Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

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Babel, Isaak (Isaac) Emmanuilovich (1 July 1894–27 January 1940). The Soviet author Isaak Babel, one of the world’s greatest exponents of the short story and one whose œuvre is inextricably linked with the civil-war era, was born in Odessa into a middle-class Jewish family. His father was killed during the violent pogroms there in 1905. Although he was nonobservant, Babel studied the Bible and the Talmud at home, having been denied entry to the Odessa Commercial School because of the quota system for Jews. He was subsequently denied entry to Novorossisk (Odessa) University for the same reason, but was finally admitted to the Kiev Institute of Finance and Business. Having graduated in 1915, he moved to St. Petersburg, where his early writings were encouraged and championed by Maxim Gorky but fell foul of the tsarist authorities, who accused their author of obscenity.

Following the October Revolution, Babel engaged in journalistic and political-administrative work for the Soviet authorities, notably as a translator for the Cheka in Odessa, as a member of a food-requisitioning unit, as an official in the People’s Commissariat for Education, and as a journalist in Petrograd and Tiflis. During the Soviet–Polish War, he worked as a war correspondent attached to the 1st Cavalry Army (although he concealed his Jewish background from the Cossacks who made up that force). His experiences in Poland formed the basis of the stories he began publishing from 1923, which in 1926 were collected as Konarmiia (Red Cavalry), Babel’s most lauded work and probably the most accomplished and vivid piece of fiction dealing with the civil-war years. These stories are notable for their ironic and even darkly humorous depiction of scenes of squalor, cruelty, and violence, although Babel’s depiction of the Red cavalrymen was not recognized by their commander, S. M. Budennyi, who accused him of “rooting around in the garbage of the army’s backyard.” Babel’s other great work of the 1920s was the collection now usually entitled Odessa Tales, depicting aspects of Jewish life in his home city (and incorporating autobiographical sketches that he had intended to publish separately as The Story of My Dovecote).

Babel lived periodically in France from 1928 to 1935, finding it difficult to accommodate his work to the encroaching and stultifyingly concrete code of socialist realism. Instead, he became a master of what (at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, in 1934) he called “the genre of silence” and published infrequently. He was arrested as a spy on 15 May 1939 and was subsequently executed at Moscow’s Butyrka prison, having given a forced confession at a brief trial. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 23 December 1954. His works began then to be republished (albeit in censored forms, omitting, for example, references to L. D. Trotsky), and a complete edition only appeared starting in 2002. In September 2011, an impressive memorial to Isaak Babel was unveiled on the northwest corner of the intersection of Rishelevskaia and Zhukovskaia Streets in Odessa, which already boasts a Babel Street in the Moldavanka district, where he grew up.

BABIEV, NIKOLAI GAVRILOVICH (30 March 1887–13 October 1920). Colonel (25 September 1918), major general (26 January 1919), lieutenant general (18 June 1920). One of the most fearless and effective cavalry generals of the White forces in South Russia, N. G. Babiev was born at Mikhailovskaia stanitsa, the son of a senior officer of the Kuban Cossack Host, and was a graduate of the Stavropol′ Officer School and the Nicholas Cavalry School (1909). During the First World War, he served as an officer with Cossack units, rising to commander of the 1st Black Sea Regiment of the Kuban Cossacks in 1917.

Babiev joined the Volunteer Army in January 1918 and was a participant in the First Kuban (Ice) March. He was wounded in battle in March 1918, captured, and imprisoned at Maikop by the Bolsheviks, but he managed to escape. During the Second Kuban March, he commanded the Kuban (Kornilov) Cavalry Regiment (13 October 1918–January 1919) and subsequently, with the Armed Forces of South Russia, was commander of the 2nd Kuban Cavalry Brigade of the 1st Kuban Division (January–March 1919), commander of the 3rd Kuban Division (March–August 1919), and commander of a cavalry group consisting of the Kuban Cossack Division and the Astrakhan Cossack Brigade of the Caucasian Army (August 1919–April 1920). Subsequently, with the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, he served as commander of the Kuban Cossack Division (May–July 1920) and commander of the Kuban Cossack Cavalry Corps (July–August 1920) and was commander of the 1st Kuban Cossack Cavalry Division during the unsuccessful landings in the Kuban (August–September 1920). He then commanded another Cossack group (of the Kuban Cossack Cavalry), the 1st Cavalry Division and the Terek–Astrakhan Brigade (September 1920). Having already been wounded 17 times in his military career, Babiev was killed by artillery fire during the trans-Dnepr operation of Wrangel’s forces in October 1920.

BAGMEN. During the civil-war era, those referred to as “bagmen” or meshochniki (literally, “people with sacks”) were generally urban dwellers who would travel to the countryside to exchange personal goods for food that, upon their return to the city, they would either barter or use for personal consumption (although the term might also be applied to peasants who also traveled into towns carrying goods, usually foodstuffs, in sacks to trade). As the policies of War Communism took hold in Soviet Russia in 1918–1919, such practices came to be officially condemned by the authorities as “profiteering” or “speculation”; periodically, individuals would be arrested or urban markets raided by the Cheka, while the stationing of roadblocks on the outskirts of cities to catch bagmen was a major grievance for workers. However, due to the dire shortage of food and imperfect mechanisms of control, private trade was generally tolerated by the authorities; indeed, by some estimates, the volume of private trade in the Soviet zone was several times larger than that engaged in by state agencies.

BAIKALOV (NEKUNDE), KARL KARLOVICH (6 April 1886–1950). The Soviet commander Karl Baikalov was born with the name Nekunde into the family of a revolutionary at Riga in Latvia. He joined the revolutionary movement himself in 1906 and was soon arrested and exiled to Irkutsk guberniia. With the onset of the civil wars in 1918, under the name “Baikalov” he formed a detachment of partisans that fought against White forces in the region for the next two years.

In 1920, Baikalov’s band was incorporated into the 5th Red Army, and in September 1921 he participated in the Red incursion into Mongolia to confront the forces of Baron R. F. Ungern von Sternberg. At the end of that month, however, the group under Baikalov’s command was surrounded at the Tolbo monestary in western Mongolia by the White detachments of General A. S. Bakich and Esaul A. P. Kaigorodov, and it remained under siege for several weeks. Following the death of the Soviet commander of forces of the Iakutsk oblast′, N. A. Kalandarishvili, on 6 March 1922, Baikalov was named as his replacement. He arrived at Iakutsk on 24 April 1922, and subsequently commanded Red forces in the suppression of the Iakutsk Revolt and the expedition of General A. N. Pepeliaev. He left Iakutia in June 1923, to work with the revolutionary tribunal of the 5th Red Army and as commander of the 19th (Special Purpose) Rifle Corp, but returned to the region the following year, as chairman of a special commission of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). He also worked on the Northern Committee of VTsIK and chaired the Iakutsk oblast′ committee of the party during the suppression of the Confederalist movement in 1927–1928, arresting its leader, P. Ksenofontov, in person, and in 1929 assisted in the suppression of the Tungus rebellion. He was then assigned once again to the Northern Committee before becoming director of the “Iakutlestrust” forestry conglomerate (1932–1936). After that, he chaired the military tribunal of the Iakutsk ASSR. He was arrested on 7 February 1937, found guilty of belonging to a Trotskyite organization, and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. He was released in 1946 and later died at Abalakh in Iakutia. Baikalov was posthumously rehabilitated on 13 February 1956.

Bailey, Frederick (“eric”) Marshman (3 February 1882–17 April 1967). Lieutenant colonel (19??). A British intelligence officer active in Central Asia during the “Russian” Civil Wars, Eric Bailey was born at Lahore, into the family of an officer, and studied at Sandhurst before returning to India to join the 32nd Sikh Pioneers. He subsequently learned Tibetan and accompanied Francis Younghusband to Lhasa in 1904. Later journeys, explorations, and discoveries in China and Tibet won him the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. During the First World War, he served on the Western Front and at Gallipoli and was wounded three times.

Having been assigned to intelligence work since 1906, in 1918 Bailey was sent to Tashkent, seeking to monitor the Soviet government’s relations with Indian nationalists. When his mission was discovered by the local Bolsheviks, he went underground, then disguised himself as an Austrian POW and gained employment with a Cheka unit assigned to hunt down “the British spy Bailey”! He was also influential in encouraging and providing assistance to local Basmachi fighters. In his later career, he served as a political officer at Sikkim (1921–1928), British minister to the court of Nepal (1935–1938), and a king’s messenger (1942–1943).

Bailey’s travels enabled him to pursue his passion for collecting birds, butterflies, and flowers. He left thousands of such specimens to the Natural History Museum in London when he died, while the Himalayan blue poppy, Meconopsis baileyi, which he discovered in the Tsangpo Gorges (Yarlung Zangbo Canyon) in 1912, is one of a number of flora and fauna named after him. He is also commemorated by a plaque on the wall of the parish church at Wiveton, Norfolk, United Kingdom.

Bakhmet′ev (Bakhmeteff), Boris Aleksandrovich (20 July 1880–21 July 1951). Born at Tiflis into the family of an engineer, Boris Bakhmet′ev was by training a hydraulic engineer. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Institute of Railway Engineers in 1902; studied also at the Zurich Polytechnical Institute from 1903 to 1904; from 1905 to 1917 lectured at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute, eventually becoming a full professor; and in 1911 successfully defended his PhD thesis. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) soon after its formation and was a member of its Central Committee from 25 April 1906 to 30 April 1907. In the intraparty struggle of the RSDLP, he supported the Mensheviks. During the First World War, as a defensist, he worked with the tsarist government’s Central War Industries Committee from 1915 and traveled to the United States in 1916 as its chief plenipotentiary. In November 1916, however, having apparently fallen under the suspicion of the tsarist authorities on account of his radical beliefs, he was removed from his post and returned to Russia. Following the February Revolution, he served (from 9 March 1917) as deputy minister of trade and industry in the Russian Provisional Government before being named its ambassador to Washington on 25 April of that year.

Bakhmet′ev remained in that position (somewhat anomalously after the October Revolution witnessed the collapse of the Provisional Government) until 30 June 1922, although he spent most of his time in New York, seeking to counter pro-Soviet sentiments among American and immigrant groups. During the civil wars, he was a leading figure in marshalling foreign political, military, and economic assistance for the White forces as a founder and member of the Russian Political Conference in Paris. After the civil wars, he resumed a career in business (as founder of the Lion’s Match Factory), but became a well-known public figure through his work in assisting émigrés (including managing the Bakhmeteff Humanitarian Fund). In 1934, he was granted American citizenship. He became a prominent member of the Republican Party and (from 1931) was an influential professor of engineering and hydraulics at Columbia University, as one of the founders of fluid mechanics theory and chairman of the Engineering Foundation. Columbia University now houses the important Archive of Russian History and Culture that Bakhmet′ev amassed (and which was renamed in his honor, as the Bakhmeteff Archive, in 1975).

Bakich, andrei (Andro) Stepanovich (31 December 1878–30 May 1922). Colonel (1916), major general (5 April 1919), lieutenant general (July 1920). One of the last White generals to remain militarily active in the civil wars, A. S. Bakich was a Montenegrin-born Serb who in 1899 was exiled from his homeland for political activities. (Allegedly, he had been part of a plot to assassinate the former king of Serbia, Milan Obrenovič.) Having made his way to Russia via Constantinople, he joined the Russian Army and saw service in the Russo–Japanese War (with the 8th East Siberian Rifle Regiment, 1902–1905 and 1906–1910) and the 41st East Siberian Rifle Regiment (1905–1906). He then served with the 5th East Siberian Rifle Regiment (1910–1913), until ill health forced him into retirement. He then worked briefly as a commercial traveler with the Russo–Mongolian Trading Company in Mongolia. He returned to the army in 1914, was in constant action on the Eastern Front during the First World War, and by January 1917 had risen to become the much-decorated commander of the 55th Siberian Rifle Regiment.

Following the February Revolution, Bakich was forced to leave his post due to the demands of the soldiers at his command (who objected to his exacting ways). In fact, though, he was of socialist convictions and sympathized with rightist elements of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries. Nevertheless, when he was mobilized by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution, becoming commander of the garrison at Samara, he soon joined an anti-Bolshevik officers’ organization. After the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, he commanded various formations of the People’s Army of Komuch, notably the 2nd Syzran′ Rifle Division (from 24 July 1918), before being placed at the head of the 4th Orenburg Army Corps (19 February 1919–6 January 1920) in the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. Following the collapse of Kolchak’s Orenburg Army, Bakich and his forces retreated from the southern Urals through Central Asia to Semirech′e, where (from 6 January 1920) he commanded the Northern Group of the Semirech′e Army. Following that force’s collapse, on 27 March 1920 he led his men across the border into China, near Chuguchak (Chöchek, now Tacheng), and was subsequently interned by the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang.

After the departure from the internment camp of Ataman B. V. Annenkov and the death of Ataman A. I. Dutov, from March 1921 Bakich commanded the Orenburg Army in exile and in the following month escaped Chinese custody and led a contingent of his men on a remarkable forced march through the deserts of Dzungaria into Mongolia to the settlement of Shara Sume. Although by the time they arrived there no more than 600 of the 8,000 men who had set off were both alive and fit for battle, Bakich soon established contact with the remains of the Asiatic Cavalry Division of Baron R. F. Ungern von Sternberg and, in September–October 1921, undertook with him an abortive invasion of Soviet territory. On 25 January 1922, the Mongolian government decided to deport Bakich and the remnants of his force to Soviet Russia. On 3 February 1922, they were duly handed over to the Bolsheviks. On 25 May 1922, together with 15 of his officers, Bakich was sentenced to death after a trial, and was shot at Novonikolaevsk on 30 May.

baku commissars. See twenty-six (BAKU) commissars.

Baku commune. This short-lived polity held power in the Azeri capital from 13 April to 31 July 1918, in opposition to the Transcaucasian Federation and the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan (whose government was at that time located at Tiflis). It was dominated by Armenian, Georgian, and Russian parties and activists, consisting (initially) of 85 members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries and the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries, 48 Bolsheviks, 36 Dashnaks, 18 members of Musavat, and 13 Mensheviks, and was led by the Bolshevik S. G. Shaumian. It faced numerous difficulties in its efforts to control events at Baku: notably, food shortages, isolation from Soviet Russia, interethnic (especially Armenian–Azeri) tensions and massacres (in the wake of the March Days), and the advance on Baku of the Turkish Army of Islam and their Azeri allies. On 5 June 1918, its small and disorganized forces, the Baku Red Army, repulsed a Turkish attack, but a subsequent offensive against the Turks’ headquarters at Ganja (also the temporary capital of the Armenian republic) failed. In the light of this, the Dashnaks, Mensheviks, and SRs decided to invite the British Dunsterforce into the city, scraping a vote in favor of this through the Baku Soviet on 25 July 1918. The Bolsheviks then resigned from the Soviet leadership and the Commune ceased to exist. It was replaced by the Central Caspian Dictatorship. Most of the Bolshevik leaders of the Baku Commune were subsequently arrested and would find fame in death as the Twenty-six Commissars.

baku congress. See Congress of the Peoples of the east.

BalodIs, Jānis (20 February 1881–8 August 1965). Captain (1914?), lieutenant colonel (Latvian Army, 28 February 1919), colonel (Latvian Army, 14 March 1919), general (Latvian Army, January 1920). The Latvian military commander and politician Jānis Balodis, a key figure in the Latvian War of Independence, was born at Trikata, Courland guberniia, into the family of a teacher. Having entered military service with the Russian Army in 1898, he graduated from the Vilnius Officer School in 1902 and served subsequently, with distinction, in the Russo–Japanese War. He spent most of the First World War in German captivity, having been taken prisoner on 20 February 1915, but returned to Latvia in November 1918 to help organize the putatively independent country’s armed forces. On 16 October 1919, he was placed in command of the Courland Division of the Latvian Army, leading forces in battle against the Russian and German irregulars of Colonel P. R. Bermondt-Avalov, and was then placed at the head of all Latvian ground and naval forces (from 1 April 1919), following the death of Colonel Oskars Kalpaks. He was officially named as commander in chief of the Latvian armed forces in October 1919.

Balodis resigned from office in 1921 and turned to politics, being elected to the Latvian Saiema (parliament) from 1925. He subsequently served as minister of war in various cabinets (1931–1940) and in May 1934, as prime minister, helped organize the coup that established the “nationalist dictatorship” of another veteran of the independence war, Kārlis Ulmanis. He was thereafter prime minister and (from 11 April 1936) vice president of Latvia; effectively, he was Ulmanis’s deputy, until the pair argued in 1940 and Balodis was dismissed. Following the Soviet invasion of Latvia in July 1940, Balodis was immediately arrested by the NKVD and exiled to Syzran′. He was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in the camps but from 1946 served his sentence in prison, latterly at Vladimir. In 1956, he was allowed to return to Latvia, where he died in 1965 at Saulkrasti on the Gulf of Riga. He was buried at Riga in the 1st Forest Cemetery.

Baltic Fleet. Founded by Peter the Great in 1703, the Baltic Fleet was one of the oldest Russian naval formations. Prior to the First World War, its chief claim to fame had been the fleet’s extraordinary around-the-world voyage during the Russo–Japanese War, which had ended in its near total destruction at the Battle of Tsushima Straits in May 1905. It was rebuilt thereafter, with numerous modern Dreadnoughts entering the service, including four of the Gangut class that were launched in late 1914 (the Gangut, the Poltava, the Petropavlovsk, and the Sevastopol′). However, during the First World War the fleet was largely confined to its bases at Kronshtadt, Helsingfors (Helsinki), and Revel, as a consequence of German dominance of the Baltic.

In 1917, sailors of the Baltic Fleet were among the most ardent supporters of the Bolsheviks (although many of them bore convictions that bordered on anarchism), and they played a prominent role in the July Days and the October Revolution. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks won 58 percent of the fleet’s vote, compared to 39 percent for the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries. Following the consolidation of Soviet power, in early 1918 the fleet was renamed “The Naval Forces of the Baltic Sea.” In 1917–1918, detachments of Baltic sailors were sent off around the country to secure the victory of Soviet power during the Railway War. Also in early 1918, as the Estonian War of Independence and the Austro-German Intervention threatened the security of vessels at Revel, and the Finnish Civil War threatened the security of those at Helsingfors, as much of the fleet as could be saved was withdrawn to Kronshtadt in what became known as the Ice March of the Baltic Fleet (17 February–11 April 1918), although a number of submarines had to be scuttled.

The Baltic Fleet was thereafter again confined to base during the civil wars, as a British naval squadron (part of the Allied intervention) dominated the Baltic and blockaded the mouth of the Gulf of Finland. One attempt at a more active strategy, in December 1918, resulted in the capture off Revel, by the Royal Navy, of the destroyers Avrotil and Spartak, along with fleet commissar F. F. Raskol′nikov. Even at Kronshtadt, however, the fleet was not totally secure: in June and August 1919, attacks on it by British coastal motorboats led by Augustus Agar caused the loss of the cruiser Oleg and the battleship Andrei Pervozvannyi, among other vessels. Indeed, probably the Baltic Fleet’s most significant contribution to the Red war effort was the contingent of vessels taken from it that were transported to the Eastern Front in the summer of 1918 to form the Volga Military Flotilla. By February 1921, famously, the relations between the Soviet government and the Baltic sailors had soured, resulting in the Kronshtadt Revolt.

Commanders of the Baltic Fleet were Rear Admiral A. V. Razvozov (7 July–18 December 1917 and 12–20 March 1918); A. A. Rushek (head of the military section of Tsentrobalt, 20 December 1917–12 March 1918); Captain A. M. Shchastnyi (20 March–26 May 1918); S. V. Zarubaev (27 May 1918–18 January 1919); A. P. Zelenoi (18 January 1919–8 July 1920); and F. F. Raskol′nikov (8 July 1920–27 January 1921).

Baltic (Baltische) Landeswehr. This German-dominated force was influential in Latvia during 1919 during both the Latvian War of Independence and the Estonian War of Independence. In essence, it came to constitute the armed forces of the United Baltic Duchy that Baltic Germans in the former Russian provinces of Courland, Livland, Estland, Riga, and Ösel attempted to construct (with Reichsdeutsch assistance) as an independent state in early 1919. It had its origins, however, in a combination of the creation of Russian volunteer anti-Bolshevik officer detachments around Riga in October 1918 and the Allies’ insistence, in Article XII of the armistice of 11 November 1918, that imperial German forces should remain temporarily in the Baltic region (by implication to prevent an invasion by Soviet forces).

In January 1919, at Riga, some of the most actively anti-Bolshevik members of the collapsing 8th German Army combined, to combat the Reds, as the Iron Division (under the command of General Rüdiger von der Goltz), while increasing numbers of Baltic Germans and Latvians associated with them entered the local volunteer detachments, which became the Baltic Landeswehr (literally, “Baltic Land Defense”). At this point, most of the Russian officer volunteers left the force. The Landeswehr then, although formally commanded by a British officer, Major Alfred Fletcher, in essence came under the control of von der Goltz and was a German force.

In March 1919, the Landeswehr and its allies won a number of victories over the Red Army, bursting out of their stronghold at Liepāja to capture first Ventspils (Windau) and Riga and driving the Reds out of much of Latvia. In light of these victories, the German authorities were able to obtain a postponement of the withdrawal of their forces from the region that the Allies were now demanding, which von der Goltz merely used, however, to attack Riga and drive out the nationalist government of Andrievs Niedra on 22 May 1919. Von der Goltz then moved his forces northward, possibly in preparation for an advance against Petrograd. However, the Latvian government had already sought assistance from the Estonian Army, which then (assisted by the Latvian Northern Corps), in the decisive contest (the Battle of Võnnu) of what became known as the Landeswehr War, defeated von der Goltz’s forces and obliged them to abandon Riga (5 July 1919). An armistice was subsequently arranged by the Allies, and in mid-July 1919 the Landeswehr came again under the control of the British army, in the person of Lieutenant General Harold Alexander (the future Field Marshal Alexander of Tunis), who gradually sought to demobilize its German elements. However, many of the demobilized men simply transferred to the West Russian Volunteer Army of Colonel P. R. Bermondt-Avalov. Others retreated into Germany as Freikorps detachments.

BALTIISKII, ALEKSANDR ALEKSEEVICH (18 June 1870–7 March 1939). Colonel (6 December 1911), major general (6 December 1916), lieutenant general (1917), Kombrig (Red Army, 1935). The Soviet military commander A. A. Baltiiskii was born at Baltiiskii Port (Paldiski), Estland guberniia. He was a graduate of the Riga Gymnasium and, having joined the army on 19 June 1891, graduated from the Academy of the General Staff (1893). He served on the staff of the Russian Army’s 4th Infantry Division (22 October 1904–25 June 1905) and from 25 June 1905 to 7 June 1912 was attached to the General Staff and subsequently (7 June 1912–September 1914) taught at the Academy of the General Staff. During the First World War, he was chief of staff of the 43rd and 72nd Infantry Divisions (September 1914–February 1915), chief of staff of the 64th Infantry Division (from February 1915), commander of the 291st Trubchevskii Regiment (from 19 March 1915), and chief of staff of the 3rd Siberian Rifle Division (from 20 May 1916). In 1917, he was attached to the war ministry in Petrograd.

In 1918, Baltiiskii volunteered for service with the Red Army and became head of the Supreme Military Inspectorate (April–June 1916), then chief of staff of the 4th Red Army (12 October–5 November 1918), then commander of that army (5 November 1918–31 January 1919). From March 1919, he was assigned to duties on the staff of M. V. Frunze with the southern group of forces on the Eastern Front. From 15 August 1919 to 18 March 1920, Baltiiskii was chief of staff of the Turkestan Front and then became deputy commander of forces in the Trans-Volga region (20 April–17 October 1920).

Subsequently, Baltiiskii was chiefly involved in teaching work at the Red Military Academy (from 1922), also serving as an advisor to the chair of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (from August 1923). He was one of the many military specialists who were investigated during Operation “Spring” in 1930, but escaped arrest, although on 1 June 1931 he was dismissed from his posts. He eventually returned to teaching in the Military Transport Academy, but on 17 March 1938 he was arrested and charged with membership in a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization. He was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on 7 March 1939 and was shot that same day. Baltiiskii was buried in a mass grave in the Donskoi cemetery in Moscow. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 2 June 1956.

BANEVUR (BONIVUR), VITALII BORISOVICH (1902–17 September 1922?). The Komsomol hero and civil-war martyr V. B. Banevur was born in Warsaw but moved with his parents during the First World War to Vladivostok, where he enrolled in the Boys’ Gymnasium. Soviet sources, notably the hagiographic Sertse Bonivura (“The Heart of Bonivur,” 1953) by D. D. Nagishkin (which in 1969 was filmed under the same title by Mark Orlov), portray him as a dedicated Communist youth, who devoted his life to the Bolshevik underground during the civil wars and who traveled to Moscow in October 1920 to attend the Third Congress of the Komsomol, where he met and was offered guidance by V. I. Lenin. Such sources have it that Banevur was active thereafter in the partisan movement in the Maritime Province, until in 1922 he was captured by a White unit of the Ussurii Cossack Host, who tortured him and cut out his heart. Subsequently, innumerable streets, squares, schools, and other public spaces and buildings were named in honor of Banevur across the USSR, and statues of him were raised at Ussuriisk and Vladivostok. Over the years, however, various more prosaic versions of his life and fate have gained currency.

BANGERSKIS, RŪDOLFS (21 July 1878–25 February 1958). Captain (December 1914), major general (February 1919), lieutenant general (Waffen SS, 1 March 1943). Born in the Taurupsk district of Latvia, the White commander Rüdolfs Bangerskis graduated from the Iaunelgavsk village school in 1895 and immediately volunteered for army service, joining the Riga NCO Battalion. He subsequently graduated from the St. Petersburg Officer School (1901) and, after service in the Russo–Japanese War, the Academy of the General Staff (1914). During the First World War, he occupied a number of command and staff positions, including (from December 1916) chief of staff of the newly formed Latvian Riflemen (Latvian Rifle Division) and commander of the 17th Siberian Rifle Regiment (from 25 January 1917).

Following the October Revolution, Bangerskis joined the anti-Bolshevik movement in eastern Russia and served during the civil wars as chief of staff of the 7th Urals Mountain Rifle Division (August–October 1918), commander of the 12th Urals Rifle Division (from October 1918), and commander of the 8th (later the 6th) Ufa Army Corps (from March 1919) of the Western Army. Following the collapse of the forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and its participation in the Great Siberian (Ice) March, Bangerskis’s Ufa group formed the basis of the 1st Transbaikal Corps of the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov at Chita (15 March 1920). Following the Reds’ defeat of Semenov’s forces, in November 1920 Bangerskis emigrated, living first at Harbin and then (from March 1921) Shanghai.

Bangerskis left Shanghai for Europe on the steamship Yamatomaru in July 1921 and arrived home in Latvia on 10 November that year. He subsequently enjoyed numerous senior postings in the Latvian Army and served twice as minister of defense (23 December 1924–24 December 1925 and 18 December 1926–23 January 1928). He retired in 1936, but came out of retirement during the Second World War, when he worked in collaboration with the occupying German forces, notably (from 1 March 1943) as inspector general of the Latvian SS Volunteer Legion. He was the only Latvian officer to be granted an official SS rank and has been frequently accused of complicity in the mass murder of Latvian Jews during the war. He retreated with the German forces into Germany in 1944 and there was made president of the (puppet) Latvian National Committee (20 February–4 April 1945). He was arrested and imprisoned by the British authorities on 21 June 1945, having been denounced as a Nazi by other Latvians, but was released in December 1946. Bangerskis spent the remainder of his life in West Germany. He died of his injuries following a car accident in 1958 and was buried in the Omsted cemetery in Oldenburg. Controversially, on 16 March 1995 Bangerskis was reburied, with full honors and as a national hero, beneath the Freedom Monument in central Riga.

BARANOV, PETR IONOVICH (10 September 1892–5 September 1933). Born into a working-class family in St. Petersburg, P. I. Baranov was a senior commander of Red forces during the civil wars and subsequently played a leading role in the development of the Soviet air forces. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1912 and the following year was exiled and deprived of all civil rights by the tsarist authorities. He was mobilized into the army in 1915, but in 1916 was court-martialed for conducting revolutionary propaganda among his fellow soldiers on the Romanian Front and sentenced to eight years’ hard labor.

Baranov was freed following the February Revolution and in September 1917 became chairman of the Front Section of Rumcherod at Odessa. In 1918, he commanded the 4th Don Army and was active in battles against the Austro-German intervention in the Donbass. He then served, successively, as a member of the Revvoensovets of the 8th Red Army and (concurrently) the Southern Group of forces on the Eastern Front (7 April–6 May 1919), the Turkestan Front 15 August–16 October 1919), the 1st Red Army (16 October 1919–27 September 1920), and the 14th Red Army (31 October–31 December 1920). In that last role, he became a close associate of M. V. Frunze in the battles against the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel during the conquest of Crimea.

In 1921, Baranov was named chief of the political section of the armed forces of Ukraine and Crimea and, as a delegate to the 10th Congress of the RKP(b), participated in the suppression of the Kronshtadt Revolt. From 18 May 1921 to 7 April 1922, he again served on the Revvoensovet of the Turkestan Front and was also commander of the Forces of the Ferghana oblast′, overseeing operations against the Basmachi. Then, in 1923, he became commander and commissar of armored forces of the Red Army. Thereafter Baranov occupied a number of posts connected with the development of the motorized and air forces of the USSR and, from 21 March 1925 to 28 June 1931, he was a member of the Revvoensovet of the USSR. On 6 June 1931, he became a member of the presidium of VSNKh and chief of the All-Union Aviation Association and in January 1932 was named Deputy People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry and head of the Main Directorate of the Aviation Industry. At the 16th Party Congress (26 June–13 July 1930), he was elected as a member of the Central Control Commission and a candidate member of the party Central Committee. Baranov died in an aviation accident near Moscow, when the aircraft in which he was a passenger failed to make a landing by instruments. He is buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

BARATOV (BARATASHVILI), NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH (1 February 1865–22 March 1932). Sotnik (Cossack lieutenant, 1885), colonel (7 August 1900), major general (March 1906), lieutenant general (26 November 1912), general of cavalry (8 September 1917). The White commander N. N. Baratov was born at Vladikavkaz into a noble family of Georgian descent that had joined the Terek Cossack Host. He enlisted in the Russian Army on 1 September 1882 and graduated from the Constantine Artillery School, the St. Petersburg (Nicholas) Military-Engineering Institute (1885), and the Academy of the General Staff (1892). After service in various Terek Cossack regiments and institutions, he rose to the command of the 1st Sunzha-Vladikavkaz Regiment (29 March 1901), in which he served with distinction during the Russo–Japanese War. He then became chief of staff of the Consolidated Cavalry Corps (August 1905–March 1906) and was then chief of staff of the 2nd Caucasus Army Corps (1 July 1907–26 November 1912). During the First World War, Baratov commanded the 1st Caucasus Cossack Corps on the Caucasus Front. He was prominent at the Battle of Sarıkamış (December 1914–January 1915), during the Persian Campaign his forces defeated Kerim Pasha’s rearguard troops on 5 August 1915 (after the Battle of Kara Killisse), and by 3 December 1915 his forces had captured the ancient Persian capital of Hamadan, proceeding to occupy Qom and Kermanshah and thereby effectively isolating Persia from Ottoman Turkey and securing it for the Entente.

After returning to Russia, from 24 March 1917 Baratov commanded the Caucasus Military District before being appointed commander of the 5th Caucasus Army Corps (25 May 1917). He then returned to Persia, following the British defeat at the Siege of Kut, and, after the October Revolution, disbanded his forces and went into exile in India. He offered his support to the Volunteer Army in August 1918 and was subsequently made General A. I. Denikin’s plenipotentiary to the Democratic Republic of Georgia, with the task of resolving the Sochi Conflict. On 13 September 1919, Baratov was badly wounded in a terrorist incident in Tiflis, resulting in the amputation of his right leg. After recuperating, he briefly joined the South Russian Government of General P. N. Wrangel in Crimea, as director of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs (March–April 1920).

In emigration from May 1920, Baratov settled in France, where he headed charitable émigré organizations such as the Union of Disabled Persons and the Overseas Union of Russian Disabled People and edited (from February 1930) the newspaper Russkii invalid (“Russian [Military] Invalid”). He died in Paris and was buried at the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery.

BARBOVICH, IVAN GAVRILOVICH (27 January 1874–21 March 1947). Colonel (1917), major general (10 December 1919), lieutenant general (19 July 1920). The White general I. G. Barbovich was born into a noble family in Poltava guberniia and was a graduate of the Elizavetgrad Cavalry Officers School (1896). He joined the Russian Army in 1894 and saw action in the Russo–Japanese War. During the First World War, he was much decorated for bravery and served as commander of the 2nd Squadron of the Hussars Regiment (from August 1914) and then commander of the 10th Ingerman Hussar Regiment (4 May 1917–February 1918).

Following the October Revolution, Barbovich moved to Khar′kov in Ukraine, where he was elected commander of the 10th Ukrainian Cavalry Division. He subsequently served as commander of the 10th Cavalry (later 3rd Mounted) Division in the Hetmanite Army of P. P. Skoropadskii. During the anti-Hetman uprising of late 1918, he built an independent anti-Bolshevik detachment of his former comrades, which, following numerous battles with the embryonic forces of Nestor Makhno, on 26 October 1918 united with the Volunteer Army. Barbovich was placed in the reserve of the Volunteer Army (October 1918–March 1919) before serving in the Armed Forces of South Russia, as, successively, commander of the 2nd Mounted (General Drozdovskii) Regiment of the Crimean–Azov Army (1 March–April 1919), commander of an independent cavalry brigade attached to the 3rd Army Corps (April–May 1919), commander of the 1st Mounted Brigade of the 2nd Cavalry Division of the 5th Army Corps (May–October 1919), commander of the 2nd Cavalry Division (October–18 December 1919), and commander of the 5th Mounted Corps (later Division, 18 December 1919–March 1920). In those posts, he saw extended action against the Reds’ 1st Cavalry Army before being evacuated from Novorossiisk to Crimea. There, in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, Barbovich served as commander of the 1st Cavalry Division (April–September 1920) and then commander of a mounted corps (September–November 1920).

He was evacuated from Crimea with Wrangel’s defeated forces in November 1920 and spent some time in the camps at Gallipoli before moving (in September 1921) to Belgrade, where he found employment as an advisor with the ministry of war of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes and was active with ROVS (heading its 4th Section from 1933). In 1924, with other Russian émigré mercenaries, Barbovich took part in the invasion of Albania that paved the way for the rule of Ahmet Zogu (“King Zog”). He moved to Berlin in September 1944 and, having fled west to avoid capture by Soviet forces in 1945, lived in a refugee camp near Munich before his death from exhaustion in a hospital at Schwabing in 1947. He was buried at a now unknown site in Munich.

BARDIZH, KONDRAT LUKICH (9 March 1868–9 March 1918). Ensign (189?) The Cossack politician K. L. Bardizh was born at Briukhovetsk stanitsa, Kuban oblast′, and was a graduate of the Stavropol′ Cavalry Officer School (although he had been expelled, for political reasons, from the Kuban Host Gymnasium in 1885) and served for 12 years (1888–1900) in the armed forces. In 1903, he was elected ataman of his home village and, having joined the Kadets during the 1905 Revolution, was elected as a member of all four State Dumas. From 1910, he was also a member of the Black Sea–Kuban Railway Board. Following the February Revolution, he served as the Provisional Government’s commissar for the Kuban region. In that role, he strove to prevent Russian and Ukrainian peasant settlers from unilaterally seizing land from the Kuban Cossack Host and dispersed local soviets and revolutionary committees.

Following the October Revolution, Bardizh worked to promote the notion of an independent Kuban and served as minister of the interior in the Host government. In that role, he argued in favor of the idea of the parity of representation of Cossacks and non-Cossacks in the Kuban government. He was also involved with the creation of anti-Bolshevik Cossack forces in the Kuban and was at the head of such a detachment that was being driven south, toward Georgia, in February–March 1918, when he was captured by revolutionary sailors near Tuapse and executed alongside his two sons. He was later reburied at Ekaterinodar, but the church and graveyard where he was laid to rest were destroyed in the Soviet era. It is now the site of a children’s hospital.

BARON, FANIA (?–29 September 1921). A now revered Russian proponent of anarchism, Fanya Baron’s origins in Russia remain obscure. It is known that in 1917, she returned to her place of birth from the United States, where (since 1912) she had been active in the International Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) as an organizer of strikes and other actions in Chicago. During the “Russian” Civil Wars she became involved, alongside her husband, Aaron Baron (Kantarovitch), in the Ukrainian Anarchist Federation and the Nabat organization, supporting the forces of N. I. Makhno. Having been arrested by the Cheka at Khar′kov on 25 November 1920, she escaped from prison at Riazan′ on 10 July 1921 and made her way to Moscow, but was betrayed and recaptured on 17 August 1921. She was then placed, with 12 other anarchists (among them Aaron Baron, Voline, and Gregory Maximoff), in the Taganka prison, joining them on a hunger strike. Although 10 of the prisoners were released and deported on 17 September 1921, Fania Baron and Lev Chernyi were retained and subsequently shot, while Aaron Baron remained incarcerated until his execution at the Taganka prison in Moscow in 1940. An anarchist organization in Sydney, Australia, centered on the bookshop Jura Books, has named its library the Fanya Baron Library in her honor.

BARSUKOV, EVGENII ZAKHAROVICH (16 March 1933–21 January 1957). Major general (January 1910), major general of artillery (Red Army, 1940). Born at Smolensk and a graduate of the Alexander Military School (1885) and the Academy of the General Staff (1895), E. Z. Barsukov was one of the key military specialists serving the Red Army during the civil wars. From 1899, he served with the Main Artillery Directorate of the Russian Army and from 1910 to 1915, was attached to the General Inspector of Artillery, as his head of affairs, chief of the Field Directorate of Artillery, and chairman of the Commission on the Organization of Heavy Artillery of Special Designation, while at the same time lecturing at the Officers’ Artillery School.

Following the October Revolution, Barsukov remained in the army and became a voenspets in the Red forces as chief of the Artillery Directorate of the Main Commander-in-Chief (December 1917). In April 1918, he was named inspector of artillery for the Western Screen, and from November 1918 to February 1919 he served as commander of the Minsk (Western) Military District. He then returned to staff work connected with the development of Red artillery forces and in 1924 was seconded to the Directorate for the Study of the Lessons of the Great War. Barsukov was the much-decorated author of more than 50 academic works and in 1940 became a doctor of military science.

Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. A formally autonomous entity within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, situated on the western slopes of the Urals, with its capital initially at Sterlitamak, the Bashkir Republic, which was the first of its kind, was founded on 23 March 1919, as the Soviet government sought to reward the Bashkirs who had renounced their former alliance with the White forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and (on 18–19 February 1918) gone over to the Red Army.

The Bashkirs were a seminomadic, Turkic people (with a population close to 1,500,000 by 1917), who were closely related to the more settled and urbanized Tatars, although the latter tended to despise the Bashkirs for their cultural “backwardness.” During the civil-war period, the Bashkir ASSR’s administration was chiefly in the hands of the Bashkir Revolutionary Committee (Bashrevkom), twice led by Ahmed Zeki Validov (21 February 1919–17 May 1919 and 30 January–26 June 1920) and also (between those periods) by Kh. Iumagudov. From 19 May 1920, this was succeeded by more regular Soviet governmental structures. On 14 June 1922, VTsIK resolved to extend the republic’s borders, incorporating into it parts of Ufa guberniia and Cheliabinsk guberniia and moving the capital to Ufa. This was an initiative resented by many Bashkirs, as it diluted the Bashkir nature of the republic with a large influx of Russians and Tatars.

BASMACHI. “Basmachi” was the name given to anti-Bolshevik (but equally anti-Russian and partly anti-Christian) rebel fighters in Central Asia during and after the “Russian” Civil Wars. Although the movement had its roots in the iniquities of Russian imperial conquest of the region in the 19th century, Russian settlers’ enclosures of land previously roamed by nomads, the development of a cotton monoculture for export at the expense of local food production, and most recently the huge uprising of June 1916 against Nicholas II’s attempt to impose mobilization into the Russian Army upon his previously exempted Muslim subjects, it can still probably be asserted that the Basmachi movement proper arose in the aftermath of the overthrow in February 1918, by Red Guards, of the Kokand Autonomy. The latter had been established by the Fourth Extraordinary Regional Muslim Congress on 26 November 1917, in what is today eastern Uzbekistan, to govern and protect the non-Russian peoples of the region. In the aftermath of this event, some secular pan-Turkic intellectuals and proponents of Jadidsm joined forces with religious leaders, local nationalists and clan leaders, and the leaders of the emirates of Bukhara and Khiva to oppose the Soviet government (although the secular elements were in a small minority).

It should be noted that although the name “Basmachi” is derived from the Turkic word basmak (meaning, in fairly neutral fashion, “to attack,” “to raid,” or “to fall upon”), it was first deployed by Soviet scholars to describe their enemies and had pejorative overtones of banditry. Equally, in Soviet scholarship the Basmachi were presented as tools of British imperialism, and the movement was portrayed as a new tactic in the great game to win Russian Central Asia for British India. Émigré memoirs generally denied this, while following the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR in 1979 and Soviet forces’ battles against the mujahideen, Western scholarship became increasingly interested in the Basmachi and frequently portrayed them in a positive light, as freedom fighters against Russian and Soviet imperialism. It remains to be seen how current Western and regional attitudes to al-Qaeda may swing the pendulum back in the opposite direction. Currently, in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, individual Basmachi leaders are lionized, but the strictly Islamic nature of some of the Basmachi factions is downplayed.

Apart from its diverse membership, the movement can be seen to have run through a series of chronological stages. The first, from 1918, saw the establishment of forces numbering up to 30,000 opposing the Soviet overthrow of the Kokand Autonomy, many in the name of and subsidized by Mohammed Alim Khan, the deposed khan of Bukhara. Among the largest of these was the group commanded by Madamin-bek. By the summer of 1920, these forces (initially assisted by the rebel Peasant Army of Ferghana of K. I. Monstrov) had established control over the rich (but traditionally conservative and deferential) Ferghana Valley and much of Turkestan in opposition to the Red Army and its allied forces of the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic and the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic. In 1920 to 1921, Soviet forces regained ground by a mixture of military offensives (now that their White opponents were on the point of defeat) and political, economic, and religious concessions to win over the population (or at least to guarantee its neutrality).

A second phase began in November 1921, with the arrival in Central Asia of the Turkish general Enver Pasha, who turned on his Soviet sponsors and joined the Basmachi. The former Turkish minister of war alienated some Basmachi groups, but united others into a more regular army of at least 16,000 men, which by early 1922 had overrun much of the Bukharan PSR. Moscow responded with a new round of concessions and a greater effort to induce Tatar and Muslim peasants to join Red forces to fight the Basmachi in the name of modernization and the “overthrow of the mullahs.” Subsequently, in a series of major battles over the summer of 1922, Red forces commanded by N. E. Kakurin enjoyed successes against Enver (who was wounded in battle and died on 4 August 1922 near Baldzhuan). At this point, although some leaders held out in remote regions, the Basmachi movement proper on Soviet territory could be said to have been nearing its end, although the new authorities faced continued, frequent, and relentless acts of sabotage, ambush, and assassination and scattered raids against military strongholds.

However, a final phase of the movement began in 1923, when Basmachi leaders who had fled into Afghanistan began to launch raids across the border and attempted to internationalize the struggle to include Afghanistan and Persia (largely unsuccessfully, to some degree because of the ambivalent to negative attitude toward them of the British imperial authorities in India and the Middle East and to some extent because of Soviet Russia’s assiduous cultivation of better relations with its southern neighbors). Nevertheless, this phase of the struggle is generally held to have come to an end only in 1931, with the Reds’ capture of Ibrahim Beg, although further pockets of resistance held out until at least 1934 and possibly until 1938.

In the Soviet Union, the Red Army’s battles against the Basmachi later became a popular subject of films that have been dubbed Red Westerns (or rather “Easterns,” Osterns). Notable examples include Ognennie Vyorsti (“Miles of Fire”/“The Burning Miles,” dir. S. I. Samsonov, 1957); Beloe solntse pustyni (“White Sun of the Desert,” dir. V. Ia. Motyl, 1969); Vstrecha u staroi mecheti (“Meeting at the Old Mosque,” dir. Sukhbat Khamidov, 1969); Sed′maia pulia (“The Seventh Bullet,” dir. Ali Khramaev, 1972); Telokhranitel′ (“The Bodyguard,” dir. Ali Khramaev, 1979); and Svoi sredi chuzhiikh, chuzhoi sredi svoikh (“At Home among Strangers,” dir. N. S. Mikhailov, 1974). These drew upon the classic Trinatsat′ (“The Thirteen,” dir. M. I. Romm, 1936) and seldom involved any more subtlety in their portrayal of the Muslim rebels than had Romm’s work.

BATUMI, TREATY OF (4 June 1918). Signed by the Democratic Republic of Armenia and the Ottoman Empire (at a time when the former Russian Caucasian Front had collapsed and the Turkish Army of Islam was poised at the gates of Yerevan), under its terms the newly proclaimed Armenian state was forced to accept as its border with Turkey the line that had been previously established by the Soviet Russian signatories of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918).

From the Armenian point of view, the treaty was unfair; thus, in 1918 General Andranik Ozanian refused to be bound by it and established the breakaway Republic of Mountainous Armenia on territory that the Batumi treaty had assigned to Turkey, while in the following years the nationalist government at Yerevan attempted to overturn the treaty. As one of the main aims of Soviet policy, however, was to placate Turkey, the terms of the Treaty of Batumi were largely reaffirmed by the Treaty of Alexandropol (2 December 1920), the Treaty of Moscow (16 March 1921), and the Treaty of Kars (13 October 1921).

Baytursynov (BAYTURSUN, Baytursin-uli), Ahmet (15 January 1873–8 December 1937). One of the most influential Kazakh politicians of the revolutionary era, Ahmet Baytursynov is also remembered as a major Kazakh poet, journalist, linguist, and educator. He was born in Turgai oblast′ into an aristocratic family that became destitute when his father was arrested for an alleged attack on a tsarist official. Nevertheless, he managed to graduate from the Orenburg Teachers’ School (1895), an institution heavily influenced by pedagogic methods established by Ibrahim Altynsarin that stressed teaching in both Kazakh and Russian, and subsequently worked as a teacher and a writer. Baytursynov was at the center of the transformation of Kazakh cultural Jadidism into a Kazakh national movement and in 1905 chaired the Congress of Kazakh Intellectuals at Vernyi (Almaty). In October of that year, at Ural′sk, he was also one of the founders of the Kazakh wing of the Kadets and in 1909 was exiled from the Steppe region for his political activities. Following his return, in 1913 he became the editor of the very successful newspaper Qazaq (“Kazakh”).

In 1917, Baytursynov became a founding member and leader of the Alash Orda party, but in 1919, as the Bolsheviks consolidated their power in Central Asia, he offered his services to the Soviet authorities. He was amnestied for his former anti-Bolshevik “crimes” by order of VTsIK on 4 April 1919 and subsequently participated in the negotiations with Soviet leaders that laid the foundations for an autonomous Kazakhstan. He also worked in a number of Soviet institutions (including stints as a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Kirghiz ASSR and as Commissar of Enlightenment of that region). In the 1920s, he was also active in educational reforms and helped establish the first Kazakh university. However, in June 1929 he was arrested, charged with promoting “bourgeois nationalist” sentiments, and exiled to Arkhangel′sk oblast′. At some time either during or after 1934, Baytursynov was allowed to return to Central Asia, but during the Great Terror, in October 1937, he was again arrested and was subsequently executed. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1989, and a statue of him now stands on a street named in his honor (the former Kosmonavtov Street) in Almaty. In contemporary Kazakhstan, his works form set texts in the school curriculum.

BELARUSSIAN PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC. Sometimes referred to as the Belarussian Democratic Republic, this short-lived polity was proclaimed by members of the Belarussian national movement at Minsk on 9 March 1918, while the region was occupied by German forces. Its first president was Jan Serada. The Belarussian Republic’s claims to legal statehood, however, are dubious; it had no constitution or defined territoriality, had no armed forces of its own, and was not recognized by any of the major powers. When German forces retreated from (and the Red Army advanced into) the region in December 1918, its governing council, the Belarussian Rada, retreated to Hrodno (Grodno) in Lithuania. The republic enjoyed a brief revival during the Slutsk Defense, as Soviet forces were driven out of western Belarus in the final stages of the Soviet–Polish War, and enjoyed the mixed blessing of support from the forces of Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz, but was vanquished thereafter and its territories incorporated into the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Belarussian rada. This national council of Belorussia was founded at a congress at Minsk in July 1917 and was dominated by members of the Belarussian Socialist Assembly, the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, the Bund, and Poale-Zion. The Rada claimed regional autonomy for Belarussia within a Russian federation. On 27 October 1917, it declared its opposition to the October Revolution and then offered its support to the Committee for the Salvation of the Revolution of the Western Front. In early 1918, some members of the Rada spoke in favor of the Dowbor-Muśnicki uprising.

On 9 March 1918, the executive committee of the Belarussian Rada pronounced the formation of the Belarussian People’s Republic and on 25 March of that year declared its independence from Russia. With the withdrawal of German forces from the region in late 1918, the advance of the Red Army into Belorussia, and the proclamation of the Socialist Soviet Republic of Belorussia at Smolensk on 1 January 1919, the Rada was dispersed, but it was able to reconstitute itself when the region was occupied by Polish forces during the Soviet–Polish War. However, the Rada was again dispersed by Soviet forces in late 1920 and driven into emigration in Czechoslovakia, where its governing council was led by the historian Vacłaŭ Łastoŭski. At a conference in Berlin in 1925, the council declared the formal dissolution of the Belarussian Rada, although it subsequently reconvened and remains in existence to this day.

BELASH, VIKTOR FEDOROVICH (1883–24 January 1938). A peasant from the village of Novospasovka (near Berdiank, Tauride guberniia), V. F. Belash received only an elementary education but, having become a proponent of anarchism, he played a prominent role in the civil wars in South Russia, first as the commander of a regiment and later as chief of staff of the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine, under Nestor Makhno.

Belash worked as an engine driver and, from 1908, was involved with anarchist circles in his native district, as well as at Berdiansk and Mariupol′. In April–May 1918, he led militia detachments around Novospasovka and elsewhere against forces of the Austro-German intervention but was forced to retire into the Kuban. There, he led a regiment that was formally part of the Red Army, but in November 1918 he deserted and returned to his native district, from where he made contact with Makhno. In December 1918, he served as the organizer of a general congress of workers, peasants, and soldiers of the insurgent region. When this met at Pologakh (3–4 January 1919), Belash was made a member of the Insurgents’ Army Council. A gifted military strategist, he was largely responsible for elaborating the military plans of the Insurgent Army and for putting them into practice throughout 1919 and 1920, as well as overseeing its logistics as chief of staff. Belash was also an advocate of collaboration with the Reds to resist the White forces of General A. I. Denikin and it was he who made the first tentative contacts with the Red command at Khar′kov on 26 January 1919. At subsequent congresses of the Insurgents, he argued for the cessation of hostilities and agitation against Soviet Russia and, in June 1919, seemed set to replace Makhno as commander of the Insurgent Army when the latter broke with Moscow. Instead, Belash briefly joined the Red Army as commander of an artillery battery, but soon broke with the Reds and created his own Nabat Southern Military Detachment in August 1919. This reunited with the main Makhnovist force, although Belash continued to preach for an agreement with Moscow, if the latter would recognize the independence of the Tauride and Ekaterinoslav gubernii, and was a firm supporter of collaboration with the Red Army in the struggle against the forces of General P. N. Wrangel in the summer of 1920. (He also attempted to curtail indiscriminate anarchist violence against the bourgeoisie and insisted upon the liberation of captured Red commanders.) When the breach between the Reds and the Insurgents opened up again in late 1920, Belash reluctantly led rebel forces in battle, but in the summer of 1921 he split again from the main Makhnovite army and attempted (unsuccessfully) to lead his own 700-strong group into Transcaucasia.

Belash was captured by Cheka forces on 23 September 1921, in the Kuban, being seriously wounded in the process, and remained in prison at Khar′kov until 1923, when he was then released on the bail of legal anarchists. He subsequently worked at Khar′kov as an instructor on tariff questions for the Iugostal′ (“Southern Steel”) trust, but continued underground anarchist work and agitation across Ukraine. He was arrested in 1930, for the attempted organization of an anarchist congress at Khar′kov, but was released again in 1932. On 16 December 1937, Belash was rearrested at Khar′kov by the NKVD and died under interrogation the following month. Although vetted and censored by the Soviet authorities, his memoirs (as published in the journal Letopis revoliutsii, no. 3 [May–June 1928]) long served as an important source of information regarding the Makhnovshchina. These were supplemented by materials collected and published by his son: A. V. Belash, Dorogi Nestora Makhno (Kiev: RVTS “Proza,” 1993).

BELOBORODOV, ALEKSANDR GEORGIEVICH (GRIGOR′EVICH) (14 October 1891–9 February 1938). Born into a worker’s family at Aleksandrovsk factory settlement in Solikamsk uezd, Perm′ guberniia, the Soviet politician A. G. Beloborodov was educated only to primary level. He worked as an electrician, joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1907, and was arrested and spent much of the remainder of the prerevolutionary period in prison (February 1908–March 1912 and May 1914–October 1916). By April 1917, he was a member (chairman from January 1918) of the Bolsheviks’ Urals Regional and Perm′ District committees. From January 1918 to January 1919, he served as chairman of the Urals oblast′ Soviet and the Viatka provincial revkom. It was in those posts that he signed the orders for the execution of the Romanov family at Ekaterinburg and their relatives at Alapaevsk.

Relocating to Rostov-on-Don, from April 1919 Beloborodov was secretary of the South-eastern Bureau of the Central Committee of the RKP(b), responsible for the ruthless de-Cossackization of the Don region, and from March 1921 chaired the South-Eastern Economic Council. He also served as a member of the Revvoensovet of the 9th Red Army (9 October 1919–28 June 1920), of the Caucasian Bureau of the RKP(b), and of the Kuban Revolutionary Committee. He was subsequently deputy people’s commissar (29 November 1921–July 23) and then (July 1923–December 1927) people’s commissar for internal affairs of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. A supporter of the Left Opposition and an associate of L. D. Trotsky, he was removed from the party in November 1927 and exiled to Ust′-Kula in the Komi Autonomous oblast′. He subsequently recanted and in May 1930 his party card was returned; he was given posts in various state procurement agencies and then (from 1932) the People’s Commissariat for Internal Trade. Beloborodov was again arrested on 15 August 1936, sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on 8 February 1938, and executed the following day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 11 March 1958 and restored to the party in 1962.

Beloi, aleksandr sergeevich (6 October 1882–9 May 1938). Lieutenant (15 June 1915), colonel (6 December 1916), kombrig (Red Army, 1935). The Soviet military commander and historian A. S. Beloi was born at Poltava in Ukraine and was a graduate of the Poltava Cadet Corps, the Mikhail Artillery School (1903), and the Academy of the General Staff (1909). He entered military service on 31 August 1900 and joined the 9th Artillery Brigade. He was later attached to the prestigious Izmailovskii Guards Regiment (27 October 1910–8 November 1911) and from 26 November 1911 was assistant senior adjutant on the staff of the Vil′na Military District. During the First World War, he served as assistant head of the quartermaster general’s office with the staff of the South-West Front (from 15 June 1915) and was later a chief clerk with the general staff of the Russian Army.

Beloi volunteered for service as a military specialist with the Red Army in early 1918 and served as chief of staff of the 4th Red Army (5 November 1918–31 January 1919). He was later made temporary commander of the 3rd Red Army (18–24 October 1920) and was then placed in command of the 4th Red Army (11 February–25 March 1921). He was subsequently engaged mainly in teaching and research in the Red Military Academy. Beloi was arrested on 17 March 1938 and, having been found guilty of espionage and membership in a “counterrevolutionary terrorist organization,” he was executed at Kommunarka, Moscow, on 9 May of that year. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 24 November 1959.

BELORUSSIA, SOCIALIST SOVIET REPUBLIC OF. The first manifestation of this republic, consisting of the former imperial Russian provinces of Smolensk, Vitebsk, Mogilev, Minsk, Grodno, and Vil′na, was established by Soviet forces at Smolensk on 1 January 1919 (moving its capital subsequently to Minsk) to replace the Belarussian National Republic, as German forces withdrew from the region at the end of the First World War. Its head of state was the writer Ciška Hartny (Źmicier Žyłunovič). One month later it was disbanded, with Smolensk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev gubernii being incorporated into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the remaining territories joining Litbel. The republic was resurrected under the same name on 31 July 1920, as the Red Army advanced during the Soviet–Polish War, but is more commonly referred to as the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the name under which it adhered to the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR on 30 December 1922.

BELORUSSIAN PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC. See BELARUSSIAN PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC.

BELORUSSIAN RADA. See BELARUSSIAN RADA.

BELORUSSIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. The polity of this name, which was one of the four original signatories of the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR (30 December 1922) and which had been proclaimed on 31 July 1920, was the second such Soviet republic. The first (the Socialist Soviet Republic of Belorussia) had existed on Belorussian territory from 1 January to 27 February 1919, initially as a constituent part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and then (from 31 January 1919) as a nominally independent state, with the official name of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belorussia (SSRB).

The republic’s prehistory can be dated back to the Minsk Soviet’s seizure of power in that city on 25 October 1917 and the subsequent union on 26 November 1917 of the executive committees of the Western Regions Soviet and the Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies of the Western Front to form a single executive (termed Obliskomzap). This created its own Sovnarkom of the Western Regions, claiming authority over all Belorussian territories not occupied by forces of the Austro-German intervention. Obliskomzap was driven out of Minsk by the Germans in February 1918 (leaving the field free for the declaration of the Belarussian People’s Republic) and moved to Smolensk. Some controversy existed within the ranks of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet government in Moscow as to whether Belorussians constituted a separate nationality and should have their own republic or whether they could be accommodated within the RSFSR. The former position was held by the Belorussian section of the RKP(b), which organized a conference in support of this plan in Moscow (21–23 December 1918). This was followed by the formation at Smolensk on 30–31 December 1918 of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Belorussia, the KP(b)B. This party proceeded to proclaim the existence of the SSRB under a Provisional Worker-Peasant Revolutionary Government. Included in the SSRB were the former Russian provinces of Vitebsk, Grodno, Mogilev, Minsk, and Smolensk. On 8 January 1919, the government moved to Minsk, as German forces retreated, and began efforts to Sovietize Belorussia. Under pressure from Polish and other nationalist forces, as well as White units in the area, however, on 27 February 1919 the SSRB was disestablished. Smolensk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev gubernii were returned to the RSFSR, and the remainder of the state was united with the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic as Litbel.

Leaders of the SSRB were D. F. Zhilunovich (chairman of the Provisional Worker-Peasant Government, 1 January–4 February 1919) and A. F. Miasnikov (chairman of the Central Executive Committee, 4–27 February 1919).

Belov, Georgii Andreevich (wittenkopf, georg-hanz Heinrich) (1881–?). Colonel (October 1916), major general (15 August 1918). A leading White commander in Siberia, G. A. Belov was of Baltic German background and was a graduate of the Nicholas Cavalry School and the Academy of the General Staff (1913). During the First World War, he served as a staff officer with the 27th Army Corps (August 1914–June 1916) and on the Kiev Military District (June 1916), before being named commander of the 9th Cavalry Division (11 June 1916–November 1917).

Having made his way east in the aftermath of the October Revolution, in the White movement Belov served as chief of staff of the Omsk Military District (6–12 June 1918) and of the Siberian Army (13 June–15 November 1918). He was then placed on the reserve list, apparently having displeased General Radola Gajda, the commander of the Siberian Army, but returned to active service, either (sources differ) on the staff of the main commander in chief or as commander of the Southern Group of forces within the Western Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s Russian Army (December 1918–February 1919). Belov then served during Kolchak’s Spring Offensive, as chief of staff of the Sterlitamak Corps (23 February–10 May 1919), before being placed in command of the Southern (Orenburg) Army (23 May–21 September 1919). When that force was smashed by the Reds, Belov retreated to Petropavlovsk and found himself in charge of its defense (October 1919). He then transferred to the Ministry of War of the All-Russian (Omsk) Government at Omsk and was placed in charge of mobilizations before, on 28 October 1919, being entrusted with control of the eastward evacuation of military establishments from Kolchak’s capital.

Some sources claim that when Omsk fell to the Red Army in November 1919, Belov retreated into Transbaikalia; others have it that he fled into Turkestan, where for some months he commanded a White partisan force against the Reds before going underground when the region was conquered by the Red Army in May 1920. All agree that he reemerged at the head of another partisan force during the peasant risings against Soviet power in Siberia during the spring of 1921 and that, with that force, he captured (and for two or three days held) Petropavlovsk against Red counterinsurgency forces. His subsequent fate, however, remains unknown.

BELOV, IVAN PANFILOVICH (15 June 1893–29 July 1938). Army commander, first rank (Red Army, 1935). One of the most senior and successful Soviet commanders in Central Asia during the civil wars, I. P. Belov was born into a poor peasant family in the village of Kalinichevo, Novgorod guberniia. He was called up to the army in 1913 and served as an NCO in the First World War.

In 1917, Belov joined the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries and from September that year was secretary and then chairman of the Soldiers’ Committee of the 1st Siberian Reserve Regiment at Tashkent. From March 1918 to April 1919, he served as chief of the garrison and commandant of the fortress at Tashkent and was at the same time commander of forces of the Turkestan ASSR. In those capacities, in January 1919 he led the brutal suppression of an anti-Soviet rising at Tashkent (the Osipov Rebellion). He joined the RKP(b) in 1919 and was named as main commander in chief of the forces of the Turkestan Red Army (8 April–18 October 1919), in which capacity he led the defense of Andizhan (September 1919). He was at this time also a member of the Revvoensovet of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist and a member of the Executive Committee of the Turkestan Soviet. He was then placed in command of an army division and then of the Bukhara Group of Forces of the Red Army (August 1920–September 1921), in which capacity he engaged in a merciless struggle to quell the Basmachi movement, with notable (if bloody) effectiveness suppressing the rising at Vernyi (now Almaty) of 12–19 June 1920, as a direct result of which the Emirate of Bukhara collapsed.

As a delegate to the 10th Party Congress in March 1921, Belov volunteered to participate in the suppression of the Kronshtadt Revolt (and won his second Order of the Red Banner for his feats). From 1921 to 1922, he was engaged in “cleansing” the territory of the former Kuban Cossack Host of “anti-Soviet” elements. In 1923, he graduated from the Red Military Academy and thereafter occupied a number of command positions, including the command of North Caucasus, Moscow, and Leningrad Military Districts. He was also a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. In June 1937, he served on the special tribunal that tried and condemned Marshal M. N. Tukhachevskii, I. E. Iakir, I. P. Uborovich, and A. I. Kork (“The Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization”). On 7 January 1938, while occupying the post of commander of forces of the Belorussian Military District, Belov was himself arrested, having been accused of anti-Soviet activities and espionage. On 29 July 1938, on the orders of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, he was sentenced to death and was shot that same day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 26 November 1955.

BELOVODSK UPRISING. This major anti-Bolshevik uprising, which erupted on 7 December 1918 in the village of Belovodsk and spread across the western reaches of Pishpek uezd and parts of the Aulie-ata uezd in Soviet Turkestan, was characterized in Soviet historiography as a “White-guard–SR–kulak” revolt but was, in fact, led by members of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries (notably N. Volkov and A. Erofeev) and is better described as a general revolt of local peasants (chiefly Russian settlers) against the requisitioning (prodrazverstka) and mobilization policies of the local Soviet authorities.

Following an assembly of peasants at Belovodsk, local Red Guards were dispersed and several Soviet officials were killed; a 10,000-strong rebel force then surrounded, but could not capture, Pishpek. Elements of the Turkestan Red Army were dispatched from the Semirech′e Front (under Ia. N. Logvinenko) to quell the rebellion, and by 23 December 1918 the Red garrison at Pishpek had been relieved. On 26 December 1918, Belovodsk was captured by the Soviet forces. A subsequent investigation by the Soviet authorities claimed to have discovered evidence that the leaders of the Belovodsk uprising were in contact with K. P. Osipov, who was to stage another anti-Bolshevik uprising (the Osipov Rebellion) in Tashkent in January 1919. However, most of the rebel leaders managed to evade arrest (although dozens of peasants were executed). One of them, P. Blagodarenko, handed himself in to the Soviet authorities in 1925 and was tried the following year at Frunze (Pishpek). The death sentence he received was commuted to five years’ imprisonment.

BENDERY UPRISING. This armed uprising was organized by local Bolsheviks in Bendery (Bender) on 27 May 1919, as one of a number of manifestations of protest by local Russians against the annexation of the former Bessarabian guberniia by Romania in December 1918. Red Guards from local factories and railway depots commanded by G. I. Staryi (Borisov), supported by 150 men of the 3rd Brigade of the 5th Division of the 3rd Ukrainian Soviet Army, captured the Bendery railway station, post office, and telegraph office, but by evening forces of the Romanian Army had arrived (together with a unit of French colonial troops) to relieve the garrison. The uprising collapsed, and many rebels fled across the Dnestr River, although at least 150 of them were captured and executed.

BERENS, EVGENII ANDREEVICH (30 October 1876–7 April 1928). Lieutenant captain (13 April 1908), captain, second rank (August 1914), captain, first rank (1917). One of the founders of the Soviet navy, E. A. Berens was born at Tiflis, in Georgia, into a noble family long associated with the imperial navy (his brother was Admiral M. A. Berens). He graduated from the Naval Cadet Corps (1904) and saw action in the Russo–Japanese War on the cruiser Variag, having participated in the around-the-world voyage of the Baltic Fleet. Following the war, he occupied a number of posts with the Baltic Fleet, lectured on naval affairs at the Academy of the General Staff (1910), and, from 1910 to 1914, was naval attaché at the Russian embassy in Berlin. From 1915 to 1917, he was naval attaché in Rome, and in June 1917 he was named chief of the Foreign Department of the Naval General Staff by the Provisional Government.

Following the October Revolution, Berens (unlike his brother) chose to serve the Soviet government and became, in succession, chief of the Naval General Staff (16 November 1917–April 1919); main commander of the Naval Forces of the Republic (24 April 1919–5 February 1920); a special representative of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (1920–1924); naval attaché in Britain (1924–25) and then France (1925–26); and a special representative of the People’s Commissariat for Naval Affairs (from 7 April 1926). In 1918, Berens was one of the planners of the Ice March of the Baltic Fleet and was also instrumental in the Soviet regime’s decision to scuttle vessels of the Black Sea Fleet at Novorossiisk. In 1919, he successfully argued that all Red military flotillas and naval detachments should be removed from the commanders of Red fronts and made directly subordinate to the central command of the Red Fleet. He was also, in 1920, a member of the delegation that negotiated the Soviet–Finnish Treaty of Tartu (14 October 1920), and he subsequently served on a number of Soviet delegations at international conferences. He died in 1928 and is buried in Novodevich′e cemetery in Moscow.

Berens, Mikhail Andreevich (16 January 1879–20 January 1943). Captain, first rank (1916), rear admiral (1919). The younger brother of the Red voenspets E. A. Berens, the White naval commander M. A. Berens was a graduate of the Naval Cadet Corps (1898) and a veteran of the Russian expedition against the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900–1901) and the Russo–Japanese War, during which he participated in the defense of Port Arthur. He rose steadily through the ranks of the Imperial Russian Navy to become chief of the Naval General Staff in late 1917.

In January 1918, Berens left his post and went, via Finland, to the Far East, where Admiral A. V. Kolchak placed him in command of the Whites’ Siberian Flotilla at Vladivostok (December 1919–1 February 1920). In January 1920, he led a group of ships from the flotilla to Japan before making his way to South Russia to become commandant of the Kerch fortress and then commander of naval forces on the Sea of Azov in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel. Following the evacuation of Crimea in November 1920, Berens helped oversee the transfer of the remains of the White Fleet to the French naval base at Bizerte (Bizerta) and, following the departure from there to Paris of Admiral M. A. Kedrov, he commanded the Russian squadron in Tunisia until its disarmament by the French in October 1924. Thereafter, he remained in North Africa, working in agriculture. Berens was an active member of the Russian émigré Military-Naval Union and was sometimes employed as a naval expert by the French authorities. He died in Tunisia and was buried in the graveyard at Mergin (until 30 April 2001, when his remains were moved to the Borjel cemetery in Tunis).

BERKMAN, ALEXANDER (OSVEI OSIPOVICH) (21 November 1870–28 June 1936). Born in Vil′na, the son of a well-to-do Jewish businessman, and raised in St. Petersburg, Alexander Berkman was one of the world’s most influential proponents of anarchism from the late 19th century until his death (although he was less prominent as a theorist) and played a notable part in the “Russian” Civil Wars. He emigrated to the United States at the age of 17, following the death of his parents (and his own earlier expulsion from school for writing an atheistic essay), and soon entered into a relationship with Emma Goldman, who became his lifelong friend and comrade. He became notorious in 1892, when he attempted to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, who was involved in a dispute with steelworkers at Homestead, Pennsylvania. Berkman was sentenced to 22 years’ imprisonment and served 14 (many of them in solitary confinement). He may also have had a part in the Lexington Avenue bombing on 4 July 1914, a bungled plot to assassinate John D. Rockefeller Jr. that killed a number of his associates in New York. Berkman always denied that charge, although he made no secret of his belief in violent action and “propaganda by the deed” (e.g., editing a journal called The Blast in San Francisco from January 1916 to 1917). After strenuously opposing the First World War and campaigning against conscription, in 1917 he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for violation of the U.S. Espionage Act.

In December 1919, Berkman, Goldman, and many other radicals of East European origin were deported to Russia. There he offered his qualified support to the Soviet government and worked for it in numerous roles, mostly cultural (including fund-raising for a museum of the revolution), and traveled widely, including to Kiev and Odessa. But by 1921, he had become disillusioned with the unyielding authoritarianism he perceived in the Bolsheviks—the suppression of the Kronshtadt Revolt being the final straw—and he subsequently joined a number of both public and secret organizations that were critical of the suppression of anarchists and other non-Bolshevik radicals in Russia, before moving via Latvia and Sweden to Germany in late 1921.

Berkman spent much of the next few years attempting to broadcast a critique of the Soviet government through such works as The Kronshtadt Revolt (Berlin: Der Syndicalist, 1922), The Russian Tragedy (Berlin: Der Syndicalist, 1922), and The Bolshevik Myth (New York, 1925). He subsequently moved to France, where he eked out a living as an editor and translator. Constantly harassed by the French authorities and plagued by illness and guilt that he had become a burden to his comrades, Berkman committed suicide in 1936. He remains revered by anarchists of many persuasions, and many of his works remain in print.

BERLIN AGREEMENT (27 August 1918). Under this treaty, a supplement to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) that was signed in Berlin by A. A. Ioffe, the Soviet government agreed to pay Germany an indemnity of 6 billion marks as reparations for damages incurred during the First World War. In a secret protocol of the same date, in the form of a letter from Ioffe to the German foreign minister, Richard von Kühlmann, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic conceded territory to Germany along the borders of the former provinces of Estland and Livland (then under German occupation) and allowed for the possibility of German and White Finnish forces entering Soviet territory to combat Allied forces in North Russia. For its part, Germany agreed to secure economic concessions for Soviet Russia from its German-occupied neighbors (notably coal from Ukraine and manganese from Georgia), not to intervene if Soviet Russia became embroiled in war with (by implication) Azerbaijan or Armenia, and to prevail upon the government in Helsinki to release Red Guards who had been imprisoned by the Finnish Whites during the Finnish Civil War and deport them to Russia.

BERLIN russian GOVERNMENT. See western russian (BERLIN) government.

BERMONDT-AVALOV, PAVEL RAFALOVICH (MIKHAILOVICH) (4 March 1877/84–27 December 1973 or 12 January 1974). Colonel (1918), major general (September 1919). Hugely influential (and controversial) in the civil wars in the Baltic theater, P. R. Bermondt-Avalov’s background remains obscure. Some sources have it that he was born into the Ussurii Cossack Host; others, that he was born in Tiflis, a descendant of the Georgian princely Avalishvili family. Some sources have it that he served in the Russian Army in a military orchestra; others, that he saw active service in the First World War.

During his initial service in the White movement, from August 1918 to January 1919, Bermondt-Avalov was active in Ukraine, commanding small detachments of anti-Bolshevik Russian volunteers, before moving to Germany in February 1919 to recruit officers and men interned there to the White cause and to raise financial subsidies (often, it has been alleged, by fraudulent means). He then moved to Latvia and led a detachment of supporters (the Special Russian Corps) alongside the Baltische Landeswehr in the capture of Riga on 24 May 1919. On 6 June 1919, he formally subordinated his detachment to the command of Colonel A. P. Lieven, but when the latter agreed to obey the order of the commander of White forces in northwest Russia, General N. N. Iudenich, to move his forces to Narva in Estonia, to join the White North-West Army in preparation for an advance on Petrograd, Bermondt-Avalov refused to follow suit. His priority seems to have been the establishment of the authority of the United Baltic Duchy rather than the overthrow of the Bolsheviks (although he alleged that he had calculated that the latter could be achieved without him and that he was attempting to secure Iudenich’s rear). He subsequently became an ally of the German commander Rüdiger von der Goltz, and during the Landeswehr War of the summer of 1919 he captured and occupied most of Samogitia (western Latvia) with his Western Volunteer Army (popularly known as the “Bermondtians”) before suffering defeat at the hands of Estonian and Latvian nationalist forces. He briefly occupied the outskirts of Riga once more in November 1919, but failed to capture the city or to establish the authority of his German-oriented Western Central Government and retired to southern Latvia and subsequently into Germany.

During the interwar period, Bermondt-Avalov became an active figure on the extreme right of Russian émigré politics, notably as a member of the pro-Nazi Russian National Liberation Movement in Weimar Germany, before moving on, via Italy, to Belgrade in 1936 (having apparently been deported by Hitler’s government). Following the 1941 coup in Yugoslavia led by the pro-Axis Dušan Simović, Bermondt-Avalov emigrated to the United States. He died in New York and is buried at the Novo Diveevo Convent at Nanuet.

BERNATSKII, MIKHAIL VASIL′EVICH (VLADIMIROVICH) (1876–16 July 1943). A leading influence on the financial policies of the White governments in South Russia, M. V. Bernatskii studied in Berlin and was a graduate of Kiev University, receiving his master’s degree in 1911. He subsequently taught political economy at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical and Technological Institutes and became a professor and (in 1914) a state counselor. Although in his youth he had been a Marxist, contributing to the journals Obrazovanie (“Education”) and Sovremenyi mir (“The Contemporary World”), his studies in economics and especially the agrarian question led him to a critique of socialism, and he adopted a more liberal-radical standpoint. He thus became associated with the Kadets before, in June 1917 (with N. V. Nekrasov), helping to found the Radical Democratic Party. Following the February Revolution, he served as director of the labor department of the Ministry of Trade and Industry of the Provisional Government (and, from the end of June 1917, as assistant minister of trade and industry). From 24 July 1917, as a member of the government’s Economic Council, he helped investigate means of increasing discipline in the factories. From late July, he became assistant minister of finance in the Provisional Government and from 25 September to 25 October 1917 was full minister.

During the October Revolution, Bernatskii was one of those members of the government arrested by Red Guards in the Winter Palace and then interned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, but he was soon released. He joined the anti-Bolshevik National Center in May 1918, to organize resistance to the Soviet government, and in January 1919 made his way to Ekaterinodar, where he was named by General A. I. Denikin as director of his Financial Department and member of the Special Council, mainly concerning himself with bolstering confidence in the banknotes issued by the Denikin regime and removing Soviet notes from circulation. Subsequently, in February 1920, he was named minister of finance of Denikin’s Government of the Main Commander of the AFSR. He remained in office under the rule of General P. N. Wrangel, as head of the Financial Directorate of the Government of South Russia (although Wrangel had come to distrust him as too much of a “theorist” and was seeking to replace him with someone “more practical” even as his regime collapsed), and was evacuated from Crimea to Turkey in November 1920 with the Russian Army.

Bernatskii subsequently made his way, via Brindisi in Italy, to Paris, where he led the Financial Committee (attached to the Conference of Ambassadors) that sought to oversee the distribution of imperial Russian assets held abroad among contending claimants in the Russian emigration. He also returned to his academic work, publishing numerous works on finance in a number of languages. He died in Paris and was buried in the Bagneux (Hautes-de-Seine) cemetery.

BERZHBITSKII, GRIGORII AFANAS′EVICH (25 January 1875–20 December 1941). Major general (20 July 1918), lieutenant general (January 1919). A White leader who came to prominence in the later phases of the civil wars in the east, G. A. Berzhbitskii was born into a lower middle-class family at Letichev (Letychiv), Podol′sk guberniia, and was a graduate of the Odessa Infantry Officer School (1897). During the First World War, he rose to the command of the 134th Infantry Division.

Following the October Revolution, Berzhbitskii refused to remain in his post and was consequently condemned to death by the Soviet military authorities, but he was saved by his men. He then fled first to Omsk (December 1917) and then Ust′-Kamenogorsk, where he went into hiding. In the summer of 1918, he was part of the officer organization that overthrew Soviet power in eastern Kazakhstan at Ust′-Kamenogorsk (and from 20 June 1918 was commander of the 1st Siberian Steppe Rifle Division) and subsequently acted as military governor of the region for the Provisional Siberian Government. From 1 January 1919, he served as commander of the 3rd West Siberian Rifle Corps and from 10 April 1919 commanded the Southern Group of the Siberian Army (subsequently the 2nd Army) of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak.

Following the collapse of Kolchak’s forces, Berzhbitskii participated in the Great Siberian (Ice) March (from January 1920 as commander the 2nd Army and from 25 March 1920 as commander of the 2nd Independent Siberian Rifle Corps). He was subsequently named commander of the Far Eastern (White) Army (22 August 1920), commander of the Armed Forces of the Maritime Provinces, and commander of the Armed Forces of the Provisional Government of the Maritime Provinces (31 May 1921). From 12 October 1921, he served the Maritime government also as director of its Ministry of Military and Naval Affairs and from December 1921 to June 1922 was commander of the remains of the Far Eastern (White) Army. In emigration, Berzhbitskii lived in China, where from 1930 he was assistant head of the Far Eastern section of ROVS. From 1932, he was head of the ROVS branch at Harbin and from 1936 that at Tientsin, where he died and was buried.

BERZIN (BERZIN′), REINGOL′D IOSIFOVICH (IAZEPOVICH) (4 July 1888–19 March 1938). Ensign (1916). Born in Livland guberniia, into the family of a Latvian farm laborer, the Soviet politician and military commander R. I. Berzin joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1905, worked in a factory and later (from 1909) as a schoolteacher, but was arrested and imprisoned for a year for revolutionary activity in 1911. He was called up to the army in 1914 and, following the February Revolution, was active in soldiers’ committees, rising to membership of the committee of the 2nd Army.

In late 1917, Berzin commanded one of the detachments of Latvian Riflemen that arrested members of the Staff of the Supreme Commander of the Russian Army at Mogilev and was subsequently assigned to combat the anti-Soviet Dowbor-Muśnicki uprising. He was then involved in the command of numerous counterinsurgency operations in Ukraine and Belorussia, and in June 1918 became chairman of the Supreme Military Inspectorate of Siberia and commander of the Northern–Urals–Siberian Front. He was subsequently named commander of the 3rd Red Army on the Eastern Front (20 July–29 November 1918) and inspector of the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia (December 1918–June 1919), and from 1919 to 1920 served as a member of numerous Revvoensovets: Western Front (August–December 1919), Southern Front (December 1919–January 1920), South-West Front (January–September 1920), and Turkestan Front (September 1920–November 1921 and December 1923–September 1924).

After the civil wars, Berzin occupied numerous posts in the Soviet defense industry and agriculture. He was arrested as a spy in December 1937 and sentenced to death on 19 March 1938 by an order of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, the sentence being carried out that day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 20 August 1955.

Bērziņš, Jānis (Kuzis, Pēteris) (13 November 1889–29 August 1938). The Soviet diplomat and intelligence officer Jānis Bērziņš was born into a Latvian peasant family in Iaynpilssk volost′, Courland guberniia, and trained as a teacher. He joined the Latvian Social Democratic Party in 1902 and the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1906; he was elected as secretary of the latter’s St. Petersburg Committee, but was forced to flee abroad in 1908 to escape arrest. In these years of exile, he gravitated toward the Bolsheviks and worked to combat the grip of the Mensheviks on the Central Committee of the Latvian SDP. In emigration, he became a member of the Foreign Bureau of the RSDLP (January 1910–1911) and a member of the Russian party’s Central Committee (January 1910–1911) and filled similar roles for the Latvian party. Having returned to Russia, he was arrested by the tsarist authorities in 1911 and exiled to Irkutsk guberniia, but escaped abroad again in 1914. That same year, he became editor of the Latvian party’s newspaper Cina (“The Struggle”). In emigration during the war, he represented the Latvian party’s internationalist wing at the antiwar Zimmerwald Conference of 1915, siding with V. I. Lenin, before emigrating to the United States. He returned once more to Russia in 1917 and was elected to the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) (3 August 1917–6 March 1918), later serving as a candidate member (8 March 1918–18 March 1919).

Following the October Revolution, Bērziņš was named Soviet ambassador to Switzerland (5 April–November 1918), but was soon expelled from that country. He subsequently served as people’s commissar for education in the short-lived Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (4 December 1918–13 January 1920). During the civil wars, he earned a reputation as one of the most fearsome and effective members of the Cheka and as one of the organizers of the Red Terror. He also served as a member (March 1919–July 1920) and then a candidate member (July 1920–June 1921), as well as secretary (June 1919–June 1920), of the Executive Committee of the Komintern, before being assigned to work with the Registration Department of the General Staff of the Red Army in December 1920. He then was assigned once more to diplomatic duties, as Soviet ambassador to Finland (16 February–24 June 1921), deputy ambassador to Great Britain (July 1921–1924), and ambassador to Austria (19 June 1925–7 September 1927). He served simultaneously as deputy chief of military intelligence (27 December 1921–March 1924). From 1927 to 1929, he was the representative of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic attached to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

In 1929, Bērziņš was recalled to Moscow, ostensibly to oversee government archives and to edit the historical journal Krasnyi arkhiv (“The Red Archive,” 1932–December 1937), although he was also head of the GRU (Glavnoe Razvedyvatel′noe Upravlenie, or Main Intelligence Directorate) of the Red Army. He seems to have been demoted in 1935 and was sent to the Far East on military work, before assignment as an advisor (under the pseudonym “Grishin”) to the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War from 1936. In June 1937, he returned to Moscow and was again placed in charge of the GRU. He was arrested on 24 December 1937 and subsequently executed as a spy. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956. Bērziņš was the subject of the Latvian documentary film Jānis Berziņš. Izlūkdienesta priekšnieks (“Jānis Berziņš: Head of Military Intelligence,” 1989, dir. Kristians Luhaers), and the 100th anniversary of his birth was marked by the issue in the USSR of a postage stamp bearing his portrait.

bessarabian republic. See moldavian people’s republic.

BESSARABIAN SOVIET REPUBLIC. This short-lived Red polity, intended to be an autonomous constituency of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, was proclaimed on 11 May 1919 (shortly before the Bendery Uprising) by a Bessarabian Soviet government-in-exile headed by I. V. Krivorukov that had been founded at Odessa on 5 May 1919 and shortly afterward moved its “capital” to Tiraspol′, Kherson guberniia. However, although units of the 2nd Ukrainian Soviet Army and the 3rd Ukrainian Soviet Army managed to establish bridgeheads on the right bank of the Dnestr River over the following weeks, the Bessarabian Soviet Republic failed to exert control over any part of historical Bessarabia, which on 9 April 1919 formally united with Romania. The government was disbanded in September 1919, when the White forces of the Armed Forces of South Russia gained control of the region.

BEZRUCHKO, MARKO DANYLOVYCH (31 October 1883–1944). Colonel (19??). A senior commander in the forces of the Ukrainian National Republic, Marko Bezruchko was born at Velikii Tokmak, Tauride guberniia, and was a graduate of the Academy of the General Staff (1914).

After service in the Russian Army during the First World War, Bezruchko returned to Ukraine and in 1918 joined the Ukrainian Army, becoming chief of the Operational Section of its General Staff. From 3 April 1919, he was chief of staff of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and on 3 January 1920, he became commander of the 6th Ukrainian Infantry Division of the 2nd Polish Army, formed from Ukrainians who had been driven onto Polish territory and interned. He commanded that unit in the advance to Kiev during the Soviet–Polish War, leading it into the Ukrainian capital on 7 May 1920. From August 1920, he commanded the Central Group of forces of the Ukrainian Army, which in October 1920, during the Polish–Ukrainian counteroffensive, captured Podol′e. He remained in Poland following the end of the war, serving on the Supreme Military Council of the Ukrainian government-in-exile from 1920 to 1924 and as its minister of war. From 1931 to 1935, he was chairman of the Ukrainian Military History Society in Warsaw. He died in Warsaw and was buried in the city’s Wola Orthodox Cemetery.

BICHERAKHOV, LAZAR′ FEDOROVICH (15 November 1882–22 June 1956). Colonel (1917), major general (British Army, 1918). Born in St. Petersburg, the son of an Ossetian officer in the Russian Army, prominent White commander of the civil wars in the Caucasus region L. F. Bicherakhov was a graduate of the Alekseev Military School in Moscow, who spent most of the First World War commanding a unit of the Terek Cossack Host in Persia (1915–1918).

In June 1918, Bicherakhov went to Enzeli (Bandar-e Anzali) and formed an agreement with General Lionel Dunsterville for joint action against Soviet forces in the North Caucasus, the consequence of which was the Bicherakhov Uprising of that month. On 1 July 1918, he landed with a unit of 600 Cossacks at Aliat (now Alat), 20 miles south of Baku, and on 10 July 1918 came to an agreement with the leaders of the Baku Commune for joint action against the Turks. However, the latters’ rapid advance on the town forced Bicherakov to withdraw with his men to Port Petrovsk (Derbent), from where he was evacuated with Dunsterforce to Enzeli in mid-August 1918. In November 1918, as the Turks withdrew from Transcaucasia, Bicherakhov and his forces returned to Baku and, in February 1919, joined the Forces of the Western Caspian Region of General A. I. Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia.

Following the collapse of Denikin’s forces, Bicherakhov emigrated in 1920 and lived at first in Britain before settling in Germany in 1928, where he led the Ossetian nationalist movement in exile and helped organize the escape of many of his fellow countrymen from the USSR. During the Second World War, he adopted a pro-Nazi line and led the North Caucasus Section of General A. A. Vlasov’s Committee of the Liberated People of Russia. He died and was buried at Ulm.

BICHERAKHOV UPRISING. This anti-Soviet uprising of the Terek Cossack Host, local officer groups, and mountain tribesmen in June–July 1918 was organized by the Menshevik G. F. Bicherakhov (president of the Host government) and his brother, Colonel L. F. Bicherakhov. They enjoyed the advice and financial support of the British Military Mission at Vladikavkaz. According to Soviet sources, the rising was timed to coincide with the Iaroslavl′ Revolt and other anti-Bolshevik uprisings in central Russia, with the offensive against Tsaritsyn organized by Ataman P. N. Krasnov of the Don Cossack Host and involved the cooperation of the Volunteer Army in Kuban, but there is little proof of this.

In late June 1918, Cossack forces laid siege to Groznyi, captured Mozdok and other centers, and proclaimed the authority of the Provisional People’s Government of the Terek Region, with G. F. Bicherakhov at its head. At the same time, a unit of Cossacks that had been stationed in Persia, led by L. F. Bicherakhov, landed with British assistance at Aliat (20 miles from Baku). Colonel Bicherakhov came to an agreement with the leaders of the Baku Commune and on 10 July united his forces with theirs. Meanwhile, responsibility for organizing Soviet resistance to the uprising rested with G. K. Ordzhonikidze, Sovnarkom’s special commissar for the Caucasus. Under his direction, forces of the 12th Red Army advanced, first relieved Groznyi, and then recaptured Mozdok (23 November 1918). G. F Bicherakhov and his associates then fled to Petrovsk and came under the protection of the forces of L. F. Bicherakhov, which continued to be active in Daghestan until they were defeated and dispersed by the 11th Red Army and local partisans in March 1920.

Biskupskii, Vasilii Viktorobich (27 April 1878–18 June 1945?). Colonel (24 March 1913), major-general (24 March 1915). A controversial military leader in Ukraine during the civil wars and subsequently one of the chief ideologues of Russian fascism abroad, V. V. Biskupskii was the son of the famous Russian actress Anastasiia Vial′tseva. A graduate of the Nicholas Cavalry School (1897), he became a guards officer, acted as a Russian Army in South Africa observer during the Boer War, and was wounded during the Russo–Japanese War. During the First World War, he served initially with the 16th Irkutsk Hussar Regiment (from 1 March 1914) and participated in Russia’s advance into eastern Persia (August–September 1914), and from January to May 1917 commanded a brigade of the 3rd Cavalry Division, before rising to the command of that entire division (from 16 May 1917).

On 29 April 1918, Biskupskii entered the service of the Hetmanite Army of the Ukrainian State of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii and, on 20 May 1918, was named commander of its 1st Cavalry Division. In that capacity, in early December 1918, he became notorious for surrendering Odessa (without a fight) to the forces of Ataman N. A. Hryhoriiv, despite the vastly superior numbers of men under his command, and on 18 December 1918, he was removed from his post. Subsequently, in emigration in Germany (from April 1919), he became even more notorious for his leadership of the pro-German Western Russian (Berlin) Government; his involvement in the Kapp Putsch; his support for the monarchist cause (as a collaborator with the Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich and head of the Russian Monarchist Union in Germany); and his membership in several proto-fascist organizations, including the group Aufbau (“Resurrection”) and the Russian National Socialist Movement. From May 1936, he served the Nazi regime as chief of the Directorate of Russian Émigré Affairs in Berlin, and in 1941 he welcomed Germany’s attack on the USSR. However, Biskupskii seems not to have enjoyed good relations with Hitler (despite sheltering him in 1923, after the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch), differing with him on the role that Russian émigrés might play in “liberating” and restructuring Russia. Indeed, some sources indicate that Biskupskii may have been party to the plot to assassinate the Führer in 1944 (the “20 July Plot”).

Biskupskii’s eventual fate is unclear: according to some accounts, after the war he made his way to safety in the United States and shortly thereafter died in New York; according to others, he returned to Germany from the United States and perished near Munich; and according to yet others, he was arrested by the Gestapo during the last days of the war and died in a concentration camp.

BLACK ARMY. See REVOLUTIONARY-INSURGENT ARMY OF UKRAINE.

Black Eagle Uprising. See Pitchfork Uprising.

BLACK GUARDS. This term is sometimes used to describe armed worker and peasant groups that, during the opening stages of the civil wars in 1917 to 1918, adhered to one or another form of anarchism, rather than swear loyalty to the Soviet government and join the Red Army (thus differentiating them from the Red Guards). Black Guards were most common in Ukraine, where Mariia Nikiforova was their chief organizer, and in Moscow, where units with a total strength of some 1,000 were led by Lev Chernyi, through the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups. The latter groups (some boasting names such as “Hurricane,” “The Avant-garde,” “Autonomy,” “The Immediate Socialist,” “Tornado,” “Charge,” and “Storm”) were mostly smashed by Red forces during the clampdown on anarchist activity in Moscow on 12 April 1918, while the remainder were mopped up during the suppression of the Left-SR Uprising of July 1918.

BLACK SEA FLEET. Founded on 13 May 1783, by the favorite of Catherine the Great, Prince G. A. Potemkin, and mainly based at Sevastopol′, the Black Sea Fleet had been one of the most prestigious branches of the armed forces of imperial Russia, even though it was largely confined to the Black Sea following the Straits Convention of 1841. During the First World War, it was initially outgunned by the Turks, thanks to the latter’s command of the German battle cruiser SMS Goeben and the light cruiser SMS Breslau, but following the completion at Nikolaevsk in 1915 of two Dreadnoughts, the Imperatritsa Mariia (“The Empress Maria”) and the Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaia (“The Empress Catherine the Great”), the Black Sea Fleet took control of its namesake. From 16 July 1916 to 9 June 1917, the fleet was commanded by the future Supreme Ruler of the Whites, Admiral A. V. Kolchak.

Following the October Revolution, the fleet (including the Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaia, now renamed Svobodnaia Rossiia, but bereft of the Imperatritsa Mariia, which had blown up in Sevastopol′ harbor a year earlier) fell into the hands of local Soviet forces, but under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), it was to be surrendered to the Central Powers. (The Ukrainian State also claimed ownership of the fleet at this time.) However, when German forces arrived in Sevastopol′ in late April 1918, they found that many of the vessels had been moved to Novorossiisk in the Kuban by the fleet’s commander, Admiral M. P. Sablin. There, F. F. Raskol′nikov, acting on the orders of V. I. Lenin, organized the scuttling of most of the ships in June 1918 (although the battleship Volia, formerly the Imperator Aleksandr III, was saved). Ships remaining at Sevastopol′ were captured by the Germans and then, following the armistice of 11 November 1918, were seized by the British forces arriving in the area the following month. On 1 April 1919, as the Red Army forced its way into Crimea, the British squadron had to withdraw. Before doing so, however, Royal Navy engineers damaged the remaining battleships and scuttled 13 submarines.

Other Russian vessels remaining in the Black Sea were commandeered by the Whites and, in January 1919, were formally incorporated into the White Fleet attached to the Armed Forces of South Russia. By the end of 1919, the Whites’ Black Sea Fleet consisted of some 120 vessels, including three battleships, three auxiliary cruisers, and eight destroyers. Also subject to the authority of the command of the Black Sea Fleet were the eight gunboats of the Azov Naval Defense Force (founded in April 1919 and transferred to the River Dnepr in July of that year).

When the forces of General P. N. Wrangel evacuated Crimea on 21 November 1920, what remained of the Black Sea Fleet was reorganized as the Russian Squadron. This consisted of the battleships General Alekseev (formally the Imperator Aleksandr III/Volia) and the Georgii Pobedonosets, the cruisers General Kornilov (formerly Kagul and Ochakov) and Almaz, nine destroyers, four submarines, and five gunboats. The squadron was put under French control, in return for French assistance to Wrangel, and, under the command of Admiral M. A. Berens, steamed to Bizerte in Tunisia, where it arrived in February 1921. When the French government recognized the USSR in 1924, ownership of the fleet reverted to Moscow. In December that year, however, a visiting Soviet technical commission, led by A. N. Krylov, found the vessels to be beyond repair, and they were scrapped locally. Many of the crews went into emigration in France and North Africa.

Commanders of the Black Sea Fleet during the civil-war period were Admiral V. A. Kanin (from 13 November 1918); Admiral M. P. Sablin (25 March–20 August 1919; 8–17 February 1920; and 19 April–12 October 1920); Admiral D. V. Neniukov (20 August 1919–8 February 1920); Admiral A. M. Gerasimov (17 February–19 April 1920); and Admiral M. A. Kedrov (from 12 October 1920).

BLACK SEA SOVIET REPUBLIC. This short-lived Soviet polity was proclaimed by the Third Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies of the Black Sea guberniia on 10–13 March 1918, at the fortress port of Tuapse. It claimed territory corresponding to the Black Sea guberniia of the Russian Empire and had its capital at Novorossiisk. A constituent territory of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, it was governed by a Central Executive Committee (led by the Bolshevik A. A. Rubin) and attempted to institute a policy of Sovietization, nationalizing industries, expropriating church and monarchical lands, and so forth, but was largely preoccupied with combating anti-Soviet forces in the area (notably the Volunteer Army and the Kuban Cossack Host). To that end, the Third Extraordinary Congress of Soviets of the Kuban and the Black Sea (Ekaterinodar, 28–30 May 1918) decided that the Black Sea Soviet Republic should merge with the Kuban Soviet Republic to form the Kuban–Black Sea Soviet Republic.

BLAGONAROV, GEORGII IVANOVICH (6 May 1896–16 June 1938). Ensign (191?). A leading Chekist of the civil-war era, G. I. Blagoranov was the son of a civil servant from Riazan′ guberniia. He studied briefly at Moscow University, but was mobilized in 1914. He then attended a military school and served in a reserve regiment. He joined the Bolsheviks at Egor′evsk, in March 1917, and was active there and in Moscow and was elected to VTsIK in June 1917 (serving as secretary of the Bolshevik faction). He was also a member of the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b) and during the October Revolution was a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet.

Blagonarov then served as commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress (November–December 1917) and as extraordinary commissar for security in Petrograd (from December 1917). From June 1918, he worked on the Revvoensovet of the Eastern Front before being transferred into the Railway Section of the Cheka (November 1918), working first on the crucial Moscow–Kazan′ line and then as instructor-inspector of the Transportation Section of the Cheka in Petrograd (January 1919). In August 1919, he was temporarily head of the Cheka in Petrograd, overseeing the Red Terror in that city.

From 1921 to 1931, Blagonarov headed the Transportation Section of the Cheka and its successors (the GPU and the OGPU) as well as occupying numerous other governmental and security posts connected to transportation and the economy: chief of the Administrative Directorate of the People’s Commissariat for Communications (1922–1925), chief of the Economic Directorate of the OGPU (28 April 1925–17 February 1926), chairman of the Directorate of the Rubber Trust of VSNKh (1926–1927), deputy people’s commissar for communications (16 December 1929–21 September 1932), first deputy people’s commissar for communications (from 21 September 1932), and head of the Central Directorate of Roads and Automobile Transport of the USSR (from 3 August 1935). On 5 July 1936, he was named Commissar of State Defense, First Rank. From 10 February 1934, he was a candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Blagonarov was arrested on 25 May 1937 and was shot as a spy on 16 June 1938. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

Bliukher, Vasilii Konstantinovich (19 November 1889–9 November 1938). Marshal of the Soviet Union (20 November 1935). A talented and thoughtful Red commander—and a much fêted hero of the civil wars—V. K. Bliukher was born into a peasant family near Rybinsk, Iaroslavl′ guberniia. In 1910, while employed as a metalworker, he was sentenced to 32 months’ imprisonment for strike activity. Called up in 1914, he became an NCO before being demobilized in 1915 after being wounded, then found employment in factories in Kazan′ and Nizhnii Novgorod. In 1916, he joined the Bolsheviks and, at the behest of the Central Committee, reenlisted in the army to act as an agitator among reserve units stationed along the Volga.

In November 1917, Bliukher led a Red Guards expeditionary detachment to establish Soviet power at Cheliabinsk and became head of the Soviet’s Military-Revolutionary Committee there. In March 1918, he commanded the Reds’ South Urals Partisan Army against the White Orenburg Army and then (July–September 1918) led the legendary 1,000-mile Urals Army March through the Urals to unite with the 3rd Red Army, for which feat he became the first recipient of the Order of the Red Banner. He subsequently served in several command posts on the Eastern Front, before moving to the Southern Front in the summer of 1920, where he performed brilliantly as commander of the 51st Rifle Division at the Battle of Kakhovka and in the storming of Crimea. Having already won the Order of the Red Banner on four occasions, he was then transferred east to become minister of war in the Far Eastern Republic and commander in chief of its People’s-Revolutionary Army (26 June 1921–14 July 1922).

After the civil wars, Bliukher occupied numerous senior Red Army posts and from 1924 to 1927 was in China as the senior Soviet military advisor to the Kuomintang. From 1929 to 1938, he commanded the Independent Red Banner Far Eastern Army and was, in all but name, military dictator of the Soviet Far East. There, from 1936 to 1938, he oversaw several waves of merciless purges in the army, while in June 1937 he sat on the Revolutionary Tribunal that passed death sentences on Marshal M. N. Tukhachevskii and other leaders of the Red Army of the civil-war era (notably, R. P. Eideman, B. M. Fel′dman, I. E. Iakir, A. I. Kork, V. M. Primakov, V. K. Putna, and I. P. Uborovich). In August 1938, following his forces’ poor performance in border clashes with the Japanese forces in Manchuria (the Battle of Khasan Lake, or the Changkufen incident), Bliukher was removed from his post. He was arrested on 22 October 1938 and subjected to horrendous torture (at one point, some sources have it, one of his eyes burst out of its socket). He died in custody in the Lefortovo Prison on 9 November 1938. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 12 March 1956 (the first senior Red commander to be granted rehabilitation). That rehabilitation led to his subsequently being positively portrayed in representations of the civil wars, notably the feature film Parol′ ne nuzhen (“No Password Needed,” dir. B. A. Grigor′ev, 1967).

bliumberg, Zhan Karlovich. See Bļumbergs Žanis Kārļa (bliumberg, Zhan Karlovich).

BLIUMKIN, IAKOV GRIGOR′EVICH (1898–3 November 1929). The mysterious assassin, spy, and member of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries Iakov Bliumkin was born into a poor Jewish family at Odessa and was raised there by foster parents. Having graduated in 1913 from the school run by Mendele Moikher-Sforim (the “grandfather of Jewish literature”), he joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries in 1914 and in 1917 gravitated toward the Left-SRs.

In May 1918, Bliumkin was recruited to the Cheka and became head of its counterespionage section. Like other Left-SRs, he came to oppose the policies of the Soviet government, particularly the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and the government’s treatment of the peasantry through the Food Army. It was Bliumkin who was chosen by the party to assassinate the German ambassador to Soviet Russia, Count Wilhelm Mirbach. On 6 July 1918 he, together with an accomplice, N. A. Andreev, using false papers, gained access to the German embassy on Denezhnii Lane in Moscow. Once inside, Bliumkin shot Mirbach at point-blank range, then Andreev threw a bomb. This assassination was the signal for the Left-SR Uprising against the Bolsheviks, which was rapidly suppressed by Red Army units. Bliumkin evaded arrest and fled to Petrograd and then Ukraine, where in the Left-SR underground he subsequently organized a failed assassination attempt on Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii and later fought against the Ukrainian National Republic.

In April 1919, Bliumkin surrendered to the Bolsheviks. He was pardoned on 16 May 1919, then assigned to counterespionage work with the 13th Red Army in Ukraine, where he worked closely with G. L. Piatakov and where he earned a reputation for extreme cruelty. In early 1920, having joined the RKP(b), he was sent to Persia, where he worked to undermine Mirza Kuchuk Khan’s leadership of the Socialist Republic of Gīlān and to have him be replaced by the Soviet puppet Ehsanollah Khan. Having returned to Russia, in August 1920 he was placed in command of the armored train that carried G. E. Zinov′ev, Karl Radek, Béla Kun, John Reed, and other Soviet leaders from Petrograd to Baku to attend the First Congress of the Peoples of the East (1–8 September 1920). He subsequently worked as a Cheka commander in Crimea and on the Volga and participated in the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion, before spending a period in 1922 at the Red Military Academy. He was then assigned as a secretary to L. D. Trotsky, helping to edit the latter’s Kak vooruzhalas′ revoliutsiia (“How the Revolution Armed,” 1923), including, ironically, the section on the suppression of the Left-SR Uprising.

After a period abroad, as an OGPU agent in Germany and the Arabian peninsula, Bliumkin was based at Tiflis from 1924 to 1925. There, in the wake of the August Uprising, he was engaged in rooting out anti-Soviet elements and suppressing rebellions and also served on the Soviet–Persian and Soviet–Turkish border commissions. In the early 1920s, Bliumkin was also a close associate of the poet S. A. Esenin, who committed suicide in December 1925, although some unsubstantiated accounts have it that he was murdered (and perhaps by Bliumkin). Equally fanciful are many of the stories that circulate regarding Bliumkin’s subsequent espionage work in (reportedly) Afghanistan, Mongolia, China, Tibet, India, and Ceylon. It has even been claimed that, in the guise of a Buddhist lama, he participated in Soviet expeditions to find the mythical city of Shambala. Bliumkin then went to Turkey on a secret OGPU mission. Tales abound of him posing as a Jewish salesman from Baku selling Hebrew incunabula and other treasures that he had looted from Ukraine. What is known for sure, however, is that in Turkey, in April 1930, he met secretly with Trotsky, who gave him a message to pass to Karl Radek back in Russia. Trotsky later claimed that Radek then betrayed Bliumkin to the authorities (and Radek later acknowledged this). Another version has it that J. V. Stalin wanted to dispose of Bliumkin, as the latter had seen Okhrana papers that proved Stalin to have been an agent of the tsarist police. Bliumkin was arrested in September 1929 and—reportedly on Stalin’s direct orders—shot. According to the defector Alexander Orlov, he shouted “Long live Trotsky!” at his executioners.

BLOCKING DETACHMENTS. Since at least Roman times, elite units have been placed in the rear of regular armed forces to prevent unauthorized retreat or surrender. During the “Russian” Civil Wars, the practice was widely used in the Red Army, with the Blocking Detachments (Zagraditel′nye otriady) usually composed of Cheka forces. Such units were first deployed, on the orders of L. D. Trotsky, by the commander of the 1st Red Army, M. N. Tukhachevskii, on the Eastern Front in August 1918, in battles against the Czechoslovak Legion and Komuch’s People’s Army. Subsequently, in December 1918, Trotsky ordered that Blocking Detachments be attached to all infantry formations of the Red Army. They were deployed also (and again by Tukhachevskii), with notable effect, behind the Red forces that crushed the Kronshtadt Revolt in March 1921.

Bļumbergs Žanis Kārļa (BLIUMBERG, ZHAN KARLOVICH) (September 1889–26 April 1938). Sublieutenant (6 August 1913), captain (1916), komdiv (Red Army, 26 November 1935). The Soviet military commander Žanis Bļumbergs was born into a Latvian peasant family at Auce (Alt-Autz), in Courland guberniia. He graduated from a gymnasium at Jelgeva (Mitau) in 1907 and, having volunteered for military service in 1908, graduated from Vil′na Military School (1913). From 6 August 1913, he served in the 99th Ivangorod Infantry Regiment and in the course of the First World War rose to the command of a regiment.

Bļumbergs joined the Red Army in June 1918 and served as commander of the 3rd Brigade of the Latvian Riflemen (June–September 1918) and commander of the 5th Red Army (20 October 1918–5 April 1919); he was subsequently commander of the northern group of forces of the 7th Red Army, then assistant commander of the 7th Red Army, chief of the rear of the 42nd Rifle Division, commander of the 2nd Brigade of that division, and in 1920 successively commander of the 126th and the 124th Brigades of the 42nd Rifle Division.

After the civil wars, Bļumbergs remained in military service, occupying senior posts such as assistant inspector of infantry of the Red Army (from July 1929) and deputy head of the Military-Engineering Academy of the Red Army. He was arrested on 13 December 1937 and, having been found guilty of membership in a “counterrevolutionary terrorist organization” by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on 26 April 1938, was immediately executed at Kommunarka, Moscow. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 19 July 1957.

BOCHKAREVA, MARIIA LEON′EVNA (July 1889–16 May 1920?). Lieutenant (July 1917). The organizer of female soldiers in the revolution and civil wars, called “the Russian Joan of Arc,” M. L. Bochkareva (née Frolkova) was born into a peasant family at the village of Nikol′sk, in Novgorod guberniia, but moved to Tomsk with her husband Afanasy Bochkarev in 1904. She left her husband when he began to beat her, and suffered abuse at the hands of another man, Iakov Buk, in a later relationship. At the outbreak of war in 1914, she left Buk and in November 1914 managed to enlist with the 25th Tomsk Reserve Battalion after the personal intervention of Nicholas II. From early 1915 to May 1917, she served in the active army with the 28th Polotsk Regiment of the 7th Infantry Division and was wounded four times and decorated three times for bravery. In May–June 1917, after discussions with A. F. Kerensky (who hoped to shame Russian men into fighting more steadfastly), she organized the Women’s Battalion of Death, which saw action during the summer offensive, when Bochkareva was again wounded.

Following the October Revolution, Bochkareva was twice detained by the Bolsheviks, first in Petrograd and then, in early 1918, near Ekaterinodar, where she had been in contact with General L. G. Kornilov and the Volunteer Army. On the second occasion, she was sentenced to death but was saved by the intervention of a soldier with whom she had served in 1915. She then made her way to Vladivostok and thence (in April 1918) to the United States, where she met President Woodrow Wilson (on 10 July 1918), and to Great Britain, where she had an audience with King George V, to plead for Allied intervention in Russia. With British assistance, she then traveled to Arkhangel′sk, arriving in August 1918, but failed in her efforts to persuade the Whites there to allow her to raise a women’s battalion; indeed, in a proclamation of 27 December 1918, General V. V. Marushevskii (governor-general of the Northern Region) pronounced that summoning women to the ranks would be damaging to the population of North Russia and forbade Bochkareva to wear her uniform. In April 1919, at Tomsk, she tried again, this time attempting to raise a women’s medical detachment (the 1st Women’s Volunteer Sanitary Battalion) in support of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s Russian Army, but again she was scorned by the White authorities.

In January 1920, Bochkareva was captured by Red forces at Tomsk and was then held in prison at Krasnoiarsk until, according to most versions, she was executed by firing squad there, on the orders of the 5th Red Army’s Cheka boss, one Pobolotin. In a recent Russian biography, however (Mariia Bochkareva, 2010), S. V. Drokov claims to have uncovered evidence that the death sentence was not carried out and that Bochkareva was rescued from Krasnoiarsk by the Russian-born American journalist Isaac Don Levine (to whom she had dictated her memoirs—Yashka, My Life as a Peasant, Exile and Soldier—when she met him in the United States in 1918) and taken by him to Harbin, where she lived until Russians were deported from the Chinese Eastern Railway zone in 1927. Bochkareva was posthumously rehabilitated by the Omsk procurator on 9 September 1992.

Bogaevskii, Afrikan Petrovich (27 December 1872–21 October 1934). Colonel (December 1908), major general (March 1915), lieutenant general (28 August 1918). The most powerful and influential Cossack leader in the White movement in South Russia during the civil wars (and in exile), A. P. Bogaevskii was born into the family of an officer of the Don Cossack Host at Kamenskaia stanitsa in the Don oblast′ and was a graduate of the Don Cadet Corps (1892), the Nicholas Cavalry School, and the Academy of the General Staff (1900). He then entered the Ataman Life Guards Regiment and occupied numerous staff positions, mostly in the St. Petersburg Military District, and taught tactics at Nicholas Cavalry School. During the First World War, he served as chief of staff and commander of the 4th Mariupol′ Hussar Regiment (October 1914–January 1915), commander of the Composite Cossack Life Guards Regiment (January–October 1915), and chief of staff and campaign ataman of All Cossack Forces of the Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich (October 1915–April 1917). Following the February Revolution, he was named commander of the Transbaikal Cossack Division and the 1st Guards Cavalier Division (April–August 1917) and then as deputy chief of staff of the 4th Cavalry Corps (August–November 1917).

Bogaevskii left his command in the Russian Army as it began to collapse in the wake of the October Revolution and made his way back home to the Don territory, where he was prominent in the White movement from its inception. In January 1918, he began organizing Cossack units around Rostov-on-Don with Ataman A. M. Kaledin and then, during the First Kuban (Ice) March, commanded the Partisan Regiment of the Volunteer Army (February–March 1918), before becoming commander of its 2nd Brigade (March–May 1918). He then served as chairman and director of the Department of Foreign Affairs of the government of the Don Cossack Host under Ataman P. N. Krasnov (May 1918–January 1919) and as chairman of the Government of the Main Commander of the AFSR under General A. I. Denikin (January 1919–February 1920). On 19 February 1919, he was elected Host ataman of the Don Cossacks, as the successor to Krasnov. Following the collapse of the Armed Forces of South Russia, he was evacuated with the Host government from Novorossiisk to Crimea (March 1920), where he remained until the collapse of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel in November 1920.

In emigration, Bogaevskii lived at first in Constantinople, before moving to Sofia (November 1921) and then Belgrade (October 1922), finally settling in Paris (from November 1923). From December 1920, he served as chairman of the United Council of the Don, Kuban and Terek (Cossack Hosts) and from 1924 as honorary chairman of the Cossack Union, organizations whose insistence on their autonomy from the leadership of the Russian Army earned them the hostility of General Wrangel, although Wrangel nevertheless tended to support Bogaevskii in his struggles to block the efforts of Krasnov to usurp his position at the head of the Don Host. Bogaevskii was active too in the formation of the Union of Cossack-Combatants (1932) and in the establishment of the Don Historical Commission and published widely himself in the émigré Cossack press under the pseudonym “El′mut” (Helmut). In 1929, all émigré organizations of the Don Cossacks elected him as the Host’s campaign ataman for life. He died in Paris of a heart attack and is buried in the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. In August 2004, the reactivated Don Cossack Host began petitioning for Bogaevskii’s remains to be reburied on the Don.

BOGOSLOVSKII, BORIS PETROVICH (23 June 1883/1885–July 1920). Lieutenant colonel (1 December 1915), major general (24 December 1918). One of the most prominent generals of the White forces in Siberia, B. P. Bogoslovskii was the son of a doctor and was a graduate of the Mikhail Artillery School (1902) and the Academy of the General Staff (1912). During the First World War, he served from October 1915 as a staff officer attached to the quartermaster general of the 4th Army, but was severely wounded and assigned to teaching work in the rear.

Bogoslovskii was pressed into service with the Red Army in February 1918 and helped create the Quartermaster General Section of the Staff of the Commander of Petrograd Military District before moving to Ekaterinburg with the Academy of the General Staff. In June 1918, he was placed in command of the 3rd Red Army, but he deserted to anti-Bolshevik forces when they captured Ekaterinburg on 25 July 1918. In the White forces, he served on the staff of General Radola Gajda (from 28 July 1918), becoming acting chief of staff (from 24 December 1918) and then chief of staff (from 4 January 1919) of the Siberian Army. Subsequently (from 17 March 1919), he served as chief of staff of the Western Army, and from 1 July 1919 he was attached to the staff of the supreme ruler, Admiral A. V. Kolchak, at Omsk. On 11 December 1919, as Kolchak’s forces collapsed, Bogoslovskii was named chief of staff of the Eastern Front. On 29 December 1919, however, he was among those wounded when an engine exploded at Achinsk station. He subsequently abandoned the White retreat and surrendered himself to Red forces at Krasnoiarsk on 6 January 1920. He was then arrested at Tomsk (22–23 January 1920) and placed in the custody of the Cheka at Omsk prison. There, having been given the death sentence at a hearing on 17 July 1920, he was subsequently executed.

BOLBOCHAN, PETRO (5 October 1883–28 June 1919). Colonel (5 November 1918). The Ukrainian military commander Petro Bolbochan, the son of a priest, was born in the village of Gedzhev (Gidzhevo) in the Khotyn (Hotin) district of Bessarabia guberniia. He attended the Kishinev seminary and in 1909 graduated from the Chugaevsk Cadet School. During the First World War, he served as an officer with the 38th Tobol′sk Regiment. In the autumn of 1917, he helped organize and then commanded the 1st Ukrainian Republican Regiment (of the 2nd Serdiuk Division), which suffered heavy losses in clashes with Red forces in January 1918, during its unsuccessful defense of Kiev in the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War. He subsequently commanded the 1st Zaporozhian Division, helping to clear the Reds from Crimea, and in the Hetmanite Army of the Ukrainian State commanded the 2nd Zaporozhian Regiment (from 3 March 1918).

Bolbochan sided with the Ukrainian National Republic Directory when it rose up against Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii in November–December 1918 and was placed in command of the Zaporozhian Corps and then the Left-bank Ukraine Forces of the Ukrainian Army. After his army group was forced to retreat into right-bank Ukraine, Bolbochan was arrested and, on 25 January 1919, removed from his post and sent to internal exile in Galicia. He had little in common with the socialists in charge of the Ukrainian National Republic (whom he termed “Marxist traitors”) and had kept many of the administrative structures and practices of the Hetmanate in place among the troops under his command. He also favored Allied intervention and an alliance with the White forces of General A. I. Denikin. Fearing that Bolbochan might become the center of a right-wing coup, in May 1919 the Ukrainian commander in chief, S. V. Petliura, attempted to send him to Italy to mobilize Ukrainian exiles in that country. Bolbochan accepted the posting, but the commission was subsequently withdrawn by the directory, which did not want a “reactionary” representing them in an Allied country. He was arrested on 9 June 1919, and on 19 June 1919 a military court found him guilty of insubordination for having attempted to usurp the command of the Zaporozhian Corps at Proskuriv (now Khmelnytskyi); in effect, Bolbochan was attempting a coup d’état. He was subsequently executed at Balin.

BOLDYREV, VASILII GEORGEVICH (5 April 1875–20 August 1933). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1908), colonel (6 December 1911), major general (26 June 1915), lieutenant general (29 April 1917). Born at Syzran′, in Simbirsk guberniia, and of peasant stock (although his father was a blacksmith), V. G. Boldyrev was one of the few senior military figures to commit himself consistently to the cause of the moderate Left during the “Russian” Civil Wars and was a key figure in the Democratic Counter-Revolution. He was a graduate of Penza Surveying School (1893), the Military-Topographical School (1895), and the Academy of the General Staff (1903), where he also taught from 1911 to 1914 and was made extraordinary professor in 1914. Prior to that, he served on the staff of the 22nd Infantry Division in the Russo–Japanese War, then (as a senior adjutant) with the 18th Army Corps (1906–1907) and the 20th Army Corps (1907–1911). On the outbreak of the First World War, Boldyrev went to the front as an assistant to the chief of staff of the 2nd Guards Infantry Regiment (from October 1914) and was much decorated for bravery. He subsequently served as commander of the 30th Poltava Infantry Regiment (from March 1915), as a duty officer with the commander of the 4th Army (from 22 February 1916), and as quartermaster general of the Northern Front (from 8 September 1916). Following the February Revolution, he became commander of the 43rd Army Corps (from 19 April 1917) and participated in the unsuccessful defense of Riga in August 1917 before succeeding General Iu. N. Danilov as commander of the 5th Army (9 September 1917).

In late October 1917, Boldyrev was arrested at Dvinsk for refusing to obey the orders of the new Soviet government and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, but was released from the Kresty prison in Petrograd in May 1918. He then became a leading figure in the anti-Bolshevik underground, as one of the founders of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia. Dispatched eastward as a delegate of that organization, he became (from 23 September 1918) commander of the forces of the Ufa Directory and one of its five members. Following the Omsk coup, he refused to recognize Admiral A. V. Kolchak as supreme ruler and left Siberia for Japan on 22 November 1918. Having refused an invitation to participate in the Gajda putsch in November 1919, he returned to Russia in January 1920, first to teach in the Academy of the General Staff at Vladivostok and then (from 4 April to 12 December 1920) to command the armed forces of the Provisional Government of the Maritime Regional Zemstvo Board at Vladivostok and (from 1 July 1920) to serve as its minister of war. With the rise to power of S. D. Merkulov and his brother in June 1921, in the Provisional Priamur (People’s) Government Boldyrev became a member (from 7 July 1921) of the presidium and (from 26 July 1921) deputy chairman of the People’s Assembly of the Maritime Province. After the establishment of Soviet power in Vladivostok, he was arrested (on 5 November 1922) and imprisoned.

Having in 1923, in an appeal to VTsIK, expressed a desire to work for the Soviet government, Boldyrev was amnestied, released, and permitted to work in a number of establishments in Siberia (including the Novonikolaevsk branch of the state planning commission, Gosplan). In 1927, he testified for the prosecution at the trial of the White leaders Ataman B. V. Annenkov and N. A. Denisov. He later worked as part of the editorial board of the Siberskaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (“The Siberian Soviet Encyclopedia,” 1929–1932). On 23 February 1933, however, he was arrested once again, charged by the OGPU with counterrevolutionary activities and espionage, and was subsequently executed. Boldyrev was the author of a number of military-technical and statistical books as well as an influential memoir of the civil-war years, Direktoriia. Kolchak. Interventy (“The Directory, Kolchak, Interventionists,” Novonikolaevsk, 1923).

BOLSHEVIKS. The Bolsheviks (“Majoritarians”) were followers of the dissenting wing of Russian Marxism led by V. I. Lenin, who were to seize power in Russia following the October Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks held that only their party was capable of providing the leadership and vision to guide the Russian working class and its allies among the laboring peasantry on the path toward socialism. The movement had its origins in debates, which came to a head in 1903 in London (at the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, or RSDLP), over the definition of a party member. Lenin, seeking to maximize party efficiency (even at the expense of party democracy) wanted only those who were willing and able to work full time for the party (“professional revolutionaries”) to be admitted to it; his opponents, led by Iulii Martov, were willing to admit those who only offered general support to the party. On that vote, Lenin lost, but on another, regarding the composition of the editorial board of the party newspaper, Iskra (“The Spark”), he won, although only because his bullying tactics had by then driven moderate members of the Bund from the hall. Nevertheless, Lenin then adopted the term “Bolsheviks” to describe his wing of the party, while dubbing his opponents “Mensheviks” (“Minoritarians”). The division remained informal until January 1912, when at a conference in Prague a separate Bolshevik Central Committee was elected. Thereafter, the party was formally known as the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks). In July 1918, the party was formally reconstituted, under a new program, as the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) or RKP(b) (the name it had used since 8 March 1918); in 1925, it was rechristened the All-Union Communist Party, and in 1952 it became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The Bolsheviks’ political philosophy hinged on the creation of a centralized and disciplined “vanguard” party, which would operate under the firm leadership of the Central Committee on the basis of the principles of democratic centralism. The party was to be composed of what Lenin termed “the most militant and class-conscious workers” and would work to raise the class-consciousness of the mass of proletarians. This was to be achieved by any means (including deception, terror, murder, and, to fund the party’s activities, robbery): for Lenin, the end was not determined by the means, and his party was characterized by its amoralism, in comparison to the Mensheviks, as well as its pragmatism. Initially, Lenin was opposed to a direct attempt to seize power and establish a socialist state—in 1905, for example, he was a stern critic of L. D. Trotsky’s “Theory of Permanent Revolution” and talked (as did the Mensheviks) of a bourgeois revolution preceding a socialist one in Russia—but by 1916–1917, influenced by the circumstances of the world war and his study of imperialism, he had changed his mind, concluding that world capitalism might break at its weakest link even before it reached maturity and began to “dig its own grave” in more industrially developed countries (as was held by more dogmatic Marxists). He had also come to regard what he identified as a burgeoning class of “poor peasants” in the Russian villages as the potential allies of Russia’s still embryonic proletariat.

Even after their formal split in 1912, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks within Russia collaborated closely, although émigré factions within the Bolsheviks were frequently in disagreement. For example, since 1905 the Bolsheviks had been deeply divided between those who held that Marxism was a universal scientific truth to guide the proletariat in its struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie and those, like A. A. Bogdanov, who held that Marxism was a set of useful myths that workers had to be convinced to believe before revolution was possible. Lenin and Bogdanov also quarreled over Bolshevik participation in the State Duma: Lenin (after some hesitation) supported it; Bogdanov denounced it as inculcating “constitutional illusions” among the workers. The First World War also sowed seeds of discontent within the Bolshevik faction. In emigration in Switzerland, Lenin (a staunch internationalist) called for the transformation of the war into an international civil war, while others were more cautious (even bordering on defensist in their attitudes). For example, the Bolshevik faction of the Fourth State Duma refused to vote in favor of war credits for the tsarist government, but when put on trial, their leader, L. B. Kamenev, distanced himself from Lenin’s extremism. Neither stance made much difference, as Russian workers (who in July 1914 had staged a general strike in Petrograd and then ignored the Bolsheviks’ orders to return to work) abjured all antiwar and defeatist propaganda and marched off to war singing “God Save the Tsar.”

The February Revolution of 1917 caught the Bolsheviks unawares. That was the case for all Russian political parties, but Lenin’s party was particularly ill-prepared, as its Petrograd Committee had been arrested some days before the February events and because so many of its leaders were in exile (Kamenev and J. V. Stalin were in Siberia) or emigration (Lenin and G. E. Zinov′ev remained trapped in Switzerland, and N. I. Bukharin and A. M. Kollontai were in far-off New York). The most senior party member in the capital during February was A. G. Shliapnikov. When the Siberian exiles Kamenev and Stalin returned, they pursued a moderate line, offering conditional support to the Provisional Government and following the Menshevik-dominated Petrograd Soviet’s line on foreign policy and the war (defined as “revolutionary defensism” and meaning that though seeking a general peace, revolutionary Russia would defend itself).

When Lenin returned to Russia in early April 1917, he consequently struggled to have the party accept his calls (delivered in his “April Theses”) for “no support for the Provisional Government.” Likewise, his assertion that Russia was already passing from the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class consciousness and organization of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage (which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants), and his demand that the country be reorganized “from top to bottom” into a Republic of Soviets were met with derision. This changed over the summer of 1917, as large numbers of radicalized workers joined the Bolsheviks; the party grew from around 11,000 members in February 1917 to around 250,000 in October of that year. Consequently (and in a process that belies later projections of the party as a pliant, unthinking mass that followed orders from the top), reelections of party bodies up to and including the Central Committee (reelected on 3 August 1917 at the Sixth Party Congress) turned party opinion in Lenin’s favor. That had its downside, however, as radical Bolsheviks at lower levels of the party proved difficult to control. It is now fairly clear, for example, that members of the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b) in Petrograd, against the wishes of Lenin and the Central Committee, were behind the botched attempt to overthrow the Provisional Government during the July Days. In the aftermath of these events, the Provisional Government turned on the Bolsheviks, occupying the party’s headquarters in the Kseshinskaia mansion and arresting its leaders (among them L. D. Trotsky, whose own faction of the RSDLP, the Inter-District Group, had recently joined the Bolsheviks, but not Lenin, who fled into hiding outside the capital), accusing them of treason, specifically of accepting funds from Germany to bring down the Provisional Government and offer victory to the Central Powers in the world war. Those charges were certainly false, but they did the Bolsheviks great damage in the short term. In the aftermath of the Kornilov affair, however, and the discrediting of A. F. Kerensky and those who supported the Provisional Government (notably the Mensheviks and the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries), the party’s stock rose once again, and by early September it had won majorities on both the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets.

It was on the basis of that support that the party planned and made the October Revolution. Again, this was not without occasioning internal dissent: both Kamenev and Zinov′ev opposed the seizure of power, resigned from the Central Committee, and proclaimed their opposition publicly in advance of the action. They also then supported the negotiations for an all-socialist government that were forced upon Lenin by the powerful union of railwaymen, Vikzhel. As the civil wars developed, however, the fissiparous Bolshevik Party of 1917 quite rapidly became transformed into a bureaucratically organized, top-down apparatus that negated the independence of soviets and eclipsed the trade unions, while suppressing all opposition. Much of this was the work of the party secretary, Ia. M. Sverdlov. Also during the civil wars, on 25 March 1919, the party Central Committee lost much of its authority with the creation of a smaller (initially five-man) political bureau (politbiuro), which thereafter functioned as the central policy-making and governing body of the party. At the same time were created an organizational bureau (orgbiuro) and a party secretariat (to replace the recently deceased Sverdlov). Analogous reorganizations were undertaken lower down the party structure (at provincial, district, and city committee levels). Ultimately, a single official (initially called a chairman and from 1920 called a committee secretary) was designated to be responsible for each local committee. This centralization of power was a two-way process, however; the center wanted more control of party affairs, but in the civil-war crisis the regions demanded more guidance and assistance from the center. Moreover, in the civil-war years (especially 1918–1920) the military emergency meant that fewer and fewer experienced leaders, who were deployed to the front, could be spared for party work.

Moreover, despite centralization, during the civil-war period the party was far from the compliant monolith it would become under Stalin and continued intermittently to be racked by internal divisions. In 1918, opponents of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) rallied around the Left Bolsheviks, who also objected to the use of bourgeois “experts” in industry and government and to the creation of a regular Red Army; in 1919, the Military Opposition within the Red Army opposed the influence of military specialists and demanded increases in the authority of military commissars; in 1919–1920, the Democratic Centralists demanded broader, collective discussions in the party; and in 1920–1921, the Workers’ Opposition charged that the party leadership had violated “the spirit of the Revolution,” denigrated the influx of nonproletarian elements into party and governmental institutions, and championed a return to workers’ control in industry (a stance echoed, from 1922, by G. I. Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group).

With regard to party membership, before the October Revolution, although party leaders tended to be of privileged (even noble) stock, more than two-thirds of the rank and file were workers. Expansion and necessity during the civil wars changed this; the official figure of 44 percent of members being of working-class background by 1921 is certainly a great exaggeration. Also, by 1921 the majority of party members were in the army. There, democratic procedures had been extinguished as elected committees were replaced by appointed political commissars who were responsible (from September 1918) to a nonparty body, the Revvoensovet of the Republic (the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic).

The beginning of the end of such dissidence was marked, against the background of the crushing of the Kronshtadt Revolt, at the Tenth Party Congress (8–16 March 1921), with the passing of two key resolutions. One, “On the Syndicalist and Anarchist Deviation in the Party,” effectively outlawed the Workers’ Opposition. The second, “On the Unity of the Party” (better known as “The Ban on Factions”) was the weapon used by Stalin from 1927 to expel from the Central Committee—and then the party—first Trotsky and then other critics of his amassing of power.

Bonch-Bruevich, Mikhail Dmitrievich (24 February 1870–3 August 1956). Lieutenant colonel (6 April 1903), colonel (6 December 1907), major general (10 September 1914), komdiv (Red Army, 1937), lieutenant general (Red Army, 1944). The brother of a leading Bolshevik (V. M. Bonch-Bruevich, 1873–1955) and one of the most senior tsarist officers to join the Red Army (as one of its military specialists), M. D. Bonch-Bruevich (in Polish, Boncz-Brujewicz ) was born in Moscow into a noble family of Polish lineage. He studied at Moscow University as an external student and was a graduate of the Moscow Constantine Surveying Institute (1891), the Moscow Infantry Officers School (1892), and the Academy of the General Staff (1898). Having earlier served as an officer with the Lithuanian Guards Regiment at Warsaw (1892–1895), following graduation from the academy he served as an adjutant on the staff of the 2nd Cossack Composite Division (2 November 1898–15 February 1900), senior errand officer on the staff of the Kiev Military District (15 February 1900–13 December 1902), and senior adjutant on the staff of the Kiev Military District (13 December 1903–18 September 1904) and taught military science at the Kiev Military School (18 September 1904–3 September 1908). After a brief spell on the staff of the Warsaw Military District (3 September–21 October 1908), he then became chief of staff of the Libau (Liepāja) Fortess (21 October 1908–9 January 1910), before returning to the Academy of the General Staff as a selector of candidates to study there (9 January 1910–10 March 1914). From 10 March 1914, Bonch-Bruevich was commander of the 176th Infantry Division, but upon the outbreak of the First World War was transferred to the post of quartermaster general on the staff of the 3rd Army (from 10 September 1914). He subsequently served as quartermaster general of the North-West Front (from 17 September 1914), before being placed on the Staff of the Supreme Commander (from 1 April 1915). He then served as chief of staff of the Northern Front (from 20 August 1915) and from March 1916 was commander of the garrison at Pskov. Following the February Revolution, he cooperated closely with local soviets and during the Kornilov affair was chosen to replace General V. N. Klembovskii (who was suspected of supporting the alleged coup) as commander of the Northern Front (29 August 1917), before secondment to the stavka (from 9 September 1917) and assignment to the post of commander of the garrison at Mogilev.

Following the October Revolution, Bonch-Bruevich was one of the first generals to support Soviet power and served as chief of staff of the main commander in chief (7 November 1917–March 1918) and military director of the Supreme Military Council (March–August 1918). In the latter role, he was even more important than his boss, People’s Commissar for War L. D. Trotsky, in laying the foundations of the new Red Army, developing the concept of Screens to defend against any renewed Austro-German attack, while at the same time instituting a regular command structure. His star waned with the rise of I. I. Vācietis (with whom he was on bad terms) as the first Main Commander in Chief of the Red Army, but he remained on the All-Russian Main Staff (August 1918–June 1919) and, after Vācietis’s dismissal, served as chief of the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (June–July 1919).

From March 1919 to 1923, Bonch-Bruevich was head of the Supreme Geodesic Directorate of VSNKh, while at the same time serving on a historical commission examining the lessons of the First World War. He was investigated for anti-Soviet activities in 1923 and again fell under suspicion and was briefly detained (21 February–17 May 1931) during Operation “Spring,” but he was not charged and remained in military and scientific work for the rest of his life. He died and is buried in Moscow. Bonch-Bruevich was the author of numerous works on tactics and geodesics and a notable and key memoir of the revolutionary period (translated as From Tsarist General to Red Army Commander, 1966).

BONIVUR, VITALII BORISOVICH. See BANEVUR (BONIVUR), VITALII BORISOVICH.

Borodin, Sisoi Kapitonovich (6 July 1883–20 February 1961). Sotnik (Cossack lieutenant, 30 March 1908), podesaul (Cossack captain, 30 March 1912), captain (30 March 1914), lieutenant colonel (15 August 1916), colonel (May 1918), major general (February 1919). The White commander S. K. Borodin was born and raised at the Nizhne-Krutoiarskaia stanitsa in the family of a member of the Don Cossack Host. Following schooling at home and in his local school, he graduated from the Novocherkassk Cossack Officer School (1904) and the Academy of the General Staff (1913). Having entered military service on 3 March 1900, he served as a coronet in the 6th Don Cossack Regiment (from 9 August 1904) and later with the 14th Don Cossack Regiment and, following graduation from the academy, commanded a sotnia in 13th Don Cossack Regiment. At the time of the outbreak of the First World War, he was on the general staff of the 1st Don Cossack Division. During the war he also served as a senior adjutant (from 2 October 1915) and then errand officer (from 27 November 1916) with the staff of the 14th Army Corps. On 25 November 1917, he was named chief of staff of the 2nd Turkestan Rifle Division but, in the wake of the October Revolution, in early 1918 he returned to the Don and then participated in the Cossack uprising against Soviet power of April–May of that year, as chief of staff in the partisan forces of General K. K. Mamontov.

In 1919, Borodin became a member of the Great Don Krug (the Don Cossack Council) and chairman of its military commission, as well as serving as chief of staff of the 8th Don Corps. At that end of that year, he was made chief of the Military Staff of the Great Don Host. After evacuation to Crimea in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, he served as chief of staff of the 3rd Don Division. He was evacuated with Wrangel’s forces to Turkey in November 1920, but soon moved on from the camps on Lemnos (via Bulgaria and Serbia) to Paris, where he was employed as a miner and a taxi driver throughout the interwar period. In the Second World War, he participated in several Russian military formations under German command, including that organized by General A. V. Turkul. In 1953, Borodin became a candidate for the post of Host Ataman of the Don Cossacks, but stood down in favor of P. K. Pisarev. He died at his home in Gagny, eastern Paris, where he is buried in a private cemetery.

BORODIN, VASILII ARISTARKHOVICH (28 January 1883–1952). Esaul (Cossack lieutenant, 1916), colonel (6 February 1919), major general (9 September 1919). The White commander V. A. Borodin was born at Verkhneural′sk, Orenburg guberniia, into a family of the Orenburg Cossack Host, and was a graduate of the Orenburg Nepliuevskii Cadet Corps (1901) and the Orenburg Cossack Officers School (1903).

During the First World War, he commanded the 2nd Squadron (sotnia) of the 9th Orenburg Cossack Regiment. From January to March 1918, in support of the Dutov Uprising, he led a Cossack partisan squadron (the 2nd Orenburg Cossack Detatchment) and was subsequently assistant commander of the Orenburg Cossack Brigade (to July 1918) and commander of the 2nd Orenburg Cossack Regiment (August 1918–3 June 1919), then commander of the Orenburg Cossack Brigade (20 July 1919–January 1920), as part of the 3rd Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s Eastern Front. Having made his way to Transbaikalia, from March 1920 he commanded the 1st Orenburg Cossack Regiment of the Far Eastern (White) Army. When the forces of Ataman G. M. Semenov were driven out of Transbailaia, Borodin moved to Vladivostok, where from 13 October 1921 he commanded the 1st Composite Cossack Corps of the Maritime Zemstvo Government and, from 8 August 1922, commanded the Siberian Cossack Group of the Zemstvo Host. He fled Russian territory with the remains of that force in October 1922 and emigrated to China, settling at Shanghai, where he was an active member of the Cossack Union and (from 1928) worked for a steamship company. In 1943, Borodin moved with his family to Harbin, where he died.

BOROTBISTS. The popular name for the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (Borotbists)—later the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Revolutionary Borotbists (Communist)—that was created by the left faction of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, following a split at the party’s fourth congress (13–16 May 1918), and which played an important role in Ukraine during the civil-war years. The party’s name was derived from the newspaper Borot′ba (“The Struggle”), which it founded while still a faction of the Ukrainian SRs. The Borotbisty never had a fully developed organizational structure, but they did enjoy popularity among the poorer elements of the Ukrainian peasantry, and at its height party membership may have reached some 15,000.

Although from a Populist background, the party was close to the Bolsheviks in its class analysis, in its hostility to parliamentarianism in general and to the Ukrainian National Republic Directory in particular, as well as in its internationalist outlook, but (to Moscow’s concern) advocated the establishment of a separate Ukrainian state and a separate Ukrainian army during the civil wars. The Borotbists were originally allied with the peasant leader Nykyfor Hryhoriiv but, unlike him, they were willing to recognize the Soviet regime established in Ukraine in 1919 by I. L. Piatakov and to work within it; in August that year (as White forces of the ASFR captured Kiev), they merged with pro-Bolshevik elements of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party to form the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party (Independents), which subsequently became the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbists). That party’s application to join the Komintern was refused but, noting the party’s great influence among the region’s peasants, V. I. Lenin was willing to offer members of the party a role in an independent Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as long as they agreed (in line with a demand of the Executive Committee of the Komintern of 26 February 1920) to merge with the pro-Moscow Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine. This some 4,000 Borotbisty did, in March 1920, having concluded that such a move was the only way to preserve a separate Ukrainian republic. They subsequently played an influential role in the Ukrainization of cultural and political life in Ukraine during the 1920s, but few of them survived Stalin’s terror in the 1930s.

Among the leaders of the Borotbisty were Hnat Mykhailychenko, Levko Kovaliv, Oleksander Shumskii, Vasyl Blakytny, Antin Prykhodko, Andrii Zalyvchy, Vasyl Chumak, Mykhailo Poloz, Panas Liubchenko, Oleksander Lisovyk, Hryhorii Hrynko, Mykhailo Panchenko, and the celebrated Soviet film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko.

BOROVSKII, ALEKSANDR ALEKSANDROVICH (6 June 1875–22 April 1939). Colonel (6 May 1914), major general (April 1917), lieutenant general (10 January 1919). A prominent military figure in the White movement in South Russia, A. A. Borovskii was a graduate of the Pskov Cadet Corps (1894), the Pavlovsk Military School (1896), and the Academy of the General Staff (1903), but did not complete a full course at the last of these institutions and did not obtain general staff posts. Instead, he enrolled in the Lithuanian Guards Regiment and, from 1907, taught at the Pavlovsk Military School. He participated in the First World War as, successively, commander of a battalion of the 6th Siberian Rifle Regiment (1912–February 1916), commander of the 8th Siberian Regiment (February 1916–April 1917), and commander of a brigade of the 2nd Siberian Division (April–November 1917) and was three times wounded.

Borovskii joined the Volunteer Army at its inception in November 1917 and helped form and then commanded its Student Battalion (from December 1917). He was then placed in command of a junker battalion (12 February 1918) and then an officer’s regiment (17 March 1918), leading the last of these through the First Kuban (Ice) March. He subsequently commanded the 2nd Infantry Division (from June 1918) before being placed at the head of the 2nd Army Corps (from 15 November 1918), the Crimean–Azov Corps (from 24 December 1918), and then the Crimean–Azov Army of the Armed Forces of South Russia (7 January–31 May 1919). When that force was disbanded, he was made commander of forces of the Transcaspian oblast′ (commander of the Turkestan Army, from 22 July 1919), but was unable to take up the post and was placed on the reserve list (8 October 1919). In April 1920 (together with Generals V. L. Pokrovskii and V. I. Postovskii), Borovskii was expelled from Crimea by General P. N. Wrangel for expressing criticisms of the latter’s policies and opposing his elevation to the leadership of the Whites in South Russia after the resignation of General A. I. Denikin. In emigration, Borovskii lived at Skopje in the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia), where he died in April 1939 (although some sources insist that he died at Nice, France, on 14 December 1938).

BREDOV MARCH. This is the name given to the retreat undertaken by 20,000 White soldiers and some 7,000 refugees from southwest Russia to Poland in early 1920. As forces of the Red Army advanced through Ukraine, in the wake of the collapse of the Armed Forces of South Russia, on 24 January 1920 General N. N. Shilling, commander of forces of the Novorossiisk region, issued a directive to the effect that all White troops in right-bank Ukraine (with the exception of the Odessa garrison) should concentrate around Tiraspol′ and then move via Romania into Poland under the command of General N. E. Bredov. When, however, the Romanian government refused the Whites passage through its territory, Bredov was forced to proceed northward along the left (Russian/Ukrainian) bank of the Dnestr River from 30 January 1920, constantly fighting off Red raiding parties.

On 12 February 1920, at Novaia Ushitsa, the White forces encountered units of the Polish Army, alongside which they engaged the Reds before, in late February, they were disarmed and interned in camps at Pikulice (near Przemyśl) and Demby (near Kraków). In August 1920, what remained of Bredov’s troops made their way, via Constanţa and a sea voyage, to Crimea, to join the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel. It is estimated that only 7,000 men reached Crimea: the remainder had died on the marches to and from Poland or from the typhus epidemic that ravaged the Polish camps. Those who survived were issued with a commemorative medal featuring a white cross, suspended by a sword from a ribbon in the colors of the Russian tricolor, and the inscription “1920.” On the back were the words “Loyal to Their Duty” (Vernye dolgu) in Church Slavonic.

Bredov, Nikolai-Pavel-Konstantine Emil′evich (30 November 1873–1945?). Colonel (1908), major general (5 August 1915), lieutenant general (12 October 1917). The White commander N.-P.-K. E. Bredov was born into a Lutheran family and was a graduate of the 1st Moscow Cadet Corps (1889), the 2nd Constantine School (1893), and the Academy of the General Staff (1901). Having entered military service on 1 September 1891, he participated in the Russo–Japanese War as a staff officer with the 9th Cavalry Division, but prior to the First World War was chiefly occupied with staff positions with the command of the Kiev Military District. During the First World War he commanded the 166th (Rovno) Infantry Regiment (10 November 1914–1915) and was quartermaster general of the 11th Army (1915), before becoming quartermaster general of the Northern Front (20 August 1915–8 September 1916), chief of staff of the Kiev Military District (8 September 1916–22 April 1917), commander of the 6th Finnish Rifle Division (22 April–9 September 1917), commander of the 24th Army Corps (9–30 September 1917), and commander of the 21st Army Corps (from 30 September 1917).

Following the October Revolution, Bredov moved to Kiev, where in April 1918 he joined the Hetmanite Army of the Ukrainian State and was placed on a special commission charged with organizing military schools and academies across independent Ukraine. When that commission was canceled (on 1 November 1918), he went into service with the Kiev branch of the Volunteer Army (from 25 November 1918). He then moved south to join the Volunteers themselves, but on 24 January 1919 was placed only on the reserve list of the Armed Forces of South Russia (possibly because of his earlier association with the Ukrainians). He returned to active service on 13 June 1919, as commander of the 7th Infantry Division and, with the Caucasian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, participated in the capture of Tsaritsyn (2 July 1919). Later in July 1919, the 7th Division was transferred to the Volunteer Army and with it (on 17 July 1919) Bredov participated in the capture of Poltava. He subsequently (from 3 December 1919) commanded the Kiev Group of Forces of the Volunteers. As the White front collapsed over the winter of 1919–1920, cut off by Red forces from a direct path of retreat to Odessa (and the possibility of a seaborne evacuation to the North Caucasus) and having been refused permission to move into Bessarabia by the Romanian government, Bredov then led his men northwest along the left bank of the Dnepr into Poland (the epic Bredov March). There, his forces were interned until, in August 1920, they received permission to move through Romania to the Black Sea and thence to Crimea to join Wrangel’s Russian Army.

Bredov arrived at Feodosiia on 11 August 1920 and was evacuated from the same port on 16 November of that year. In emigration, after a period in the camps around Constantinople, he moved to and settled in Bulgaria, where from 1924 he was one of the local leaders of ROVS. In the 1930s and during the Second World War, he helped run the Russian (Military) Invalid Home at Shipka. When Soviet forces entered Bulgaria at the end of the war, Bredov was arrested and transported to the USSR, where he apparently died in the gulag.

BREST-LITOVSK, TREATY OF (27 JANUARY 1918). Signed between representatives of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) and the Central Powers, this agreement brought an end to Ukraine’s involvement in the First World War. Following the armistice between the Russian and Austro-German forces of 3 December 1917, the Ukrainian Central Rada decided to send its own delegation (led by Vsevolod Holubovych) to the subsequent peace negotiations, which began at Brest-Litovsk on 9 December 1917. The Central Powers recognized the delegation (which arrived at Brest on 1 January 1918) as officially representing the UNR, but the Soviet delegation did not, having sponsored the establishment of the rival Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at Khar′kov on 25 December 1917. Indeed, the head of the Soviet delegation, L. D. Trotsky, tried to discredit the UNR delegation by summoning Yukhym Medvedev and Vasyl Shakhrai of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic to Brest. After discussions at Kiev, a second Ukrainian delegation, under Oleksandr Sevriuk, returned to Brest in late January. It negotiated the terms of the treaty that was signed late on 9 February 1919 by Sevriuk, Mykola Liubynsky, Mykola Levytsky, and Serhiy Ostapenko on behalf of the UNR; General Max Hoffmann and the state secretary, Richard von Kühlmann, for Germany; Minister of Foreign Affairs Count Ottokar Czernin for Austria-Hungary; Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov, Andrey Toshev, I. Stoianovich, T. Anastasov, and P. Ganchev for Bulgaria; and Mehmed Talat, I. Hakki Pasha, A. Nessimi Bey, and Ahmed İzzet Pasha for the Ottoman Empire.

Within a few days, almost half a million men of the Austro-German intervention had entered Ukraine, clearing the country of pro-Soviet Russian forces and allowing the Rada (which had been expelled from its capital by Red Guards on 27 January) to return to Kiev on 2 March 1918. However, the main aim of the UNR delegation, to win the inclusion within an independent Ukraine of Ukrainian lands that had been under Austro-Hungarian rule (chiefly eastern Galicia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia), was not realized—indeed, at the insistence of the Austrians, the issue was not even discussed—although the Central Powers were willing to allow that regions contested between Ukraine and Russia (or Poland) should belong to Ukraine (chiefly Kholm, Podlachia, and Sian).

The treaty itself consisted of 10 articles. It fixed the Austro-Hungarian–Ukrainian border on the line of that of 1914 and made provision for the establishment of a joint commission to determine the Ukrainian–Polish border. It provided for the evacuation of occupied areas, the establishment of diplomatic relations, the exchange of prisoners of war, the renunciation of claims for war damages and reparations, and the establishment of trading links. Finally, the treaty provided for the Central Powers to provide military assistance to the UNR in its struggle with the Bolsheviks (meaning, effectively, Austro-German occupation of Ukraine) and the provision of a loan that was to be paid for in grain and other goods. A secret protocol was also signed between Austro-Hungary and the UNR, which stipulated that Bukovina and Eastern Galicia would be united into a single “crown land” within the Dual Monarchy, but Polish objections led Vienna to annul that agreement on 4 July 1918 (on the pretext that Ukraine had not delivered the promised amounts of grain).

Although the treaty provided the UNR with Austro-German military aid in clearing Bolshevik forces from most of its territory, the presence in Ukraine of forces of the Central Powers was to undermine the independence and security of the Rada and lead to the rise of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii and the Ukrainian State. Moreover, the Allies, who had been considering the recognition of the UNR, received news of the treaty with indignation and suspended relations with Ukraine.

In 1922, the Treaty of Rapallo between Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia canceled Germany’s recognition of the UNR, while the disintegration of Austria-Hungary automatically annulled Austria’s commitments, and Turkey renounced the treaty by signing an agreement with the Ukrainian SSR in 1922. Of the Central Powers, therefore, only Bulgaria seems never to have formally renounced the treaty.

Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (3 MARCH 1918). This agreement between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire) marked Russia’s withdrawal from the First World War. Following the conclusion of an armistice on the Eastern Front (on 3 December 1917), negotiations between the signatories began on 9 December 1917 at Brest-Litovsk (now Brest in Belarus). The Soviet delegation was initially headed by A. A. Ioffe. The key figures present for the Central Powers were Richard von Kühlmann (the German foreign minister), Ottokar Czernin (the Austrian foreign minister), Max Hoffman (chief of staff of Ober Ost), and Talat Pasha (Mehmet Tâlât, the Turkish grand vizier).

On 5 January 1918, the Central Powers presented the Soviet delegation with an ultimatum, demanding the secession of all lands currently occupied by Germany and its allies. When these demands were discussed by the Soviet leadership, V. I. Lenin (in his “Theses on the Question of the Immediate Conclusion of a Separate and Annexationist Peace,” 7 January 1918) declared himself in favor of accepting them, on the grounds that the Soviet government and nascent Red Army lacked the means to resist the Central Powers militarily and worse terms might be offered at a later date, if they did not capitulate immediately. Lenin argued also that Soviet Russia needed a “breathing space” to consolidate the revolution internally and to organize the suppression of its opponents. However, the majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee opposed him and favored the launching of a “revolutionary war” as advocated by N. I. Bukharin and the Left Bolsheviks. In the event, a compromise was reached and a new Soviet delegation returned to Brest-Litovsk under L. D. Trotsky with instructions to draw out the negotiations for as long as possible but not to sign a treaty. When the leaders of the Central Powers lost patience with his prevarication, on 28 January 1918 Trotsky announced that Russia was withdrawing from the negotiations and from the war but would not sign a treaty (the policy of “neither war nor peace”). He was gambling that his opponents would not risk resuming hostilities for fear of arousing sympathy for the Bolsheviks among their own armed forces and populations. However, just over a week later, on 18 February 1918 (the Julian calendar employed in Russia had at this time been abandoned in favor of the Gregorian), the Germans renounced the armistice and resumed the offensive (in Operation Thunderbolt, which Lenin dubbed the Eleven-Days’ War) and, after some hesitation, the Soviet side was forced to sue for peace. (Lenin threatened to resign from the Bolshevik Central Committee unless it adopted this policy, which it eventually did by a vote of 7–4, with four abstentions, on 23 February 1918.)

Under the terms accepted (but demonstratively not actually read) by the Soviet delegation (led by G. V. Chicherin) on 3 March 1918—and ratified two weeks later at the Fourth (Extraordinary) All-Russian Congress of Soviets)—Russia confirmed (Articles III–IV) the independence of Finland and lost control of the Baltic provinces, Poland, Belarussia, and Ukraine, as well as all lands captured from the Ottoman Empire in the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–1878 and the First World War (specifically the regions around Ardahan, Batumi, and Kars). This amounted to a total of some 500,000 square miles of territory. Together with this were forfeited more than one-third of the old empire’s population (56,000,000 people), one-third of its railway network, half its industry, three-quarters of its supplies of iron ore, and nine-tenths of its coal. In addition (Article VI), the Soviet government pledged to end its war with the Ukrainian National Republic, which had been recognized by the Central Powers in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (27 January 1918); the Russian Army was to be fully demobilized (Article V); and Soviet Russia renounced all claims to special privileges in Persia and Afghanistan (Article VII) that it might have inherited from treaties and agreements signed in tsarist times (including the Anglo–Russian Convention of 1907). A supplementary protocol (the Berlin Agreement, signed on 27 August 1918) required Russia to pay Germany an indemnity of six billion marks.

Turkey broke the terms of the treaty by invading the Armenian and then Azerbaijani regions of the Transcaucasian Federation in May–June 1918, and Germany renounced its terms on 5 November 1918, on the grounds that the Bolsheviks had been spreading revolutionary propaganda in areas occupied by forces of the Austro-German intervention (thereby breaking Article II of the treaty). On 13 November 1918, following Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the VTsIK of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic also declared the treaty to have been annulled. Subsequent attempts by Moscow to restore its governance over the areas lost in the treaty met, however, with mixed results: the Estonian War of Independence, the Latvian War of Independence, and the Lithuanian War of Independence secured the independence of the Baltic countries, and the Soviet–Polish War also ended with defeat for the Red Army; on the other hand, the Soviet–Ukrainian War achieved the reconquest of most of Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, the Democratic Republic of Armenia, and the Democratic Republic of Georgia were brought back into the Soviet fold in 1920–1921, although the border with Turkey established at Brest-Litovsk was largely reaffirmed by the Treaty of Alexandropol (2 December 1920), the Treaty of Moscow (16 March 1921), and the Treaty of Kars (13 October 1921). By the terms of the Soviet–German Treaty of Rapallo (16 April 1922), Germany accepted the nullification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and both sides renounced all territorial and financial claims against each other that had arisen from the war.

Although the treaty had lasted only some eight months, it was of enormous significance for the “Russian” Civil Wars, in that it aroused great opposition domestically, giving momentum and a unifying cause to the nascent White movement and divorcing from the Soviet government some of its left-wing allies (notably the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries, whose representatives withdrew from Sovnarkom in protest at the treaty and began preparing the Left-SR Uprising). It was also important internationally, in that it legitimized Allied intervention in Russia (as well as the Allied blockade of the country), while at the same time planting the seeds of independence movements from the Baltic to Transcaucasia that would flower in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union some 70 years later. (Indeed, the western and southeastern borders of Russia imposed by the treaty run remarkably close to those established by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–1991.)

BROVA, MIKHAIL (?–September 1921). Batko (“Little Father”) Brova, a prominent and popular commander in Nestor Makhno’s Revolutionary Insurgent-Army of Ukraine, was born into a peasant family at Novogrigorevka in Ekaterinoslav guberniia and from childhood worked as a locksmith at Avdeevka Iuzovskii station. He was attracted to anarchism as early as 1904 and was active in the revolutionary struggles of 1905 to 1907. During the First World War, he was mobilized into the Black Sea Fleet but returned to Ukraine following the October Revolution and established an anarchist cell at Aleksandrovsk.

In the summer of 1918, Brova helped establish a partisan group in the Dibrivski forest that fought against the Hetmanite Army of P. P. Skoropadskii and the forces of the Austro-German intervention, in collaboration with the group commanded by Fedir Shchus′. He was badly wounded at this time but recovered to join the Makhnovists in late 1918 and to fight with them, as a member of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Insurgent Army, against White and Red forces in 1919. In January 1920, when the Red Army overran Ukraine, Brova formed and commanded a 400-strong anarchist guerrilla detachment around Novomoskovsk, Ekaterinoslav guberniia. In mid-February 1920, he was captured by the Cheka and imprisoned at Ekaterinoslav, but escaped in April of that year, resumed guerrilla operations, and reestablished contacts with the Makhnovists, who appointed him plenipotentiary of the Insurgent Army for the Novomoskovsk region. In October–November 1920, Brova’s detachment fought alongside the Reds in the final campaign against the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel and assisted in breaking into Crimea across the Perekop isthmus, but he returned to Novomoskovsk before the end of November and organized a 700-strong Makhnovist detachment that attacked Red forces around Krivoi Rog, Pavlogradsk, and Novomoskovsk. In late January 1921, Brova’s detachment merged with that of G. S. Maslakov, with Brova assuming the role of chief of staff of the united force as it moved into the Kuban. By August 1921, the Maslakov-Brova detachment numbered several thousand fighters. At that point, however, it was smashed by the Reds and broke up into a number of smaller units. One of these, commanded by Brova, retreated into Chechnia, where in September 1921 Batko Brova was apparently assassinated by Cheka agents who had infiltrated his camp.

Brushvit, Ivan Mikhailovich (1879–1946). Ensign (1916). Of Latvian background—he was born at Vindavskii, the son of a mining engineer of peasant stock—and educated at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute, I. M. Brushvit joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) upon its founding in 1898 and became a key leader of the right wing of that party during the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918. Having trained and worked as a telegraphist, he volunteered for the imperial army in 1916, and in 1917 was elected to the Constituent Assembly from the party list of the PSR and as a representative of the Soviet of Peasant Deputies of Samara guberniia.

Following the closure of the Constituent Assembly, Brushvit was briefly imprisoned by the Cheka and thereafter was active in the anti-Bolshevik underground on the Volga from February 1918. Together with B. K. Fortunatov and P. D. Klimushkin, he was one of a three-man Revolutionary Center at Samara that sought to establish military, political, and financial cooperation among anti-Bolshevik forces in the region. Brushvit was actually responsible for last of these, but in the first week of June 1918 his contribution of greatest significance was persuading forces of the Czechoslovak Legion at Penza, under Colonel S. čeček, to assist in “liberating” Samara from the Bolsheviks. Subsequently, he became deputy chairman of Komuch and director of its Department of Finance and, on 13–15 July 1918, led the regime’s delegation to the first of the Cheliabinsk conferences that were preliminaries to the Ufa State Conference. Following the Omsk coup of 18 November 1918, he helped (unsuccessfully) to organize opposition to Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s seizure of power by summoning the Congress of Members of the Constituent Assembly.

In emigration, Brushvit lived in Czechoslovakia, where he was a member of the Administrative Center of the Above-Party Democratic Union from 1920 to 1922 and from 1922 to 1932 headed the Prague branch of Zemgor, and he was also active in the Congress of Members of the Constituent Assembly in that city. When, in May 1945, at the end of the Second World War, Soviet forces captured Prague, Brushvit was arrested and deported to the USSR, where he was sentenced to a term of five years’ imprisonment (having been found guilty, in absentia, of “anti-Soviet activity” during the Moscow trial of the PSR leadership in 1922). He died in prison and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1992.

Brusilov, Aleksei Alekseevich (19 August 1853–17 March 1926). Lieutenant colonel (30 August 1887), major general (6 December 1900), colonel (30 August 1892), lieutenant general (6 December 1906), general of cavalry (6 December 1912). A. A. Brusilov, the commander in chief of the Russian Army in 1917, who would later join the Red Army, was born in Tiflis, Georgia, the son of a general. He was a graduate of the Corps of Pages (1872) and the Cavalry Officers School (1883) and served in the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–1878. Between 1883 and 1906, he served continuously as an instructor at the Cavalry School, eventually becoming its commandant. He did not attend the Academy of the General Staff and took no active part in the Russo–Japanese War, but nevertheless, having risen to the command of the important Warsaw Military District (5 December 1912–15 August 1913), upon the outbreak of the First World War he was placed in command of the 8th Army, which won important (and rare) victories for Russia in Galicia and the Carpathians during the opening months of the fighting. On 17 March 1916, he became commander of the South-West Front, leading an offensive (later referred to by his name) that was among the most successful Russian actions of the war; his forces broke through the Austro-Hungarian defenses to occupy broad expanses of Volynia, Galicia, and Bukovina. The “Brusilov Offensive” also saw the development of numerous shock tactics that were later employed by the Red Army: deception, surprise and momentum, and the deployment of small units of crack troops to attack weak points in the enemy lines that larger forces could pour through.