Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

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JADIDISM. This pan-Islamic, modernizing movement, which had a great influence among the Turkic population of southern and eastern Russia in the revolutionary era, grew out of efforts to revolutionize the schooling of Muslims within the Russian Empire by N. I. Ilminskii (1822–1891), a Russian professor of theology at Kazan′ University. He introduced the teaching of Russian into the madrassas at higher levels and at lower levels offered instruction in non-Islamic subjects in the native language. Although Ilminskii aimed at socializing the Muslims of the empire, his work provoked a reaction by Tatar intellectuals, who feared it would lead to Russification. Following the example of “New Method” (Usul-Jadid) schools of the Crimean Tatar Ismail bey Gasprinskii (1851–1914), the Jadids set about modernizing their own schools, teaching Ottoman Turkish rather than Arabic and adding secular subjects to the religious curriculum, and they began to spread Jadidism to non-Tatar Turks, such as the Kazakhs and Uzbeks.

The central thrust of the movement, in the light of Russia’s penetration of Central Asia from the 1870s onward, was to safeguard indigenous Islamic culture by adapting it to the modern state and modern technology (notably, the printing press). By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Jadidism had developed a political edge and had even embraced the emancipation of women. Hence, it was from Jadid schools that there emerged in Central Asia such liberal, pan-Islamic movements as the Young Tatars and the Young Bukharan Party, who sought to overthrow both tsarist rule and the rule of the traditional Muslim clerical elite. Some of the Bukharan Jadids (such as Turur Ryskulov and Faizullah Khojaev) later joined the Bolsheviks to struggle against the power of the Emir (Said-mir Mohammed Alim-khan). Khojaev even became general secretary of the Russian Communist Party’s Bukharan revkom in 1919. A minority, though, offered their support to the Emir or joined other anti-Bolshevik formations (such as the Kokand Autonomy or even the Basmachi, especially after the arrival in the region of Enver Pasha). For a while the Jadids benefited from the Bolsheviks’ need for allies in Central Asia, reflected in the Turkestan Commission’s purging of non-Jadids from the local party and the Jadids’ prominence in the newly established Khorezem People’s Soviet Republic and Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic in 1920. However, although the Jadids, like the Bolsheviks, were opposed to colonialism and feudalism and were (sometime violently) anticlerical, Marxist ideas of class struggle and the destiny of the proletariat meant little to them. Consequently, M. V. Frunze established a new Turkestan Commission that purged all Jadid Communists and fought against the notion of a single, pan-Turkic state in Central Asia through the establishment of the separate autonomous Soviet republics of Turkestan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. By the end of the 1920s, all Jadids had been removed from positions of power, and it is thought that only one of the movement’s leaders, Sadriddin Aini (Ayni), died of natural causes, the remainder falling victim to the purges of the 1930s.

JANIN, PIERRE CHARLES MAURICE (19 October 1862–28 April 1946). General (20 April 1916). One of France’s leading authorities on Russian military affairs and a prominent, if largely ineffectual, figure in the Allied intervention in Siberia, Maurice Janin was a graduate of the Saint-Cyr Special Military School. Having been attached to the Russian military mission to France in 1893, he subsequently studied in Moscow and spent several tours of duty in Russia prior to his appointment to a teaching post in St. Petersburg, at the Academy of the General Staff, in 1912. He returned to France upon the outbreak of the First World War to command a brigade on the Marne and at Yser, before being attached to the French General Staff. In August 1916, he was named head of the French military mission to Russia. He returned to France following the October Revolution, but on 24 August 1918 was named as commander in chief of all Allied forces in eastern Russia, including the Czechoslovak Legion, and was dispatched to Siberia. By the time he arrived at Omsk on 16 December 1918, however, this posting had become more or less redundant, as the Czechoslovak Legion had left the front, and power and military command in Russia and Siberia had been centralized in the hands of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (who enjoyed a far better relationship with the head of the British military mission, General Alfred Knox, than he did with Janin).

Janin’s frustrations with Kolchak and Knox formed the core of his subsequent memoirs of the period (Ma mission en Sibérie 1918–1920, 1933), but he himself has been widely blamed (as—albeit nominal—commander of the Czechoslovak Legion) for (variously) failing to prevent, condoning, or even engineering the surrender of Kolchak to the Political Center at Irkutsk in January 1920. When he was summoned back to Paris from Harbin in April 1920, he took with him three suitcases containing 311 relics of Nicholas II and his family that had been collected from the scene of the Romanovs’ execution and incineration at and near Ekaterinburg by General M. K. Diterikhs and Pierre Gilliard (the Romanov family tutor). On 28 November 2007, Janin’s medals and awards were sold for record prices at the London auctioneer Spink.

JASSY CONFERENCE. This term refers to the meeting of some 21 prominent anti-Bolshevik politicians (among them P. N. Miliukov, V. I. Gurko, V. V. Shul′gin, A. V. Krivoshein, and S. N. Tret′iakov) and military leaders (including Generals A. N. Grishin-Almazov and D. G. Shcherbachev of the Volunteer Army) that took place at the temporary Romanian capital of Jassy (Iaşi) from 16 to 23 November 1918 and then reconvened at Odessa from 25 November to 6 December 1918.

Encouraged by the French and other Allied missions in Romania and Ukraine (notably by the possibly bogus French vice-consul in Kiev, Captain Emile Henno) and by supporters of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, the conference, which was also attended by representatives of the National Center and the State Unity Council (some delegates representing more than one of these anti-Bolshevik groupings), aimed to unify the various anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia and to provide them with political guidance. However, despite the Allies’ indication that only a unified opposition to the Soviet government might receive financial and military assistance, the delegates could not agree on a common program, and no candidate discussed as a potential (provisional) military dictator by a meeting of 14 delegates on 21 November 1918 could be generally agreed upon as suitable (although General A. I. Denikin gained the most support, with nine votes, followed by the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, who garnered four). Indeed, there was no agreement that a temporary military dictatorship might be the best solution for defeating the Bolsheviks, with some right-wing delegates favoring the restoration of the monarchy and moderates supporting a civilian directory. Votes were passed, though, in favor of Allied intervention in Russia (and delegations were sent to meet Allied military leaders in Constantinople and to liaise with Allied governments in London and Paris) and in support of the indivisibility of the former Russian Empire (although most delegates accepted the loss of Poland). The National Center seemed to have achieved most success in gaining endorsement of its program, but in fact more centerist elements remained unreconciled to its support for military dictatorship and remained adamant that the only legal all-Russian authority was the recently appointed Ufa Directory; in any case, the results of votes taken at the conference were merely symbolic and had no legally binding authority over the participants. Allied observers were less than impressed with the endless bickering and politicking of the various delegates, and it was not without just cause that the conference was later judged to have been a “fiasco” by historians of the anti-Bolshevik movement.

Jewish Communist Party (Poale Zion). This political party, formed by Leftist elements of Poale Zion, was active on Russian and Polish territory from its foundation at Gomel on 10–15 August 1919 until its dissolution and merger with the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in December 1922. The party had its roots in the Poale Zion organizations that sprang up across Russia, Poland, and the wider world in the early 20th century, after the Bund rejected Zionism. It was represented in the Komintern by Zaima Ostrovskii, who also participated in the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East in 1920. The party’s main publication was the newspaper Nakanune (“On the Eve”). It was banned in the USSR in 1928 and subsequently disbanded.

Jewish Section of the central committee of the RKP(b). See evsektsiia.

JEWS. According to the 1897 census, 5,189,000 Jews lived at that time within the Russian Empire, constituting 4.13 percent of the population and qualifying thereby as the largest Jewish community in any country in the world. Their prominence locally was magnified by the fact that 95 percent of Russia’s Jews, as a consequence of state-enforced anti-Semitism, were forced to live within the Pale of Settlement (stretching from Lithuania and Poland through Belorussia and right-bank Ukraine to Bessarabia), and the majority of them lived in urban settlements: Jews made up 75 percent of the population of the city of Białystok, for example. Most Jews could have been categorized as middle class in the mid-19th century and were associated with the world of business and commerce, but by the revolutionary period (although some had prospered during Russia’s period of industrialization) most, having been proletarianized, were living in poverty and faced competition for jobs from Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Russian peasants migrating to urban areas after being liberated from serfdom in 1861. This was one of the roots of the outbreaks of pogroms against Jews that characterized late tsarist Russia (and which would reach a peak during the civil wars) and the source of antagonism that drove such notorious state-led prerevolutionary persecutions of Jews as the blood libel of the 1913 Beilis Case. The combination of impoverishment and violence led nearly 2 million Jews to leave Russia between 1881 and 1914.

As was the case elsewhere in Europe, Russia’s Jews experienced a process of rapid secularization in the half century prior to the revolutions of 1917 and the “Russian” Civil Wars, but (unlike elsewhere) assimilation was minimal; some Jews became Russified, but the resistance of the Russian state to such a process was a virtually insuperable barrier. This in turn led a disproportionate number of Jews to join the revolutionary movement, with socialist parties like the Bund and Poale Zion attracting tens of thousands of adherents, while all Jews were forced into a consideration and definition of their Jewish identity vis-à-vis their “host” populations. The First World War brought new disruptions and discontinuities, as the Eastern Front swept across the Pale and the Russian authorities were forced to lift residential restrictions on Jews, allowing (or, more often, forcing) many to move eastward, away from the front, into Russia proper (although around 2 million were left behind, under German occupation). Moreover, at least 600,000 Jews were mobilized into the Russian Army, despite lingering and widespread fears that Jews were ridden with pro-German sentiments.

Following the February Revolution, on 20 March 1917 the Russian Provisional Government proclaimed a complete emancipation of Russian Jewry (as part of a ban on all racial and religious discrimination), and most Jews, across the political and social spectrum, anticipated their representation in the forthcoming Constituent Assembly. After all, M. M. Vinaver (a Jewish leader of the Kadets) was a prominent member of the electoral commission preparing for the summoning of the assembly, while other Jews at the forefront of political life included Osip Minor (mayor of Moscow) and Abram Gots (deputy chair of VTsIK); Mark Natanson and Isaak Steinberg of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries; Iulii Martov and F. I. Dan of the Mensheviks; and L. D. Trotsky, L. B. Kamenev, and G. E. Zinov′ev of the Bolsheviks.

Although the political Right in Russia tended to identify Bolshevism with the Jews, most Jews actually regarded the October Revolution with considerable trepidation: Bolshevik promises of a socialized economy threatened Jewish commercial life, while Marxist antipathy to religion (symbolized by the Soviet government’s prohibition against religious education) was also a concern to many, and even secularized and socialist Jews were wary of V. I. Lenin’s avowed skepticism regarding the concept of a separate Jewish national identity. It is impossible to tell how many Jews voted for the Bolsheviks in the elections to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917, but it is telling that of the 498,198 votes cast for Jewish parties, Zionist and other religious parties (all hostile to Bolshevism) polled 437,798 (87.87 percent). On the other hand, during the civil wars, despite the occasional pogromist aberration (notably the atrocities committed by the 1st Cavalry Army during the Soviet–Polish War, as recorded by Isaak Babel in his Red Cavalry stories), the Red Army came to be regarded by many Jews as a savior from the vehement and unabashed anti-Semitism of the Whites and some Ukrainian nationalist forces. (S. V. Petliura, leader of the Ukrainian National Republic Directory, it is worth recording, was assassinated by a Jew in Paris in 1926, as revenge for the pogroms perpetrated by his lawless Ukrainian Army.) Moreover, Bolshevik policy toward the notion of Jewish identity had apparently softened during the course of the conflict, symbolized by the establishment in October 1918 of the “Jewish Section” (Evsektsiia) of the party Central Committee. This, however, proved only to be a maneuver to encourage Jewish support and assimilation; once the civil wars were won, the Evsektsiia became the cutting edge of Soviet attacks on Jews and Judaism. Suffice to say that, as early as 1921, the party organized a mock show trial in Kiev (appropriately, in the same courtroom in which Menahem Beilis had been tried) at which the defendant was “the Jewish religion.” The prosecution “proved” beyond doubt that Judaism was a “creation of the bourgeoisie,” and it was duly sentenced to death.

Joffe, ADOLF ABRAMOVICH. See IOFFE (JOFFE), ADOL′F ABRAMOVICH.

Judeņš, Jānis (1884–12 August 1918). Ensign (1916). A much-celebrated Red hero of the civil wars, Jānis Judeņš, who was born into a poor Latvian peasant family at Liezēre, was mobilized into the Russian Army during the First World War and attended the Military School at Vil′na. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in May 1917, was elected to Iskolat, and in April 1918 was placed in command of the 3rd Brigade of the Latvian Riflemen. With that unit Judeņš participated in the suppression of the Left-SR Uprising in Moscow in July 1918. On 8 August 1918, he arrived with his men at the ornate Krasnaia Gorka station, near Kazan′, and engaged with forces of the People’s Army and the Czechoslovak Legion. On 12 August 1918, he was killed by an exploding artillery shell; he was subsequently buried at Sviiazhsk. On 14 August 1918, Sovnarkom decreed that Krasnaia Gorka should be renamed “Iudino” in his honor. This was the first time that an inhabited locality had been renamed after a civil war hero in Soviet Russia. The Volga town of Naberezhnye Chelny also still boasts a Iudinsk Street in his honor.

JUGHELI, VLADIMIR (“VALIKO”) (1 January 1887–9 January 1924). The leader of the People’s Guard of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, Valiko Jugheli had originally sided with the Bolsheviks of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party after the 1903 party schism, but later aligned himself with the Mensheviks and became an influential figure in the civil war era in Transcaucasia. On 29 November 1917, it was he who led the attack on the arsenal in Tiflis that was guarded by pro-Bolshevik troops, thereby almost certainly—and almost single-handedly—forestalling a Soviet takeover in Georgia at that time. Later, in 1918–1919, it was Jugheli who undertook the dirty work of suppressing Abkhazian and Ossetian nationalist-, peasant-, and Bolshevik-inspired risings against the Georgian Menshevik regime (including the extensive Georgian–Ossetian conflict). He did so with what critics at the time regarded as excessive zeal; even today, his actions are a matter of dispute between the authorities in Tblisi and separatist leaders.

Jugheli fled into exile with the rest of the Menshevik regime in March 1921 and lived for awhile in Paris, but returned to Georgia to assist in the preparations for what would become the August Uprising against the Soviet regime. However, he was captured by the Cheka and shot on 9 January 1924, having failed in a bid to persuade his comrades to abort the uprising in light of the fact that the Soviet government was clearly aware of what was afoot.

JULY DAYS. This term denotes the events that took place in central Petrograd in early July 1917, when soldiers, sailors, and workers joined mass demonstrations against the Russian Provisional Government under the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” in what might be regarded as one of a number of dress rehearsals for the civil wars proper.

The immediate background to the events of the July Days was the unsuccessful offensive against the Central Powers that had been launched by the Russian Army in mid-June, which had soon petered out as German forces counterattacked, leading to mass desertions on the Russian side and the effective collapse of parts of the front. Also, on 2 July 1917, Kadet ministers in the Provisional Government had resigned over its plans to grant autonomy to Ukraine. As tensions grew, elements of the Petrograd Garrison (notably the 1st Machine-Gun Regiment) that were under the sway of anarchism and/or rogue elements of the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b) and the party’s Petrograd Committee took to the streets and refused to recognize orders that they should prepare for deployment to the front.

A general demonstration was called for 3 July 1917, but the VTsIK (dominated by Mensheviks and the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries) refused to support it, reckoning that, whatever the popular mood in Petrograd, the Russian provinces and many troops at the front (still less the Allies and the command staff of the Russian Army, whose partnership was vital if the war was not to be lost) were not ready to countenance a Soviet government. What then transpired is still debated. Soviet historians claimed that the Bolshevik Central Committee decided to lead an even larger demonstration on 4 July—especially when news arrived that thousands of anarchistic sailors from the Kronshtadt naval base were en route to join it—in order to ensure that it remained peaceful. In contrast, A. F. Kerensky and many Western historians have charged that the Bolsheviks planned to use the demonstrations to seize power. The latter scenario seems unlikely, however, as in early July the Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin was on holiday in Finland, only arriving back in Petrograd on the morning of 4 July, after being summoned by his comrades, and in a speech to the sailors clearly attempted to calm their mood rather than stoke it. On the other hand, many militant Bolsheviks—among them N. I. Podvoiskii and Martin Latsis—were critical of the Central Committee’s moderate line and may have hoped to force the leadership’s hand. Whatever the plans or hopes of the Bolshevik leadership, though, clashes broke out between government forces and the demonstrators (whose numbers swelled to 400,000) and many lives were lost, while VTsIK voted to refuse the demonstrators’ demand that it should take power. Early in the morning of 5 July, the Bolshevik Central Committee issued firm instructions that the demonstrations should end. This may have been, however, because of news that the Provisional Government was about to release information that, it claimed, proved that the Bolshevik leaders were the paid agents of Germany and were deliberately attempting to sow disorder in the Russian rear so as to facilitate the German advance, as well as news that troops loyal to the government were arriving from the front.

In the aftermath of the July Days, the Bolshevik Party was (somewhat ineffectually) banned, and many of its leaders were arrested (although Lenin escaped and fled to the Finnish countryside). Kerensky also became prime minister (8 July 1917), promising to restore order in the country. However, Kerensky’s victory was a Pyrrhic one, as the July Days had served also to both enrage and embolden the political Right, as evinced in the ensuing Kornilov affair.

Junaïd-khan (SEDAR, MOHAMMED-KURBAN) (1857–1938). The Basmachi leader Junaïd-khan, who had played a prominent role in the anti-Russian Central Asian uprising of July–August 1916, was one of the foremost of the Muslim rebels in Central Asia (specifically, the regions covered by contemporary Turkmenistan). Having killed the local khan (Isfandiyar Jurji Bahadur) and selected a puppet to replace him (Said-Abdulla), he established himself as dictator of Khiva from January 1918 to January 1920. He was then driven out of the city by the Red Army, but periodically held Khiva under siege again and even captured it for some weeks in January 1924. In 1927, having been offered amnesty by the Soviet government, he again rebelled and had to be driven back into the Karakum desert. From there, in 1931, he made his way to Persia and, reportedly, Afghanistan.

JUNKER REVOLT. This term is used to denote one of the very first organized attempts to resist Bolshevik rule and to overthrow the Soviet government in Petrograd. Prompted by the Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution, in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917, officer cadets (in Russian parlance, “junkers”) based at the capital’s Nikolaevsk Engineering School under the leadership of General G. P. Polkovnikov, planned to seize the city’s telephone exchange and to occupy the Peter and Paul Fortress. Their action was meant to coincide with the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising, but the cadets were forced to act prematurely when one of their number, who was carrying detailed plans of the proposed action, was captured by Red Guards. Early in the morning of 29 October 1917, they therefore took to the streets, arresting Soviet commissars and briefly capturing the central telephone exchange. Most of the cadets were subdued by Soviet forces in the capital by daybreak, but serious battles took place at the Hotel Astoria and around the military schools; at the Vladimir Cadet School alone more than 200 men had been killed by the end of 29 October, more than the total of deaths recorded until that point in the course of the October Revolution.