Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

In the aftermath of the February Revolution, Brusilov was named as successor to General M. V. Alekseev as supreme commander of the Russian Army (21 May to 19 July 1917), but was replaced by General L. G. Kornilov when the summer offensive he had planned ended in disaster and large-scale desertion. He remained as a special military advisor to the Provisional Government but retired following the October Revolution.

Brusilov then lived in Moscow. Having been briefly imprisoned by the Cheka in August 1918, he was under house arrest until December of that year and then at liberty, but refused all invitations from the Whites to join them. He remained, at heart, a monarchist and was no friend of the Soviet government, but he was troubled by the Whites also, viewing their attack on the increasingly established authority of the Soviet government as damaging to Russian interests. He may also have held against the Whites the fact that in 1919 his son Aleksei, who was serving in the Red Army, was captured by them and executed. Certainly, from 1919 he began to cooperate with the Red Army, and in May 1920, during the Soviet–Polish War, he was one of the signatories of an appeal published in Pravda urging other former officers to follow suit (“To all former officers, wherever they may be”). This was followed by a further appeal, in September 1920, for former officers to assist in the struggle against General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army (signed by Brusilov, M. I. Kalinin, S. S. Kamenev, V. I. Lenin, and L. D. Trotsky). He subsequently headed a special commission on the strengthening of the Red Army and then (from July 1922) became inspector of cavalry of the Red Army. Brusilov died of heart disease in March 1926 and was buried with full military honors in the Novodevich′e Cemetery in Moscow.

BUBNOV, ALEKSANDR DMITRIEVICH (1883–2 February 1963). Captain, second rank (6 December 1913), rear admiral (28 July 1917). One of the most senior commanders of the White Fleet, A. D. Bubnov, who was born in Warsaw, was a graduate of the Naval Corps (1902) and the Naval Academy (1913). He was badly injured during the Battle of the Tsushima Straits during the Russo–Japanese War and spent some months in a Japanese prison. He subsequently worked as a professor at the Naval Academy and on the Naval General Staff, and during the First World War rose to the post of chief of the Naval Directorate on the Staff of the Supreme Commander in Chief (12 October–2 December 1917). He was dismissed from this post following the October Revolution and briefly returned to work at the Naval Academy before fleeing the country and traveling to Paris.

In late 1918, on the orders of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, Bubnov joined the Russian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference as its naval expert. He then returned to South Russia to command a division of torpedo boats at Novorossiisk (from 3 May 1919) and on 20 August 1919 was named chief of staff to the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Admiral D. V. Neniukov. Together with the latter, on 8 February 1920 Bubnov was dismissed from his post by General A. I. Denikin for having plotted to have the commandant of Crimea, General N. N. Shilling, replaced by General P. N. Wrangel. In emigration, he helped found and then taught at the Yugoslav Naval Academy in Dubrovnik (obtaining the title of professor) and was a member of the Russian Scientific Institute at Belgrade; he also authored numerous important books on naval strategy. Expelled from his post by the Germans during the Second World War and later regarded with suspicion by the Communist regime of Josip Tito, Bubnov became a Russian-language teacher at Bela Krajina and also later at Kranj in Slovenia, where he died.

Bubnov, Andrei Sergeevich (22 March 1884–1 August 1938). A prominent member of the Left Bolsheviks and historian of the civil wars, A. S. Bubnov was born into a middle-class merchant family in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Vladimir guberniia, and attended the Moscow Agricultural Institute but was expelled for revolutionary activities. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903 and soon gravitated to the Bolsheviks. He was arrested 13 times by the tsarist authorities and experienced four years of exile, but was nevertheless elected to the Fourth State Duma as part of the social-democratic caucus. Active in Moscow in early 1917, he became a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 3 April of that year.

Bubnov played a prominent part in the October Revolution, as a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and in November–December 1917 was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Ways and Communications. During the civil wars, he was chiefly active in Ukraine, where, as a key associate of V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko and N. N. Podvoiskii, he was a member of the Revvoensovet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (25 April–4 June 1919) and of the 14th Red Army (21 June–31 December 1919). He was also people’s secretary for economic affairs of the Ukrainian SSR (March–April 1918), twice a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (12 July–17 October 1918 and 6 March 1919–17 March 1920), chairman of the All-Ukrainian Central Military-Revolutionary Committee (July–September 1919), chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Ukrainian SSR (12 July–28 November 1918), chairman of the Kiev Revolutionary Committee (October 1918–25 February 1919), people’s commissar for internal affairs of the Ukrainian SSR (29 January–September 1919), and a member of the Council of Defense of the Ukrainian SSR (August–September 1919). One of Bubnov’s most important tasks was the organization of uprisings in the rear of the White forces. In late 1920, he returned to Moscow to work as head of the Main Directorate of the Textile Industry of VSNKh (1920–1921), before again being assigned to military work as a member of the Revvoensovet of the 1st Cavalry Army (29 April–27 May 1921) and the Revvoensovet of the North Caucasus Military District (1921–1922).

Throughout the civil-war period, Bubnov adhered to a Leftist line, opposing the Soviet–German Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (going so far as to resign from the party Central Committee over the issue on 23 February 1918), supporting regional autonomy for Ukraine, fighting against what he saw as the overcentralizing tendencies of War Communism, supporting the independence and authority of the trade unions, and resisting the efforts of L. D. Trotsky toward the militarization of labor through the creation of Labor Armies, yet in March 1921 he participated enthusiastically in the crushing of the Kronshtadt Revolt (for which he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner).

As the civil wars wound down during the early 1920s, Bubnov briefly sided with the Trotskyist Left Opposition, but recanted and was able to work in numerous Soviet institutions, including periods as head of the Agitprop Department of the party Central Committee (May 1922–February 1924), head of PUR (2 February 1924–1 October 1929), editor of the military journal Krasnaia zvezda (“Red Star,” 2 February 1924–1 October 1929), member of the Revvoensovet of the USSR (2 February 1924–1 October 1929), and people’s commissar for education of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (September 1929–October 1937). He was also a member of the Bolshevik party Central Committee from 31 May 1924 to 14 January 1938. Nevertheless, he was arrested on 17 October 1937, and on 1 August 1938 was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, the sentence being carried out that same day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 14 March 1956. Bubnov was the author of more than 200 published works and was one of the editors of the three-volume compendium Grazhdanskaia voina (Moscow, 1928–1930), a key early Soviet work on the civil wars.

BUDANOV, AVRAAM (1886–1928/1929). One of the foremost advocates of anarchism in revolutionary Russia, Avraam Budanov was born into a peasant family at Slavianoserbsk, in Ekaterinoslav guberniia, and from a young age was employed as a fitter at Lugansk. He was first attracted to radical politics during the 1905 Revolution, and in 1917–1918 organized anarchist groups among miners in the Donbass region in southeast Ukraine.

With the arrival of the forces of the Austro-German intervention in Ukraine in March–April 1918, Budanov fled to Soviet Russia, where in the autumn of 1918 he joined the anarchist Nabat organization. He then went back to Iuzovka as part of an underground cell battling both the interventionists and the Ukrainian State. In May 1919, he joined the forces of Nestor Makhno at Guliai-Pole and was involved in cultural-educational work. In June 1919, when the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine was outlawed by the Soviet government, Budanov joined the Red Army to undertake secret anarchist agitation among its ranks. In that capacity, he was partially responsible for the mutiny on 20 August 1919 of the Reds’ 58th Rifle Division, which renamed itself the Southern Group of the Makhnovist Army. Budanov then became chief of staff of the 1st Don Corps of the Makhnovists, participating in the fighting against the Armed Forces of South Russia in autumn 1919 and the capture of Elizavetgrad and Krivoi Rog. In January 1920, when the Soviets again broke with the Makhnovists, Budanov was forced once more into hiding. Over the next two years, he organized and led numerous anarchist-partisan units before being captured in early 1922. He was released on bail and returned to agitational work around Mariupol′, creating a branch of Nabat and fostering contacts with anarchists elsewhere in Soviet Russia. In late 1928, Budanov’s group was arrested by the OGPU, and shortly thereafter he was executed.

BUDBERG, ALEKSEI PAVLOVICH VON (15 November 1869–14 December 1945). Colonel (1904), major general (15 May 1908), lieutenant general (18 March 1916). The author of a lengthy, detailed, and very frequently cited diary of the civil-war years, which was acerbically critical of the White regime he served under in Siberia in 1919, Baron A. P. von Budberg was the scion of a noble family from Livland guberniia. He attended the Corps of Pages and was a graduate of the Mikhail Artillery School (1899) and the Academy of the General Staff (1895) and held a number of military posts in the Imperial Russian Army in Siberia, rising to quartermaster general of the staff of the Amur Military District (from March 1913). He saw action in the First World War, serving as quartermaster on the staff of the 10th Army (from August 1914), and from January to November 1918 was commander of the 14th Army Corps of the 5th Army on the Northern Front.

Following the October Revolution, Budberg formally retired and on 23 January 1918 made his way to Japan. In April 1918, he moved to Harbin and headed the Inter-Departmental Billeting Commission in the forces of General D. L. Khorvat in the Chinese Eastern Railway zone. On 3 May 1919, he was made main head of supplies in the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and moved to Omsk. Soon after his arrival, however, his considerable organizational talents were rewarded with promotion to the posts of assistant chief of staff of the main commander in chief of the Russian Army and director of the Ministry of War (23 May 1919). From 27 August 1919, he was minister of war in the Omsk government, but retired on 20 October 1919, due to ill health, and moved back to Harbin. In 1920, he emigrated to the United States, where, in 1924, he became head of the First Section of ROVS. Budberg was also, until his death, head of the Society of Russian Veterans of the Great War in his adopted hometown of San Francisco.

BUDENNYI, SEMEN MIKHAILOVICH (13 April 1883–17 October 1973). Sergeant major (vakhmistr, 191?), Marshal of the Soviet Union (20 November 1935). S. M. Budenny, the founding father of Soviet Russia’s cavalry forces and one of the most decorated and lauded Red Army soldiers of all time, was born at the Koziurin khutor, Platonov stanitsa (now Budennovskaia), near Rostov-on-Don, into a poor and landless peasant family. (Contrary to many accounts, his family was not part of the Don Cossack Host but had recently migrated south from Voronezh to the Don territory.) After working periodically as a farm laborer, a shop hand, and an assistant blacksmith, he was drafted into the Russian Army in 1903 and trained at the St. Petersburg Cavalry School (1907–1908). He served with the Primorskii Cossack Infantry (Dragun) Regiment during both the Russo–Japanese War and the First World War, rising to the rank of NCO during the latter, fighting on the Eastern Front and on the Caucasus Front, and winning the St. George’s Cross on no fewer than four occasions for valor.

Budennyi was radicalized by the events of 1917 and chaired his regimental soldiers’ committee at Minsk. In early 1918, as an accomplished horseman, he helped form and then commanded a unit of Red Cossacks on the Don that was subsequently incorporated into the Red Army. With the latter, he then served as assistant commander of a regiment (July–September 1918), assistant commander of the 1st Don Cavalry Brigade (September 1918–March 1919), commander of the 4th Cavalry Division (April–June 1919), and commander of the 1st Cavalry Corps (26 June–17 November 1919). During this period, in the fighting at Tsaritsyn and on the Southern Front, Budennyi cemented a close relationship with K. E. Voroshilov and J. V. Stalin. He joined the RKP(b) in 1919 and was the natural choice as founding commander of the 1st Cavalry Army (17 November 1919–October 1923). The last of these formations was one of the most successful and lauded of Red Army forces, playing a key role in the defeat and destruction of A. I. Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia, but was also notorious for its lack of discipline, looting, and cruelty (particularly to Jews, as captured in the Red Cavalry stories of Isaak Babel). During the Soviet–Polish War, Budennyi’s army became bogged down at L′vov in August 1920 and was unable to move to assist Red Army forces before Warsaw, contributing to Soviet defeat. The 1st Cavalry Army itself was then defeated at the Battle of Komarów (31 August 1920) and was subsequently sent back south, to assist in the defeat of General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army.

Budennyi’s post–civil war positions included membership in the Revvoensovet of the USSR (28 August 1923–20 June 1934), assistant main commander of the Red Army for cavalry (October 1923–1924), and inspector of cavalry of the Red Army (1924–1937). He also graduated from the Red Military Academy (1932) and was a candidate member (10 February 1934–10 March 1939) and later a full member (21 March 1939–5 October 1952) of the Bolshevik Central Committee (and from 14 October 1952 until his death remained a candidate member), and in 1935 was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union. On 12 June 1937, he served on the tribunal that condemned to death M. N. Tukhachevskii, I. E. Iakir, I. P. Uborovich, A. I. Kork, and five other Red Army commanders (“The Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization”). From 1937 to August 1940, he was commander of the Moscow Military District. In the Soviet–Finnish War, he commanded an army, with disastrous results, but was nevertheless then made first deputy people’s commissar for defense of the USSR (August 1940–27 August 1942) and first deputy chief of the General Staff (August 1940–1941) and a member of the Defense Committee of Sovnarkom (31 August 1940–9 April 1941).

Following the German invasion of the USSR, in July–September 1941 Budennyi became commander in chief of the Soviet armed forces of the South-Western Direction (on the South-West and Southern Fronts in Ukraine), and as such bore the responsibility for the disastrous encirclement of Soviet forces during the Battle of Uman and the Battle of Kiev that cost at least 1,500,000 men killed or taken prisoner—one of the greatest routs in military history. He escaped execution or even punishment, thanks to his relationship with Stalin, but was subsequently shunted into a series of lesser command positions and ultimately into the sinecure of the by then largely obsolete post of commander of cavalry of the Red Army (from 24 January 1943). After the war, he became deputy minister of agriculture of the USSR, with special responsibility for horse breeding (1947–June 1953), but following the death of Stalin he was allowed to retire as a three-time Hero of the Soviet Union (1958, 1963, 1968, which supplemented his three awards of the Order of the Red Banner in 1919, 1923, and 1930). Budennyi then lived out his days quietly on his pension, pursuing equestrian interests and writing five volumes of memoirs, in which he described at length his part in the civil wars, as well as the everyday life of the 1st Cavalry Army. In his 91st year he died in Moscow of a brain hemorrhage and was buried, with full military honors, beneath the Kremlin Wall.

Virtually uneducated but with enormous charisma (and even more enormous mustaches), Budennyi—whose image as a civil-war hero was ceaselessly promoted by the Stalinist and even post-Stalinist Soviet propaganda machines in Moscow—became a folkloric figure in the USSR, a decorative accoutrement and counterpoint to the gray men of the postwar Soviet leadership and something of a museum piece. Present at all important military parades and state occasions, bedecked with medals and orders, he was a living relic of the heroic days of the civil wars. Several thousand streets, settlements, collective farms, and other locations were named in his honor, as was the Budennyi breed of horse (famous for its strong performance in sports and remarkable endurance) and the budenovka broadcloth helmet (a staple of Red Army uniforms during and after the civil wars). There are notable statues and memorials to him at Donetsk (in Budennyi Square) and in Moscow’s Red Square and many lesser examples across the former Soviet Union. He was also commemorated in many popular Russian military songs, including “The Red Cavalry Song” (1936) and “The Budennyi March.” As a mark of his enduring prominence in Moscow’s narrative of the birth of the USSR, one of the last Soviet civil-war feature films produced before the onset of glasnost′ featured Budennyi’s exploits: Pervaia konnaia (“The First Cavalry Army,” dir. V. P. Liubomudrov, 1984).

Bukeykhanov, Ali-khan NURMUKHAMEDOVICH (Aliqan Bokeyqan-uli) (5 March 1866–27 November 1937). One of the most influential Kazakh nationalists and proponents of jadidism of the revolutionary era (as well as an eminent historian and folklorist), Ali-khan Bukeykhanov (who claimed to be a descendant of Genghis Khan) was born at Samara and was a graduate of the Omsk Forestry Institute (1890) and the Imperial Forestry Institute in St. Petersburg (1894). He participated in various expeditions and scientific enterprises in Central Asia from 1896 onward, but his career was made not in engineering but as an anti-Russian journalist. He wrote for innumerable Kazakh and radical Russian newspapers, including the influential Qazaq (“Kazakh”); joined the Kadets; and was elected to the First and Second State Dumas as a representative of Semipalatinsk. Following the dissolution of the Second State Duma, he was one of the signatories of the Vyborg Manifesto and consequently suffered exile from his home territory, relocating to Samara. In the immediate aftermath of the February Revolution, in March 1917 (together with Ahmed Baytursunov and Mirjaqip Dulatuli), he formed the Alash Orda party.

Following the October Revolution, Bukeykhanov was one of the leading advocates of immediate and full autonomy for Kazakhstan, and at Orenburg, during the Third Kazakh Congress of 5–13 December 1917, he was elected congress president. He subsequently led the eastern Alash Orda government at Semipalatinsk, as chairman of the Provisional People’s Council of Kazakh Autonomy. In 1919, as Red forces triumphed in Central Asia, he formally accommodated himself to the new regime, even joining the RKP(b) in 1920, but he soon fell foul of Moscow’s restrictions on the jadids, withdrew from an active public life in Soviet Kazakhstan, and returned to scientific work. He nevertheless was subjected to repeated arrests (in 1926 and again in 1928), and in 1930 the Soviet authorities banished him from the steppe territories and forced him to relocate to Moscow for purposes of surveillance. Bukeykhanov was again arrested in 1937; having been found guilty of membership in a terrorist organization by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, he was executed in prison. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1989.

BUKHARAN PEOPLE’S SOVIET REPUBLIC. Established on 8 October 1920, by the First All-Bukharan Congress of People’s Representatives, and predominantly populated by Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Turkomen, this short-lived, pro-Soviet polity replaced the overthrown Emirate of Bukhara and existed until 17 February 1925, when it joined the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. It was supported financially and militarily by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which recognized its existence in October 1920 and signed a series of treaties with it in 1920–1921.

The first attempts to establish such an entity had ended in disaster, when, in February–March 1918, leaders of the radical Young Bukharan Party (including Faizullah Khojaev) summoned (mostly Russian) Bolsheviks and Red Guards from Tashkent to assist in overthrowing the emir (Said-mir Mohammed Alim-Khan) and his conservative Islamic regime. The Tashkent forces were beaten off, and most of the Young Bukharans were slaughtered. The emir’s supporters then repelled further sporadic Red attacks for more than two years, until the Red Army arrived en masse in the region (under the command of M. V. Frunze) in early September 1920. During several days of fighting, Alim Khan was forced to flee the city, his royal citadel (Arc) was razed, and finally, the Red flag was displayed from atop the great Kalyan minaret (2–6 September 1920). The new republic was then proclaimed on 8 October 1920, under the presidency of F. U. Khojaev. The latter’s elevation was typical of Soviet policy in the region at this time, which was to encourage collaboration with local radical leaders and followers of jadidism, rather than to enforce rigid Sovietization and Bolshevization. Consequently, many Bukharans were drawn into the administration (and the local branch of the Bolshevik Party), not least to counter the popularity of the huge Basmachi forces that would control most of the countryside around the city of Bukhara for the next two or three years. These policies began to change from 1922 onward, as Soviet power was consolidated and the Basmachi were cowed. From 19 September 1924 to 17 February 1925, the republic was known as the Bukharan Soviet Socialist Republic. When, in 1924, Moscow drew new “national” boundaries in Central Asia, the Bukharan SSR was prevailed upon to vote itself out of existence and join the Uzbek SSR. Today the territory of the defunct republic lies mostly in Uzbekistan, with smaller areas in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

BUKHARIN, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH (27 September 1888–15 March 1938). The Soviet theorist and, during the civil-war period, leader of the left wing of the RKP(b), was born in Moscow, the son of two schoolteachers. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1906 and became associated with its youth wing, as an effective propagandist and organizer. He entered Moscow University in 1907 to study economics, but dedicated himself to party work and never graduated (although in 1929 he was accorded the title Academician of the USSR). In 1910, he was arrested by the tsarist authorities and was briefly imprisoned and then exiled to Onega (Arkhangel′sk guberniia) for three years, but in 1911 he fled abroad to Germany before settling in Vienna in 1913. During the war, as a convinced and vocal supporter of the internationalist and antiwar policies of V. I. Lenin, Bukharin came to the attention of the authorities of both the Central Powers and the Allies and moved frequently—to Switzerland, London, Stockholm, Christiana, Copenhagen, and, finally (from October 1916), New York—a process that seems only to have strengthened his internationalism.

In May 1917, following the February Revolution, he returned to Russia (via Japan), becoming one of the leading Bolsheviks in Moscow. By this time his reputation as a Marxist theorist had been sealed by his Political Economy of the Leisure Class (1912) and World Economy and Imperialism (1915). The latter was a strong influence on Lenin (although he differed with Bukharin on other issues, notably the national question, as Bukharin repudiated the notion of the right of national self-determination). On 3 August 1917, he was elected as a full member of the party Central Committee and in December of that year became editor of Pravda.

In early 1918, Bukharin gained a high profile as the prime exponent of Left Communism, editor of the journal Kommunist, an advocate of radical economic policies, a proponent of “revolutionary war” (to spread the revolution into Europe), and an opponent of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). When the decision was taken to sign the latter, he resigned from the Central Committee (23 February 1918), but was soon (and repeatedly) reelected (8 March 1918–26 January 1934). Likewise, he resigned from the Pravda editorship (23 February 1918) but soon resumed it (in July 1918).

During the civil-war era, Bukharin concentrated on ideological work, as one of the authors of the 1918 Constitution of the RSFSR and (with E. A. Preobrazhenskii) the related ABC of Communism (1920) and Economics of the Transition Period (1920), as well as Historical Materialism (1921). As the civil wars developed and his own beliefs underwent a significant change, his rift with Lenin was healed. He became one of three candidate members of the party Central Committee’s new Politbiuro (from 25 March 1919) and deputy chairman of the Komintern (from 3 March 1919) and was one of the foremost proponents of War Communism. In 1921, however, he supported the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and subsequently became its chief theorist and advocate, stressing the need to find an evolutionary path to socialism in alliance with the peasant majority of Russia and, in the years around the death of Lenin, supporting the party leadership against the Left Opposition and L. D. Trotsky. He was rewarded by reelection to the Politbiuro (23 May 1924) and by being made secretary of the Executive Committee of the Komintern (December 1926) following the political demise of G. E. Zinov′ev. As the party’s leadership under J. V. Stalin turned away from the NEP, however, Bukharin (whom Lenin had termed “the favorite of the whole party”) was castigated as a “rightist” and, once the danger of the Left Opposition had been quashed by its wholesale expulsion from the party in 1927, he was removed from Pravda (April 1929), the Komintern (July 1929), and the Politbiuro (17 November 1929) and was widely vilified in the press.

After a period in the relative wilderness, as a member of the presidium of VSNKH and head of its Scientific-Technical Directorate (April 1929–1932) and a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry (1932–February 1934), in February 1934 Bukharin was reelected to the party Central Committee and became editor of Izvestiia. He was also one of the chief architects of the 1936 (“Stalin”) Constitution of the USSR. However, he was arrested and imprisoned on 27 February 1937 and the following year appeared as the star defendant in the last great show trial of the purge era, the “Trial of the Twenty-One” (or “The Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites”), on 2–13 March 1938. He broadly confessed to the outlandish charges laid against him, of espionage and plotting to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders—probably to save his wife, Anna Larina (1914–1996), and young son Iurii (born in 1934). However, Bukharin denied the charges of having plotted to assassinate Lenin in 1918, and even his “confessions” can be read as a subtle, Aesopian attempt to subvert the whole trial. He was sentenced to death and immediately executed. Bukharin was posthumously rehabilitated on 4 February1988; earlier, on 3 December 1987, his widow, Anna, had made public his last written work, a letter to future party leaders that she had preserved by memory during her own long years of imprisonment and banishment. It is widely believed that Bukharin was the basis of the character Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s lauded novel Darkness at Noon (1940).

BUKRETOV, NIKOLAI ANDRIANOVICH (6 April 1876–8 May 1930). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1908), colonel (6 December 1911), major general (6 December 1915). The ataman of the Kuban Cossack Host during a crucial period of the civil wars, N. A. Bukretov was born in Georgia into a family descended from Greek colonists. Having enlisted in the Russian Army on 12 August 1894, he graduated from the Moscow Infantry Officers School (1896) and the Academy of the General Staff (1903). Among his prewar posts was that of lecturer at the Tiflis Military School. During the First World War, he served on the staff of a Kuban Cossack infantry brigade, then as commander of the 2nd Kuban Infantry Brigade (1914–11 October 1915). For the remainder of the conflict, he was commander of the 90th (Onega) Infantry Regiment (October 1915–December 1917). When, following the October Revolution, the Kuban Rada refused to recognize the Soviet government, Bukretov became commander in chief of the forces of the Kuban republic (January–February 1918) and a member of the Kuban People’s Republic government under L. L. Bych.

Having refused to participate in the First Kuban (Ice) March—he retired instead to his farm and produced sour milk—Bukretov was subsequently shunned by the Whites when they recaptured the Kuban and was forbidden to enlist in the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) In 1919, he was arrested by General V. I. Pokrovskii for alleged bribery and abuses of power (but more likely because Bukretov was an outspoken advocate of Kuban separatism). In January 1920, as the AFSR collapsed, he was elected Host ataman by the Kuban Rada. He then led what remained of the Kuban Army to Sochi, whence the Cossacks and their mounts were taken by sea to Crimea. There, Bukretov’s independent frame of mind led him into conflict with General P. N. Wrangel, and he moved back to the Kuban to lead Cossack partisan forces against the occupying Red Army. In May 1920, he was forced again to retreat into Georgia and in September of that year emigrated to Turkey and then (from 1922) the United States. He died and is buried in New York.

Bułak-Bałachowicz, Stanisław (bulak-balakovich, stanislav nikodimovich) (10 February 1883–10 May 1940). Colonel (May 1919), major general (June 1919). One of the most colorful of the many self-styled (and usually lawless) “atamans” thrown up by the civil wars, Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz was dubbed the “highwayman general” by L. D. Trotsky. In the revolutionary period, he served in the forces of imperial Russia, the Provisional Government, the Soviet government, the Estonian government, the White army, the Polish Army, the Russian Political Committee of B. V. Savinkov, and (while allied to the Ukrainian nationalists) the Belorussian national movement, but most of all he served himself. He would sometimes pose as a “peasant general” who opposed all tyranny, both Red and White, but there is little doubt that forces under his command were the perpetrators of more than their fair share of cruelty and violence toward the civilian population of western and northwestern Russia.

Bułak-Bałachowicz was born near Braslav (Kovno guberniia), into a family of petty-noble horse breeders, and was of mixed Polish, Lithuanian, Belorussian, and (allegedly) Tatar lineage. He graduated from an agricultural school and worked as a farm manager before volunteering for service in the Russian Army in 1914 (or, according to some sources, before running away to the army in 1915 to avoid being arrested for theft). During the First World War, he commanded a squadron of Cossack volunteers on the Western Front before serving in an officer partisan detachment in the enemy rear (September 1915–March 1918). According to some sources, he met G. M. Semenov at this time.

In early 1918, on Trotsky’s orders, he became involved in the formation of a Polish cavalry unit attached to the Red Army near Luga, but deserted with his men and crossed the lines near Pskov into an area controlled by forces of the White Northern Volunteer Corps and German anti-Bolshevik Freikorps formations (24 November 1918). He sided with the Whites, but distrusted their collaboration with the Germans (and was openly hostile to the officer class as a whole), and soon led his men north into Estonia, where, after a period of collaboration with the Estonian Army, he formally (albeit reluctantly) united his forces with the White North-West Army. He was given the command of an assault group by General A. P. Rodzianko and, on 29 May 1919, assisted Estonian forces in capturing Pskov. He then proclaimed himself military governor of the city, refusing to integrate his private army with the White forces proper and extracting huge financial contributions from the local populace, whom he terrorized. When the town was recaptured by the Bolsheviks, General N. N. Iudenich ordered Bułak-Bałachowicz’s arrest; apparently, his tolerance of Polish and Estonian nationalists, as well as socialist organizations at Pskov, aroused suspicion, but it was his insubordination, brigandage, and counterfeiting that the White leadership really resented. Bułak-Bałachowicz, however, managed to avoid arrest and slipped away to Estonia, where he formed yet another partisan unit.

He now plotted to arrest and overthrow Iudenich and Rodzianko (who had formally dismissed him from the Russian forces on 24 August 1919 and refused to readmit him, declaring him to be an outlaw) and to seize control for himself of the entire White movement in the region. When this plot failed, he led his men again to Pskov, which had fallen to Estonian forces on 15 October 1919. As Iudenich’s forces collapsed, Bułak-Bałachowicz slipped into Estonia again, from where, in the aftermath of the Treaty of Tartu of 2 February 1920 (and having again been thwarted in an attempt to arrest Iudenich), he contacted Józef Piłsudski and offered to unite his forces with the Poles in the ongoing Soviet–Polish War. He then set off with 800 men on a forced march behind Soviet lines to join the Poles at Duneberg (Daugavpils). Over the following months, he participated as an ally in the Polish invasion of Belorussia and Ukraine and fought with his unit in the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920, achieving many remarkable victories over Red forces. When a Soviet–Polish armistice was agreed at Riga in October 1920, he opted to continue the crusade and led his men (now united with elements of the forces gathered by Savinkov and some of the remains of the Ukrainian forces commanded by S. V. Petliura, and renamed the Russian People’s Volunteer Army) into territory abandoned by both Soviet and Polish forces. He quickly captured Gomel (Homel), Mozyr, and other centers in November 1920 and proclaimed the independence of Belorussia (12 November 1920). Red forces, however, soon dislodged him, and on 28 November 1920 the last of his units crossed back into Poland and was interned.

Following the Soviet–Polish Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921), Bułak-Bałachowicz was released. He then disbanded his forces and settled in Poland as a forester (apparently subsidized by the Polish Army), surviving numerous attempts by the NKVD to abduct him. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), he served with a Polish mission as an advisor to General Franco’s army, before returning to Warsaw to fight against the German invasion of September 1939. According to some versions of his end, Bułak-Bałachowicz subsequently led a resistance group, Konfederacja Wojskowa (“the Military Confederation”), the operations of which were uncovered by the Gestapo, and was shot dead during a police raid on one of its meetings (but not before he had killed one of his assailants with a sword). According to others, he was shot by a German patrol on the corner of 3 May Street and French Street in Warsaw for refusing to show his papers when challenged by a routine patrol.

BULLITT MISSION. This term refers to the clandestine mission to Soviet Russia undertaken by the U.S. diplomat William C. Bullitt (1891–1967), who at that time in his life was considered to be a radical, although he would later become a militant anti-Communist (in the 1950s he advocated preemptive nuclear strikes against the USSR and the People’s Republic of China). Bullitt had been working as an attaché with the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and undertook his mission at the behest of Colonel Edward M. House, Woodrow Wilson’s chief advisor, following consultations with the British government (notably with Philip Kerr, advisor to and friend of David Lloyd George). Neither the U.S. president nor the British prime minister, however, knew the details of what Bullitt was to propose to the Soviet government (which is not to say that they would have disapproved at the time, given their recent Prinikpo Proposal). In fact, Bullitt was to suggest peace terms between the Allies and the Bolsheviks, as a means of ending the Allied intervention in Russia that would not be humiliating to the interventionist powers. These terms included “amnesty to all political prisoners on both sides,” the “restoration of trade relations between Soviet Russia and the outside world,” and a consideration of Russia’s foreign debts to be undertaken by a neutral third party. In return, all Allied forces would be withdrawn from Russian territory “as soon as the Russian armies above [a] quota to be defined have been demobilized and their arms surrendered or destroyed.” These terms were contained in a note to Bullitt from Kerr of 21 February 1919, and he admitted that they had “no official significance and merely represent suggestions of my own.” Nevertheless, when Bullitt left Paris the following day, he was carrying Kerr’s note along with official credentials from Secretary of State Robert Lansing authorizing him to study “conditions political and economic” in Russia on behalf of the U.S. government.

Accompanied by Walter W. Petit (a U.S. intelligence captain) and the radical and Russophile journalist Lincoln Steffens, Bullitt traveled via Sweden and Finland and arrived in Petrograd on 8 March 1919, his entry into the country being facilitated by the Swedish Communist Karl Kilbom, who had joined Bullitt’s party in Stockholm. In Petrograd Bullitt met G. E. Zinov′ev (who nervously refused to enter into negotiations with a semiofficial delegation) and the more accommodating G. V. Chicherin and M. M. Litvinov, before traveling to Moscow, where he remained for three days and met V. I. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. In response to Bullitt’s proposals, Lenin made his own (on 14 March 1919), which seemed to concede a lot: all existing de facto governments (including the Whites and national breakaway governments) were to remain in control of territory held at the moment of an armistice to be called by the Allies (in advance of a peace conference in a neutral country); the Allied blockade of Russia was to be lifted; free access to all railways and ports of the former Russian Empire was to be granted to Soviet Russia; free movement across new borders was to be granted; there was to be a general amnesty for political prisoners; Allied troops were to withdraw from Russian territory and military assistance to Moscow’s enemies was to end; and Russia’s foreign debts were to be recognized by all governments established on the territory of the former empire. How long the Whites and other opponents of the Bolsheviks might have held out after the curtailment of Allied aid is, however, a matter of speculation, as is the question of whether Lenin could have secured the agreement of a sufficiently large proportion of the Bolshevik Party to such apparently generous terms. (There had been no extensive debate on the issue comparable, for example, to that of January–March 1918 over the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which had almost split the party.)

During his week in Russia, Bullitt also compiled an extensive report on economic and political conditions there. While acknowledging the hardships facing the Russian people, he asserted that the violent phase of the Bolshevik revolution had ended and that the Soviet government enjoyed popular support—he had been assured of this by those Mensheviks and members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries who were at that moment allies of the Bolsheviks—and that no party less radical than Lenin’s could currently govern Russia. However, a few days after he had arrived back in Paris on 25 March 1919, Bullitt learned that his “deal” would not be considered by the Allied leaders. Wilson (who was busy with the German problem and whose relations with House had recently soured) would not even see him. Lloyd George cited domestic anti-Bolshevik sentiment (especially the Daily Mail). Deeper causes may have been a mixture of fear that the recent Soviet invasion of Ukraine was a precursor to union with the recently established Soviet-style regime of Béla Kun in Hungary, mixed with optimism that the planned offensives of the White forces of A. V. Kolchak and A. I. Denikin might prove successful. Consequently, the 10 April 1919 deadline for the Allies to respond to Lenin’s offer passed without any word from the Allied side. Bullitt angrily resigned from the U.S. delegation on 17 May 1919. In 1933, he became the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.

BUND. Founded at Vil′na (Vilnius) in 1897 by a group of social democrats, the General Jewish Labor Union of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia (known as the Bund from the German word for “union”) was a secular, anti-Zionist socialist party that sought to unite Jews within the Russian Empire but was allied with the broader Russian social democratic movement, participating autonomously in its conferences, meetings, and activities (and, indeed, playing a significant part in the founding of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1898). As an associated party of the RSDLP (except for the period 1903–1906), the Bund pioneered Jewish political activism in the Russian Empire and made significant contributions to the development of a modern, secular Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, as well as promoting the Yiddish language, and developed a political program that called for Jewish cultural autonomy in a democratic Russian state.

The Bund’s members welcomed the February Revolution of 1917, but most opposed the October Revolution (a policy endorsed at the party’s eighth congress in December 1917) and during the civil-war period continued to support the convention of the Constituent Assembly. Bund members also denounced—with particular vehemence—the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), which granted to Germany control of almost the entire area in which “Russian” Jews were settled (the “Pale”). However, as the Democratic Counter-Revolution floundered in 1918 and Russian White, Ukrainian, and other nationalist forces engaged in increasingly ferocious pogroms, many Bund militants offered their support to the Soviet government and joined the Red Army in large numbers. The Bund then split, as first its left wing, then a central faction (under Moyshe Rafes), and then the rump United Jewish Socialist Party joined the Bolsheviks.

By 1922, the Bund had ceased to exist as an independent party in Soviet Russia. It continued, however, to be influential in independent Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland between the wars, but its effectiveness as an organization could not survive the predations of the Nazi and then Stalinist regimes in those countries during the 1940s. It remained influential for longer among Jewish communities in the United States, and branches still exist in Argentina, Mexico, and elsewhere.

Burevoi, Klim (Sopliakov, Konstantin Stepanovich) (2 August 1888–15 December 1934). One of the most prominent members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) to seek accommodation with the Soviet government during the civil wars, Klim Burevoi was of Ukrainian peasant stock and was educated at home in Voronezh guberniia. He joined the PSR in 1905, during which year he organized a rural terrorist group, and spent the years 1907 to 1912 and 1914 to 1915 in exile in northern and eastern Russia. (He later claimed to have seen the inside of no less than 68 prisons during his lifetime.)

In 1917, Burevoi was chairman of the Voronezh Soviet and a frequent contributor to Delo naroda (“The People’s Cause”) and other SR newspapers and was elected to the Constituent Assembly on the PSR list. Having tried and failed to oppose the Soviet government through legal means in Moscow (and having subsequently, as a member of the Ukrainian Central Rada, witnessed the rise of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii in Kiev), in May 1918 he moved to Samara and, as a key figure in the Democratic Counter-Revolution on the Volga, helped establish Komuch. In September 1918, he attended the Ufa State Conference, serving as conference secretary. Following the Omsk coup, on 19 November 1918 he was arrested by White officers at Ekaterinburg, alongside other SR members of the Congress of Members of the Constituent Assembly, but was rescued by soldiers of the Czechoslovak Legion, escaped, and went underground.

The following month, Burevoi initiated talks with Soviet representatives, crossed the front lines on the Volga, and returned to Moscow to become a member of the Narod Group of the PSR that sought collaboration with the Bolsheviks. In June 1919, he left the SR Central Committee and penned an account of the civil wars in Siberia (Kolchakovshchina, 1919) that attributed the rise of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and the Whites directly to the “fatally mistaken policies” of the PSR and its allies in 1918 that advocated armed resistance to Soviet rule. He made a similar argument in a speech to the 7th Congress of Soviets in Moscow in December 1919 (by which time, in November 1919, he had been expelled from the PSR) and in February 1922 was a signatory of a declaration calling for the party’s voluntary disbandment. Nevertheless, as a witness at the trial of SR leaders in Moscow in June–August 1922, he sought to vindicate his former colleagues on the SR Central Committee. Thereafter, Burevoi worked in the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern) and with the cooperative movement in Soviet Russia, but in December 1934, in the aftermath of the assassination of S. M. Kirov, he was arrested, charged with membership in an “anti-Soviet Ukrainian terrorist organization” by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, and shot. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1960.

BURIAT-MONGOLIAN STATE. This putative but unrealized autonomous polity (the Buryad-Mongol Ulas) was first proclaimed at the First All-Buriat Congress at Chita on 25 April 1917. It was to include all lands in the circum-Baikal region occupied by Buriats and was to be provisionally governed by a Buriat National Committee. When the forces of Ataman G. M. Semenov occupied Transbaikal in 1918, the committee took on a pro-White complexion but was nevertheless in constant conflict with the ataman. The Buriat–Mongolian State ceased to function in October 1920, as Red forces overran the region, and its lands were divided between the Far Eastern Republic and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

BURLIN, PETR GAVRILOVICH (1879–10 February 1954). Colonel (1916), major general (20 August 1918). Born into a family of the Orenburg Cossack Host, the White commander P. G. Burlin was a graduate of the Orenburg Cossack Officer School (1901) and, until 1914, studied also at the Academy of the General Staff, but appears not to have graduated. A veteran of the Russo–Japanese War and of the First World War (rising to the post of senior adjutant to the quartermaster general of the 3rd Army during the latter), he first made a mark on the civil wars as one of the leaders of the overthrow of Soviet power in Vladivostok, where he led an underground officers’ organization, during the summer of 1918. On 10 July 1918, he was named quartermaster general of the Military and Naval Forces of the Maritime Province. He subsequently moved to Omsk and served on the staff of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, rising to assistant chief of staff of the Russian Army from 28 January 1919 (and temporarily occupying the post of chief of staff to Kolchak during the spring offensive of 1919). From 1 October 1919, he served as first quartermaster general of the Staff of the Supreme Ruler.

With the collapse of Kolchak’s forces, Burlin emigrated, settling initially at Hanoi. From 1930, he served as an advisor to the general staff of the Chinese (Nationalist) army and from 1932 was a professor in the Chinese military academy. He was also head of the Chinese section of the controversial émigré organization the Brotherhood of Russian Truth at Shanghai, as well as working for ROVS. In 1948, Burlin followed the Kuomintang leadership into exile on Taiwan and subsequently settled in Australia. He died and is buried in Sydney, Australia.

BURYSHKIN, PAVEL AFANAS′EVICH (21 February 1887–27 July 1953). The jurist, politician, freemason, financier, industrialist, writer, and prominent Russian émigré P. A. Buryshkin was briefly a minister in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. The son of a merchant, who had made his fortune in the textile industry, he was a graduate of the Katkov Lyceum (1905), the Law Faculty of Moscow University (1909), and the Moscow Commercial Institute (1913) and served as a member of the editorial board of the liberal newspaper Utro Rossii (“Russian Morning”). From 1912, he was a member of the council of the Russian Congress of Trade and Industry. He was also a member of the Moscow Stock Exchange Society and of the Moscow City Duma. From its foundation (again in 1912), he was also a member of the Central Committee of the liberal Progressist Party. During the First World War, he served with the Union of Town Councils and from 1915 to 1917 was a member of the Central and the Moscow War Industries Committees. In 1917, as deputy mayor of Moscow (from March of that year), he was one of the organizers of the Moscow State Conference. During that year, he declined an invitation to succeed A. I. Konovalov as Minister of Trade and Industry in the Provisional Government.

Following the October Revolution, from early 1918 Buryshkin was closely involved with a number of anti-Bolshevik underground organizations, notably the Right Center and the National Center. He left Russia during the summer of 1918 and moved to London, but in the spring of 1919 went to Ekaterinodar to advise the Special Council of General A. I. Denikin. By then having become a member of the Kadets, he subsequently relocated to Siberia (alongside S. N. Tret′iakov and others) in an attempt to boost the quality of advice on financial and industrial matters available to Admiral Kolchak. He first served the latter as head of the Main Directorate for Foreign Purchases and as a member of the State Economic Conference and on 3 December 1919 was named minister of finance, following the relocation to Irkutsk of Kolchak’s government and a cabinet reshuffle. In that capacity, he was responsible for ending investigations into the alleged financial improprieties of his predecessor, L. V. von Goyer.

When the socialist Political Center seized power at Irkutsk in January 1920, Buryshkin escaped to China and lived for some time at Harbin before moving, first to Japan, and then to the United States, England, and, finally, France. In emigration he advised Zemgor on financial matters, served with innumerable Russian banks and business organizations in both Paris and London, and from 1925 to 1934, taught at the Russian Commercial Institute in Paris. He also spent his time collecting materials for a Museum of Old Moscow and published widely on the history of the Moscow merchant class. His son, Vladimir, became a noted member of the French Resistance during the Second World War.

BYCH, LUKA LAVRENT′EVICH (18 November 1870–12 January 1944/1945?). The Cossack political leader Luka Bych was born at the Pavlovsk stanitsa, Kuban oblast′, into the family of a member of the Kuban Cossack Host. He was a graduate of the Law Faculty of Moscow University and subsequently served as secretary of the Novorossiisk City Duma. He was apparently at one point elected mayor of Novorossiisk, but was prevented by the tsarist authorities from taking up the post because of his suspect politics: Bych was a founding member of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor Party. After a period in business, as a director of the Eastern Society of Volga and Caspian Transport, he returned to public work as a member of the Baku City Duma and (from 1912) mayor of Baku. Following the February Revolution of 1917, he was named by the Provisional Government as chief of supply of the Caucasian Front.

Following the October Revolution and the collapse of the Caucasian Front, Bych returned to the Kuban, where he was immediately named head of the Host government in the Kuban People’s Republic (11 November 1917–14 March 1918). When, in February–March 1918, the government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, Bych participated alongside units of the Volunteer Army in the First Kuban (Ice) March. Following the Whites’ recapture of Ekaterinodar (15–18 August 1918), he was disappointed to be defeated in the elections for the post of Host ataman by A. P. Filimonov and subsequently had an uneasy relationship with the Host government (and with General A. I. Denikin, who rightly regarded Bych as a Ukrainophile and a separatist), but was nevertheless chosen as one of its representatives to the Paris Peace Conference in early 1919. There, he was one of the signatories of an agreement between the Kuban delegation and representatives of the North Caucasus Mountain Republic that spoke of “the full political independence” for the Kuban, which led to the recall and subsequent execution by the Whites of the delegation’s leader, A. A. Kalabukhov. Following the Soviet occupation of Kuban and the overthrow of the Kuban government in early 1920, Bych remained in emigration, settling from 1922 in Czechoslovakia. There, he taught municipal law in the Ukrainian Agricultural Academy and eventually became rector of that institution.

BZHISHKYAN, HAIK. See GAI, GAI DMITRIEVICH (BZHISHKYAN, HAIK).