Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

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GAI, GAI DMITRIEVICH (BZHISHKYAN, HAIK) (6 February 1887–11 December 1937). Ensign (1915), komkor (1935). The esteemed Soviet military commander G. D. Gai (also sometimes known as Gaia Gai) was born into a family of teachers at Tabriz, in Iran. His mother was Persian and his father was an Armenian socialist who had fled to Persia in the 1880s to escape the tsarist authorities. Gai moved to Tiflis in 1901, to study at the Nersesian Theological Seminary, but soon gained a reputation as a radical journalist. In 1912, he was arrested and exiled to Astrakhan, but was amnestied and drafted into the Russian Army in 1914 and then sent to military school in Tiflis. He fought on the Caucasian Front, as a commander of an Armenian volunteer unit (the 6th Hunchak Volunteers), and was much decorated for bravery in the battles for Erzurum, Hlata, and Mush. He was captured by the Turks in 1916, but managed to escape and returned (badly wounded) to Russia in early 1917.

Gai joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and volunteered for service in the Red Army in early 1918 (according to some sources he had actually joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1904) and was active on the Eastern Front, notably in the capture of Simbirsk and in battles against the Orenburg Cossack Host of Ataman A. I. Dutov, for which he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. During the civil wars, Gai’s commands included that of the 1st Samara Infantry (later 24th Rifle) Division (July–November 1918), in the ranks of which served the young G. K. Zhukov, who was to become Gai’s protégé; the 1st Red Army (4 January–25 May 1919); the 42nd Rifle Division (August–September 1919); and the 1st Caucasus Cavalry Division (September 1919–March 1920). During the Soviet–Polish War, he was at the head of the 3rd Cavalry Corps, the first Red force to cross the Vistula and to attempt to encircle Warsaw (winning thereby a second Order of the Red Banner). When the Red Army was flung back, according to Polish sources (wherein he is often called Gaj-Chan, i.e., “Gai-khan,” to emphasize his Asiatic origins), Gai’s unit committed a series of atrocities against the civilian population and executed some 1,000 POWs. He subsequently led his men across the border into East Prussia, where he was briefly interned before repatriation to Soviet Russia.

From 1922 to 1923, Gai served as People’s Commissar for Military Affairs of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and then as commander of the Minsk garrison. He worked also as a military historian, producing several keys books on the civil wars. He graduated from the Red Military Academy in 1927 and taught there for the next five years before, in 1933, becoming head of the Department of Military History and the Art of War at the Zhukov Military-Aviation and Engineering Academy in Moscow.

Gai was arrested at Minsk on 3 July 1935 (the first Red commander of proletarian origin to suffer such a fate), stripped of his military command and honors and of his party card, and (following a brief escape from custody en route to a prison in Iaroslavl′) on 11 December 1937 was found guilty by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR of participation in an “anti-Soviet terrorist organization.” He was executed that same day at the Butovskii Polygon in Moscow. Gai was posthumously rehabilitated on 30 May 1956. The passenger ship Komdiv Gai (built in 1963) still bears his name (although his highest rank was actually corps commander, not divisional commander). Among other memorials to him are a huge equestrian statue (by S. Nazarian) in Yerevan, where a street also bears his name (as do streets in Minsk, Grodno, and Samara); a bust outside a school in Stavropol′; and a bust on Gai Street in Orenburg. A factory town and its surrounding district in Orenburg oblast′ are also called Gai, as (since 1978) is the town of Khatunarkh (Armavir province, Armenia).

GAJDA PUTSCH. Following the dismissal of General Radola Gajda from the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, the young Czech commander made his way to Vladivostok, leaving Omsk on 15 July 1919. Prior to his arrival in the Maritime Province he had been contacted by a range of anti-Kolchak organizations with the aim of trading on his reputation with the Allies, the Czechoslovak Legion, and the local populace and making him the figurehead of a planned attempt to overthrow the White regime in the Far East. Among the organizations involved were the Central Bureau of Military Organizations and the Committee for the Convocation of a Zemskii Sobor′, both of which had a regionalist hue and were associated with the right wing of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries. The Zemskii Sobor′ organization was chaired by I. A. Iakushev (former head of the Siberian Regional Duma) and involved a number of other figures who had been active in the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918. Apparently Gajda was not at first convinced, but when on 27 August 1919 he heard that (contrary to an earlier promise) Kolchak was about to strip him of his rank in the Russian Army, he changed his mind and joined the conspirators.

Having allowed themselves to be misled into expecting Allied support by the British consul at Vladivostok, W. E. O’Reilly, and having heard of the fall of Omsk to the Red Army on 14 November 1918, early in the morning of 18 November rebel forces seized Vladivostok railway station and part of the docks area, proclaimed a Provisional People’s Government of Siberia, and ran up a green and white Siberian regionalist flag (differentiated by a red diagonal). Czechoslovak forces in the town declared their strict neutrality. So too did the Japanese, but in order to “localize hostilities” the latter threw a cordon around the rebel-held area, sealing it off from potential areas of support in other working-class districts of the city and allowing the rebels to be brutally crushed by the Cossacks of Ataman I. M. Kalmykov and the White garrison of General S. N. Rozanov. Gajda was injured and captured but released and hurriedly placed aboard a Czechoslovak transport and sent abroad. Several hundred members of the rebel forces were killed in the action, while the American General William S. Graves estimated that Rozanov had executed 500–600 more in retribution by the end of the year.

Gajda, Radola (Geidl, Rudolf) (14 February 1892–15 April 1948). NCO (Austro-Hungarian Army, 1915), captain (Montenegrin Army, 1915), major general (Czechoslovak Legion, 26 September 1918), lieutenant general (Russian Army, 17 January 1919), divisional general (Czechoslovakian Army, 1921). One of the most colorful and controversial figures of the civil wars in Siberia (and even more so in the interwar history of Czechoslovakia) and a man who attracted the description “adventurer” from all sides of its historiography, Radola Gajda was born in the Adriatic port of Cattaro in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Kotor in Montenegro). He was the son of a Czech officer in the Austrian Army and a Montenegrin noblewoman. He trained as a pharmacist before being mobilized into the Austrian Army, in August 1914, as a Feldscher (medical orderly). In September 1915, he was captured by enemy forces at Višegrad in Bosnia and immediately offered his services to the army of Montenegro, apparently passing himself off as a captain. Following the Montenegrin army’s collapse and retreat into Albania in 1916, he was evacuated by sea—passing through France—to Russia, with the aid of the Russian Red Cross. He arrived in Petrograd in February 1916, and there he joined a Serbian detachment, as a medical orderly, before enrolling (on 30 January 1917), following a scandal involving his use of false personal papers, in the Czechoslovak Army Corps (soon to become the Czechoslovak Legion), rising to command its 7th Infantry Regiment. He saw action against the Austrians in the Battle of Zborov (1–2 July 1917)—a defining moment in the foundation of the legion—and was decorated with the Cross of St. George (4th Class) for valor.

Promoted to the general staff of the Legion in March 1918 and elected as a member of its Provisional Executive Committee at a conference at Cheliabinsk on 20 May 1918, Gajda was one of the leaders of the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion against the Soviet authorities in Siberia. As commander of the legion’s Eastern Group, he drove the Bolsheviks from Novonikolaevsk and Omsk in May–June 1918, before performing the same task around Irkutsk and the vital circum-Baikal railway, linking Siberia with the Far East, in July–August. In these operations he demonstrated remarkable initiative in command, although sometimes ignoring the orders of his nominal superiors. Nevertheless, he was made commander of the 2nd Czechoslovak Division (from 26 September 1918) and promoted to the rank of major general. Around this time, his name was mooted by some political forces as a potential commander of the Siberian Army of the Provisional Siberian Government, but it was realized that its officers would not subject themselves to the command of a foreigner. Still, with the permission of General M. P. Štefánik, Gajda joined the Russian forces as commander of the Ekaterinburg Group of the Siberian Army on the North Urals Front (from 12 October 1918). He expressed support for the Omsk coup, soon won (9 December 1918) another Cross of St. George (3rd Class), and, for his contribution to the Siberian Army’s capture of Perm′ in December 1918, was promoted (on 17 January 1919) by Admiral A. V. Kolchak to the rank of lieutenant general. At the same time, he was awarded the Order of the Bath and the Croix de Guerre (with laurels) on the recommendation of the British and French military authorities in Siberia.

From 24 December 1918, Gajda served in Kolchak’s Russian Army as commander of the Siberian Army (acting to 1 March 1919), leading the successful operations on the northern sector of the front against the Red Army that led eventually, in early June, to the capture of Glazov and the tantalizing possibility of effecting a union with the White and interventionist forces in North Russia. As the Kolchak’s Western Army collapsed on Gajda’s left flank, however, he was forced to retreat and soon entered into a public slanging-match with Kolchak’s chief of staff, D. A. Lebedev, whom he blamed for the failure of the offensive, and found himself accused (probably with some foundation) of plotting with members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) against the regime. He was subsequently dismissed from the Russian Army (7 July 1919) and stripped of the rank of lieutenant general (2 September 1919). He moved to Vladivostok and on 17–18 November 1919, in league with various PSR and regionalist organizations, led a failed rising in the port against the Omsk government (the Gajda putsch). He was arrested but permitted to leave Russia in December 1919.

Arriving in Czechoslovakia on 11 February 1920, Gajda was given the rank of general in the new state’s army but was not assigned to a command, being sent instead to military-engineering schools in France from 1921 to 1922. On his return, he rose in the army hierarchy to the post of first deputy to the chief of the Main Staff (1 December 1924). In 1926, he was in line to succeed General J. Syrový as chief of the Main Staff, when Syrový became minister of war. However, Syrový, supported by President Tomáš Masaryk, sent him instead on indefinite leave (14 August 1926), while investigations were made into charges against Gajda of espionage for the USSR and of planning a coup. A disciplinary committee of the ministry of war (14–21 December 1926) subsequently found him to be unfit for military service, stripped him of his rank, and cut his army pension by 25 percent. This marked the end of Gajda’s military career. He turned instead to politics, becoming a founding member (and, from 2 January 1927, leader) of the National Fascist Community, which modeled itself on Mussolini’s party. In 1932, he was found guilty of inciting an attempted coup by fascist officers (the “Židenice Mutiny”) and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. From 1935 to 1939, he held a seat in parliament for his party, but following the Munich crisis of 1938 and Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, he came out in support of the Communist leader Klement Gottwald’s call for armed resistance to Nazi Germany and took an active part in the Party of National Unity. Although he was then prominent in the pro-German Czechoslovak National Committee of St. Václav (Wenceslas), during the occupation he seems to have abandoned politics. Nevertheless, he was arrested on 12 May 1945 by Czechoslovak security forces engaged in rooting out collaborationists and was held in prison for two years. (Some sources have it that during this period he was handed over to Soviet investigators of SMERSH and subjected to torture that left him virtually blind.) Finally, on 4 May 1947, he was brought to trial in Prague, found guilty of the “propagation of Fascism and Nazism,” and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. However, having already spent almost that precise amount of time in custody, and being gravely ill, he was released on 12 May 1947. He died in Prague the following spring. Gajda’s grave, in Prague’s Olšanské Cemetery, has become a shrine for right-wing and nationalist organizations in the Czech Republic and is periodically vandalized by antifascist groups.

GALICIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. This short-lived polity existed from 8 July to 21 September 1920, during the Soviet–Polish War, when the area of Podolia—formerly divided between the Ternopol′ and L′vov oblasti and confirmed as part of Poland by the Treaty of Warsaw (21–24 April 1920) between Poland and the Ukrainian National Republic—was occupied by the 14th Red Army and the 1st Cavalry Army of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The Galician SSR was nominally governed by the Galician Revolutionary Committee (Galrevkom or, in Ukrainian, Halrevkom), established at Ternopol′ (Ternopil) under V. P. Zatonskii. (Its other members were M. L. Baran, A. G. Baral, F. Konar, M. V. Levitskii, K. Litvinovich, and I. Nemolovskii.) Galrevkom failed to extend its influence into the key strategic and economic area of Eastern Galicia around L′vov, but did create a rudimentary administrative structure, declared an end to private property in land, nationalized the banks, issued its own currency, and began to raise its own Galician Red Army. In September 1920, as Red forces were driven out of Galicia by the Polish counteroffensive, the area was reoccupied by Polish forces and the republic ceased to exist. By the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921), the area (and all of Galicia) was incorporated into Poland.

galkin, nikolai aleksandrovich (?–?). Lieutenant colonel (1917), major general (24 August 1918). One of the chief organizers and leaders of the anti-Bolshevik rising at Samara in the summer of 1918, N. A. Galkin was a graduate of the Vladimir Military School and the Academy of the General Staff (1917, accelerated course) and served briefly with the 25th Army Corps in 1917 before transferring to the Kiev Military District and then the Volga Military District in 1918, the latter by then having come under Soviet command. Galkin was one of the founders of a network of underground anti-Bolshevik officers’ groups at Samara and was instrumental in persuading General Stanislav čeček to commit forces of the Czechoslovak Legion to assist in the overthrow of Soviet rule on the Volga. With the establishment of Komuch, he became director of its department of military affairs (8 June–24 September 1918) and a member of the General Staff of the People’s Army. He was also part of the Komuch delegation to the Ufa State Conference in September 1918, after which he was attached to the staff of General V. G. Boldyrev (from 24 September 1918), charged with assisting in the merger of People’s Army units into the Siberian Army. Following the collapse of the Democratic Counter-Revolution in the east, in 1919 Galkin served with the Whites in the Urals Corps of the Southern Army on the Eastern Front, recruiting and organizing forces around Iaitsk. In February 1920, he was a member of a group of Whites commanded by A. P. Perkhurov that was captured by Red forces at the village of Karpovo, near Ust′-Kut. His subsequent fate is unknown.

GALLER, LEV MIKHAILOVICH (17 November 1883–12 July 1950). Captain, second rank (1916), admiral (1940). Born into a noble family in Petrograd, L. M. Galler played a key role in the Red Fleet during the civil wars and would subsequently become one of the most senior admirals of the USSR. He was a graduate of the Naval Cadet Corps (1905), the Artillery Officers School (1912), and the Military-Naval Academy (1926) and served in the First World War as a flag officer with a naval artillery brigade in the Baltic Fleet and then as a senior officer on the battleship Slava. In November 1917, by which time he was commander of the battleship Turkmenets Stavropol′skii, he decided to serve the Soviet government and participated in the Ice March of the Baltic Fleet.

From 1918 to 1919, Galler was commander of the battleship Mecheslav and chief of staff of the Baltic Fleet. Also in 1919, as commander of the battleship Andrei Pervozvanii, he participated in the suppression of the Krasnaia Gorka uprising and the sailors’ revolt at Seriia Loshad′ and was one of the architects of the Reds’ defense of Petrograd against the advance of the forces of General N. N. Iudenich. In 1921, he was made chief of the Naval Forces of the Baltic Sea, taking charge of the rebuilding of the fleet. In 1932, he joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and was made commander of the Baltic Fleet, and from 1937 he was deputy chief of naval forces with the People’s Commissariat for Defense of the USSR. In 1938, he became chief of the Main Naval Staff and during the Second World War was occupied with naval construction, as deputy commander of the Soviet Navy. In 1947, Galler was made head of the Military-Naval Academy, but the following year he was suddenly arrested, stripped of his rank and decorations, and sent to a labor camp, where he died in 1950. In 1953, he was among the first of the repressed to be posthumously rehabilitated following the death of J. V. Stalin.

GALLIPOLIITSi, SOCIETY OF. This émigré organization was founded on 22 November 1921 by members of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel who, following the evacuation of Crimea in November 1920, had spent time in camps around Gallipoli in Turkey. Its first chairman was the commander of the 1st Army Corps (which was distributed around those camps), General A. P. Kutepov. The society’s aim was to maintain the unity and esprit de corps of the men of the 1st Army Corps, who had survived hunger and disease in the camps. Its main efforts in this direction involved the production of numerous periodical and commemorative publications. Its motto was “Only death frees you from fulfilling your duty.” In a sense, therefore, the organization was a prototype of ROVS, of which it became a constituent part from 1924. As the 1st Army Corps came to be dispersed across the globe in the 1920s, affiliate branches of the Society of Gallipoliitsi were founded in Belgium, Hungary, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Yugoslavia, the United States, Spain, Australia, Argentina, Morocco, Syria, and elsewhere. The American branch is active to this day, under the chairmanship of ataman of the Don Cossack Host Ia. L. Mikheev.

GAMOV, IVAN MIKHAILOVICH (18 March 1887–18 January 1969). Born at the Verkhne-Blagoveshchensk khutor (Ekaterinskaia raion, Amur oblast′), I. M. Gamov was ataman of the Amur Cossack Host during the revolutionary period (April 1917–1920). He trained and worked as a teacher in his native district before, in 1912, being elected to the Fourth State Duma as a representative of the Amur Cossacks and the Ussurii Cossack Host. In the Duma, he was associated with the Kadets and the Siberian Group and worked on educational issues. Having taken an active part in the February Revolution, he was elected Host ataman of the Amur Cossacks in April 1917, and following the October Revolution led the Amur Cossacks’ opposition to Soviet rule.

From October 1917 to late February 1918, when Soviet rule was established in the Amur oblast′, Gamov had effective command over the region. He led the “Gamov uprising” against Soviet power (6–12 March 1918), but was forced by Red Guards to retreat into China. In September 1918, as Soviet power collapsed along the Amur following the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, he returned and, with the assistance of Japanese interventionist forces in the region, established an independent fiefdom, refusing to bow to the successive governments at Omsk, including that of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (although he offered nominal recognition of the latter in November 1918). Instead, he ruled the Amur region independently, in partnership with a civilian government (the Provisional Government of the Amur Region) under the former mayor of Blagoveshchensk, A. N. Alekseevskii, until Red forces entered the region in February 1920, when he moved to the Maritime Province. His regime was notably less brutal than that of his fellow Far Eastern atamans, G. M. Semenov and I. M. Kalmykov.

Gamov was forced into emigration in China in late 1922 and subsequently worked in Manchuria as a teacher. When the Red Army invaded Manchuria in August 1945, at the end of the Second World War, Gamov fled first to Australia and later to the United States. He died and is buried in Switzerland.

GANDZIUK, IAKOV GRIGOR′EVICH (21 March 1873–29 January 1918). Captain (18 June 1912), lieutenant colonel (24 February 1914), colonel (5 January 1915), major general (6 June 1917). The Ukrainian military commander Ia. G. Gandziuk was born into a peasant family in Podol′sk guberniia, was educated at the Vinnitsa Realschule, and graduated from the Odessa Infantry Officer School (1895). He entered military service, with the 47th Infantry Regiment, on 5 November 1891. Following a distinguished career in the tsarist army, during which he saw action in the Russo–Japanese War as a company commander with the 6th East Siberian Rifle Regiment and the 12th (Velikolutsk) Infantry Regiment and was frequently decorated and promoted for bravery, from 30 June 1917 he commanded the 104th Infantry Division and from July 1917 was involved in the Ukrainization of elements of the 34th Army Corps, which became the 1st Ukrainian Army Corps.

From August 1917, Gandziuk commanded the 1st Ukrainian Infantry Division, before being placed in command of the 1st Ukrainian Army Corps (December 1917–29 January 1918), as successor to General P. P. Skoropadskii. On 25 January 1918, as Red forces commanded by M. A. Murav′ev approached Kiev in the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War, Gandziuk moved from Belaia Tserkov to the Ukrainian capital to confer with the war ministry of the Ukrainian National Republic. There, together with his chief of staff, General Ia. V. Safonov, he was captured by Red Guards and executed when he refused to join the Red Army. In March 1918, when forces of the Ukrainian Army recaptured Kiev, Gandziuk’s remains were rescued from a mass grave and reburied in the grounds of the Vydubitskii monastery. The grave was destroyed in 1950, but in 1990 a new monument to him was raised at the monastery, bearing crossed swords and the legend (from John 15:13) “Greater love hath no man than this, That he should lay down his life for his fellows.”

GANJA UPRISING. This anti-Soviet uprising broke out around the city of Ganja (Elizavetpol′) in northwest Azerbaijan on the night of 25–26 May 1920, as Azeris attempted to resist the recent overthrow of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan by the 11th Red Army and the establishment of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist republic. Rebel troops from the Ganja garrison were joined by volunteers from the local population to form a force some 10,000–12,000 strong that soon had control of the Azeri parts of Ganja (although they were unable to capture the city’s lower, Armenian-populated districts, or to hold on to the railway station). Equally, attempts by Red forces sent from Baku to drive out the rebels were repulsed on both 28 and 29 May. By 31 May 1920, however, the Reds had concentrated an overwhelming force that successfully stormed Ganja and drove the rebels into the mountains. According to Soviet sources, both sides in the conflict suffered roughly 1,000 fatalities.

GASTEV, ALEKSEI KAPITONOVICH (26 September 1882–15 April 1939). The Soviet trade unionist and industrial theorist A. K. Gastev was born in Suzdal′, Vladimir guberniia. The son of a teacher, he was educated at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, but was expelled in 1902 for revolutionary activities. He had joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1900 and, following the party schism in 1903, at first adhered to the Bolshevik faction, but moved away from them in 1907. He was actively involved in the 1905 Revolution, as chairman of the Kostroma Soviet, and was subsequently arrested and exiled on at least three occasions by the tsarist authorities, but escaped each time; in 1909 he moved to France. Employed as a laborer in various factories around Paris, he became associated with the syndicalist movement (having abandoned the RSDLP in 1908). He returned to Russia in 1917 and was elected chairman of the All-Russian Union of Metalworkers (which he had first joined in 1906).

During the civil-war period, Gastev involved himself in the study of work practices and the development of theories of scientific management (a brand of Taylorism), as a contribution to War Communism, and in 1920 established the Central Institute of Labor in Moscow. From that point onward he devoted himself to educational work and the propagation of scientific management (“Taylorism”) and largely abandoned his previous efforts as a poet. (His verses, actually written in a prose style, had also tended to celebrate the factory and industrial life, the first published volume of his poetry being entitled Poeziia rabochego udara, “The Poetry of the Workers’ Strike.”) He joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1931, but on 8 September 1938 he was arrested and charged with “counterrevolutionary activity.” He was executed at Kommunarka, near Moscow, the following spring and buried in a mass grave. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1962, following which a number of his theoretical works and editions of his poetry were republished in the USSR.

Gattenberger, Aleksandr Nikolaevich (23 April 1861–1 May 1939). The son of a railway engineer of French and German ancestry, prior to the revolutionary era A. N. Gattenberger had already made his name as a prominent public figure in Siberia. He is thought to have been born in St. Petersburg (although other evidence points to his having been born at the village of Iurushkovo in Tver′ guberniia) and attended a military school. In 1905–1906, he had been one of the founders of the Tomsk branch of the Kadets, but can be better described as a conservative Siberian oblastnik, who was close to G. N. Potanin.

On 26 April 1917, Gattenberger was made commissar of Tomsk guberniia by the Russian Provisional Government and was subsequently minister of the interior in the Provisional Siberian Government and in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. In September 1918, he played an active role in the closure of the Siberian Regional Duma (which, like many more conservative proponents of Siberian regionalism, he regarded as a front for the Russian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries) and in early 1919 spent much time on framing legislation to reform the electoral processes of zemstvos and town councils. He found, however, that his efforts to introduce legality and regularity into the White administration were constantly being undermined by the activities of the army and, on 29 April 1919, he was removed from his post (for “reasons of ill-health and overwork,” it was announced) and replaced by V. N. Pepeliaev. In February 1920, Gattenberger went into emigration, settling initially at Harbin before, in 1922, moving to San Francisco, where he spent the remainder of his life.

GAVRILENKO, PETR (1888–28 November 1920). Staff captain (1917). Born into a peasant family at Guliai-Pole in Ekaterinoslav guberniia, the revolutionary Petr Gavrilenko was politically active from the time of the 1905 Revolution, when he became interested in anarchism.

Gavrilenko was mobilized in 1914 and was decorated for bravery before returning to his home district in 1917, to organize an anarchist-communist group that by the summer of 1918 had merged with the partisan forces of his neighbor and contemporary Nestor Makhno to oppose the Austro-German intervention. He commanded first a regiment, then a battalion, then (by spring 1919) a brigade in Makhno’s Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine. When Makhno was declared a renegade by the Soviet authorities in early July 1919, Gavrilenko initially remained in the Red Army, but soon reunited with Makhno. At a congress of the Makhnovists on 1 September 1919, he was elected commander of the 3rd Ekaterinoslav Corps, which by the end of the year reached a strength of 34,000 men. It was this force that captured Aleksandrovsk from the Armed Forces of South Russia on 5 October 1919, thereby contributing significantly to the defeat of the Whites in South Russia.

Following a reform of the Makhnovist forces, from December 1919 Gavrilenko took charge of commander training at Ekaterinoslav. When the Red Army entered the region in January 1920, he went underground but was soon arrested by the Cheka and imprisoned at Khar′kov. He was released in October 1920, when the Makhnovists again allied with the Soviet government, and became Makhno’s chief of staff. From 22 to 26 October 1920, he participated in a raid into the rear of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, before assisting the group of Makhnovist forces of S. N. Karetnikov in the assault on the Perekop Isthmus and subsequent advance into Crimea (from 26 October 1920). On 24 November 1920, Gavrilenko was summoned to Melitopol′ by the Red command. En route, together with other Makhnovist leaders, he was arrested and executed.

Gegechkori, Evgeni PETROVICH (20 January 1881–5 June 1954). One of the leaders of the Georgian Social-Democratic Labor Party, Evgeni Gegechkori was born into a noble family in Kutaisi guberniia, western Georgia. He graduated from the Kutaisi Gymnasium (1902) and the Law Faculty of Moscow University (1906), where from 1903 he had also become involved in the revolutionary movement, and worked briefly as an assistant justice of the peace before being elected to the Third State Duma as a representative of Kutaisi guberniia (1907–1912). Together with N. S. Chkheidze, he was the acknowledged leader of the social-democratic faction in the Third Duma, but was unable to stand for the Fourth Duma when his political rights were withdrawn by the authorities. He was also a noted freemason, and during the First World War adopted a defensist position. In 1917, he was a member of the Special Transcaucasian Committee (Ozakom) of the Russian Provisional Government and was also a member of the presidium of the Tiflis Soviet.

From November 1917, Gegechkori chaired the Transcaucasian Commissariat and also served as its minister of labor, before becoming chairman and minister of war in the Transcaucasian Sejm. With the collapse of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federal Republic, on 26 May 1918 he was named minister of foreign affairs in the government of the new Democratic Republic of Georgia. He also served briefly as minister of justice in that regime in early 1921, but was forced into exile by the Soviet invasion of the Georgian republic of February–March in that year.

In emigration, Gegechkori lived in France, heading the foreign delegation of the Georgian Mensheviks, before, in 1953, he briefly became head of the Government-in-Exile of the Democratic Republic of Georgia. He died and is buried in Paris.

GEKKER, ANATOLII IL′ICH (25 August 1888–1 July 1937). Staff captain (191?), komkor (1935). The noted military specialist and Red Army commander A. I. Gekker was born into the family of a Jewish army doctor at Tiflis, Georgia, and was a graduate of the Vladimir Military School, St. Petersburg (1909). During the First World War, he rose to the post of chief of staff of the 33rd Army Corps (July 1917). In 1917, he also briefly attended the Academy of the General Staff but, apparently radicalized by the war, he also joined the Bolsheviks in September of that year.

During the civil wars, Gekker held numerous command positions with Soviet forces. From January 1918, he was commander of the 8th Army, then commander of the Donets Red Army (from March 1918), before joining the Red Army as military commissar of the White Sea Military District (May–July 1918). He then played a leading role in the suppression of the Iaroslavl′ Revolt in July 1918, before becoming commander of the Vologda Rear Region and the Kotlas and Northern Dvina regions (from August 1918), chief of the Astrakhan Fortified District (from December 1918), and commander of the 13th Red Army (16 April 1919–18 February 1920), and from 8 April to August 1920 he served as chief of staff of VOKhR, the internal security forces of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. He was then placed in command of the 11th Red Army (18 October 1920–29 May 1921) and was instrumental in the Sovietization of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, subsequently becoming commander of the Independent Caucasian Army (later the Red Banner Caucasian Army, 29 May 1921–1 January 1922). In January 1922, he was made deputy head of the Red Military Academy, subsequently serving as head of that institution (February–June 1922), before becoming chief military advisor to the Mongolian People’s Republic.

Gekker then became a political commissar on the Chinese Eastern Railway and a military attaché in China (1922–May 1929) and, from May 1929, was the chief Soviet military attaché in Turkey. He returned to Russia in 1933, to work on the Main Directorate of the Red Army, and from 1934 was section head with the Foreign Liaison Directorate of the Red Army. He was arrested on 30 May 1937 and subsequently executed for treason. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 22 August 1956.

GENDEL′MAN (“Iakobi”), MIKHAIL IAKOVLEVICH (8 June 1881–3 October 1938). One of the central figures of the Democratic Counter-Revolution on the Volga, M. I. Gendel′man was born into a doctor’s family at Kiev. He was expelled from the Medical Faculty of Kiev University in 1901 for political activities and sent into the army, but fled abroad and joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) as a student in Germany in 1902. Back in Russia, he worked as a lawyer, edited the newspaper Molodaia Rossiia (“Young Russia”), and was an active participant in the 1905 Revolution. He was then frequently arrested and imprisoned by the tsarist authorities prior to the 1917 revolution. In March 1917, he was elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet, and at the 3rd Congress of the PSR (25 May–4 June 1917) was elected a member of his party’s Central Committee. He subsequently was elected to VTsIK (June 1917). During the October Revolution, he led the PSR delegates out of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in protest at the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and was an active supporter of the efforts of Vikzhel to establish a coalition socialist government. In November 1917, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly as a representative of the city of Riazan′.

When the Constituent Assembly was dispersed by the Bolsheviks, Gendel′man became an active opponent of Soviet power, and in May 1918 he moved to Samara, where he was one of the founders of Komuch, in which he served as deputy chairman. When Komuch collapsed, he lived underground in Soviet Russia until 1920, when he was arrested and imprisoned by the Cheka, accused of establishing contacts with Allied agents and “White guards” with the aim of overthrowing the Soviet government. On 7 August 1922, he was given a suspended death sentence by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, after the trial of members of the PSR leadership. On 14 January 1924, Gendel′man’s sentence was reduced to five years’ imprisonment, but he remained in prison or in exile for the rest of his life (for some time working as a ferryman at Kirov). On 3 October 1938, the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to death, and he was shot the same day. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1989.

general andranik. See Ozanian, Andranik toros.

GENERAL DRO. See KANAYAN, DRASTAMAT (“GENERAL DRO”).

General Jewish Labor Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia. See Bund.

GENOA CONFERENCE. This international conference, held at Genoa, Italy, from 10 April to 19 May 1922, was attended by 29 countries, including Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (but not the United States). It was the first such conference attended by Soviet Russia (G. V. Chicherin led its delegation, with the assistance of A. A. Ioffe) and was intended by its Anglo–French sponsors to reintegrate Soviet Russia (and Weimar Germany) into the political and economic life of Europe, as well as to provide a forum for the settlement of claims against the Soviet government regarding foreign debts incurred by earlier Russian governments and compensation for foreigners whose property in Russia had been nationalized since 1917. Chicherin refused to accept the Allies’ demands, however, without promises of substantial loans, trade, investment, and technology transfer from London and Paris, which were not forthcoming. Consequently, the negotiations stalled. In the meantime, Chicherin headed down the coast to sign the Treaty of Rapallo (16 April 1922) with Germany.

GEORGIA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF. This polity—the only example in history of a “Menshevik state”—was proclaimed by the Georgian National Council at Tiflis (Tblisi) on 26 May 1918, as the Transcaucasian Democratic Federal Republic collapsed. It survived until the invasion of Georgia by Soviet forces in February–March 1921 (at the climax of the Soviet–Georgian War). It had a total land area of roughly 100,000 square miles (compared with the 46,000 square miles governed by today’s Georgia, if one includes the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia) and a population of 2.5 million. Initially, the government was led by Noe Ramishvili. It was always dominated by Mensheviks of the Georgian Social Democratic Labor Party (such as E. P. Gegechkori, I. G. Tsereteli, and N. N. Zhordania), but it did include representatives of various other Georgian socialist parties, including the Socialists-Federalists and the National Democrats. Soon, however, it became an exclusively Menshevik body, chaired (from 28 July 1918) by Zhordania.

From the first day of its existence, the regime was confronted with problems raised by German and Turkish incursions into Transcaucasia in the aftermath of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). In May 1918, the German Caucasus Mission had arrived in Georgia and proclaimed a protectorate over the region that the Menshevik government agreed to accept (by the Treaty of Poti, 28 May 1918), hoping that it might afford some defense against Turkey, but by the Treaty of Batumi (4 June 1918), Georgia was forced to cede the region of Adzhariia, including Batumi and other cities, to the Ottoman Empire. Following the armistice of 11 November 1918, the presence of the Central Powers was then swapped for that of various Allied missions, including a British force that arrived at Tiflis on 25 December 1918, to guard the oil pipelines between Baku and the Black Sea, and that occupied Batumi until 1921. This laid the Menshevik regime open to charges from Moscow of abetting imperialism and the Allied intervention against Soviet Russia.

In March 1919, a Georgian Constituent Assembly was summoned to legitimize the regime. Of the 130 delegates, 109 were Mensheviks, and elected as chairman was the veteran Menshevik N. S. Chkheidze. In the two years of its existence, this body ratified 126 laws that aimed to bring into being a socialist democracy and the guarantees promised by the state’s Act of Independence of 26 May 1918: guarantees of full political rights “irrespective of nationality, creed, social rank or sex.” On 21 February 1921, on the eve of the invasion of Georgia by the Red Army, a constitution of the new state was also finally promulgated.

However, despite broad support from the Georgian population and from the international socialist movement (among many notable visitors to the Republic were Ramsey Macdonald and Karl Kautsky), the regime faced some major problems. Chief among these were separatist uprisings among the Abkhazians, Ossetians, and other groups in the west and north of its territory (frequently encouraged, quite cynically, by the Whites and later by the Bolsheviks) and territorial claims made by Armenia to part of the Borchalu district (which led to the Georgian–Armenian War of December 1918) and by Azerbaijan (albeit less forcefully) to the Zaqatala district. The regime was also hamstrung by its socialist leaders’ suspicions of the military: it failed to create, supply, and train an effective mass army of its own, preferring to rely on the irregular People’s Guard—effectively, the armed wing of the Georgian Menshevik Party. There were also conflicts between the internationalist (even Russophile) outlook of Tsereteli, Vladimir Jugheli, and others and the increasingly ethnocentric views of the majority of the Menshevik leadership in Georgia. On the other hand, the land reforms and redistributions introduced by the regime have to be counted as a significant achievement and a popular (if not unqualified) success.

From 1918 to 1920, Georgia enjoyed protection from potential Soviet incursions by the presence to its north of the White forces of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR). (Not that the Georgian Republic should ever be considered an ally of the Whites; there was constant friction between the two over border issues, relating especially to the region around Sochi [the Sochi conflict] customs barriers, and other matters, while White forces that crossed the border into Georgia, as the Red Army advanced, were usually interned.) However, following the collapse of the AFSR in early 1920 and the establishment of Soviet regimes in Azerbaijan and Armenia in April and December of that year, the Red Army was poised on Georgia’s northern, western, and southern borders and began to foment unrest within the country. A series of incursions by Red forces and uprisings by local Bolsheviks were endured and overcome in April–May 1920, before the Menshevik government was obliged to sign a peace, the Treaty of Moscow (7 May 1920). Under the terms of this treaty, Georgian independence was at least recognized by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, but it also demanded that Georgia cut all links with “counterrevolutionary forces,” expel foreign missions, and legalize the Bolshevik Party on its territory. Signing this treaty was the equivalent of the Georgian Mensheviks sawing through the branch on which they were sitting. With the Soviet plenipotentiary S. M. Kirov resident in Tiflis and free to fund and encourage local Bolsheviks and other anti-Menshevik forces, work began to undermine and overthrow the regime. A workers’ uprising began on 11 February 1921, and within two weeks Tiflis was under the control of local Bolsheviks and units of the 11th Red Army. The Menshevik government, meanwhile, fled to Batumi and then (on 18 March 1921, on the French cruiser Ernest Renan) into exile, eventually settling at Leuville-sur-Orge near Paris, where it founded the Government-in-Exile of the Georgian Democratic Republic.

The regime had been refused entry into the League of Nations (one reason for which was its 1918 alliance with Germany), but it did achieve de jure recognition by the Allies on 27 January 1921, and subsequently two League of Nations resolutions (in 1922 and 1924) recognized the sovereignty of Georgia. Nevertheless, no state was willing to come to its aid, and the republic was replaced with the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (proclaimed on 25 February 1921), one element of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, although guerrilla resistance to Soviet rule, coordinated by the Committee for the Liberation of Georgia, continued until 1924 (notably in the Svanetian uprising and the Kakhet–Khevsureti rebellion).

The Georgian republic’s achievements and the nature of its demise lent it a romantic image as “a martyr state” in the minds of most democratic socialists and Georgian nationalists throughout the rest of the 20th century (something reinforced by the brutal Soviet repression of a failed attempt to restore it during the August Uprising of 1924, following which at least 7,000 people were executed and a further 15,000 deported). It was unsurprising, then, that following the restoration of an independent Georgian state in 1991, the national symbols of the Menshevik republic were readopted, including the national anthem “Dideba zetsit kurthelus” (“Praise Be to The Heavenly Bestower of Blessings”), and 26 May was again celebrated as Georgian independence day. However, few of these symbols survived the “Rose Revolution” of early 2004.

GEORGIAN AFFAIR. This was the term applied to the conflict within the Soviet leadership over the building of socialism in Georgia that erupted in 1921–1922, in the aftermath of the Red Army’s invasion of the Democratic Republic of Georgia in February–March 1921. It involved, on the one hand, local Georgian Bolshevik leaders, such as Budu Mdvani and Filipp Makharadze (who generally favored a maximum degree of autonomy for the Georgian SSR), and on the other, J. V. Stalin (of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities) and G. K. Ordzhonikidze (chairman of the Kavbiuro), who favored greater central control and the amalgamation of Georgia (together with Armenia and Azerbaijan) into a Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. After initially supporting Stalin’s line (that the Georgians were exhibiting a “national deviation”), from late 1922 V. I. Lenin began to offer conditional support to the Georgian party, criticizing the prevalence of “Great Russian chauvinism” in the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and moving toward a rupture of relations with Stalin. Following his third stroke on 9 March 1923, however, Lenin was too incapacitated to intervene further (although he had prepared a series of notes sharply critical of Stalin), and L. D. Trotsky, who distrusted Georgia as a former nest of Menshevism and who (like other Bolsheviks) was fearful for the future of the revolution in the light of Lenin’s illness, was not inclined to confront Stalin over the issue at the 12th Congress of the RKP(b) in April 1923. Consequently Georgia, which had already been submerged within the Transcaucasian SFSR when it signed the Treaty on the Formation of the USSR on 30 December 1922, remained so until the dissolution of the Transcaucasian SFSR on 5 December 1936.

GEORGIAN–ARMENIAN WAR. This border conflict between the Democratic Republic of Georgia and the Democratic Republic of Armenia was fought in late 1918 over control of the provinces of Lori and Javakheti and the Borchalo district. During the final months of the First World War, these areas had been occupied by Turkey, and when the Turkish Army of Islam withdrew, armed clashes erupted between Georgia (which had moved troops into the predominantly Armenian-populated area) and Armenia on 7 December 1918. On 31 December 1918, the British military mission in the region brokered a cease-fire, and in January 1919 sponsored talks that resulted in an agreed upon shared Azeri–Armenian governance of the “Lori Neutral Zone” (or the “Shulavera Condominium”).

GEORGIAN–OSSETIAN CONFLICT. From 1918 to 1920, a series of uprisings occurred in the North Caucasus, as the peoples of Ossetian-inhabited districts attempted to throw off the control over the region of first the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic and then the Democratic Republic of Georgia. Conflict first arose between Ossetian forces and the Georgian People’s Guard around Tskhinvali in March 1918, when the Georgian population of that town was massacred by invading Ossetians. The rebels were dispersed and the Ossetian population subjected to harsh repression in retaliation, leading to resentment of the Georgian Social-Democratic Labor Party and some inclination among Ossetians to seek the support of Soviet Russia. Negotiations between Tiflis and the Ossetians throughout 1919 came to nothing, as the Georgians refused to grant Ossetia the degree of autonomy that had been granted to Abkhazia and the Muslim Georgians of Adjara and then outlawed the National Council of Ossetia for its pro-Bolshevism. Further uprisings and conflict then occurred in October 1919, in the Roki area. The rebels were again suppressed by Georgian forces, but in May 1920 a renewed (and ultimately disastrous) Ossetian offensive was launched (with the assistance of the Red Army) by forces gathered at Vladikavkaz. At least 3,000 (and possibly as many as 7,000) Ossetians were killed during and in the aftermath of these events, and some 20,000 Ossetians were forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in Soviet-held areas north of the Caucasus range. Consequently, in February 1921 many Ossetians assisted in the Red Army invasion of Georgia. They were rewarded by the establishment on 20 April 1922 of the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast′, which included a number of purely Georgian-inhabited districts. A lid was kept on this conflict during the Soviet period, but ethnic tensions resurfaced following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Ossetians accusing Georgia of genocide and Georgians accusing the Ossetians of serving as the pawns of Soviet and Russian imperialism. The result was the South Ossetian (Russo–Georgian) War of August 2008.

GEORGIAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC LABOR PARTY. The most popular party in Georgia prior to (and for some time beyond) its Sovietization, this organization, consisting of Mensheviks who had previously adhered to the Russian-Social Democratic Labor Party, was the governing party throughout the existence of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (26 May 1918–25 February 1921). In the elections to the Georgian parliament of 14 February 1919, it won 81.5 percent of the votes. Among the party’s leading members in this period were Nikolai Chkheidze, Akaki Chkhenkeli, Evgeni Gegechkori, Valiko Jugheli, Noe Ramishvili, Irakli Tsereteli, and Noe Zhordania. The Georgian Mensheviks also dominated the Government-in-Exile of the Democratic Republic of Georgia.

Gerasimov, Aleksandr Mikhailovich (11 November 1861–2 March 1931). Rear admiral (1911), vice admiral (29 April 1913). A senior naval commander and administrator in the White movement in South Russia, A. M. Gerasimov was a graduate of the Naval Corps (1882), the Officers Mining Class (1886), and the Mikhail Artillery Academy (1892). He participated in the Russo–Japanese War as a senior officer on the battleship Pobeda and, after the surrender of Port Arthur, spent time as a prisoner of war of the Japanese (January–December 1905). During the First World War, he was commandant of the Peter the Great Naval Fortress near Revel (1913–1917), serving at the same time (from 11 August 1914) as governor-general of Estland and Livland gubernii. On 2 March 1917, during the February Revolution, he was struck on the head with a bayonet and badly injured while attempting to negotiate with revolutionary workers and lost control of Revel, although he was not formally removed from his post until 4 April 1917. He was subsequently retired from the service (23 June 1917).

In late 1918, Gerasimov made his way to South Russia and from December of that year served as assistant chief and then chief of the Naval Directorate on the Main Staff of the Armed Forces of South Russia. From July 1919, he was also a member of General A. I. Denikin’s Special Council, and from 17 February to 19 April 1920 he was commander of the Black Sea Fleet, before being removed from that command by General P. N. Wrangel, who dispatched him to Batumi as his plenipotentiary in negotiations with the Democratic Republic of Georgia. In November 1920, Gerasimov was placed in general command of that portion of the White Fleet that sailed from Crimea, via Constantinople, to Bizerte, in Tunisia, where the vessels were to be handed over to the French as payment for assistance rendered to Wrangel’s forces. He appears to have remained at Bizerte, as director of the Russian Naval Corps in the port (prior to its dissolution on 25 May 1925), until his death in 1930, although some sources have it that he died in 1931 at Ferryville (Menzel Bourguiba). He is buried in the European cemetery in Tunis.

GERASIMOV, PETR VASIL′EVICH (1877–23 September 1919). The anti-Bolshevik politician and organizer P. V. Gerasimov was born into the family of a successful businessman at Tomsk and was educated at the Kostroma Realschule. He entered the Law Faculty of Moscow University in 1898, but was expelled in 1900 for political activity and moved to the Demisov Juridical Lyceum in Iaroslavl′ to complete his education. He subsequently worked as a lawyer and as a liberal journalist, editing Kostromskaia zhizn′ (“Kostroma Life”) in 1905 and Kostromich (“The Kostroman”) in 1906. He joined the Kadets in 1906 and was an active member of their caucus in the Third and Fourth State Dumas (as a representative of Kostroma), and during the First World War he ran a frontline hospital unit for Zemgor. During the February Revolution, he was a member of the Duma Committee that subsequently formed the Russian Provisional Government. In May 1917, he was elected to the Kadet Central Committee, heading its military section and organizing pro-war propaganda, and during the Kornilov affair he was an outspoken advocate of military dictatorship.

Following the October Revolution, Gerasimov became one of the leading members of the anti-Bolshevik National Center, working underground in Petrograd and ferrying intelligence to the White forces of General N. N. Iudenich. He was also listed as deputy head of the anti-Bolshevik government-in-waiting (the Government of the North-West Russian Region) that planned to govern the Petrograd region once it had been captured by the Whites. He was arrested by the Cheka and executed, alongside N. N. Shchepkin and 65 other “counterrevolutionaries,” in Moscow in September 1919 under the name “Grekov” (the name of the family with whom he had been hiding in Petrograd). It was only in 1920, during the trial of members of the Tactical Center, that his true identity was established. Gerasimov was buried in Moscow’s Kalitnikov cemetery.

GERBEL′, SERGEI NIKOLAEVICH (1856–19??). Coronet (1878). A prominent figure in Ukrainian political life during the revolutionary period, S. N. Gerbel′ (Serhii Gerbel), the son of a St. Petersburg merchant, was a graduate of the Keremchug Realschule (1877) and the Elizavetgrad Cavalry School (1878). He left military service in 1883 and forged a distinguished career in local government, becoming head of the Kherson guberniia zemstvo board in 1900. He was made a state councillor in 1901, was governor of Kherson guberniia from 1903 to 1904, and from 1904 to 1912 worked as head of the directorate for local economic affairs of the Ministry of the Interior. During the First World War, he was concerned with food supply to the Russian Army.

In 1918, Gerbel′ made his way back to Ukraine, and from 29 May of that year worked as chief plenipotentiary of the Ukrainian State with the staff of the Austro-Hungarian forces in Odessa. From 3 July 1918, he was minister of supply in the cabinet of Fedir Lyzohub, and in October 1918 was one of the Ukrainian ministers who signed the “Letter of the Eight,” calling upon Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii to cut ties to the Central Powers, reorient Ukraine toward the Allies, and seek a federal union with Russia rather than independence. Subsequently (14 November–14 December 1918), he chaired the council of ministers of the Ukrainian State and was simultaneously minister of agriculture. In mid-December 1918, he was arrested by forces loyal to the Ukrainian National Republic Directory and held at the Luk′ianovka prison in Kiev. He was released in February 1919 and moved to Odessa, where he offered his services to the White regime of General A. I. Denikin. Gerbel′ emigrated to Germany later in 1918. His subsequent fate is unknown.

GERMAN CAUCASUS EXPEDITION. This was the name given to the farthest-flung element of the Austro-German intervention in revolutionary Russia. Following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), Germany sought to land forces in Transcaucasia to secure supplies of oil from the Caspian and to extend its influence over the (potentially pro-German) Democratic Republic of Georgia. (Georgia was also known to be a rich source of various other minerals, including copper, lead, and especially manganese, of which it accounted for no less than 35–40 percent of world production in 1914.) Some advisors to the kaiser also saw this as an opportunity to extend Berlin’s influence through Persia and Afghanistan, so as to confront the British in India; chief among them was the explorer and adventurer Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer, Germany’s equivalen to T. E. Lawrence. Consequently, following the Treaty of Poti (28 May 1918) between Germany and Georgia, some 3,000 men, commanded by Major General Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein, were transported from Crimea and were landed in Georgia, the troops being drawn from the 7th Bavarian Cavalry Brigade, the 29th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, the 10th Storm Battalion, the 1st Machine-gun Detachment, and the 176th Mortar Company. Local German settlers in the region (who had been enticed there by Catherine the Great in the late 18th century) were also mobilized, and joint German–Georgian garrisons were established in the main cities.

The presence of these forces enabled Georgia (which, since the Poti treaty, was officially a German protectorate) to withstand the advance of Ottoman forces from the south. The Army of Islam abruptly abandoned its advance on Tiflis in June 1918, following threats from Berlin. Subsequently, two more German divisions were transported from the Balkans, bringing the total there to around 19,000 men. (Among them was Niedermayer’s brother, Friedrich, a doctor, who would later claim that among the patients he treated in Georgia was the mother of J. V. Stalin.) These forces began to move on Baku to secure the oil supplies promised to Germany under the supplementary agreements to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed on 27 August 1918 (the Berlin Agreement). However, they faced competition with the Turkish forces that occupied Baku on 15 September 1918; in any case, the political crisis in Berlin was about turn into a revolution. Consequently, the order for the mission’s complete withdrawal was given on 21 October 1918, as the German Empire collapsed, and the last vessels transporting members of the mission back across the Black Sea left Poti in December 1918.

Gerua, Boris Vladimirovich (9 March 1876–March 1942). Major general (July 1915). A graduate of the Corps of Pages and the Academy of the General Staff (1904), the White diplomat B. V. Gerua (Heroys) served in the Russo–Japanese War on the staff of the quartermaster general of the commander in chief of the Russian Army and prior to 1914 lectured on military tactics at the academy. During the First World War, he rose to chief of staff of the 11th Army (from 9 May 1917). He was briefly arrested in August 1917 for his alleged participation in the Kornilov affair, but was released and returned to work in the academy (from 22 September 1917). In early 1918, when the new Soviet government evacuated that institution to the Urals, he refused to accompany it and instead fled illegally across the border into Finland. From Helsinki, in late 1918 he traveled to London, where he was engaged as head of a Special Military Supply Mission for the White forces in south, north, and eastern Russia. When the mission was liquidated in 1920, Gerua devoted himself to painting, studying at the Slade School of Art in Chelsea and developing into an accomplished (and now highly collectable) portraitist. He died and is buried at Culton St. Mary, Devonshire.

Gīlān, Soviet Republic of. Also known as the Persian (or Iranian) Soviet (sometimes Socialist) Republic (although most of its inhabitants were Gilaki), this short-lived entity, centered on the city of Resht (Rasht), existed in northern Persia from 5 June 1920 to September 1921. Founded by Mirza Kuchuk Khan, of the Constitutional Movement of Gīlān, and his Jangali (“forest people”) partisan allies, who had long been struggling against the central government at Tehran (Gīlān had been the center of the revolutionary upheavals in Persia of 1905–1911) and its imperial Russian and British protectors, the republic relied for its existence on Soviet backing. Such backing had arrived soon after, in the Enzeli operation of May 1920, Red forces of the Astrakhan–Caspian Military Flotilla (commanded by F. F. Raskol′nikov) had landed on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea and captured the Whites’ Caspian Flotilla. An agreement was at that point signed between the Soviet government and Kuchuk Khan, but was abruptly ended as Moscow sought to smooth over relations with Tehran (through the Soviet–Persian Treaty of Friendship of 26 February 1921) and Britain (through the Anglo–Soviet Trade Agreement of March 1921). Pro-Gīlān elements in Moscow (among them J. V. Stalin) had also been undermined by the politically moderate Kuchuk Khan’s increasingly open conflict with the Iranian Communist Party (which had its roots largely in Baku).

The last Soviet troops (among whom had served the subsequently renowned Futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov) left Gīlān on 8 September 1921, and Persian government forces easily dispersed the remaining scattered defenders of the “Jungle Republic,” which by that point had succumbed to an internal civil war between Persian communists (with whom Ia. G. Bliumkin was cooperating) and the moderates led by Kuchuk Khan. The Gīlān events are said to have partly inspired the poet Sergei Esenin’s cycle Persian Motifs, which he penned during a visit to Baku shortly before his suicide.

Gins (Guins), Georgii Konstantinovich (15 April 1867–24 September 1971). A central figure in the White movement in Siberia, and one of its chief chroniclers, G. K. Gins was born near Warsaw. He was the son of an officer at the fortress of Novogeorgevsk (now Modlin, Poland) and could claim Ukrainian and English heritage through his father and Greek and Bulgarian blood through his mother. He graduated from the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1909) and then worked on the Resettlement Board of the Ministry of Agriculture, while pursuing further studies part time (leading to a PhD thesis, completed in 1915 but not defended until 1929, before an émigré college of Russian academicians in Paris, until) and teaching law at the universities of St. Petersburg, Heidelberg, Berlin, and Paris. He was also active as a journalist, publishing articles in numerous law journals and liberal newspapers, notably Slovo (“The Word”). Following the February Revolution, he was made chief legal counselor of the Ministry of Supply of the Russian Provisional Government and became close to a number of Kadets (notably A. I. Shingarev), although he did not join the Kadet Party.

Gins left St. Petersburg following the October Revolution and journeyed to Siberia in January 1918. After some months working with the cooperative movement in the area and lecturing at the Omsk Agricultural Institute, he entered the successive anti-Bolshevik administrations at Omsk; he was administrative secretary to the West Siberian Commissariat, the Provisional Siberian Government, and the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. Although he refused the proffered post of minister of education in the Omsk government in May 1919, he also served under Kolchak as deputy minister of education (November–December 1918), minister without portfolio (from 1 April 1919), deputy minister of foreign affairs (from 9 April 1919), chairman of the State Economic Conference (from 19 June 1919), and chief secretary to the Council of Ministers and to the supreme ruler (from 16 August 1919, as the replacement for G. G. Tel′berg), and was instrumental in drafting Kolchak’s land decree of April 1919, which promised the transfer of land from large estates to small peasant proprietors. Indeed, he was regarded as one of the most active and intelligent of Kolchak’s ministers.

When Kolchak’s regime collapsed in January 1920, Guins narrowly escaped arrest by the Political Center at Irkutsk and emigrated to Harbin, where until 1926 he worked as director of the chancellery and then chief controller of the administration of the Chinese Eastern Railway. At the same time, he edited the journal Russkoe obozrenie (“The Russian Review”) and helped found the Harbin Law Faculty. He then lectured at the faculty (and published a number of juridical-philosophical works), until that institution’s closure by the Japanese authorities in 1937. He then lectured (until 1939) at the Japanese-sponsored Northern Manchurian University and the Harbin Commercial Institute, but was forced out of these posts by the Japanese, who distrusted his independent position in regional politics (even though Gins was a firm opponent of any compromise with the Soviet regime). In 1941, he was obliged to depart Manchukuo for the United States. He subsequently lived in the San Francisco Bay area and worked on émigré newspapers, including Russkaia zhizn′ (“Russian Life”), as well as lecturing (and publishing extensively) on Russian and Soviet history, economy, and law at the University of California at Berkeley and the U.S. Army Language School at Monterey (1945–1954) and acting as an advisor on Russian affairs to the radio station Voice of America (1955–1964). Guins was the author of 11 monographs and one of the basic sources on the “Russian” Civil Wars, Sibir′, soiuzniki i Kolchak, 2 vols. (Peking, 1921).

Gintowt-Dziewałtowski, Ignacy (1888–December 1925). Staff captain (1915). A Polish revolutionary who was active in the “Russian” Civil Wars, Ignacy Gintowt-Dziewałtowski was born into a noble family at Plishki in Vil′na guberniia and was a graduate of the Vil′na Realschule. He studied at the Lemberg (L′vov) Polytechnical Institute and the St. Petersburg Physics and Engineering Institute, but did not graduate, devoting himself instead to revolutionary work (as a member of the Polish Socialist Party from 1908). From April to August 1915, he was enrolled as a student at the Pavlovsk Military School and subsequently served in a grenadier regiment. In April 1917, he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), and he played an active part in the October Revolution, as a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and commissar of the Winter Palace (26 October 1917).

From 27 October 1917, Gintowt-Dziewałtowski was deputy commander of the Petrograd Military District and in 1918 was made chief commissar of the Directorate of Military-Educational Institutions of the All-Russian Main Staff (Vseroglavshtab). He subsequently served as deputy people’s commissar for military and naval affairs of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (June–August 1919) and then as full commissar (August–October 1919). Having been transferred to Siberia, he then served as assistant commander of the Eastern Front (October 1919–March 1920), as a member of the Bolshevik Dal′biuro and as a member of the Revvoensovet of the 5th Red Army, before becoming (under the pseudonym Ignatii Iurin) minister of war and minister of foreign affairs of the Far Eastern Republic (FER). Subsequently, he undertook a diplomatic mission to China on behalf of the FER (August 1920–May 1921).

Following the civil wars, Gintowt-Dziewałtowski occupied a variety of important posts, including delegate to the executive committee of the Komintern on behalf of the Bulgarian Communist Party (1924), and was also a Red Army intelligence agent in the Baltic region (March–November 1925). In November 1925, he defected to Poland and became an advisor to Marshal J. K. Piłsudski. He died suddenly the following month. Suspicions remain that his death was the result of poisoning by Soviet agents.

GITTIS, VLADIMIR MIKHAILOVICH (24 June 1881–22 August 1938). Captain (September 1915), colonel (1917), komkor (1935). Among the most prominent of the Red Army’s military specialists during the civil wars, V. M. Gittis was born into a middle-class family in St. Petersburg and was a graduate of the Infantry Officers School (1902). During the First World War, he commanded the 147th (Samara) Infantry Regiment and rose to the command of the Caspian Infantry Regiment by 1917.

In February 1918, Gittis volunteered for service in the Red Army and, after commanding the forces of the Northern Screen (August–September, 1918), became commander of the 6th Red Army (11 September–22 November 1918) and then commander of the 8th Red Army (1 December 1918–23 January 1919). As commander of the Southern Front (24 January–13 July 1919), he achieved notable success in the Red counterattack against the Don Army of General P. N. Krasnov and subsequently, as commander of the Western Front (22 July 1919–29 April 1920), had overall responsibility for the Reds’ successful operations against the forces of the White North-West Army of General N. N. Iudenich. Finally, he was responsible for mopping up the remnants of the Armed Forces of South Russia as commander of the Caucasian Front (15–29 May 1920).

In the years following the civil wars, Gittis was commander of the Trans-Volga and Petrograd Military Districts and from 1921 was assigned to special commissions for the Revvoensovet of the Republic. He joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1925, and from 1926 was chief of supply of the Red Army. From 1930, he served as representative of the People’s Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs in the Commissariat for Trade and then as head of the Department of Foreign Purchases of the People’s Commissariat for Defense of the USSR. Gittis was arrested on 28 November 1937 and, having been found guilty of espionage and belonging to a “counterrevolutionary organization,” was sentenced to death on 22 August 1938 by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. The sentence was carried out that same day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 2 June 1956.

GLAGOLEV, VASILII PAVLOVICH (23 May 1883–12/14 March 1938). Sublieutenant (10 August 1903), lieutenant (13 August 1905), staff captain (30 April 1909), captain (6 December 1912), colonel (6 December 1916), kombrig (13 December 1935). The Soviet military commander V. P. Glagolev was born into a noble family in St. Petersburg and was a graduate of the Academy of the General Staff (1909). Having entered military service on 1 September 1900, from 1903 he served with the 1st Turkestan Artillery Brigade and subsequently commanded a regiment of the 10th Turkestan Regiment (28 October 1909–2 November 1911); from 7 May 1912 he was an adjutant on the staff of the 1st Turkestan Cossack Division. During the First World War, he occupied a series of staff posts with various units and from 2 October 1917 was commander of the 38th Turkestan Rifle regiment.

In April 1918, Glagolev volunteered for service in the Red Army, serving initially as commander of the forces of the Kursk region and then as Kursk provincial commissar. He was then commander of the 1st Kursk Infantry Division (May–October 1918) and commander of the Reserve Army. From January to May 1919, he was commander of the Ukrainian Front and then became commander of the 6th Red Army on the Northern Front (2–29 May 1919). From 22 July to 14 August 1919, Glagolev was commander of the 16th Red Army and subsequently served as commander of the 11th (24 September–16 October 1919) and 12th (5 December 1919–8 September 1920) Cavalry Divisions. He was also briefly commander of the 10th Red Army (20 June–8 July 1920). From 1 August 1921, he occupied a series of command and staff posts with the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic and from 30 November 1922 was first assistant commander of the 5th Red Army.

Following the civil wars, Glagolev was retained as a staff officer and military instructor in the Red Army. He was nevertheless arrested in Moscow on 11 December 1937 and, on 5 March 1938, he was sentenced to death, having been found guilty of treason. He was subsequently executed at Kommunarka, Moscow, and buried in a mass grave.

GLAVPOLITPROSOVET. The Main Political-Educational Committee of the Republic (Glavnyi politiko-prosvetitel′nyi komitet Respubliki) was founded by a decree of Sovnarkom of 12 November 1920, as a branch of the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros). It organized reading circles, popular libraries, adult education classes, cultural centers, people’s universities, and similar institutions and was one of the Soviet state’s most effective agitprop departments. Lenin’s wife, N. K. Krupskaia, headed Glavpolitprosovet until June 1930, when it was reorganized.

GLAZENAP, PETR VLADIMIROVICH VON (2 March 1882–27 May 1951). Colonel (April 1917), major general (12 October 1918), lieutenant general (24 November 1919). Born at Gzhatsk (known since 1968 as Gagarin), the son of an officer from the nobility of Livland guberniia, the White commander P. V. Glazenap was a graduate of the 1st Moscow Cadet Corps (1901) and the Nicholas Cavalry School (1903). After service with the 13th Dragoon Regiment, he also completed a course at the Cavalry Officers School (1911–1913). During the First World War, he commanded a number of independent units, notably a partisan detachment for raiding behind the enemy lines (1915–1917) and the Colonel Glazenap Shock Detachment (March–November 1917).

In December 1917, Glazenap led a group of officers from his eponymous detachment to Novocherkassk to join the Volunteer Army. Subsequently, in the White forces in South Russia, he served as commander of a cavalry detachment during the First Kuban (Ice) March (December 1917–March 1918), commander of the 1st Mounted (“Mounted Partisan”) Regiment (successfully capturing Egorlytskaia, Mechetinskaia, Kachalinskaia, and other Kuban stanitsy, 25 March–June 1918), commander of the Kuban Independent Brigade (June–July 1918), and military governor of Stavropol′ guberniia (July 1918–June 1919). He was then placed on the reserve list, but following an agreement between Admiral A. V. Kolchak and General A. I. Denikin, on 7 October 1919 he arrived at Narva to join the North-West Army of General N. N. Iudenich, being named by the latter as commander of forces and governor-general in the zone of operations of his army during its advance on Petrograd (18 October 1919). He then served as governor-general of the North-West (Pskov) oblast′ (7–28 November 1919) and, as deputy for Iudenich, as commander of the North-West Army (28 November 1919–22 January 1920).

Following the internment of his forces in Estonia in early 1920, Glazenap accompanied Iudenich via Riga to London, arriving there in April 1920. He then moved to Poland to command the 3rd Corps of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, which was being raised from refugees and internees in that country under the supervision of B. V. Savinkov. Following an aborted attempt to raise volunteers for an anti-Bolshevik force in Hungary in 1921—his efforts were regarded as disruptive by General P. N. Wrangel—Glazenap lived in emigration in Germany (from 1922), Danzig (from 1925), Warsaw (from 1939), and finally, Munich (from 1946). He died in Munich and is buried there.

GLEBOV, FADEI (FEDOR) L′VOVICH (25 June 1887–23 October 1945). Colonel (November 1919), major general (September 1920), lieutenant general (July 1921). The Cossack commander F. L. Glebov was born near Petropavlovsk, in western Siberia, and entered military service in 1907 with the 1st Siberian (Ermak Timofeevich) Cossack Regiment. Having completed military school in 1911, he became a Cossack NCO (uriadnik) before leaving the army. He was mobilized in 1914 and by 1915 was commander of the 4th Siberian Cossack Regiment.

Following the October Revolution, Glebov refused to recognize Soviet power and organized an underground officer group at Petropavlovsk. In the summer of 1918, he helped create the 1st Siberian Cossack Division and then commanded its first sotnia as part of the Omsk garrison of the Siberian Army. In that capacity, he was one of those behind the Omsk coup of 18 November 1918 that brought Admiral A. V. Kolchak to power as supreme ruler of the Whites. He subsequently commanded the 1st Siberian Cossack Regiment, during the Russian Army’s spring offensive of 1919, and from 6 August 1919 was commander of the 10th Siberian Cossack Regiment.

When Kolchak’s regime collapsed, Glebov joined the Great Siberian (Ice) March, arriving at Chita in March 1920. There, he joined the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov, as commander of a Siberian Cossack regiment. When Semenov was driven out of Transbaikal in September 1920, Glebov moved with his Cossacks to Grodekovo, in the Maritime Province. Remaining loyal to Semenov, he ignored all orders emanating from S. D. Merkulov’s Provisional Government of the Maritime Region Zemstvo Board at Vladivostok, although on 11 December 1921 he did agree to unite his group with the White Insurgent Army of General V. M. Molchanov during its advance on Khabarovsk. However, he subsequently changed his mind and ordered his men to withdraw. He then attempted to emigrate to Japan, but was arrested at Vladivostok on 31 December 1921. A military court then expelled him from the army, but he was allowed to live on in Vladivostok, on a railway carriage supplied by the Japanese, and was given the post of acting ataman of the Siberian Cossack Host. When General M. K. Diterikhs came to power in June 1922, Glebov was again given command of the Grodekovo group of forces and, after battling with Red partisans around Spassk and with the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic as it advanced on Vladivostok, he led his men into emigration in October 1922.

Glebov moved first to the Korean port of Wŏnsan and then journeyed on to Shanghai in August 1923, arriving there on 14 September 1923. He initially refused the requests of the Chinese authorities that his unit should disarm; consequently, he and his men were confined to their ships for several months. When the Russian consulate at Shanghai was taken over by the Soviet authorities in July 1924, Glebov’s group came under further pressure to disband, but he kept them intact, as part (from 21 January 1927) of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps that guarded the French concession. After General P. P. Ivanov-Rinov returned to the USSR, the Siberian Cossack government at Harbin recognized Glebov as Host ataman, on 29 June 1927. He remained in Shanghai and died there in 1945.

Goldman, Emma (27 June 1869–14 May 1940). An influential proponent of anarchism, Emma Goldman, who was active in Russia during the civil wars, was born into a Jewish family at Kovno (Kaunas) in Lithuania and in her youth lived in Königsberg and St. Petersburg. In 1885, she emigrated, with her elder sister, to Rochester, New York, where she worked as a seamstress, later moving to New York City, where she befriended her thereafter constant companion, the anarchist Alexander Berkman. Over the next three decades, she worked tirelessly as an agitator, orator, and labor organizer, and was under almost constant surveillance by the police. She was arrested on numerous occasions, and in 1917 was imprisoned for two years for spreading propaganda opposed to U.S. involvement in the First World War.

In 1919, alongside Berkman, Goldman was deported under the terms of the Immigration Act of 6 October 1918 (“The Anarchist Exclusion Act”). On a ship that the press nicknamed the Soviet Ark (actually USS Buford), containing hundreds of anarchists and socialists (of mostly Russian and East European origin), she set sail from New York on 21 December 1919, landing at Hanko (Hangö) in Finland on 17 January 1920, before proceeding to Petrograd. She initially supported the Soviet government and worked in a variety of posts, but eventually came to regard the Bolsheviks as tyrants, who cared nothing for revolutionary principles. The last straws for Goldman were the suppression of the Kronshtadt Revolt, the Tambov Rebellion, and the Makhnovshchina in 1921. Along with Berkman, she left Soviet Russia for Riga in December 1921, before moving on to Berlin. There she wrote a series of articles for the New York World that were subsequently collected and published as the enduringly influential My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924), both sharply critical of the Soviet regime. She moved to London in 1924, then Canada in 1927, later settling near St. Tropez in France to write her memoirs. She died in Toronto after a series of strokes and was buried in the Forest Home cemetery.

Goldmanis, Jānis (29 August/23 September 1875–18 November 1955). The Latvian statesman Jānis Goldmanis, after a lengthy and successful legal career, was elected as a representative of Courland to the Fourth State Duma in 1912 (in which he joined the Progressives faction) and in 1917 was elected to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly. During the First World War, he helped found and organize the Latvian Riflemen and worked in refugee relief. In the aftermath of the February Revolution, on 8 March 1917 he was named the Russian Provisional Government’s commissar for Riga. He fled the city as German forces approached in August 1917, but returned to Latvia in 1918 and became a member of the National Council (Tautas Padome) that declared Latvian independence in November of that year. He subsequently served as minister of agriculture in the Latvian Provisional Government and was elected to the Latvian parliament in 1922 and 1925. He escaped Latvia in 1944, when Soviet forces invaded, and emigrated, settling in the United States from 1950.

GOLD RESERVE, IMPERIAL RUSSIAN. The Imperial Russian Gold Reserve was inherited almost in its entirety by the Soviet government following the October Revolution of 1917. Fearing for its security in the event of a German invasion of the country, however, in early 1918 the Soviet authorities decided to concentrate the reserve deep in the (apparently more secure) Russian interior, and from May 1918 huge amounts of gold, silver, platinum, coinage, paper money, and objets d’art were stored in the vaults of the State Bank at Kazan′, on the Volga. On 7 August 1918, that city, together with the gold reserve, was captured by the People’s Army of Komuch and forces of the Czechoslovak Legion. Very soon, however—almost certainly as a consequence of an act of subterfuge perpetrated by I. A. Mikhailov—trains carrying the treasure arrived, not at Komuch’s capital of Samara, but at Omsk, where eventually the reserve passed into the control of the Omsk government and White Supreme Ruler Admiral A. V. Kolchak, whom Mikhailov served as minister of finance.

Initially, Kolchak was reluctant to draw upon the reserve, which, it was calculated, amounted to some 651,532,117 rubles and 86 kopeks in value. But as the Siberian economy collapsed and it became increasingly difficult to supply the front with arms and, especially, food and clothing, he relented. Consequently, from May 1919 onward more than one-third of the reserve (worth over 241,000,000 rubles) was sent abroad by Kolchak to secure loans and to purchase goods (although how much of it actually arrived at its proper destination is uncertain, as a small but not insignificant portion was purloined at Chita by Ataman G. M. Semenov and seems ultimately to have ended up in the hands of the Japanese army). The remainder of the reserve accompanied Kolchak on his retreat eastward from Omsk to Irkutsk from November 1919 to January 1920. At Irkutsk, along with the person of Kolchak, on 15 January 1920 it was handed over to the Political Center by the Czechoslovak Legion to secure the legion’s safe passage through the city to the Far East. The reserve then fell into the hands of local Bolsheviks when they took control of Irkutsk on 21 January 1920. On 3 May 1920, what remained of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve (worth 409,625,870 rubles and 86 kopeks) arrived back in Moscow. In the 1920s, a significant portion of the remaining reserve was sold abroad by the Soviet authorities.

The fate of the gold reserve has provided inspiration for a number of far-fetched fictional works in the West, ranging from Brian Garfield’s thriller Kolchak’s Gold (London, 1974) to an episode in the adventures of the popular Italian comic-book hero Albi di Corto Maltese (drawn by Hugo Pratt): Corte Sconta detta Arcana (1974), which was animated as Corto Maltese: La Cour secrète des Arcanes (dir. Pascal Morelli, 2002). The Soviet feature film Zolotoi eshelon (“The Gold Train,” dir. I. Ia. Gurin, 1959) also concerns the fate of the gold.

GOLITSYN, VLADIMIR VASIL′EVICH (9 July 1878–?December 1919). Colonel (1916), major general (22 April 1917), lieutenant general (3 January 1919). The White commander V. V. Golitsyn served in the anti-Bolshevik underground in Russia and (unusually) in White forces in both South Russia and Siberia. He was born into an impoverished branch of an ancient noble family at Zhitomir, Volynsk guberniia, was a graduate of the Polotsk Cadet Corps (1895) and the Alexander Military School (1897), and served with the St. Petersburg Regiment of the Life Guards. He saw action in Russia’s Chinese expedition in 1900 and in the Russo–Japanese War, and thereafter (1906–1914) served with the 3rd Amur Border Regiment in the Far East. During the First World War, he initially commanded a company of the 16th Siberian Rifle Regiment, and from 7 February 1915 he was commander of its 3rd Battalion. He was wounded in 1915, but returned to service, rising (from 7 February 1917) to the command of the 15th Siberian Rifle Regiment and (from March to April 1917) to the command of the 3rd Guards Reserve Brigade. He then officially retired from the army, due to ill health, but was in fact retained by General L. G. Kornilov as an aide on the staff of the 8th Army and later that of the South-West Front.

Golitsyn supported Kornilov during the Kornilov affair of August–September 1917 and subsequently accompanied him to the Don and helped found the Volunteer Army, becoming a duty officer on its main staff. After participating in the First Kuban (Ice) March, he made his way to Astrakhan and then Moscow in late spring 1918, to rescue his family and to supply funds to the National Center. From there, he moved to the Urals, where he joined the Siberian Army and was named head of the garrison at Ekaterinburg. On 30 July 1918, he joined the staff of the Siberian Army’s Urals Corps. He subsequently became commander of the 2nd (later 7th) Division of the Urals Mountain Riflemen (6 August–24 December 1918), refusing the post of war minister in the Provisional Oblast′ Government of the Urals in September 1918. After seeing action at various points in the Urals and participating in the Siberian Whites’ spring offensive with the Western Army, on 22 June 1919 he was assigned to the Staff of the Supreme Ruler, Admiral A. V. Kolchak, and from 28 August 1919 was placed in charge of the various volunteer detachments being created in Siberia (e.g., the Holy Cross Druzhina). According to most sources, he disappeared during the Great Siberian (Ice) March in December 1919, soon after the evacuation of Omsk, and is presumed to have died then. Some reports have it, however, that he remained in command of a group of forces of the Whites 2nd Army until it reached Transbaikalia in February 1920, then went into emigration in Manchuria and later China.

GOLOVIN, NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH (22 February 1875–10 January 1944). Lieutenant colonel (17 April 1905), colonel (6 December 1909), major general (6 December 1915), lieutenant general (1918). A leading figure in the White movement, a noted and much-published military historian, and during the Second World War, a prominent collaborator with the Nazis, N. N. Golovin was born in Moscow into an ancient noble family and was the son of General of Infantry N. M. Golovin. He was a graduate of the Corps of Pages (1894) and the Academy of the General Staff (1900). Prior to the First World War, he served mostly in guards regiments, and from 1908 to 1913 he was a professor at the academy (from 1908 to 1910, engaged in study at the École Superieur de Guerre in Paris). However, his plans for the wholesale reform of military education in Russia earned him the enmity of war minister V. A. Sukhomlinov. Golovin consequently lost his teaching post, and the outbreak of the war found him in command of the 2nd Grodno Hussars. His distinguished command of that regiment in the Galician campaigns of August–September 1914 earned him promotion, and he rose to become chief of staff of the 7th Army (from 24 October 1915), chief of staff of the Romanian Front (from April 1917), and subsequently, assistant commander in chief of that front.

Following the October Revolution, Golovin was briefly pressed into the Red Army and became chief of Vseroglavshtab (the All-Russian Main Staff), but he soon deserted that post and moved to Kiev. He joined the Volunteer Army in 1918 and was sent to Paris and London as its representative and as an advisor on military affairs to S. D. Sazonov. He subsequently (August 1919) moved to Siberia, where from 17 September 1919 he oversaw the reform of the Staff of the Supreme Ruler, Admiral A. V. Kolchak, and played a major role in the planning and execution of the Russian Army’s counterattack against Red forces of that month (the Tobol′sk–Petropavlovsk Operation). In October 1919, troubled by wounds he had received in 1914, he was evacuated to Tokyo.

Following the collapse of Kolchak’s forces, Golovin moved to Crimea, as an advisor to General P. N. Wrangel. Having been evacuated with the remains of Wrangel’s Russian Army from Sevastopol′ to Turkey in November 1920, in emigration he settled in France. There he associated himself with ROVS and returned to military-educational work, establishing courses in Paris, Brussels, and Belgrade for émigré officers; lecturing in military institutions in Paris and Washington; and authoring numerous works on military history and theory. From 1926 to 1940, he was also the European “ambassador” of the Hoover Institution, amassing a large number of documentary collections for its archives. Following the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, he served on the collaborationist Committee of Mutual Aid of Russian Émigrés and was involved in recruiting officers for the forces organized by General A. A. Vlasov and in training Russian émigré officers to serve the Wehrmacht. Golovin died of a heart attack in 1944 (soon after hearing that he had been condemned to death by the French Resistance) and is buried in the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Paris.

Goltz, Gustav Adolf Joachim Rüdiger von der (8 December 1865–4 November 1946). Major general (German Army, March 1916). A prominent commander of German and anti-Bolshevik forces in the Baltic theater, Graf Gustav von der Goltz was born in Züllichau, in Prussian Brandenberg (now Sulechów in the Lubusz voivodship of Poland). A career officer, he joined the Prussian Army in 1885; attended the Berlin Kriegsakademie; and had risen to the rank of major general and was serving in France (in command of the 37th Infantry Division) when, in March 1918, he was placed in command of Germany’s 10,000-man Baltic Sea Division, which landed at Hanko (3–5 April 1918) and then moved toward Helsinki and Lahti in support of the White Finns during the Finnish Civil War. Von der Goltz’s force then remained in and around the Finnish capital for the remainder of the First World War.

Following the armistice of 11 November 1918, as commander of the 6th Reserve Corps of the German Army and (from January 1919) governor of Libau (Liepāja), von der Goltz was involved in the formation of and subsequently commanded the Iron Division, part of the Freikorps active in Latvia that operated under the auspices of the Baltische Landeswehr. With the Iron Division, he helped to clear most of Latvia of Red forces in March–April 1918, but in contravention of Allied wishes proceeded also to overthrow the nationalist government of Kārlis Ulmanis and occupied Riga on 22–23 May 1919. He in turn was defeated by Estonian and Latvian forces in the Landeswehr War in June 1918, in the first stage of what he later claimed was a march on Petrograd to unseat the Bolsheviks (although it is more likely that he was seeking to establish a German-dominated Baltikum). On 21 September 1919, he signed an agreement with White leaders under which many of the forces under his command were able to join the Western Army of P. M. Bermondt-Avalov rather than return to Germany, as the Allies were now insisting. Von der Goltz clearly hoped to continue to pull the strings in the background, but under Allied pressure he was forced to return to Germany in October 1919. In the interwar period, he was active in antirepublican politics and was head of the Reich Association of German Officers. He died at Kinsegg (in the Allgäu region of Bavaria) just after the end of the Second World War.

GONGOTA AGREEMENT. This treaty was signed at Gongota station, near Chita (in Transbaikalia), on 15 July 1920, between a delegation of the Far Eastern Republic (FER), led by A. M. Krasnoshchekov and G. Kh. Eikhe, and representatives of the Japanese Expeditionary Force, led by its chief of staff, General Yui Mitsue. Under the terms of the agreement, thrashed out in negotiations that stretched back to late May 1920 (and which were several times broken off), the Japanese agreed, without formally recognizing the sovereignty of the FER, to end military actions against its People’s-Revolutionary Army and Red partisans in the region and to the establishment of a demilitarized buffer zone west of Chita. This enabled the FER to prepare its final assault on the forces of Ataman G. M. Semenov, notably the Far Eastern (White) Army, which were centered on Chita, and marked the end of Japanese ambitions to establish a vassal state in Transbaikalia.

GORODOVIKOV, OKA IVANOVICH (19 September 1879–26 February 1960). Colonel general (1941). The Red cavalryman Oka Gorodovikov was born into a Kalmyk peasant family at the Mokraia El′muta khutor in the Don territory. After service in the First World War, in early 1918 Gorodovikov joined the Red Army and rose from the command of a squadron of Red Cossacks to the command of the 4th (from August 1919) and 6th (from April 1920) Divisions of the 1st Cavalry Army. He joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919. From 16 July to 6 September 1920, he commanded the 2nd Cavalry Army in key actions against the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel.

Gorodovikov then spent a number of years in military education, culminating in his graduation from the Red Military Academy (1932), before being placed in command of the 1st Mounted Corps of the Cherven Cossacks and serving as deputy commander of the Central Asian Military District (1932–1938). He was then inspector general of cavalry for the Red Army (1938–1943) and deputy main commander of cavalry (from 1943). He saw action in the Second World War, as commander of the 8th Red Army on the North-West Front (from July 1941) and later as a staff officer with mounted units that undertook raids into the rear of the enemy during the Battle of Stalingrad. He retired, highly decorated (having been six times awarded the Order of the Red Banner and three times the Order of Lenin, among other prizes) and with a pension, in 1947, having been one of the minority of Kalmyks to escape deportation to Central Asia at the end of the war. Indeed, he had helped organize the deportation of the Kalmyks in 1943–1944. On 10 March 1958, he was rewarded with the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Streets were named in Gorodovikov’s honor in Lipetsk and Rostov-on-Don, as was (from 1971) the town of Gorodovikovsk (formerly Bashanta) in Kalmykiia, while an equestrian statue of him was unveiled in a square in Elista on 16 November 1976.

GOTS, ABRAM (ABRAHAM) RAFAELOVICH (1882/1886–4 August 1940). The leading member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR), Abram Gots was born in Moscow into a wealthy Jewish merchant family and was a graduate of the Philosophy Faculty of Berlin University. He joined the revolutionary movement in 1896, and in 1906 became a member of the terrorist wing of the PSR. He was soon arrested for organizing an attempted assassination of a policeman and remained in administrative exile until he was liberated by the February Revolution of 1917. During the revolutionary year, he was prominent as a right-of-center member of the PSR Central Committee and as deputy chairman of VTsIK. He was also elected as a member of the Constituent Assembly, representing Penza.

For his opposition to the October Revolution, Gots was arrested by the Soviet government on 18 December 1917 but freed the following day. When the Constituent Assembly was closed, he became one of the founders of the anti-Bolshevik Union of Regeneration (he had earlier led the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution), concentrating on military affairs. In the summer of 1918, he created an armed PSR unit that he attempted unsuccessfully to lead to the Volga to fight for Komuch. Frustrated in that aim, he headed south and was subsequently engaged in party work at Odessa and was a proponent of the PSR’s engaging in “a struggle on two fronts,” against both the Bolsheviks and the Whites. For those activities, he was arrested by the Soviet government in 1920, and in 1922 he was tried alongside other PSR leaders and sentenced to death (subsequently, in 1924, commuted to five years’ imprisonment). He later (from 1927) worked for the state planning apparatus (Gosplan) at Simbirsk, but he was arrested in 1937, and on 20 June 1939 he was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment. Gots died the following year in the Kraslag camp complex at Nizhnii Ingash, Krasnoiarsk krai.

Government-in-exile of the Democratic Republic of Georgia. As Soviet forces overran Georgia, on 18 March 1921 the last session of the Georgian Constituent Assembly, held at Batumi, voted in favor of the government of the Democratic Republic of Georgia going into exile. That same day, members of the government and other Georgian political and military leaders went on board the French battleship Ernest Renan and were transported to France, where they were offered political asylum. The government purchased a hunting lodge in large grounds at Leuville-sur-Orge, south of Paris, which served thereafter as its base. Its early activities focused on assistance for the Committee for the Independence of Georgia in advance of the August Uprising of 1924 and on securing international recognition, but the rising failed, and despite two League of Nations resolutions in favor of Georgian sovereignty, full recognition was not forthcoming, as the Allies sought to normalize relations with Soviet Russia (although Belgium, Britain, France, and Poland retained some ties to it). Despite this—and despite the suicide of N. S. Chkheidze and the assassination of Noe Ramishvili—the government continued to function for some years, but international recognition of the USSR and the latter’s entry into the League of Nations in September 1934 made its existence problematic. The prime ministers of the Government-in-Exile of Georgia were Noe Zhordania (1921–1953) and Evgeni Gegechkori.

GOVERNMENT OF SOUTH RUSSIA. This White polity, which had its roots in the Council of Heads of Departments formed at Sevastopol′ in April 1920 by General P. N. Wrangel (which in turn was the legacy of the Government of the Main Commander of the Armed Forces of South Russia, created by General A. S. Denikin in December 1919, as the successor to the Special Council), came into being on 19 August 1920 (by Wrangel’s Order No. 3504), at the height of Wrangel’s military success, following the agreement signed between Wrangel and the atamans of the Don Cossack Host (A. P. Bogaevskii), the Kuban Cossack Host (V. G. Naumenko), the Terek Cossack Host (G. A. Vdovenko), and the Astrakhan Cossack Host (N. V. Liakov). Its leading members were A. V. Krivoshein (chairman), P. B. Struve (head of the Directorate of Foreign Affairs), and Admiral N. P. Sablin (chief of the Naval Directorate and commander of the Black Sea Fleet, replaced, due to illness, by Admiral M. A. Kedrov on 17 October 1920).

Apart from organizing the rear of the Russian Army, directing supplies to the front, and publishing anti-Bolshevik propaganda through its press and propaganda departments, the government’s main concern was to achieve international recognition and foreign credits. The Wrangel regime was duly afforded de jure recognition by France in August 1920, but following the military collapse of September to November 1920 (and after a total of 54 biweekly meetings), its personnel were evacuated to Constantinople with the remnants of the army. The government then ceased to operate.

GOVERNMENT OF THE MAIN COMMANDER OF THE ARMED FORCES OF SOUTH RUSSIA. This anti-Bolshevik polity was created by General A. I. Denikin as the White effort in South Russia collapsed over the winter of 1919–1920. It had its origins in a memorandum (“On the Current Necessity of Re-organizing the Government”) that was presented to Denikin, on 16 December 1919, by a group of members of his previous government, the Special Council, headed by N. I. Astrov and M. M. Fedorov. The following day, by Denikin’s Order No. 176, the new government came into being. Subsequently, by his Order No 177 of 20 December 1919, it was detailed that the new government would consist of the chairman of the government (to be chosen from among its members), the chief of the Directorate of Internal Affairs, the chief of the Directorate of Finance, the main chief of Communications, the main chief of Supplies, the chief of the Directorate of Trade and Industry, and the chief of the Directorate of Justice. The heads of the Directorate of Foreign Affairs and the State Controller were not members of the government but reported directly to the main commander in chief, General Denikin.

The Government of the Main Commander of the Armed Forces of South Russia continued, in theory, to operate (under the chairmanship of General A. S. Lukomskii) until late February 1920, but in the chaotic conditions engendered by the disintegration of the army, it achieved nothing of note.

Government of the north-west Russian region. This anti-Bolshevik authority was created by General N. N. Iudenich at Revel, on 11 August 1919, following the delivery of an ultimatum from the head of the local British military mission (General F. Marsh), who had despaired at the inability to cooperate of the fractious White forces in the Baltic theater. Its key figures were S. G. Lianozov (prime minister, minister of finance, and minister of foreign affairs), Iudenich (minister of war), and Rear Admiral V. K. Pilkin (minister of marine). It claimed authority over Petrograd, Pskov, and Novgorod gubernii, but its function (in which it failed) was to unite the various anti-Bolshevik factions in northwest Russia in anticipation of Iudenich’s planned advance on Petrograd. When that attack was repulsed by the Red Army in October–November 1919, the government ceased to function, and it was formally dissolved on 5 December 1919.

GOVOROV, ALEKSEI VLADIMIROVICH (12 January 1885–2 March 1967). Lieutenant colonel (15 August 1917), major general (June 1919), lieutenant general (October 1919). A prominent staff officer in the White movement in South Russia, A. V. Govorov, the son of a priest, was educated at the Don Seminary and subsequently graduated from the Tver′ Cavalry School (1907) and the Academy of the General Staff (1914). During the First World War, he occupied staff posts at regimental, brigade, and divisional levels, chiefly as senior adjutant on the staff of the 4th Don Cavalry Division (22 March 1915–3 January 1917).

Having refused to recognize the October Revolution, Govorov joined the Volunteer Army soon after its inception and participated in the First Kuban (Ice) March, as chief of staff of a cavalry brigade (January–March 1918). He subsequently served as chief of staff of the 1st Don Mounted Division (25 May 1918–29 October 1919) and chief of staff of the 3rd Don Cossack Corps (18 November 1919–March 1920). After the evacuation from Novorossiisk to Crimea in March 1920, he joined the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, as chief of staff of the 3rd Don Cavalry Division (from 25 March 1920), and subsequently became chief of staff of the 1st Cavalry Division (from September 1920), chief of staff of the Don Corps (from 1 October 1920), and then commander of that corps (October–November 1920).

Following the evacuation of White forces from Crimea to Turkey, Govorov emigrated to France, where he made a living as a taxi driver and from 1931 headed the Union of Pervopokhodniki in Paris. From December 1944, he headed the Union of Russian (later Soviet) Patriots, and on 14 February 1949 he gave evidence against the Soviet defector V. A. Kravchenko in the case that the latter had launched against the French communist weekly Les Lettres Françaises. Govorov returned to the USSR in 1947 and worked in the historical museum attached to the St. Sofia Cathedral in Kiev. He died in 1967 and is buried in Kiev.

GOYER, LEV VIKTOROVICH VON (27 January 1875–30 April 1939). The jurist and financier L. V. von Goyer, who was to become a controversial figure in the White regime in Siberia during the civil wars, was born and raised at Minsk. Having worked, before the First World War, as an agent in the Far East of the imperial Russian ministry of finance and as a director of the Far Eastern (Shanghai) branch of the Russo–Asiatic Bank, von Goyer was summoned to Omsk from Japan by Admiral A. V. Kolchak in August 1919 to replace the disgraced I. A. Mikhailov as minister of finance in the Omsk government. In that capacity, he oversaw operations to sell parts of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve on the international markets in order to finance the operations of the government and the Russian Army, attempted to involve private banks in stimulating Siberia’s foreign trade, and succeeded (where Mikhailov had failed) in persuading the U.S. government to release to Kolchak the Russian banknotes (to the value of 3,900,000,000 rubles) that had been ordered in 1917 by the Provisional Government and held in escrow ever since. His imperious manner and the hardship caused by his (failed) efforts to stabilize the value of the Kolchak ruble, however, earned him criticism from both Left and Right, and there were even demands that he be put on trial for malfeasance.

Following the reorganization of the Omsk government and its relocation to Irkutsk in November 1919, von Goyer was replaced as finance minister by P. A. Buryshkin. An official investigation into his activities was subsequently begun, but was curtailed as the White movement in the east collapsed over the winter of 1919 to 1920. He emigrated to Manchuria in January 1920, leaving Irkutsk on board a train of the American Red Cross. (Reportedly, he disguised himself as a cook while traveling through Transbaikalia, fearing arrest at the hands of Ataman G. M. Semenov, whose predations on the local population he had criticized and sought to curtail.) Until 1926, he remained a director of the Russo–Asiatic Bank in Shanghai and Manchuria, subsequently relocating to Paris, where he died.

GRAVES, WILLIAM SIDNEY (27 March 1865–27 February 1940). Colonel (U.S. Army, 30 June 1917), brigadier general (U.S. Army, 17 December 1917), major general (U.S. Army, 26 June 1918). The commander of the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia during the Allied intervention, General William S. Graves was born into a military family at Mount Calm, Texas, and was a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (1889). He fought in the Spanish–American War of 1898, remained in the Philippines until 1902, and in succeeding years served as a member of the General Staff in Washington, D.C. (including stints as secretary to the General Staff and a tour of duty as the assistant chief of staff of the U.S. Army). From May 1917 to July 1917, he undertook a secret mission to London, Paris, and Flanders to prepare for the entrance of the United States into the First World War.

When President Woodrow Wilson decided to intervene in Russia, Graves was given command of the 8th U.S. Infantry Division (18 July 1918) and sent to the Siberian theater, landing with his 8,000 men at Vladivostok on 1 September 1918. Before embarkation, he had been warned by Secretary of State Newton Baker that he would be “walking on eggs loaded with dynamite” and was supplied in advance with a famously vague aide-memoire by the president that insisted that U.S. forces in Siberia remain strictly neutral in the “Russian” Civil Wars. This led immediately to tensions between Graves and the Omsk government, which accused him of aiding the Bolsheviks. With the assumption of power by Admiral A. V. Kolchak (18 November 1918), relations became even worse, although Graves’s view of the White regime was undoubtedly prejudiced by the aspect of it that he could observe most closely from his base in the Far East: the atamanshchina of G. M. Semenov and I. M. Kalmykov. He visited Omsk only once, in July 1919 (to attend the Omsk Diplomatic Conference).

Graves’s relations with the Japanese, whom he suspected of harboring territorial ambitions against Russia and China, were no better, while he was openly critical of the French and the British, whom he suspected of using the intervention to further their own economic ambitions in Siberia and the Far East and whom he accused of interference in Russian affairs. Graves departed from Vladivostok with the last American soldiers on 1 April 1920. He retired from the army on 4 September 1928 (his last posting being the command of the Panama Canal Zone) and wrote a book about his experiences in Russia (America’s Siberian Adventure, 1931) that was so scathing in its criticism of the Whites that it was immediately translated into Russian and republished in Moscow by the Soviet government. When Kolchak’s former commander in chief, General K. V. Sakharov, read the book, he felt obliged to challenge the author to a duel. Graves ignored the challenge (which arrived by mail) and died at his home in Shrewsbury, N.J., of coronary disease on 27 February 1940. He was buried, with military honors, at the Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia.

GREAT SIBERIAN (ICE) MARCH. This term denotes the eastward retreat of the White forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s Eastern Front from approximately 14 October 1919, when they were forced back across the River Tobol′, to 14 February 1920, when they crossed Lake Baikal and the pursuing 5th Red Army halted at Irkutsk. During the march, the White 2nd Army and 3rd Army for the most part proceeded parallel to the Trans-Siberian Railway (the 2nd Army to the north of it, the 3rd Army to the south), although the rearguard of the 2nd Army, under General V. O. Kappel′, was forced to make a lengthy and murderous northward detour around Krasnoiarsk following the seizure of that town by pro-Bolshevik rebels in early January 1920. For the 3rd Army, meanwhile, traversing the barren Shedlovsk taiga proved equally fatal. At Novonikolaevsk, many of the participants of the march simply gave up, although Soviet claims that 31,000 troops and 2,000 officers were taken prisoner there are probably exaggerated.

Apart from attacks of the Red Army and peasant partisans and frosts of minus 50 degrees, the men faced a hopeless battle against typhus; one estimate is that 60,000 people died of that disease at Novonikolaevsk alone over the winter of 1919–1920. A further 1,400 perished when a munitions train exploded at Achinsk station on 17 December 1919. The retreat was further complicated by the fact that the Trans-Siberian Railway in eastern Siberia was in the hands of the Czechoslovak Legion, whose commanders prioritized the withdrawal of their own units.

No reliable figures exist for the number of soldiers who survived the march, although it may have been around 30,000. For those survivors a medal was struck in 1920, with a design similar to that awarded to the Pervopokhodniki of the First Kuban (Ice) March. Still less is known about the number of civilians who also attempted the trek or of how many of them survived. Many of the units that reached Chita in February–March 1920 were incorporated into the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov.

GREENS. The Greens (sometimes the “Green Movement” or the “Forest Brethren”) is the name usually given to forces in the “Russian” Civil Wars, usually peasant-based, that although supportive of the February Revolution of 1917—and even of the promises made by the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution—had by 1918 become disillusioned with the Soviet government and fought against not only the Whites but also the Red Army, usually in the name of local autonomy and often under the slogan “Soviets without Communists.” Often their leaders expressed sympathy for anarchism, although in Soviet historiography they were designated as “bandits” and “renegades.” The name is thought to derive from the forests in which the Greens would frequently hide as hostile forces passed through their territories.

If one accepts that the Greens were one manifestation of anarchism in the civil-war period, then the most famous of the Greens was Nestor Makhno, but Green bands and even armies flourished right across the territories of the former Russian Empire, from Ukraine and Kuban to the Maritime Province, as the old order collapsed and the Soviet government struggled to establish a new one. However, many had little or no commitment to anarchism in any ideological or practical sense and fought only to preserve their local independence and security from outside incursions, while other groups were led by members (or former members) of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries.

GREEN UKRAINE. Sometimes also known as the Green Wedge (Zelenii klin) or New Ukraine, this term refers to a would-be polity occupying an indeterminate expanse of territory between the Amur River and the Pacific Ocean (in Russia’s Maritime Province) with a population of predominantly Ukrainian settlers. During the revolution and civil wars, efforts were made in the region to forge autonomy, or even independence from Russia, as the Ukrainian Republic of the Far East. On 11 June 1917, the First All-Ukrainian Far Eastern Congress at Nikol′sk-Ussuriisk formed a Far Eastern Krai Rada; in January 1918, the Second All-Ukrainian Far Eastern Conference at Khabarovsk proclaimed the union of the region with the Ukrainian National Republic; and in April 1918, the Third All-Ukrainian Far Eastern Congress demanded the creation of a fully independent Ukrainian state in the region and the raising of an army. Following the Omsk coup and the establishment of the dictatorship of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, such separatism was suppressed, but efforts were redoubled with the collapse of the Whites in 1920 and the creation of the Far Eastern Republic (FER), which laid claim to the lands of Green Ukraine. By 1922, however, with the advance of the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the FER into the Maritime Province, the Soviet authorities were again able to suppress the movement. The head of the Krai Secretariat of Green Ukraine (from June 1918 to 1919 and from 1919 to 1922) was Iuri Hlushko-Mova.

GREKOV, ALEKSANDR PETROVICH. See HREKIV (HREKOV/GREKOV), OLEKSANDR PETROVICH.

GRIGOR′EV, NIKOLAI ALEKSANDROVICH. See HRYHORIIV (GRIGOR′EV), NYKYFOR (MATVII).

Grishin-Almazov, Aleksei Nikolaevich (24 November 1880/1881–5 May 1919). Lieutenant (1917), colonel (June 1918), major general (10 July 1918). One of the most controversial figures in the White movement, A. N. Grishin was born at Kirsanovsk uezd, Tambov guberniia, the son of a tsarist bureaucrat (with the rank of collegiate secretary), and was a graduate of the Voronezh Cadet Corps (1899) and the Mikhail Artillery School (1902). He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War as a member of the active army (from 3 August 1904 to 10 November 1905) and thereafter occupied a number of army posts in Siberia and the Far East. During the First World War, he initially served on the staff of the 5th Siberian Rifle Corps (as an adjutant to its commander) and from April 1915 was transferred to the command of a battery with the 35th Mortar Division. Following the October Revolution, he was briefly arrested by the Soviet authorities in November 1917 and expelled from the army.

Having been commissioned by the Alekseev organization to create an anti-Bolshevik volunteer force in the east, Grishin was active in forming underground officer groups across Western Siberia during the spring of 1918 (assuming the pseudonym “Almazov,” meaning “rough diamond”) and led partisan groups against local Soviet forces during the early stages of the Democratic Counter-Revolution. On 27 May 1927, during the rising of the Czechoslovak Legion, he played a leading role in the capture of Novonikolaevsk and was subsequently named chief of staff of the West Siberian Commissariat and commander of the Omsk Military District (28 May–12 June 1928). Upon the formation of the Provisional Siberian Government, he became director of its ministry of war (1 July–5 September 1918) and commander (13 June–5 September 1918) of the Western Siberian Army (from 27 July 1918, the Siberian Army). In these capacities, he was engaged in raising forces in Siberia and the Southern Urals (notably the 3rd Urals Corps of General M. V. Khanzhin) and participated in the conferences at Cheliabinsk (15–16 July and 20–25 August, 1918), attended by delegations of the Siberian government and Komuch in preparation for the Ufa State Conference. He initially had some contacts with members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries and Siberian oblastniki (and had earned the suspicion of some officers for his taste for “revolutionary” discipline in the army), but in August 1918, Grishin-Almazov made clear to the Siberian Regional Duma that it had no authority over military forces in the region and that he personally favored a military dictatorship. On 4 September 1918, he was removed from his command following an altercation with Allied representatives at Cheliabinsk. (According to some sources, it was I. A. Mikhailov who insisted on the firing of Grishin-Almazov; Mikhailov was jealous of his power and was also, reportedly, conducting a love affair with his wife.)

Grishin-Almazov left Omsk on 22 September 1918, on a mission to forge links with the Volunteer Army, traveling through Red lines on the Volga to reach the Kuban 38 days later. He was subsequently placed in command of raising forces in the Tauride region by General A. I. Denikin; attended the Jassy Conference as a delegate of the Volunteers; and following the withdrawal of the forces of the Austro-German intervention from Ukraine, was named military governor of Odessa (4 December–15 January 1919) and commander of the Forces of the Odessa Region (4 December 1918–6 April 1919). In April 1919, he was placed at the head of a mission from the Armed Forces of South Russia to Admiral A. V. Kolchak. This mission was on board the steamer Leila on the Caspian Sea when, on 5 May 1919, it was waylaid near Fort Aleksandrovsk by the vessels of the Red Astrakhan-Caspian Flotilla (among them the torpedo boat Karl Liebknecht), which were eavesdropping on White and British radio communications in the region. Grishin-Almazov died during this encounter; according to some accounts, he shot himself to avoid capture, while according to others, he was executed by a Bolshevik commander.

GROUP OF DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISTS. See DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISTS, GROUP OF.

Guins, Georgii Konstantinovich. See Gins (Guins), Georgii Konstantinovich.

Gummet. See Hummet (Gummet, HIMMÄT).

GUREVICH, VISSARION IAKOVLEVICH (28 May 1876–20 May 1940). A leading figure of the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918, V. Ia. Gurevich, who was the son of a St. Petersburg school headmaster, was a graduate of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of St. Petersburg University, a member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (from 1898), and by training a barrister, who was elected as a member of the State Duma. In 1915, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and exile in Siberia, where, following the February Revolution, he became a leading member of the executive committee of the Krasnoiarsk Soviet. Subsequently, he was named deputy chairman of the All-Russian Peasant Congress in St. Petersburg, worked on the Russian Provisional Government’s electoral commission for the Constituent Assembly, and (from late July to October 1917) was deputy minister of internal affairs in the cabinet of A. F. Kerensky.

In November 1917, Gurevich was elected to the Constituent Assembly (as a representative of the Tula district), and following the assembly’s dispersal by the Bolsheviks, made his way to the Volga. There he became a member of Komuch and served as its plenipotentiary to the Siberian Regional Duma, as well as being a member of its delegation to the Ufa State Conference in September 1918. The Omsk coup and the rise to power of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in November 1918, however, drove Gurevich out of politics in Siberia. In emigration he lived in Czechoslovakia, working as chairman of the Prague branch of Zemgor (1921–1922) and director of the Russian Foreign Historical Archive (1923–1928), as well as being a professor in the Law Faculty of the Russian People’s University. He later emigrated to the United States, where he died.

GURKO, VLADIMIR IOSIFOVICH (1863–18 February 1927). The son of a famous tsarist general (Field Marshal I. V. Romeiko-Gurko, a hero of the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–1878), the White politician V. I. Gurko was a graduate of the Law Faculty of Moscow University (1885). He had a successful career in the tsarist bureaucracy, serving as vice governor of Warsaw guberniia in the 1890s and from 1902 as head of the land department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St. Petersburg. On 2 March 1906, he was named assistant minister of internal affairs, but was dismissed on 17 September 1907 for abuse of power and negligence after being taken to court for failure to fulfill a contract. Having in 1905–1906 been associated with the right-wing Union of the Russian People, in 1908 he became director of the standing council of the Union of Russian Nobles (the United Nobility). On 9 August 1912, he was elected to the State Council, where he was associated with the “Rightist Group” and the “Non-Party Union.” In 1917, he played a prominent part in the resurrection of the All-Russian Union of Landowners—Gurko was one of the great landowners of Russia, with 3,227 desiatiny of property in Tver′ and Voronezh gubernii—and in October of that year served as its representative in the pre-parliament.

Following the October Revolution, Gurko was one of those influential figures who attempted to use the Union of Landowners to combat Soviet power. In March 1918, alongside P. I. Novgorodtsev and A. V. Krivovshein, he was also a founding member of the anti-Bolshevik Right Center. He was subsequently sent south by that organization to liaise with the Volunteer Army. Stopping off in Kiev, he made contact with the Union for the National Unification of Russia and thereafter tried (without much success) to build bridges between the pro-German ataman of the Don Cossack Host, P. N. Krasnov, and the pro-Allied Volunteers. His own view (which coincided with that of P. N. Miliukov) was that the Whites should make a tactical alliance with the Germans and their puppet Ukrainian State, as the only means of clearing the Bolsheviks from Russia. This, perhaps, was why Gurko was never given a post in General A. I. Denikin’s government, the Special Council. He did participate in the Jassy Conference in November 1918, however, and then journeyed to London and Paris to urge support for Denikin among the Allied governments, but his dalliance in German-occupied Kiev had earned him suspicion on the part of political and military leaders in London and Paris. He returned to Russia, but pointedly went to Odessa rather than to Denikin’s headquarters at Rostov-on-Don.

Gurko subsequently went into emigration and was active in a number of right-wing émigré organizations in Paris, although—an opportunist to the last (his view on the land question did moderate)—by 1926 he was advocating the recognition of all land seizures that had taken place during the revolution. His influential memoirs (Features and Figures of the Past) were published in English by Stanford University Press in 1939.

GUSEV, SERGEI IVANOVICH (DRABKIN, IAKOV DAVIDOVICH) (1 January 1874–10 June 1933). One of the most active of the Reds’ military-political organizers, S. I. Gusev was born near Moscow, the son of a village schoolteacher, but was raised at Rostov-on-Don. As a student at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, in 1896 he joined V. I. Lenin’s Union for the Struggle for the Emancipation of Labor and in 1898 joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, associating himself with the Bolsheviks from the time of the split at the party’s Second Congress, in Brussels and London (July–August 1903), which he attended. He then worked in various party secretarial posts in Rostov-on-Don, St. Petersburg, and Odessa, before, in 1906, becoming party organizer in the railway district of Moscow.

During the October Revolution, Gusev was head of the secretariat of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and subsequently served as secretary to the Committee for the Defense of Petrograd and as administrative secretary of the Northern Commune, as a close associate of G. E. Zinov′ev (February–March 1918). He then served on the Revvoensovet of the 2nd Red Army (19 September–12 December 1918) and the Revvoensovet of the Eastern Front (12 December 1918–5 June 1919) and from 6 June to 4 December 1919 was commander of the Moscow Sector of Defense and a commissar of the Military Committee of the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. He was also a full member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic from 21 June to 4 December 1919 and from 18 May 1921 to 28 August 1923 (on the first occasion, with special responsibilities for military intelligence, and on the second, as head of PUR from 19 January 1921 to 12 January 1922). He also served on the Revvoensovets of the South-East Front (11 December 1919–16 January 1920), the Caucasian Front (16 January–29 August 1920), the South-West Front (29 August–14 October 1920), the Southern Front (14 October–10 December 1920), and the Western Front (29 January 1922–8 April 1924). From 5 April 1920 to 17 April 1923, he was a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and from January 1921 to February 1922 was chairman of the Turkbiuro of the Central Committee, serving at the same time as chief of the Political Directorate of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (PUR).

Gusev was a marked opponent of the use of military specialists in the Red Army, which brought him into conflict with L. D. Trotsky (who had him removed from PUR) and into partnership with M. V. Frunze, as a supporter of the development of a new “Proletarian Military Doctrine”—views he aired as the founding editor of the journal Voennaia nauka i revoliutsiia (“Military Science and Revolution”). From the time of the civil wars onward he was also close to J. V. Stalin. From February 1922 to April 1924, he was a member of the Revvoensovet of the Turkestan Front, organizing the suppression of the Basmachi. He then served in numerous party posts, notably on the Central Control Commission (as a member of its presidium and as principal secretary of its secretariat, 4 April 1923–2 December 1927) and as head of the press department of the Central Committee (1925–1926). He also held a government post as a member of the collegium of the Commissariat for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, Rabkrin (from 1923). At the same time, he was engaged in historical work with Istpart’s Military-Historical Commission, attached to the Revvoensovet of the USSR, studying the lessons of the First World War and the “Russian” Civil Wars. From 1928, he was attached to the Komintern, initially as head of its Central European Secretariat and later (from 1929) as a member of the presidium of its executive committee. Gusev died in Crimea in 1933, after a long illness, and was buried with full military honors in the Kremlin Wall, Moscow.

GUTOR, ALEKSEI EVGEN′EVICH (30 August 1868–13 August 1938). Major general (4 November 1910), lieutenant general (31 December 1914). One of the more senior Russian Army generals to serve in the Red Army as a military specialist, A. E. Gutor was born into a noble family, the son of an officer, in Voronezh guberniia, and was a graduate of the 4th Moscow Cadet Corps, the Mikhail Artillery School (1889), and the Academy of the General Staff (1895). After service as a staff officer with the Grenadiers Corps (1897–1900), he taught at the Moscow Military School (1900–1901), then filled numerous staff posts before serving as chief of staff of the 9th Infantry Division during the Russo–Japanese War (22 March 1904–14 June 1905). After recovering from wounds sustained in that conflict and receiving the coveted Gold Sword of Honor, he became, successively, commander of the 121st Penza Infantry Regiment (from 14 June 1905), commander of the Moscow Life Guards Regiment (from 4 November 1910), and chief of staff of Kazan′ Military District (from 6 March 1913). During the First World War, he was chief of staff of the 4th Army (from 19 July 1914), commander of the 34th Infantry Division (from 1 April 1915), commander of the 6th Army Corps (from 2 March 1916, in which capacity he played a key part in the Russian breakthrough during the Brusilov offensive), commander of the 11th Army (from 15 April 1917), and main commander of the South-West Front (from 22 May 1917). In the last of these capacities, he played a key role in the Russian Army’s initially successful but ultimately disastrous summer offensive of 1917. Gutor was blamed by A. F. Kerensky for the failure of the 1917 offensive and lost his post at the front. He was placed instead on the staff of the supreme commander (from 10 July 1917), before being put on the reserve list on 6 October 1917.

Gutor joined the Red Army, voluntarily, in August 1918; from September of that year was chairman of its Main Service Regulations Commission; and taught in various military colleges. From May 1920, he was a member of the Special Conference attached to the main commander in chief and in August 1920 became the main commander’s chief representative in Siberia. Almost immediately, however, he was arrested at Omsk (23 August 1920), sent back to Moscow, and imprisoned in the Butyrki prison, accused of counterrevolutionary activities. He was eventually freed, on 11 March 1922, when the security services concluded that there was no evidence of his treason, and was given a teaching post at the Red Military Academy, where he lectured and wrote on the subject of military strategy. On 1 May 1931, during the purge of former military specialists (Operation “Spring”), Gutor was removed from his post and retired. He was arrested and executed as a spy at the height of the purges.