the Commissariat for Military Affairs (in which capacity he was dispatched to Siberia in May 1918 by L. D. Trotsky to negotiate with the Czechoslovak Legion). He then became one of the first members of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (30 September 1918–8 July 1919), serving as military commissar of its Field Staff (24 October 1918–15 June 1919) and (from 14 October 1918) as a member of its Military-Revolutionary Tribunal. He was then made the first chief of the Soviet military intelligence organization (the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army) as head of the Registration Board of the Red Army (November 1919–June 1920). (In that capacity, it was Aralov who developed the practice of holding hostage the families of former officers serving as military specialists in the Red Army.) He then moved on to work in the Revvoensovets and command staffs of the 11th Red Army, the 12th Red Army, and the 14th Red Army. From 1 to 31 December 1920, he was a member of the Revvoensovet of the South-West Front and from January to March 1921 was a member of the Revvoensovet of the Kiev Military District. Finally, as the civil wars wound down, he became deputy commander of the forces of the Kiev Military District (April 28–October 1921).

Aralov was then seconded to the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (although it is certain that he was, in fact, still working for the military intelligence service) and accompanied Soviet missions to Lithuania (5 January 1922–29 April 1923), Turkey (29 April 1923–April 1925), and Latvia (April 1925–December 1926). From December 1926 to October 1927, he was Soviet plenipotentiary to the government of Nationalist China. He returned to Moscow to serve as a member of the presidium of the Foreign Department of VSNKh (1927–1 January 1932) and as a member of the Collegiate of the People’s Commissariat for Finance of the USSR (1932–1938). For reasons that are not clear, Aralov survived the purges and from 1938 to 1941 was deputy director of the State Literature Museum. On the outbreak of the Second World War, he volunteered for service at the front and by April 1945, at the age of 64, was in command of an antitank brigade in the battle for Berlin. After the war, he occupied various government posts before retiring on a pension in 1957. He is buried in the Novodevich′e cemetery in Moscow.

ARARATOV (Araratyan), KRISTOPOR (Katchator) gerasimovich (1876–10 December 1937). Lieutenant colonel (1915), major general (March 1919). The Armenian military leader Kristopor Araratov was born into a noble family at Tiflis. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the Russian Army. He graduated from the Tiflis Cadet Corps (1893) and the Mikhail Artillery School in St. Petersburg (1895) before serving with the Caucasus Artillery Brigade, with which he saw action in the Russo–Japanese War and the First World War.

When the Russian Army disintegrated in late 1917, Araratov left the South-West Front and returned to the Caucasus, where in 1918 he became head of the artillery brigade of the army of the nascent Democratic Republic of Armenia and played a key role in the Battle of Sardarapat and the Battle of Karakilisa against the invading Ottoman Army. He was then moved to the front against the Democratic Republic of Georgia, helping Armenian forces occupy Lori during the Georgian–Armenian War of late 1918. In March 1919, he became minister of war in the government of the Armenian republic, before being transferred to the military governorship of the disputed city of Kars in April 1920. In October 1920, when Kars was yielded to Turkey, Araratov was taken prisoner. He was released and repatriated in late 1921 and served the Armenian SSR as commander of a rifle division before finding work as a military science lecturer at Yerevan Institute of Higher Education (later Yerevan State University) and subsequently in economic management. He was arrested on 2 September 1937, as a “bourgeois-nationalist” and “counterrevolutionary.” Three months later, alongside a number of other Armenian generals of the civil-war era (including Movses Silikyan), Araratov was executed by an NKVD firing squad in the Nork gorge near Yerevan. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

ARAS REPUBLIC. This polity, named after the Aras River (and also known as the Araks Republic and the Araxi Republic) and led by its self-styled “governor-general,” Jafarkuli-khan Kelbali-khan ogli Nakhchivanskii, was created in late 1918 at Nakhchivan, by Muslim forces eager that the region should not be captured by the army of the Democratic Republic of Armenia in the wake of the withdrawal of the Turkish Army of Islam following the Armistice of Mudros. They were motivated too by the proposal of a border settlement by Sir John Oliver Wardrop, the British chief commissioner in the region, that would have handed control of the region to Yerevan. The state, whose territory corresponded roughly with that of the current Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan, remained unrecognized internationally but was aided by the ruling Musavat Party in Azerbaijan. However, some 40 percent of the local populace were Armenian. In late June 1919, Armenian forces, supported by the British, occupied Nakhchivan and liquidated the Aras Republic in the so-called Aras War. This led to conflict between Armenia and the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, part of the wider Armenian–Azerbaijan War. Red Army forces eventually expelled the Armenians from the region in 1920 and, under the terms of the Treaty of Moscow (16 March 1921) and the Treaty of Kars (13 October 1921), Nakhchivan became an autonomous region within Azerbaijan.

Argunov (voronovich), Andrei Aleksandrovich (1866–7 November 1939). Prominent in the anti-Bolshevik underground and in the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918, A. A. Argunov was a graduate of Moscow University, where he took an active part in student politics in the 1880s. One of the founding members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) and a founding editor of its newspaper Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia (“Revolutionary Russia”), in 1905 he was elected to the party’s Central Committee. Having been arrested and exiled to Siberia, he escaped and moved abroad, working for the PSR Central Committee Foreign Delegation. During the First World War, he adopted a defensist position. Returning to Russia in April 1917, he was again elected to the SR Central Committee, associating with like-minded members on the right of the party (notably N. D. Avksent′ev) and working on the SR newspaper Volia naroda (“The Will of the People”), and was elected to the Constituent Assembly as a joint representative of the SRs and the Soviet of Peasant Deputies of Smolensk guberniia.

In early 1918, Argunov was one of the organizers of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia and as such did not enter Komuch. At the Ufa State Conference, he was selected as Avksent′ev’s deputy on the Ufa Directory. He subsequently moved to Omsk to attempt to negotiate a truce between the Siberian Regional Duma and the Provisional Siberian Government. During the Omsk coup of 18 November 1918, he was arrested alongside his party colleagues on the directory and on 20 November 1918 was expelled from Siberia. In 1920–1921, he was active as a journalist in White-held areas of South Russia and in the Democratic Republic of Georgia. Subsequently, in emigration, he lived at first in Czechoslovakia (where he left the PSR and helped form the rival party Peasant Russia) and then, from 1931, in Berlin, as an editor of the newspaper Rul′ and publisher of the journals Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia and Prizyv (“The Call”).

Arkhangel′skii, Aleksei Petrovich (18 March 1872–2 November 1959). Colonel (7 December 1907), major general (6 December 1913), lieutenant general (24 August 1917). A prominent civil-war deserter from the Red Army to the Whites, A. P. Arkhangel′skii, was a graduate of the Second Moscow Cadet Corps (1891), the Third Alexander Military School (1893), and the Academy of the General Staff (1898) and a member of the Volynskii Life Guards Regiment. He served in a number of senior posts in the Warsaw Military District and with the General Staff of the Russian Army, first in the mobilization section of the Main Directorate and (from 19 September 1910) as a duty general of the Main Staff. Then, throughout Russia’s participation in the First World War, he occupied the post of duty general and chief of the command staff at the General Staff (1914–8 December 1917). From 9 May 1917, under the Provisional Government, he was also chief of the Main Staff.

Following the October Revolution, Arkhangel′skii attempted to leave his post, but on 8 December 1917 he was pressed back into service with Red forces as head of the Directorate of the Main Staff (from May 1918 the Directorate of the Command Staff of the All-Russian Main Staff of the Red Army). However, Arkhangel′skii remained in close contact with anti-Bolshevik underground groups, notably the National Center, and was responsible for helping many officers evade or leave service with the Reds and make their way south to join the Volunteer Army. Following the desertion to the Whites of his immediate superior, General N. N. Stogov, Akhangel′skii found himself also under suspicion and on 15 September 1918 took the chance to desert his post while on a tour of inspection on the Southern Front and join the Whites. He then had to endure an investigation by a military tribunal of the Volunteers, as a consequence of his service with the Reds, but was exonerated and, on 26 February 1919, was placed on the reserve list of staff of the commander in chief of the Armed Forces of South Russia, General A. I. Denikin. From 14 May 1919, Arkhangel′skii served in the department of Denikin’s staff that verified promotions and, from 3 June 1919, he was at the same time head of the General Section of the Military Directorate of the Armed Forces of South Russia. With the establishment of the regime of General P. N. Wrangel, he was chosen as a duty general on the staff of the Russian Army in April 1920.

Immediately following the evacuation of White forces from Crimea, on 20 November 1920 Arkhangel′skii was named as head of Wrangel’s personal staff, and he remained in that post (first at Constantinople and then at Sremski Karlovci in Serbia) until 1926. He then served briefly as assistant chief of staff of the Russian Army (14 October–1 November 1926) before in 1927 moving with Wrangel to Belgium, where he found employment in a transport office and headed a number of émigré organizations (among them the Union of General Staff Officers in Belgium and the Union of the Volynskii Life Guards). From 1931, after a series of scandals that had rocked the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS) following the assassination of General A. P. Kutepov, he worked as a senior figure in that organization, becoming its head (formally from 22 March 1938) following the NKVD’s abduction of General E. K. Miller. He lived in Brussels during the Second World War and remained there after the war, the Belgian government having refused a demand in 1944 from Moscow for his extradition and having placed him under arrest for some days to protect him from abduction. He remained as head of ROVS until 27 January 1957, when illness forced him to pass on the mantle to his assistant, General A. A. von Lampe. Arkhangel′skii died and is buried in Brussels. He was the author of numerous articles and memoirs on the history of the civil wars.

ARMADEROV, GEORGII ALEKSANDROVICH (14 June 1888–25 August 1956). Staff captain (1917), kombrig (5 February 1939), major general (4 June 1940). The military specialist G. A. Armaderov, who was born at Kadnikov, in Vologda guberniia, was a graduate of the Pavolvsk Military School (1909) and completed an accelerated course at the Academy of the General Staff (1917). From 1913 to 1915, he commanded a company of the 1st Finnish Guards Regiment. During the First World War, prior to attending the academy, he commanded an anti-aircraft battery. On 30 November 1917, he was placed on the staff of the 33rd Army Corps and in January 1918 was elected as chief of staff of the 8th Army. Having joined the Red Army voluntarily in March 1918, in August 1918 he was placed on the staff of the commander of the Iaroslavl′ Military District, M. V. Frunze, and subsequently (from 5 March 1919) served with Frunze on the staff of the Southern Group of Forces of the Eastern Front and subsequently (from December 1919) the staff of the Turkestan Front. Araderov was then (May–September 1920) chief of staff of VOKhR. From 10 October to 6 December 1920, he was also chief of staff of the 2nd Cavalry Army, organizing its part in battles against the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel and its advance into Crimea. His subsequent posts included chief of staff of the 10th Red Army, assistant chief of military communications on the Turkestan Front (from February 1921), inspector of military communications of the Kiev Military District (from June 1922), and acting chief of staff of the 1st Cavalry Corps (from 27 November 1922). He then became a senior lecturer at the Red Military Academy.

Armaderov was arrested as a suspected spy on 28 November 1941 and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. On 19 October 1951, he was sentenced to a further 25 years’ imprisonment by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. He was freed on 22 May 1954 and, although suffering from the advanced stages of tuberculosis, which he had contracted in the camps, was one of the few senior voenspetsy who lived to see their own rehabilitation (on 7 June 1955). He died and was buried in Moscow.

ARMED FORCES OF SOUTH RUSSIA. The Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR)—in Russian, Vooruzhennye sily Iuga Rossii (VSIuR)—was the name given from January 1919 to the operational and strategic union of the military forces of the Whites, Cossacks, and other forces fighting against the Reds in South Russia, the North Caucasus, and Transcaspia.

The AFSR was created on 8 January 1919, as a consequence of an agreement forged (at Torgovaia stanitsa) for joint action against the Red Army by the command of the Volunteer Army and the leaders of the All-Great Don Cossack Host, which had by then renounced its alliance with the retreating forces of the Austro-German intervention. They were subsequently joined by other anti-Bolshevik forces in the region (notably forces of the Kuban Cossack Host and the Terek Cossack Host), so that the complement of the AFSR soon included the Volunteer Army (from 8 January to 8 May 1919, the Caucasian Volunteer Army; from 3 January 1920 the Volunteer Corps), the Don Army, the Crimean–Azov Volunteer Army (from 22 May 1919, the 3rd Army Corps), the Caucasian Army (from 8 May 1919; renamed the Kuban Army from 29 January 1920), the Turkestan Army (Forces of the Transcaspian Region, 9 January 1919–February 1920), the Forces of the Terek–Daghestan Region (from 22 July 1919, the Forces of the North Caucasus), the Forces of the South Western (Odessa) Region (15 January–23 April 1929), the Forces of the Kiev Region (7 September–20 December 1919), and the Forces of New Russia and Crimea (from September 1919). Also included within the complement of the AFSR were the Black Sea Fleet and other elements of the White Fleet operating in the region (notably the Caspian Military Flotilla). From 25 July 1919, the Urals Army also transferred its operational direction to the command of the AFSR from that of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s Eastern Front in Siberia.

Figures for the size of the AFSR vary; one source gives a maximum of 270,000 men in October 1919 (although less than half of these were in the active army), with 600 field guns, 38 tanks, 72 aircraft, 120 sizable boats, and about 60 armored trains. A very high proportion of the manpower of the AFSR consisted of officers, as many as one in three of the men in artillery units and one in twelve in infantry units. Indeed, it is possible that two-thirds of the command staff (with the rank of colonel or above) of the Imperial Russian Army served at one time or another in the AFSR.

The major strategic operation of the AFSR, following the Moscow Directive of its commander on 3 July 1919, was its Moscow offensive, which commenced on 17 May 1919 against the Reds’ Southern Front, along a front stretching from the shores of the Sea of Azov to the Caspian. Within a few weeks, having captured the Donbass and Crimea, AFSR forces entered Khar′kov (24 June 1919), Ekaterinoslav (27 June 1919), and Tsaritsyn (30 June 1919). Subsequent raids into the rear of the opposing Red forces (notably the Mamontov Raid) disorganized the enemy, weakened Red counteroffensives in August–September 1919, and paved the way for a further push westward and northward from the AFSR, whose forces then captured Odessa (27 August 1919), Kiev (31 August 1919), and Kursk (20 September 1919). This was followed by the capture of Voronezh (6 October 1919) and, ultimately, Orel (13 October 1919), bringing the AFSR to the point of its greatest success, as White units threatened the arsenal city of Tula, just 120 miles south of Moscow. However, at that point, with the rear of the AFSR being severely disrupted by the activities around Peregonovka and elsewhere of Nestor Makhno’s Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine, its fortunes changed. A major Red counteroffensive over the winter of 1919–1920 forced the AFSR back into the North Caucasus. Hopes of making a stand there were then scuppered by the disruption in the ranks of the separatist Kuban Cossack Host, and in March 1920 a hurried and far from successful evacuation was organized at Novorossissk, whence most remaining White forces moved to Crimea to be reorganized as the Russian Army. By that time, almost 183,000 officers and men of the AFSR had been captured by the Reds.

Commanders of the AFSR were General A. I. Denikin (8 January 1919–4 April 1920) and General P. N. Wrangel (4 April–11 May 1920). Assistant commander and head of the Military and Naval Directorate of the Armed Forces of South Russia was General A. S. Lukomskii. Chiefs of staff were General I. P. Romanovskii (26 December 1918–16 March 1920) and General P. S. Markov (16–26 March 1920).

ARMED FORCES OF SOUTH RUSSIA, MILITARY AND NAVAL DIRECTORATE OF THE. Fulfilling the functions of a war ministry in the White administration in South Russia, this establishment was based on the Military and Naval Department of the Special Council of the Volunteer Army. It included departments of the General Staff, Legal Affairs, and Military Educational Institutions and sections of Organizational Affairs, Mobilization, Military Topography, Administration, Pensions, and Aid. On 19 March 1920, the Military and Naval Directorate was reformed and renamed the Military-Naval Directorate, which now included sections of the General Staff, General Affairs, and Military Justice; a directorate of Sanitary Inspection; and the office of the chief of supply. The head of the establishment throughout most of its existence was General A. S. Lukomskii (January 1919–8 February 1920) and thereafter General V. E. Viaz′mitinov.

ARMENIA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF. This independent but unrecognized state existed in Transcaucasia from 28 May 1918 to 2 December 1920. By the time of its collapse, it controlled territory (occupied by a population of around 1,500,000 people) corresponding to most of present-day Armenia, as well as the Kars, Iğdır, Çıldır, and Göle districts of what is now the Turkish province of Ardahan, while it also disputed control of the regions of Nakhchivan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Zangezur (Syunik), and Qazakh with the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan and that of the Oltu and Lori regions with the Democratic Republic of Georgia. At the Paris Peace Conference, President Woodrow Wilson also argued for the incorporation into a greater Armenia (“Wilsonian Armenia”) of the Erzurum, Bitlis, and Van provinces of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the western part of its Trabzon province (including the port of Trabzon), to give Armenia access to the sea. This was incorporated into the Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920), but that treaty was not ratified by the United States or Turkey, and the fate of those territories was determined by the Treaty of Alexandropol (2 December 1920), the Treaty of Moscow (16 March 1921), the Treaty of Kars (13 October 1921), and ultimately the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923).

The republic was declared by the Armenian National Council, as the Transcaucasian Federation collapsed in the spring of 1918, although its government remained in exile at Tiflis until 19 July 1918, when it moved to Yerevan. The first prime minister was Hovhannes Katchaznouni (30 June 1918–28 May 1919). He was succeeded by Alexander Khatisyan (28 May 1919–5 May 1920); Hamazasp Ohandzhanyan (5 May–25 November 1920); and Simeon Nazari Vratsian (25 November–2 December 1920). Ministers of defense in the government were Aram Manukian (July 1918–January 1919); Alexander Khatisyan (February 1919–August 1919); Abraham Gulkhandanian (August 1919–May 1920); Ruben Ter-Minasian (May 1920–September 1920); Sargis Araratian (September 1920–November 1920); and Simon Vratsian (November 1920). All of the above-named figures were members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (the Dashnaks), as were the overwhelming majority of members of the Armenian parliament elected in June 1918 (not least because Azerbaijanis, Georgians, and other minorities who made up almost half of the state’s population largely boycotted the elections).

Apart from issues relating to interethnic tensions and the disputed border regions (the worst of which occasioned the Armenian–Azerbaijan War and the Turkish–Armenian War), of grave concern to the government were the hundreds of thousands of refugees who poured into the country from Turkey and Azerbaijan in 1918–1919 (over half a million by some counts). They suffered terribly from hunger, exposure, and epidemics of typhus and Spanish flu. At least 150,000 of them are thought to have perished. The Republic came to an end in November–December 1920, as the 11th Red Army crossed the border from Azerbaijan to establish the Armenia Soviet Socialist Republic. Attempts to resurrect it in the Armenian February Uprising of 1921 were crushed by Soviet forces by early April 1921, while in the south of the country the resurrected Mountainous Republic of Armenia resisted Sovietization until July 1921.

ARMENIAN–AZERBAIJAN WAR. This series of conflicts, many of them of a guerrilla nature and involving civilians, between the Democratic Republic of Armenia and the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, centered on the disputed regions of Kazakh-Shamshadin (Qazakh), Zangezur (Siunik), Nakhchivan (Naxçıvan), and Karabakh (Qarabağ). Conflict between the two communities can be traced back at least to August 1905, when fighting erupted in Susha; it began again in the spring of 1918, initially in Baku (where Armenians were dominant and attempted to expel Azeris from the city). During one incident alone, in late March 1918 (the March Days), as many as 12,000 Azeris may have been killed by Armenian units in retribution for an (alleged) planned uprising. In September 1918, as the Ottoman Army of Islam entered Baku, as the Central Caspian Dictatorship collapsed, and as the British interventionist force (Dunsterforce) withdrew from the port, a bloody retribution was taken by the Azeris (the September Days) and at least 10,000 Armenians (and possibly twice that many) were killed.

Meanwhile, the Republic of Mountainous Armenia was declared and attempted to incorporate the Susha region into its territory, while Armenians in the Karabakh area (where they constituted two-thirds of the population), under the command of General Andranik Toros Ozanian (who had entered Zangezur with his irregulars in July 1918), claimed that region for Armenia and extended control eastward to Nakhchivan (crossing its border on 2 December 1918), as the Turks withdrew in the wake of the Armistice of Mudros, which ended the First World War in the region. However, the town of Nakhchivan itself remained in Azeri hands, as the center of the Aras Republic. Moreover, Andranik was obliged immediately to withdraw and demobilize in early 1919, as British forces in the region took control. The British, who were attempting to pacify a much broader area, in which Azeris constituted a majority, tended to favor them over the Armenians, even to the extent of confirming Azeri control over not only Nakhchivan but also Zangezur and of endorsing the appointment of the notoriously Armenophobic and pro-Turkish Khosrov bey Sultanov as Azeri governor of the region. For Armenians, who had fought in large numbers on the Allied side against Turkey during the First World War, this was a bitter pill. To this day, Armenians allege that British policy was dictated by a desire (particularly strong among officers on the spot who had spent their careers in India) to foster a large, Shia Muslim state around Azerbaijan that would act as a buffer between the subcontinent and Russia and might also not fall willingly under the sway of Sunni Turkey. Evidence suggests that there may be more than a grain of truth in this, although it should also be noted that the commander of British forces in Transcaucasia, Major General William M. Thomson, was also convinced that the peace conference would offer compensation to Yerevan through the union of Transcaucasian and Anatolian Armenia.

However, following the withdrawal of British forces from the region, fighting broke out once more on 21–22 March 1920, as Armenians in Karabakh revolted and again demanded union with Armenia (which sent military support). In response, local Azeris attacked the Armenian community at Susha, the number of deaths resulting remaining a matter of bitter dispute (with estimates ranging from 500 to 20,000). When, during April 1920, the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan Republic collapsed and was invaded by the 11th Red Army, Armenia took advantage of the situation to seize Susha, Khankendi, and other areas and by the end of the month was in control of a large swath of western Azerbaijan, including all of Karabakh and Nakhchivan. In early June 1920, however, Red Army units and units of the reformed army of the newly proclaimed Azerbaijan SSR counterattacked and forced the Armenians to withdraw from Susha (5 June) and reclaimed Karabakh, following that up with a joint Azeri–Soviet–Turkish assault on Nakhchivan that also pushed the Armenians out of that region (28 July). On 10 August 1920, a cease-fire agreement was signed at Yerevan, under which Armenia recognized Azeri control of Karabakh and the temporary independence (under joint Azeri–Soviet–Turkish control) of Nakhchivan, although fighting sporadically continued.

Meanwhile, from September to November 1920, Armenia was engaged in a separate conflict with Turkish forces (the Turkish–Armenian War), which advanced almost to the gates of Yerevan. Although a cease-fire was then signed in that conflict, it had so weakened Armenia that the country was unable to resist a second Soviet–Azeri invasion, on 28 November 1920, prompted by violence in Sharur and Karabakh that it was alleged had been caused by the government in Yerevan. On 4 December 1920, Red forces entered Yerevan and prepared for the promulgation of the Armenian SSR, effectively bringing an end to the Armenian–Azerbaijan War. By the subsequent Treaty of Moscow (16 March 1921) and Treaty of Kars (13 October 1921), Alexandropol was returned to Armenia, and Nakhchivan became an autonomous region within Azerbaijan. Most Armenians regarded the war as one in which they had been cheated of victory, and conflict reerupted in the region (notably in Nagorno-Karabakh) in the late 1980s as Soviet control loosened.

Armenian Revolutionary Federation. See Dashnaks.

Armored trains. Armored trains were first used in battle during the American Civil War (1861–1865) and were subsequently deployed in the Boer War and in the Russo–Japanese War, among other conflicts, but are more associated with the “Russian” Civil Wars than any other. The fact that, together with the tachanka, armored trains played such a significant part in the “Russian” Civil Wars (and indeed became emblematic of it) indicates the extent to which, in contrast with recent wars, such as the First World War on the Western Front, it was a war of movement.

Although it was more static than the civil-war fronts, the Eastern Front of 1914–1918 had also been mobile to a greater extent than the Western Front, and it was there that from 1915 armored trains first began to be used by the Imperial Russian Army as mobile artillery platforms. There were seven of them in use by mid-1917. In the civil wars, however, the armored train became hugely important for all sides, as the spearhead and focus of advances and retreats that were usually made along (or close to) railway lines (and not only in the railway war). It is surprising that the side with the most armored trains (and the greater ability to repair and replace them) won most of the “Russian” Civil Wars.

Red Armored Trains:

On 21 January 1918, the Central Council for Control of the Auto-Armored Units of the Republic (Tsentrobron) was established to oversee the construction and administration of all Red armored units, including (from April 1918) armored trains. On 3 January 1919, it merged with other bodies to become the Chief Directorate of Armor and this, in turn, was reformed into a new, larger institution on 1 October 1919: the Armor Department of the Chief Military Engineering Directorate.

The Reds had the advantage of inheriting almost all tsarist railway stocks, supplies, and personnel for the production of armored trains (although some experts joined the Whites) and were able to produce them in relatively large numbers and relatively standard forms (thereby facilitating repair). On 1 October 1918, there were 43 trains at the Red fronts. By 1 October 1919, there were at least 73. On 1 July 1920, 110 trains were registered, although only about 90 were in service. On 1 October 1920, following the damaging battles of the Soviet–Polish War, the corresponding figures were 103 and 74. Some two-thirds of the trains were constructed at factories at Petrograd, Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, Kolumna, and Briansk. Most of these units were configured of an armored engine, two armored wagons (each containing two, rotating, usually cylindrical gun turrets), and an armored tender, with two control wagons positioned at the front and rear and, occasionally, further wagons to the front and rear that were either empty or contained nonvital supplies. (The purpose of the latter was to take the shock of a first artillery strike from an enemy train further down the line, to act as a buffer against unmanned locomotives and cars packed with explosive that might be sent down the line, or to detonate mines before they could damage the essential parts of the echelon.) Weaponry could be in the range of from two to four three- to six-inch artillery pieces and four to sixteen machine guns. The armor plate was in the range of one-half to one inch in thickness, and most trains were double armored for further protection (sometimes with springs or even concrete separating the two plates). As such, these behemoths had a top speed of only 30 mph and a range of only 15 miles without taking on new stocks of water and were further hampered by the fact that many of the country’s wooden bridges would not bear their weight. Coal supplies were extremely limited, and most trains were fueled by wood, again limiting their efficiency.

Because the trains were complicated to use and expensive to build and run, their crews were highly trained by Red Army standards and would generally include a high proportion of party members (sometimes, as on Trotsky’s Train, almost 100 percent). Training courses began in Moscow, in April 1918, at the Armored Car Garage, which by early 1919 had become a formal Academy of Armor. Similar institutions were developed at Nizhnii Novgorod and Briansk.

In the course of 1918, Red armored trains came to be designated as either “heavy” or “light,” depending on the scale of their armor and weaponry. Generally, in battle one of each class was expected to work in tandem, with the heavy train stationed in the rear and providing an artillery barrage, while the more mobile, light train made forays against the enemy (although this did not always happen). An attached supply train would also be stationed in the rear and could act as a base. Other combat configurations involved attaching cavalry or machine-gun detachments to the trains, or even aircraft and balloon units (as in the case of Armored Train No. 85, which patrolled the southern coastline in the spring of 1920). Such configurations, however, were generally found to be too unwieldy, necessitating lengthy echelons of supply and accommodation trains to accompany the armored echelons. In August 1920, new designations were given (in ascending order of caliber of weapons and weight of armor): Type A1–A2 (three-inch guns); Type B1–B6 (four-and-one-half- to five-inch guns), and Type V1–V5 (six- to eight-inch guns). A separate Type M (Morskoi, i.e., naval) train was also developed to guard ports and coastlines.

Armored trains were used by the Red Army in the earliest clashes of the civil wars in early 1918, against the forces of the Ukrainian Central Rada before Kiev and against the Don Cossack Host in the southeast. However, perhaps the most dramatic early use of an armored train by the Reds was on 12 September 1918, at Simbirsk, when Armored Train No. 1 (The Minsk Communist, in Honor of Comrade Lenin) was sent across the mile-long bridge across the Volga (behind a driverless locomotive to clear the tracks and followed by a brigade of infantry), forcing units of the Komuch’s People’s Army to abandon the city to the 1st Red Army. Thereafter, they were utilized on every front, but were especially prominent in actions in the south, west, and northwest, where the railway network was denser. In contrast, there were few lines in North Russia, while practical problems arose during the invasion of Poland in August 1920 because of the break-of-gauge between the five-foot Russian system and the narrower Polish network.

A problem encountered on all fronts was that enemy troops could sever the tracks in the rear of a train, thereby leaving it stranded. Sudden shortages of fuel, or natural disasters, such as floods and rock falls, or a fire on a wooden bridge (often caused by a spark from a passing engine) also made the echelons vulnerable to capture. The consequence was that a train might change sides on several occasions during the course of the war. For example, the Red Armored Train Comrade Voroshilov was captured by Ukrainian forces in early 1919, repainted, and renamed the Sichovyi, just in time for it to be captured by the invading Polish forces on 24 May 1919. They renamed it the General Dowbór. On 23 June 1920, it was captured again by forces of the 1st Cavalry Army and reclaimed for the Red Army.

White Armored Trains:

As all the armored trains of the Imperial Russian Army of the First World War fell into the hands of the Reds, the Central Powers, or the Ukrainian authorities in 1917–1918, the incipient White forces were left with nothing. Moreover, as railway stocks and factories and alternative construction opportunities were sparse in the peripheral regions they initially controlled, the Whites had to rely at first on trains captured from the Reds or on hastily improvised armored units. (The “armor” of one such train operating on the Kem–Kandalaksha line in Karelia in 1918, for example, is reported to have consisted predominantly of corrugated iron.)

Still, by the middle of 1919, the White forces across Russia had at least 79 armored trains in the field. These usually consisted of armored locomotives and flat wagons with armored walls and embrasures and turrets for cannons or machine guns—like those of the Reds, the White trains were usually protected at the front and rear by expendable wagons that would act as buffers against attacks by driverless trains, mines, or artillery firing down the line—but might also consist of heavy naval guns mounted onto wagons or even of armored cars and tanks that had been fixed to a train. Either Russian- or Allied-produced units might be utilized in the latter configurations. For example, in August 1918, two 12-pounders and one six-inch naval gun were taken from the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Suffolk at Vladivostok, mounted on flat wagons, and sent into action against Red partisans along the Ussurii line in the Maritime Province. The train was then sent to the Urals front and was deployed from November 1918 near Ufa, where the three guns were distributed among three separate echelons with considerable effect. In May 1919, gunners from the cruiser HMS Suffolk arrived with a replacement six-incher, and all the weapons were transferred onto vessels of the White’s Kama Flotilla before seeing action in the spring offensive of the Russian Army. In June 1919, they were transferred back to a single armored train echelon and joined the White retreat to Vladivostok.

In fact, however, there was a notable shortage of armored trains attached to the forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. According to some sources, only four quite primitive White armored trains were in operation west of the Urals during his Russian Army’s spring offensive of 1919. Meanwhile, in east the men of the Czechoslovak Legion jealously guarded their own powerful echelons, such the Orlik (not least because they served as the only available accommodation for the legionnaires), while Ataman G. M. Semenov was said to command at least 14 trains in his Transbaikal fiefdom, where they were used only to terrify the population and to hold up supply trains destined for the front. (The armor for some of Semenov’s trains—including his own personal mobile fortress, the Terrible—was apparently derived from breaking up and melting down the boilers of dozens of sorely needed locomotives, but this was a war in which no ataman worth the name could be without his own squad of armored trains.)

In North Russia, conditions did not suit the deployment of many trains (of the two major railways, the Murmansk–Petrograd line was narrow gauge, while the 425-mile line from Arkhangel′sk to Vologda traversed no fewer than 262 wooden bridges, rendering trains liable to sabotage or capture). Still, the considerable British naval presence in the region meant that some trains near Arkhangel′sk were equipped with naval guns, the Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin among them. Another Admiral Kolchak operated in northwest Russia, supporting the North-West Army, but it was in South Russia that White armored trains were most numerous. The Volunteer Army captured six trains during and immediately after the Second Kuban March of the summer of 1918, renaming them the General Alekseev, the General Kornilov, the Officer, the Forward for the Fatherland, the Battery of Distant Battle (later the United Russia), and the Naval Battery of Distant Battle, No. 2 (later Dmitrii Donskoi). During the spring of 1919, these and other echelons were used with tremendous skill by General V. Z. Mai-Maevskii to shuttle troops around the Don region and to launch numerous surprise attacks against the 8th Red Army and the 13th Red Army, before the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) set out on its Moscow offensive that summer. By October 1919, capturing and renaming Red trains as it moved north, the AFSR had increased its inventory to some 65 echelons of various sizes and capacities. By April 1920, however, as General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army was organized in Crimea, that number had shrunk to about 15, grouped into a railway battalion of five detachments commanded by Major General I. I. Kaliks. Most of those were captured by the Red Army as it advanced into Crimea in November, but the Reds were denied the echelons United Russia and St. George, Bringer of Victory, which were destroyed by means of a deliberate collision near Sevastopol′ on 14 November 1920, as the last White forces evacuated the city by ship.

ARMY OF ISLAM. Although it was only active from March to August 1918, this field army of the Ottoman Empire (known in Turkish as Kafkas İslâm Ordusu) had a profound influence on the civil wars in Transcaucasia. Created, on the orders of Enver Pasha, from some 20,000 Turkic-speaking Muslims and free of the German officers and influence that characterized most of the rest of the Ottoman Army, the force’s purpose—even at the cost of antagonizing Germany—was to extend Ottoman rule into former territories of the Russian Empire as the Russian Army and its Caucasus Front collapsed in the aftermath of the October Revolution. The force was commanded by Enver’s brother, Nuri Pasha (Nuri Killigil).

In the aftermath of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), the Army of Islam advanced to claim the spoils of that agreement, through the newly declared Democratic Republic of Armenia and (with Azeri support) the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan toward Baku. Following victory over Armenian, Soviet, and British forces (Dunsterforce) in the region, it won, in alliance with its Azeri supporters, the Battle of Baku (August 1918) and entered the city shortly before the arrival of officials of the German Caucasus Mission. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, defeat in the world war, and the political demise of Enver Pasha meant that many of its conquests were temporary, but the later Treaty of Moscow (16 March 1921) and the Treaty of Kars (13 October 1921) confirmed Turkey in possession of some of the territorial gains that the Army of Islam had earlier won.

ARSENAL UPRISING. The Kiev Arsenal Uprising (sometimes referred to in Ukraine as the January Uprising, Sichneve povstannia) was the name accorded in Soviet histories to the workers’ revolt against the Ukrainian Central Rada that was organized in early 1918 by local Bolsheviks. It broke out on the night of 28–29 January 1918, as Red forces approached the Ukrainian capital during the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War. Led by the Bolsheviks Jan Hamarnyk, Oleksandr Horvits, Andrei Ivanov, and Isaak Kreisberg, workers at the Kiev Arsenal (many of them Russians or Russianized Ukrainians) seized the premises and, having been joined by soldiers of the Bohdanivsky, Shevchensky, and Sahaydachny Regiments, set about achieving the aim of the revolt, which was to encircle the building occupied by the Rada (today’s Kiev Pedagogical Museum), to allow Red forces into the city and to proclaim Ukraine united under V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko’s Soviet government at Khar′kov.

As the revolt spread across the city, engulfing the Khreschatyk (Kiev’s main thoroughfare) and the Podil district, a general strike paralyzed the Ukrainian capital on 30 January 1918. Many of the local forces of the former Russian Army remained neutral, but the Rada was able to call upon the services of Ukrainized regiments (the Polubotkivsky and the Bohunsky) and a division (kurin) of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. On 1–2 February 1918, Ukrainian forces (including Free Cossacks) retreating from the front under the command of Symon Petliura and Evhen Konovalets entered Kiev and assisted in extinguishing the revolt, although the rebels held on to their headquarters, the Arsenal itself, until it was stormed on the morning of 4 February 1918, shortly before Red forces under M. A. Murav′ev entered the northern outskirts of the city. According to Soviet sources, Petliura had 300 of the rebels executed before Ukrainian forces retreated from the city, although Ukrainian sources now dispute this.

In memory of the event, in Soviet times a wall of the arsenal (pockmarked with shell holes) was preserved on Moskovska Street, near the Arsenal′na metro station, which until the early 1990s boasted a huge statue at its entrance that depicted the events of the uprising. A statue dedicated to rebels remains in the city’s Mariiinskii Park. The Arsenal Uprising was also the subject of the film Arsenal (1928), a major work of the esteemed Soviet Ukrainian director A. P. Dovchenko.

Arsen′ev, Evgenii Konstantinovich (3 November 1873–29 May 1938). Colonel (28 August 1911), major general (23 November 1914), lieutenant general (29 April 1917). A graduate of the Officer Cavalry School (1895) and a veteran of the Russian expedition into China of 1900 and the Russo–Japanese War, the White commander E. K. Arsen′ev spent much of the First World War in command of the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Guards Division (December 1915–January 1917), before becoming commander of the 1st Guards Cavalry Division (27 January–29 April 1917) and then commander of the Guards Cavalry Corps (29 April–November 1917). He remained in Petrograd following the October Revolution, organizing Guards officers against the Bolsheviks.

Arsen′ev was arrested by the Cheka in May 1918, but managed to flee to Finland. From there he joined the White North-West Army, commanding its 2nd Army (10 July 1919–24 November 1919). Following the collapse of this force and its disbandment in Estonia, he emigrated, settling first in Berlin and later in Paris.

ARSHINOV, PETER (MARIN, PETR ANDREEVICH) (1887–1938?). Born at Andreevka, near Iuzovka (Donetsk), Peter Arshinov trained as a metalworker and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1904, working as editor of the newspaper Molot (“The Hammer”) before gravitating toward anarchism at Ekaterinoslav during the 1905 Revolution. On 7 March 1907, he shot dead one Vasilenko, a workshop boss at Aleksandrovsk who had denounced revolutionary workers to the authorities. He was immediately arrested and imprisoned, but soon escaped to France. He returned to Russia in 1909, was again arrested (for propaganda work), and again escaped. In September 1910, he was arrested by the Austrian authorities at Tarnopol (Ternopol′) while attempting to smuggle arms into Russia and was handed over to the tsarist police in May 1911. The following October, he was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment and remained incarcerated in the Butyrki prison in Moscow, alongside Nestor Makhno, until the amnesty of March 1917.

Arshinov worked as an organizer and propagandist for the anarchist federation around Moscow until mid-1918, and then, as a leading figure in the Nabat organization, in the Don basin and at Ekaterinoslav, and was active in cultural and educational work in the areas controlled by Makhno’s forces from 1918 to 1921, notably as Makhno’s secretary and as editor of the newspapers Put′ k svobode (“The Road to Freedom”) and Golos anarkhista (“The Anarchist Voice”). Alongside Voline, he was also an organizer of various anarchist congresses. When Makhno was crushed by the Reds, Arshinov fled across the border. In Berlin, from 1922, he edited Anarkhicheskii vestnik (“The Anarchist Herald”), then moved to Paris (1925–1929), where he was again involved in publishing work, and later Chicago (from 1930), where he edited Delo truda (“The Cause of Labor”). He also wrote an important history of the Makhnovist movement and was one of the authors of the controversial Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists (1926), which argued that anarchists were doomed to failure unless they accepted some of the features of a regular political party.

Seemingly disappointed at anarchist critiques of his Platform (of the senior anarchist figures in exile, only Makhno offered his support to the scheme) and unhappy as an exile, Arshinov contacted G. K. Ordzhonikidze, whom he had known in prison, and arranged a deal whereby he would be permitted to return to Soviet Russia if he renounced anarchism and ceased his criticisms of the Communist Party. To the publicly proclaimed disgust of Makhno, Alexander Berkman, and other anarchists, Arshinov then published two anti-anarchist pamphlets in Paris (Anarchism or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1931, and Anarchism in Our Age, 1933) before returning to Soviet Russia in late 1934. He was apparently arrested and executed in early 1938. Suggestions by his supporters that his renunciation of anarchism was a smokescreen to allow him to return to Soviet Russia in order to aid the underground anarchist movement there remain unsubstantiated.

ART. Following the October Revolution, the Soviet government sought to transform the world of art in Russia by simultaneously replacing existing institutions with new, revolutionary ones and promoting the avant-garde. Thus, in April 1918 the Imperial Academy of Art (which had operated through the Palace Ministry) was formally abolished. In its place was established a Fine Arts Department and a Department of Museums and the Preservation of Antiquities within the People’s Commissariat for Education. Across the Soviet zone, a decentralized system of Free Art Schools was established, wherein students chose their own professors and their own curricula, while state funds were directed toward (juryless) Exhibits of All Artistic Trends that favored modernist works. These trends were frequently in conflict with the personal tastes of leading Bolsheviks, who tended to favor traditional forms of subjective and figurative art, but although various individuals spoke out about the experimentation in art of the Russian futurists and other groups, and although V. I. Lenin was opposed to the efforts of Proletkul′t to dominate the art scene, the early Soviet government never issued any definitive pronouncement on what was to be regarded as the official art form of the revolution.

Sovnarkom did, however, utilize art as a branch of agitprop; for example, in April 1918, two decrees were issued that called for the toppling of “monuments created to glorify the tsars and their servants,” while launching the Program of Monumental Propaganda to commemorate revolutionary heroes from Spartacus to Marx and Engels and to legitimize the revolution. Mass spectacles on city streets and squares (beginning with the celebration of the first anniversary of the October Revolution in November 1918) served a similar purpose. Few artifacts survive from these experimentations, but the ideas of some of those involved had a lasting impact on artistic trends in Europe and the United States (stemming from “The First Russian Art Exhibition” at the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin in 1922): notably, the constructivism of Vladimir Tatlin (head of the Moscow section of the Fine Arts Department), the productionalism of Vasilii Kandinsky and Alexander Rodchenko (founders of the Institute of Artistic Culture), and the suprematism of Kasimir Malevich (founder, with Marc Chagall, of an experimental art school at Vitebsk).

Soviet art became rather less experimental and more utilitarian from 1920, with the establishment in Moscow of Vkhutemas, the Higher Art and Technical School (the task of which was “to prepare master artists of the highest qualifications for industry and builders and managers for professional-technical education”) and the formation in 1922 of the New Society of Painters, which campaigned for a return to easel painting.

Artem (Sergeev), Fedor Andreevich (7 March 1883–21 July 1921). One of the leading Bolshevik activists in Ukraine in the revolutionary period, F. A. Artem was born into a peasant family in the village of Glebovo, Kursk guberniia. He was educated at Ekaterinoslav Realschule (1892–1901) and then entered the Imperial Higher Technical School in Moscow, but was arrested and imprisoned for six months in 1902, the year he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, for participating in student demonstrations. He then spent some months in Paris, at M. M. Kovalevskii’s Russian Higher Social Science School (1902–1903), where he met V. I. Lenin, before returning to Russia. In December 1905, he led the armed uprising at Khar′kov and was again arrested in 1906. He escaped from Khar′kov prison, but was rearrested at Perm′ and exiled to eastern Siberia (to what is now the town of Artem, Primorskii krai). He escaped in 1910 and made his way via Korea and China to Australia, where he worked as a docker and (known as “Big Tom”) was active in the labor movement as chairman of the Union of Russian Worker-Immigrants and editor of the social-democratic newspaper Australian Echo.

Artem returned to Russia following the February Revolution and led the Bolshevik group in the Khar′kov Soviet. At the 6th Congress of the RSDLP(b) (26 June–3 August 1917), he was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee. Following the October Revolution, he played an active part in efforts to establish Soviet power in Ukraine, initially as people’s secretary for trade and industry of the People’s Secretariat of the Ukrainian People’s Republic of Soviets (from 12 December 1917) and chairman (and commissar of the economy) of the Sovnarkom of the Donets-Kryvoi Rog Soviet Republic (2 February–19 March 1918), and later as chairman of the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine (1918–1919) and deputy chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Ukrainian SSR (1919–1920). In 1920, as chairman of the Donets Bolshevik gubkom, he organized the rebuilding of the mines in the Donbass region, before becoming secretary of the Bolshevik Party Moscow Committee (November 1920–January 1921) and then chairman of the All-Russian Union of Mineworkers (1921).

Artem was among a number of passengers killed near Moscow when an experimental propeller-driven train was derailed. Sabotage was suspected, but never proved. He was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Moscow. A number of statues were raised in his honor, notably at Slaviangorod (1927), Donetsk (1967), and Lugansk. Artem is also the subject of the biographical novel by Thomas Keneally, The People’s Train (2009).

ARTEM′EV, MIKHAIL KONSTANTINOVICH (November 1888–27 March 1928). M. K. Artem′ev, the Siberian partisan leader who fought both for and against the Bolsheviks during the civil wars, was born into a poor peasant family at the Botyrusskii settlement (ulus) in Iakutsk oblast′. Prior to the revolution, he spent four years at the Iakutsk Realschule and found employment as a clerk and later as a teacher in his home village and then at the Amga settlement (sloboda).

During the civil wars, Artem′ev fought against White forces in eastern Siberia as commander of a partisan detachment and, on 17 March 1920, was named as a volost′ commissar by the invading Red Army. He soon became disillusioned with Soviet power, however, and in 1922 he left Iakutsk to join the White partisan forces commanded by M. Ia. Korobeinov during the Iakutsk Revolt. When that force was crushed by Red counterinsurgency operations, Artem′ev hid with his men in the taiga until, in early 1923, he was able to join the forces of General A. N. Pepeliaev that had appeared in Iakutia. When Red forces drove Pepeliaev from the region in March 1923, Artem′ev once again went into hiding, then emerged to participate in another anti-Soviet revolt, that of the Tungus people (Evenks), of 1924–1925. He then took advantage of an amnesty in June 1925 to resume a legal existence, working for the Soviet administration of Nel′kansk volost′ as a clerk, telegraph operator, and translator. In 1927, however, he once again went underground, emerging as one of the key participants in the “Confederalist” anti-Soviet revolt led by P. V. Ksenofontov. In January 1928, he finally surrendered to Soviet forces. He was subsequently tried and sentenced to death and was later executed at Irkutsk. Later Soviet accounts portrayed him as a “bourgeois nationalist” and an agent of Japan. On 11 October 1999, by order of the procurator general of the Sakha Republic, Artem′ev was posthumously rehabilitated.

ARTILLERY. See WEAPONRY (RED ARMY); WEAPONRY (WHITE ARMIES).

ASHKHABAD COMMISSARS. This was the name given in Soviet historiography to the nine Bolsheviks executed near Ashkhabad during the Ashkhabad uprising on 23 July 1918. The men killed included V. T. Taliia (chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Turkestan ASSR) and Ia. E. Zhitnikov (head of the local Bolshevik organization), as well as two commissars of the Turkestan Republic—S. M. Molobozhoko (military affairs) and N. I. Rozanov (finance and foreign affairs)—the chairman of the Ashkhabad Soviet (V. M. Batminov), and the former chairman of the Urals regional Soviet (D. B. Kolostov). The executions took place between the railway halts of Annau and Griaus, some 10 miles from the city. When Ashkhabad was recaptured by Soviet forces on 26 July 1918, the bodies of the men were reburied in a mass grave at Ashkhabad. A memorial obelisk (designed by A. Akhmedov) was raised at the site of the executions in 1957.

ASHKHABAD UPRISING. This anti-Bolshevik rebellion began on 11–12 July 1918, in the town of Ashkhabad, on the Trans-Caspian Railway. It was organized and led by a mixture of members of the PSR (including F. A. Funtikov), Mensheviks, and Kadets and led to the establishment of the Transcaspian Provisional Government.

ASIATIC CAVALRY DIVISION. Formed in Transbaikalia on 28 May 1919, on the basis of the disbanded Native Cavalry Corps of the local White forces, this initially 8,000-strong force consisted of the 1st Cavalry and the 2nd Cavalry and was subordinated directly to Ataman G. M. Semenov, the commander in chief of all forces in the Russian Far Eastern Regions, on 18 March 1920. On 21 May 1920, it formally became part of the Far Eastern (White) Army. On 7 August 1920, it was transformed into a partisan unit, and later that month, under attack from forces of the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic and its Red Army allies, crossed the border into Mongolia. There, the Asiatic Cavalry Division united with various other refugee White forces (including the detachments of Colonel N. N. Kazagrandi, ataman of the Eniseisk Cossacks I. G. Kazantsev, and A. P. Kaigorodov) to battle with Red and Chinese forces in the area, eventually capturing the Mongol capital from the latter in February 1921. Elements of the force thereafter, on two occasions, attempted to undertake expeditions back into Transbaikalia but suffered heavy losses (with up to 1,000 killed). In June 1921, the force numbered some 3,500 men, but two-thirds of those were lost in battles with Red forces at Troitskosavsk. The remainder soon melted away in mass desertions to the Reds. The commander of the Asiatic Cavalry Division was General R. F. Ungern von Sternberg. Its chiefs of staff were Colonel V. Aktsinov (1919), Colonel E. Zhukovskii, and Colonel Ostrovskii.

ASTRAKHAN–CASPIAN MILITARY FLOTILLA. This naval force of the Red Fleet was created on 13 October 1918 to defend Astrakhan, the lower Volga, and the northern Caspian from the Volunteer Army and other White forces. In its formation, vessels commandeered locally had been joined by torpedo boats and submarines from the Baltic Fleet that had been dispatched via Lake Ladoga and the Volga River network in the autumn of 1918, to create a squadron of some 50 combat ships, reinforced by six hydroplanes, that was placed under the operational control of the Red Army’s Eastern Front. Its crews totaled 3,500 men. From December 1918, the flotilla formed part of the forces of the Caucasus–Caspian Front of the Red Army, and from 13 March 1919, it was operationally subordinated to the 11th Red Army. In early May 1919, the flotilla captured Fort Aleksandrovsk (now Fort Shevchenko) and with it (on 5 May 1919) the steamship Leila, on which was berthed General A. N. Grishin-Almazov, General A. I. Denikin’s envoy to Admiral A. V. Kolchak. Subsequently, in May and June 1919, the flotilla (which now encompassed three cruisers, six destroyers, three torpedo boats, four submarines, ten armed steamships, and numerous other vessels and floating batteries) supported the 10th Red Army and the 11th Red Army in the successful defense of Astrakhan and the less successful defense of Tsaritsyn. On 31 July 1919, the Astrakhan–Caspian Military Flotilla was united with the Reds’ Volga Military Flotilla to form the Volga–Caspian Military Flotilla.

The commanders of the Astrakhan–Caspian Military Flotilla were S. E. Saks (13 October 1918–9 June 1919) and F. F. Raskol′nikov (10 June–31 July 1919).

ASTRAKHAN COSSACK HOST. Occupying territory along the Volga in Astrakhan, Saratov and Samara gubernii, the Astrakhan Cossack Host, which had its capital at Astrakhan, was settled in some 20 stanitsy and 39 smaller centers. It had a population of 40,000 and during the First World War mobilized 2,600 men.