Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

C

Čakste, Jānis (14 September 1859–14 March 1927). The first president of independent Latvia, as elected head of the government created by Tautas Padome (People’s Council) from 18 November 1918, Jānis Čakste was born at Lielsesava, Courland guberniia, and was a graduate of the Jelgava (Mitau) Gymnasium (1882) and the Law Faculty of Moscow University (1886). He had a successful career as a lawyer (in the Courland public prosecutor’s office) and was prominent as a political activist in Jelgava prior to the revolution, notably as editor of the newspaper Tevija (“Fatherland”), and in 1906 was elected as a delegate to the First State Duma, wherein he spoke out in favor of independence for Latvia. As a signatory of the Vyborg Manifesto (issued in protest against the dispersal of the Duma in July 1906), he was condemned to three months’ imprisonment and forfeited his political rights. During the First Word War, he lived in Petrograd and Iur′ev (Tartu). In 1916, he visited Stockholm to promote the cause of Latvian independence and authored Die Letten und ihre Latwija (“The Letts and Their Latvia”), and in 1917 he headed the Latvian Refugees’ Central Committee. In December 1918, he journeyed to France to agitate for the recognition of Latvia at the Paris Peace Conference. After his return, in July 1919, he was confirmed as chairman of the Tautas Padome by the Latvian Constituent Assembly (formally serving, thereby, also as president and commander in chief of the Latvian army at a key stage of the Latvian War of Independence). From 1 May 1920, Čakste was also chairman of the Latvian Constituent Assembly; he was elected president of Latvia on 14 November 1922 and was reelected to that office in November 1925. He died, in office, at Riga. A memorial to him stands in the Forest Cemetery, Riga.

CASPIAN–CAUCASIAN FRONT. This Red front was created on 8 December 1918, on the orders of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. It consisted initially of the 11th Red Army, the 12th Red Army, and the Astrakhan–Caspian Military Flotilla, which had been detached from the Southern Front and operated across a region covering the lower Volga, the northern and western shores of the Caspian Sea, and the North Caucasus.

With its staff based at Astrakhan, the central task of the Caspian–Caucasian Front was to recapture Ekaterinodar from the forces of the Armed Forces of South Russia and to push on to Novorossiisk on the Black Sea, while also clearing the enemy from Vladikavkaz, Groznyi, and Kizliar; moving into Petrovsk and Derbent to drive out the forces of L. F. Bicherakhov; and driving White forces out of Gur′ev. Poorly supplied, undermanned, and isolated from Moscow, however, it proved impossible for the front to achieve its aims, and by February 1918 the 11th Red Army had been driven out of the North Caucasus and had retreated to Astrakhan. By capturing and holding Astrakhan and the lower Volga, however, as well as by dominating the waters of the northern Caspian, the front did prevent any effective or meaningful union between the White forces of General A. I. Denikin and Admiral A. V. Kolchak. The Caspian–Caucasian Front was disestablished on 13 March 1919 and its forces transferred to the 11th Red Army. The commander of the Caspian–Caucasian Front was M. S. Svechnikov (8 December 1918–19 March 1919).

CASPIAN FLOTILLA. Part of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), this constituent force of the White Fleet was initially created by Russian naval officers in northern Persia in 1918 (among them Senior Lieutenants N. N. Lishin and N. V. Potapov), who were joined by naval officers who had been fighting with the Volunteer Army in the Don region and the Kuban. It had no vessels of any importance until 8 April 1919, when the motor launch Uspekh (“Success”) arrived at Port Petrovsk, having been taken from Bolshevik-held Astrakhan by Captain Ordovskii-Tanaevskii. In June 1919, General A. I. Denikin ordered more naval officers to leave the White front in South Russia to join the Caspian Flotilla, and by March 1920 it mustered some 200 officers and 500 other ranks, with nine auxiliary cruisers, seven gunships, and several other vessels, combined with a military-aviation section.

With the collapse of the AFSR in the spring of 1920, and the Red Army’s capture of the flotilla’s bases at Gur′ev and Krasnovodsk (now Türkmenbaşy), most of the flotilla made its way via Baku to Persia, where it came under British protection. A group of its officers then made their way via Mesopotamia to the Far East Vladivostok, where they joined White naval forces in the region (the Siberian Flotilla). The vessels of the Caspian Flotilla (numbering 43 in total, plus four sea planes) were subsequently captured at Enzeli (17–18 May 1920) by the Red Volga–Caspian Flotilla, under the command of F. F. Raskol′nikov.

Commanders of the Caspian Flotilla were Captain, First Rank (later Rear Admiral) A. I. Sergeev (from June 1919), and in its last days, Captain, First Rank B. M. Bushen.

Casualties. Estimates of the numbers of those who died during the “Russian” Civil Wars have varied enormously, not least because all sides in the civil wars would routinely inflate the number of deaths caused by the “terror” policies of their opponents (e.g., the Red Terror and the White Terror). Moreover, during this chaotic conflict, no side was able to keep systematic records of its losses; for obvious reasons, no side would keep records of the number of civilians and prisoners they executed in the pursuit of terror policies. A recent, very careful Russian study, by V. V. Erlikhman (“Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke: spravochnik,” 2004), however, gives the totals of those killed shown in table 1:

Table 1.

Category

Number

Total killed or died from wounds

2,500,000

Red Army

950,000

White and nationalist armies

650,000

Partisan forces

900,000

Deaths resulting from terror

2,000,000

From Red terror

1,200,000

From White terror

300,000

From partisan terror

500,000

Died from hunger and cold

6,000,000

Total

10,500,000

To put those 10,500,000 deaths in perspective, the Russian deaths in the First World War were approximately 3,500,000 by recent estimates (2,000,000 military deaths and 1,500,000 civilian). For comparison, it is worth noting that in Europe’s other great internecine conflict of the 20th century, the Spanish Civil War, it is likely that losses amounted to around 530,000, with perhaps 50,000 more fatalities in Franco’s prison camps during the immediate postwar period. Given that Spain’s population in 1936 was approximately 25,000,000, while the population of the Russian Empire in 1917 was approximately 150,000,000, it seems that mortality was around three times greater in the “Russian” Civil Wars than in the Spanish Civil War.

Of course, the Russian figure would be higher if it were to take into account that, for decades afterward, an individual’s participation in the civil wars might come back to haunt him (or her), as many émigrés found out (Generals A. P. Kutepov and E. K. Miller in one fashion, Atamans G. M. Semenov and P. N. Krasnov in another)—as did the legions of Red Army leaders of the civil-war era who perished in Operation “Spring” and later purges of the 1930s. Unknown numbers of émigrés also succumbed to disease, death, or suicide, notably one of the most prominent political figures of the revolutionary era, N. S. Chkheidze, who killed himself in Paris in 1926. There were also, of course, many examples of assassination, notably that of L. D. Trotsky, while the deaths of many other Bolshevik defectors are still regarded as suspicious, for example, F. F. Raskol′nikov.

No reliable figures exist for those maimed and crippled, but it must have been millions, while the fact that one of Soviet Russia’s gravest social problems in the 1920s was the number of orphaned children roaming the city streets speaks volumes.

Caucasian Army. This constituent force of the Armed Forces of South Russia was created on 22–23 May 1919, when, following the Moscow Directive of General A. I. Denikin, the former Caucasian Volunteer Army was divided in two, with the Caucasian Army deployed toward Tsaritsyn and Saratov and the Volunteer Army deployed toward Kursk and Orel. The Caucasian Army initially consisted of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Cavalry Corps and the Composite Don Corps, the Astrakhan Brigade, and the 6th Infantry Division; following reformation, it included the 1st and 2nd Kuban, the Independent, and the 3rd Cavalry Corps and had operational control also of the Composite Don Corps; by 5 July 1919, it had a complement of 23,234 men (including 1,120 officers).

After a series of attacks and a prolonged siege, the Caucasian Army captured Tsaritsyn on 30 June 1919—one of the greatest triumphs of White forces—and moved on up the Volga to capture Kamyshin on 28 July 1919. Exhausted by these endeavors and lacking reserves and supplies, however, the Caucasian Army then failed in its efforts to capture Saratov and, from 1 August 1919, was forced to retreat by a counterattack of the 10th Red Army and the 1st Cavalry Army. Kamyshin was surrendered without a battle on 19 August 1919, but the Red advance was halted at Tsaritsyn. That city was abandoned only in January 1920, when the Caucasian Army retreated to the River Sal and then to the Manych, where on 8 February 1920 it was reformed into the Kuban Army.

Commanders of the Caucasian Army were General P. N. Wrangel (8 May–4 December 1919) and General V. L. Pokrovskii (9 December 1919–8 February 1920). Its chiefs of staff were General Ia. D. Iuzefovich (8 May–20 June 1919); General P. N. Shatilov (20 June–13 December 1919); and General D. M. Zigel′ (13 December 1919–8 February 1920).

CAUCASIAN BUREAU. See KAVBIURO.

Caucasian front. This Red front was created according to the orders of the Revvoensovet of the Republic on 16 January 1920, from forces formally operating with the South-East Front. Its task was to clear the North Caucasus region of the White forces of the Armed Forces of South Russia. The front’s staff headquarters was initially at Millerovo, later transferring to Rostov-on-Don. The principal forces attached to the Caucasian Front, numbering some 160,000 men, were the 8th (16 January–20 March 1920), 9th (16 January–29 May 1921), and 10th (16 January–4 July 1920) Red Armies; the 10th Terek-Daghestan Red Army (7 March–29 May 1921); the 11th Red Army (16 January 1920–29 May 1921); and the 1st Cavalry Army (16 January–18 March 1920).

In January–March 1920, the forces of the Caucasian Front overran the North Caucasus, forcing the hasty evacuation of many Whites from Novorossiisk and capturing as many as 100,000 prisoners (by Soviet estimates). In August–September 1920, it successfully opposed the landing on the Kerch peninsula of members of the Kuban Cossack Host on behalf of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, and in the course of the following months, oversaw the Soviet invasion of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, the Democratic Republic of Armenia, and in the Soviet–Georgian War, the Democratic Republic of Georgia. The Caucasian Front was liquidated on 29 May 1921 and its forces transferred to the Independent Caucasus Army and the North Caucasus Military District.

Commanders of the Caucasian Front were V. I. Shorin (16–24 January 1920); F. M. Afanas′ev (temporary, 24 January–3 February 1920); M. N. Tukhachevskii (4 February–24 April 1920); I. T. Smilga (acting; 24 April–15 May 1920); and V. M. Gittis (15 May 1920–29 May 1921). Its chiefs of staff were F. M. Afanas′ev (1 October–23 February 1920); V. V. Liubimov (23 February–6 March 1920); and S. A. Pugachev (7 March 1920–29 May 1921).

CAUCASIAN IMAMATE. This putative Muslim state, which had originally been declared by the imams of Daghestan and Chechnia in 1828 to oppose Russian imperial expansion into the Caucasus and which reached the height of its authority and influence under the third imam, Shamil, was briefly reestablished (with Turkish assistance) in March–April 1918. Its head was the fourth imam, Najm ad-Din (Najmuddin Gotsinskii), who was the son of one of Shamil’s naibs (deputies). With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in October–November 1918, the imamate was overrun by other contending forces in the “Russian” Civil Wars, and Najm ad-Din subsequently pursued a guerrilla war against both the Red Army and the Whites.

CAUCASIAN VOLUNTEER ARMY. See Caucasian Army.

čeček, Stanislav (13 November 1886–29 May 1930). Major general (Czechoslovak Legion, 2 September 1918), divisional general (Czechoslovak Army, 1923). One of the leaders of the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion on the Volga in May–June 1918, Stanislav čeček was the son of a forest warden and was born in Lišne u Benešova, Moravia. He was a graduate of Prague Academy of Trade (1904) and the Higher School of Commerce in Leipzig and received some military training in the Austro-Hungarian Army before emigrating to Russia in 1911 to work as an accountant in Moscow. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he volunteered for service in the Czechoslovak druzhina of the Russian Army, rising to command its 4th Rifle Regiment.

On 20 May 1918, čeček participated in the extraordinary meeting of the Czechoslovak National Council at Cheliabinsk that resolved not to agree to the Soviet government’s demands that the legion should disarm during its journey to the Far East (prior to its planned transferal to support French forces on the Western Front). Subsequently, in early June 1918, his (eventually) positive response to the pleas of local SR I. M. Brushvit—that the Legion should assist in clearing the Bolsheviks from Samara if it was to stand a chance of moving farther eastward—was key to the establishment of Komuch and the (temporary) success of the Democratic Counter-Revolution on the Volga. Thereafter (from 2 September 1918), čeček was commander of the 1st Division of the Legion in the region of Penza and Samara and also commander of the Volga Front of the People’s Army of Komuch (17 July–12 October 1918). He then moved to the Far East and oversaw aspects of the supply and evacuation of the legion before departing from Vladivostok for Czechoslovakia on 15 October 1920.

čeček subsequently occupied a number of senior positions in the Czechoslovak Army, including first deputy chief of the General Staff (1920–1921) and chief of the Military Chancellery of the President of the Republic, who was T. G. Masaryk (1923–1924). Between those postings, he studied at a military school in Paris (1921–1923); subsequently, he headed the aviation department of the Ministry of Defense of Czechoslovakia (from 1926). čeček ended his career as commander of the 5th Infantry Division of the Czechoslovak Army at České Budějovice (from 1929). He died following surgery to alleviate complications from wounds he had suffered in Russia.

Çelebicihan, Noman (Çelebi Cihan, Numan) (1885–23 February 1918). The most prominent leader of the Crimean Tatars during the revolutionary period (and a much respected author and poet), Noman Çelebicihan was born in the village of Büyük Sonaq, in the Conğar region of Crimea, into a well-to-do Tatar family. He was educated at the influential Gülümbey madrasa and (from 1908) at a law school in Constantinople. In Turkey, he began to write on Tatar affairs and joined several associations of Tatar students, among them Vatan (“The Homeland”), which became the nucleus of the main Crimean Tatar nationalist party, Milliy Firqa. After his return to Russia, he was mobilized during the First World War. Following the February Revolution, at the First Congress of Crimean Tatars (at Simferopol′ on 25 March 1917), he was elected mufti and chairman of the Muslim Executive Committee. In that capacity, he subordinated that body to the ministry of the interior of the Russian Provisional Government, but was soon in conflict with Petrograd over the extent of Tatar authority over their armed forces and was briefly arrested in June. (Since the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the world war in November 1914, the Crimean Tatars had been regarded as potential fifth-columnists of the sultan by most Russians.) Also in 1917, he was elected as a delegate to the Crimean Tatar Qurultay (Assembly). Upon its opening, on 26 November 1917, he was chosen as the first president of the independent Crimean-Tatar National Republic, serving also as director of the Ministry of Justice.

Çelebicihan resigned from all his posts on 4 January 1918, and on 10 January 1918 founded a commission to seek a negotiated settlement with the Soviet government and its local agency, the Bolshevik Provisional Revolutionary Committee at Simferopol′. However, on 14 January 1918, as Red forces invaded Crimea, he was arrested by local Bolsheviks and imprisoned at Sevastopol′. The following month, Çelebicihan was executed, without trial, by a firing squad of sailors of the Black Sea Fleet. It is alleged that his body was dismembered and then thrown into the sea.

CENTRAL BUREAU OF COMMUNIST ORGANIZATIONS OF THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES. This little-known but very influential organization, attached to the Central Committee of the RKP(b), was founded in Moscow on 15 September 1918 and was chaired by Ia. M. Sverdlov. The Bureau was referred to by contemporaries as the “Little International” and elected Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg as its honorary presidents. Uniting representatives of Communist organizations in territories subjected to the Austro-German intervention, it was initially conceived as a means of sponsoring and guiding the activities of Bolshevik and pro-Bolshevik parties in the Baltic provinces, Belorussia, and Ukraine, in order to circumvent the clauses of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) that forbade the Soviet government to undertake propaganda within the occupied territories. Subsequently, from November 1918, as the Central Powers collapsed, the world war ended, and the Brest-Litovsk treaty was revoked, the organization applied itself to preparing cadres to create new Soviet republics to the west and southwest of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, as the Red Army attempted to advance to fill the vacuum left by the withdrawing Germans and Austrians: the Estonian Workers’ Commune, the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic, the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Socialist Soviet Republic of Belorussia, and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The bureau, which tended to favor the promulgation of maximalist policies associated with the Left Bolsheviks, was an influential part of the Soviet administration for several months, but lost its importance as efforts to advance the Western Front stalled in the spring of 1919.

CENTRAL CASPIAN DICTATORSHIP. This coalition regime of members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and Armenian Dashnaks (sometimes referred to by its Russian name, Tsentrokaspyi) came to power at Baku on 1 August 1918, following the defeat of the Bolsheviks’ Baku Commune by a vote of 259–236 in the Baku Soviet on 26 July 1918. In its first complexion it consisted of 11 members and was chaired by the Menshevik P. G. Sadovskii; its military forces were led by Colonel L. F. Bicherakhov. It immediately arrested a number of members of the previous government (among them those to become famous as the martyred Twenty-six Commissars), and requested the assistance of British forces based in northern Persia (Dunsterforce) in defending Baku against the approaching Turkish Army of Islam commanded by Enver Pasha. The regime collapsed, however, when Ottoman and Azeri forces entered Baku on 14–15 September 1918, and the British forces were obliged to withdraw. Members of the government and their supporters fled first to Port Petrovsk (Makhachkala) and then across the Caspian to Enzeli, where they sought the protection of the British.

Central Executive Committee, all-russian. See VTsIK.

Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Siberia. See Tsentrosibir′.

CENTRAL LITHUANIA, REPUBLIC OF. This short-lived polity was established around Vil′na (Wilno to the Poles) on 12 October 1920, during the Polish–Lithuanian War. It was born out of the rebellion of the 1st Lithuanian-Belarussian Infantry Division of the Polish Army under General Lucjan Żeligowski (the Żeligowski mutiny) and the intervention of other Polish forces and served as a buffer state between Poland (of which it was a client state) and Lithuania, which claimed Vil′na (as Vilnius) as its capital. Poland officially denied responsibility for Żeligowski’s action, maintaining that he had acted on his own initiative, but there is evidence that the rebellion was staged by Poland in order to abort the Polish–Lithuanian Suwałki Agreement, recently brokered by the League of Nations, which had tacitly granted Vilnius (Wilno) to Lithuania.

Following a general election of 8 January 1922, which Lithuania regarded as fixed (and which most Lithuanians and Jews and many Belorussians in Wilno boycotted), the state parliament, dominated by Polish parties, voted for incorporation into Poland. This request was accepted by the Polish Sejm on 22 March 1922, and two days later the Republic of Central Lithuania ceased to exist, its territories being incorporated into Poland’s new Wilno voivodship. The union (deemed an illegal annexation by the Lithuanians) was subsequently endorsed by the Allied Conference of Ambassadors in Paris, but conflict over Wilno/Vilnius soured Polish–Lithuanian relations throughout the interwar years. However, some Lithuanians now accept that had Poland not occupied the city, it would almost certainly have been invaded by the Red Army.

Chaikovskii, Nikolai Vasil′evich (26 December 1850–30 April 1926). The veteran Russian Populist N. V. Chaikovskii was born into a noble family at Viatka and educated at the Viatka Gymnasium (from 1862) and the St. Petersburg Gymnasium (from 1864), graduating from the latter with a gold medal in 1868. In 1872, he graduated from the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of St. Petersburg University, where had studied under D. I. Mendeleev. He was prominent in student discussion circles and spent three months in prison in 1871, following his arrest for political activities. In 1873, Chaikovskii emigrated to the United States, where he unsuccessfully attempted to found a utopian socialist commune in Kansas, worked in a sugar factory and as a carpenter, and became involved with various Christian sects. He returned to Europe in 1878, becoming a founder of the Fund of the Russian Free Press in London and a key figure in the émigré community. In 1904, he joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) and was subsequently involved in gun-smuggling operations during the 1905 Revolution. He returned to Russia in 1907 and was soon arrested and imprisoned. However, he was released the following year on a bond and subsequently left the PSR and became engaged in legal work with the cooperative movement and the Free Economic Society. He was also at this time closely involved with the work of political freemasonry in Russia. During the First World War, he adopted a defensist position and worked with Zemgor. During 1917, he was a member of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet, helped found the Party of Popular Socialists, and organized the First All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies. He was also elected to the Constituent Assembly, as a representative of Viatka.

As a convinced opponent of the October Revolution, Chaikovskii was one of the central figures in the anti-Bolshevik Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution and a founder of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia. On behalf of the latter he made his way to Arkhangel′sk, where he became chairman and minister of foreign affairs in the Supreme Administration of the Northern Region (from 2 August 1918). He was also elected as a member of the Ufa Directory, although he never took up his seat. After his regime at Arkhangel′sk, having been destabilized by the coup organized by G. E. Chaplin, was replaced by the more conservative Provisional Government of the Northern Region (28 September 1918), Chaikovskii went abroad (on 1 January 1919) to join the Russian Political Conference in France, in order to attempt to secure further Allied aid for the anti-Bolshevik cause and to represent Russian interests at the Paris Peace Conference (January–August 1919). He then moved to South Russia and in February 1920 served briefly as Minister of Propaganda in the Government of the Main Commander of the AFSR of General A. I. Denikin. From April 1920, he lived in emigration in France and Britain, working once again for Zemgor and attempting to forge a union of all anti-Bolshevik émigré organizations. He died at Harrow, near London, in 1926.

CHAKHOTIN, SERGEI STEPANOVICH (3 September 1883–24 December 1973). The scientist, social scientist, and White propagandist S. S. Chakhotin was the son of a Russian consul at Constantinople, where he was born. After graduating from the Odessa Gymnasium (with the gold medal), he entered the Natural Sciences Faculty of Moscow University, but was expelled for participation in a student strike in 1902 and went abroad. He received his doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1907 and then worked at the University of Messina before returning to Russia in 1912 to work with the Nobel Prize–winning scientist I. P. Pavlov.

Following the October Revolution, Chakhotin made his way to the Don region and put himself at the service of the fledging Volunteer Army. For some months (October 1918–January 1919), he headed the Whites’ intelligence and propaganda service, Osvag. He went into emigration in 1919, eventually settling in Berlin, where he became a leading contributor to the journal Nakanune (“On the Eve”) and, as such, was an early proponent of Smenovekhovstvo.

Having obtained work with the permanent Soviet trade mission to Germany in the 1920s, Chakhotin was granted Soviet citizenship, but he remained in Berlin attending to his scientific research, latterly (from 1930 to 1933) at Heidelberg and at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology (now the Max Plank Institute) in Berlin. He was developing simultaneously the beginnings of a reputation as a leading investigator of mass psychology (one of his key works appeared in English as The Rape of the Masses: The Psychology of Totalitarian Political Propaganda in 1940). In 1932, he became associated with the antifascist, anticommunist, and antimonarchist Iron Front formed by the SPD and the Center Party and (with Karl Mirendorf) helped design the organization’s distinctive “Three Arrows” symbol. In April 1933, following the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Chakhotin was expelled from his post in Berlin and moved to Denmark. In 1934, he settled in Paris, working in various scientific institutions and in 1936 winning an appointment to the L’Académie française. Somewhat surprisingly, he survived the Nazi occupation of France, although he did spend some months in a prison camp at Compiègne. In 1958, he moved to Italy but soon afterward accepted an invitation to return to the USSR, where he worked at the Institute of Cytology of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad and (from 1960) the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow. Chakhotin was the author of dozens of enduringly influential scientific works.

Chapaev, Vasilii Ivanovich (28 January 1887–5 September 1919). The much mythologized (and lampooned) Soviet hero of the civil wars, Komdiv V. I. Chapaev was born into a poor peasant family in the village of Budaiki (now a suburb of Cheboksary), in Samara guberniia, and received almost no education. Mobilized in the First World War, he achieved the rank of junior ensign and was awarded the Cross of St. George on three occasions. He joined the Bolsheviks in September 1917, and as head of a troop of Red Guards, assisted in the establishment of Soviet power at Nikolaevsk (near Tsaritsyn). In early 1918, as a district military commissar, he organized the suppression of peasant rebellions in the mid-Volga region. In May 1918, he joined the Red (partisan) Pugachev Brigade and over the next months saw action against the forces of the Czechoslovak Legion and the People’s Army on the Volga.

In December 1918, Chapaev enrolled in the Red Military Academy, but unable to adapt himself to classroom learning, he soon requested to be allowed to return to the Eastern Front. After playing a notable part in the capture of Ural′sk (24 January 1919), he came to the notice of M. V. Frunze and was promoted to the command of the Aleksandrovsk Group of Red forces (February 1919) and then the 25th Rifle Division (April 1919). With the latter, he staged a remarkable fording of the Belaia River, facilitating the capture of Ufa by the Reds (9 July 1919), as the spring offensive of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s White forces was turned. For his exploits in the battle for Ufa he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Chapaev was then involved in operations to clear the southern Urals of enemy forces. However, during the night of 5 September 1919, a White Cossack unit launched a surprise attack on his headquarters at Lbishchevsk. According to the official Soviet accounts, already badly wounded, Chapaev died under a hail of machine-gun fire as he tried to swim across the Ural River with his comrades.

Chapaev subsequently became the eponymous hero of the popular novel Chapaev (1923) by D. A. Furmanov (who had served as his military commissar on the Eastern Front); a hugely popular biopic, Chapaev (1934, directed by Georgii and Sergei Vasilev), which was reputed to be one of J. V. Stalin’s favorite films; and countless songs, stories, portraits, images, and posters, while many locations were renamed in his honor in the USSR, along with dozens of military units, institutions, ships, and so forth, and in 1932 a huge monument (by M. G. Manizer and I. G. Langbard) was raised to his memory in Leningrad. His name is also attached to the board game Igra v Chapaeva (“Playing Chapaev”), a mixture of draughts and billiards in which players flick their pieces at those of their opponent (and in which the Red side always gets the opening move). The Chapaev myth was challenged from the first, however, and less romantic, unofficial versions of his demise held that Chapaev was shot dead on the banks of the Belaia; his rude, uneducated character (and supposed illiteracy) provided fertile ground for thousands of (very unofficial) jokes expressing both popular skepticism of official Soviet propaganda and intellectual condescension toward the peasant.

chapan war. Sometimes translated as the “Kaftan War,” this name, derived from the local term (chapan) for a peasant overshirt (kaftan), was applied to one of the largest uprisings against Soviet power in the civil-war era, encompassing broad swaths of Simbirsk and Samara gubernii in March–April 1919. The uprising, which was caused by the careless application of requisitioning policies (prodrazverstka) by Soviet forces in the region (the Food Army and other detachments), began on 3 March 1919, at the village of Novodevich′e, near Sergiopol′, Simbirsk guberniia. Following the desertion of several Red units to the rebels, Sergiopol′ itself was captured by the rebels, without a fight, on 7 March 1919. From there, a rebel committee under a local Red soldier, A. V. Dolinin, published its own broadsheet (Izvestiia) demanding an end to the Communist dictatorship and “All Power to the Working People.” Within a few days, thousands of peasants joined the rebellion, forcing the Red Army to divert units from the Eastern Front and the forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and, on the initiative of M. V. Frunze, to construct at Simbirsk a counterinsurgency staff and army group (from forces of the 4th Red Army, supplemented by Cheka units and VOKhR). These forces were then deployed against the rebels, crushing their main forces at Stavropol′ on 13 March 1919. The last major engagement of the Chapan War at Karsun was fought four days later, although mopping up operations (featuring mass executions of suspected rebels) continued for several more weeks.

Chaplin, Georgii Ermolaevich (5 April 1886–1 February 1950). Captain, second rank (1914), captain, first rank (July 1919), colonel (British Army, 194?). The maker of the “Chaplin coup” at Arkhangel′sk in September 1919, which led to the collapse of the Supreme Administration of the Northern Region, the White commander G. E. Chaplin was a graduate of the St. Petersburg Technological Institute (1905), the Naval Corps (1907), and the Naval Academy (1914). In the First World War, he served as assistant chief of the Operational Department of the Baltic Fleet.

In February 1918, Chaplin left his post and, on the advice of the British military attaché, Captain F. N. A. Cromie, made his way to North Russia with the aim of entering the British Army and thereby furthering the Allied cause in the world war. Instead, he became one of the instigators of the anti-Bolshevik movement in that region and, in August 1918, led the overthrow of Soviet power at Arkhangel′sk. He was subsequently commander of the Armed Forces of the Northern Region (August 1918–February 1919), commander of the 4th Rifle Regiment of Armed Forces of the Northern Region (April–July 1919), commander of the Flotilla of the Northern (Arctic) Ocean (July 1919–February 1920), and commander of the forces of Arkhangel′sk Region (July 1919–February 1920).

Chaplin was evacuated from Arkhangel′sk with the White forces of North Russia in February 1920 and emigrated to London. A convinced monarchist, in the 1920s he was an active supporter of Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich’s claim to the Russian throne, and in the 1930s he worked for ROVS. During the Second World War, he served in the British Army, seeing action in Norway (1940), Normandy (1944), and Belgium (1944–1945). He was promoted to the rank of colonel and received the Order of the British Empire. After the war he taught at a military school in Glasgow, Scotland.

Chebyshev, Nikolai Nikolaevich (18 June 1865–24 February 1937). The senior political advisor to the White leaders in South Russia, the lawyer and journalist N. N. Chebyshev was of noble background and was a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1890). He was born near Warsaw and worked in the imperial Ministry of Justice before serving terms as procurator of the Smolensk District Court (1906–1909) and assistant procurator of the Moscow Legal Chambers (1909–1914). Subsequently, as procurator of the Kiev Legal Chambers (1914–1917), he was involved in the closing stages of the infamous “Beilis case.” Following the February Revolution of 1917, he served briefly as procurator of the Moscow Legal Chambers.

A firm opponent of the October Revolution, Chebyshev joined the anti-Bolshevik Right Center in the spring of 1918, before fleeing the outbreak of Red Terror in September of that year and making his way to Ekaterinodar, in the Kuban region, where he became head of the Directorate of Internal Affairs in General A. I. Denikin’s Special Council. However, following a series of disagreements with Denikin, whom he regarded as too weak-willed, Chebyshev resigned his post and became editor of the newspaper Velikaia Rossiia (“Great Russia”), as well as a member of the monarchist State Unity Council of Russia. In emigration, he lived at first in Constantinople, where he worked as head of the Press Bureau of the exiled regime of General P. N. Wrangel, then later served as chairman of the Union of Russian Lawyers, living in Berlin (1921–1923), where he acted also as an advisor to Wrangel’s military representative in Germany (A. A. von Lampe). He then moved to Belgrade (1923–1926), where he chaired Wrangel’s civilian chancellery, and then (from 1926) lived in Paris. In France, Chebyshev was active as one of the editors of the influential émigré journal Vozrozhdenie (“Regeneration”), a member of the board of the Union of Russian Writers and Journalists Abroad, and one of the founders of the Popular Monarchist Union.

CHEKA. The Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, known as the Cheka (an acronym formed from the initial letters of the first two words, Chrezvychainaia kommissiia, of its full name in Russian) was the first state security agency of Soviet Russia. It was founded on the orders of Sovnarkom on 7 December 1917, apparently on the initiative of V. I. Lenin and Feliks Dzierżyński, to take over security functions that until then had been in the hands of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and, from 29 October 1917, of VTsIK. Dzierżyński headed the organization throughout the civil wars (except for a brief period from 8 July to 21 August 1918, when, in the aftermath of Dzierżyński’s arrest during the Left-SR Uprising, it was chaired by Ia. Kh. Peters). In reality he did so from early 1918 as part of a troika, initially consisting of himself, Peters, and V. A. Aleksandrovich of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries. In August 1918, the central institution’s name was amended to the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Sabotage, Profiteering and Corruption and hence became the Vcheka (from Vserossiiskaia chrezvychainaia kommissiia), although its local branches were usually refereed to as Chekas. A member of the organization was usually referred to as a “Chekist,” a term employed also to describe members of later incarnations of the Soviet security services and proudly borne by them.

The Cheka was subordinate to Sovnarkom, to which it reported directly and exclusively, and initially its functions were “to liquidate counter-revolution and sabotage, to hand over counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs to the revolutionary tribunals” and to apply such measures of repression as “confiscation, deprivation of ration cards, publication of lists of enemies of the people, etc.” As early as 21 February 1918, however, following the Sovnarkom appeal “The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger!,” it appropriated the right to sentence and execute suspects summarily and was given the additional task of dealing with “enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators and German spies,” as it saw fit and without going through the courts. The following day, a Sovnarkom decree added “saboteurs and other parasites” to that list, urging that they be shot “on the spot.” Indeed, throughout its existence the Cheka lacked clear judicial status and judicial powers and operated as an “extraordinary” agency, outside of the normal (constitutional) fabric of the Soviet governmental system. (This was so except for a brief period following a VTsIK decree of 17 January 1920 that, in the light of apparent military and economic success, specifically abolished the right of the Cheka to commit extrajudicial executions. That right was restored on 28 May 1920, however, in connection with the outbreak of the Soviet–Polish War.)

Apart from generally targeting members of the bourgeoisie and hostile socialists (particularly those Kadets and members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries suspected of belonging to underground anti-Bolshevik organizations, such as the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, the Right Center, and the National Center), as well as those suspected of channeling support to the nascent Volunteer Army, in 1918 the Cheka was at the helm of two major operations against opponents of the Soviet regime: the first was the roundup of proponents of anarchism in Petrograd and (especially) Moscow in April 1918, which led to dozens of deaths and hundreds of arrests; the second was the wave of Red Terror that was instituted on 5 September 1918, in the wake of the attempt on the life of Lenin, the assassination of Moisei Uritskii, the uncovering of the “Lockhart Plot,” and the growing sense of paranoia that gripped the Soviet regime as the Democratic Counter-Revolution on the Volga reached its zenith. The Red Terror died down in October–November 1918, but Cheka operations against real and suspected enemies of the Soviet state continued throughout the civil wars, always becoming more frantic when White forces were successfully attacking (e.g., in September–October 1919).

The Cheka was initially staffed exclusively by Bolsheviks, although from 8 January 1918 a disproportionate number of Left-SRs also joined the organization. These were expelled, and 13 Left-SR Chekists, including Aleksandrovich, were executed following the Left-SR Uprising in early July 1918, in which Left-SR Chekists had played a leading role. A new Cheka board was then formed, on 21 August 1918, consisting of 12 Bolsheviks: Dzierżyński, Peters, M. I. Latsis, I. K Ksenofontov, M. S. Kedrov, V. V. Fomin, V. N. Iakovleva, M. S. Kedrov, V. V. Kamenshchikov, N. A. Skrypnik, I. N. Polukarov, and V. P. Ianushevskii. Membership changed markedly during the civil wars, but in late 1920 Sovnarkom confirmed a Cheka board consisting of Dzierżyński, Latsis, Peters, Ksenofontov, Kedrov, V. A. Avanesov, N. N. Zimin, F. D. Medved, V. S. Kornev, M. R. Menzhinskii, V. N. Mantsev, S. A. Messing, and G. G. Iagoda. Despite White propaganda that stressed the “foreign,” “alien,” and “non-Russian” complexion of the Cheka, the overwhelming majority (77.3 percent) of Chekists by 1920 were Russians; only 9.1 percent were Jews, 3.5 percent Latvians, 3.1 percent Ukrainians, 0.5 percent Belorussians, 0.5 percent Muslims, 0.2 percent Armenians, and 0.1 percent Georgians. If there were any Chinese in the regular Cheka organizations (another favorite allegation of the xenophobic Whites), their number was so small as to render them statistically invisible. Russians also accounted for 52 of the 86 chairmen of provincial and republican Chekas in 1920.

The Cheka was initially organized into three departments: information (surveillance), organization, and the fight against counterrevolution and sabotage. On 11 December 1917, a department for combating speculation was added to these, and on 20 March 1918, by which time the Cheka’s headquarters had been transferred to the Lubianka in Moscow, a department to combat administrative crimes was added. By the end of 1918, further departments had been added, including secret operations, investigation, transportation, and military affairs; in November 1920, the Cheka was given responsibility for the security of the borders of the Soviet state; and in December 1920, a foreign operations section was also developed. The Cheka’s function of strengthening economic security, through battling the black market, bribery, and corruption, only expanded with the introduction of the New Economic Policy: its Economic Administration, founded in January 1921, continued its earlier work but also fought sabotage and profiteering and even attempted to oversee the fulfillment of production targets in the state sector. Also during 1918, a countrywide network of territorial Chekas had been established at provincial and district levels (38 at provincial level and 75 at district level by August 1918), with a first national Cheka conference being held in Moscow on 11–14 June 1918 (bringing together 86 delegates from 43 Cheka organizations).

Initially, the number of Chekists was small: just 23 at the beginning of the Petrograd stage (December 1917) and 120 by the time the organization moved to Moscow (March 1918). But by 1 January 1919, the Vcheka’s strength was around 37,000; by late 1920, it was approaching 100,000. By 1921, the Cheka had also become an important military force, with its own Forces for the Internal Defense of the Republic (VOKhR), numbering some 140,000 men. These troops policed forced labor camps and concentration camps (“Vcheka Special Purpose Camps”), notably that established on the Solovetskii Islands in the White Sea. They also participated in food requisitioning operations, the quelling of strikes and the suppression of peasant rebellions, and the pursuit of deserters from the Red Army. In late 1920, in Crimea, the Cheka was also involved in mass arrests and executions of officers and Cossacks, the remnants of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel. In 1921, Cheka forces also played a prominent part in crushing the Tambov Rebellion and in the suppression of the Kronshtadt Revolt (notably, in forming Blocking Detachments). By 1921, the Cheka also controlled 100,000 border troops. All these figures would decline significantly from 1921 to 1922, as the civil wars began to wind down, although the Cheka was heavily involved in the suppression of anti-Soviet rebellions in Georgia (the Svanetian uprising, the Kakhet–Khevsureti rebellion, and the August Uprising) and elsewhere.

It is very unlikely that the number of victims of the Cheka during the civil wars will ever be exactly determined; the improbably precise figure of 12,733 for the entire period 1918–1920, once offered by Martyn Latsis, is certainly far too low, while that of 200,000 for the period 1917–1923, once cited by the American historian Robert Conquest, is certainly too high. Estimates between those figures include 50,000 deaths “during the civil war” (W. H. Chamberlin) and 140,000 for the period December 1917 to February 1922 (George Leggett), but the truth will probably never be known.

A Sovnarkom decree of 6 February 1922 replaced the Cheka with the State Political Administration (GPU) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (NKVD) of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, thereby integrating the state security agency into the regular machinery of the Soviet state and depriving it of its extrajudicial powers. That, however, did not last long: Article 61 of the Constitution of the USSR of 6 July 1923 elevated the GPU, by then renamed the OGPU (Unified GPU), to the equivalent of a people’s commissariat, attached directly to Sovnarkom.

Despite its bloody and fearsome reputation—tales abound, and not all of them exaggerated, of the many, varied, and elaborate forms of torture and execution developed by depraved or overzealous Chekists—the Cheka became a staple and heroic subject of Soviet feature films and popular literature. In part, this may have been a governmental ploy to romanticize the organization and to deflect attention from the crimes and atrocities that it committed—and still more, those committed by its successors under J. V. Stalin, the OGPU and the NKVD. In part, though, this was also a consequence of the useful opportunities the subject offered to filmmakers to spin action-packed plots and detective stories around Chekist characters (one could compare the genre to the crime fiction and spy films and literature, such as the James Bond series, which were so popular in the West during the Cold War era). Soviet films featuring the Cheka include Ognennye versty (“Miles of Fire,” dir. S. I. Samsonov, 1956); Sotrudnik ChK (“The Cheka’s Assistant,” dir. B. I. Volchek, 1963); Svoi sredi chuzhikh, chuzhoi sredi svoikh (“At Home Among Strangers, a Stranger at Home,” dir. N. S. Mikhailov, 1974); and Tachanka s iuga (“Tachanka from the South,” dir. E. F. Sherstobitov, 1977). One of the most feared Chekists, Jēkabs Peterss, was the subject of Peters (dir. S. S. Tarasov, 1972), and a Chekist was also the hero of the Soviet television mini-series Ad″iutant ego prevoskhoditel′stva (“The Adjutant of His Excellency,” dir. E. I. Tashkov, 1969). A distinctly less heroic treatment of the subject appears in the post-Soviet Chekist (dir. A. V. Rogozhkin, 1992).

CHEKABIEV, MUHAMMAD. See IBRAHIM-BEK (CHEKABIEV), MUHAMMAD.

CHEKHIVSKYI, VOLODYMYR Musiyovych (19 July 1876–3 November 1937). The prominent Ukrainian political and religious leader Volodymyr Chekhivskyi, the son of a priest, was born in the village of Gorokhuvatka, Kiev guberniia, and was a graduate of the Kiev Theological Academy (1900). Following service as the assistant inspector of the Kamenets-Podol′skii Theological Seminary (1901–1905) and political activity with the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party, he was elected to the First State Duma in 1906. He then spent a year in exile for political crimes and subsequently taught at Odessa, where he was active in local nationalist societies (hromady). In 1917, he edited the newspaper Ukrainske slovo (“The Ukrainian Word”) at Odessa and was elected to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party (of which he had been a founding member) and to the Ukrainian Central Rada. He was also named as political commissar for Odessa by the Provisional Government in October 1917.

In November–December 1918, Chekhivskyi led the Ukrainian Military Revolutionary Committee, which was active in organizing the overthrow of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii and the Ukrainian State. He then became prime minister of the reestablished Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), serving at the same time as its minister of foreign affairs (26 December 1918–11 February 1919). In those roles, he oversaw the UNR’s union with the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic under the Act of Zluka. After helping found the Committee for the Defense of the Republic at Kamenets-Podol′skii in March 1919, he subsequently concentrated on religious-educational work, promoting the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, as professor at the Kamenets-Podol′skii Ukrainian State University (1919–1920), the Vynnitsa Institute of People’s Education (1920–1921), and the Kiev Medical Institute (1921–1922).

In 1921, Chekhivskyi became a member of the presidium of the All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council and chairman of its Ideological Commission. During the 1920s, having reluctantly reconciled himself to Soviet rule, he also worked at the Historico-Philological Section of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Chekhivskyi was arrested by the Soviet security services on 29 July 1929 and was one of those tried as a member of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine on 9 March–19 April 1930. At the end of the trial, he was sentenced to death, although this was then commuted to 10 years’ solitary confinement. After spells in prisons at Khar′kov and Iaroslavl′, he was transferred to the Solovetskii camp in the White Sea. He was subsequently executed at Sandarmokh, in the Medvezhegorsk region of Karelia. On 19 July 2006, the Ukrainian National Bank issued a two-hryvnia coin commemorating the 130th anniversary of Chekhivskyi’s birth.

CHEKIST. See CHEKA.

Chelyshev, Viktor Nikolaevich (1870–1952). The leading figure in the legal establishment of the White movement in South Russia, V. N. Chelyshev was a graduate of the Law Faculty of Moscow University (1893) and worked as a justice of the peace prior to the First World War. In March 1917, he became chairman of the Moscow Legal Chambers and was elected chairman of the All-Russian Union of Lawyers.

Following the October Revolution, Chelyshev joined the underground anti-Bolshevik organization the National Center and made his way to South Russia, where he became head of the Directorate of Justice in the Special Council of General A. I. Denikin (November 1918–February 1920) and then chief procurator of the First Department of the Senate under General P. N. Wrangel (April–November 1920). Following the evacuation of Wrangel’s forces from Crimea in November 1920, Chelyshev settled in Belgrade and worked in the Ministry of Justice of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1924–1929), while also acting as a member of the board of the Union of Russian Writers and Journalists Abroad and as deputy chairman of the Union of Russian Writers and Journalists in Yugoslavia. In 1931, he moved to Czechoslovakia, where, from 1932, he served as a member of the Council of the Russian Foreign Historical Archive.

CHERKASSK DEFENSE. One of the most long-lasting and significant peasant uprisings against White rule during the civil wars, the Cherkassk Defense united a dozen villages populated by Russian settlers in the Lepsinsk uezd of Semirech′e oblast′ against the Whites, forces of the Semirech′e Cossack Host, and those loyal to Alash Orda. The uprising, which was centered on the village of Cherkassk, began in June 1918 and reached epidemic proportions following the Whites’ capture of Sergiopol′ on 21 July 1918. By the autumn 1918, the rebels had organized some 5,000 men into a number of formations. Following a series of failed attempts to suppress the rebels (and thereby ease communications with Vernyi), a major White offensive was launched on 16 July 1919 by the 5th Siberian Rifle Division (under Major General V. P. Gulidov) and the Cossack forces of Ataman B. V. Annenkov, which left the rebels in control of only Cherkassk, Petropavlovsk, and Antonovskoe. Efforts by Red forces of the Semirech′e Front to unite with the rebels over the summer of 1919 were thwarted, and the rebel stronghold fell to the Whites on 14 October 1919.

CHERMOEV, TAPA ABDUL MIGIT BEY ORTSA. See TSARMOIEV (CHERMOEV), TAPA ABDUL MIGIT BEY ORTSA.

CHERNAVIN, VSEVOLOD VLADIMIROVICH (29 January 1859–August 1938). Colonel (6 December 1899), major general (31 May 1907), lieutenant general (30 December 1914). The Soviet military commander V. V. Chernavin was born into a noble family at Tiumen′, in Western Siberia, and educated at the Siberian Military Gymnasium. He entered military service on 11 August 1877 and graduated from the 1st Pavlovsk Military School (1877), before seeing action in the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–1878. After a long and successful career, he eventually rose to the command of the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Guards Infantry Division (from 3 May 1910). During the First World War, he commanded the 58th Infantry Division (from 19 July 1914), the 3rd Guards Infantry Division (from 16 September 1914), and the 2nd Guards Corps (from 25 August 1914).

Chernavin joined the Red Army following the October Revolution and commanded the 1st Voronezh Infantry Division and forces of the Voronezh region from 30 April 1918. He subsequently commanded the southern sector of the Western Screens (from 4 August 1918) and was then named commander of the 8th Red Army on the Southern Front (26 September–1 December 1918). He then became inspector of infantry with the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (from 18 December 1918), inspector of infantry on the Western Front (from 15 April 1919), and assistant commander of the Western Front (from 28 June 1922). After the civil wars, he remained in the service, filling numerous staff roles attached to the Revvoensovet of the Republic and its successors, until his retirement on 31 March 1931. His fate is unclear, but some sources have it that like many other former military specialists, he was executed in 1938.

CHERNETSOV, VASILII MIKHAILOVICH (1880–21 January 1918). Esaul (Cossack captain, 1917), colonel (3 January 1918). The organizer and leader of what is held to be the first anti-Bolshevik Don Cossack partisan unit, V. M. Chernetsov was born into a family of the Don Cossack Host at Ust-Belovalitvensk stanitsa and was a graduate of the Novocherkassk Cossack Officer School (1909). During the First World War, he led partisan units of the 4th Don Cossack Division, operating in the rear of enemy lines on the Eastern Front, and was thrice wounded and much decorated. Having recovered from his wounds, in 1917 he was made commandant of the Makeevskii mines (March–November 1917). Chernetsov was one of the minority of Cossacks who in December 1918 answered the appeal of Ataman A. M. Kaledin for armed resistance to Soviet incursions into the Don territory and formed a partisan detachment that opposed Red forces across the region. Having again been wounded, he was captured by Red Cossacks at Glubokaia stanitsa and was executed by their leader, F. G. Podtelnikov, in person. Chernetsov’s activities of December 1917–January 1918 were portrayed (not always accurately) in Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel Tikhii Don (“The Quiet Don”).

Chernov, Viktor Mikhailovich (16 November 1873–15 April 1952). The leader of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) and chairman of the Constituent Assembly, V. M. Chernov was born into a petty noble family at Novouzensk, Samara guberniia. He was the grandson of a serf and the son of a local treasury official. He attended the Saratov Gymnasium but, as a consequence of his contacts with exiled Populists such as M. A. Natanson, was relocated to the Dorpat Gymnasium in Estonia (graduated 1892). He was permitted to enroll with the Law Faculty of Moscow University in 1892, but was arrested and imprisoned in 1894 for his political activities. The following year, he was exiled to Kamyshin, near Tsaritsyn, later moving to Saratov and then Tambov on health grounds. At Tambov, in 1898, he formed the Brotherhood for the Defense of the People’s Rights to struggle for the peasants’ interests. In 1899, he left Russia for Switzerland, where he studied philosophy at Bern University. In exile, he joined the PSR in 1901, joining its Central Committee in 1903, and edited the party journal, Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia (“Revolutionary Russia”). He was soon recognized as the party’s outstanding theorist, penning a party program in 1905 that added a touch of Marxism to its Populist essence. Chernov recognized too that the party had to appeal to workers as well as peasants, but still argued that the peasant commune could serve as the basic building block of socialism in Russia. This ideology has sometimes been termed “neo-populism.”

Chernov returned to St. Petersburg in October 1905, and the following year was elected to the Second State Duma, becoming the leader of the Populist faction, but left for Finland and then western Europe in 1907, following the Duma’s dissolution. During the First World War, he adhered to the Internationalist faction of the PSR, arguing that the war should be utilized to further the European revolutionary cause, and attended the Zimmerwald Conference of like-minded socialists in Switzerland in September 1915. He also propagated these views in the newspapers he edited: Mysl´ (“Thought”) and Zhizn´ (“Life”). Following the February Revolution, he managed to return to Russia by ship, via the North Sea—spurning the offer of a passage through Germany that V. I. Lenin and other exiles accepted—and arrived in Petrograd on 8 April 1917. He soon became an elected a member (and deputy chairman) of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, an assistant to the chairman of VtsIK (from June 1917), and honoris causa head of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies. On 5 May 1917, he became minister of agriculture in the Provisional Government, but found his proposals for radical land reform blocked by other ministers and their aides (some of them from the right wing of his own party). He also clashed with ministers who favored the use of force against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the July Days. Consequently, he resigned his portfolio on 26 August 1917.

Following the October Revolution, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, and the spread of the civil wars, Chernov argued that the SRs should form a “third front” to fight both the Bolsheviks and the Whites. He left Moscow in May 1918 and traveled to Samara, where he joined Komuch. However, he was never given a post in that government, as he vehemently opposed his colleagues’ agreement to join and support the Ufa Directory, a move which he regarded as conceding too much power to conservative elements. In late November 1918, he was briefly arrested at Ufa, in the aftermath of the Omsk coup that brought Admiral A. V. Kolchak and the Whites to power in Siberia, but was quickly released by members of the Czechoslovak Legion (otherwise he would certainly have become a victim of the Omsk Massacre). He subsequently spent much of the civil wars in hiding (as a fugitive from both the Reds and the Whites). He opposed the Edinstvo group of SRs that offered support to the Soviet government in 1919, but in June of that year supported the vote of the SRs’ 9th Party Council to cease active struggle against the Soviet government. Chernov, though, lived in constant fear of arrest by the Cheka; his wife and children were arrested in January 1920 and held as hostages by the police pending his own surrender.

Chernov briefly emerged from his underground existence in May 1920 to make a spectacular appearance on the dais of a meeting of the Moscow printers’ union that had been called to welcome a delegation from the British Labour Party. Knowing that the police would not arrest him in front of the foreign Labourites, he made a 20-minute speech in which he excoriated the Soviet government before disappearing into the crowds and again escaping arrest. Soon afterward, in September 1920, he moved to Estonia, from where he welcomed the Kronshtadt Revolt in March 1921 and offered to assist the sailors (although they rebuffed him). In emigration he lived mostly in Czechoslovakia before moving to France in 1931 and then, on the eve of the Nazi invasion of June 1940, to the United States. In exile, he wrote extensively on the subject of what he termed “constructive socialism” and edited the émigré SRs’ newspaper Za svobodu (“For Freedom”) and (from 1921 to 1931) again Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia. Chernov also wrote a series of influential memoirs, in which he dwelt on his party’s failure in 1917 and during the civil wars and concluded that, in part, the failure was his own, as he lacked the will and toughness to be an effective party leader. He died and is buried in New York.

CHERNYI, LEV (TURCHANINOV, PAVEL DMITRIEVICH) (189?–29 September 1921). The poet and libertarian Lev Chernyi was born as P. D. Turchaninov, the son of a colonel in the tsarist army. In 1907, he published an influential work entitled Associational Anarchism and began a campaign of criticism against the communistic anarchism of Prince Petr Kropotkin and in favor of the free association of independent individuals. He was soon afterward imprisoned by the tsarist authorities for his revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia, returning to European Russia only after the February Revolution of 1917. In that year, he became prominent as the chief Russian ideologue of individualist anarchism and secretary of the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups.

Following the October Revolution, Chernyi became a vocal critic of the Soviet government’s centralism and bureaucracy. He campaigned instead for the complete decentralization of production and was an advocate of the removal of all internal power structures from the revolutionary state. In 1919, he became associated with the Underground Anarchists, but there is no evidence that he was involved in their bombing of a meeting of the Moscow Committee of the RKP(b) on 25 September 1919 that killed 12 people and injured 55. Nevertheless, he was constantly pursued by the Cheka, and in November 1920 he was arrested on criminal charges of counterfeiting. His supporters have always maintained that this was a frame-up. On 29 September 1921, Chernyi was executed without trial, along with Fania Baron and a number of others described as “anarchist bandits” by the Soviet authorities. The contemporary American anarchist Jason McQuinn sometimes writes under the pseudonym “Lev Chernyi.”

chernyshev, viktor nikolaevich (30 October 1889–1954). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1912), colonel (15 June 1915), komdiv (20 November 1935), major general (4 June 1940), lieutenant general (29 October (1943). The Red military specialist V. N. Chernyshev was of middle-class background and was educated at the Kronshtadt Realschule and the Moscow Military School (graduated 1899). He entered military service on 29 August 1897 and graduated from the Academy of the General Staff in 1906. Having occupied various staff posts prior to the First World War, during the war he was chief of staff of the 44th Infantry Division (2 November 1915–3 September 1916) and chief of the directorate of the staff of the quartermaster general of the Northern Front (from 4 September 1916), subsequently moving to the counterintelligence section of that staff. From 17 October 1917 until the imperial army’s demobilization, he was chief quartermaster of the staff of the 42nd Army Corps.

Chernyshev volunteered for service in the Red Army in early 1918 and served initially as chief of staff of forces of the Karelia region (March–April 1918). Among many subsequent postings, notable were his service as chief of staff of the 10th Red Army (28 August 1919–15 June 1920) and as commander of the 10th Terek-Daghestan Red Army (26 April–11 May 1921), as White forces were forced back into and then cleared from the North Caucasus in 1920–1921. He also served as acting commander (5 October–21 November 1921) and chief of staff (21 August–5 October 1920, and 21 November 1920–28 January 1921) of the 9th Red Army during the Reds’ conquest of the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia. He remained in military service following the civil wars, commanding the 5th Aviation Brigade in the 1930s, for example, and in 1937 became head of the 1st Section of the Administrative-Mobilization Directorate of the Red Army. He was arrested and imprisoned as a suspected traitor from 2 March 1938 to 2 December 1939, but was (for reasons that remain obscure) released (and, indeed, promoted). He subsequently taught at the Red Military Academy until his retirement.

Cherven-Vodali, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1872–27 June/July 1920). From a modestly wealthy family of Bessarabian landowners, A. A. Cherven-Vodali was, in effect, the last prime minister of the White regime of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in Siberia. He began his education in Odessa, was a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University, and worked as a notary at Tver′. In 1905, he became a founding member of the Kadets, leading the party’s Tver′ branch, and was a member of its Central Committee from 1912, the year in which he was also elected to the 4th State Duma, having previously been employed as a lecturer and teacher. As a Duma member, he became known during the First World War as a tireless worker for the War Industries Committee. Following the February Revolution, in 1917 he briefly became the Provisional Government’s commissar of Tver′ guberniia before moving to Moscow, where he became active in Zemgor and the Union of Trade and Industry and was elected to the board of the City Duma.

Following the October Revolution, Cherven-Vodali became immediately active in the anti-Bolshevik underground, moving to Kiev to help found the Right Center. However, he soon left that organization because of its pro-German orientation. Instead, he joined the pro-Allied National Center and, having moved to Ekaterinodar, became one of its most prominent Kadet activists in the White-held areas of South Russia, working on legislation relating to the land question, supply, and labor for the Special Council of A. I. Denikin. In March 1919, he was sent by the National Center to Siberia, where (on 1 August 1919) he became a member of the State Economic Conference and (from 25 November 1919), at Irkutsk, assistant minister of internal affairs of the Kolchak government, with temporary command of the ministry. In late December 1919, as revolutionary forces overthrew White authority in Irkutsk, he was chosen as minister-chairman of the triumvirate that briefly replaced the former Omsk government. In that capacity, he failed in his efforts to secure passage to the east for Admiral Kolchak and the remains of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve. During the anti-Kolchak uprising at Irkutsk, Cherven-Vodali was arrested by forces of the Political Center during the night of 4–5 January 1920 and was subsequently handed over to the Bolshevik Revolutionary Committee that took control of the city. By order of the Omsk Extraordinary Revolutionary Tribunal of 30 May 1920, he was sentenced to death. Despite pleas for clemency that reached the Soviet government through a number of eminent figures of the new regime, in late June or July (sources differ) the sentence was carried out.

CHICHERIN, GEORGII VASIL′EVICH (12 November 1872–7 July 1936). The Soviet foreign minister of the civil-war era, G. V. Chicherin was born at the village of Karaul (Tambov guberniia) into an aristocratic family and was a distant descendant of the poet Alexander Pushkin. His father was a distinguished diplomat, as was his grandfather, Count Gustav Ernst von Stackelberg (1766–1850). Indeed, Chicherin could trace his ancestry back to Athanase Cicerone, who had arrived in Moscow from Italy, in the suite of the Byzantine princess Zoe Palaiolgina in 1472. He graduated from the Historical-Philosophical Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1896) and was proficient in all the major European languages and a number of Asiatic ones. He began his career in the archives section of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1897–1903), rising to the rank of titular counselor. In February 1904, he inherited the estate of his uncle, the celebrated philosopher and jurist Boris Chicherin, thus becoming very wealthy. He used that wealth, however, to fund revolutionary activities of various political parties and was obliged to move abroad in late 1904 to avoid arrest by the tsarist authorities. He initially lived in emigration in Berlin, where in 1905 he joined the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party and in 1907 became secretary of the RSDLP Foreign Bureau, even though he was still nominally employed by the Russian foreign ministry. When his revolutionary affiliations were uncovered, in 1908, he was expelled from Germany and settled in France and (from 1914) London.

During the First World War, however, Chicherin refused to support the Allied war effort, a stance that brought him closer to the revolutionary defeatism (internationalism) of V. I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks than most Mensheviks’ defensism. On 22 August 1917, he was arrested by the British authorities for his antiwar agitation and was confined in Brixton prison in London. However, he was released on 3 January 1918 and returned to Russia (arriving in Petrograd on 6 January 1918), in exchange for the passage out of Russia allowed to British subjects (including the ambassador, Sir George Buchanan) by the new Soviet government. At this point Chicherin joined the Bolsheviks (January 1918) and, on 30 May 1918, succeeded L. D. Trotsky as commissar for foreign affairs (having been Trotsky’s deputy since 29 January 1918). Chicherin was also one of the signatories of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). He worked tirelessly thereafter to end the international isolation of Soviet Russia, negotiating treaties of friendship and cooperation with Turkey (the Treaty of Moscow, 16 March 1921), Persia (now Iran) (the Soviet–Persian Treaty of Friendship, 26 February 1921), and Afghanistan (the Soviet–Afghan Treaty of Friendship, 28 February 1921).

In 1922, Chicherin led the Soviet delegation to the Genoa Conference. There he signed the Soviet–German Treaty of Rapallo, his crowning achievement, and subsequently pursued a policy of close collaboration with Berlin. In 1925, he became a member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), but political leadership never concerned him—Chicherin was above all a professional diplomat—which may have saved him from persecution by J. V. Stalin. He was known as a prodigious worker—he practically lived at the foreign ministry (Narkomindel)—but illness sapped his strength and abilities in the later 1920s, while Germany’s increasingly pro-Western orientation following the Locarno treaties (5–16 October 1925) damaged his reputation. His isolation was increased among the often sexually conservative leaders of the party by rumors that he was homosexual. On 21 July 1930, he was replaced as commissar for foreign affairs by M. M. Litvinov. He died in Moscow in 1936, apparently of natural causes (not such a common occurrence among high Soviet functionaries of that time) and was buried in the capital’s Novodevich′e cemetery. Chicherin was a scholar of music and wrote an important study of Mozart (Motsart: Issledovatel′skii etiud), although as his name was largely expunged from history in Soviet Russia for many years after his death, this was only published in the USSR in 1973. He was also the subject of a sympathetic late-Soviet biographical film, Chicherin (dir. A. G. Grigor′evich and N. I Parfenov, 1988).

CHIKOVANI, GIORGI. See KVINITADZE (CHIKOVANI), GIORGI.

CHINESE. Many Chinese people lived within the Russian Empire by 1917, and not only in Siberia, the Far East, and Central Asia (Russian Turkestan): tens of thousands were employed in the construction industry in European Russia, especially (from 1915) on the Petrograd–Murmansk railway and on fortifications constructed around the Gulf of Finland during the First World War. Although some would join the Whites or other anti-Bolshevik forces—while some White forces would also take refuge in Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang/Sinkiang)—the majority of those who participated actively in the civil wars fought for the Red Army.

It is impossible to determine how many Chinese fought in the civil wars, although White propaganda, seeking to denigrate the Soviet government’s popularity among the Russian people (and exhibiting its proponents’ xenophobia), hugely exaggerated their number and influence, giving equal (and improbable) prominence with the Latvian Riflemen to the small Chinese units that fought in Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and Siberia. Among the latter were the 450-strong Chinese Battalion of the Tiraspol′ Detachment (which fought against Romanian forces in Bessarabia in early 1918, under the command of I. E. Iakir), the Red Chinese (Zen Fu-chen) Detachment (which fought in the Urals in 1918–1919), and the Chinese Platoon of the Kiev Military District (which was active in 1919). Contemporary Soviet sources claimed that the number of Chinese in the Red Army was between 2,000 and 3,000 in 1919. The Whites also alleged that the Cheka was staffed almost entirely by Letts and Chinese, but sources indicate that only some 500 Chinese actually served in the Cheka (many of them in the Chinese Company of the Special Detachment of the Kiev Cheka, commanded by Li Siu-lian).

Following the Red Army’s capture of Irkutsk in March 1920, direct telegraph communications between Soviet Russia and China were reestablished. Subsequently, Soviet–Chinese relations became more direct, and several Chinese radicals visited Moscow, notably Chiang K’ang-hu (founder of China’s first socialist party) and the poet Chü Ch’iu-pai (later a leading figure in the Chinese Communist movement), who befriended V. V. Maiakovskii, attended the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Komintern (July and November 1922), and taught at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East.

Chkheidze, Nikolai (“Karlo”) Semenovich (9 March 1864–7/13 June 1926). An influential leader of the Georgian Mensheviks, who played a pivotal role both in Petrograd in 1917 and in Georgia during the civil wars, Karlo Chkheidze was born into a petty noble family at Poti, Kutaisi guberniia. After graduating from a local gymnasium, he enrolled at Novorossiisk University in Odessa (1887) and the Khar′kov Veterinary Institute (1888), but was expelled from both for his political activities. He then moved to Vienna, where he studied mining engineering but continued his affiliation with socialist organizations in exile. In 1892, having returned to his homeland, he was a founding member of the first Georgian social-democratic organization, Mesame-Dasi (the “Third Group”), and in 1898, at its inception, joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. Having worked in local government at Batumi and later Tiflis, he became prominent in the Third and Fourth State Dumas (1907–1917) as a representative of Tiflis guberniia and as a talented orator, a widely published spokesman for the social-democratic faction (from 1913, chiefly the faction of the Mensheviks), and a fearlessly sharp critic of government policies. (In the period 1908 to 1912, Chkheidze was banned from the Duma chamber for a record 23 of its sessions as a consequence of his attacks on ministers.) He was also a leading advocate of political freemasonry, which brought him into close contact and collaboration in this period with A. F. Kerensky. During the First World War, he adopted a paradoxical position, refusing to vote in favor of war credits but at the same time leading the Workers’ Section of the tsarist government’s War Industries Committee. Similarly, during the February Revolution he was a member of the Temporary Committee of the State Duma, from which sprang the Russian Provisional Government, but his ideological rigidity (and deep suspicion of “bourgeois” politicians) led him to refuse the labor portfolio on the latter. Instead, he was first elected chairman of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and then, in June 1917, chairman of the Presidium of VTsIK. In those roles, working closely with his Menshevik colleague and fellow Georgian Irakli Tsereteli, he became an advocate of conditional support for the Provisional Government and of “revolutionary defensism,” but on 9 September he was replaced as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet by L. D. Trotsky.

Chkheidze, whose political effectiveness in 1917 seems to have been undermined by profound depression following the accidental death of his teenage son in March of that year, was resting and visiting his family in Georgia at the time of the October Revolution and was never again to return to Russia. Instead, he became chairman of the Transcaucasian Sejm (February 1918). Following the collapse of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federal Republic, he supported the Georgian Democratic Republic and, in May 1919, was elected chairman of its Constituent Assembly. In that capacity, he accompanied the Georgian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, although his efforts to secure Allied recognition of the Georgian republic failed, largely as a consequence of Tiflis having accepted German protection under the Treaty of Poti (28 May 1918). He then returned to Georgia, becoming one of the authors of the republic’s constitution that was promulgated in February 1921. When Soviet forces invaded Georgia in February–March 1921, at the end of the Soviet–Georgian War, he was forced to emigrate, settling with the rest of the Government-in-Exile of the Democratic Republic of Georgia in Paris. There, in 1926, Chkheidze committed suicide. According to Tsereteli, “Having been deprived of direct contact with the people, he lost the capacity to resist,” although he was also suffering badly from tuberculosis. He was buried in the cemetery at Leuville-sur-Orge, the last resting place of numerous Georgian exiles.

Chkhenkeli, Akaki (1874–5 January 1959). A leading figure in the Georgian Social Democratic Labor Party, Akaki Chkhenkeli was born into a noble family at Khoni, in western Georgia, and was a graduate of the law faculties of the Universities of Kiev, Berlin, and London. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party at its foundation, in 1898, and sided with the Mensheviks from the time of the initial party schism in 1903. He ran an illegal printing press in Tiflis, was briefly arrested during the revolutionary events of 1905–1906, and was exiled from Transcaucasia in 1911, but was nevertheless permitted to seek, and won, election to the Fourth State Duma in 1912, where he became a prominent spokesman for minority nationality affairs. Having in July 1914 attended the Brussels extraordinary (9th) conference of the International Socialist Bureau of the Second International, during the First World War he adopted a defensist position.

Following the February Revolution of 1917, Chkhenkeli worked on the Special Transcaucasian Commission (Ozakom) of the Provisional Government, as commissar for internal affairs, and in June 1917 was elected to VTsIK. In these capacities, he was the primary link between the political leadership of the Mensheviks in Petrograd and the workers’ organizations of Georgia. On 15 November 1917, he was named minister of the interior in the Transcaucasian Commissariat and later that month was elected to the All-Russia Constituent Assembly from the Transcaucasian constituency.

On 14 February 1918, Chkhenkeli became minister of foreign affairs of the short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic, and on 9 April 1918 was named prime minister of that entity. In that capacity, he oversaw the signing of the Treaty of Poti (26 May 1918), which granted Germany a protectorate over Georgia, and headed the mission that negotiated the Treaty of Batumi (4 June 1918) with Turkey, which granted the disputed regions around Kars to the Ottoman Empire. When the Transcaucasian Republic collapsed, he was instrumental in the declaration of Georgian independence and subsequently served as minister of foreign affairs of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (May–November 1918). He was also elected to the Georgian Constituent Assembly (1919) and, in January 1921, served briefly as an emissary to France for Menshevik Georgia. He remained in Paris following the Soviet invasion of his homeland in February 1921 and was active in Georgian émigré politics for the remainder of his life, initially as ambassador to France for the Government-in-Exile of the Democratic Republic of Georgia. He died in 1959 and was buried in the Georgian cemetery at Leuville-sur-Orge, south of Paris.

Chokay-oghlu (Chokaev), Mustafa (7 January 1890–27 December 1941). Born into an aristocratic family in the Syr-daria district of Kyzyl-Ordinsk oblast′, Mustafa Chokay became one of the leaders and ideologues of the nationalist movement in Turkestan and led the anti-Bolshevik revolt in Kokand in November 1917 that gave rise to the Provisional Government of Autonomous Turkestan (the Kokand Autonomy). He was educated at the Russian gymnasium at Tashkent and the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University. While studying in the Russian capital, he became an organizer for the Muslim faction in the Third and Fourth State Dumas, campaigning for the extension of the franchise to the Muslims of Central Asia and, in 1916, gathering information on the Russian Army’s suppression of the Kazakh revolt. In 1917, following the February Revolution, he served as the Provisional Government’s commissar for the Steppe (Akmolinsk) Region and became a prominent campaigner for a “United Turkestan.”

When, in early 1918, Red forces crushed the revolt that had broken out against the proclamation of Soviet power in Kokand, Chokay found himself with a price on his head and, after a year spent in Georgia, fled abroad in 1920. He settled in Paris, where he became an expert on the history of Central Asia and the nationalist movement in Turkestan, authoring many articles on those subjects, as well as editing the monthly journals Zhana Turkestan (“New Turkestan”) and Zhas Turkestan (“Young Turkestan”). In 1940, with the arrival in France of the Nazis, he moved to Berlin (although his supporters claim he was taken there under arrest) and was rumored to be one of the founders of what would become the Turkestan Legion, made up of exiles and prisoners of war, that fought for Hitler’s Germany (although his modern-day supporters deny that Chokay had any part in this). In December 1941, he suddenly fell ill and died. According to some sources, he was poisoned by Vali Kayum, a rival for the leadership of the Turkestan National Committee. He is buried in the Islamischer Friedhof (Columbiadamm) in Berlin. There is also a memorial to Chokay at Nojan-sur-Marne in France.

CHOLOKASHVILI, KAIKHOSRO (KAKUTSA) (14 July 1888–27 June 1930). Colonel (Georgian Army, 1918). A leader of Georgian resistance to Soviet Russia in the civil-war era and beyond, and now fêted as a Georgian national hero, Kakutsa Cholokashvili was born into an ancient noble family at Matani, in the Kakheti region of eastern Georgia, and was a graduate of the Tiflis Gymnasium (1907). He volunteered for military service in 1907 and served with the Tver′ Dragoon Regiment before retiring in 1912. He was recalled to the service during the First World War and served on the Austrian Front, on the Caucasian Front, with the Georgian Cavalry Legion in Persia, and (from 1916) with the British expeditionary forces in Mesopotamia. He returned to Georgia in 1917, joined the liberal National Democratic Party of Georgia, and in 1918, helped organize and command cavalry units for the army of the Democratic Republic of Georgia.

In 1919, Cholokashvili served briefly as minister of defense of the Georgian republic. When Soviet forces entered Georgia in February 1921, he withdrew into the mountains and organized guerrilla resistance to the Red Army around Khevsureti. His group (“Georgia’s Sworn Sons”) were forced to retire into Chechnia in the summer of 1922, but made a renewed incursion into the country in November of that year. During the national uprising against Soviet power in Georgia of 1924 (the August Uprising), he achieved a number of further victories over Red forces, but the following month he was obliged to flee into Turkey.

Cholokashvili subsequently lived in emigration in France, where, living in poverty, he succumbed to tuberculosis in 1930. He was initially buried at the Sain-Ouen cemetery, near Paris, but his remains were soon moved to the Georgian compound of the Leuville cemetery at Leuville-sur-Orge. For the next 65 years, Cholokashvili’s name was taboo in the Soviet Union, but during the Georgian independence movement of the late 1980s his portrait was ubiquitous, and in November 2005 he was reburied, with great ceremony, at the Mtatsminda Pantheon in Tbilisi. On 16 April 2007, the National Bank of Georgia issued a 200 Lari banknote bearing his image, and a street in the Vaki district of Tbilisi has also been named in his honor.

chon. This was the acronym by which were known the Bolsheviks’ Forces of Special Purpose (Chasti osobo naznacheniia) of the civil-war period. The forces of ChON were created by a declaration of the Central Committee of the RKP(b) on 17 April 1919. They were attached to regular party committees (from the level of the factory cell to provincial committees) and to revolutionary committees, and charged with assisting the local organs of Soviet power with the maintenance of law and order. The first ChON units, formed from party members and candidate members, were established in Moscow and Petrograd. By September 1919 (by which time membership was extended to members of trade unions and the Komsomol), according to Soviet sources, they were active in 33 gubernii. In pre-front areas, ChON forces tended to come under the operational command of the Red Army. The forces were disbanded and incorporated into the regular army in 1924.

The Soviet feature film Konets imperatora taigy (“The End of the Emperor of the Taiga,” dir. V. G. Sarukhanov, 1978) focuses on a little known episode in the biography of the future novelist Arkadii Gaidar (A. P. Golikov), who as a commander of a ChON force in Western Siberia in 1924 hunted down the rebel peasant leader I. N. Solov′ev.

Church, Russian Orthodox. After Peter the Great forbade the election of a new patriarch following the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700, the Orthodox Church became a tame branch of the Russian state, controlled by the lay bureaucrats that ran its appointed council, the Holy Synod. Its moral prestige consequently declined, and it was viewed as a reactionary organization by all Russian radicals of the 19th century. Hopes for a democratic church renewal during the 1905 Revolution proved stillborn, but following the February Revolution, on 28 August 1917, a Church Council (Sobor′) was gathered in Moscow that on 13 November 1917 elected the Moscow Metropolitan Tikhon as patriarch. (Opponents of this move, who favored a reformed synodal system, walked out of the conference and would later evolve into the Soviet state-sponsored—or, rather, manipulated—Living Church.) The Sobor′ proceeded to reform the church, restoring local freedoms, powers, and democracy, but in the prevailing chaos of the civil wars, few of its reforms could be implemented.

Formally, the Orthodox Church remained neutral in the civil wars. Tikhon appealed for an end to the bloodshed and refused to offer even a secret blessing to the White forces (even when they were within striking distance of Moscow and Petrograd in October 1919), but (on 1 February 1918) he had anathematized the Bolsheviks for their use of terror and urged the clergy to defend their parishes by prayer and peaceful resistance. For its part, the Soviet government waged an undeclared war against the church. The campaign began with the Sovnarkom decree “On the Separation of the Church from the State” of 5 February 1918, which deprived the church of its legal person status and all its property (including church buildings) and forbade the teaching of religion in all general schools, state and private. When attempts at confiscation aroused demonstrations of protest, these gatherings were fired upon by Cheka units, and arrests and executions of clergy and lay activists mounted. The church itself claimed that, in the period 1918 to 1920, 28 bishops and thousands of parish clergy were shot, often having been accused of offering funds and blessings to White forces. There is no doubt that many did; in White-held areas volunteer units of the Orthodox were sometimes formed (e.g., the Holy Cross Druzhina in Siberia), and autonomous church councils were founded that disobeyed Tikhon and openly supported the White cause. The most important of these was the Provisional Higher Church Administration of South Russia, members of which, in emigration in 1921, formed the Higher Russian Church Administration Abroad (renamed the Bishops’ Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in 1922), based in Serbia at Sremski Karlovci (the headquarters of the exiled leader of what remained of the White armies, General P. N. Wrangel). This claimed, falsely, to be a free representative of Tikhon and in his name called for an anti-Bolshevik crusade and renewed military intervention in Russia.

Despite Tikhon’s efforts to disassociate himself from the “Karlovcians” in repeated encyclicals (of 5 May 1922 and 1 July 1923), their activities were seized upon by the Soviet government as a reason to renew its attack on the Orthodox Church in Russia. That process had begun during the great famine of 1921–1922, when Sovnarkom ordered that all church valuables were to be confiscated and sold or melted down to provide funds for relief efforts. The church agreed to hand over all valuables except for the vessels used in the Eucharist, but the state demanded the surrender of those as well, leading to many violent clashes and more arrests, exiles, and executions. Tikhon himself was imprisoned for more than a year (May 1922–June 1923), and before he died, was declared deposed by the Living Church. That, however, did not protect members of the latter from the mass execution of Orthodox clergymen and religious leaders of all sorts that would accompany the collectivization campaign of 1928–1932 and the subsequent Terror of the 1930s.

CICHOWSKI, KAZIMIERZ (7 December 1887–29 October 1937). The Polish-Soviet politician Kazimierz Cichowski, who was born at Ostrowiec, near Grodno, was expelled from school in 1905 for participating in student strikes and joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy, SDKPiL) in 1907. Forced into exile, he studied at the University of Liège, but was again expelled (in 1909) and was expelled also from the Sorbonne (1913). Between these periods, and during the First World War, he worked in banks in Warsaw and Petrograd.

In 1917, Cichowski joined the Bolsheviks and, following the October Revolution, was deputy commissar for Polish affairs in the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities. From November 1918, he was the deputy commissar for Polish affairs of the Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (Litbel) and was subsequently chairman of that republic’s Central Executive Committee and its commissar of finance. With the dissolution of Litbel at the end of the Soviet–Polish War, he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Eastern Galicia. Charged with subversion and efforts to unite Eastern Galicia with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, he was subsequently arrested by the Polish authorities in 1923 and imprisoned until 1925. Following his release, he became a leading member of the Communist Party of Poland but suffered harassment and imprisonment at the hands of the Polish authorities, finally being sentenced to eight years’ hard labor in 1930. In 1932, as part of a Soviet–Polish exchange of prisoners, he moved to the USSR to work for the Executive Committee of the Komintern. In late 1936 or early 1937, Kazimierez was sent to Madrid to coordinate the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. He was recalled to Moscow from Paris in August 1937 and was subsequently executed as a counterrevolutionary following a decision of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. He was posthumously rehabilitated by that same body on 28 October 1955.

Cihangirzade, İbrahim (aydin) Bey (1874–1948). As the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War, İbrahim Bey Cihangirzade became leader of the Turkish nationalist (Kemalist) revolutionaries in his native province of Kars, as chairman of the South-West Caucasian National Resistance Government (5 November 1918), and was subsequently elected president of the pro-Turkish South-West Caucasian Democratic Republic (9 January 1919). In April 1919, he was arrested by British forces, as they occupied Kars in support of the Democratic Republic of Armenia’s claims to the region, and together with 11 members of his cabinet was exiled to Malta for a year. Following his return from Malta to the new Turkish Republic, from 1921 to 1927 he served as mayor of Kars, which had been won back from Armenia under the Soviet–Turkish Treaty of Kars (13 October 1921). In 2003, a cenotaph to his memory was erected in the city, and a municipal park there also bears his name.

CINEMA. During a spate of civil wars in the regions that had previously formed the Russian Empire, where the majority of the population were illiterate and more than 100 languages were spoken, visual media such as art, drama, and film were potentially of great importance for the conducting of what came to be called agitprop (i.e., agitation and propaganda) by the Bolsheviks. However, the almost complete absence of production facilities, film stock, and so forth, in the peripheries of the old empire, where they were based, meant that the Whites were at an enormous disadvantage in this respect.

The situation in the Soviet zone, however, was far from ideal, even though the Soviet leadership proclaimed cinema to be “the most important of all the arts.” Existing films tended to be of foreign manufacture and escapist in nature; the supply of raw film stock was nearly exhausted; and cinema owners, who saw their commercial interests threatened by the regime, hid their supplies, closed their premises, or fled to the White zones. The People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment, which was nominally responsible for Soviet cinema, held that nationalization of the film industry was the long-term answer, but its head, A. V. Lunacharskii, realized that if the process was too rapid, it would provoke a reaction from cinema owners that could only be counterproductive. Thus, cinema committees were established in Moscow and Petrograd in April 1918, but it was announced that only one cinema in each Soviet town or city would be nationalized. Then, in late 1918, all film equipment and stock was required to be registered, as a precursor to full nationalization. Full nationalization was imposed by a Sovnarkom decree of 27 August 1919 (celebrated in the USSR from 1979 as “The Day of Soviet Cinema”), but even then the process was not completed until late 1920. Around the same time, the First State School of Cinematography was established in Moscow, under the experienced and successful director V. R. Gardin, to train a new generation of Soviet directors. (This may have been the first film school established anywhere in the world.)

Meanwhile, the Moscow and Petrograd film committees commandeered studios to produce short agitational films (agitki). These comprised 63 out of the total of 93 films produced by Soviet film studios between 1918 and 1920 (while many more were commissioned from private firms). Apart from being shown in city cinemas, they were distributed to agit-trains and agit-barges for display around the countryside. Filmmakers also accompanied the agit-trains and recorded footage at the various fronts that was sent back to Moscow and Petrograd to be edited into newsreels, to allow audiences there to see what was happening around the country. Among those who participated in these agitprop exercises were some of the leading figures of the subsequent “golden age” of Soviet cinema of the 1920s, including Lev Kuleshov, Sfir Shub, Eduard Tisse (Sergei Eisenstein’s cameraman), and Dziga Vertov. The civil wars would themselves become the subject of innumerable feature films produced in the Soviet Union.

COLORFUL UNITS. This was the unofficial collective designation by which were known four divisions (and their smaller precursors) of the Armed Forces of South Russia that were named in honor of some of the founding fathers of the Volunteer Army and the White movement in general: the Alekseevtsy (for General M. V. Alekseev), the Drozdovtsy (for General M. G. Drozdovskii), the Kornilovtsy (for General L. G. Kornilov) and the Markovtsy (for General S. L. Markov). The Samurskii Infantry Regiment (the Samurtsy), formed from deserters from the Red Army, was also designated as a colorful unit (tsvetnaia chast′). The term was derived from the forces’ decorative caps, uniforms, and badges of rank and insignia, common features of which were a representation of the imperial Russian flag in the form of a downward pointing chevron on their left sleeves and the presence somewhere on their apparel of an embroidered representation of the initial letter of their unit.

COMINTERN. See KOMINTERN.

COMMISSAR. This was the term, derived from the French commissaire, that the Bolsheviks chose as the title for members of the first Soviet government, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), on 26 October 1917. The name was apparently first suggested by L. D. Trotsky, as an alternative to the discredited term “minister” (which was associated with the “bourgeois” Provisional Government and the tsarist regime), and seconded by V. I. Lenin, who commented that it “smacked of revolution.” In fact, the term had a long history in Europe and Russia (dating back to the time of Peter the Great) and had been used by the Provisional Government to denote heads of regional administrations and special plenipotentiaries, a use that was also adopted by the Soviet government during its first months. (G. K. Ordzhonikidze, for example, was made Sovnarkom’s Provisional Extraordinary Commissar for Ukraine in December 1917.) During the civil wars, apart from being used to denote a people’s commissar (narkom) in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and other Soviet governments, the term was attached to political mentors (military commissars) working in the Red Army.

COMMITTEE FOR THE INDEPENDENCE OF GEORGIA. This anti-Soviet organization, active in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic during the early 1920s (following the collapse of the Democratic Republic of Georgia), was commonly known as the Damkom (from the Georgian Damoukideblobis komiteti, meaning “Independence Committee”). It was created in May 1922, following negotiations between the Georgian Social-Democratic Labor Party and other political parties (including the National Democratic Party, the Federalist Party, and the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries), with each organization being represented by one member on the committee. The first chairman of the committee was Gogita Paghava, who was quickly replaced by Nikoloz Kartsivadze. When the latter was arrested by the Cheka (on 16 March 1923), Alexander Andronikashvili became chairman. The committee published journals, including ProGeorgia (1922) and Propartia (1923); offered military training courses to émigré students; and sought contacts with sympathetic governments in Europe, especially that of Poland, which had offered sanctuary to numerous Georgian émigrés and had enrolled hundreds of Georgians in its military schools.

The committee naturally made contact with members of the Government-in-Exile of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, some of whom returned clandestinely to Georgia to assist its efforts (among them Valiko Jugheli, former commander of the People’s Guard). Despite many arrests and executions of its supporters, the committee made plans for the Georgian rising against Soviet power that broke out on 29 August 1924 (the August Uprising). On 4 September 1924, most of the leaders of the Damkom were captured by Cheka forces at the Shio-Mgvime Monastery (near Mtskheta, eastern Georgia). Having been promised an end to mass executions, they were persuaded to issue an appeal for an end to the fighting. Soon afterward the captured leaders of the Damkom were executed.

COMMITTEE FOR THE SALVATION OF THE MOTHERLAND AND THE REVOLUTION. The first organization to attempt to reverse the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, this cross-party group was founded in Petrograd on 26 October 1917, uniting largely moderate-Left representatives of the city duma (chiefly Mensheviks and members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries), VTsIK, the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies, delegates of the ongoing Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and other bodies. It was an offshoot of the Committee for Public Safety, formed by the Petrograd City Duma on 24 October 1917, and set as its aim “the reconstruction of the Provisional Government that, operating on the forces of democracy, will lead the country to the Constituent Assembly and save it from counter-revolution and anarchy.” Its members included figures who would be prominent in the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918, including the Right-SRs N. D. Avksent′ev (chairman) and V. M. Zenzinov. The committee distributed appeals for noncooperation with the Soviet government and offered support to those officer cadets attempting to resist the Bolsheviks by force (in the Junker Revolt). It was rapidly dispersed by Red Guards, but quickly emerged in a new guise as the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly. A parallel Committee for Social Safety, led by the Moscow mayor, the Right-SR V. V. Rudnev, was proclaimed in Moscow on 25 October 1917 and suffered a similar fate.

COMMITTEE OF MEMBERS OF THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. See KOMUCH.

COMMITTEES OF PUBLIC SAFETY. Among the first organizations to attempt to oppose Soviet rule, these bodies (named after the Comité de salut public formed in Paris by the National Convention in April 1793) were formed in Petrograd (this one spawned the Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution) and in Moscow on 25–26 October 1917. In both cases, they were formed at the behest of the cities’ mayors (G. I. Shreider in Petrograd and V. V. Rudnev in Moscow). They claimed to be acting chiefly to defend the Constituent Assembly (not the Provisional Government) and drew primarily on right-socialist and left-liberal members of the city dumas and representatives of trade unions. When Soviet rule was firmly established in the two capitals, both organizations were forcibly dissolved.

COMMITTEES OF THE VILLAGE POOR. See KOMBEDY.

COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF YOUTH. See KOMSOMOL.

COMMUNIST PARTY (BOLSHEVIK) OF UKRAINE. This political party—often abbreviated CP(b)U—developed from two sources: cells within Ukraine of the Russian Social-Democratic Party (Bolsheviks) and the Borotbists. The decision to establish an independent Ukrainian party had initially been taken, on the initiative of Mykola Skrypnyk, at a Bolshevik conference at Taganrog on 18–20 April 1918, but was reversed on the insistence of V. I. Lenin when the new party (dubbed the Ukrainian Communist Party, UCP) held its first congress in Moscow in July 1918 and declared itself to be an integral part of the RKP(b). Following the collapse of the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine, the UCP declared itself dissolved, but resumed its activities in late 1919, when the third Soviet invasion of Ukraine established a more durable Soviet government (that became the Sovnarkom of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). Finally, the CP(b)U was constituted in 1920 when the UCP merged with the Borotbists. Some 53.6 percent of party members described themselves as “Russian” in 1920, 13.6 percent as “Jewish,” and only 19 percent as “Ukrainian.”

COMMUNIST PARTY OF EASTERN GALICIA. This political party was formed by a group of Borotbists led by Karlo Savrych at Stanyslaviv (Ivano-Frankivsk) in February 1919, on the basis of the former International Revolutionary Social Democracy group. Following the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921), which recognized Poland’s suzerainity over Eastern Galicia (Western Ukraine), the party began a long dispute with the Communist Labor Party of Poland, which established its own branches in Galicia. Finally, in 1923, the Galician party (now calling itself the Communist Party of Western Ukraine) joined the Polish one as an autonomous branch. When Soviet forces occupied the region in 1939, surviving members of the party were hunted to extinction by J. V. Stalin’s security services.

Communist party, russian. See bolsheviks.

COMRADE. Although after 1917 this term of address became associated with Soviet Russia, socialists across Europe had been using it as an egalitarian (and non-gender-specific) alternative to “mister,” “miss,” “mistress,” and so forth, from the middle of the 19th century. The Russian form is tovarishch, which originally meant something like “business partner” (from tovar, meaning “merchandise”). During the civil wars, Bolsheviks would use the word only when addressing people they assumed to be sympathetic to their cause: other Bolsheviks, workers, and (for a time) members of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries. All others, no matter what their status or affiliation, would be addressed as “citizen” (grazhdanin, fem. grazhdanka), sometimes as an insult; for example, Nicholas II’s guards always made a point of addressing him as “citizen Romanov” during his imprisonment in 1917–1918. A Bolshevik’s deliberate refusal to address as “comrade” someone who might have expected that appellation was almost always a deliberate and hostile act. During the civil wars, other (non-Bolshevik) socialists continued to use the term, although rarely as pointedly, while the Whites would often mockingly refer to their enemies as “the comrades.”

Confederated Republic of ALTAI. See Altai, Confederated Republic of.

Congress of Members of the Constituent Assembly. See Constituent Assembly, Congress of Members of the.

CONGRESS OF THE PEOPLES OF THE EAST. Organized by the Komintern as a forum for the condemnation of European (especially British) and U.S. imperialism in Asia, this congress opened in Baku on 2 September 1920, soon after the Red Army’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan and the establishment of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. It was fortunate (but not entirely coincidental) that it also met less than a month after the signing of the Allied–Turkish Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920), the allegedly harsh terms of which, in dividing the empire and severely restricting the powers of the sultan (who was also caliph), had so exercised the Muslim world.

The congress was attended by 1,891 delegates (including 1,273 Communists), among them Turks; Persians; Indians; Chinese; and representatives of the various non-Russian peoples of the Central Asian, North Caucasian, and Transcaucasian regions of the new Soviet state. Prominent parts were played at the congress by G. E. Zinov′ev, Karl Radek, and Béla Kun. Also present was the American journalist John Reed.

Among the Congress’s achievements was the creation of a Council of Propaganda and Action of the Peoples of the East, which acted as the Komintern’s Executive Committee’s means of maintaining contact with revolutionary organizations in Asia. The congress also agreed that the Latin alphabet would be adopted by Turkic-speaking peoples within the USSR. Muslim delegates also utilized the Baku congress to voice concerns about chauvinist abuses by (often Russian) Soviet officials in the autonomous republics, and a resolution on this topic was submitted by 21 delegates, representing a wide range of nationalities. In his closing remarks to the congress, Zinov′ev promised energetic corrective action. When the congress was over, 27 delegates traveled to Moscow to meet with the Politbiuro of the RKP(b), which adopted a resolution drafted by V. I. Lenin. The resolution’s provisions included the decision to found (in Moscow) a University of the Peoples of the East (it actually became the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, founded on 21 April 1921) and instructions to rein in the authority of Soviet officials in autonomous regions. The congress’s manifesto appeared in the journal Kommunisticheskii internatsional, no. 15 (20 December 1920).

CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. The All-Russian Constituent Assembly met for just one prolonged session (from 4:00 p.m. on 5 January to 4:40 a.m. on 6 January 1918) at the Tauride Palace, Petrograd, before being dispersed by Soviet forces. It failed to complete—or even begin—the task for which it had formally been assembled: to draw up a constitution for the state that, following the temporary administration of the Provisional Government, was to succeed the Russian Empire.

Immediately following the February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet had agreed that the primary task of the government was to lead the country toward elections to the Constituent Assembly in the shortest possible time. Virtually all political parties, including the Bolsheviks, were pledged to participate in the elections and to abide by the results. Indeed, the summoning of a constituent assembly had been a common theme in the demands of all opposition parties in Russia since the mid-19th century. However, the elaboration of electoral laws in revolutionary and wartime conditions proved complicated, and the process was deliberately prolonged by filibustering Kadets; they were in a majority on the electoral commission (the Special Council for Preparing the Draft Statute on the Elections to the Constituent Assembly), they feared for their party’s fate in any election, and they questioned the wisdom of having an election in the midst of a world war. Consequently, the elections (to select 800 members from 73 civilian districts and 8 army constituencies) did not begin until 12 November 1917, after the October Revolution had seen the establishment of a provisional Soviet government (Sovnarkom), and were not complete, as a consequence of disturbed conditions associated with the mounting civil wars across the former Russian Empire. Still, around 60 percent (some 41,700,000 souls) of the enfranchised population (all adults aged 21 years and over) participated in what was Russia’s first truly nationwide and democratic election.

The Bolsheviks won about 25 percent of the vote, performing particularly strongly in urban areas and among soldiers at the front, but the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) was the outright winner: together with its allied national branches in Ukraine, Armenia, and elsewhere, the PSR won almost 60 percent of the national vote (although its share was over 90 percent in some rural constituencies along the Volga and in Western Siberia). However, whether the deeply divided SRs could have fashioned a functioning majority remains a matter of conjecture. The Kadets, meanwhile, won only 8 percent of the vote (drawing support chiefly from the major cities) and the Mensheviks only 2 percent.

Although Sovnarkom was officially also a provisional government that was to rule only until the summoning of the Constituent Assembly, V. I. Lenin soon began to argue that the Soviets were a “higher form of democracy” than the Constituent Assembly and pointed out that the results of the elections had been skewed, as party lists did not differentiate between the recently formed Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries (the Bolsheviks’ coalition allies in Sovnarkom) and the mainstream PSR, thereby denying electors the possibility of expressing favor for those who supported Soviet power. After some prevarication, from 11 December 1917 the Bolshevik Central Committee followed Lenin’s line. Consequently, when the assembly eventually met on 5 January 1918 (delayed from 28 November 1917), the Soviet government presented it with a virtual ultimatum, in the form of a “Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Peoples,” that would have confined the assembly to merely endorsing the legislation of Sovnarkom and limited its role to “establishing the fundamental principles of the socialist reconstruction of society.” When those of the 703 elected deputies who had managed to reach Petrograd refused to accept this (by a vote of 237 to 146) and voted instead in favor of following an agenda proposed by the SRs, on the advice of the assembly’s chairman, V. M. Chernov (elected with 244 votes against the Bolshevik-backed M. A. Spiridonova’s 153), Bolshevik and Left-SR delegates walked out. Subsequently, an emergency meeting of Sovnarkom was convened, at which it was decided that the Constituent Assembly should be dispersed, if necessary by force. Baltic sailors and Red Guards attending the meeting were given the order, and eventually their commander at the Tauride Palace, A. G. Zhelezniakov, approached Chernov and said “The guard are tired. I propose that you close the meeting and let everybody go home.” Before dispersing, the assembly hurriedly passed a decree on land (essentially instituting the SRs’ land program) and a decree pronouncing Russia to be a democratic federal republic and issued an appeal to the Allies, requesting that they define terms by which the First World War could be brought to a negotiated end. When delegates arrived back at the Tauride Palace the following day, they found the building locked and well guarded. Later that day, a decree of VTsIK ratified the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. Some of the assembly’s members gathered at the Gurevich High School for a number of covert meetings, but the Red Guards’ firing on the (very muted) demonstrations in favor of the assembly and the pursuit of the Cheka convinced them to relocate to Kiev and seek the protection of the Ukrainian Central Rada. However, when the Rada was driven out of Kiev by Red forces (on 26–27 January 1918), the assembly ceased to exist in any coherent form.

On 8 June 1918, attempts to revive the Constituent Assembly as a democratic alternative to the Soviet government began with the formation at Samara of Komuch (the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly). Despite the later demise of that body and the rise to power of Admiral A. V. Kolchak following the Omsk coup of 18 November 1918, hopes for the reconvention of the Constituent Assembly were revived when (on 26 May 1919) leaders of the Allied powers sent Kolchak a note in which it was indicated that their further support for the Whites in the civil wars was predicated upon (among other things) the reconvention of the Constituent Assembly. However, when Kolchak indicated on 4 June 1919 that he would not commit himself to that condition, as the assembly had been “elected under a regime of Bolshevik violence,” and when the Allies (on 12 June 1919) declared that this response was “satisfactory,” the death knell of the Constituent Assembly was sounded. In emigration, 38 members of the Constituent Assembly convened in Paris in late 1920 and elected an executive committee consisting of P. N. Miliukov, A. I. Konovalov, N. D. Avksent′ev, and A. F. Kerensky, but this proved to be stillborn.

CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY, COMMITTEE OF MEMBERS OF THE. See KOMUCH.

Constituent Assembly, Congress of Members of the. Created at the Ufa State Conference in September 1918, this was the body (chiefly composed of members and associates of Komuch) that was formally charged by the Ufa Directory with gathering a quorum of members of the Constituent Assembly by 1 January 1919, in order that it could (re)assume power in Russia. When its original base at Samara fell to Red forces on 7 October 1918, the congress moved to the city of Ekaterinburg in the northern Urals. There, some 120 members of the congress eventually gathered and, in association with members of the Central Committee of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (including V. K. Chernov), in the immediate aftermath of the Omsk coup and the collapse of the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia, issued a protest (“To All the People of Russia”) against the new Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and called for armed resistance to the Whites. Subsequently, on the night of 19 November 1918, many of the signatories of that protest were arrested by White forces at Ekaterinburg (but not Chernov, who escaped); they eventually were sent to be held in prison in Omsk. There, a number of them would become victims of the Omsk massacre the following month.

CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY, UNION FOR THE DEFENSE OF THE. Led by V. N. Filippovskii, this anti-Bolshevik coalition of right-wing members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, members of the Party of Popular Socialists, Kadets, and others (including representatives of the trade unions and the cooperative movement) worked from 23 November 1917 to early January 1918 to rouse popular support for the Constituent Assembly, the opening of which it hoped to utilize as an opportunity to overthrow the Soviet government. Branches of it operated in Petrograd, Moscow, Novgorod, Odessa, Samara, and elsewhere, and a newspaper, Izvestiia Soiuza zashchity Uchreditel′nogo sobraniia (“News of the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly”) advertised its cause. Planned demonstrations in Petrograd on the day of the opening of the assembly, however, were aborted after clashes with Red Guards. Thereafter, the union disintegrated.

CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY. See KADETS.

CONSTITUTION OF THE RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATIVE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. See Russian soviet federative socialist republic, CONSTITUTION OF THE.

Cooperative movement. Imperial Russia had witnessed the growth of the most highly developed and powerful cooperative movement in the world. It dated back to credit and consumer societies formed in the 1870s, but only became a coherent mass organization after 1905. During the First World War, the cooperatives played a vital role in supplying clothing, victuals, and raw materials to the Russian Army and the civilian population. By 1917, producers’ and consumers’ unions for flour, flax, and myriad other goods had melded with previously established unions (the Moscow People’s Bank, the Moscow Union of Consumer Societies, the Union of Siberian Dairy Societies, etc.) to form a vast and interdependent production, marketing, and finance network. By 1917, Russia had some 25,000 cooperative societies with 9,000,000 members, and the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions (Tsentrosoiuz) had branches in London, New York, Copenhagen, Paris, and elsewhere.

Following the February Revolution of 1917, tsarist restrictions on the cooperative movement were lifted, and it blossomed further. In theory, the cooperatives were apolitical, devoted only to the welfare of the Russian peasants, but in fact their leadership tended to be dominated by members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR), while prominent cooperators were also drawn into the ranks of the Provisional Government: S. N. Prokopovich (minister of trade and industry in the First Provisional Government and minister of food supply in the Third Coalition) and S. L. Maslov (minister of agriculture in the Third Coalition), for example. Also, during 1917 numerous workers’ cooperatives were organized in urban areas. These tended to be dominated by the Mensheviks.

Following the October Revolution, this situation posed a dilemma for the Soviet government, which recognized the potential value of the movement in building socialism (particularly with regard to food supply), but at the same time regarded it with suspicion, due to its political orientation toward the PSR. Consequently, early Soviet laws on the cooperatives (12 April and 21 November 1918 and 20 March 1919) sought to restrict their freedom and to institute central (state) control over their activities. This resulted in a standoff and an eventual compromise, whereby the cooperatives were granted control over their own internal affairs and memberships but in return had to agree to affiliate themselves to VSNKh and follow the policies dictated by the People’s Commissariat for Food.

The situation during the civil wars, in regions not held by the Bolsheviks, was more complicated. In North Russia, cooperatives enjoyed a privileged position for as long as N. V. Chaikovskii (former chairman of the Union of Flax Producers) was at the helm of the Supreme Administration of the Northern Region, but came to be regarded with increasing suspicion thereafter, despite their leaders’ pledges to oppose the Soviet government. In South Russia, the Moscow Union of Consumer Societies is known to have been one of the chief suppliers of food to the Armed Forces of South Russia, yet it was again regarded with suspicion by many Whites. In Siberia, where the movement was not only historically imbued with “SR-ism” but was also steeped in oblastnichestvo (Siberian regionalism), the government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak regarded cooperatives with open hostility. This was despite the fact that the All-Siberian Union of Cooperative Associations (Zakupsbyt, literally “Buy and Sell”) united 4,400 constituent associations representing some 600,000 members (or 42 percent of all heads of household in the region), while from the very morrow of the October Revolution the movement had brandished impeccably anti-Bolshevik credentials: at the First All-Siberian Cooperative Congress (25–28 November 1917), the Soviet government was declared illegal and its armistice with Germany was criticized, while at its second congress (6 January 1918), members were urged to take up arms against the Bolsheviks and a fighting fund was established. Yet the Kolchak government committed itself only to the promotion of private enterprise. Still, in 1919 Zakupsbyt committed itself to a “benevolent neutrality” toward the Kolchak regime, and other unions were even more supportive: by 1 August 1919 Siberian cooperatives had contributed almost 200,000,000 rubles to the Russian Army (compared to 12,000,000 proffered by private businesses). Even so, cooperators were excluded from positions of influence within Omsk’s Ministry of Food, where they had gained a strong foothold during the period of the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia, while less than 1 percent of government loans and subsidies was directed toward cooperatives (compared to more than 36 percent granted to private businesses). Occasionally, this prejudice was accompanied by violence (prominent cooperators, such as Nils Fomin, were among those slaughtered by White officers during the Omsk Massacre), while cooperative properties were frequently and illegally confiscated by the White military (as befell the Tsentrosoiuz headquarters at Omsk and the Zakupsbyt center at Ekaterinburg).

Cooperatives would earn a new lease on life in Soviet Russia in the 1920s under the New Economic Policy; indeed, one of V. I. Lenin’s last writings was an article “On Cooperation” that extolled the potential utility of the movement as a means of transferring the socialist ethos into the countryside. They also played an important role in Soviet foreign trade following the lifting of the Allied blockade on Soviet Russia (because of their extensive networks abroad and because the Allies remained queasy about trading directly with the Soviet government). However, their threat as both potential and real nests of socialist opposition to the Bolsheviks meant that the cooperatives’ long-term future remained precarious in the USSR, and the movement was subsequently obliterated under the rule of J. V. Stalin.

Copenhagen agreement. This agreement (sometimes termed the Litvinov–O’Grady Agreement) was signed, after lengthy negotiations, by the Soviet diplomat M. M. Litvinov and the British Labour MP James O’Grady in the Danish capital on 12 February 1920. According to its terms, the British would supply ships for the repatriation of British, Allied, and neutral prisoners held on Soviet territory. Litvinov later signed similar agreements at Copenhagen with Belgium (20 April 1920), France (20 April 1920), Hungary (21 May 1920), Italy (27 April 1920), and Austria (5 July 1920). The Copenhagen Agreement is sometimes seen as the first step toward the normalization of relations between Soviet Russia and the West, as the Allied intervention wound down and the Allied blockade was lifted.

COSSACKS. Fighting chiefly, but far from exclusively, on the side of the Whites, the Cossacks played a hugely important role in the “Russian” Civil Wars. The word “Cossack” (kazak in Russian, kosak in Ukrainian) is probably derived from the Turkic qazaq (meaning “freeman”) and came into use in the late medieval period to denote the fiercely independent groups of warriors, freebooters, and runaway serfs of mixed ethnic origins who lived in the steppe regions of what is now Ukraine and southern Russia from the 13th century onward, between the encroaching Muscovite and Polish states (built on serfdom) from the north and west and the declining remnants of the Tatar Horde to the south and east. From these beginnings emerged two Cossack traditions. In some instances, during the 16th and 17th centuries, in exchange for certain privileges, the Russian and Polish-Lithuanian states transformed these communities of frontiersmen into military servitors (“Town Cossacks”) and deployed them as guards along the periphery of their territories (in “lines,” as the Russians put it). From 1654, those living in what is now Ukraine but in Polish service placed themselves under the protection of the Russian tsar, but this did not prevent the further erosion of their freedoms or the forced merger or even abolition of some groups. Other communities, of “Free Cossacks” (a term revived in the civil-war period), however, remained outside the control of the tsar, in settlements farther distant, along the river valleys of the Pontic steppe (chiefly the rivers Don and Dnepr). But they did ally with the tsar on increasingly frequent occasions, and by the end of the 18th century had also fully entered his service, although they would periodically revolt in protest against encroachments on their freedoms (e.g., the revolt of Stenka Razin in 1660–1671 and the Pugachev revolt of 1772–1775).

From the late 18th century onward, a series of military reforms regularized Cossack military service in the Imperial Russian Army and subordinated their governing institutions—the krug (rada in Ukraine and later in the Kuban and the Terek), or council—to the Russian state. At the same time, the Cossack elites were integrated into the Russian nobility, while the tsar assumed the right of appointing the formerly elected leader (ataman) of each Cossack group (or host, voisko in Russian). Essentially, as a closed military caste or estate (soslovie), the Cossacks became subject to mandatory (usually mounted) military service in return for the collective title to their lands and a reaffirmation of their traditional privileges (although the latter could be and were constricted on many occasions). By the middle of the 19th century, the Cossack communities were supplying half of the Russian Army’s cavalry requirements. This proportion grew over the following decades, as new Cossack Hosts were created from formerly peasant settlers in the newly colonized areas of Central Asia, Siberia, and the Far East. By 1914, Cossack forces comprised 54 mounted regiments, 6 Cossack infantry battalions (plastuny), 23 artillery batteries, 11 independent Cossack squadrons (sotny), 4 independent horse and foot battalions (diviziony), and the specially selected Imperial Guard, amounting to 68,500 men. By 1917, their strength had increased to 164 cavalry regiments, 54 batteries, 30 dismounted regiments, 179 independent sotny, and other units totaling some 200,000 men.

At this time, the Cossacks were widely perceived to be the tsar’s most loyal guards and the bastions of autocracy—and rightly so, as the Cossacks’ part in the suppression of the 1905 Revolution evinced. However, by the beginning of the 20th century, some of the Cossack Hosts (notably the Don Cossacks and the Kuban Cossacks) were approaching a crisis, as a consequence of a number of factors: the heavy burden of military service (all males were called upon to serve for up to 20 years, reduced to 18 years in 1909, and had to supply their own mounts, clothing, and cold weapons, while the Cossack communities were supposed to provide firearms and fund the administration of the entire system); the influx of non-Cossack settlers (inogorodnie) to their territories and the growth of an often radicalized working class in the developing towns of Rostov-on-Don, Taganrog, and Ekaterinodar, meaning that Cossacks no longer formed a majority of the population in their territories (although they retained ownership of most of the land, leading to tensions between Cossacks and peasants); and the growing class struggle between poor Cossacks and the Host elites. The specificity and utility of the Cossacks was also being questioned by the high command of the Russian Army, who saw them as less well disciplined, trained, and mounted than the hussars, dragoons, and lancers of the regular cavalry. The Cossacks, however, retained their distinct military traditions, their communal land holdings, and at least the shadow of their local democracy and thus nurtured a very highly developed sense of identity and separateness (one bordering, indeed, upon chauvinism and a superiority complex).

All these problems were exacerbated during the First World War, as further divisions arose between those who had seen service at the front (frontoviki) and those (chiefly the elderly) who had not; caste barriers that had divided Cossacks from other groups became blurred, at least temporarily, in the eyes of the frontoviki, while a sense of common purpose and common resentment of authority developed between them and the peasants and workers with whom they had shared years of misery at the front. Consequently, although almost all socialists continued to see them as such (causing further misunderstandings and grievances), by 1917 the Cossacks were, in fact, no longer the trusty bulwarks of the tsarist regime.

This was graphically witnessed during the February Revolution, when Cossacks refused to fire on demonstrators, and during the civil wars when, although most Cossacks fought for the Whites, a numerically and psychologically significant minority declared for the Bolsheviks (Red Cossacks), notably in the 1st Cavalry Army and the 2nd Cavalry Army, while in Ukraine a motley patchwork of self-proclaimed Free Cossack units supported Ukrainian independence. Moreover, during the civil wars most Hosts sought to resurrect their traditional freedoms, to seek autonomy for their homelands, and to reassert Cossack dominance over non-Cossack inhabitants of their Host territories. Indeed, they often prioritized these issues over defeating the Bolsheviks: this was exemplified by the willingness, during the summer of 1918, of the Don Host and its ataman, A. M. Kaledin, to seek the protection of Germany, during the Austro-German intervention, against the protests of the fervently pro-Allied leadership of the Volunteer Army, as well as by the efforts of some elements of the leadership of the Kuban Host to seek Allied recognition of the independence of Kuban, even after they had formally allied with the Volunteer Army to form the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR).

Tensions between Cossacks and peasant settlers also worsened after the revolution, as the peasants could see no reason why, if landlord estates and church properties were being redistributed among the people, the same should not happen to the large Cossack landholdings, while non-Cossacks were excluded from the resurrected Host governments in the Cossack territories. Thus, by the spring of 1918 it had become clear to the Cossacks that there would be no place for them in the new Soviet order, and uprisings against Soviet power occurred in every Cossack territory (e.g., the Dutov Uprising). This was so despite the Soviet government’s initial attempts to win over the Cossacks through, for example, the establishment of a Cossack Committee attached to VTsIK on 4 November 1917 and the promulgation of a decree on 31 May 1918 that allowed Cossacks to retain their existing land allotments.

The 11 full Cossack voiska active during the civil wars were the Don Cossack Host, the Kuban Cossack Host, the Terek Cossack Host, the Astrakhan Cossack Host, the Orenburg Cossack Host, the Urals Cossack Host, the Siberian Cossack Host, the Semirech′e Cossack Host, the Transbaikal Cossack Host, the Amur Cossack Host, and the Ussuri Cossack Host. The Don and Kuban Hosts were by far the most numerous, followed by the Terek. It was the misfortune of the Whites, though, that it was precisely among these large voiska that Cossack identity and Cossack resentment of all outsiders was most highly developed. This meant that Cossack forces within the AFSR seemed often to be fighting for their own autonomy rather than for Russia, leading to endless quarrels between General A. I. Denikin and the Host atamans and governments. The Don, Kuban, and Terek Cossacks would prove to be formidable fighters when defending their own territories, but were less effective (and prone to bouts of looting and banditry) when operating farther afield (during the Mamontov raid, for example).

Following the Bolshevik victory in the civil wars, many Cossacks emigrated. Those that remained in (or, as in the case of some thousands, returned to) Soviet Russia were persecuted during periodic bouts of de-Cossackization (raskazachivanie). Apart from mass application of Red Terror, this often involved the formal abolition of the Cossack Hosts, dividing the Host territories among other existing or new administrative units, and active encouragement of the resettlement in these territories of non-Cossack peoples. A decree of 25 March 1920 abolished separate Cossack Soviets that had been created in 1918 and established the normal governmental institutions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic on all the former Cossack territories.

Those in exile, chiefly (in the case of the numerically dominant Don and Kuban Hosts) in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, survived as best they could, often as laborers. Some, but not all, gravitated toward the Nazis during the Second World War (e.g., as the 15th Cossack Cavalry Corps of the Wehrmacht, founded in 1944, which contained regiments of various Cossack Hosts from the Don, Kuban, Terek, Siberian, and other voiska). In the summer of 1945, infamously but in accordance with agreements made at the recent Allied conference, the British authorities in northern Italy, Yugoslavia, and Austria handed over to the Soviet Union at least 35,000 Cossacks who had been part of formations allied to the Wehrmacht (plus at least another 10,000 of their dependents), most of whom were subsequently executed. Among them were numerous White veterans of the civil wars (including Ataman P. N. Krasnov, General A. G. Shkuro, and Sultan-girei Klych), but these “victims of Yalta” also included men who had been born in emigration and had never been citizens of the USSR or even of Russia.

Council of Labor and Defense. This organization (in Russian the Sovet truda i oborony), sometimes referred to by its Russian acronym “STO,” was created by a decree of the VTsIK of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) on 30 November 1918, with the original title of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defense. (The name change occurred in April 1920.) Throughout the civil-war period it was chaired by V. I. Lenin.

A commission of Sovnarkom, the STO sought to direct and coordinate the work of all economic commissariats of the RSFSR with all institutions having a stake in the defense of Soviet Russia and had subordinate organizations at provincial, district, and even village levels (although how any of these actually functioned during the civil wars and how effectively remains obscure). Nevertheless, it had a status and authority in the realm of economic affairs equal to or even greater than that of Sovnarkom, and all state agencies and institutions (central and local) and all individuals were bidden to implement its decisions unconditionally. Its broad remit is indicated by the fact that, in 1919, 40 percent of its published decrees concerned military affairs; 13 percent concerned fuel supplies; 10 percent concerned transport; 8 percent concerned industry; and the remaining 29 percent concerned matters as diverse as the post office, agriculture, and state finances. Its membership included the chairman of Sovnarkom; the commissars of war, ways and communications, agriculture, supplies and labor; the head of the Commissariat for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (Rabkrin); the chairmen of VSNKh and the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS); and (with a nonvoting role) the head of the Central Statistical Directorate.

The STO met, on average, twice a week during the civil-war years; according to M. V. Frunze, without it the Reds could not have survived the civil wars. Among other tasks, STO administered the Labor Armies from January 1920 and oversaw the implementation of the Decree on Universal Labor Service (also from January 1920). When the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) was established in February 1921, it was made subordinate to STO, which was charged with the nomination of its members. From 1921 to 1922, it almost completely lost its military concerns and concentrated instead on issues regarding labor, industry, and transport. Reflecting that change, the commissars of finance and foreign trade were added to the council in September 1921. The STO ceased to exist by an order of Sovnarkom on 28 April 1937.

Council of Lithuania. See Taryba.

Council of People’s Commissars. See SOVNARKOM.

COUNCIL OF PEOPLE’S MINISTERS OF THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL REPUBLIC. See UKRAINIAN NATIONAL REPUBLIC, COUNCIL OF PEOPLE’S MINISTERS OF THE.

COUNCIL OF THE SUPREME RULER. Also known (sometimes ironically, even among the Whites) as the “Star Chamber,” this ad hoc body established itself within the Omsk government from 21 November 1918, and in the spring and summer of 1919 assumed a dominant role in Siberian political affairs. It met, quite informally, usually three times each week between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m., to draft advice for Admiral A. V. Kolchak on any number of military, economic, and political questions, with the general aim of coordinating the activity of the front and the rear in the anti-Bolshevik east. For many commentators, however, it played a baleful role in the White movement, serving to isolate the supreme ruler from his own government, informed opinion, and society as a whole.

The Council of the Supreme Ruler was dominated by Minister of Finance I. A. Mikhailov and Minister of War (and chief of staff of the Russian Army) D. A. Lebedev. Its other members were General A. A. Mart′ianov (head of the Supreme Ruler’s Private Chancellery), I. I. Sukin (director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), G. G. Tel′berg (minister of justice), V. N. Pepeliaev (minister of the interior), and P. V. Vologodskii (chairman of the Council of Ministers). Its existence sparked a crisis in the Omsk government in August 1919, as critics of the council (including ministers who were not members) charged that its influence on policy was irregular and unaccountable. Following the departure from the government of Mikhailov and Tel′berg, which was the outcome of the “August crisis,” the council effectively ceased to function.

COUNCIL OF WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ DEFENSE. See COUNCIL OF LABOR AND DEFENSE.

COURLAND AND SEMIGALLIA, DUCHY OF. This short-lived polity, with its capital at Riga, was a client state of the German Empire that coincided territorially with the former Courland guberniia of the Russian Empire and was an heir of an earlier polity with the same name that had existed from 1561 to 1795. It was proclaimed on 8 March 1918, by an assembly of Baltic Germans, in reaction to the declaration of independence on 15 January 1918 issued by the Latvian National Council (Tautas Padome) and in the wake of the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). The dukedom was offered to and accepted by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who granted it full recognition on 15 March 1918. The duchy, which was occupied by German forces throughout its lifetime, collapsed with Germany’s defeat in the First World War, as the Latvian National Council issued a new proclamation of independence on 18 November 1918 and formed a government under Kārlis Ulmanis.

Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. This Soviet polity, with a mixed population of Russians (50 percent), Tatars (25 percent), Bulgarians, Greeks, Ukrainians, and Germans (and 53 other nationalities) totaling 720,000, was created as an autonomous territory within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) on 18 October 1921, almost a year after the Red Army had driven White forces (the Russian Army) of General P. N. Wrangel from the Crimean peninsula. Its capital was Simferopol′. On 7 November 1921, the First All-Crimean Constituent Congress of Soviets elected a Central Executive Committee (chaired by Iu. P. Gaven) and a Sovnarkom (chaired by S. Said-Galiev). The Crimean ASSR suffered badly in the famine of 1921–1922, during which it is estimated that 100,000 people starved to death on the peninsula (three-quarters of them Crimean Tatars). The Crimean ASSR was converted into the Crimean oblast′ of the RSFSR on 30 June 1945.

Crimean–Azov Volunteer Army. This White force, based on the preexisting Crimean–Azov Corps, was created on 10 January 1919, as part of the Armed Forces of South Russia, as a consequence of the division of the Volunteer Army into the Crimean–Azov Army and the Caucasian Volunteer Army. In May 1919, it consisted of the 5th Infantry and the Independent Cavalry Divisions. On 22 May 1919, it was reformed into the 2nd Army Corps.

Commander of the Crimean–Azov Army was General A. A. Borovskii (7 January–31 May 1919). Its chief of staff was General D. N. Parkhomov (29 November 1918–12 May 1919).

CRIMEAN GOVERNMENT. Formed at Simferopol′ on 25 June 1918, under the aegis of the occupying forces of the Austro-German intervention, this anti-Bolshevik regional regime was led by the Polish-Lithuanian Tatar general M. A. Sul′kevich, who served as chairman of its Council of Ministers, as well as being minister of the interior and minister of war. It strove to establish (under German protection) the independence of Crimea from Russia and Ukraine, but was unable to secure recognition for this from Berlin (despite the dispatch of a mission to the German capital under the regime’s minister of foreign affairs, Dzhafer Seydamet). The regime also oversaw the collapse of the peninsula’s economy, when the Ukrainian Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii ordered a blockade of the breakaway region, even as Sul′kevich was attempting to fulfill the demands for grain exports made by the Berlin government that he was attempting to appease. Three days after German forces evacuated the peninsula on 18 November 1918, Sul′kevich handed power to a new authority, the Crimean Regional Government, under S. S. Krym.

Crimean RED Army. This Red force was created on 5 May 1919, by an order of the Sovnarkom of the Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic, from elements of the 3rd Ukrainian (formerly 1st Trans-Dnepr) Rifle Division and various other local units. Of its planned two divisions, only one was actually formed (numbering some 18,000 men). From 4 June to 21 July 1919, it was subordinated to the 14th Red Army. The army was engaged with White forces on the Kerch peninsula and also fought against the forces of Ataman Nykyfor Hryhoriiv. It was forced out of the Crimea by the Whites in June 1919, and its units were subsequently incorporated into the Crimean (from 27 July 1919 the 58th) Rifle Division.

The commander of the Crimean Red Army was P. E. Dybenko (5 May–4 June 1919). Its chief of staff was S. I. Petrikovskii (5 May–4 June 1919).

CRIMEAN REGIONAL GOVERNMENT. Formed at Simferopol′ on 15 November 1918, at a meeting of local town councilors and zemstvo representatives, this regional authority was led by S. S. Krym, as chairman of the Council of Ministers. Other leading figures were the Leftist Kadets V. D. Nabokov (minister of justice) and M. M. Vinaver (minister of foreign affairs). Supported by forces of the French intervention in the peninsula (and vocally pro-Allied, in order to differentiate its leaders from those Kadets, such as P. N. Miliukov, who had collaborated with the German occupiers in 1918), the government aimed to reestablish a unitary Russian state and opposed the Crimean-Tatar separatism espoused by its pro-German predecessor, the Crimean government of General M. A. Sul′kevich. In early 1919, it established links with the Volunteer Army and subsequently coordinated its military policy with the Armed Forces of South Russia. In late April 1919, as Red forces captured Sevastopol′ and proclaimed the Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic, Krym’s government disintegrated and its leaders fled to Constantinople.

CRIMEAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. Proclaimed at a conference of local Soviet delegates at Simferopol′ on 28–29 April 1919, in the wake of the capture of all Crimea (except the Kerch peninsula) by forces of the 3rd Red Army, this short-lived regime was led by D. I. Ulianov and included P. E. Dybenko among its commissars. It had time only to issue a few decrees on the formation of a Crimean Red Army, the nationalization of industry, and the confiscation of large landholdings before being driven from power, on 23–26 June 1919, by the invading forces of the Armed Forces of South Russia (commanded by Ia. A. Slashchev). Its leaders fled via Kherson to Moscow, returning to Crimea only after the defeat of General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army, to help create the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in October 1921.

crimean-tatar national party. See MILLIY FIRQA.

CRIMEAN-TATAR NATIONAL REPUBLIC. Proclaimed at Bakhchisarai (Bağçasaray, the former capital of the Crimean Khanate) in December 1918, at a meeting of the Crimean-Tatar Parliament, this short-lived regime was the outcome of the reemergence of Tatar national identity in the previous decades that had been fostered by Ismail Gaspirali, Cafer Seydamet, and others. It was dominated by members of Milliy Firqa, the Tatar national party (including Seydamet, who served as foreign minister and, from early January 1918, prime minister of the republic) and sought to gain the support and recognition of Germany and Turkey for its planned establishment of a Crimean-Tatar state. President of the republic was the nationalist poet and organizer Numan Çelebicihan. On 11 January 1919, it launched an attack on the Soviet government at Sevastopol′, but its forces were driven back and were then decisively defeated by Red Guard detachments near Simferopol′ on 12–13 January 1919. The government then collapsed, as some of its members were arrested (and subsequently executed) by the Soviet authorities, while others (including Seydamet) fled to Turkey.

CURTAIN FORCES. See SCREENS.

CURZON LINE. This term denotes the delineation of Poland’s eastern border that was proposed in a declaration on the subject by the Allied Supreme Council on 8 December 1919 (earlier agreements at the Paris Peace Conference having stated only that this problematic border would be “subsequently determined”). Running south from Grodno (Hrodna) through Brest-Litovsk to L′vov (L′viv), it lay approximately along the border established between Prussia and the Russian Empire in 1797, after the Third Partition of Poland. However, although the original scheme granted L′vov to Poland, a later version (possibly drafted by Louis Napier of the British Foreign Office) placed that city outside Poland. In the event, the line was not used to determine the border between the newly independent Poland and its eastern neighbors: as the Soviet government sought to invade Poland to ignite a European revolution, while the Polish government had ambitions to sovereignty over territories well to the east of the line, neither side would accept it as a basis for negotiation when this was suggested by the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon of Kedleston (hence the “Curzon line”), in July 1920, during the high point of the Soviet–Polish War. Eventually, following the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921), the Soviet government had to agree to a border that incorporated into Poland some 50,000 square miles of territory to the east of the Curzon line.

CZECHOSLOVAK LEGION. Just like its similarly alien but pro-Bolshevik counterpart in the Red Army, the Latvian Riflemen, this non-Russian, anti-Bolshevik force played a part in the “Russian” Civil Wars that was very disproportionate to its size. Although generally treated (especially in Soviet histories) as part of the Allied intervention in Russia (and routinely and misleadingly referred to in Soviet-era books as an organization of “White Czechs”), the legion’s history was specific, although it was echoed (on a smaller scale) by the experience of the Polish Legion and smaller units of Serbian and other volunteers from Allied countries who had happened to find themselves stranded in revolutionary Russia. It should also be noted that Czechoslovak volunteer units fought on the Allied side in the First World War not only in Russia but also in France, Italy, and Serbia.

From the opening days of the First World War, émigré Czech and Slovak politicians and soldiers, such as Tomáš Masaryk and Milan Štefánik, propagated the idea that Czechoslovak units should be formed to fight on the Allied side in the name of an independent “Czechoslovakia” to be carved out from lands at that time included in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These units were initially comprised of émigrés, but their ranks were swelled, as the war progressed, by deserters and prisoners of war taken from the Austrian Army. On the Western Front, in Italy, and in the Balkans, these units were incorporated into their “parent” armies and deployed against the enemy with some fanfare. In the multinational Russian Empire, however, where in previous decades the tsarist regime had embarked upon a doomed effort to homogenize its diverse subjects through a process of Russification, such tactics were regarded with suspicion (in view of the hopes they might arouse among Finns, Poles, Ukrainians, etc.). Thus, although a “Czech Detachment” (Česká družina) was established in Russia on 14 August 1914, with a muster roll of almost 10,000 by early 1917 (approximately 10 percent of the Czechs and Slovaks then resident in Russia, most of them living in Volynia guberniia), its feats were not loudly trumpeted, and its numbers were restricted. It consisted of the 1st (Jan Hus) Rifle Regiment, the 2nd (Jiří z Poděbrad, “George of Poděbrad”) Rifle Regiment, and the 3rd (Jan Žižka) Rifle Regiment, all named after heroes of the Hussite struggles of the 15th century. They marched under a flag that had the Russian tricolor on one side and the crown of St. Wenceslas in the center of the other side, superimposed on fields of white over red. The družina was originally attached to Russia’s 3rd Army, and its men were deployed in demi-platoons as scouts and propagandists, targeting Czech and Slovak regiments in the Austrian Army. They had some success: the 28th (Prague) Infantry Regiment went over to the Russians almost in its entirety on 2 April 1915, followed by the 8th Infantry Regiment in May of that year.

Following the February Revolution of 1917, both Masaryk and Štefánik visited Russia to negotiate with the Provisional Government regarding the possibility of supplementing the force with prisoners of war and having it placed under the control of the Czechoslovak National Council, either as an independent Czechoslovak army or as part of the French Army. (The force was vaguely conceived as being akin to the French Foreign Legion, hence the nomenclature.) Their intervention was successful (not least because the Czechs fought with distinction during the Russian Army’s offensive of June 1917, notably at the Battle of Zborov), and the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia was formally created by order of General N. N. Dukhonin on 26 September 1917. Having absorbed many freed POWs, it expanded to a strength of two divisions (the 1st and 2nd Hussite Rifles), numbering some 45,000 men, by that October and was concentrated in bases across right-bank Ukraine.

Following the October Revolution, the new Soviet government, wary of this potent Allied force in its midst (the legion had been formally designated as part of the French Army on 15 January 1918), agreed on 26 March 1918 to permit it to be evacuated from Russia, via Vladivostok, with the implication that it would then fight on the Western Front. Such a possibility was hardly welcomed by the Bolsheviks’ German and Austro-Hungarian co-signatories of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), which had stipulated (under its Article VIII) that “the prisoners of war of both parties will be released to return to their homeland.” The Legionnaires, however, certainly did not wish to be repatriated to Austria-Hungary, where they faced execution as traitors, and engaged in rearguard battles against the forces of the Austro-German intervention when the latter entered Ukraine in March–April 1918 (notably at the Battle of Bachmach, 4–13 March 1918). They then moved toward Penza and entrained for the east, but progress on the railways was slow—not least because hundreds of thousands of Austro-Hungarian and German POWs were being shipped westward, having been released from camps in Siberia and Central Asia, thereby monopolizing the railway.

Also during March and April 1918, relations between the legion and the Soviet government became fatally strained. The Legionnaires feared that their progress was being deliberately delayed by the Bolsheviks, as a prelude to their being handed over to the Central Powers; the Bolsheviks (following Allied landings in North Russia and at Vladivostok) were coming to regard the Czechoslovaks as a fifth column of the Entente and viewed with considerable trepidation their passage into regions where Red forces were already engaged in battle with the Orenburg Cossack Host (in the Dutov Uprising) and the Special Manchurian Detachment of Ataman G. M. Semenov. Czechoslovak accounts of this period often add that Soviet war commissar L. D. Trotsky’s decision, in the light of these considerations, to order the partial disarmament of the legion (each train, containing 600 men, was permitted to carry just 168 rifles and one machine gun) was a fulfillment of instructions from Berlin. Soviet sources, on the other hand, made much of the contacts between the Czechoslovak National Council and Allied agents in Moscow (including Robert Bruce Lockhart) and, in the regions traversed by the Czech echelons, around Penza and Samara, between officers of the legion (such as Generals M. K. Diterikhs and Stanislav čeček) and representatives of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia and other underground anti-Bolshevik organizations.

The actual cause of the final breach between the Soviet government and the legion, however, appears to have been sparked by a spontaneous fight between eastbound Czechs and westbound Magyars in the railway station at Cheliabinsk, in western Siberia, on 14 May 1918, when a Czech was injured by something thrown from a Hungarian train, and in retaliation, the Czechs lynched the man responsible (who, according to some accounts, was not a Hungarian at all but an ethnic Czech called Malik). Red Guards then arrested the Czech executioners, inspiring their brethren to surround the local soviet demanding their release. Matters got out of hand, and soon the legion was in possession of the town. It is more than possible that agents provocateur on both sides took advantage of the “Cheliabinsk incident” to open a final breach between the Legion and Moscow. That breach was formalized on 25 May 1918, when Trotsky ordered: “Every armed Czech found on the [Trans-Siberian] Railway is to be shot on the spot.” The weak local Red forces in western Siberia, however, had no means of enforcing such a decree and were rapidly quashed by the Legionnaires.

Over the following weeks, in what is generally termed the “revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion,” Czechoslovak forces (often in collaboration with anti-Bolshevik organizations of Cossacks and Russian officers who emerged from the underground) captured the entire Trans-Siberian Railway, from the Volga to the Pacific, with Vladivostok invested by units under General Diterikhs on 29 June 1918. (One operation involved a waterborne attack on Baikal station, which has been described as the first and only victory of the Czechoslovak Navy.) In their wake were established the various governments of the Democratic Counter-Revolution in the east: Komuch at Samara, the Provisional Oblast′ Government of the Urals at Ekaterinburg, the Provisional Government of Siberia at Omsk, the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia at Vladivostok, etc. Such was the influence of the legion that, in September 1918, the Omsk regime gave serious thought to naming one of the most successful and flamboyant Czech commanders, Radola Gajda, supreme commander of its nascent Siberian Army.

Meanwhile, during June 1918 the legion’s command made the crucial decision to jettison efforts to leave Russia and instead to remain and fight the Red Army (and thereafter the Germans) on a new Eastern Front. (By this point, an inrush of volunteers had facilitated the formation of a 3rd Division of the legion and had swelled the muster roll to nearly 70,000.) The Legionnaires’ leaders viewed the option of remaining in Russia as the best means of proving their worth to the Allies, in the hope that the latter would commit themselves to the establishment of an independent Czechoslovakia, while it suited well the plans of the most pro-interventionist of the Allied leaders. (It was rather odd, then, that in July 1918, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, who was very skeptical of the efficacy of intervention in Russia, cited the need to assist in extraditing the Czechoslovaks from Siberia as the central plank in his argument for joining the Allied intervention.)

The legion remained in action for the rest of the summer and autumn of 1918, fighting the Bolsheviks alongside the People’s Army on the Volga, where General Jan Syrový was given overall command of the anti-Bolshevik front, and assisting in the capture of Ufa (5 July), Simbirsk (22 July), and Kazan′ (where they captured the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve on 7 August), and alongside the Siberian Army in the northern Urals (entering Ekaterinburg on 25 July 1918). However, the legion’s soldiery were generally socialistic in political leanings and viewed with deep distaste rightward-moving political developments in the autumn of 1918 in Siberia, such as the demise of Komuch, the disbanding of the Siberian Regional Duma, the Novoselsov affair, and the Omsk coup and the Omsk Massacre, while the declaration of Czechoslovak independence on 28 October 1918 and the armistice of 11 November 1918 seemed to obviate their reasons for fighting in Russia at all. Consequently, the Legionnaires began to demand to be withdrawn from the front. (In the words of Winston Churchill, they had “wearied somewhat of their well-doing.”) Thereafter, in January 1919, under the Inter-Allied Railway Agreement, the legion was withdrawn from the Urals and assigned a new task in policing stretches of the Trans-Siberian Railway (chiefly in Eniseisk guberniia). It subsequently played a crucial role in fending off attacks on the line by Red partisans and engaged in the pursuit of the latter deep into the Siberian hinterland. However, its relations with the White regime of Admiral A. V. Kolchak deteriorated rapidly, with open revolts breaking out among some units around Irkutsk by the summer. In September 1919, the Czechoslovak government successfully petitioned the Allies to agree that the legion should be repatriated, but quarrels over who would provide the shipping and who would pay for it meant that most Legionnaires were still in eastern Siberia (west of Lake Baikal) during the winter of 1919–1920, as the White regime collapsed.

Although discontented, the legion remained relatively united and would play an extraordinary role in the fate of Admiral Kolchak. On 7 January 1920, having already (since 10 December 1919) assigned the supreme ruler’s train to the slow line, as anti-Bolshevik forces and a flood of refugees poured east from Omsk, and then (on 27 December 1919) having had Kolchak’s train detained altogether at Nizhneudinsk, the legion’s commander, General Syrový, formally took charge of Kolchak’s echelon, with instructions from the Allies to afford him (and his accompanying gold reserve) safe passage to the Far East. The legion’s 6th Rifle Regiment was assigned to guard the White leader’s train. Meanwhile, however, the coalition-socialist Political Center had seized power at Irkutsk and demanded the surrender of Kolchak and the gold to them, in return for an unhindered passage through Irkutsk for the legion. Fearing that if they did not evacuate immediately they would be trapped—rumors were rife that Ataman Semenov was about to dynamite the tunnels that carried the railway around the southern shore of Lake Baikal—and cognizant of the fact that their nominal supreme commander, the French general Maurice Janin, appeared to be encouraging such a transaction, the legion complied. Thus, on 15 January 1920, the Czechs handed Kolchak, his entourage, and the gold over to the revolutionaries at Innoken′tevskaia Station, near Irkutsk, before establishing a formal truce with the pursuing forces of the 5th Red Army (the Kuitun Agreement) and pushing on for Vladivostok.

By 2 September 1920, when the last member of the legion had been evacuated from Vladivostok, it is reckoned that 67,739 of its complement (swelled by 1,600 Russian women who had married Legionnaires and some 10,000 civilians) had been dispatched from the Pacific port, bound for Trieste, Marseille, Le Havre, Bremen, and other points of entry into Europe. Some 4,112 Legionnaires had died in Russia. Back in the new Czechoslovakia, the returning Legionnaires would form the backbone of the army of the First Republic, while the men’s savings and pensions (supplemented, according to as yet unfounded charges, by gold bullion pilfered from the Russian reserves) helped establish the powerful Legion Bank (Legiobanka) in Prague. The bank’s headquarters building (which is one of the jewels in the crown of Prague’s architecture), situated on Na Poříčí Street, features a glorious art nouveau-cum-folk-Bohemian façade, bearing scenes of the legion’s celebrated “anabasis” through Siberia (although katabasis is the correct term for a march toward the sea), with sculptures of Legionnaires atop its extravagant pillars. Prague’s Legion Bridge (Most Legii) is also named in the legion’s honor, and a large monument to it stands in the capital’s Palacký Square. The highest point in the Carpathians was also for some time renamed Štít Legionárov (Legionnaire Peak), although that did not survive the Communist coup of 1948, and it now retains its title of Gerlachovský štít. A memorial to the Legionnaires who fell at the Battle of Zborov in July 1917 stands in the Kalinivka cemetery in Ukraine, and another can be seen at Blansko in the Czech Republic. The legion’s exploits were also widely commemorated in Czech fiction, notably in the novels, plays, and poetry of Rudolf Medek and in his screenplay for the feature film Zborov (dir. J. A. Holman and Jirí Slavícek, 1938). The last surviving Legionnaire, Alois Vocasek, died on 9 August 2003 at the age of 107. At the time of his death, Vocasek was attempting to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that in 1946 he had been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for nine years for collaborating with the Nazis during the Second World War.

Czechoslovak National Council. This organization was founded in 1916, in Paris, by Tomáš Masaryk (who became its first chairman), on the basis of previously existing and separate Czech and Slovak national councils, to lead the campaign to persuade the Allies to make the creation of a unified, independent “Czecho-Slovakia” one of their war aims. It included figures such as Edvard Beneš (secretary), Milan Štefánik (military affairs), and M. Dula (for the Slovaks). The council’s task was not a straightforward one, as the Allies were being tempted by indications from the new Habsburg emperor, Charles I, that Austria-Hungary might consider a separate peace, if it were not dismembered. Consequently, it was only in mid-1918 (on 30 June and 8 August, respectively) that, in the wake of the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia, the council obtained France and Britain’s recognition of its claim to be the authorized representative of the Czech and Slovak peoples.

From April 1917, the council had had a filial branch in Russia (which the following month was visited by Masaryk) that helped coordinate the establishment of the Czechoslovak Legion. The Russian branch was led by Masaryk’s nominated deputies, P. Maksa and B. Chermak, and was based initially at Kiev, but in 1918 it accompanied the legion eastward into Siberia (although Maksa and Chermak were briefly held in Moscow by the Soviet authorities). Following the declaration of the independence of Czechoslovakia (28 October 1918), in December 1918, on the orders of Štefánik (who was at that point touring Siberia), the Russian branch changed its name to the Special College in Russia of the Government of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia. This was chaired by Boris Pavlu (and later Boris Girsa) and remained active until the evacuation of the legion from Vladivostok was completed in September 1920. Among its most important functions was the publishing of the legion’s newspaper, Československý denik (“The Czechoslovakian Daily”).