Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Declaring its refusal to recognize Soviet power, from 12 to 25 January 1918, in cooperation with a group of some 300 officers at Astrakhan, the Host engaged Red Guards in battle. This action (the Astrakhan rebellion) was crushed by Soviet forces, who then executed the Host ataman, I. A. Biriukov, and a number of captured officers and, on 20 February 1918, declared the Astrakhan Cossack Host to be disbanded.

From the summer of 1918, Astrakhan Cossacks were again active in the anti-Bolshevik movement, entering the ranks of the Astrakhan Army that worked alongside the Don Army. In the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), the Host provided the Astrakhan Independent Mounted Brigade and later the Astrakhan Cossack Division, while it also contributed a Special Astrakhan Independent Detachment to the Urals Army in the autumn of 1919. Following the collapse of the AFSR, Astrakhan Cossacks who had joined the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel in Crimea entered the Terek–Astrakhan Brigade.

Atamans of the Astrakhan Cossack Host during the revolutionary period were I. A. Biriukov (to January 1918), Colonel Tundutov (1918–1920), and N. V. Liakov (1920).

ASTRAKHAN REBELLION. This anti-Bolshevik uprising occurred on 10 March 1919, in the city at the mouth of the Volga that was an important industrial center, hub of the fish-processing industry and trade of the Volga-Caspian basin, and a vital strategic link between European Russia and both the North Caucasus and Transcaspia. (Earlier rebellions, generally referred to by the same name, had been crushed by Soviet forces in January–February 1918 and on 15 August 1918.) According to Soviet sources, the Astrakhan rebellion was organized by British intelligence officers (who had been smuggled into the city from Baku) with the aim of breaching the Reds’ hold on the lower Volga and thereby facilitating communications between the White forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in Siberia (specifically those based on the Urals Cossack Host) and General A. I. Denikin in North Caucasus. However, it seems more likely that resistance to Soviet rule in the port had been stirred up by the domineering attitude to the local authorities of Bolsheviks dispatched to the region from the center, such as A. G. Shliapnikov and others commanding the Reds’ Southern Front and Caspian–Caucasian Front, as the 11th Red Army collapsed under attacks from the Armed Forces of South Russia, as the latter sought to break out of the North Caucasus. On 10 March 1919, elements of the garrison at Astrakhan, encouraged by officers and local merchants who were sympathetic to the Whites, came out against Soviet power, utilizing weapons that had been stored in advance at the Novodevich′e convent. This was accompanied by an uprising in the surrounding countryside. It took local Red Army and Cheka units (coordinated by S. M. Kirov) until 13 March 1919 to restore order in the city and surrounding villages, although protests, strikes, and demonstrations continued to threaten Soviet rule at Astrakhan for several more months (despite, or perhaps because of, savage purges of the local administration).

Astrakhantsev, aleksandr Iosifovich (1893–1927). The Red commander and military commissar A. I. Astrakhantsev (whose background and upbringing remain obscure, although he was reportedly born at Troitsk in Orenburg guberniia) joined the RKP(b) in 1918, and from March of that year was military commander of Cherniaevsk uezd. From November 1918 to May 1919, he was commander of the 2nd Tashkent Regiment and at the same time was assistant commander of the Transcaspian Front. He then served as commander of the Aktiubinsk Front (24 June–3 October 1919) and next as commander of the garrison at Tashkent (November 1919–February 1920). He was then named, in succession, military commander of Cherniaevsk uezd (February–August 1920), military commander of Syrdar′insk oblast′ (August–September 1919), commander of the Khirgiz Cavalry Brigade (September–November 1920), commander of the 2nd Turkestan Cavalry Division (November 1920–April 1921), and commander of the 3rd Turkestan Cavalry Division (August–October 1921). Following the civil wars, Astrakhantsev was engaged in military-administrative and military-juridical work. He died of a heart attack at Vladivostok, where he was serving as regional military procurator.

Astrov, Nikolai Ivanovich (26 February 1868–12 August 1934). A leading liberal activist in the anti-Bolshevik underground and in the White administration in South Russia, N. I. Astrov was the son of a doctor and a graduate of the Law Faculty of Moscow University (1892) and worked for many years as secretary of the Moscow City Duma. In 1905, he became a founding member of the Kadets, leading the party’s Moscow branch and entering its central committee in 1907. He was elected to the 1st State Duma in 1906 and, following its dissolution, was again active in the Moscow Duma. From 1914, he was a member of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Union of Towns, becoming its chairman in 1917, in which year he served also as mayor of Moscow (March–June 1917) and as the Provisional Government’s deputy commissar for that city. During the summer of 1917, A. F. Kerensky attempted to lure him into the government, but Astrov refused, believing that Kerensky was insufficiently committed to the restoration of law and order in the country. In the autumn of 1917, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly.

Following the October Revolution, Astrov became one of the most energetic organizers of the anti-Bolshevik underground, trying to unite liberal and right-socialist political forces around a program of opposition to Soviet power, the restoration of private property, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, and the encouragement of Allied intervention in Russia. He was a member of the Right Center and the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, but was most committed to the National Center. On behalf of the last of these organizations, he moved from Moscow to South Russia in the summer of 1918, with the aim of coordinating its activities with those of the Volunteer Army. Although elected, in absentia, by the Ufa State Conference as a member of the Ufa Directory, he refused to participate in it, because he did not trust the moderate General V. G. Boldyrev as a representative of the military (favoring, instead, the candidature of M. V. Alekseev), preferred a three-man (as opposed to a five-man) directory, and opposed the subordination of the directory to the Constituent Assembly of 1917. Instead, he served as a member (without portfolio) of A. I. Denikin’s Special Council (September 1918–December 1919), occupying himself in particular with the question of land reform. During the autumn of 1919, there was some discussion of Astrov as a potential replacement for P. V. Vologodskii as chairman of the Council of Ministers in the Omsk government, but when the White regimes collapsed he instead emigrated, being evacuated from Novorossiisk on 13 March 1920. He lived thereafter mostly in Prague, where he was head of the Union of Writers and Journalists and was active in the work of both Zemgor and the Russian Foreign Historical Archive.

Atamanshchina. Literally “the rule of the atamans,” although the Russian suffix “shchina” often has sinister or negative undertones. This term denotes the frequently violent and lawless and sometimes bestial regimes and activities of independent (usually Cossack or pseudo-Cossack) leaders during the “Russian” Civil Wars. The phenomenon was most prevalent in Siberia and the Far East (where comparisons could be made with the era of warlordism that was then dawning in neighboring China), although examples could be found elsewhere. The chief exponents were (in the east) B. V. Annenkov, I. M. Kalmykov, G. M. Semenov, R. F. Ungern von Sternberg, and (in the Baltic region), and S. Bułak-Bałachowicz, all of whom swore nominal allegiance to the White cause but did much to damage it through their terrorizing of the populations over which they “ruled.” Indeed, the phenomenon was damned by the White leader Admiral A. V. Kolchak as “Bolshevism of the Right.”

AUGUST UPRISING. This failed insurrection against Soviet rule in Georgia (in Georgian, the Agvistos adjankʹeba) was the culmination of a three-year-long guerrilla campaign. Tensions in Georgia associated with the imposition of a patently unpopular Communist regime in 1921 (following the defeat of the Democratic Republic of Georgia in the Soviet–Georgian War) were exacerbated by the “Georgian affair” of 1922, during which hardliners (such as J. V. Stalin and G. K. Ordzhonikidze) forced local Georgian Bolsheviks to follow strictly policies laid down in Moscow and to consent to union with Armenia and Azerbaijan in a single Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Meanwhile, a series of rebellions by nationalist forces that had retreated into the mountains of western Georgia (notably the Svanetian uprising and the Kakhet–Kevsureti rebellion of 1921–1922) had had to be contained by Red Army forces, and during 1923 dozens of guerrilla groups surrendered or were wiped out. Consequently, Georgian Mensheviks in exile negotiated an agreement with their rivals, the National Democrats, out of which emerged the Committee for the Independence of Georgia (Damkom), which appointed General Spiridon Chavchavadze as commander of all rebel forces in Georgia.

Meanwhile, several members of the former government and armed forces of the Georgian Republic returned clandestinely to Transcaucasia from abroad (notably Noe Khomeriki and Valiko Jugheli), but the local Cheka (under Lavrentii Beria) managed to penetrate the organization, and attempts to forge links with Armenian, Azeri, and Chechen resistance groups floundered. On 19 May 1923, 15 members of the Military Center of the Damkom (among them Kote Abkhazi, Alexander Andronikashvili, and Varon Tsuludze) who had been arrested were executed. Khomeriki and Jugheli were also arrested, on 9 November 1923 and 6 August 1924, respectively. Despite the Cheka refusing his request to issue an appeal to his comrades to abandon plans for a general armed uprising, as their plans had been discovered, Jugheli’s message to that effect reached rebel commanders. However, it was ignored in the belief that it was a Cheka provocation. Thus, plans for a general rising continued to develop (although there is some suspicion that they were primarily advocated by Cheka agents within the movement, seeking an excuse to eliminate all opposition). On 28–29 August 1924, rebel forces attacked and succeeded in wresting control of much of Georgia away from Soviet forces, and a Provisional Government of Georgia, chaired by Prince Giorgi Tsereteli, was proclaimed.

Over the next few days, however, Red Army and Cheka forces drove the rebels from the major towns and into the mountains, and on 4 September 1924, leaders of the Damkom were arrested at the Shio-Mgvime Monastery, near Mtskheta. By mid-September, resistance by scattered groups had been quelled, as a wave of Red Terror was unleashed across Georgia. It has been estimated that 3,000 rebels were killed during the fighting and that at least 7,000 (and possibly twice that number) of those arrested were subsequently executed. As many as 20,000 Georgians were also exiled to Siberia, Central Asia, and North Russia. The August uprising stands as the last major outbreak of armed resistance to Soviet rule, and as such became a taboo subject in the USSR. Since 1991, however, its leaders have been lauded in independent Georgia, while the Museum of Soviet Occupation, which opened in central Tblisi on 26 May 2006, has begun the process of identifying and commemorating those who were killed.

Austro-German intervention. This term is usually reserved to describe the occupation of much of Ukraine by the forces of the Central Powers in the wake of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (27 January 1918), which had been signed with representatives of the Ukrainian Central Rada, as it was driven from Kiev by Red forces at the beginning of the Soviet–Ukrainian War. In return for promises of desperately needed food supplies, especially grain and sugar beets, Austrian and German forces entered Ukraine in late February 1918 and by 1 March of that year had driven the Bolsheviks out of Kiev. Ukraine was then divided into six military districts (Militärbezirke): Kyiv, Homel, Kharkiv, Poltava, Volhynia, and Rostov–Taganrog. Command of these districts was then placed in the hands of the interventionist forces, who were answerable to the German military governor of Ukraine (and commander of Army Group Eichhorn-Kiev), General E. G. H. von Eichhorn. Soon, having concluded that the Rada was either unwilling or unable to deliver the promised supplies in the face of widespread hostility from the population and the rapid growth of rebel partisan armies (noticeably groups under Nestor Makhno that would later become the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine), the Central Powers first (following von Eichhorn’s order of 6 April 1918) blatantly violated the sovereignty of Ukraine by seizing supplies without even the pretense of consultation or agreement, and then, on 29 April 1918, overthrew the recently proclaimed Ukrainian National Republic and established the more pliable Ukrainian State under their puppet, Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii.

The extraction of food supplies (organized, until October 1918, by General Wilhelm Groener, the chief of staff of the German commander in the region, although most of the grain captured went to Austria-Hungary) subsequently proceeded more successfully, as German and Austrian forces extended their tutelage as far east as the Don (with Rostov captured on 8 May 1918) and as far south as Odessa (captured 14 March 1918) and Crimea, with Sevastopol′ (and, with it, much of the Black Sea Fleet) captured on 1 May 1918. They were also then able to dispatch the German Caucasus Mission to Transcaucasia. (In general, some German strategists saw the occupation of Ukraine as but the first step on the path to the Near East.) The resistance of the four quasi-independent Soviet republics that existed in the region proved chimerical: the Odessa Soviet Republic and the Soviet Socialist Republic of the Tauride immediately collapsed, while the forces of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic had to surrender Khar′kov on 8 April 1918, and those of the Donets–Krivoi Rog Soviet Republic abandoned Lugansk on 29 April 1918. The occupiers also found some liberal and conservative Russians who had fled to Kiev willing to collaborate with them (including the leader of the Kadets, P. N. Miliukov).

However, resistance from Ukrainian peasants, anarchists, and socialists (some of them moving into the country from Russia) remained implacable, forcing the interventionist forces to withdraw from more isolated posts in the countryside from June 1918, regrouping so that at least a full infantry company was quartered at any defensive point. Nevertheless, guerrilla attacks continued unabated, leading to the deaths of at least 1,500 interventionist troops, and on 30 July 1918, von Eichhorn himself was assassinated by B. M. Donskoi (a member of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries). (German forces in the region were subsequently termed Army Group Kiev and were commanded by General Graf von Kirbach.) Still, it was unlikely that such rebel forces could have dislodged the Germans from Ukraine, and some German generals (notably Ludendorff) argued that Berlin should be more ambitious and attempt to drive the Bolsheviks from Petrograd and Moscow. What (at least in the short term) probably forestalled any such attempt was not the ramshackle resistance that the Soviet government was rapidly assembling (the new Red Army and its Screens), but a belief in Berlin that the Bolsheviks were too weak and unpopular to be a threat. Also a factor was the willingness of the Soviet government to appease the Germans: the abrasive L. D. Trotsky was replaced as foreign commissar by the suave diplomat G. V. Chicherin, who rapidly negotiated a supplementary Soviet–German treaty, the Berlin agreement (6 August 1918), promising Germany the right to exploit more of Russia’s wealth without the expense of further intervention. Thus, in the south, the Austro-German intervention remained confined to Ukraine.

Under the terms of the armistice of 11 November 1918, the Central Powers were obliged to make a complete withdrawal from Ukraine (and Transcaucasia), which was largely complete by the end of the year. In contrast, however, the armistice required that German forces should remain in other areas of the former Russian Empire until the Allies decided it was time for them to withdraw. This meant that German forces would play a complex role in the Baltic region, in particular, as the Estonian War of Independence, the Latvian War of Independence, and the Lithuanian War of Independence got under way.

Autonomous Governorate of Estonia. See Estonia, Autonomous Governorate of.

AVANESOV, VARLAAM ALEKSANDROVICH (MARTIROSOV, SUREN KARPOVICH) (24 March 1884–16 March 1930). A key Bolshevik administrator of the civil-war period, V. A. Avanesov was born into a peasant family in Karsk oblast′. He joined the revolutionary movement in the late 1890s and was a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party from 1903, initially siding with the Mensheviks. He was active in the North Caucasus during the revolution of 1905, conducting propaganda among the military, but in 1907 was forced to move to Switzerland for health reasons (he had tuberculosis). He lived in Switzerland until 1913 and graduated from the Medical Faculty of Zurich University in that year, before returning to Russia, where he then sided with the Bolsheviks.

Following the February Revolution, Avanesov was a member of the presidium of the Moscow Soviet and during the October Revolution was a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet (heading its press and information section). At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, he was elected to VTsIK and served on its presidium and as its secretary from 1917 to 1919. From 1918, he was commissar for military affairs (head of the military committee) within the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and, in late 1919, as the Armed Forces of South Russia advanced on the Soviet capital, he was a member of the three-man Committee for the Defense of the Moscow Region. From 1919 to 1920, he was also a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for State Control and from 1920 to 1921 was acting chairman of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defense. From 1920 to 1924, he was deputy head of the People’s Commissariat for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (Rabkrin) and from March 1919 to 1922 served on the collegium of the Cheka (from August 1919, as second deputy head of its Special Department). From 1922 to 1927, he was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR; from 1924 to 1925, Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade; and from 1925, a member of the Presidium of VSNKh.

AVENS, Pēteris (?–1937). Lieutenant colonel (191?). After service in the Imperial Russian Army, the Latvian commander Pēteris Avens (whose name is sometimes Russianized to Petr Iakovlevich Aven) was commander of the 2nd Latvian Rifle Brigade (April–June 1918) of the nascent Red Army and, subsequently, commanded the Latvian Riflemen (25 July 1918–11 January 1919), chiefly on the Eastern Front, before becoming assistant commander of the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia (January–31 May 1919) in battles against nationalist forces during the Latvian War of Independence. When the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia was disbanded, he was named assistant commander of the 14th Red Army. Finally, during the civil-war period, Avens served as assistant inspector of infantry with the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. He was arrested and executed in 1937, at the height of the purges, and was posthumously rehabilitated in the Khrushchev period.

Avksent′ev, Nikolai Dmitrievich (29 November 1878–4 March 1943). One of the chief ideologues of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) and probably the most prominent leader of the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918, N. D. Avksent′ev came from a noble family in Penza, where his father was a barrister. In 1899, he was expelled from Moscow University for leading a student strike, but continued his education in Germany, at the Universities of Berlin, Leipzig, and Halle, eventually being awarded a PhD for a thesis on Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1905, he returned to Russia, where he proved himself to be an effective public speaker and was an SR delegate to the St. Petersburg Soviet and a member of its Executive Committee. Exiled to Obdorsk in Siberia in 1906, he escaped and, from 1907 to 1917, lived in Paris, as a member of the Central Committee of the PSR and, initially, as editor of the party newspaper Znamia truda (“The Banner of Labor”). One of the most active and influential figures on the right wing of the SRs, he founded his own journal Pochin (“Initiative”) and used its pages to campaign for the SRs’ renunciation of terrorism and the adoption of a legal existence. During the First World War, he adopted a defensist position and, as a member of the Prizyv (“Mobilization”) Group, even helped to organize a volunteer detachment of political émigrés in France. He returned to Russia in 1917 and was elected chairman of the Soviet of Peasant Deputies. A close collaborator of A. F. Kerensky (and a fellow Freemason), from July to September that year he served as minister of the interior in the Provisional Government and subsequently chaired the pre-parliament intended by Kerensky to prepare the ground for the Constituent Assembly.

Following the October Revolution, Avksent′ev immediately became active in cross-party anti-Bolshevik organizations, notably the Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution (which he chaired) and the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly. Following the Bolsheviks’ dispersal of the assembly, he became a founding member of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia in Moscow, before traveling east in the hope of building a new political coalition against Bolshevism. In September 1918, at the Ufa State Conference, he was chosen as chairman of the Provisional All-Russian Government (the Ufa Directory), but subsequently, during the Omsk coup of November 1918, he was arrested and sent abroad by Admiral A. V. Kolchak. Despite that experience (which was repeated, en route to Western Europe, in White-held South Russia), on arriving in Paris in 1919, he spoke out against the decision of the 9th SR Council to end the armed struggle with Bolshevism and blamed V. K. Chernov for provoking the Right into overthrowing the directory.

In the interwar emigration, Avksent′ev associated with the Kadet leader P. N. Miliukov and published items frequently in his newspaper, Sovremennye zapiski (“Contemporary Notes”). In the 1930s, he led the Paris-based émigré Masonic lodge, the Northern Star, before fleeing to the United States to escape the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. He died (in 1943) and is buried in New York. Avksent′ev’s daughter was the artist Alexandra Pregel (1907–1984).

AVKSENT′EVSKII, KONSTANTIN ALEKSEEVICH (18 September 1890–2 November 1941). Sublieutenant (May 1916). A successful Soviet military commander (and close friend of M. V. Frunze), K. A. Avksent′evskii was born into the family of a village scribe at Staryi Kunozh (Fetinsk volost′, Totemsk uezd, Vologodskaia guberniia). He attended a local infants school and the Totemsk seminary and worked for several years as a teacher in his native province. In 1914, he was mobilized into the Russian Army and saw action in the Carpathians, where he fell victim to frostbite. After finishing a course at the Vladimir Infantry School in Petrograd, he was placed in command of the 2nd Reserve Machine-gun Regiment in Finland.

Avksent′evskii joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in October 1917, and soon thereafter, having been demobilized from the army, returned to his native village and worked in the local soviet administration for the following year, specializing in military affairs. In April 1919, he was made commander of the 4th Red Army and a member of the Revvoensovet of the Southern Group of forces on the Eastern Front. From October 1919, he commanded the 1st Red Army, and from March to June 1920 was commander of the Trans-Volga Military District. His subsequent posts included chief of recruitment of the 6th Red Army (from June 1920), commander of the 2nd Labor Army (1920), and commander of the 6th Red Army (20 August–26 October 1920), during the defense of Kakhovka against the forces of General P. N. Wrangel. In 1921, he commanded forces against the Insurgent Army of Nestor Makhno in Ukraine and was deputy commander of the Southern Front and (until July 1922) deputy commander of forces of Ukraine and Crimea. He then served briefly (15 July–16 August 1922) as minister of war of the Far Eastern Republic and as main commander in chief of its People’s-Revolutionary Army.

Following the civil wars, after completing a course at the Red Military Academy (1922–1923), Avksent′evskii commanded the 8th Rifle Corps in Ukraine (June 1923–June 1924), then the 6th Rifle Corps (June 1924–March 1925), and was then commander of the Ukraine Military District (March–November 1925) before being dispatched to Central Asia as commander of the Turkestan Front (2 December 1925–4 June 1926) in battles against the Basmachi. He was then placed in command of the Red Banner Caucasian Army (20 October 1928–1931). Avksent′evskii was then sent to study at the German Military Academy. Suffering from alcoholism, he was placed on indefinite leave from the Red Army in February 1931 and worked thereafter on the board of the Tsentrosoiuz cooperative organization. He died in Moscow in November 1941, reportedly killed by thieves who were attempting to burgle his apartment.

AVTONOMOV, ALEKSEI IVANOVICH (16 January 1890–2 February 1919). Ensign (191?). The Red military commander A. A. Avtonomov was born into the family of a member of the Kuban Cossack Host. He served on the Caucasian Front in the First World War and in late 1917 was active in organizing Red Cossacks against the forces of Ataman A. K. Kaledin. In January 1918, he was named commander of the South-East Revolutionary Army (operating around Tikhoretsk, later the Red Army of the North Caucasus) and in April of that year, alongside I. L. Sorokin, organized the defense of Ekaterinodar against the successive assaults of the Volunteer Army. He then served (from 19 April 1918) as the main commander of the armed forces of the Kuban Soviet Republic, but on 28 May 1918 was removed from that post (by the Third Congress of Soviets of the Kuban–Black Sea Republic) for insubordination to the civil authorities and the main staff of the republic. This was then confirmed by the authorities in Moscow, who sent the former tsarist officer General A. E. Snesarev to replace him. Avtonomov then traveled to Moscow, where he received orders from G. K. Ordzhonikidze to return to the North Caucasus as commander of armored trains and to assist in mobilizing the Mountain Peoples against the Whites. He commanded units in that region for some months, before he died of typhus in early 1919, during the Reds’ retreat from the North Caucasus.

AZBUKA. What became the intelligence service of the White government in South Russia (and thus a competitor to Osvag) was to a significant extent the brainchild of V. V. Shul′gin (which helps explain its anti-Semitic propensities), who had founded it as a private organization in Kiev as early as November 1917. In 1918, it was funded by the National Center and the Right Center, but in 1919 funds began to be supplied from the government of General A. I. Denikin. Attached to the staff of the Armed Forces of South Russia, Azbuka never employed more than 100 agents and was largely unsuccessful in its attempts to penetrate Red institutions, but it did supply the White regime with regular and relatively accurate reports on political developments and public opinion both in South Russia and Soviet Russia and from abroad and had some success in infiltrating the Ukrainian regimes of S. M. Petliura and P. P. Skoropadskii. Its head, in the Denikin period, was V. A. Stepanov, a member of the Special Council. Its operations were formally ended in December 1919, but in practice agents continued to work until early 1920.

AZERBAIJAN, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF. This state was founded on 28 May 1918, by the Azerbaijani National Council, following the collapse of the Transcaucasian Federation. It claimed sovereignty over a land area of some 80,000 square miles, with a population of around six million. The government of the republic initially existed in exile at Tiflis (from where it sent a delegation to sign the Treaty of Batumi with the Turks on 4 June 1918), moving to Ganja on 16 June 1918 and eventually, in mid-September 1918, to Baku, once the forces of the Central Caspian Dictatorship, the Baku Commune, and the Dunsterforce had been driven from the city by the Ottoman Army of Islam, assisted by Azeri irregulars. Its parliament, which opened on 7 December 1918, was led, but not entirely dominated, by the Musavat party (which had 38 deputies of the 125 elected), as was the governing Council of Ministers, which went through five coalition formations during the state’s existence. Only in the last of these was the main opposition group, Ittihad (an Islamist party), represented (albeit only by one member).

The Azeri republic’s first prime minister was Fatali Khan Khoyski, who led the first three coalition governments; Nasibbek Usubbekov led the last two. The parliamentary chairman, Alimardan Topchubashov, was proclaimed head of state and, having rebuffed Soviet offers of a military alliance against the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), in 1919 led the Azerbaijani delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. There, he initially got a frosty reception from the Allied leaders (who accused the Azeris of collaboration with Turkey to dismember Russia), but on 12 January 1920, as Red forces invaded the North Caucasus, de facto recognition of Azerbaijan was granted by the Allied Supreme War Council (5,000 British and Commonwealth troops under General William Thomson had occupied Baku from 17 November 1918).

Throughout its existence, the Azeri republic was plagued by various territorial disputes and interethnic hostilities, the most serious of which sparked the Armenian–Azerbaijan War, although generally friendly relations were maintained with the Democratic Republic of Georgia (with which a defensive treaty aimed against the AFSR was signed on 16 June 1919). Azerbaijan was also the subject of the ambitions of both Reds and Whites in the “Russian” Civil Wars (not to mention the Austro-German, Turkish, and Allied interventionists) to control its huge oil fields. The state collapsed on 27–28 April 1920, as the 11th Red Army, having crushed the AFSR, crossed its northern border to establish the Azerbaijani SSR under Nariman Narimanov. With the Azerbaijani army tied down on the front against Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh, there was little resistance to the Soviet invasion at this point, but a major rebellion against Soviet rule soon broke out in the northwest of the country (the Ganja uprising). It was crushed by the Red Army on 31 May 1920. Many Azerbaijani leaders then fled abroad, while others were arrested. Some of the latter (like Mammed Amin Rasulzade) were subsequently permitted to emigrate, while others (like Samedbey Mehmandrov) were given responsible posts in the new regime. Many, however, were executed (including at least 28 generals of the Azerbaijani army), and still others (like Fatali Khan Khoyski) were assassinated by Armenian militants.

AZIZBEKOV (ALIZ-BEG-OGLI), MESHADI (MESHALI) (6 January 1876–20 September 1918). Born at Baku into a family of bricklayers, the Muslim revolutionary Meshadi Azizbekov was a graduate of the Baku Realschule (1896) and the St. Petersburg Technological Institute (1908). He had gone to the capital in 1896 to continue his education, but became involved in the student movement and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) upon its foundation in 1898. As a Bolshevik member of the party’s Baku committee, he was active in Transcaucasia during the 1905 Revolution, as the organizer of workers’ militia units (notably Hummet) and of the oil workers’ union. He worked in Baku as an engineer from 1908 and was a close associate of J. V. Stalin. In 1911, he was elected to the Baku City Duma and was regarded as one of the leading revolutionaries in the region.

Following the February Revolution, Azizbekov was a prominent member of the Baku Soviet and participated in numerous conferences and congresses of trade unions and revolutionary organizations. From February 1918, he was a member of the Central Staff of the Baku Red Guard. As such, he was one of the leaders of the suppression of Musavat and, on 31 March 1918, was named commissar for defense of the Muslim areas of the city. From April 1918, he served as a regional commissar and Deputy Commissar for Internal Affairs of the Baku Soviet, and from June 1918 he was acting chairman of the Organizational Committee of Hummet. In these capacities, he participated in the battles for the defense of Baku in August 1918, as the Army of Islam approached the city.

Azizbekov was then arrested by the British forces in the region (Dunsterforce) and subsequently died in Transcaspia as one of the Twenty-six Commissars. As such, he was revered in the USSR: a suburban district and a metro station in Baku were named after him, as was a city in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, while the town of Vayk in Armenia also bore his name until 1994. A statue of Azizbekov (by the sculptor T. Mamedov) survives in Baku—he is still widely respected in Azerbaijan for his efforts to prevent the massacre of Muslims in August 1918—but that of him in Yerevan was torn down by nationalist demonstrators in 1990. The square on which the statue stood, once Azizbekov Square, is now named Sakharov Square.