Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

D

DAKHADAEV, MOHAMMED-ALI (“MAKHACH”) (1882–22 September 1918). One of the leading revolutionary activists of Daghestan in the early civil-war era, Makhach was the son of a blacksmith from the village of Untsukul′. He studied at the St. Petersburg Institute of Transport Engineers from 1900 (finally graduating in 1910, due to repeated exclusions) and was active in the student movement in the capital before returning to Daghestan in 1905 to help organize local branches of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. He was twice arrested and in 1906 was exiled from Daghestan. He subsequently worked as an engineer on the Maikop railway in the Kuban (1910–1916).

Following the February Revolution of 1917, Makhach became one of the Leftist leaders of the Daghestan Regional Soviet at Temir-Khan-Shur (now Buinaksk) and in 1918, as a member of the regional revvoensovet and military commissar, he was one of the principal founders of the Daghestan Red Army, commanding its forces in actions against the Turks and the Austro–German intervention and against the forces of L. F. Bicherakhov. On 22 September 1918, Makhach was captured by White forces at Verkhnii Dzhengutai and was summarily executed. Numerous locations were renamed in his honor in the Soviet Union, including, in May 1921, the town of Port Petrovsk, which became Makhachkala. It is currently the capital of Daghestan and also has a Dakhadaev Street.

DAL′BIURO. The Far Eastern Bureau (Dal′nevostochnoe biuro) of the RKP(b) was created on 3 March 1920, following the collapse of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s White government in Siberia, to coordinate efforts to establish Soviet power in the regions east of Lake Baikal. It was initially subordinated to the party’s Sibbiuro, but in August 1920 was placed under the direct command of the Bolshevik Central Committee, which seems to have been concerned that the Dal′biuro was acting too aggressively and incautiously and might—at a time when the Red Army was facing the crisis of the Soviet–Polish War at the opposite end of the country—provoke the Japanese interventionist forces in the Far East into abandoning the Soviet–Japanese Gongota Agreement (15 July 1920) that had recently been secured. The Dal′biuro’s leading figures included A. M. Krasnoshchekov (the first president of the Far Eastern Republic) and S. G. Lazo and P. M. Nikoforov, who were based at Vladivostok. The organization’s significance declined appreciably when the FER joined the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in November 1922, although it existed formally until 20 November 1925.

damkom. See COMMITTEE FOR THE INDEPENDENCE OF GEORGIA.

DAN (GURVICH), FEDOR IL′ICH (19 October 1871–22 January 1947). The leader of the Mensheviks, Fedor Dan (real name Gurvich) was born in St. Petersburg into the family of a well-to-do Jewish pharmacist and graduated from the Medical Faculty of Dorpat (Iur′ev) University (1895). Having embraced Marxism as a student, he began working in and organizing social-democratic circles from 1894 onward. He was arrested in 1896 and, following imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, was exiled to Viatka, where he worked as a statistician and wrote a study of the local peasantry. In the summer of 1901, when his term of exile was complete, he moved to Berlin and helped organize, in collaboration with V. I. Lenin, the smuggling into Russia of the newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”), the main organ of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). In 1902, he returned to Russia but was arrested and exiled to eastern Siberia. He escaped and fled abroad in 1903, immediately joining the Mensheviks when the party split. He returned to Russia in 1905, as one of the most senior members of the RSDLP—he was known as the Mensheviks’ “chief of staff”—and helped lead the Menshevik faction in the First and Second State Dumas. In 1907, he fled abroad once more to join Iu. O. Martov in producing the newspaper Golos sotsial-demokrata (“Voice of the Social-Democrat”) in Geneva and later Paris. Taking advantage of a political amnesty announced during the tercentenary of Romanov rule, Dan returned to Russia in 1913 to mentor the social-democrat faction in the Fourth State Duma. Having adopted an internationalist position (in opposition to Russia’s participation in the First World War), he was arrested upon the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 and exiled to Minusinsk. In late 1915, he was mobilized into the army as a surgeon, serving in eastern Siberia and Central Asia.

Dan returned to Petrograd following the February Revolution, arriving there on 19 March 1917, and served on the Central Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet (as its deputy chairman) and (from June 1917) on the presidium of VTsIK. By then a proponent of “revolutionary defensism” and a convinced advocate of coalition government, he was a firm opponent of the October Revolution and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and throughout the civil-war period, during which he was mobilized into the Red Army as a doctor, continued, alongside Martov (whose sister he had married), to be a vocal critic of the Soviet regime, notably (from April to July 1918) in the newspapers Vpered (“Forward”) and Vsegda vpered (“Always Forward”). For that, he suffered continued harassment from the Cheka and, ultimately, imprisonment from 26 February 1921. In January 1922, following a prolonged hunger strike, he was thrown out of Soviet Russia.

Dan settled again in Berlin, as did many Mensheviks in the emigration, and helped publish Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (“The Socialist Messenger”), but moved to Paris with the rise of Hitler and then to New York in 1940, as the Nazis invaded France. Although he had previously accepted the necessity of the five-year plans and forced collectivization of agriculture in the USSR of J. V. Stalin, from the United States he spoke out bitterly against the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939. Yet, following the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, Dan proffered his support to the Soviet regime, arguing in his journal Novyi put′ (“The New Path”) and his book The Origins of Bolshevism (1943) that Bolshevism remained “the carrier of socialism,” while still demanding the political “humanization” and “democratization” of the Soviet Union. Dan died of lung cancer in 1947 and was buried in New York.

Daniševskis (“GERMAN”), Jūlijs Kārlis (Danishevskii, Karl Iulii Khristianovich) (3 May 1884–8 January 1938). One of the most active political and military organizers of Red forces during the civil wars, Jūlijs Daniševskis was born at Liublin, Courland guberniia, and was of Latvian peasant stock. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1900; in 1907 became a member of that organization’s Central Committee; and was subsequently active (under the pseudonym “German,” i.e., Herman) in St. Petersburg, Transcaucasia, Poland, Latvia, and Moscow. During this period, in 1912, he was expelled for sedition from the Moscow Commercial Institute. After the February Revolution of 1917, he became a member of the Bolsheviks’ Moscow Committee and a delegate of the Moscow Soviet, but from May 1917 worked in Latvia, as editor of the Bolshevik newspaper Tsina (“The Struggle”) and as an agitator among the Latvian Riflemen. In August 1917, with the arrival of German forces in the region, he went underground as a labor and party organizer.

Having returned to Russia following the October Revolution, as a delegate to the 5th All-Russian Congress of Soviets, in July 1918 Daniševskis helped lead the suppression of the Left-SR Uprising in Moscow. From July to October 1918, he was a member of the Revvoensovet of the Eastern Front and from 6 September 1918 (to 27 April 1919) he was a founding member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic and chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Republic. From December 1918 to January 1919, as the Red Army tried and failed to invade Latvia, Daniševskis was deputy chairman of the Provisional Soviet Government of Latvia and from mid-January 1919 a member of the government and chairman of the Council of Revolutionary Struggle of the putative Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. From March 1919, he was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Latvia; from March to June 1919, chairman of the Revvoensovet of the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia; and from June 1919, a member of the Revvoensovet of the 15th Red Army. From July 1919 to October 1920, he was deputy military commissar and from October 1920, military commissar of the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. He was also a candidate member of the Central Committee of the RKP(b) from 1919 to 1920 and a member of VTsIK.

After the civil wars, Daniševskis worked in numerous party and state institutions and from 1932 to 1936 was deputy people’s commissar for forestry of the USSR. During the civil wars, however, Daniševskis had clashed with J. V. Stalin over the issue of the use of military specialists, siding with L. D. Trotsky during the Tsaritsyn affair. In 1923, he was also a signatory of the “Platform of the 46,” a letter sent to the Central Committee by a group of Old Bolsheviks that was critical of the current party leadership. It was hardly unexpected, then, that at the height of the Great Terror, on 16 July 1937, Daniševskis was arrested and charged with anti-Soviet activities. On 8 January 1938, by order of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, he was sentenced to death and was executed that day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 18 July 1956.

DASHNAKS. Formally the Haigagan Heghapokhakan Dashnaksutiun (the Armenian Revolutionary Federation), this socialist and nationalist political party was founded in Tiflis in 1890, by Christapor Mikaelian, Stepan Zorian, and Simon Zavarian. It was committed to the use of terror in a battle for a “free independent and unified” Armenia, but in the short term concentrated on organizing the self-defense and arming of Armenians under Turkish rule. With the outbreak of the First World War, the party committed itself to the Allied cause, hoping that this would help win independence and the unity of Armenians.

In 1917–1918, with strong representation in the cities of Georgia and Azerbaijan, the Dashnaks played an important part in the establishment of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (23–24 February 1918). As that union collapsed (26–28 May 1918), the party helped to organize the defense of Armenia against Turkey’s Army of Islam at the Battle of Sardarapat and, led by Andranik Ozanian, was the major political force in the Democratic Republic of Armenia (May 1918–December 1920). Following the invasion of Armenia by the Red Army in late 1920, the Dashnaks’ failed February Uprising of 1921 against Soviet power, and the subsequent Sovietization of the country, the party was banned and its leaders went into exile, many of them to Lebanon and other parts of the Levant, from where they campaigned for the international recognition of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and for the restoration of the borders of greater (“Wilsonian”) Armenia, as projected in the aborted Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920). Following the collapse of the USSR, the party once again established a significant presence in Armenia. The Dashnak History Museum was opened in Yerevan on 13 July 2007.

DECISTS. See DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISTS, GROUP OF.

DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLES OF RUSSIA. One of the foundation documents of the Soviet state (alongside the Decree on Land and the Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Peoples), the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia was issued by Sovnarkom on 2 November 1917, over the signatures of V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin (the People’s Commissar for Nationalities).

Without venturing into the difficult territory of defining what constituted a “people” (or ethnos), the document proclaimed the equality and sovereignty of all the peoples of the former Russian Empire, their right to self-determination (up to and including secession and the formation of independent states), the abolition of all national and religious privileges and restrictions, and the free development of all national groups. Debate continues as to whether this was a sincere expression of the Bolsheviks’ intentions; it does reflect both the “Declaration on the National Question” approved by the party’s April Conference of 1917 and Sections 55–59 of the 1918 party program, but the fact remains that peoples attempting to express their right of self-determination during the civil-war period usually found themselves at war with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (in, e.g., the Soviet–Ukrainian War, the Estonian War of Independence, the Latvian War of Independence, the Lithuanian Wars of Independence, and the Soviet–Georgian War).

Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Peoples. This seminal document, approved by the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 4 January 1918, was drafted by V. I. Lenin with two purposes: first, to provide an outline of the principles on which the Soviet state (soon to be formally constituted as the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) was to be organized (a sort of digest of a constitution), and second, to hold a gun to the head of the Constituent Assembly. Article I proclaimed the Russian Soviet Republic to be a “Republic of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies . . . established on the basis of a free union of free peoples, as a federation of National Soviet Republics.” Article II called upon the Constituent Assembly to recognize Soviet laws on the abolition of private property in land, on workers’ control of industry, the nationalization of the banks, on the universal duty to work, and on the creation of a Red Army. Article III demanded that the assembly endorse Soviet foreign policy; recognize the independence of Finland; agree to the repudiation of tsarist debts; and seek “a democratic peace between nations on the principles of no annexation, no indemnities, and free self-determination of peoples.” Article IV insisted that the Constituent Assembly accept that, as it had been elected before the October Revolution, when “the people were not yet in a position to rebel against exploiters . . . it would be quite wrong to put itself in even technical opposition” to the Soviet government and that “it has no power beyond working out some of the fundamental problems of reorganizing society on a socialist basis.” When, on 5–6 January 1918, the Constituent Assembly refused to accept the terms of this ultimatum, it was forcibly disbanded by Red Guards.

DE-COSSACKIZATION. This term (in Russian, raskazachivanie) is used to denote the wave of Red Terror unleashed against the Cossacks (initially and primarily those of the Don Cossack Host) by the Soviet authorities from March 1919 onward, following a resolution of the Bolsheviks’ Central Committee of 24 January 1919. As many as 8,000 Cossacks may have been executed in the first wave of the policy in 1919, leading to a series of Cossack revolts against Soviet power in the Don region. Many thousands more were executed following the collapse of first the Armed Forces of South Russia and then the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel in 1920, and thousands of others were more or less deliberately starved to death. It is probable that, by the end of the civil wars, around one-third of the Cossack population of Russia had fallen victim to de-Cossackization, a policy designed to excise from the state a caste regarded by the Bolsheviks as innately hostile to socialism (and therefore a policy that might justifiably be regarded as a precursor to the better known dekulakization of 1929 to 1932). Some historians and other commentators have argued that the policy amounted to an attempted genocide against the Cossacks.

DECREE ON LAND. This document, the second decree issued by Sovnarkom—the first was the Decree on Peace—was written by V. I. Lenin on 26 October 1917. It abolished the property rights of landlords and called for the confiscation and redistribution of their estates, with no compensation. Further detail on the process was provided by VTsIK’s “Fundamental Law on Land Socialization” on 19 February 1918. Under the terms of these decrees, some 371 million acres of arable land, pasture land, and forests, formerly in private hands or belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church, the state, or the Romanov family, were to be confiscated and distributed by local land committees among roughly 25 million peasant households across the former Russian Empire, while remaining “the property of the whole people.” These laws were superseded by the “Land Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic” of 1 December 1922, but essentially, the prohibition on private ownership of land would remain in place in Russia and the USSR until December 1990.

DECREE ON PEACE. This, the first decree of Sovnarkom, was read to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets by its author, V. I. Lenin, on 26 October 1917, in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, and passed by an overwhelming majority. It called upon “all the belligerent peoples and their governments to start immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace”—a peace “without annexations or indemnities”—and suggested an armistice of three months’ duration to allow for “negotiations for peace with the participation of the representatives of all peoples or nations, without exception, involved in or compelled to take part in the war, and the summoning of authoritative assemblies of the representatives of the peoples of all countries for the final ratification of the peace terms.” When the Allied powers failed to respond, the Soviet government concluded an armistice with the Central Powers on 1 (14) December 1917 and thereafter commenced the negotiations that would eventually lead to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918).

DEL′VIG, SERGEI NIKOLAEVICH (4 July 1866–1944). Lieutenant colonel (13 November 1899), colonel (6 December 1903), major general (24 January 1909), lieutenant general (8 January 1916), general colonel (Ukrainian Army, 1920). One of Russia’s (and, during the civil wars, Ukraine’s) leading artillery experts, S. N. Del′vig was born into a noble family in Moscow guberniia and educated at the 2nd Moscow Cadet Corps (to 1883). Having entered military service on 1 September 1883, he graduated from Mikhail Artillery School (1886) and served in various artillery units, rising to the command of the 24th Artillery Brigade (24 January 1909). He began the First World War as acting inspector of artillery of the 9th Army Corps (from 26 January 1914) and subsequently served as full inspector of that force (from 9 January 1915). From 19 April 1915, he was commandant of the Peremyshl′ fortified region; from 8 June 1915, he was on the staff of the commander of the South-West Front; from 20 October 1915, he was commander of the 40th Army Corps; and from 20 April 1916, he was inspector of artillery of the South-West Front, in which capacity he made a notable contribution to Russian successes during the Brusilov Offensive.

In the spring of 1917, Del′vig went into retirement. In November 1917, however, he joined the Ukrainian Army, serving as its inspector of artillery (to February 1918). Following the establishment of the Ukrainian State in April 1918, he served in the Hetmanite Army, organizing its Artillery Directorate. In December 1918, after the collapse of the Hetmanate, he served again in the Ukrainian Army of the Ukrainian National Republic, as its inspector of artillery. On 1 June 1919, Del′vig went on a mission to Warsaw and subsequently (21 June 1919) signed an agreement on a demarcation line (“the Del′vig Line”) between the Polish Army and the Ukrainian Galician Army, an agreement that remained unrecognized by Evgenii Petrushevich, leader of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic. Del′vig then became head of the UNR’s military mission to Romania and its chief plenipotentiary in Bucharest (1920), where he lived until moving to Egypt in 1944. He died and is buried in Cairo.

DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISTS, GROUP OF. Sometimes called the Decists (desisty), the Group of Democratic Centralists was a dissenting faction within the RKP(b) that coalesced in March 1919, at the 8th Party Congress in Moscow. Composed predominantly of former Left Bolsheviks from an intelligentsia background, the group criticized the party leadership for the excessive centralism of the Soviet state and the party and argued for allowing more local initiative in administrative, economic, and party affairs. The Decists’ concerns overlapped with those of the Workers’ Opposition and the Military Opposition, but they were most concerned with the rights of party members and the means of getting local voices heard by the center. Among the group’s leaders were the Old Bolsheviks M. S. Boguslavskii, A. Z. Kamenskii, N. Osinskii, V. N. Maksimovskii, Rafail (R. B. Farbman), T. V. Sapronov, and V. M. Smirnov. Their influence peaked at the 9th Party Congress, in March–April 1920, but none of their rather vague motions was carried, and they attempted a similarly unsuccessful intervention into the intra-party policy on trade unions in late 1920. The faction became moribund after the 10th Party Congress of March 1921. Still troubled by the stifling of discussion in the party in the mid-1920s, many Decists joined L. D. Trotsky in the Left Opposition and later the United Opposition, and with other members of the latter were expelled from the party at the 15th Party Congress in 1927. Very few of the members of the group survived the purges of the 1930s.

DEMOCRATIC COUNTER-REVOLUTION. This term was used, retrospectively, to describe the regimes dominated by the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, the Party of Popular Socialists, and, to a lesser extent, Mensheviks that were established on the Volga, in Siberia, North Russia, and elsewhere in the late spring and summer of 1918, following the collapse of Soviet power in the regions that the members of those governments had helped to achieve, not least through the activities of underground organizations such as the National Center and the Union for the Regeneration of Russia. The term is derived from Soviet historiography and was popularized by I. M. Maiskii, whose memoirs of the events was published under that title in 1923. It could be said to apply to Komuch, the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia, the Western Siberian Commissariat, and the Siberian Regional Duma, as well as to the Provisional Siberian Government (at least until, in the aftermath of the Novoselov affair, more conservative elements came to dominate that regime), and the Provisional Government of the Northern Region (until, in the aftermath of the coup organized by G. E. Chaplin, more conservative elements also came to the fore at Arkhangel′sk). Whether the Ufa Directory should be included in that list is a moot point, given its struggles against Komuch and the Siberian Regional Duma and its capitulation to the forces of the Right and the Siberian Army. What is more clear is that participants in the “Democratic Counter-Revolution” would not have accepted the term, as for them it was the Bolsheviks who had committed an act of counterrevolution through their overthrow of the Provisional Government and especially their closure of the Constituent Assembly in 1917–1918.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF ARMENIA. See ARMENIA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF AZERBAIJAN. See AZERBAIJAN, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF GEORGIA. See GEORGIA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF.

Denikin, Anton Ivanovich (4 December 1872–8 August 1947). Lieutenant colonel (28 March 1904), colonel (13 July 1905), major general (June 1914), lieutenant general (24 September 1915). A. I. Denikin, the military and political leader of the Whites in South Russia in 1919–1920, was born at the village of Shpetal Dolnyi, near Włocławek, in central Russian Poland. Denikin’s father, a former serf from Saratov who had been mobilized into the tsarist army, had worked his way up to the rank of major in the Russian frontier guards during his 25 years of service, but remained impecunious. His mother was a Polish Catholic seamstress of equally humble origins, who spoke only broken Russian, but her son nevertheless displayed deep suspicion of Polish aspirations toward independence from Russia.

After a childhood spent in poverty, Denikin graduated from the Lovich (Łowicz) Realschule (1890). Having entered military service on 11 July 1890, he then graduated from the Kiev Officer School (1892) and the Academy of the General Staff (1899). Although he initially struggled at the academy, he eventually blossomed (being ranked 14th in his class), but bureaucratic problems meant that he did not become a general staff officer until 1902, after a period working in the Warsaw Military District. He then served as an adjutant on the staff of the 2nd Infantry Division (23 July 1902–17 October 1903) and as a senior adjutant on the staff of the 2nd Cavalry Corps (17 October 1903–28 March 1904). He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War and as a staff officer for special commissions with, successively, the 9th Army Corps (28 March–3 September 1904) and the 8th Army Corps (3 September 1904–2 January 1906), and in a series of emergency command positions distinguished himself in battle. The defeats that Russia suffered in the Far East, however, depressed him profoundly and, unusually among the officers of the general staff, Denikin welcomed the October Manifesto of 1905 and advocated political reform and the establishment of a true constitutional order in Russia. He then served in similar roles with the 2nd Cavalry Corps (2 January–30 December 1906) and the 57th Infantry Brigade (30 December 1906–29 June 1910), before being placed in command of the 17th (Arkhangel′sk) Infantry Regiment (26 June 1910–23 March 1914) and then transferring to the staff of the Kiev Military District (from 23 March 1914). He entered the First World War as quartermaster general of the 8th Army (from 19 July 1914) but, preferring a more active post, was relieved to be named (on 6 September 1914) commander of the 4th (“Iron”) Rifle Brigade, which in 1915 was expanded into a division. With that force—one of the most successful units of the Russian Army—he participated in the fighting in Galicia and the Carpathians, notably capturing Lutsk (Łuck) in June 1916, during the Brusilov Offensive. Denikin was the first man to enter the city, an achievement for which he was awarded the rare Cross of St. George with Swords and Diamonds. On 9 September 1916, he transferred to the command of the 8th Army on the Romanian Front, retaining that post until 18 April 1917, when he became chief of staff to the main commander in chief. Having been removed from that post before he had any chance to prove himself, he subsequently served as commander of the Western Front (31 May–2 August 1917) and commander of forces on the South-West Front (from 2 August 1917).

The Provisional Government hoped that Denikin’s humble origins would endear him to the revolutionary soldiery; for his part, Denikin had initially accepted the February Revolution as a necessity. However, he became disillusioned with the new regime’s inability to prosecute the war and to maintain discipline in the army and order in the country and, in the aftermath of the Kornilov affair, he was the second most senior of those “counterrevolutionary” generals interned at Bykhov (Bykhaw), alongside L. G. Kornilov. On 19 November 1917, he escaped and, disguised as a Polish bourgeois (thanks to his mother, he was bilingual), made his way to Novocherkassk, in the Don territory, where he was named as chief of staff and assistant commander of the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army (from December 1917). Following the death of Kornilov (13 April 1918), Denikin became commander in chief of the Volunteers. In that capacity, he led the successful Second Kuban March that summer and masterminded the Whites’ remarkable North Caucasian campaign in the autumn.

Following the death of M. V. Alekseev (29 September 1918), Denikin assumed both the political and military leadership of the White forces in South Russia, becoming commander in chief of the Armed Forces of South Russia (26 December 1918–22 March 1920) once he had negotiated the union of the Volunteers with the forces of the Don Cossack Host and the Kuban Cossack Host. (His potential rivals for the leadership of the White movement, Generals S. L. Markov and M. G. Drozdovskii, had fallen in battle in 1918.) In that capacity, he proclaimed himself to be “above politics”; realizing that his forces were divided between monarchists and republicans, he decided not to advertise his own pragmatic republicanism. Although he did insist on maintaining a unitary Russian state (a “Russia One and Indivisible”), he otherwise failed to develop a meaningful political program; he seems to have been personally convinced of the need for radical land reform, for example, but made minimal efforts to put into action plans formulated by his political advisors on the Special Council. On 5 January 1920, Denikin was named as his successor as supreme ruler of Russia by Admiral A. V. Kolchak. However, the exhausted and much criticized Denikin decided to step down from office following the failure of his Moscow offensive in late 1919 and the collapse of the AFSR in the North Caucasus in early 1920. He was succeeded by General P. N. Wrangel, whom Denikin believed had been plotting against him.

Denikin left Yalta on a British ship on 23 March 1920 and went into emigration. Following a brief stay in London, where he felt uncomfortable as a consequence of the British government’s ongoing negotiations with Moscow, he lived initially in Belgium (from August 1920) and then (July 1922–March 1926) in Hungary (where he hoped life would be cheaper) before settling in Paris. A talented writer and orator, he supported himself and his family on the modest royalties from his many publications (both memoirs and historical works) and fees for his speeches and lectures. He remained, however, on the periphery of émigré politics, preferring to stand aloof from the intrigues and scandals that wracked ROVS during the interwar years. Following the Second World War (during which he had shunned all Russian collaborators with the Nazis but was permitted by the Germans to live in controlled exile at Biarritz), he emigrated to the United States and, having passed through Ellis Island with $9.00 in his pocket, settled in New York. He suffered a heart attack while on holiday at Ann Arbor and died at the Michigan University Hospital. His remains were originally buried in Detroit, but subsequently (15 December 1952) transferred to St. Vladimir Russian Orthodox cemetery in Jackson, New Jersey.

On 3 October 2005, in accordance with the wishes of his daughter, the author Marina Grey, and by the authority of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Denikin’s remains were reburied, with full military honors, at the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow. At the ceremony, which was attended by 2,500 people, Patriarch Aleksei II said, “Today’s event proves that we are concluding the process of restoring the unity of our people, who were divided by the tragic history of the last century.” Denikin’s best memorial, however, might be that although he has been criticized as a failed strategist and a failed political leader, his personal integrity and essential modesty have never been seriously impugned. In this, he stands in stark contrast to many other White leaders. Denikin’s five-volume Ocherki russkoi smuty (“Notes of the Russian Time of Troubles,” Paris/Berlin, 1921–1926) remains one of the key sources on the “Russian” Civil Wars.

Denisov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1890–25 August 1927). Major general (1919/1920). A close associate of Ataman B. V. Annenkov during the civil-war conflicts in Semirech′e, the White commander N. A. Denisov was born into a middle-class family in Ivano-Vozneshensk guberniia. He was a graduate of the St. Petersburg Vladimir School and an accelerated course at the Academy of the General Staff (1917). During the civil wars, he was active in the Semirech′e Army, becoming its chief of staff in November 1919. He went into exile in China with the remains of that force in May 1920. There, in 1927, together with Annenkov, he was abducted by Soviet agents and was subsequently put on trial at Semipalatinsk. Found guilty of a range of crimes against the Soviet state, Denisov was subsequently executed. On 7 September 1999, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation turned down a petition to have him rehabilitated.

Denisov, Sviatoslav varlamovich (10 September 1878–29 April 1957). Colonel (6 December 1916), major general (April 1918), lieutenant general (June 1918). The Cossack commander S. V. Denisov, who was active in the opposition to Soviet power in South Russia in 1918, was raised at the Lugansk stanitsa in the territory of the Don Cossack Host and, having entered military service on 31 August 1896, graduated from the Don Cadet Corps (1897), the Mikhail Artillery School (1898), and the Academy of the General Staff (1908). Following service as a staff officer with various Cossack regiments, from 2 May 1911 he served as an assistant adjutant on the staff of the Omsk Military District. During the First World War, he was initially on the staff of the Urals Cossack Division (to 6 December 1914) and served then with the quartermaster general on the staff of the 4th Army (6 December 1914–16 August 1915). From 16 August 1915, he was chief of staff of 2nd Composite Don Cossack Division; from April 1917, he commanded the 2nd Don Cossack Regiment; and from August to November 1917, he was chief of staff with the 3rd Mounted Corps of General P. N. Krasnov.

Having, in the wake of the October Revolution and the disintegration of the old army, made his way home to the Don in January 1918, Denisov commanded a column of Cossacks in rebellion against Soviet power (playing a key role in the Cossacks’ recapture of their capital, Novocherkassk, from the Red Guards), before becoming commander of the Don Army (from 5 May 1918). He resigned from that post on 2 February 1919, when the Krug of the Don Cossack Host passed a vote of no confidence in him. This followed Red Army victories over forces on the left flank of the Don Army and a breach with General Krasnov, who ignored Denisov’s pleas not to recognize the authority of General A. I. Denikin over the Cossack forces through the creation of the unified command of the Armed Forces of South Russia.

Denisov immediately went abroad following his resignation, traveling via Batum to Constantinople. In emigration, he lived in Turkey and (from 1922) Germany before settling in the United States in 1923. He was a founder and active member of the Cossack Union in the United States, serving as its chairman. Denisov died at Stratford, Connecticut, where he was buried in St. Joseph’s Cemetery.

derber government. See siberia, provisional government of autonomous.

Derber, Petr Iakovlevich (1883/1888–19 March 1938). A leading (but oddly obscure) figure among the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) in Siberia during the revolutionary period, who occupied a position toward the right wing of the party, P. Ia. Derber was born into the Jewish family of a petty bureaucrat in Odessa, where he attended a technical school. He joined the PSR in 1902 and was first arrested by the tsarist authorities in 1904, leading to his exclusion from university. He was released in 1905, but was again arrested for political crimes late in that year and was exiled to Tobol′sk guberniia. Following several more periods of arrest and exile, in 1913 Derber fled abroad, eventually settling in Paris. He returned to Russia in 1914, settling in Kurgan, and for a while seems to have avoided his former contacts in the revolutionary underground. In 1916, he moved to Omsk to work as secretary to the local branch of the Workers’ Group of the War Industries Committee, but fell foul of the authorities over a local strike and again went underground. He emerged in 1917, following the February Revolution, to chair the Akmolinsk Regional Land Committee and was elected to the Constituent Assembly as a delegate of the Steppe Region.

At the Extraordinary Regional Conference that met at Tomsk (6–15 December 1917), in the aftermath of the October Revolution in Petrograd, Derber was elected to the Siberian Regional Council, which was charged with preparing the convocation of the Siberian Regional Duma to decide the future of Siberia. This angered seasoned proponents of Siberian Regionalism, such as G. N. Potanin, who felt that their movement was being hijacked by “Russians.” Nevertheless, as Red Guards captured Tomsk, on 25–26 January 1918, Derber was chosen by a secret convocation of the regional duma to head a Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia (the PGAS, sometimes referred to as the “Derber government”). Several of its members were immediately arrested by local Red Guards, while others dispersed or went into hiding.

During March 1918, Derber and many of his ministers made their way to Harbin, in the Chinese Eastern Railway Zone of Manchuria. However, his power was not recognized by the military governor of the city, General D. L. Khorvat, and despite moving his base to Vladivostok, where he enjoyed good relations with the leaders of the Czechoslovak Legion and Allied (especially American) diplomats, when Soviet power collapsed across Siberia in the summer of 1918, Derber was unable to assert his authority over the more right-wing members of his government (who had remained in western Siberia and created the Provisional Siberian Government at Omsk) and was also subject to criticism from local representatives of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia. On 30 July 1918, in an attempt to appease “bourgeois” forces, he stepped down as the head of the PGAS and was succeeded by I. A. Lavrov, but he continued to serve as the regime’s foreign minister until the government disbanded in October 1918. (Derber himself had been responsible for negotiating the agreement by which the PGAS recognized the authority of the Provisional Siberian Government during the visit to the Far East of P. V. Vologodskii in September 1918.)

Following the Omsk coup and the assumption of power by White forces in Siberia, Derber was arrested at Tomsk and, on 31 November 1918, he was sentenced to death by the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. However, he escaped from prison at Omsk during the workers’ uprising there in the following month. From 1919 to 1922, he then lived and worked at Omsk and Novonikolaevsk. In May 1920, he appeared as a witness for the (Soviet) prosecution in the trial of members of the Kolchak regime, but in 1922 (during the investigations made in preparation for the show trial of members of the PSR Central Committee) he was arrested by the Soviet security services and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for “counterrevolutionary activities.” Freed in early 1924, he subsequently worked in a number of Soviet institutions, including Gosplan (from 1924) and the People’s Commissariat for Trade (from 1925). Derber was arrested on 7 January 1938, and on 19 March 1938 was found guilty of participation in a “counterrevolutionary terrorist organization” by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and was shot the same day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 24 July 1991.

DERMENZHI (DERMENDZHI) (ca. 1880–19 August 1921). Batko (“Little Father’) Dermenzhi, a commander in the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine, whose forename and patronymic remain obscure, was born into a middle-class family in the Ismail district of Bessarabia guberniia. He worked as an engineer in the telegraph industry before being mobilized into the Russian Navy. In June 1905, he was a participant in the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin, following which he sought sanctuary in Romania, where he joined a radical commune and became a proponent of anarchism. He subsequently associated with Russian émigré anarchists in Italy, Switzerland, France, and Britain before returning to Russia in 1917.

By early 1918, Dermenzhi was associated with the anarchist group around Guliai-Pole of which Nestor Makhno was a leading member. In the summer of 1918, he was active in the armed struggle against the Hetmanite Army of P. P. Skoropadskii and the forces of the Austro–German intervention in southeast Ukraine, and by early 1919 he was in command of a group of several hundred anarchist partisans. His group united with the Makhnovists at an insurgent congress on 4 January 1919, at which Dermenzhi was elected as commander of the 1,100-strong 2nd Regiment of the Insurgent Army. Having already once been arrested by the Cheka as a “counterrevolutionary,” when the Red Army attacked the Makhnovists in June 1919 he went underground and led guerrilla operations against both Red and White forces over the summer of 1919. On 20 August 1919, he was one of the instigators of the mutiny of the Reds’ 58th Division, which brought many thousands of fighters over to the Makhnovists. When Soviet forces returned to southeast Ukraine in early 1920, Dermenzhi was again arrested by the Cheka, but he apparently escaped in mid-February of that year and rejoined the Makhnovists, becoming chief of communications of the Insurgent Army in the summer of 1920. He died in action against Red forces in Kherson guberniia the following year.

DIMANSTEIN (DIMANSHTEIN), SEMEN (SHIMEN) (21 March 1886–25 August 1938). The Soviet activist, theorist on the national question, and Jewish leader Semen Dimanstein was born at Sebezh, Pskov oblast′, into the family of a peddler. He studied at the Chabad Yeshiva, earning his rabbinate in 1904, but abandoned his religious views in favor of revolutionary politics, joining the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) that same year and working to translate the party program into Hebrew and Yiddish. Following the schism he soon gravitated toward the Bolsheviks and was particularly active in that faction’s ideological and tactical battles against the Bund. He was arrested by the tsarist authorities following the 1905 Revolution, and in 1908 was exiled to Irkutsk, but in 1913 he escaped, fled abroad, and after a spell in Germany, settled in France. He returned to Russia in April 1917, following the February Revolution, and joined the editorial board of the Bolsheviks’ newspaper Okopnaia pravda (“Trench Truth”). He also served on the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b) at Riga and was active in the metalworkers’ union.

Dimanstein played an active role in the October Revolution and on 1 February 1918 was appointed head of the Jewish Section of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities. He was also the long-serving secretary of the Central Bureau of the Jewish Section (Evsektsiia) of the Central Committee of the RKP(b) (1918–1920) and edited the first Soviet Yiddish newspaper, Di varhayt (“The Truth,” 1918) and its successor Der emes (“The Truth,” 1918–1919). During the civil wars, Dimanstein was active on the central committees of the communist parties of Latvia and Belorussia, and in 1920 he undertook a mission to the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic to help establish Soviet institutions. He then joined the People’s Commissariat for Education of the Turkestan Soviet Socialist Republic and from 1922 to 1924 worked as a propagandist in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic before returning to Moscow, where he worked in numerous institutions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and as an editor of the journal Novyi Vostok (“The New East”) and other publications.

Dimanstein was a supporter of J. V. Stalin in the power struggles of the 1920s, but opposed the drive for the collectivization of agriculture from 1928 and was removed from his senior positions following his publication of an article critical of the policy. His last posting was as head of Ozet (The Society for Settling Toiling Jews on the Land). He worked also for the establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast′ around Biribidzgan in the Far East. Dimanstein was arrested on 21 February 1938, charged with treason, and sentenced to death. He was executed on 25 August 1938, and was rehabilitated on 13 August 1955.

directory. See Ufa directory.

DIRECTORY OF THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL REPUBLIC. See UKRAINIAN NATIONAL REPUBLIC, DIRECTORY OF THE.

Diterikhs Mikhail Konstantinovich (5 April 1874–9 September 1937). Captain (14 April 1902), lieutenant colonel (17 April 1905), colonel (6 December 1909), major general (6 December 1915), lieutenant general (July 1919). One of the most senior (and, as an unabashed monarchist and convinced anti-Smite) most controversial of the White generals, M. K. Diterikhs was born either at Kiev or St. Petersburg (sources differ) into a noble family of either Swedish or Czech extraction (again, sources differ) with a long tradition of military service. (His father, K. A. Diterikhs, 1823–1899, was a general of infantry in the imperial army.) Having entered military service on 1 September 1892, he graduated from the Corps of Pages (1894) and the Academy of the General Staff (1900). Following graduation from the academy and a brief period on the staff of the Moscow Military District, he served as a senior adjutant with the 2nd Grenadier Guards Division (15 November 1901–26 February 1902) before returning to the Moscow Military District as a senior warrant officer (26 February 1902–28 April 1904). His many subsequent postings included service as a warrant officer on the staff of the 17th Army Corps during the Russo–Japanese War (28 April 1904–25 August 1905), staff officer for special commissions with that same Corps (25 August 1905–11 November 1906), staff officer for special commissions with the staff of the 7th Army Corps (11 November 1906–14 February 1909), and staff officer with the Kiev Military District (2 April 1909–30 June 1913); finally, from 30 June 1913 he served on the mobilization section of the general staff.

During the First World War, after serving as quartermaster general of the 3rd Army (30 September 1914–19 March 1915) and then of the South-West Front (19 March–28 May 1916), in which role he helped plan the Brusilov Offensive, on 28 May 1916, Diterikhs was named commander of the Russian Expeditionary Force at Salonika (the 2nd Special Infantry Brigade). From October to November 1916, he commanded a joint Franco-Russian Division on the Salonika Front (latterly as part of the Serbian Army). He returned to Russia in July 1917 and was placed on the reserve list of the staff of the Petrograd Military District; during the Kornilov affair he became chief of staff to General A. M. Krymov’s Special Petrograd Army (27–31 August 1917), then quartermaster general on the Staff of the Main Commander in Chief (10 September–3 November 1917), and finally, chief of staff of the main commander in chief, General N. N. Dukhonin (3–8 November 1917).

When Dukhonin was lynched by revolutionary soldiers in November 1917, Diterikhs fled Mogilev and went with his family to Ukraine, where at Kiev he was named chief of staff of the Czechoslovak Legion (March 1918–January 1919). He journeyed with the legion into Siberia and participated in (some have argued, instigated) its uprising of the summer of 1918. In August 1918, he commanded Czech forces in and around Vladivostok; he remained in the Far East until offering his services to Admiral A. V. Kolchak and being placed at the head of the commission established by the Omsk government to investigate the fate of the Romanov family (8 January–July 1919). He was subsequently commander of White Siberian Army (10–22 July 1919), before being placed at the head of Kolchak’s forces as commander in chief of the Eastern Front (20 June–4 November 1919). He served at the same time as chief of the Staff of the Supreme Ruler (10 August–6 October 1919), was temporarily minister of war to the supreme ruler (12 August–6 October 1919), and was noted for attempts to turn the White movement into a religious crusade against the “godless Bolsheviks” through his sponsorship of the Holy Cross Druzhina in Siberia. When Diterikhs refused to consider attempting to defend Kolchak’s capital, Omsk, against the Red advance, arguing instead for a strategic withdrawal of all forces beyond the River Ob, he was replaced as commander in chief of the White forces in Siberia by General K. V. Sakharov (4 November 1919).

Diterikhs then retreated into Transbaikalia, where he served briefly in the forces of Ataman G. M. Semenov, as chairman of the Military Conference of the Staff of the Far Eastern (White) Army (8 May–1 July 1920), then went into emigration, settling at Harbin, before being selected by the Provisional Priamur (People’s) Government to lead its army, the Zemstvo Host (8 July 1922). On 8 August 1922, he was chosen, almost unanimously, to lead the government and the following day declared himself Voevod (“Ruler”) of the Maritime Zemstvo Region. When the Zemstvo Host was defeated by the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic and Red forces entered Vladivostok (25 October 1922), Diterikhs and the remains of his army were evacuated by sea to Korea from Pos′et Bay.

After some months in a refugee camp in Manchuria, in May 1923 Diterikhs moved to Shanghai, where he settled into émigré life as chief cashier at the local branch of the Franco-Chinese Bank and as an active member of ROVS, chairing its 9th (Far Eastern) Section from 1930 until his death from tuberculosis in 1937. Diterikhs died at Shanghai and was buried there in the Liu-Kavzi cemetery (which was demolished and built over during the Cultural Revolution).

DNEPR MILITARY FLOTILLA. This contingent of the Red Fleet was created at Kiev in March 1919, according to a directive of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, and initially consisted of 19 vessels organized into three brigades. From April 1919, it was engaged in battles against the insurgent Ukrainian forces of Danylo Zeleny and then participated in the suppression of the Hryhoriiv Uprising and in the (eventually unsuccessful) defense of Kiev from the successive attacks of the Ukrainian Army and the forces of the Armed Forces of South Russia. By late September 1919, it consisted of almost 80 vessels, organized into two divisions. After participating in the Soviet–Polish War, during which it ventured along the River Pripiat′ as a constituent force of the Western Front, the Dnepr Military Flotilla was formally disestablished on 22 December 1920.

Commanders of the Dnepr Military Flotilla were A. V. Polupanov (12 March–13 September 1919); P. I. Smirnov (13 December 1919–7 August 1920 and 6 October–14 December 1920); B. V. Korsak (7 August–6 October 1920); and M. G. Stepanov (14–22 December 1920).

DOLGORUKOV, PAVEL DMITRIEVICH (1 May 1866–10 July 1927). The prominent liberal politician Prince P. D. Dolgorukov was a scion of one of the most ancient of Russian noble families. He was born at Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg, and was a graduate of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University (1890). He served from 1893 to 1903 as marshal of the nobility of Ruzskii uezd in Moscow guberniia, but was attracted to liberal politics from an early stage, joining the Beseda Circle and helping to found the powerful Union of Unions in 1904. In 1905, he was a founding member of the Kadets, chairing the party’s Central Committee until 1907 and thereafter serving as its deputy chairman. He was also elected to the Second State Duma in 1906, but was then deprived of his political rights due to his forceful opposition to government policies on a number of subjects. Following the February Revolution, he worked as chairman of the Kadet Central Committee and from July 1917 became an advocate of military dictatorship as a solution to Russia’s problems. During the October Revolution, he worked alongside members of the Moscow Military District to organize armed opposition to Soviet rule.

Dolgorukov was subsequently elected to the Constituent Assembly, as a representative for Moscow on the Kadet ticket, but was arrested by the Soviet authorities and spent the period from 28 November 1917 to February 1918 in prison in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. Following his release, he went underground to work as assistant (deputy) chairman of the anti-Bolshevik National Center. In the autumn of 1918, he made his way to South Russia to assist the Volunteer Army as a member of Osvag and as an organizer of publications and public meetings to rally popular support behind General A. I. Denikin. He also provided ideological support to the Crimean regime of General P. N. Wrangel in 1920.

In November of that year, Dolgorukov emigrated, living subsequently in Constantinople, Belgrade, Paris (where he taught Russian literature at the Sorbonne), and Warsaw, always participating actively in the work of the Kadets and preaching armed opposition to the Soviet government. However, he longed to return to Russia and in 1924 attempted to cross the Polish–Soviet frontier disguised as a peasant. He was apprehended and sent back to Poland, the local Cheka investigators having failed to recognize their distinguished prisoner. He tried again on 7 June 1926, crossing into the USSR from Romania. However, after 40 days in the country he was again captured and this time was identified and placed in detention in Khar′kov prison. The following year Dolgorukov was executed, alongside 19 other Russian aristocrats and former Whites, apparently in reprisal for the assassination in Warsaw of the Soviet ambassador to Poland, P. L. Voiskov.

DON ARMY. The Don Army, a key White force of the civil-war years, was founded during the spring of 1918, when forces of the Don Cossack Host rose up against the Soviet authorities that had seized power in the Don territory in January–February of that year and executed the Don ataman, A. M. Nazarov. The nucleus of the army was the Cossack partisan detachment of General P. Kh. Popov, which had refused to join the Volunteer Army on its First Kuban (Ice) March and remained in the Don territory (undertaking its own “Steppe March” to avoid the encroaching Bolsheviks). By late April 1918, the army consisted of some 6,000 fighters, with 30 field guns, divided into seven infantry and two cavalry regiments. From 11 April 1918, it consisted of three groups: the Southern (under Colonel S. V. Denisov), the Northern (the former Steppe Detachment, under Lieutenant Colonel E. F. Semiletov), and the Zadonskaia Group (under Major General P. T. Semenov and Colonel I. F. Bykadorov).

By the end of the summer of 1918, some 57,000 Don Cossacks were under arms, many of them supplied, in exchange for foodstuffs, by the forces of the Austro–German intervention, with whom the new Host ataman, General P. N. Krasnov, had entered into diplomatic relations. That relationship naturally soured the Don Army’s relations with the pro-Allied Volunteers, but the fact of the matter was that the Don Army had severed Red communications with the North Caucasus, enabling the Whites there to drive Soviet forces from the region. By January 1919, when the Don Army was united with the Volunteer Army in the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), its complement was approaching 50,000, with 153 field guns and almost 6,000 machine guns. At this point, the Don Army was reorganized into the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Army Groups (joined by a 4th Army Group on 28 June 1919). In that formation, it participated in the AFSR’s Moscow offensive of the summer of 1919, delivering crushing blows to the 8th Red Army and the 9th Red Army and driving Soviet forces from the entire Don region by the end of June. By October 1919, its complement was 25,834 infantry, 24,689 cavalry, 1,343 sappers, 1,077 field guns, 212 heavy guns, six aircraft, seven armored trains, four tanks, and four armored cars.

Following the collapse of the AFSR and its forces’ retreat into the North Caucasus, in late March 1920 a much-reduced Don Corps was evacuated from Novocherkassk to Crimea, where it was incorporated into the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel. The fate of the Don Army in the civil wars forms the central theme of M. A. Sholokhov’s epic novel, Tikhii Don (“The Quiet Don,” usually known in English as Quiet Flows the Don).

Commanders in chief of the Don Army were Major General I. A. Poliakov (3–12 April 1918); Major General P. Kh. Popov (12 April 12–5 May 1918); Major General S. V. Denisov (5 May 1918–2 February 1919); and Lieutenant General V. I. Sidorin (2 February 1919–14 March 1920). Its chiefs of staff were Major General S. V. Denisov (3–12 April 12; 1918); Colonel V. I. Sidorin (12 April–5 May 1918); Colonel I. A. Poliakov (5 May 1918–2 February 1919); and General A. K. Kelchevskii (2 February 1919–14 March 1920).

DON CIVIL COUNCIL. This body was established at Novocherkassk in December 1917, as a military government for the Don region and as a means of coordinating the anti-Bolshevik activities of the Whites (chiefly the Volunteer Army) and the Don Cossack Host. At its head was a triumvirate, consisting of General M. V. Alekseev (responsible for financial affairs, internal affairs, and foreign policy), General L. G. Kornilov (military affairs of the Volunteers), and Ataman A. M. Kaledin (Don Cossack affairs). Other members included Generals I. P. Romanovskii and A. S. Kukomskii; the Kadets M. M. Fedorov, G. N. Trubetskoi, and A. S. Beletskii; General M. P. Bogaevskii and P. N. Ageev (a rightist member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries); as well as B. V. Savinkov and P. B. Struve. Its political program (the “Kornilov constitution”) promised the preservation of democratic liberties, the denationalization of industry, land reform, the guarantee of the labor rights won by workers in 1917 (including the right to strike and freedom of assembly), the convocation of a constituent assembly, the restoration of the Russian Army on a volunteer basis, and the continuation of the war against the Central Powers. To spread word of this program, agents of the Don Civil Council were dispatched to central Russia, Siberia, and the North Caucasus. On 15 December 1917, the Council relocated to Rostov-on-Don. It ceased to operate following the capture of that city by Red Guards on 23–24 February 1918, but was subsequently resurrected in a different form as the Special Council of the commander in chief of the Volunteer Army.

DON COSSACK HOST. “The All-Great Host of the Don” (Vsevelikoye Voisko Donskoe), to give it its formal (and proudly archaic) title, which was the most numerous Cossack host of the Russian Empire, occupied territory in the Don Host oblast′ and was divided into 10 districts, containing 134 stanitsy and 1,728 khutora, with a central capital at Novocherkassk. It had begun to take shape as an organized community in the late 16th century, and by the time of the 1917 revolutions had a population of some 1,500,000. Due to the immigration of Russian and Ukrainian settlers into the Host territory from the middle of the 19th century onward, however, this amounted to only 42.3 percent of the local population by the revolutionary period, leading to considerable tensions over land between the Cossacks (who still owned 64.5 percent of the land) and the less privileged inogorodnie (“outsiders,” literally “those of a different settlement”). During the First World War, the Host had mobilized 100,000 men, around 6,000 of them of officer rank.

Following the February Revolution, in 1917 the Host reestablished its elected assembly, the Krug, and the institution of an elected Host Ataman and sought autonomy within a federal Russia, but following the October Revolution, on 7 November 1917, the Host elders declared the full independence of the Don, under Ataman A. K. Kaledin, and refused to recognize the Soviet government. This policy was challenged by younger and poorer elements of the Cossack population (and by non-Cossacks, particularly the booming Russian working-class populations of Rostov-on-Don and other cities) and by radicalized Cossack frontoviki, who organized a Don Cossack Military-Revolutionary Committee at Kamenskaia Station on 10 January 1918, proclaimed a Soviet government, and invited Red forces from the north to invade. Kaledin found that, in the end, most Cossacks were unwilling to fight for his government. Consequently, the Host saw its major centers occupied by Red forces in early 1918, as a Don Soviet Republic was proclaimed (23 March 1918). Many of the most active opponents of the Bolsheviks were executed at this time in a deliberate policy of de-Cossackization of the Don territory, which badly backfired on Moscow when it inspired a major uprising of the Don Cossacks in April 1918. Having driven Soviet forces out of most of the region by the end of that month, a Host Krug (“the Don Salvation Krug”) was held at Novocherkassk on 11 May 1918, which elected a new Host government and ataman (P. N. Krasnov) and proclaimed a new state (the Don Republic) with greatly expanded boundaries (stretching as far north as Khar′kov and as far west as Tsaritsyn, on the Volga).

During the summer of 1918, as it dispersed the scattered forces of the Don Soviet Republic, Krasnov’s government looked to the forces of the Austro–German intervention in Ukraine for assistance, eventually receiving some arms from the Germans. The pro-Allied Russian officers who had fled to the region in late 1917 to create the Volunteer Army, having been alienated by the Cossacks’ striving for independence and disappointed at their inability to resist the Bolsheviks, had left the Don for the Kuban in January 1918. But new (albeit frequently strained) links between the Whites and the Don Cossacks were forged at the end of the First World War, as the Central Powers withdrew from the region. Relations between the Whites and the Don Cossacks improved after Krasnov resigned as ataman in February 1919, to be replaced as Host ataman by General A. P. Bogaevskii, whose policy rested on cooperation with the Whites. Thereafter, although the Whites continued to criticize them for their lack of discipline and their tendency toward separatism, Don Cossacks continued to feature prominently in the ranks of the anti-Bolshevik forces in South Russia in 1919, especially the Don Army and the Armed Forces of South Russia, and in 1920 played an important role also in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel in Crimea. Pro-Bolshevik Don Cossacks were also prominent in the Red Army, however, particularly in the 1st Cavalry Army, which was one of the forces that captured the Don region for Soviet rule in early 1920, at which point the Host was proclaimed to be disbanded and subjected to further rounds of de-Cossackization by the Soviet authorities. However, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the Don Cossack Host was formally resurrected in the late 1980s.

The atamans of the Don Cossack Host during the revolutionary period were General A. M. Kaledin (17 June 1917–29 January 1918); Major General A. M. Nazarov (30 January–18 February 1918); General P. N. Krasnov (3 May 1918–6 February 1919); and General A. P. Bogaevskii (6 February 1919–1934).

DONETSK-KRYVOI ROG SOVIET REPUBLIC. This short-lived polity, led by F. A. Artem, had its capital at Khar′kov (and later Lugansk) and claimed control over the regions of Khar′kov, Donetsk, Sumy, Ekaterinoslav, Kherson, and part of the Don territory. It was proclaimed at a congress of soviets at Khar′kov on 27–30 January 1918 and was intended (by its chiefly Russian or Russified-Ukrainian founders) to be a rival to the authority of the Ukrainian National Republic, but its creation was opposed by Moscow and by many Ukrainian Bolsheviks, such as Mykola Skrypnyk, as being divisive. Eventually, the Republic bowed to this pressure and, at the Second All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets at Ekaterinoslav (17–19 March 1918), it was abolished. Its leaders then joined the Moscow-approved Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine.

DONETS RED ARMY. This Red military formation was created in March 1918, to defend the recently established Donets-Kryvoi Rog Soviet Republic from the forces of the Austro–German intervention, by an order of the commander of Soviet forces in the region, V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko. It numbered some 8,500 men and included in its complement elements of the former 8th Army of the Imperial Russian Army (previously deployed in Romania during the First World War) and various local Red Guards units. It engaged with German forces along the River Oskol and the Northern Donets and, from 18 April 1918, battled them also around Iziumo and then Lugansk before merging with the 5th Red Army in late April 1918.

Commanders of the Donets Red Army were A. I. Gekker (from 27 March 1918); P. I. Baranov (from 7 April 1918); and A. S. Kusser (from 20 April 1918).

DON REPUBLIC. This was the formal name of the anti-Bolshevik state established on the territory of the Don Cossack Host following the anti-Soviet uprising there during the spring of 1918. The independence of the Don Republic was proclaimed by an extraordinary Host Krug (known as the “Don Salvation Krug”) on 18 May 1918, after an initial attempt to establish a Don Republic proclaimed on 7 November 1917 had been stymied when Red Guards overran the Don region in January 1918 and established the Don Soviet Republic.

The Don Republic claimed authority over the Don territory (divided into 10 okrugi), with its capital at Novocherkassk, and in 1918 sought the assistance of Germany in its struggle against the Bolsheviks (and in the annexation of territories to the north of the Host territory, including Tsaritsyn and Khar′kov). However, following the armistice of November 1918, the Don Republic was reconciled with the (pro-Allied) White forces of General A. I. Denikin and contributed many forces to the Armed Forces of South Russia, although the issue of the region’s autonomy remained a thorny one.

The heads of the Don Republic were the Don Cossack atamans P. N. Krasnov (18 May 1918–6 February 1919) and A. P. Bogaevskii (from 6 February 1919).

DONSKOI, BORIS MIKHAILOVICH (1894/1896–10 August 1918). The Russian revolutionary and assassin B. M. Donskoi was born at Gladkie Vyselki in Riabinsk guberniia into a peasant family of Old Believers and attended the village school. He was mobilized in 1915 and served on a minelayer with the Baltic Fleet, but was soon arrested by the tsarist authorities for organizing a protest against service conditions for the sailors. He was freed following the February Revolution and in 1917 was a prominent Leftist member of the Kronshtadt Soviet and the local committee of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, having joined that party in 1916. In August 1917, at the height of the Kornilov affair, he led a detachment of sailors defending Petrograd against the advance of counterrevolutionary forces.

During the October Revolution, Donskoi was active as a commissar at Fort Ino (on the northern shore of the Gulf of Finland) and around Pulkovo (south of Petrograd) during the defeat of the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising. Having affiliated himself with the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries, Donskoi strongly opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), and after it was signed, on the instructions of the All-Russian Terrorist Organization of the Left-SRs, moved to Kiev to organize a terrorist cell to combat the forces of the Austro–German intervention in Ukraine. On 30 July 1918, it was Donskoi who assassinated (with a bomb) the commander of German forces in Kiev, General Herman von Eichhorn. He was immediately apprehended and was subsequently sentenced to death by a German military field court and executed.

DON SOVIET REPUBLIC. This polity, covering parts of the Don territory and Ekaterinoslav guberniia, with its capital at Rostov-on-Don, existed from 23 March to 8 May 1918, following the expulsion from the region of the Volunteer Army and those elements of the Don Cossack Host loyal to Ataman A. M. Kaledin. On 9–14 April 1918, a regional congress of soviets elected a Central Executive Committee (of 26 Bolsheviks and 24 members of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries), which formed a Sovnarkom led by F. G. Podtelkov. An Extraordinary Staff, under G. K. Ordzhonikidze, was also created to run the military affairs of the new republic. However, the food requisitions and executions of alleged “counterrevolutionaries” ordered by the regime soon destroyed its popularity, and it also faced a general uprising of the Don Cossacks in April 1918, as well as the arrival in the region beginning 1 May 1918 of forces of the Austro–German intervention, as a consequence of the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). Following the capture of Rostov by the forces of Ataman P. N. Krasnov and the Germans’ entry into that city on 6 May 1918, the leaders of the Don Soviet Republic fled to Tsaritsyn (although Podtelkov was captured by Don Cossack forces and executed), and power in the region passed to the Cossacks’ Don Republic.

DOROSHENKO, DMYTRO VANOVICH (27 March 1882–19 March 1951). A historian who was active in Ukrainian politics in the civil-war era, D. V. Doroshenko was born at Vil′na into a family that had provided Ukraine with two Hetmans during the 17th century (Mykhailo and Petro Doroshenko). He was educated at the universities of Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and Kiev and, prior to the First World War, was a member of the Society of Ukrainian Progressives. He was a prominent contributor to Ukrainian journals of a liberal-nationalist stamp and from 1910 to 1913 edited the periodical Dniprovi khvyli (“The Waves of the Dnepr”). During the world war, he was active in Zemgor in Russian-occupied Galicia and Bukovina. Following the February Revolution, he joined the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Federalists and, from April 1917, was a member of the Ukrainian Central Rada. He was also named commissar of Galicia and Bukovina by the Provisional Government in April 1917. When Russian forces withdrew from those regions in the summer of 1917, Doroshenko became commissar of Chernigov guberniia, having declined the offer to participate in the Rada’s General Secretariat because of political differences with the Leftist Mykhailo Hrushevsky.

Following the rise to power in Ukraine of P. P. Skoropadskii in April 1918, Doroshenko returned to Kiev to serve as minister of foreign affairs (20 May–14 November 1918) in the government of the Hetman’s Ukrainian State (for which he was expelled from the Socialists-Federalists). In that capacity, he attempted, but failed, to act as an intermediary between Skoropadskii and the socialist leaders of the Ukrainian National Republic. He had no more success in his efforts to garner international recognition of Ukrainian statehood and was in conflict with Russophile elements within the Hetman’s government, who envisaged not independence but a future union with a non-Bolshevik Russia. He resigned shortly before the collapse of the Skoropadskii regime in December 1918 and became a lecturer at the recently established Kamianets-Podilskyi Ukrainian State University.

Doroshenko emigrated in 1920, becoming professor of history at the Ukrainian Free University in Prague (1921–1951) and head of the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Berlin (1926–1931). In 1945, he fled to western Germany, and in 1947 he moved to Canada, where he taught history and literature at Saint Andrew’s College in Winnipeg and was active as the founding president of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Canada. He is now chiefly remembered as a leading proponent of the conservative, statist school in Ukrainian historiography and as the author of more than 1,000 published works on Ukrainian history and culture.

Dowbor/dowbór-MuŚnicki, Józef (dovbor-musnitskii, iosif romanovich) (25 October 1867–28 October 1937). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1904), colonel (6 December 1908), major general (12 August 1914), lieutenant general (5 May 1917), general of arms (Generał broni, Polish Army, 1920). The leader of one of the first armed risings against Soviet power, Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki was born into a noble family at Gabrov, Sandomir uezd (now in województwo świętokrzyskie in Poland) and was a graduate of the 2nd Constantine School (1888) and the Academy of the General Staff (1902). He was a participant in the Russo–Japanese War (as a staff officer with the 1st Siberian Army Corps, 3 February 1904–11 September 1906) and during the First World War rose to the command of the 123rd Infantry Division (25 February 1916–1 January 1917). He was then made chief of staff of the 1st Army (from 1 January 1917), then commander of the 38th Army Corps (from 28 April 1917). In August 1917, he was placed in command of the 1st Polish Corps, established by the Provisional Government in Belorussia, and in February 1918 led that force in a major uprising against Soviet power, the Dowbor-Muśnicki uprising.

In May 1918, at the insistence of the Germans, Dowbor-Muśnicki formally dissolved his Corps and retired with it into Poland. There, he soon adopted Polish citizenship (November 1918) and in January 1919 was named main commander in chief of the Polish Army by the Supreme People’s Council (the provisional government of newly independent Poland). This was despite his political rivalries with Józef Piłsudski, whose pro-Austrian policies Dowbor-Muśnicki abhorred. He then set about building the Polish Army around the nucleus of the resurrected 1st Corps and, in early 1919, led its campaigns around Poznań over territories disputed between Poland and Germany (the “Greater Poland Uprising”). It was for these feats that, in May 1919, he was promoted to Generał broni, which at that time was the highest rank in the Polish Army. Upon the outbreak of the Soviet–Polish War, he resigned from his post and in March 1920 retired from the service.

Dowbor-Muśnicki subsequently avoided involvement in Polish politics and military affairs, although he strongly opposed Piłsudski’s coup in 1926, and concentrated on writing his memoirs at his home at Batorów, near Poznań. He died of a heart attack there in 1937, and is buried in the local cemetery. One of his daughters, Janina Lewandowska, an army pilot, was the only woman killed by the NKVD during the Katyn massacre in 1940.

Dowbor-Muśnicki upRISING. One of the first armed challenges to Soviet power (although far less well-known than the later, somewhat analogous revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion), this uprising centered on the 1st Polish Corps of the Russian Army and was named after the corps’ commander, General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki.

The 1st Polish Corps, numbering some 30,000 men and divided into three infantry divisions with cavalry and artillery support, was formed in August 1917, at the initiative of the Chief Polish Military Committee in Petrograd, from Poles inhabiting territory of the Russian Empire. Stationed in Belorussia, it was intended to protect Polish-inhabited areas both in Russia and in the independent Polish state that had been newly recognized by the Provisional Government. Following the October Revolution and the subsequent armistice signed between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers (1 December 1917), Dowbor-Muśnicki declared his intention that the 1st Corps should remain loyal to the Allied cause and on 12 January 1918 refused an order from the Soviet high command to disband his force. This led immediately to an armed clashed between the Poles and pro-Bolshevik units of the Latvian Riflemen. Initially, the 1st Corps enjoyed some success, but by the end of January, following heavy fighting around Minsk, Vitebsk, and elsewhere, the Latvians’ commander, Colonel Ioakim Vācietis, had forced the Poles to retreat to Bobruisk and Slutsk, where they were quickly surrounded by German Ober Ost forces. When, however, in mid-February the Germans resumed their advance into Russia, in the aftermath of the rupture of peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, the 1st Corps was incorporated (alongside units loyal to the putative Belarussian People’s Republic) into the German forces as an auxiliary unit and played a leading role during the Eleven-Days’ War in the capture of Minsk (18 February 1918), an event of enormous significance in persuading a majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee to accept the signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). Following the signing of the treaty, the Polish corps remained in Belorussia for some months, performing police duties under the German authorities, before being disbanded over the period May–July 1918, when its usefulness to the Germans had diminished. The majority of the men of the corps were then allowed passage into Poland, where they later regrouped as the 1st Polish Army Corps, again under Dowbor-Muśnicki. The corps became the nucleus of the new Polish Army and played major roles in various actions over the coming years, including the Soviet–Polish War.

Dragomirov, abram Mikhailovich (21 April 1868–9 December 1955). Colonel (1902), major general (21 May 1912), lieutenant general (16 August 1914), general of cavalry (August 1916). A close advisor to the successive leaders of White forces in South Russia, A. M. Dragomirov (the son of the military theorist General M. I. Dragomirov, 1830–1905, and a scion of the nobility of Chernigov guberniia) was a graduate of the Corps of Pages (1887) and the Academy of the General Staff (1893) and subsequently joined the elite Semenovskii Life Guards Regiment. After postings including chief of staff of the 7th cavalry Division (4 December 1902–24 February 1903), chief of staff of the 10th Cavalry Division (24 February 1903–23 February 1920), commander of the 9th Hussar (Kiev) regiment (23 February 1920–24 May 1912), commander of the Kovno fortress (24 May–7 August 1912), and commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 9th Cavalry Division (7 August–27 November 1912), he entered the First World War as commander (from 27 November 1912) of the 2nd Independent Cavalry Brigade (from November 1914 a Corps). During the First World War, Dragomirov served as commander of the 9th Army Corps (from 6 April 1915) and commander of the 5th Army (from 14 August 1916) and from 29 April 1917 was commander of the Northern Front. However, he was removed from his command early the following month, when at a meeting in the Winter Palace he voiced criticism of the Provisional Government’s attitude to discipline in the army (especially A. F. Kerensky’s “Declaration on Soldiers’ Rights” of 11 May 1917), and from 31 May 1917 he was placed at the disposal of the Ministry of War.

Following the October Revolution, Dragomirov joined the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army on the Don in late 1917, becoming assistant commander (20 August–26 September 1918) to General M. V. Alekseev and then, following Alekseev’s death, chairman of the Special Council (26 September 1918–October 1919), in which capacity he led the civil administration of General A. I. Denikin, the main commander in chief of the Armed Forces of South Russia. He was at the same time on the staff of the main commander in chief, with the rank of assistant to Denikin (August 1918–May 1919), and following a diplomatic mission to the Paris Peace Conference, during the Whites’ offensive of the summer of 1919 served as governor of Khar′kov and commander of forces of the Khar′kov region (June–August 1919) and then commander of forces of the Kiev region (September–November 1919). Dragomirov then concentrated on staff work and was responsible for overseeing relations with the Allied military missions in South Russia (November 1919–May 1920). He also commanded the disastrous evacuation of Novorossiisk by Denikin’s forces, before (in March 1920) chairing the military council summoned by Denikin to nominate his successor. Subsequently, under General P. N. Wrangel, he served as a member of the staff of the main commander in chief of the Russian Army (April–November 1920).

Having been evacuated from Crimea with Wrangel’s forces in November 1920, Dragomirov lived in emigration in Serbia and later (from 1931) in France. In 1934, he returned to Serbia before moving on to Austria. He was active in ROVS from its foundation and served as an advisor to both Wrangel and General E. K. Miller. During the Second World War, Dragomirov was a supporter of General A. A. Vlasov’s collaborationist Russian Liberation Army, being assigned to its reserve in 1945. In 1950, he returned to France, passing away at Gagny, eastern Paris, five years later. He was buried in the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.

Dratsenko, Daniil Pavlovich (8 December 1876–1945?). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1914), colonel (6 December 1915), major general (1917), lieutenant general (1919). A leading military figure in the White movement in South Russia, D. P. Dratsenko was of lower middle-class origins and was a graduate of the Odessa Infantry Officer School (1897) and the Academy of the General Staff (1908). He saw action and was wounded in the Russo–Japanese War and during the First World War served with distinction on the Caucasian Front, as a senior commissioned officer (26 November 1912–6 December 1914), chief of the Reconnaissance Section of the Field Staff of the Caucasian Front (from 6 December 1914), chief of staff of the 39th Infantry Division (from 5 March 1916), and commander of the 153rd (Baku) Infantry Regiment (from 5 April 1917), before returning to the main staff of the front in July 1917.

Following the October Revolution, Dratsenko soon joined the Whites, commanding a number of partisan formations in the North Caucasus (January 1918–March 1919) and around Astrakhan (March–September 1919) before being named as commander of the 1st Mounted Division (September 1919–March 1920) of the Armed Forces of South Russia. After a period serving as the representative of the Whites in Batumi, in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel he served as chief of staff to General S. G. Ulagai during the failed landings on the Taman peninsula of July–September 1920. He subsequently commanded Wrangel’s 2nd Army during its attempt to break out of Crimea into the northern Tauride (2 September–2 October 1920), but failed in his efforts to secure a bridgehead on the right bank of the Dnepr.

Dratsenko was evacuated from Crimea with the remains of Wrangel’s forces in November 1920, and after some months in Turkey settled into emigration at Zagreb from 1922. There, he was employed as a teacher with the Yugoslav Army and from April 1931 headed the local branch of ROVS. During the Second World War (from 1943), he commanded a regiment of General B. A. Shteifon’s collaborationist Russian Corps in the Balkans, battling against the partisan forces of Josip Tito. According to most sources, Dratsenko died in 1945, but his precise fate remains a mystery.

Drozdovskii, Mikhail Gordevich (7 October 1881–1 January 1919). Colonel (January 1917), major general (8 November 1918). One of the most revered of White commanders and the namesake of one of the colorful units of the Volunteer Army, M. G. Drozdovskii was the son of a general who had participated in the siege of Sevastopol′ during the Crimean War and was a graduate of the Vladimir (Kiev) Cadet Corps (1899), the Pavlovsk Military School (1901), and the Academy of the General Staff (1908). Having entered military service on 31 August 1899, he saw action in the Russo–Japanese War, as an ensign with the 34th (East Siberian) Infantry Regiment (from 19 October 1904), and subsequently served as a staff officer with the Warsaw Military District before taking command of a company of the Volynskii Life Guards (12 September 1908–4 November 1910). He then served on the staff of the Amur Military District (26 November 1910–26 November 1911) before being named assistant senior adjutant on the staff of the Warsaw Military District (from 26 November 1911). From 13 June to 3 October 1913, he studied at the military aviation school at Sevastopol′. Upon the outbreak of the First World War, Drozdovskii was assigned to the staff of the North-West Front (from 18 July 1914) and from 3 September 1914 served on the staff of the 27th Army Corps. He subsequently served as a staff officer with the 26th Army Corps (from 23 December 1914); as chief of staff of the 64th Infantry Division (from 14 April 1915); and following a bout of illness (from September 1915), acting chief of staff of the 26th Army Corps (22 October–10 November 1915 and 6–16 January 1916). He was badly injured on the Romanian Front in September 1916, but returned to active service there as commander of the 15th Infantry Division (January–April 1917) and then commander of the 60th Infantry Regiment (from 24 April 1917).

In November 1917, Drozdovskii was named commander of the 14th Infantry Division, but did not take up the post. Instead, in the wake of the October Revolution, he left the front at Jassy (Iaşi) and joined the volunteer detachments that had been formed by General D. G. Shcherbachev with the aim of marching to join the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army on the Don. In the end, Drozdovskii gathered his own, 1,000-strong 1st (Independent) Brigade of officer-volunteers from the Romanian Front, which left Jassy on 26 February 1918 and headed for the Don. Almost two months later, the brigade reached Rostov-on-Don, more than 1,000 miles to the east, and helped drive Red forces from the town (21 April 1918). By now more than 2,000 strong, the detachment then assisted forces of the Don Cossack Host in capturing Novocherkassk before merging with the Volunteer Army at Mechetinsk Station (27 May 1918) to become the 3rd Officers’ Infantry Division.

Drozdovskii remained in command of the unit and participated in the Second Kuban March, playing a pivotal role in clearing the Kuban and the North Caucasus of Red forces. He was badly wounded in the leg near Stavropol′ on 31 October 1918 and died of gangrene poisoning at Rostov on 1 January 1919. (Subsequently, numerous rumors surfaced that he had either been deliberately shot by a supporter of General I. P. Romanovskii, with whom he had clashed frequently, or that he could have been saved but was deliberately allowed to die by his doctors, who were acting on Romanovskii’s orders.) Thereafter, his division became officially known as the 3rd General Drozdovskii Infantry Division (or, more familiarly, as the Drozdovtsy). His body was originally interned in the Ekaterinodar Cathedral, but was removed and taken to Crimea by the commanders of the Drozdovtsy when White forces evacuated the Kuban in February 1920. Drozdovskii was then secretly reburied; only six of the commanding staff of his unit were allowed to know the location of the grave, to protect it from desecration at the hands of the Bolsheviks.

DROZDOVTSY. This was the name given to one line of the colorful units of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) in honor of General M. G. Drozdovskii. The unit, initially and formally the 2nd Officers’ Rifle Regiment of General Drozdovskii, was created in early May 1918 at Novocherkassk, as an officers’ regiment, from elements of the former Colonel Drozdovskii Detachment who had accompanied their namesake in his trek from the Romanian Front to the Don. It was incorporated into the 3rd Infantry Division of the Volunteer Army—which subsequently became the 3rd Infantry (Drozdovskii) Division—and participated in the Second Kuban March. The unit took Drozdovskii’s name on 4 January 1919, after his death at Rostov three days earlier, and in the AFSR’s advance of the summer of 1919 it played a notable part in the capture of Khar′kov. On 25 August 1919, the unit was renamed the 1st Officers’ Rifle Regiment of General Drozdovskii, and from 14 October 1919 it was incorporated into a Drozdovskii Division. The unit suffered heavy casualties over the winter of 1919–1920, as the AFSR was driven back into the Kuban, but following its evacuation to the Crimea, its remnants formed the backbone of the Drozdovskii Rifle Division (founded 28 April 1920, as the Drozdovskii Riflemen) of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel. It is estimated that in the course of the civil wars 15,000 Drozdovtsy were killed and 15,000 wounded.

Drozdovtsy infantrymen wore a forage cap with a crimson crown and a white band and crimson epaulettes emblazoned with a yellow letter “D.” Drozdovtsy riflemen wore a cap with a crimson crown and a black band and crimson epaulettes emblazoned with a yellow letter “D.” The predominance of crimson accounts for their nickname, “The Raspberries.”

Commanders of the Drozdovtsy were Major-General V. V. Semenov (to 21 April 1918); Colonel M. A. Zherbak-Rusanovich (22 April–23 June 1918); Colonel V. K. Vitkovskii (24 June 1918–January 1919); Colonel K. A. Kel′ner (from 18 January 1919); Colonel V. A. Rummel′ (to 11 October 1919); Colonel A. V. Turkul (11 October 1919–August 1920); Colonel V. Mel′nikov (August–23 September 1920); and Colonel (later Major General) Chesnakov (from 23 September 1920).

DUCHY OF COURLAND AND SEMIGALLIA. See COURLAND AND SEMIGALLIA, DUCHY OF.

DUKES, PAUL HENRY (10 February 1889–27 August 1967). Paul Dukes, the British spy codenamed “ST-25,” was born at Bridgewater in Somerset, southwest England, the son of a Congregationalist minister, and was educated at the Congregationalist Caterham School in Surrey. After working as a language teacher at Rotterdam, Warsaw, and Riga, Dukes, who was a gifted pianist, moved to Petrograd in 1910 to study at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire and to work at the Mariinskii Theater. During the First World War, having been declared unfit for active service (due to a heart defect), he was employed by the Anglo–Russian Bureau, a British government agency run by the novelist Hugh Walpole that monitored conditions in Russia. He returned to London in June 1917 to work at the Foreign Office, made a brief (secret) visit to Russia in December 1917, and was then recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (later MI6).

Dukes returned (again in secret) to Petrograd in November 1918, becoming Britain’s most active agent in the city and working to facilitate the escape from Red hands of numerous anti-Bolsheviks, whom he ferried across the border into Finland. According to some accounts, Dukes managed to infiltrate a number of Soviet institutions, including the RKP(b), the Komintern, the Red Army, and (according to his own version of events) even the Cheka. He returned to Britain in 1920, was knighted (Knight Commander of the British Empire)—he remains the only member of the British intelligence services to be knighted for espionage work—and subsequently retired from MI6. He went on to become a successful author, memoirist, and public speaker and, as one who had met the famous spiritualist and healer George Gurdjieff, an advocate of yoga (about which he wrote and published extensively), hypnosis, and psychic healing. In 1948, Dukes gave the first demonstration of yoga to be presented on British television, and in 1950 he presented a four-part series on the subject on the BBC. He died at Cape Town, South Africa.

Dukhonin, Nikolai Nikolaevich (1 December 1876–20 November 1917). Colonel (6 December 1911), major general (6 December 1915), lieutenant general (4 August 1917). The last commander in chief of the Imperial Russian Army and one of the first victims of the “Russian” Civil Wars, N. N. Dukhonin was born into a noble family in Smolensk guberniia; was a graduate of the Vladimir Kadet Corps in Kiev (1894), the Third Alexander Military School (1896), and the Academy of the General Staff (1902); and was a member of the Lithuanian Life Guards Regiment. Following service as an intelligence officer in the Kiev Military District, during the First World War he commanded the 165th Lutsk Infantry Regiment (1914–December 1915) before playing a leading role in the Brusilov Offensive, as, successively, assistant quartermaster (from 22 December 1915), quartermaster general (from 5 May 1916), and chief of staff (from 29 May 1916) of the South-West Front. He subsequently served as chief of staff of the Western Front (4 August–October 1917); in the wake of the removal of senior generals suspected of plotting against the Provisional Government during the Kornilov affair, he replaced General M. V. Alekseev as chief of staff to the supreme commander in chief, A. F. Kerensky (10 September–1 November 1917).

Following the October Revolution and Kerensky’s flight from Petrograd, Dukhonin became (on Kerensky’s order) main commander in chief of the Russian Army (from 1 November 1917). In that capacity, he supported the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising against Soviet power; refused to obey the orders of Sovnarkom to open armistice negotiations with the Central Powers; and ordered the release from prison at Bykhov of Generals L. G. Kornilov, A. I. Denikin, A. S. Lukomskii, S. L. Markov, and others who had been incarcerated for their parts in the Kornilov affair. Dukhonin was lynched at Mogilev station by revolutionary troops (according to some accounts, sailors from the entourage of N. V. Krylenko, who had journeyed to Mogilev to relieve Dukhonin of his post, as ordered by the Soviet government on 9 November 1917). He was buried in the Luk′ianovsk military cemetery at Kiev.

Dulatuli (dulatov), Mirjaqip (25 November 1885–5 October 1935). One of the most influential Kazakh nationalists and proponents of Jadidism of the revolutionary era, Mirjaqip Dulatuli was born into an aristocratic family at Kostanai, in northern Kazakhstan, and was educated at the famous Galiye madrassa at Ufa and the Gaurgan Russo–Kazakh School. He moved to St. Petersburg in 1907, and prior to the revolution was published widely as a journalist and as a poet, the appearance in 1909 of his collected poems Oyan Kazakh (“Awake, Kazakh!”) gaining him a reputation as both a militant nationalist and a consummately skilled writer (even though the book was almost immediately banned by the tsarist authorities). In 1911, he was arrested for his political activities and spent 18 months in prison. Together with his mentors, Ahmed Baytursynov and Ali-khan Bukeykhanov, in early 1917 Dulatuli was one of the founders of Alash Orda and, like them, having failed to sustain an independent Kazakh government, subsequently accommodated himself to the Soviet regime.

Dulatuli joined the RKP(b) in 1919 and subsequently worked as a professor at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow and at other educational institutions, influencing a generation of Kazakh intellectuals. However, his alleged “bourgeois nationalism” caused him endless problems with the Soviet authorities, and he was detained by the Cheka (and its successors) on numerous occasions. He was arrested for the final time on 29 December 1928, and in 1931 was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. He was sent to the Solovki camp in the White Sea and was shot at Sosnovets Station, Karelia, on 5 October 1935. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1988.

Dumenko, Boris Mokeevich (1888–11 May 1920). Vakhmistr (cavalry sergeant major, 1917). The leader of one of the first Red partisan detachments, B. M. Dumenko was born into a Ukrainian peasant family at the Khomutets-Cossack khutor in the territory of the Don Cossack Host and served in artillery units in the First World War. He returned to his native region in early 1918, as the Russian Army collapsed, and put his detachment together from non-Cossack (inogorodnie) elements at the Veselo khutor to challenge Don Cossack domination of his home region.

Dumenko subsequently commanded the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Independent Peasant Socialist Regiment (from April 1918), the 1st Peasant Cavalry Socialist Regiment (from 10 June 1918), the 1st Don Cavalry Brigade (from 25 September 1918), the 1st Independent Cavalry Division of the 10th Red Army (from 4 December 1918), and the 4th Cavalry Division (from 30 January 1919) and was assistant chief of staff for cavalry of the 10th Red Army (from 10 April 1919). He was badly wounded in the chest on 10 April 1919, but recovered to command a Free Cavalry Corps and in December 1919 joined the RKP(b). In 1919, he was also awarded the Order of the Red Banner, receiving it from L. D. Trotsky personally, as well as receiving the personal congratulations of V. I. Lenin for the victories of his corps. In January 1920, he played a leading role in driving the Whites from Novocherkassk; indeed, he can be counted as among the most able cavalry commanders in the Red Army and has been called “the first saber of the republic.” However, on 23 February 1920 he was suddenly removed from his post and arrested, charged with being involved in the murder of a military commissar attached to his force (V. N. Mikeladze) and of plotting an anti-Soviet rebellion. The charges were almost certainly based on false evidence, but Dumenko was found guilty by a military tribunal and was shot at the Bratsk Cemetery, Rostov-on-Don, on 11 May 1920. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1964, and streets in Novocherkassk, Rostov-on Don, and Krasnodar were among the many sites subsequently named or renamed in his honor. He has since been held up as a martyr of the civil wars and as a man more deserving of respect than his cavalry colleague, S. M. Budennyi, and there are statues of him at Volgodonsk and elsewhere.

Dundić, Aleksa (Alejo, OLEKO, “Ivan”) (13 April 1896–8 July 1920). The ethnicity of Aleksa Dundić, a much eulogized Red hero of the civil wars and the only Yugoslav to win an Order of the Red Banner, is a matter of dispute—he has been claimed by both Croats and Serbs (who maintain that his real name was Milutin Čolić)—but it is known that he was born in 1896 into a peasant family in the village of Grabovac, in Dalmatia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). At the age of 12, he emigrated to South America, where he worked as a shepherd for four years in Brazil and Argentina before returning home to Europe. During the First World War, he was mobilized into the Austrian Army, but in May 1916, when serving as an NCO with the 70th Infantry Regiment, was captured by the Russians near Lutsk. He then volunteered for service with the Serbian Volunteer Corps in Russia and was assigned to its 1st Division at Odessa.

Having joined the Bolsheviks following the February Revolution, Dundić participated in the actions of numerous detachments of Reds Guards and other partisan forces around Odessa from 1917 to 1918, before joining the Morozov-Donetsk division in the group of forces commanded by K. E. Voroshilov around Tsaritsyn. He then participated in the prolonged defense of that city against the attacks of the Don Army, as commander of a battalion of internationalists. From early 1919, he served in the Special Don-Caucasus Division and then in the 1st Cavalry Army as a deputy regimental commander and as a special aide to its commander, S. M. Budennyi. From June 1919, he was the deputy commander of the 36th Regiment of the 6th Cavalry Division. He was killed in action near Rovno, in Western Ukraine, during the opening stages of the Soviet–Polish War.

“Red Dundić” subsequently became a legendary figure in the Soviet popular memory of the civil wars, lauded for his bravery, his internationalism, his devotion to the revolutionary cause, and his skilled horsemanship. He was fêted in innumerable stories and songs and was the subject of the joint Soviet–Yugoslav feature film Oleko Dundich/Aleksa Dundić (dir. L. D. Lukov, 1958). Streets in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Lipetsk, Novosibirsk, Voronezh, Rovno, Chernigov, and elsewhere still bear his name. However, the memorial to Dundić in Rovno’s Shevchenko Park, where he is buried, was badly vandalized in 2002.

Dunsterforce. Named after its commander, General L. C. Dunsterville, this expeditionary force of almost 1,000 elite British, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand troops that had been drawn from both the Mesopotamian and Western Fronts was formed from 14 January 1918. Its purpose was to defend the route to India and Afghanistan from potential invasion by Austro–German and Bolshevik forces, as well as from liberated prisoners of war, in the wake of the December 1917 armistice between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers. In the short term it was reasoned in London that, if an Eastern Front was to be restored, then all shipping on the Caspian should be under British control, and to this end Baku should be taken and defended against the Turks. In the longer term, it was hoped that Dunsterforce might become the nucleus of a much larger army to be raised from local volunteers in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. Dunsterville therefore arrived in Baghdad on 18 January 1918, with orders to proceed via Baku to Tiflis, as the chief British military plenipotentiary to the Transcaucasian Federation.

By the time the force had been mustered at Hamadan, moved 300 miles across Persia by armored vehicle, evaded pro-Soviet forces around Enzeli, and been shipped to Baku, however, it was 4 August 1918. By then, the Transcaucasian Federation had collapsed, to be replaced at Baku by the socialist Central Caspian Dictatorship; Armenians and Azeris at Baku were massacring each other; the German Caucasian Expedition was in Tiflis; and the Turkish Army of Islam was at the gates of the Baku. After a brief siege, during which Dunsterforce fought alongside chiefly Armenian and Russian forces, some of them pro-Bolshevik, the force withdrew from Baku on 14–15 September 1918. Subsequently, 180 of the members of Dunsterforce were listed as dead or missing. Many of the survivors returned to Baku as an army of occupation in November 1918.

Dunsterville, Lionel Charles (9 November 1865–1946). Major general (1918). The British general who commanded Dunsterforce in 1918, Dunsterville was commissioned as an officer in the British Army in 1884 and subsequently served with the Indian Army on the North-West frontier. He was a contemporary of Rudyard Kipling at the United Services College, and the character of Stalky in Kipling’s Stalky & Co. (1899) is supposedly based on him.

DUROV, BORIS ANDREEVICH (20 August 1879–3 August 1977). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1915), colonel (15 August 1917). The White officer B. A. Durov was born into a military family (part of the nobility of Ufa guberniia) and was raised in St. Petersburg, where he graduated from the 2nd Cadet Corps and attended the Nicholas Engineering School and the Mikhail Artillery School. He was also a graduate of the Academy of the General Staff (1910). He entered military service on 3 September 1898 and saw action in the Russo–Japanese War with the 8th Siberian Mountain Battery. He received numerous postings thereafter, notably as assistant chief section commander on the staff of the Brest-Litovsk Fortress (26 November 1912–10 April 1914) and as errand officer with the staff of the Warsaw Military District (from 10 May 1914). During the First World War, Durov served as assistant section commander on an army staff on the Western Front (from 6 April 1915) and then moved to the Salonika Front, as chief of staff of the 4th Special Infantry Brigade (from 3 July 1916).

Following the October Revolution, Durov joined the Whites and made his way from Macedonia via Britain to North Russia, where he became deputy director of the war ministry of N. V. Chaikovskii’s Provisional Government of the Northern Region (August 1918), subsequently being promoted to director of that establishment (from 6 September 1918). Following the coup launched by Captain D. E. Chaplin against the Chaikovskii regime, Durov was named commander in chief of the Northern Army and, at the same time, governor-general of the Northern Region (18 September–3 November 1918). Having passed on that latter post to V. V. Marushevskii, Durov retired from military service in November 1918 and subsequently went into emigration in France. There, he was active in a number of émigré organizations and was also one of the founders of the Russian Gymnasium in Paris, where he taught mathematics, eventually becoming the school’s director (1931–1961). In 1941, he was arrested by the German occupying forces and spent some time in a prison camp at Compiègne. Durov died at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, where he is buried in the Russian cemetery.

Dutov, Aleksandr Il′ich (5 August 1879–7 March 1921). Colonel (September 1917), major general (25 July 1918), lieutenant general (21 September 1919). The most senior leader of the White movement in the southern Urals, A. I. Dutov was the son of an officer of the Orenburg Cossack Host from Syrdar′insk oblast′ and a graduate of the Orenburg Neploevskii Cadet Corps (1897), the Nicholas Cavalry School (1899), and the Academy of the General Staff (1908). Following service with the 5th Sappers’ Battalion (including a spell in the Far East during the Russo–Japanese War) and a period spent in various capacities at the Orenburg Cossack Officer School (1909–1912), during the First World War he rose to the command of the 1st Orenburg Cossack Regiment (March 1917) and distinguished himself in battle on the Romanian Front, where he was seriously wounded. In March 1917, he was elected chairman of the All-Russian Union of Cossack Hosts and on 5 September of that year was chosen as ataman of the Orenburg Cossacks and head of the Host government. He was also made commissar for provisions of Orenburg guberniia and Turgai oblast′ by the Provisional Government.

Having refused to recognize the October Revolution, in November 1917 Dutov led what became known as the Dutov Uprising against Soviet power in Orenburg and for the next eight months battled the Red force commanded by V. K. Bliukher across the province. In July 1918, the 7,000-strong Cossack force that he commanded finally drove the Red Army from Orenburg. Dutov was then confirmed as Orenburg’s commandant by both Komuch and the Ufa Directory (in the formation of which he played a leading role, as a member of the council of elders at the Ufa State Conference.) The city of Orenburg became Dutov’s base for the next year, as his army (now dubbed the Independent Orenburg Army) was incorporated into the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, although in the spring of 1919 he was formally removed from that command and from June to August of that year was employed on a special mission to the Far East (formally, as inspector of Cossack forces in that region) to combat Red partisans. On 21 September 1919, near Atbasar, he resumed command of a reformed but retreating Orenburg Army (based on elements of the Southern Army of General G. A. Belov). That month Dutov’s army was decisively defeated by Red forces near Aktiubinsk and was obliged to beat a hasty retreat into Central Asia, where its remnants subsequently merged with the White Semirech′e Army.

Dutov himself, based at Lepsinsk, was named governor-general of Semirech′e (October 1919–April 1920) by Ataman B. V. Annenkov of the Semirech′e Cossack Host. On 27 May 1920, traversing the Kara-sarik Pass (at an altitude of 19,000 feet), he crossed the border into Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang/Sinkiang) with his men and subsequently lived in Sai-dun. There, on 7 March 1921, he was assassinated in his office by Makhmud Khodzhamiarov (Khadzhamirov), an agent of the Cheka, apparently in a bungled attempt at a kidnapping. Dutov was buried at Sai-dun but, according to some accounts, his corpse was soon afterward disinterred and decapitated (presumably to provide proof of his death). The cemetery was destroyed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Dutov’s defeat in and flight from Semirech′e was the subject of the Soviet feature film Konets atamana (“End of an Ataman,” dir. Shaken Aimanov, 1970).

DUTOV UPRISING. This anti-Bolshevik uprising in the southern Urals was led by Colonel A. I. Dutov (Ataman of the Orenburg Cossack Host and head of the Orenburg Host government) over the period November 1917 to July 1918. On 14 November 1917, Dutov declared the Orenburg Cossacks to be at war with the Soviet government and that night arrested the leadership of the Orenburg Soviet and its Military-Revolutionary Committee. He then instituted a mobilization of Cossack forces, which, with the support of elements of the local Bashkir community, resulted in the formation of a 7,000-strong army by January 1918. The rebels soon captured Orenburg, Troitsk, and Verkhneural′sk, thereby severing railway communications between Soviet Russia and Siberia and Central Asia.

Soviet efforts to battle the uprising were coordinated by Sovnarkom’s extraordinary commissar in Central Asia, P. A. Kobozev, but he met with little success until the arrival of Red Guard forces from elsewhere (notably the Samara Group led by V. K. Bliukher). On 18 January 1918, Red forces drove the Cossacks out of Orenburg and back toward Verkhneural′sk, where a new mobilization resulted in a new threat to Orenburg. This was eventually repulsed by Bliukher, and the Cossacks retreated into the Turgai steppe, but the uprising of the Czechoslovak Legion in late May 1918 revivified the revolt, and Dutov’s forces were able to recapture Orenburg on 3 July 1918, forcing Bliukher’s men onto the Urals Army March. Dutov’s Orenburg Army then offered its support to Komuch and later to the Ufa Directory, before becoming a constituent part of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in November 1918.

Dybenko, Pavel Efimovich (16 February 1889–29 July 1938). A controversial Red commander of the civil-war years, P. E. Dybenko was born into a Ukrainian peasant family in Chernigov guberniia. Forcibly mobilized into the imperial Russian services in 1911, he became a sailor in the Baltic Fleet but was frequently imprisoned for revolutionary activities, having joined the Bolsheviks in 1912. In 1915, he was the ringleader of the mutiny on the battleship Imperator Pavel I.

In 1917, Dybenko headed the executive committee of the Baltic Fleet Soviet (Tsentrobalt) and from October 1917 to March 1918 was the first head of the People’s Commissariat for Naval Affairs. He played a leading role in the October Revolution, marshalling sailors of the Baltic Fleet to defend Petrograd against the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising, but in the spring of 1918 was disgraced and accused of cowardice in failing to prevent the German invasion of Narva. He was then expelled from the government and the Bolshevik Party but was unexpectedly found not guilty by a court martial in April 1918. During May 1918, he was active at Samara as a vocal opponent of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and was again lucky to escape imprisonment (some have detected the influence here of his wife, A. M. Kollontai, who was a member of the party Central Committee). Instead, he was assigned to military work in Ukraine, where in the summer of 1918 he was arrested by forces of the Austro–German intervention near Stavropol′ but was liberated in an exchange of prisoners. From December 1918, he was commander of the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Ukrainian Rifle Division and from January 1919 was group commander of forces directed at Ekaterinoslav and then Khar′kov on the Ukrainian Front. From May to July 1919, he commanded the Crimean Soviet Army and at the same time was people’s commissar for military and naval affairs and chairman of the Revvoensovet of the Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic; he was, in effect, dictator of Crimea and led a regime characterized by arbitrariness and violence against the local population, for which he was severely criticized in Moscow.

From October 1919, Dybenko was head of the 37th Rifle Division, from March 1920 commanded the 1st Caucasian Cavalry Division, and in June–July 1920 commanded the 2nd Stavropol′ (Blinov) Cavalry Division. From 1919 to 1922, he also taught at Red Military Academy. In 1922, his party membership was restored and he subsequently occupied several senior military and political posts, including membership in the Supreme Soviet and (1928–1938) command of the Central Asian, Volga, Siberian, and Leningrad Military Districts. In 1937, he was also part of the investigating commission that gathered evidence against senior military leaders of the Red Army who were suspected of treason and later shot (including M. N. Tukhachevskii, I. P. Uborevich, and I. E. Iakir). Early in 1938, Dybenko was removed from his Red Army posts and placed at the head of an industrial trust associated with the Gulag system. He was then arrested on 26 February 1938, charged with and found guilty of corruption and espionage, and sentenced to death on 29 July 1938 and immediately executed. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 16 May 1956.

Dybenko, who during his career had three times been awarded the Order of the Red Banner and was the bearer of two Orders of the Red Star, was subsequently commemorated by the naming of streets in his honor in Dnepropetrovsk, Donetsk, Khar′kov, Leningrad, Moscow, Samara, and Sevastopol′. At Simferopol′, in 1968, a memorial plaque to him was also unveiled (another can be found at Gatchina). Two metro stations also bear his name (in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the latter planned but not yet built), and two stamps bearing his likeness were issued in the USSR in 1969 and 1989.

Dzerozhinskii, Anton Fedorovich (3 January 1867–November 1939?). Colonel (21 October 1915), major general (7 June 1919), lieutenant general (12 October 1919). Born into a middle-class Polish family of Mogilev guberniia, the White military commander A. F. Dzerozhinskii volunteered for service in the Russian Army and studied at the Smolensk and Vil′na Infantry Schools (1888–1890). By the time of the Russo–Japanese War, he had risen to the rank of staff-captain and served on the staff of the main commander of Russian forces in Manchuria. During the First World War, he served on several fronts and was twice wounded.

Dzerozhinskii joined the Whites in early 1918, helping to organize the Pskov Volunteer Corps, which retreated into Estonia when the Red Army captured Pskov on 27 November 1918. In January 1919, on the orders of the commander of the Estonian Army, General Johan Laidoner, Dzerozhinskii replaced General von Nef as commander of the Northern Army Corps. Subsequently, in June 1919, he helped form and then led the 1st Rifle Division of the 2nd Corps of the North-West Army, which operated on the right flank of that force and captured Pskov (26 August 1918) and Luga (13 October 1919) before being transferred to the unsuccessful advance on Narva of the forces of General N. N. Iudenich during early November 1919. When the North-West Army was disarmed and interned by the Estonians in January 1920, Dzerozhinskii worked on a sanitary commission to look after the demobilized men and was later able to settle in Riga. Some sources have it that he returned to Poland in the 1930s and that he was killed at Warsaw shortly following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, but his precise fate is unknown.

Dzevaltovskii, Ignatii Leonovich. See Gintowt-Dziewałtowski, Ignacy.

DZHUNAID-KHAN. See Junaïd-khan (sedar, mohammed-kurban).

Dzierżyński, Feliks (30 August 1877–20 July 1926). The Polish revolutionary and inspiration and first head of the Soviet political police, “Iron Feliks” Dzierżyński was born at Oshmiansk uezd, Vilensk guberniia, in what is now Belarus. He was the son of a Polish nobleman, who taught physics and mathematics at the Taganrog Gymnasium before retiring to his estate near Ivianets. His mother, Helena Januszewska, was a member of a prominent Polish noble family. Dzierżyński was raised in an intensely Catholic and patriotic home environment, and it was intended that he would enter the priesthood. However, he became involved in radical student circles at the Vilnius Gymnasium (where one fellow pupil was Józef Piłsudski) and was expelled shortly before he was due to graduate in 1896.

The following year, on 29 June 1897, Dzierżyński was arrested by the tsarist police and was exiled for three years to Nolinsk, Viatka guberniia, as a member of the illegal Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (which he had joined in 1895) and for spreading socialist propaganda among workers at Kovno. This was the first of six arrests and three periods of exile in his prerevolutionary career. He escaped in August 1899 (the first of three escapes from Siberian exile) and returned to Warsaw, where in January 1900 he helped found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL). Despite his frequent incarcerations and the need for him mostly to live abroad (chiefly in Berlin) when at liberty, Dzierżyński was a permanent member of that party’s executive committee (from January 1900) and was responsible for SDKPiL’s ideological line (he was a disciple of Rosa Luxemburg) and for defining its relations with the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In July 1906, he joined the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), as the representative of SDKPiL, following the formal union of the two parties, but was again arrested by the tsarist authorities, although he soon managed to escape and fled abroad. He was arrested for the final time on 19 August 1912, having returned illegally to Warsaw, and sentenced to successive terms of three (on 29 April 1914) and then six (on 4 May 1916) years’ hard labor. This time he could not escape and was only released, from Moscow’s Butyrki prison on 1 March 1917, during the February Revolution.

By this time firmly siding with the Bolsheviks, he joined the party’s Central Committee (3 August 1917) and was a leading member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet during the October Revolution, commanding the Red Guards that captured the Central Post Office in Petrograd. He also assumed responsibility for the security of the Bolshevik headquarters in the capital, at the Smolnyi Institute. It was therefore not surprising that he was chosen by V. I. Lenin to head the Cheka upon its foundation on 7 December 1917. At this time, Dzierżyński was also elected to the Constituent Assembly. In 1918, he sided with the Left Communists and was opposed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), but ultimately seems to have believed that the unity of the party was more important and, unlike other Leftists, remained in the Central Committee. He was briefly arrested on 8 July 1918, following the assassination of Count Wilhelm Mirbach and the Left-SR Uprising—the panicked Bolshevik leadership apparently believed that he may have been party to the uprising—but was restored to his post on 22 August 1918.

It is generally agreed that it was Dzierżyński’s somewhat obsessive personality that led the Cheka to become more than a secret police force and to interest itself in every aspect of Soviet life, from the control of diseases through border patrols to the management of the railways. It was also Dzierżyński who was responsible for implementing the Red Terror, earning him the undying hatred of successive generations of enemies of the Soviet state, although evidence suggests that he personally only shot one person (a drunken Chekist who abused his family, in 1918), and that this act induced in him a convulsive fit. (Other sources have it, however, that Dzierżyński had accidentally shot dead either a brother or a sister in his youth.) To achieve coordination in security matters, he served also as people’s commissar for internal affairs from 30 March 1919 to 7 July 1923. During the Soviet–Polish War, he served as chief of the rear on the Western Front (29 May–23 July 1920) and was a member of the Revvoensovet of the Western Front (9 August–10 September 1920), the abortive Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Poland (Polrevkom, July–September 1920), and the Polish Bureau of the RKP(b) (July–September 1920).

As the civil wars wound down, Dzierżyński’s impressive organizational talents were much in demand, and he was placed at the head of Glavkomtrud (the Main Committee for Universal Labor Conscription) of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) from 19 February 1920, then became also people’s commissar for transport (14 April 1921–2 February 1924). When the Cheka was abolished in 1922, he remained at the head of its successor, the OGPU (from 1 March 1922), answerable to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (the NKVD, of which he, of course, was also head). Characteristically, he also interested himself in the establishment of orphanages. As chairman of VSNKh (from 2 February 1924), he aligned himself with the pro-peasant policies of N. I. Bukharin and was a strong proponent of the New Economic Policy. He was also a member of the Council of Labor and Defense of the USSR (from 17 July 1923). On 2 June 1924, he was elected to the status of candidate member of both the Politbiuro and the Orgbiuro of the party Central Committee. His health having been undermined by the 11 years he had spent in prison and his selfless devotion to work, Dzierżyński collapsed and died of a heart attack in July 1926, following a two-hour speech at a Central Committee plenum, in which he had forcefully attacked the United Opposition of L. D. Trotsky, G. E. Zinov′ev, and L. B. Kamenev, venting particular bile against the economic policies of their supporter, G. L. Piatakov. He was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

Following his death, Dzierżyński became an officially revered figure in the Soviet Union; the reputation and achievements of the fabled “Sword of the Revolution” were honored by numerous renamed cities and towns (including Dziaržynsk, formerly Koidanava, near his birthplace), innumerable institutions, buildings, factories, streets, parks, and districts, as well as commemorative stamps, statues, and portraits, not only in the USSR but throughout its East European satellites following the Second World War. His career in the early Soviet government was also the focus of the Soviet film Vikhri vrazhdebnye (“Hostile Whilwhinds,” dir. M. K. Kalatozov, 1953), and he features in many of the tales of the Soviet spy novelist Iu. S. Semenov. However, the most famous image of Dzierżyński, E. V. Vuchetich’s 15-ton bronze statue raised in 1958 that dominated Lubianka Square in Moscow (near the headquarters of the Cheka and its successors), was among the first of the symbols of Soviet power that came under attack and was toppled by crowds of protestors in August 1991, following the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. A similar edifice on Dzierżyński Square in Warsaw had already been felled in 1989. However, in November 2005 a smaller bust of Dzierżyński was restored to the courtyard of Petrovka, 38 (the Moscow police headquarters), from where it had been removed in August 1991, and on 26 March 2006, a new statue of him was unveiled in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.