Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

The Komintern’s founding conference (of 2–6 March 1919) announced the birth of “a unified world Communist party, individual sections of which were parties active in each country” and adopted a set of theses proposed by Lenin that stressed the need for the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” denounced “bourgeois democracy,” and condemned the Socialist Conference held at Berne in February 1919 in an attempt to revive the Second International. Decisions made by congresses and the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) were binding on member parties. However, despite the claim that the founding congress, held in Moscow, had gathered 52 delegates from 34 parties, during the civil-war period few bona fide delegates from other parties could attend, due to the Allied blockade of Soviet Russia, and delegates tended to be foreign nationals who, for a variety of reasons, happened to find themselves in Russia. (Only delegates from Sweden, Norway, Holland, Germany, and Austria actually came from abroad.) The statutes passed by the founding congress declared that the Komintern would struggle by all available means (including armed force) to create an international Soviet socialist republic, as a transitional stage to the abolition of the state and the establishment of a communist society. Delegates were assured by L. D. Trotsky that the forces under his control served not just to defend the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic but were the Red Army of the Komintern.

The Second Congress of the Komintern (19 July–7 August 1920), again held in Moscow, was more representative and hosted many more delegates from abroad, but is chiefly remembered for defining the “Twenty-One Points” to which all member parties had to subscribe. These included purging themselves of reformist elements and subscribing to the Leninist principle of “Democratic Centralism” (the policy of “freedom of discussion, unity of action,” meaning that parties would make decisions democratically, but uphold, in a disciplined and united fashion, whatever decision was made). A number of new communist parties were consequently founded (in, for example, France, Spain, and Italy), as those willing to adhere to the conditions of membership in the Komintern split away from broader socialist parties.

The Third (22 June–12 July 1922) and Fourth (November 1922) Congresses of the Komintern, both of which were again held in Moscow, were chiefly concerned with how the working-class struggle could be transformed into revolution and, where necessary, civil wars. From the beginning, however, as the only party that had actually seized power, the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) had an unrivaled dominance over the organization, and in reality, the congresses merely rubber-stamped policies and nominees put forward by the Bolsheviks. (Although a show of internationalism was maintained, with, for example, the lingua franca of the Komintern declared to be German.) Serious efforts were made to assist revolutionary movements across Europe (e.g., the Hungarian and Bavarian Soviet Republics of 1919, the “March Action” in Germany in 1921, the uprisings across Germany in late 1923) and anticolonial struggles (notably in Persia and China), but Soviet Russia was too distracted and weakened by its own civil wars to do much. Increasingly, as the 1920s progressed (and particularly with the rise of fascism), the Komintern came to resemble a subsidiary branch of the Soviet foreign and security services, concerned with the defense of the USSR and the maintenance of the correct (i.e., Stalinist) party line within the international socialist movement rather than with spreading revolution.

At the first congress, G. I. Zinov′ev was named chairman of the ECCI. He was assisted by Angelica Balabanoff (as secretary), Victor Serge, and V. O. Mazin. Zinov′ev remained in this post until 1926. A number of other organizations were sponsored and subsidized by the Komintern. Chief among them were the Communist Youth International (founded in 1919); the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern, founded in 1920); the International Association of Red Sports and Gymnastics Associations, commonly known as Red Sport International (or Sportintern, founded in 1921); International Red Aid (founded in 1922); and the Red Peasant International (Krestintern, founded in 1923). In September 1920, the Komintern also sponsored the Congress of the Peoples of the East at Baku, while in 1921 it founded the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (or Far Eastern University) and the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West, both located in Moscow. In 1925 the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University was added. The Seventh (and final) Congress of the Komintern took place in 1935. The organization was disbanded in 1943, on the orders of J. V. Stalin, who was seeking to appease his democratic allies in the struggle against Hitler.

KOMSOMOL. This is the acronym by which was known the Communist League of Youth, the youth organization of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) that came to accept members from 14 to 28 years old. The Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, in 1903, had called upon proletarian youths to organize and to look to the party for guidance; spontaneous youth organizations, particularly among school and university students, had flourished during the 1905 Revolution (although most of them took inspiration from the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries), but they had tended to fade away in the subsequent period of reaction. Following the February Revolution, youth organizations, such as Trud i svet (“Labor and Light”), experienced a renaissance, and at the Sixth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in July–August 1917, a resolution “On Youth Leagues” again tried to rally them to the party (although it stopped short of calling for a single youth organization affiliated with the Bolsheviks). The following year, in Moscow (from 29 October to 4 November 1918), there assembled an All-Russian Congress of Youth, summoned by a variety of youth groups. At the congress, which claimed to represent 120 youth organizations with 22,100 members and at which about half the delegates were members of the RKP(b), the Komsomol was founded.

Even though its Central Committee was exclusively Bolshevik, the word “Communist” appeared in its name, the rules described the organization as being united with the RKP(b), and its task was “spreading the ideas of Communism and involving the worker and peasant youth into active construction of the Soviet Russia,” the Komsomol nevertheless claimed to be “independent” (samostoiatel′nyi). This stance was approved by the 8th Congress of the RKP(b) in March 1919, but in August of that year a joint declaration of the party Central Committee and the Komsomol declared the latter to be “directly subordinated” to the former. Thereafter, all party members under the age of 20 automatically became members of the Komsomol.

The purpose of the Komsomol was not clearly spelled out in its early years, but it was obviously intended to prepare young people for party service and to offer them approved and self-improving outlets for their energies: study, sports, and “physical culture” came to be emphasized, for example, in the 1920s. During the civil-war years, however, more immediate service to the Soviet state was demanded, and specific tasks, frequently related to military affairs, were assigned to the organization (e.g., encouraging young people to volunteer for the Red Army or to undergo basic military training). On 10 May 1919, a special Komsomol mobilization was ordered, on a nationwide basis, to meet the threat from the advancing Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. A second mobilization was pronounced during the Second Congress of the Komsomol on 5–8 October 1919, to meet the simultaneous threats from the forces of N. N. Iudenich (against Petrograd) and A. I. Denikin (against Moscow), calling up all members over 16 years of age. By the time of the Third Komsomol Congress (2–10 October 1920), four more mobilizations had been ordered. According to Soviet sources, 75,000 members came forward in the course of the civil wars (not including those komsomol′tsy who volunteered during other party and trade union mobilizations). These young volunteers were distributed among existing units or merged into new units with older recruits, but there were a few exclusively Komsomol units in the Red Army (notably, a Petrograd Bicyclists Detachment an a Urals Youth Guard). Komsomol mobilizations were also ordered, on a local, ad hoc basis, to help with harvests, fight typhus, increase industrial production, and so forth.

The Komsomol was also called upon to form international links, leading to the summoning of the First Congress of the Communist International of Youth in Moscow (20–26 November 1919). At this meeting were assembled delegates representing 10 European countries other than Russia, although almost all of them were already resident in Russia, as the Allied blockade made it virtually impossible for anybody from abroad to visit Soviet Russia. These “foreign representatives” made the equally dubitable claim to have the mandate of youth organizations with a membership of over 300,000. The Communist International of Youth was disbanded in 1943, at the same time as the Komintern, but the Komsomol continued to thrive until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (with membership having reached its peak in the 1980s).

KOMUCH. This was the acronym by which was known the Komitet chlenov Uchreditelnogo sobraniia (“Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly”), which spearheaded the Democratic Counter-Revolution after its seizure of power at Samara on 8 June 1918. Komuch had its origins in the determination of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) to reconvene the Constituent Assembly elected in November 1917, which the Bolsheviks had forcibly closed down on 6 January 1918. Recognizing that the Soviet government’s grip on and popularity in Petrograd was too firm to offer any hope in that region, the SRs decided to shift the focus of their operations to an area in which their electoral support had been strongest, the middle Volga. In February 1918, they therefore established a Revolutionary Center at Samara that aimed to seize power in the region. The Revolutionary Center entrusted V. K. Fortunatov with organizing a military force, while P. D. Klimushkin and I. M. Brushvit entered negotiations with other local anti-Bolshevik socialist organizations.

When the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion toppled Soviet power on the Volga, the Revolutionary Center assumed power in the name of Komuch, claimed all-Russian authority on the grounds that it derived legitimacy from the All-Russian Constituent Assembly (although a disproportionate number of its members came from and/or represented constituencies along the Volga in the Urals and in western Siberia), and set about organizing the People’s Army, which in cooperation with the Czechs would soon capture Syzran′ (10 July), Simbirsk (22 July), and Kazan′ (6 August). Initially, Komuch consisted of just five members: V. K. Vol′skii (chairman), Brushvit, Fortunatov, Klimushkin, and I. P. Nesterov. By early August, it had grown to 29 members, by early September, 71, and by the end of September, either 96 or 97 (sources differ). All were members of the PSR (with the exception of the renegade Menshevik, I. M. Maiskii), although Komuch was strongly criticized by some SRs, notably V. K. Chernov, for its willingness to make concessions to the Right. Its executive body was the Council of Heads of Department, chaired by E. F. Rogovskii.

In persuit of its moderate-left socialist policies on the domestic front, Komuch annulled all Soviet decrees, declared the freedom of private enterprise and trade, returned factories and banks to their former owners, and reinstated zemstvo and city duma institutions, but at the same time decreed a mandatory maximum eight-hour working day, permitted the summoning of workers’ and peasants’ congresses, recognized the rights of trade unions and factory committees, and adopted a red flag as its revolutionary standard. Red Army victories on the Volga Front in September 1918, however, and pressure from the Allies and members of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia for the formation of a united anti-Bolshevik government in the east, forced Komuch into negotiations with the Provisional Siberian Government and other groups more conservative than itself at the Ufa State Conference and into reluctant support for the Ufa Directory created there on 23 September 1918. Komuch members who distrusted the Ufa compromise attempted to prolong its independent existence through the Council of Heads of Departments, which claimed local authority over what remained of Komuch’s territory in Ufa guberniia, and a Congress of Members of the Constituent Assembly, based at Ekaterinburg (following the evacuation of Samara on 8 October 1918), which sought to gather the quorum of assembly members to succeed the directory (as decreed at the Ufa conference). However, in the wake of the Omsk coup, these organizations were crushed by the White military (chiefly the Siberian Army) and many of their members arrested. Some of them were subsequently killed during the Omsk massacre.

KONDZEROVSKII (KONDYREV), PETER KONSTANTINOVICH (22 June 1869–16 August 1929). Lieutenant colonel (9 April 1900), colonel (6 December 1904), major general (29 March 1909), lieutenant general (22 October 1914). The White officer P. K. Kondzerovskii, who was born into a military family in St. Petersburg, was a graduate of the 1st Cadet Corps, the 2nd Constantine Military School (1889), and the Academy of the General Staff (1895). He served as an officer in the Jaeger Life Guards Regiment and occupied numerous staff postings in his early career, rising to duty officer with the General Staff from 2 December 1908 and duty officer with the main commander in chief from 19 July 1914 (remaining in that post when Nicholas II took over formal command of the Russian Army in August 1915). Following the February Revolution, Kondzerovskii was among those generals regarded with suspicion by the new Russian Provisional Government, and he lost his post.

After moving with his family to Finland in 1918, Kondzerovskii joined the anti-Bolshevik North-West Army on 26 July 1919, as assistant main commander and chief of staff to General N. N. Iudenich. He was also minister of war in Iudenich’s rudimentary government, the Russian Political Conference. On 28 November 1919, as the Whites fell back from their abortive attack on Petrograd, Kondzerovskii was named Iudenich’s plenipotentiary to Finland. From Finland, he moved into emigration, settling in Paris from late 1920, and from 1925 was head of the military chancellery of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. He died in Paris and is buried at the Batignolles cemetery.

KONONOV, KONSTANTIN LUKICH (11 November 1892–17 January 1988). Lieutenant colonel (14 August 1918), colonel (1919). The White commander K. L. Kononov, who was born at Łódź in Russian Poland, was a graduate of the Elizavetgrad Cavalry Officers School (1913) and served subsequently in the 8th Astrakhan Dragoon Regiment. He joined the White movement in Siberia in 1918, became chief of staff of the (1st) Mid-Siberian Army Corps (13 June–24 July 1918) of the nascent Siberian Army, and served as head of the Reconnaissance Section of the Staff of the Siberian Army (to April 1919), then chief of staff of the 8th Siberian Army Corps (to May 1919) and quartermaster general of the Northern Group of the Siberian Army (from 15 May 1919), before being named chief of staff of the newly formed 1st Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s Eastern Front (22 July–August 1919). He subsequently went into emigration, emerging as a member of Polish forces fighting under British command during the Second World War. After that war, Kononov taught Russian at the University of London before emigrating to the United States, where he chaired the organization of Russian Veterans of the Great War in California, where he died. He was buried in the Serbian cemetery at Colma, near San Fransisco.

KONOVALETS, EVHEN OLEKSIIOVICH (14 June 1891–23 May 1938). Sublieutenant (Austro-Hungarian Army, 191?), colonel (Ukrainian Army, 1919). A prominent military figure during the civil wars in Ukraine, and one of the most important Ukrainian nationalist leaders of the interwar era, Evhen Konovalets was born in the village of Zaskhiv, near Lemberg (L′viv), in Austrian Galicia, and was a graduate of the Law Faculty of Lemberg University. Active in politics from an early age, he worked with the Ukrainian Prosvita (“Enlightenment”) educational organization (as its secretary from 1912) and was a member of the executive committee of the National-Democratic Party (from 1913). During the First World War, he was mobilized into the Austro-Hungarian Army, but in June 1915 was captured by Russian forces and interned near Tsaritsyn.

In September 1917, Konavalets escaped from a POW camp and made his way to Kiev, where he helped organize the Galician–Bukovinan Battalion of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (later renamed its 1st Battalion), assumed its command in December–January 1918, and helped drive Bolshevik forces from Kiev in early March 1918. In November–December 1918, Konovalets’s force played a key role in overthrowing the Ukrainian State of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii and in restoring the Ukrainian National Republic. His battalion was then expanded into a detachment, then a division and a corps, and finally an army group, during battles against the Red Army, the Whites, and the Poles in 1919. In December 1919, following defeat in the Ukrainian–Polish War, the force was demobilized, and Konovalets was interned by the Poles at Lutsk. He was released in the spring of 1920 and went to Czechoslovakia, where, at the behest of S. V. Petliura, he attempted to organize scattered remnants of the Ukrainian Galician Army for a renewed struggle for Ukrainian independence.

In August 1920, Konovalets helped found the Ukrainian Military Organization (UMO), aimed at overturning the Russian and Polish “occupations” of Ukraine and preparing the ground for independence through collaboration with Germany, and built its central organization at Lwów. He fled abroad in December 1922 and subsequently lived in exile in Berlin (1922–1929), Geneva (1929–1936), and Italy. He also visited the United States to urge the forming of Ukrainian nationalist organizations there. In 1929, he attended the founding (Vienna) congress of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which had similar aims to the UMO and endorsed a terrorist campaign in Poland, and he was subsequently active in the leadership of that organization. He was killed in Rotterdam in 1938 by a parcel bomb delivered to him by the NKVD agent P. A. Sudoplatov. In late 2006, the L′viv council announced that his remains would be transferred to the city’s Lychakivskiy cemetery to rest alongside those of Stepan Bandera, Andrei Melnyk, and other interwar heroes of the struggle for Ukrainian independence.

KONOVALOV, DMITRII EFIMOVICH (1882–1921). A Red commander active in Central Asia during the civil wars, D. E. Konovalov had served in the Russian Army during the First World War, rising to the rank of staff captain. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Party (Bolsheviks) in 1917, and from October 1917 to March 1918 commanded a Red Guards detachment in battles against the Orenburg Cossack Host of Ataman A. I. Dutov during the Dutov Uprising. He served subsequently as regional commissar, with responsibility for the defense of communications, in Turkestan. From June 1919, he was commander of the 1st Independent Regiment on the Aktiubinsk Front of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and was subsequently acting commander of the Aktiubinsk Front (19 August–8 September 1919). From September 1919, he was in command of a regiment in Transcaspia and from January 1920 was commander of the 1st Detachment of the International Brigade and commander of the group of forces deployed against White-held Krasnovodsk, on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. He then served successively as commander of the 2nd Turkestan Rifle Brigade (May–June 1920), of the Samarkand Army Group (June–August 1920), of the 2nd Turkestan Rifle Division (September–December 1920), and of the 3rd Turkestan Rifle Division (January–March 1921), and as military commandant of Samarkand oblast′ (from April 1921). He died of typhus later that year.

Konovalov, German Ivanovich (1882–31 April 1936). Colonel (November 1918), major general (6 June 1920). A talented White officer of unusually liberal opinions, G. I. Konovalov was a graduate of the Odessa Infantry Officers School (1902) and the Academy of the General Staff (1914); during the First World War, he rose to assistant chief of the Quartermaster General Department of the South-West Front.

Konovalov joined the Volunteer Army in late 1918, as one of the leaders of an officer detachment raised in Ekaterinoslav that was originally loyal to the Ukrainian State of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii. In January 1919, that detachment moved to Crimea to become part of the Crimean-Azov Volunteer Army of General A. A. Borovskii, and Konovalov joined the latter’s staff as head of that force’s operations department. From February to April 1920, he served as quartermaster general in the Armed Forces of South Russia and subsequently (April–November 1920) performed the same task in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel. He also oversaw the evacuation of the troops of the unsuccessful expeditionary force that landed on the Taman peninsula in the Kuban in the summer of 1920, replacing General D. P. Dratsenko as chief of staff to General S. G. Ulagai, and subsequently acted as a close advisor to Wrangel on operational matters.

In November 1920, as the Red Army broke into Crimea, Konovalov was evacuated, with the remains of Wrangel’s forces, from Crimea to Turkey. He subsequently lived in emigration in Bulgaria (from 1921) and then Romania (from 1930), where he worked as manager of a forestry concession near Derna. He died in 1936, in mysterious circumstances, in a hospital at Cluj, succumbing to wounds suffered during an earlier attempt on his life that had apparently been commissioned by the owner of the concession.

KORK, AVGUST IVANOVICH (22 July 1887–12 June 1937). Sublieutenant (1908), lieutenant colonel (1917), komandarm, second rank (November 1935). One of the most successful of the Red Army’s military specialists of the civil-war era, A. I. Kork was born into a poor, Estonian peasant family in the village of Ardlan, Livland guberniia, and was a graduate of the Chuguev Rifle School (1908) and the Academy of the General Staff (1914). Following a period on the staff of the Vil′na Military District, during the First World War he served for three months as a senior adjutant on the staff of the 3rd Siberian Army corps and for six months as a senior adjutant on the staff of the 8th Siberian Rifle Division. He served then as assistant senior adjutant with the quartermaster general of the 10th Army (from 25 December 1915) and, having attended a pilot school, as a staff officer with responsibility for aviation units with the staff of the Western Front (from 25 February 1917). He sided with the revolution in 1917, and from August 1917 to February 1918 was chairman of the soldiers’ committee of the Western Front.

Kork volunteered for service in the Red Army in June 1918, serving initially with the Operation Section of the All-Russian Main Staff, and from October of that year was jointly a departmental head on the staff of the Western Front and head of the operational-surveillance department of the staff of the 9th Red Army. From December 1918, he worked as a military advisor to the Estonian Workers’ Commune and from 18 February to 30 May 1919, he served as chief of staff of the Estonian Red Army, during the failed Soviet invasion of Estonia in the Estonian War of Independence. During the autumn of 1919, as assistant commander of the 7th Red Army, he was one of the chief organizers of the defense of Petrograd against the advance of the forces of N. N. Iudenich. He subsequently commanded the 15th Red Army (31 July–15 October 1919, and 22 October 1919–16 October 1920) in the Soviet–Polish War, then (26 October 1920–13 May 1921) was placed in command of the 6th Red Army. With the latter, he played a decisive part in the storming of the Perekop isthmus and the expulsion of the Russian Army of P. N. Wrangel from Crimea. From 4 June 1921 to 27 April 1922, Kork commanded the forces of the Khar′kov Military District, and then was assistant commander of forces of Ukraine and Crimea (June–October 1922). From 18 October 1922 to 12 August 1923, he was commander of the Turkestan Front, playing a leading role in combating the Basmachi revolt. For his exploits during the civil wars, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner on two occasions and received a gold sword of honor.

As the civil wars wound down, Kork served as commander of the Western Military District (April 1924–February 1925) and acting commander of the Western Front (26 March–5 April 1924), and in 1925 was commander of the Red Banner Caucasian Army (1925). He was subsequently commander of the Forces of the Western Belorussian (13 November 1925–May 1927), Leningrad (May 1927–28 May 1928), and Moscow (November 1929–17 May 1935) Military Districts, undertaking also a military mission to Germany (28 May 1928–13 May 1929) and serving as chief of supply of the Red Army (May–November 1929). From 17 May 1935, he was head of the Red Military Academy. He had joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1927 and was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.

Kork was arrested on 12 May 1937 and on 12 June 1937, along with M. N. Tukhachevskii, I. P. Uborevich, and I. E. Iakir, was sentenced to death and shot, having been found guilty of treason and membership in a “military-fascist plot” against the USSR. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 31 January 1957.

KORNILOV AFFAIR. A central event in the history of the Russian Revolution and the civil wars in Russia, the term “Kornilov affair” denotes the alleged conspiracy against the Russian Provisional Government that sought to establish the commander in chief of the Russian Army as a military dictator. It was a symptom of a general political crisis during the summer of 1917, facets of which included mass demonstrations against the government by the Left (the July Days), the disintegration of the first coalition Provisional Government (as the Kadets members resigned on 2 July 1917, in protest against A. F. Kerensky’s offer of autonomy to Ukraine), economic collapse, military defeat (the failure of the June offensive and the loss of Riga on 18 August), and the emergence of assertive right-wing organizations demanding the “restoration of order.” Although the latter’s attention focused initially on Admiral A. V. Kolchak as the man best qualified to establish a “firm power” (i.e., a military dictatorship) and to “save Russia,” his resignation from his command of the Black Sea Fleet and dispatch to the United States on a naval mission left the field open for General L. G. Kornilov.

Kornilov had long been advocating “stern measures” to stem the disintegration of the army, including the restoration of the death penalty and the militarization of the railways, and in mid-July leaders of the Kadets made it clear to Prime Minister Kerensky that their rejoining the coalition was conditional upon the appointment of Kornilov as commander in chief and the implementation of his program. Kornilov was duly made commander in chief on 18 July 1917. Kerensky probably hoped that this would appease the Right, but in fact it only encouraged a number of shadowy counterrevolutionary organizations to make further preparations for a coup that would remove Kerensky and enthrone Kornilov. How much Kornilov knew of what was being plotted in his name remains obscure, but it is clear that he saw himself as having a key role in the reconstruction of Russian politics and the Russian state and that he was more than willing to use force to achieve this, certainly against the Petrograd Soviet and possibly against the Provisional Government.

On 27 August 1917, having a day earlier been on the point of accepting a list of measures conveyed to him by Kornilov through B. V. Savinkov, Kerensky chose instead to construe another garbled communication from the general (which he had received through a second intermediary, V. N. L′vov, and a vague direct wire conversation with the general during which he pretended to be L′vov) as evidence that Kornilov was planning a coup. In fact, Kerensky would not obtain evidence that Kornilov may have intended to go beyond their agreement until after the event (when it was revealed that the general was moving forces toward Petrograd other than those that Kerensky had summoned, that they had orders to occupy the city, and that they were to be greeted and supported there by preassembled and armed counterrevolutionary organizations). Nevertheless, Kerensky dismissed the general and had his named successor, General M. V. Alekseev, place Kornilov and some of his associates (among them Generals A. I. Denikin, A. S. Lukomskii, S. L. Markov, and I. P. Romanovskii) in prison at Bykhov. Alekseev, however, appears to have fulfilled this order as much to protect the Kornilovites (and particularly the “Bykhov generals”) as to incarcerate them, and in November 1917, in the immediate wake of the October Revolution, he joined them in fleeing to Novocherkassk, where the Bykhov generals became the nucleus of the command structure of the Volunteer Army.

Whatever Kornilov and his supporters may have planned in August 1917, it came to naught, as Red Guards and revolutionary railwaymen (most of them organized by the Bolsheviks) blocked the path of Kornilovite forces marching on Petrograd and persuaded them to desist. This was not sufficient to save Kerensky, however, as he was discredited by the affair, while the political stock of the Bolsheviks soared, as they claimed credit for saving the capital from the counterrevolution, won majorities in the Soviets of Petrograd and Moscow, and began preparations for their seizure of power, which they could now portray as a defensive measure to save the revolution from the “counterrevolutionary” Kerensky. When their blow fell, Kerensky would find almost no support from either the moderate Left, who were shocked at his earlier flirtations with Kornilov, or the Right, who detested him for having betrayed their hero. Thus, the main fault lines of the “Russian” Civil Wars were emerging even before the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power.

Kornilov, Lavr Georgievich (18 August 1870–13 April 1918). Colonel (February 1905), major general (December 1912), lieutenant general (26 August 1914), general of infantry (30 June 1917). Notorious among Leftists for his role in 1917’s Kornilov affair, the first commander of the Whites’ Volunteer Army remains a revered figure to those sympathetic to the White cause during the civil wars.

Kornilov was born into a family of the Siberian Cossack Host at Ust-Kamenogorsk, in Russian Turkestan, although his mother was allegedly of Buriat origin. He was a graduate of the Siberian Cadet Corps (1889), the Mikhail Artillery School (1892), and the Academy of the General Staff (1898). He served as an intelligence officer on the staff of the Turkestan Military District from 1899 to 1904, in that period undertaking numerous covert expeditions to Mongolia, Chinese Turkestan, Afghanistan, Persia, and India, and in the process, acquiring fluency in a number of Asiatic languages. His reports on his travels were published for the general staff, to great acclaim. He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War on the staff of the 1st Rifle Brigade and subsequently served as a military attaché in China (from 1 April 1907 to 24 February 1911). During the First World War, he initially commanded the 48th Infantry Division of the 8th Army. In April 1915, that unit was surrounded by Austrian forces in the Carpathians; Kornilov was twice injured and was finally captured on the 23rd of that month. He remained a prisoner of war in Austria-Hungary, in a camp for senior officers near Vienna, until June 1916, when he managed to escape and returned, via Romania, to Russia, a feat for which he was lionized in the Russian press.

Kornilov was then placed in command of the 25th Rifle Corps (from 13 September 1916), but in March 1917, as a supporter of the February Revolution (he had lost all faith in the monarchy), was made commander of the Petrograd Military District (2 March–24 April 1917). In that capacity, he oversaw the imprisonment of Nicholas II and his family at Tsarskoe Selo, thereby gaining a reputation as a “revolutionary general.” However, he left that post, at his own instigation, after the Russian Provisional Government turned down his request to use cannon against antigovernment demonstrators in the capital during the disturbances known as the “April Days,” which were consequent to the publication of materials (the “Miliukov Note”) that seemed to indicate the foreign minister, P. N. Miliukov, was pursuing an annexationist policy, in defiance of the Petrograd Soviet’s commitment to a peace “without annexations or indemnities.” He then served as commander of the 8th Army (24 April–8 July 1917), achieving some limited success during the Russian Army’s June 1917 offensive and gaining prominence for his strict application of military discipline, before being named commander of the South-West Front (8 July 1917). Somewhat unexpectedly, on 18 July 1917 he was named main commander in chief of the Russian Army by A. F. Kerensky. (It is possible that the beleaguered premier was pressured into this appointment, as the price of tempting back into the government those members of the Kadets who had left the coalition, on 2 July 1917, over the issue of Ukrainian autonomy.) Kornilov famously accepted the post only on condition that he would be answerable only to his own conscience and set about realizing his plans to restore the death penalty at the front and at the rear by having deserters hung from lampposts. On 27 August 1917, during the Kornilov affair, he was denounced as a mutineer by Kerensky, accused of plotting to overthrow the government and trying to establish his own military dictatorship, and was dismissed from his post.

Kornilov was arrested (2 September 1917) and incarcerated at Mogilev and then Bykhov (Bykhaw), together with his chief (alleged) co-conspirators, Generals A. I. Denikin, A. S. Lukomskii, S. L. Markov, I. G. Erdeli, and others. He and the other “Bykhov generals” escaped on 19 November 1917—not a difficult task, as he was being guarded by his own supporters—and made his way covertly to Novocherkassk, the capital of the Don Cossack Host, arriving there on 6 December 1917, to join General M. V. Alekseev in founding the Volunteer Army; he subsequently became its first commander (from 25 December 1917).

Kornilov was killed during the Volunteers’ unsuccessful storming of Ekaterinodar on 13 April 1918, in the midst of the First Kuban (Ice) March, when a shell hit his headquarters. He was buried the following day at Gnachbau, a nearby village of German colonists, but on 15 April 1918 his grave was desecrated by Red troops, who exhumed his corpse and later burned it on a local rubbish dump after parading it through the streets. Throughout the Soviet era the word “Kornilovite” became a synonym for “counterrevolutionary” in official usage, although he was worshiped as a White martyr by opponents of the regime, especially in the emigration. In 1994, a statue of Kornilov was unveiled at Krasnodar (Ekaterinodar). Another has since been raised at Sevastopol′.

KORNILOVTSY. This was the name given to one of the colorful units of the Whites in South Russia (and their predecessors in the Imperial Russian Army) that was named in honor of General L. G. Kornilov (although there was also a Kornilov Cavalry Regiment of the Kuban Cossack Host and a Kornilov Military School at Ekaterinburg). The Kornilovtsy had their origins in an order of General Kornilov, then commander of the 8th Army, of June 1917 for the creation (from officer, NCO, and other-rank volunteers) of the 1st Shock Detachment, which in August 1917 was renamed the Kornilov Shock Regiment.

Following the liquidation of the Kornilov affair, this unit was redubbed the 1st Russian (later Slavonic) Shock Regiment, but its officers remained true to their hero, and after the October Revolution many of them followed him to Novocherkassk, on the Don, where the unit was resurrected as the Kornilov Shock Regiment, one of the founding regiments of the Volunteer Army. A 2nd Kornilov Shock Regiment was founded in June 1919 and a 3rd Kornilov Shock Regiment was added at Khar′kov in September of that year. All three regiments were then combined as the Kornilov Division. In September 1919, at Kursk, heavy casualties meant that the regiments were reduced to a single Kornilov Shock Brigade, but after the capture of Orel (in October 1919), this was supplemented with a brigade from the 1st Infantry Division to become the Kornilov Shock Division. In addition, in November 1919 the 1st and 2nd Artillery Brigades of the Volunteer Army were united as the Kornilov Artillery Brigade and added to the division. A 4th Kornilov Shock Regiment, formed at Azov in December 1919, was annihilated in the Kuban in March 1920, as the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) disintegrated.

Following the evacuation of the remnants of the AFSR from Novorossiisk to Crimea in March 1920, what was left of the Kornilovtsy were reformed into the Kornilov Shock Division of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel. Most of that unit was wiped out in the battles in Northern Tauride in the summer of 1920, however, and following the evacuation of Wrangel’s forces to Turkey in November 1920, the remnants of the Kornilovtsy became the Kornilov Shock Regiment, housed in the camps at Gallipoli. The following year the Kornilovtsy relocated to Bulgaria, and many members later moved to France.

The Kornilovtsy infantry wore a forage cap with a red crown and black edging, black and red epaulettes with a white letter “K”; on their left sleeve was a blue shield with white lettering (“Kornilov”) and a white skull over crossed bones and chevrons (pointing downward). Kornilovtsy artillerymen wore a cap with a green crown and a black band and black shoulder straps with yellow crossed guns and the letter “K.”

Commanders of the Kornilovtsy were M. O. Nezhentsev (to 31 March 1918); A. P. Kutepov (31 March–12 June 1918); V. I. Indeikin (12 June–31 October 1918); N. V. Skoblin (31 October–summer 1919); M. A. Peshnia (summer–14 October 1919); K. P. Gordienko (from 14 October 1919); V. V. Cheliadinov (acting; January and August 1920); M. Dashkevich (acting, January–February and July–21 August 1920); and D. Shirkovskii (acting, February 1920). In Gallipoli, the Kornilov Shock Regiment was again commanded by Major General N. V. Skoblin. In exile, in France, the remnants of the group were led by Lieutenant G. Z. Troshin.

KOROBEINIKOV, MIKHAIL IAKOVLEVICH (?–24 April 1924). Coronet (1917). A White leader of obscure background, M. Ia. Korobeinikov distinguished himself as the commander of the White-partisan Iakutsk People’s Army, which rose against Soviet rule in eastern Siberia during the Iakutsk Revolt. After the defeat of his army in the summer of 1923, he made his way to Harbin, in Manchuria, where he died.

Kostandi, Leonid Vasil′evich (20 September 1883–March 1921). Captain (9 August 1914), lieutenant colonel (15 August 1916), colonel (4 June 1919). A prominent figure in the White forces in North Russia, L. V. Kostandi was born into a lower middle-class Greek family at Odessa. Having entered military service in 1901, he graduated from the Odessa Military School (1905) and the Academy of the General Staff (1912). During the First World War, he became (from 2 October 1915) chief of staff to ground defenses of the Peter the Great naval fortress (then under construction on the coast of Estland, near Revel).

Following the October Revolution, Kostandi was pressed into service with the Red Army and in early 1918 was transferred to a staff post with the White Sea Military District at Arkhangel′sk. With other officers, he conspired to overthrow Soviet power in the north and played an active part in the coup of 2 August 1918 that established the anti-Bolshevik Supreme Administration of the Northern Region. He subsequently became commander of the Murmansk Volunteer Army (November 1918–June 1919) and chief of the military department of the Murmansk Region (from 23 January 1919). In those capacities, he organized and led an offensive against Soviet forces in February 1919 and achieved some success in mobilizing men and supplies around Murmansk in support of the White efforts. His reward, in June 1919, was promotion and a posting as chief of the operational department of the staff of the main commander in chief, General E. K. Miller. When the British announced that they were going to evacuate their forces from North Russia, Kostandi went personally to see General W. E. Ironside and returned to him a medal that he had earlier been awarded by the British.

When White forces evacuated Arkhangel′sk, Kostandi remained behind in the port, assuming the role of commander of forces of the Arkhangel′sk region, in order to oversee the peaceful surrender of the region to the approaching Reds, with whom he negotiated personally. He was subsequently imprisoned, transferred to a Cheka prison in Moscow, and executed in March 1921. In the historical novel Iz tupika (“Out of the Deadlock,” 1982), by V. S. Pikul′, Kostandi appears in the thinly disguised character “Colonel Konstandi.”

KOSTIAEV, FEDOR VASIL′EVICH (8 February 1878–27 September 1925). Colonel (6 December 1914), major general (1917). One of the most important military specialists in the Red Army, F. V. Kostiaev was born at Jelgava (Mitau) in Latvia into a noble family and was a graduate of the Orenburg Nepliuevskii Cadet College, the Nicholas Engineering School (1899), and the Academy of the General Staff (1905). He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War and subsequently served as assistant senior adjutant on the staff of the Irkutsk Military District (from 10 January 1907) and then filled a number of other staff posts. During the First World War, he served as chief of staff of the 30th Infantry Division (from 31 December 1914), commander of the 32nd Siberian Rifle Regiment (from 1 February 1916), chief of staff of the 17th Siberian Rifle Division (from 3 January 1917), chief of staff of the 1st Siberian Army Corps (from 7 August 1917), and assistant to the chief of staff of the Western Front (from 16 December 1917).

Kostiaev joined the Red Army in March 1918, as chief of staff of the Pskov region and then commander of the Petrograd Division (May–June 1918) and assistant commander of the Petrograd district. From September to October 1918, he was chief of staff of the Northern Front, and from October 1918 to June 1919, he was chief of the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. In July 1919, he was briefly arrested, together with the supreme commander, Jukums Vācietis, but was soon released and assigned to teaching work at the Red Military Academy (from September 1919). From 1921 to 1923, he was a member of the commission that negotiated the precise line of Soviet Russia’s border with Poland and, from 1924 to 1925, filled a similar role in negotiations with Finland. He died and is buried in Moscow.

Kotliarevskii, Sergei Andreevich (23 July 1873–15 April 1939). The historian, jurist, and political activist K. S. Kotliarevskii, the son of a tsarist bureaucrat, was born in Moscow guberniia and was a graduate of the Historical-Philosophical Faculty of Moscow University (1894), where he subsequently lectured, receiving his doctorate in history in 1904 and a second doctorate in law in 1909. He was active in politics from around 1903, was one of the founders of the Kadets in 1905, and from 1905 to 1908 was a member of that party’s central committee. At this time, Kotliarevskii was involved in a number of philosophical and literary societies and was close to the novelist Andrei Belyi. He also served as a deputy in the First State Duma in 1906, representing Saratov guberniia, but was deprived of his political rights as a signatory of the Vyborg Manifesto.

Kotliarevskii left the Kadets in 1912 and concentrated on his academic work, but returned to politics in 1917, as a deputy minister in the Russian Provisional Government, and from 1918 to 1920 was active in a number of underground anti-Bolshevik organizations, notably the National Center. In 1920, he was arrested by the Cheka as a member of the so-called Tactical Center and was sentenced to death, although this was subsequently commuted to a sentence of five years’ imprisonment. Upon his release, Kotliarevskii returned to his academic work and became a consultant to the publications division of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He was arrested once more, on 17 April 1938, and was executed as a counterrevolutionary a year later at Kommunarka, near Moscow, where he was buried in a mass grave. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 8 December 1956.

KOTOVSKI, Hryhorii (KOTOVSKII, GRIGORII IVANOVICH) (12 June 1881–6 August 1925). A much decorated and much lauded Red hero of the civil wars, who joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in April 1920, Hryhorii Kotovski was born into a working-class family (his father was a mechanic) at Gancheti, Bessarabia guberniia (now Hînceşti in the Republic of Moldova), and attended a village school and Kishinev Realschule. He participated in peasant risings in the region in 1902 and was arrested the following year. In 1905, he was called up to the army, but he deserted and organized further rural disturbances in his home district. He was subsequently arrested again on several occasions and, in 1907, was sentenced to 12 years’ hard labor and exiled to Nerchinsk. He escaped from there in 1913, and in 1915 was again at the head of a peasant band in Bessarabia. He was sentenced to death in 1916, which was commuted to hard labor for life, but was freed following the February Revolution and joined the army on the Romanian Front.

In November 1917, as a member of his regimental committee (the 136th Taganrog Infantry Regiment), Kotovski joined the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries and was later elected to the soldiers’ committee of the 6th Army. He then operated around Kishinev, as a member of the front organization of Rumcherod, and from April 1918 worked in the Bolshevik underground in southern Ukraine. In 1919, he commanded a brigade of the 45th Rifle Division of the Red Army during the forced 250-mile march from the Dnestr to Zhitomir that was led by I. E. Iakir, then was redeployed in the defense of Petrograd against the White forces of General N. N. Iudenich. He subsequently commanded the same unit in the battle for Tiraspol′ (January–March 1920), for which he later received his first Order of the Red Banner. From March to October 1920, he commanded an independent cavalry brigade on the South-West Front, and from November 1920 was head of the Caucasus Brigade of the 45th Rifle Division in battles against the Ukrainian forces of S. V. Petliura (receiving a second Order of the Red Banner for his achievements). From December 1920, he commanded the 17th Caucasian Division, and from April to August 1921 was involved in the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion (for which he received a ceremonial weapon). From September 1921, he was commander of the 9th Caucasian Cavalry Division, then (from October 1922) the 2nd Caucasian Mounted Corps. In November 1921, his cavalry group was instrumental in suppressing the second of the Winter Campaigns of the Ukrainian Army.

In 1924, Kotovski received a third Order of the Red Banner. One of his last acts was to assist in the establishment of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. He died in somewhat murky circumstances in 1925 (possibly shot either accidentally or purposefully by his own men) and was buried at Birzul (which in 1935 was renamed Kotovsk, Odessa guberniia). His mausoleum was destroyed by Romanian forces during the Second World War. (A monument now marks the spot.) The town of his birth was also renamed Kotovskoe in 1940 and again from 1945 to 1965. In 1965, this was shortened to Kotovsk. It also featured a house museum dedicated to him. The town became Hînceşti in 1990. Kotovski was also the subject of the anti-German film Kotovskii (1942, dir. A.M. Faintsimmer), which featured a score by Sergei Prokofiev. A street was named after him in Lipetsk, and in 1954 a massive equestrian statue of him (by a group of sculptors led by L. I. Dubinovskii) was erected in central Kishinev. The statue adorned two four-kopek stamps issued in 1961 and 1967, and Kotovski’s portrait was used on a 40-kopek stamp in 1957 and a Red Army medal struck in 1981. He was also the subject of numerous songs and stories in the Soviet Union.

KOUCHEK KHAN, MIRZA. See Kuchuk (KOUCHEK) Khan, MIRZA.

kovtiukh, epifan iovich (9 May 1894–29 July 1938). Ensign (1916), staff captain (1917), komkor (November 1935). The Red military commander E. I. Kovtiukh was born into a peasant family at Baturino, Kherson guberniia. He was mobilized into the Russian Army in 1911, during the First World War saw action on the Caucasian Front, and in 1916 graduated from a military school.

Following the February Revolution, Kovtiukh was elected to his regimental soldiers’ committee, and in 1918, having joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), he commanded units of Red Guards in the Kuban, in August–September 1918 participating in the defense of Ekaterinograd against the Volunteer Army. On 27 August 1918, he was named deputy commander of the Taman (Red) Army and commander of its first column. When I. I. Matveev was imprisoned and executed by the rebel I. I. Sorokin, Kovtiukh assumed command of the Taman Army (October–December 1918). He was subsequently commander of the 48th (Taman) Rifle Division (September–November 1919), then commander of the 50th (Taman) Rifle Division (December 1919–January 1920), and thereafter commander of the Independent Cavalry Corps of the 11th Red Army (from January 1920). In those capacities, he participated in key battles against the retreating forces of the Armed Forces of South Russia around Tsaritsyn, Tikhoretsk, Tuapse, and Sochi. In September–August 1920, Kovtiukh was commander of the Ekaterinodar garrison, leading the defense of the Kuban against forces of P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army (under S. G. Ulagai) that had landed on the Taman peninsula. In March 1921, he also participated in the suppression of the Kronshtadt Revolt.

As the civil wars waned, in 1922 Kovtiukh graduated from the Red Military Academy and thereafter occupied numerous senior posts in the Red Army, rising to army inspector and deputy commander of the Belorussian Military District in 1936. He was arrested on 10 August 1937 and subsequently executed as a spy. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 22 February 1956 (one of the first Red commanders to be rehabilitated). Kovtiukh, who was three times awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his exploits in the North Caucasus, is portrayed as “Kozhuk,” the hero of Aleksandr Serafimovich’s celebrated novel Zheleznyi potok (“The Iron Flood,” 1924).

KOZHEVNIKOV, INNOKENTII SERAFIMOVICH (1 November 1879–April 1931). A prominent organizer of Red partisan forces during the civil wars, I. S. Kozhevnikov was born at Bochkarevo, in Irkutsk guberniia, and educated at the Khabarovsk Commercial Institute. From 1915 to 1917, he worked as a mechanic on the telegraph service at Khar′kov, and in 1917 was prominent as an organizer of Red Guards detachments in that city. The following year, he organized resistance to the forces of the Austro-German intervention in Ukraine and to the army of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii, before being dispatched to organize partisan forces in Bashkiriia, in the rear of the forces of Komuch. From February 1919, he was active in Red advances toward the Don, from 6 March to 16 April of that year as commander of the 13th Red Army. In 1920, he was deployed as a military commissar with the Volga-Caspian Military Flotilla, with which he assisted in the occupation of Fort Aleksandrovsk and later the capture of the White Caspian Flotilla in the Enzeli Operation.

In early 1921, Kozhevnikov was made assistant minister of foreign affairs of the Far Eastern Republic, and in May of that year he was sent to the Maritime Province to organize partisan forces. From 1922 to 1923, he worked as Soviet ambassador to the Bukharan People’s Republic and then to Lithuania. He subsequently worked in the People’s Commissariat for Post and Telegraph of the USSR.

KRAINII, VIKTOR (SCHNEIDERMAN, MOSEI ISRAELEVICH) (1898–21 October 1918). The son of a Jewish teacher, and a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) from 1914, in 1917–1918 Viktor Krainii served as a member of the party committee in Odessa, as well as the local revolutionary committee and city soviet, while enrolled at the New Russian University there. He was also a member of Rumcherod (January–March 1918). From May 1918, he was chairman of the Ekaterinoslav committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and from July 1918 was chairman of the North Caucasus Regional Committee of the RKP(b), as well as deputy chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the North Caucasus Soviet Republic and a member of the Revvoensovet of its armed forces. Krainii was among those local Soviet leaders who, in September 1918, were arrested at Piatigorsk by the renegade Red commander I. L. Sorokin and subsequently executed on his orders. He is buried at the foot of the Mashuk Hill in Piatigorsk, where a central street was renamed in his honor.

KRAKOVETSKII, ARKADII ANATOL′EVICH (28 August/September 1884–2 December 1937). Lieutenant colonel (May 1917). Born into a military family, the revolutionary socialist and anti-Bolshevik military organizer A. A. Krakovetskii studied at the Orlov Cadet Corps and the Mikhail Artillery School and served as an officer with the artillery of the Warsaw fortress from 1905 to 1907, but in 1905 joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) and, as a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of Warsaw Military District, undertook extensive propaganda and organizational work in the army. He was arrested in December 1907, and on 10 February 1909 was sentenced to eight years’ hard labor and exile. He served most of his sentence at Aleksandrovsk Central prison, in eastern Siberia.

Following the February Revolution, Krakovetskii was released and promoted, and by the end of 1917 had risen to the command of the Irkutsk Military District. He was in Petrograd at the time of the October Revolution and was a leading participant in the Junker revolt against Soviet power. He subsequently returned to Siberia and, in January 1918, was elected to the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia, as minister of war. Around this time he also undertook a mission to Ukraine, in an effort to forge links between the anti-Bolshevik movement in Siberia and the Ukrainian National Republic. After further negotiations with General D. G. Shcherbachev at Jassy, he then returned to Siberia once more and worked (with some success) during the Democratic Counter-Revolution east of the Urals to organize an underground network of military-SR cadres across the region, before fleeing to Harbin in the summer of 1918 to escape arrest by the Soviet authorities.

Krakovetskii was denied a post in the Siberian Army because of the distrust felt toward him by the more right-wing officers who came to dominate it and, following the Omsk coup, became the subject of investigations by White military intelligence. Radola Gajda evidently wanted to place him in command of a division, but instead Krakovetskii was arrested and exiled to Biisk, from where he made his way to Vladivostok. There, as a member of the Committee for the Convocation of a Zemskii sobor′, alongside I. A. Iakushev and others, he played a major role in the anti-Kolchak conspiracies that would lead to the Gajda putsch of November 1919. Thanks to the intervention of the local American commander, General William Graves, he escaped arrest and execution in the aftermath of the failure of the putsch and, in 1920, agreed to make his peace with the new Soviet authorities in Siberia, working for the overthrow of the remains of the White movement in the Maritime Province.

Krakovetskii was then recruited to the Cheka and sent on a mission to North America; he traveled from there to Europe with the returning Czechoslovak Legion. Having conducted propaganda work among the refugee soldiers of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, he went to France, but was arrested by the authorities and deported as an undesirable. He arrived back in Moscow in 1922, in time to act as a witness for the prosecution in the trial of the leadership of the PSR, and was seconded to the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. He subsequently worked as Soviet representative to Albania and as Soviet consul at Mukden. He returned to Moscow in 1928, and that same year became a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), having been made a candidate member of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1922. He subsequently worked in the economic directorate of the OGPU. As a “former counterrevolutionary,” Krakovetskii lost his official posts in 1934, and he was arrested and shot during the purges.

Krasil′nikov, Ivan Nikolaevich (1888–January 1920). Esaul (1917), colonel (19 November 1918), major general (1919). An officer of the Siberian Cossack Host who became notorious for his reactionary views during the period of the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia, and who played a leading role in bringing Admiral A. V. Kolchak to power, I. N. Krasil′nikov created and led a detachment of Cossacks around Omsk in the spring of 1918; in the summer of that year, as part of the Mid-Siberian Corps of the Siberian Army, he took the lead in clearing Nizhneudinsk and then Irkutsk of its Soviet defenders, actions that earned him a promotion on the orders of General A. N. Grishin-Almazov. In October 1918, he led his Cossacks in a vicious police action against striking railwaymen at Omsk, in which numerous workers were executed. In November 1918 (together with Colonel V. I. Vol′kov and Colonel A. V. Katanaev), it was he who arrested and imprisoned the members of the Ufa Directory (one of whom he had earlier, in October 1918, threatened to shoot for refusing to stand up for the anthem “God Save the Tsar” at a banquet). He and his companions accepted sole responsibility for the Omsk coup, but were found not guilty of treason by a military court and were subsequently promoted, with Krasil′nikov gaining the rank of colonel (November 1918).

In Kolchak’s Russian Army, he led his Cossacks (now formally named the Krasil′nikov Detachment) in a series of punitive expeditions against the Taseevo Partisan Republic of P. E. Shchetinkin and A. D. Kravchenko in eastern Siberia, winning a reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty among the local population but achieving some success in many small battles against the rebels. In September 1919, he was named commander of the Independent Chasseurs Brigade of the Siberian Cossack Host and of the Northern Partisan Front of Eniseisk guberniia. He died of typhus at Irkutsk, in January 1920, during the Great Siberian (Ice) March.

KRASIN, LEONID BORISOVICH (3 July 1870–24 November 1926). The Soviet politician and diplomat L. B. Krasin was born into the family of a tsarist bureaucrat at Kurgan, Tobol′sk guberniia, and was a graduate of the Khar′kov Technological Institute (1901). He joined the social-democratic movement in 1890 and was arrested on at least two occasions over the following years. (His political activities also led to his being expelled from St. Petersburg Technological Institute in 1891.) When the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) split in 1903, he gravitated toward the Bolsheviks. He was a member of the RSDLP Central Committee from 29 September 1903 to 30 April 1907, and then a candidate member from 19 May 1907 to 26 December 1911, and advised the Bolsheviks on technical matters and funding. (He was, in fact, a member of the Bolsheviks’ secret Financial Group, which handled money obtained through bank robberies and other “expropriations” and helped design bombs and other weapons.) At the same time, he worked as an electrical engineer in Baku (1900–1904), Orekhovo-Zueve (1904–1905), and St. Petersburg (1905–1907). In 1908, he left Russia for western Europe, returning in 1912 to become a director of the Siemens and Schukkert electrical factory in St. Petersburg and subsequently working as the company’s general manager in Russia. At this point, Krasin seems to have temporarily abandoned politics.

Following the October Revolution, he advised the Soviet government on a range of economic matters, was one of the negotiators of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), and from August 1918 to March 1920 was a member of the presidium of VSNKh. During the civil wars, Krasin also chaired the extraordinary commission on supply for the Red Army and was a member of the transportation commission of the Revvoensovet of the Republic and the Council of Labor and Defense; from 13 November 1918 to 11 June 1919, he was people’s commissar for trade and industry of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, combining that role with that of People’s Commissar for Ways and Communications (17 March 1919–23 March 1920). He also served as head of the Soviet delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Tartu (2 February 1920) with Estonia. From 11 June 1920 to 18 November 1925, he was people’s commissar for foreign trade. In that latter capacity, one of his first tasks was the negotiation of the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement (16 March 1921). Among numerous other foreign missions to arrange for the restitution of Soviet trade and the export of gold reserves, he also attended the Genoa Conference in 1922. He was also a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (31 May 1924–24 November 1926), and served as Soviet diplomatic and trade representative in London (15 May 1921–23 July 1923, and 30 October 1925 to 24 November 1926) and Paris (14 November 1924–30 October 1925).

Krasin died in London of a blood disease and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. His ashes were subsequently buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. His name was later given, inter alia, to two Soviet ice-breakers; a passenger steamer; streets in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Khar′kov; and schools in Perm′ and Kurgan.

KRASNAIA GORKA UPRISING. On 13 June 1919, Red Army soldiers at the naval fortress of Krasnaia Gorka, situated on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland (just west of the island of Kotlin), rose in revolt against the Bolsheviks, demanding the election of “Soviets without Communists.” The rebellion was supported by the men of the nearby Seriia Loshad′ Battery and the crew of the minesweeper Kitoboi. Soviet historians claimed that the uprising was engineered by the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who, it was alleged, hoped to assist the march on Petrograd of the White forces of General N. N. Iudenich, but that has never been substantiated. The rebels may also have been expecting support from the Baltic squadron of the Royal Navy, part of which was stationed at Revel (Tallinn), but its vessels were deterred by minefields in the gulf. On the night of 17 June 1919, Captain Augustus Agar did lead a raid of British Coastal Motor Boats (based in Finland) on the Soviet Baltic Fleet that was shelling the fortress, resulting in the sinking of the cruiser Oleg. However, on the following day, Red forces commanded by J. V. Stalin recaptured Krasnaia Gorka and executed many of the rebels. The uprising fed Soviet paranoia about the untrustworthiness of military specialists and was probably a factor in the arrest, a few days later, of the commander in chief of the Red Army, Jukums Vācietis.

Krasnoshchekov (tobel′son), Aleksandr Mikhailovich (10 October 1880–26 November 1937). Born into a Jewish family in Chernobyl, Kiev guberniia, the Soviet politician A. M. Krasnoshchekov attended Kiev University from 1896, but in 1898 was imprisoned and exiled for revolutionary activities. He subsequently worked in a variety of socialist organizations in Ukraine, before fleeing Russia to avoid arrest in 1901. He then lived in the United States until 1917 (sometimes under the name “Stroller Tobenson”), playing an active part in the workers’ movement, including helping to found the International Workers of the World (the Wobblies). During this period, he also graduated from the Law Faculty University of Chicago (1912) and subsequently worked as a lawyer, defending radicals accused of various crimes. Soon after the February Revolution, he returned to Russia, via Vladivostok, and was elected chairman of the Nikol′sk Soviet. It was also at this time that he formally joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) and became chairman of the Nikol′sk-Ussuriisk obkom of the party.

In the wake of the October Revolution, Krasnoshchekov was instrumental in calling a conference of Soviets of the Far East at Khabarovsk, in December 1917. Having failed to achieve a compromise with the local zemstva, this conference elected a Far East Executive Committee of Soviets, with Krasnoshchekov as chairman, and laid claim to control of the Amur and Maritime provinces, as well as the island of Sakhalin and the Kamchatka peninsula. (This set it in competition with the Bolshevik Tsentrosibir′, at Irkutsk, which also claimed control of these regions.) Following the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion and the collapse of Soviet power throughout Siberia, Krasnoshchekov went underground in September 1918. In 1919, he was arrested several times by the White authorities, but managed to escape custody, until he spent a lengthy period of incarceration at Irkutsk from September of that year. He was released in December 1919, as power in the city passed to the Political Center.

When, in January 1920, power at Irkutsk was passed to the local Bolshevik revolutionary committee, Krasnoshchekov proposed and then undertook a mission to pass through the retreating White lines to the west of the city to meet the leaders of the 5th Red Army and propose that a quasi-independent buffer state be established in the Far East, between Soviet Russia and the interventionist forces of Japan. He could with some justification, therefore, claim to be the founding father of the Far Eastern Republic (FER). He then became the new state’s first president (7 March 1920–December 1921; provisional to 6 April 1920) and also served as its minister of foreign affairs, as well as taking responsibility for drafting its constitution.

Following clashes with other members of the government of the FER, Krasnoshchekov was ordered to Moscow in April 1921 and became deputy people’s commissar of finance (from December 1921), then a member of the presidium of VSNKh (from April 1922); then (from November 1922) he was head of the National Industrial Bank (Prombank). In those capacities he was an outspoken advocate of the New Economic Policy, earning himself as many enemies in Moscow as he had created in the Far East, although his position was safe as long as V. I. Lenin was active, the latter valuing Kranoshchekov’s energy and experience. In October 1923, after Lenin had become incapacitated by a stroke, Kranoshchekov was arrested and imprisoned for some months, charged with financial irregularities in the performance of his job at Prombank (specifically, that he had given special privileges to his lover, Donna Gruz, and to his own brother, Iakob). This caused a sensation in Moscow, as this was the first instance of a Bolshevik supported by Lenin being put on public trial. Krasnoshchekov was found guilty, expelled from the party, and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. Suffering from pneumonia he had contracted in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, he was amnestied in January 1925 and sent to Yalta to recover. He subsequently worked at the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture, concentrating on cotton production in Central Asia. Arrested and shot as a spy during the purges, he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

Krasnov, Grigorii Adrianovich (ANDREEVICH) (1883–?). A little-known but influential figure in the anti-Bolshevik movement in the east, G. A. Krasnov, after graduating from the St. Petersburg Spiritual Academy and building a long but undistinguished career in various ministries of the tsarist regime (he reached the rank of state councilor in 1916), headed the Council of State Control of the Provisional Siberian Government (from 6 June 1918) and served as state controller under both the Ufa Directory (from 4 November 1918) and the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak throughout its existence (18 November 1918–4 January 1920).

In January 1920, Krasnov was arrested by the Political Center at Irkutsk and consequently, at the end of that month, fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks. On 30 May 1920, he appeared before a Revolutionary Tribunal at Omsk. According to some sources, he was sentenced to death and executed. Others have it, however, that he was put to work in the Soviet administration, was amnestied in 1922, and subsequently worked in Siberian branches of the economic administration of the USSR.

KRASNOV, PETR NIKOLAEVICH (22 September 1869–17 January 1947). Colonel (19 March 1910), major general (2 November 1914), general of cavalry (26 August 1918). General P. N. Krasnov, the ataman of the Don Cossack Host and a key figure in the White movement in South Russia, was born in St. Petersburg into the family of a Cossack general and historian. After graduating from the Alexander Cadet Corps (1887) and the First Pavlovsk Military School (1889), he entered the Ataman Regiment of the Life Guards. (Krasnov also attended the Academy of the General Staff, but left it after a year, in 1893, without graduating, although he did graduate from the Cavalry Officers School in 1909). In 1897–1898, he led the first major Russian military mission to Abyssinia. He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War, during which he worked also as a war correspondent—he had been the Far Eastern correspondent of the Russkii invalid (“The Russian Veteran”) since 1901—and during the First World War was commander of the 10th Don Cossack Regiment (October–November 1914), the 1st Brigade of the 1st Don Cossack Division (November 1914–May 1915), the 3rd Cossack Native Cavalry Division (May–July 1915), the 3rd Don Cossack Division (July–September 1915), the 2nd Independent Cossack Division (16 September 1915–April 1917), the 1st Kuban Cossack Division (April–August 1917), and the 3rd Cavalry Corps (24 August–30 November 1917).

In the aftermath of the October Revolution, Krasnov answered A. F. Kerensky’s plea for aid and launched an unsuccessful attack on Petrograd with Cossack forces (the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising). He was subsequently arrested by the Soviet authorities but was then, somewhat surprisingly, released on his word of honor that he would desist from armed opposition to Soviet power. He immediately fled to the Don territory, where he was elected Host ataman of the Don Cossacks (16 May 1918) and became head of the government of the Don Republic. He then commanded Cossack forces during the Host’s uprising against Soviet power in the spring of 1918, and in collaboration with forces of the Austro-German intervention (with whom he established diplomatic relations), cleared the Don territory of Red forces over the summer of that year, then initiated an advance toward Tsaritsyn. An effective—and to the rank-and-file Cossacks, inspirational—leader (among other things, Krasnov was an effective orator and an impressive horseman), he subsequently led the Don Army into alliance with the Volunteer Army of General A. I. Denikin, formalized by the creation of the Armed Forces of South Russia on 8 January 1919, but was forced to retire on 19 February 1919 following a series of disputes with Denikin, chiefly over issues of the autonomy of the Cossack regions, and in the light of the poor performance of the Don Army. His collaboration with the Germans in 1918 was always going to make his relationship with the pro-Allies Denikin difficult.

After a period in Batumi, Krasnov made his way to Estonia, where he served on the staff of the North-West Army of General N. N. Iudenich and involved himself in propaganda work (22 July 1919–19 January 1920). When that force was dissolved, he went into emigration in Estonia (January–March 1920), Germany (from March 1920), and France (from 22 November 1921), devoting his energies to literary work and producing numerous works of fiction (among them 21 novels, notably the widely translated trilogy From the Double-headed Eagle to the Red Flag), military history, and memoirs. He was also an active member of ROVS.

Krasnov returned to Germany in April 1936, and during the Second World War was a prominent collaborator with the Nazis, serving from 31 March 1944 as head of the Main Directorate of Cossack Forces attached to the Wehrmacht and working to achieve the independence of the Don territory. At the end of the war, Krasnov was incarcerated by British forces in Austria (19–28 May 1945), before being sent back to Russia with other White and Cossack leaders of the civil-war era (notably General A. G. Shkuro and Sultan-girei Klych). There he was subsequently tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, found guilty of treason and other crimes, and executed.

In 1994, a memorial to Krasnov and other Cossack leaders was unveiled in the grounds of the All-Saints Church in central Moscow, while in 2006 a memorial complex dedicated to Cossacks who lost their lives in the struggle against Bolshevism, featuring a bronze statue of Krasnov, was opened at the Elanskaia Sholokhovskaia stanitsa, Rostov oblast′. Various attempts by monarchist and right-wing organizations to have Krasnov officially rehabilitated, however, have been turned down by the Russian authorities.

Kravchenko, aleksandr diomidovich (1880–21 November 1923). Ensign (191?). The commander of a major group of partisans in Eniseisk guberniia, Siberia, during the civil wars, A. D. Kravchenko was born into a peasant family in Voronezh guberniia and was active in the revolutionary movement since 1902, although initially as a supporter of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries rather than the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (as a consequence of which, his significance as a partisan leader tended to be downplayed in Soviet historiography). After working as an agronomist near Minusinsk (from 1907), he was mobilized in 1914, and during the course of the First World War was decorated on several occasions for bravery. In 1917, he was a member of the Achinsk Soviet, and in 1918 he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks).

Following the overthrow of Soviet power in Siberia in May–June 1918, Kravchenko went underground and, in October of that year, he was (as chairman of the local revolutionary committee) the organizer of the Bolshevik uprising at Stepno-Badzheisk. At his direction, there was founded at Stepno-Badzheisk an armaments factory that supplied weapons to partisans across the region. By January 1919, he was in command of a force of some 2,000 partisans, and in March of that year was elected chairman of the United Soviet of Peasants’, Soldiers’, and Workers’ Deputies of what became known as the Stepno-Badzheisk Republic. During the summer of 1919, in union with the forces of P. E. Shchetinkin, Kravchenko’s units engaged with the counterinsurgent forces of the Omsk government under the command of General S. N. Rozanov (including a unit commanded by the future anti-Soviet partisan leader I. N. Solov′ev); having been defeated, they were forced to retreat from their stronghold in southern Eniseisk guberniia (the Taseevo Partisan Republic) into the Uriankhai (Tuva) region, on the borders of Mongolia. Having regrouped and rearmed his men, in September 1919 Kravchenko led a successful attack on the town of Minusinsk and from there advanced north toward Krasnoiarsk, harrying, defeating, and dispersing the retreating forces of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak over the winter of 1919–1920. By this time, the forces at his command numbered some 30,000 men, which in February 1920 became attached to the Red Army as the Eniseisk Rifle Division, under the command of Kravchenko. In the summer of 1920, he led a Siberian partisan regiment on the Western Front in the Soviet–Polish War, before returning east to take a seat on the executive committee of the Eniseisk guberniia Soviet and working for the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture.

Kravchenko died at Rostov-on-Don, in 1923. According to some accounts, he was killed by peasant rebels. In 1979, his ashes were reinterred in Minusinsk.

Krestinskii, Nikolai Nikolaevich (13 October 1883–15 March 1938). The Soviet politician and diplomat N. N. Krestinskii was born at Mogilev, in Belorussia, into the family of a Jewish schoolteacher who had converted to Orthodoxy, and was a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1907), subsequently working as a barrister. Having joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903, he soon sided with the Bolsheviks. He was a member of the social-democratic faction in the Third and Fourth State Dumas and, in November 1914, was exiled to Ekaterinburg for opposing the war. Following the February Revolution, he became chairman of the Urals regional committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks).

As an effective party organizer, Krestinskii was elected to the Bolshevik Party Central Committee on 3 August 1917, and later to its Orgbiuro (25 March 1919) and its Politbiuro (25 March 1919), and was also a senior member of the secretariat (from 29 November 1919). Following the October Revolution, he served as deputy chief commissar to the State Bank (December 1917–March 1918) and assistant chairman of the State Bank (from March 1918), then as people’s commissar for finance (16 August 1918–22 November 1922). At this time, he was associated with the faction of Left Bolsheviks. He lost all his party posts at the 10th Party Congress on 8 March 1921, and became instead Soviet ambassador to Germany (20 October 1921–26 September 1930). In that capacity, he attended the Genoa Conference and was instrumental in sealing the Treaty of Rapallo.

In the leadership struggles of the 1920s, Krestinskii supported L. D. Trotsky and the Left Opposition, but eventually broke with that faction and continued work as a diplomat and as deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs (from September 1930). He then worked briefly as first deputy people’s commissar for justice (March–May 1937). He was arrested on 29 May 1937 and subsequently, in March 1938, was put on trial (in the “Trial of the 21”) for espionage and membership in a “Rightist-Trotskyite anti-Soviet bloc.” Krestinskii’s court appearance was sensational, as he was the only major purge victim to publicly assert his innocence of all crimes. However, on the following day he recanted and pleaded guilty, and was subsequently shot. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 8 July 1963, and a street in Ekaterinburg was later renamed in his honor.

KRITZMAN (KRTISMAN), LEV NATANOVICH (1890–1937/1938). The Soviet economist and planner L. N. Kritzman remains an obscure but influential figure. He was born in 1890 and by 1905 had joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, initially gravitating toward the Mensheviks. Little is known of the next 13 years of his life, but he seems to have traveled in Western Europe and studied economics. He returned to Russia in early 1918, by which time he had drawn close to the Left Bolsheviks, and found work with VSNKh. In 1921, he joined the presidium of the State Planning Agency (Gosplan), and from 1928, he was assistant director of the Central Statistical Administration of the USSR. He was also a member of the presidium of the Communist Academy and was subsequently (from 1925) director of its Agrarian Institute and editor of its journal, Na Agranome fronte (“On the Agrarian Front”). In these positions, during the early 1920s, he was a stern critic of the introduction of the New Economic Policy, notably in his work The Heroic Period of the Russian Revolution (1924), and was a proponent of a single economic plan for the entire Soviet economy. As assistant to the chairman of Gosplan in 1931–1933, he played a fateful role in the persecution of the pro-NEP economists N. D. Kondrat′ev and A. V. Chaianov. This did not save him from demotion and persecution in subsequent years. He was arrested as a Trotskyite in 1937 and died shortly afterward in prison.

KRIVOSHEIN, ALEKSANDR VASIL′EVICH (19 July 1857–28 October 1921). The eminent Russian statesman A. V. Krivoshein, who played a notable part in the White movement in South Russia during the civil wars, was born into a noble family at Warsaw and was a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University. He began his career as a legal consultant with the Northern Donetsk Railway, but soon entered government service and, from 1894, worked in the Ministry of Justice and, from 1887, in the Land Department of the Ministry of the Interior. From 1889 to 1891, he was head of peasant affairs in Poland, and from 23 December 1904 headed the Resettlement Board of the Ministry of the Interior. On 6 May 1906, he became a member of the State Council (the “upper house” of the Russian parliament) and served as assistant minister of finance (from 6 October 1906), reaching the rank of state secretary by 1910. From 21 May 1908, he was minister of agriculture, providing advice and assistance to Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin during the latter’s efforts to eradicate the peasant commune and build a class of prosperous independent farmers in Russia. On 26 October 1915, however, Krivoshein was dismissed, following his opposition to Nicholas II’s assumption of personal command of the Russian Army and his prorogation of the State Duma in August 1915. Krivoshein at this time favored the establishment of a “Government of Public Confidence.” Despite this, he opposed the February Revolution and was party to a scheme to liberate the Romanov family from their incarceration.

Following the October Revolution, Krivoshein was one of the organizers of the anti-Bolshevik Right Center in Moscow (facilitating the merger with it of the All-Russian Union of Landowners, in which he was active) and narrowly escaped arrest at the height of the Red Terror. He fled to Kiev, where from October 1918 he was a founder and deputy chairman of the monarchist State Unity Council of Russia. He also participated in the Jassy Conference, attempting to persuade the Allies to expand their intervention in Russia. From December 1919 to February 1920, he served as chief of the Supply Board attached to the Special Council of General A. I. Denikin.

Krivoshein then went into emigration, finding employment with a Russian bank in Paris, but in April 1920 was persuaded by General P. N. Wrangel to return to Crimea to head his Government of South Russia. He arrived back in Sevastopol′ on the British cruiser HMS Cardiff on 20 May 1920, and on 6 June 1920 was named Wrangel’s chief political advisor—in effect, vice governor of South Russia, with responsibility for civil affairs. In that capacity, he was largely responsible for the introduction of progressive land reform in Wrangel’s Crimea, although he voiced doubts in private about the wisdom of it. On 22 October 1920, following the last meeting of the White government, he left Crimea for Constantinople on board the British cruiser HMS Centaur, charged with the task of preparing for the arrival in Turkey of the Russian Army, following the planned evacuation from Crimea. He moved subsequently to Paris, as head of a mission to the French government for Wrangel, and then to Germany. Krivoshein died the following year in Berlin.

KROL′, LEV AFANAS′EVICH (ARONOVICH) (5 July 1871–3 January 1931). An engineer by training, a Freemason by conviction, and a liberal in anti-Bolshevik politics, L. A. Krol′ was born into a well-to-do Jewish family at Mogilev, in Belorussia, and graduated from the Mogilev Gymnasium and the Moscow Engineering School (1889). After a higher technical education in Western Europe, where he graduated from Liège University in Belgium in 1893, he returned to Russia and became director of the central electricity-generating station at Ekaterinburg. In that capacity, he gained a reputation for liberalism, following a campaign he led in favor of an eight-hour working day in 1902. He joined the Kadets when that party was founded in 1905, organized its Urals branch, and was immediately elected to the party central committee. In 1907, he was exiled from Ekaterinburg because of his political activities. During the First World War, he was active in the War Industries Committee, liaising with the workers’ group in the Urals, and in March 1917, following the February Revolution, he served as chairman of the Ekaterinburg Committee for Public Safety. As a popular orator, Krol′ was much in demand during the revolutionary year and spent most of 1917 in Moscow and Petrograd. In November 1917, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, as a representative of Perm′ guberniia.

In July 1918, Krol′ was dispatched eastward from Moscow, as a representative of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, and during the Democratic Counter-Revolution in the east, was one of the founders of the Provisional Oblast′ Government of the Urals, becoming its deputy premier and head of the department of finance (August 1918). Krol′ was also a participant in the Ufa State Conference and a prominent supporter of the Ufa Directory. Moving east to Omsk, however, he found the Siberian Kadets, under the influence of V. N. Pepeliaev and V. A. Zhardetskii, hostile to the politics of coalition with the moderate Left. Following the ascent to power of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in November 1918, Krol′ was forced into opposition to the White regime, founding a vocal but weak liberal pressure group, the All-Russian Democratic Union (although he was elected to Kolchak’s advisory State Economic Conference in June 1919). He moved to Irkutsk in November 1919 and then to Vladivostok, where he remained active in politics until going into emigration in 1922, settling initially at Harbin. Krol′ subsequently moved to Paris, where he was active in Masonic circles, published the newspaper Svobodnaia Rossiia (“Free Russia”), and collaborated with P. N. Miliukov on Poslednie novosti (“The Latest News”), which issued an appreciative obituary of him (on 24 April 1931) after his death from stomach cancer.

KRONSHTADT REVOLT. The name given to the unsuccessful uprising against the Bolsheviks by sailors of the Baltic Fleet (supported by some soldiers and civilians) in February–March 1921. The rebellion—in Soviet historiography it was usually designated as a miatezh, meaning “mutiny”—which was staged in the name of “Soviets without Communists” and as a repudiation of the Bolsheviks’ “Commissarocracy,” was mercilessly crushed by the Red Army and is an event that became central to libertarian critiques of the Soviet Union. The rebellion was focused on the naval base of Kronshtadt, the home of the Baltic Fleet, on the ice-bound island of Kotlin, in the Gulf of Finland, 20 miles west of Petrograd. In 1921, the island had a population of some 50,000, around half of whom were sailors and soldiers of its garrison.

The revolt occurred as the civil wars were winding down, but as their economic impacts were becoming stark: industrial output in 1921 had fallen to around one-fifth of pre-1914 levels, while the grain harvest was around a third of what it had been in the prewar years. Hardships were exacerbated by a tightening of the screws of War Communism in the winter of 1920–1921, notably the deployment of requisitioning detachments to prevent food being brought into cities by bagmen and other private traders (or “speculators,” as the regime had come to regard them), and the raiding of private markets by Cheka forces. All this had already sparked off a strike wave in St. Petersburg (followed by a wave of arrests of strikers) and a number of uprisings against the Bolshevik government across the country (notably the Tambov Rebellion, although much of Ukraine, where Nestor Makhno was still active, and Western Siberia were also aflame). On 26 February 1921, a delegation of sailors from Kronshtadt, which in 1917–1918 had been a bastion of support for the October Revolution, visited Petrograd to investigate the causes of the strikes there. The delegation’s report indicated that the workers were suffering under an unfair, cruel, and semimilitarized regime that had been instituted by the local authorities, guided by the tyrannical party boss G. E. Zinov′ev. Allegations of corruption and malfeasance against the party leadership in Petrograd were also widespread, as were tales of the luxurious lifestyle enjoyed by the recently cashiered commander of the Baltic Fleet, F. F. Raskol′nikov, and his glamorous wife, Larissa Reisner. Two days later, on 28 February 1921, the crews of the two battleships docked at Kronshtadt, the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol′, convened an emergency meeting that approved a 15-point resolution (“The Petropavlovsk Resolution”). This called for, inter alia, new elections to the soviets, by secret ballot and on the basis of “an equal franchise” (as opposed to the current arrangement, whereby workers’ votes had more weight than those of other classes); freedom of speech for all proponents of anarchism and Left-socialism and the liberation of all prisoners who professed these creeds; freedom of assembly and of trade union organizations; the abolition of the requisitioning detachments and of Cheka guard detachments in factories; and the equalization of rations for all workers. On 1 March 1921, a general meeting of the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, held on Anchor Square in Kronshtadt, approved the resolution and shouted down the representatives of the Soviet government, Premier M. I. Kalinin and N. N. Kuz′min (chief commissar of the Baltic Fleet). Kalinin and Kuzmin (along with some 200 other Bolsheviks) were subsequently arrested by the rebels, who elected a Provisional Revolutionary Committee (of six civilians and nine sailors), chaired by S. M. Petrichenko, on 2 March 1921.

The Soviet government responded with a series of ultimata, demanding the release of its delegates and an end to the revolt, which it tendentiously described as “SR-Black Hundred” in spirit and “undoubtedly prepared by French counter-intelligence,” while claiming that at the head of the “mutiny” was “the White general Kozlovskii,” one of the military specialists in charge of artillery on the island. When the rebels refused to comply with the government’s demands (although Kalinin and Kuz′min were allowed to leave the island), the 7th Red Army, commanded by M. N. Tukhachevskii, launched an assault against Kotlin on 7–8 March 1921. However, this attack had been hastily prepared—fear that the ice surrounding the island would soon melt, rendering it virtually impregnable, had injected urgency into the situation—and approximately 10,000 Soviet forces (with 85 field guns and 96 machine guns) were repulsed by the rebels (who controlled 280 field guns and 30 machine guns, as well as the heavy guns and other weaponry on the ships in Kronshtadt harbor). Also, despite the presence of Cheka forces and blocking detachments to force them onto the ice, some Red units had mutinied and expressed sympathy for the Kronshtadters. Prominent among the mutineers were men of the crack 27th Omsk Rifle Division (formerly a unit of the 5th Red Army that had been commanded by the Red martyr V. I. Chapaev). This was worrying for the Soviet leadership, as the 27th had been Tukhachevskii’s first choice as a spearhead for the attack on the island. A second attack was launched, following a lengthy artillery barrage, on 17–18 March 1921, with some 25,000–30,000 Red soldiers, supplemented by a mass of heavy artillery on the northern and southern shores of the gulf and by an influx of 400 senior Bolsheviks who had rushed to the scene from the 10th Party Congress in Moscow. By 19 March 1921, the rebellion had been crushed and all of Kotlin was in Soviet hands.

The number of dead and wounded on both sides remains a matter of dispute. Official Soviet sources claimed at the time that some 1,000 rebels were killed, 2,000 wounded, and 6,528 captured during the fighting, while the Red Army suffered 527 fatalities and 3,285 wounded, but this is likely to be a gross distortion of the true number of casualties. Recently published Soviet documents indicate that at least twice as many rebels were killed in the fighting, while up to 2,000 Red soldiers may have lost their lives. Moreover, it has been estimated that more than 2,000 Kronshtadters were subsequently executed by the Cheka and that as many again were dispatched to prison camps in the White Sea (the Solovetskii) and elsewhere, most of them with five-year sentences. Several thousand rebels (perhaps as many as 8,000, and among them Petrichenko) escaped across the ice to Finland. When the ice on the gulf eventually melted, hundreds of corpses were washed up on Finnish shores, prompting an official complaint from Helsinki. A memorial to the fallen now stands on Iakornaia Square, before the Naval (St. Nicholas) Cathedral at Kronshtadt.

V. I. Lenin subsequently wrote that the events at Kronshtadt “lit up reality like a flash,” causing some observers to infer that the New Economic Policy was introduced as a consequence of the rebellion, but in fact plans for the NEP’s introduction predated the rebellion by many weeks. A mystery also surrounds the appearance in the French newspaper Le Matin, two weeks before the rebellion, of reports about a revolt on Kronshtadt. This may have been linked to a “Memorandum on the Question of Organizing an Uprising on Kronshtadt” that was probably drafted by émigré members of the National Center. That document (which is preserved in the archives of Columbia University, New York, and seems to have been written in January 1921) contains very detailed information about how the resources, personnel, and arms at Kronshtadt might be used for a rebellion in March 1921, but why anti-Bolsheviks should contemplate a rebellion in a town then still renowned as a bastion of Bolshevism remains to be explained.

Further controversy surrounds the composition of the crews of the Baltic Fleet at Kronshtadt in 1921. Later, in exile, in response to criticism from Emma Goldman, Victor Serge, and others that he had betrayed the revolution in crushing Kronshtadt, L. D. Trotsky and his supporters claimed that most of the proletarian Kronshtadters in 1917—those whom the former commissar for war had once termed “the pride and glory of the revolution”—were no longer at the naval base by 1921, and that those who remained had had their revolutionary zeal diluted by a new influx of petit bourgeois, peasant elements. The historian Israel Getzler, however, has published data indicating that at least 75 percent of the sailors of the Baltic Fleet in 1921 had been drafted into service prior to 1918, and that on the Petropavlovsk and the Sevastopol′ no less than 93.9 percent of the crews were pre-1918 recruits. Getzler has also contested the claim (voiced by Petrichenko himself at one point) that the rebellion’s leadership was dominated by Ukrainian elements hostile to Russia and/or in contact with the Makhnovists.

KROPOTKIN GUARD. Sometimes also called the “Black Hundred” or the “Devil’s Hundred,” this elite unit of the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine was named after the anarchist P. A. Kropotkin and formed the personal guard for Nestor Makhno and his staff. The unit, although only 150-strong, played a key role in the Battle of Peregonovka (26 September 1919) and the subsequent disruption of the rear of the Armed Forces of South Russia and in the Makhnovists’ battles against the Red Army in 1920 and 1921. Members of the Kropotkin Guard were among those who accompanied Makhno in his flight across the Dnestr into Romania on 28 August 1921.

krouzinian, Simon. See Vratsian (krouzinian), Simon.

KRUTOVSKII, KONSTANTIN KONSTANTINOVICH. See IURENEV (KRUTOVSKII), KONSTANTIN KONSTANTINOVICH.

KRUTOVSKII, VLADIMIR MIKHAILOVICH (25 January 1856–19 October 1938). A doctor, publicist, public activist, and leading proponent of Siberian regionalism in the era of the Democratic Counter-Revolution, V. M. Krutovskii was born into a peasant family from Vladimir guberniia who had migrated to Siberia. He was a graduate of the St. Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy (1881). As a youth he was attracted to Populism and was exiled for political activism, but he nevertheless served on the Krasnoiarsk City Duma from 1883 to 1917. In 1906, he was elected to the First State Duma, but in 1907 was again exiled. Indeed, by 1917 Krutovskii had been arrested and/or exiled on no fewer than 10 occasions. In 1917, he was named by the Russian Provisional Government as commissar for Eniseisk guberniia and chaired the 1st Siberian Regional Conference at Tomsk in October of that year.

In December 1917, Krutovskii was arrested and imprisoned by the Bolshevik authorities at Krasnoiarsk, but was subsequently named, in absentia, as minister of health in the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia on 25–26 January 1918. Released from prison as Soviet power fell in the region in late May 1918, he entered the Provisional Siberian Government at Omsk, as one of its ruling Council of Five, but rarely attended meetings. Rather, he was a supporter of the Siberian Regional Duma in its conflict with the government and spent most of the summer of 1918 at the Duma’s headquarters at Tomsk, which he thought should be named as the capital of Siberia. He returned to Omsk, however, during the Novoselov affair in late September 1918 and, upon threat of execution, was forced into resigning his ministerial portfolio by the Siberian military.

Krutovskii then absented himself from politics and, when Soviet power was restored in the region, he returned to medical work as the director of a Feldscher School, although the newspaper he edited, Sibirskie zapiski (“Siberian Notes”), was shut down by the authorities. He was fired from the school in 1928, and was arrested in either 1937 or 1938 and imprisoned as a spy. He subsequently died in a prison hospital at Krasnoiarsk and was buried in that city’s Nikolaevsk cemetery. In 1989, the Krasnoiarsk No.1 Medical School was renamed in Krutovskii’s memory.

KRUTY HEROES. This is the name by which are remembered the Ukrainian students, cadets, and soldiers (commanded by Captain Ahapiy Honcharenko) who died in battles against Red forces commanded by M. A. Murav′ev around the railway junction of Kruty (Chernigov guberniia, 90 miles northeast of Kiev) on 27–29 January 1918, during the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War. The Ukrainians, who mustered between 300 and 400 men, faced Red forces of 10 times that number, but held out for several hours, interrupting the Reds’ advance on Kiev. During that hiatus, the Ukrainian National Republic concluded the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (27 January 1918) with the Central Powers,

In March 1918, with the reoccupation of the Ukrainian capital by the Ukrainian Central Rada, 11 of the fallen were subsequently reburied at Askold’s Grave, in central Kiev, in a ceremony led by Mykhailo Hrushevsky (although the bodies were moved to the Lukianivska cemetery in 1935, when the area was remade as a park). The Kruty heroes were also the subject of a poem by Pavlo Tychyna, “On the Anniversary of Kruty (In Memory of the Thirty).” In 1998, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the battle, a new monument was raised at Askold’s Grave, and a commemorative hryvnia coin was minted in Ukraine. In 2006, a Kruty Heroes’ Monument was erected on the site of the battle. The form of the latter, a red column, alludes to similar columns on the façade of the main building of Kiev University, the alma mater of many of the dead students. The Heroes’ Monument, however, has been frequently vandalized by Russian nationalists in recent years.

KRYLENKO, NIKOLAI VASILEVICH (2 May 1885–29 July 1938). Ensign (191?). Effectively (if not in name) the first Soviet commander in chief, and later the head of the Soviet legal system, Ensign N. V. Krylenko was born at Bekhteevo, near Smolensk, into the family of a minor government official (and former political exile), and was a graduate of the Historical-Philosophical Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1909) and the Faculty of Law of Khar′kov University (1914). He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1904 and was assigned to its military organization in the capital. He was called up into the army in 1911 (leaving in 1913 with the rank of ensign), and at the same time joined the editorial board of the Bolsheviks’ newspaper, Pravda. He was arrested in 1913, but managed to flee to Switzerland in 1914. Upon his return to Russia in 1915, he was arrested again, as a draft dodger, and sent into the army, serving on the South-West Front. Following the February Revolution, he rose to chairman of his divisional soldiers’ committee and in May 1917 was elected to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, again becoming active in the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b).

During the October Revolution, Krylenko was a leading member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and subsequently joined Sovnarkom as one of the commissars for military and naval affairs. On 9 November 1917, he was named commander in chief of the Russian Army, to replace General N. N. Dukhonin, who refused to cooperate with the new regime. In that capacity, he was assigned to take control of the stavka at Mogilev and to drive “White guard elements” out of the army command. He also played a leading role (from 21 January 1918) on the All-Russian Collegium for the Organization and Formation of the Red Army. In March 1918, he resigned his military positions and transferred to legal work. From May 1918, he was chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal attached to VTsIK and was a central figure in the establishment of the Soviet legal system and in the drafting of the first Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (as he was later in the drafting of that of the USSR). As president of the Supreme Tribunal and chief prosecutor of the USSR from 1922 to 1931, he presided over the major political trials of the 1920s and became (in his more than 100 publications) an exponent of “socialist legality” and “revolutionary justice,” arguing that political considerations should override criminal evidence at trial. He was made commissar for justice of the RSFSR in 1931 and of the USSR in 1936. As such, he was an active participant in the organization of the great show trials of the mid-1930s. Nevertheless, he was removed from his post on 19 January 1938 and arrested on 31 January 1938. On 29 July 1938, Krylenko was tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, and having been found guilty of espionage, was sentenced to death and immediately shot. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.

KRYM, SOLOMON SAMOILOVICH (25 June 1867–9 September 1936). The leader of the anti-Bolshevik Crimean Regional Government of 1918–1919, S. S. Krym was born in Feodosiia, into a wealthy family of Karaite Jews. He was a graduate of Moscow University and the Petr-Rozumovskii Agricultural School. From 1898 to 1917, he was a member of the Feodosiia City Duma, and he was also elected to the Second and Fourth State Dumas, as a member of the Kadets. From 15 November 1918 to 15 April 1919, he was prime minister of the Crimean Regional Government, holding also the posts of minister of agriculture and minister of state property. He was also a lifelong collector of Crimean folklore and a member of the Tauride Scientific Archival Commission. He is remembered as one of the founders of the Tauride (Crimean) University at Simferopol′. When his government collapsed in April 1919, Krym went into emigration, settling in France. He died and is buried near Toulon.

KSENOFONTOV (KRAIKOV), IVAN KSENOFONTOVICH (28 August 1884–23 March 1926). One of the leading Chekists of the civil-war era, I. K. Ksenofontov, who was of Greek heritage, was born into a poor peasant family in the village of Svanika, Smolensk guberniia, but worked in Moscow factories from the age of 12. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903, soon gravitating toward the Bolsheviks, and was fired from his job in late 1905 for revolutionary activities. In 1906, he was called up for military service. He returned to factory life in 1909, but was fired, arrested, and exiled on several occasions before being mobilized again in 1914. During the First World War, he served in a telegraph battalion on the Western Front. In 1917, he was active in a number of soldiers’ soviets and was elected to both VTsIK and the Constituent Assembly, as a representative of the Western Front.

On 8 December 1917, Ksenofontov was made secretary of the Cheka, and from 27 March 1918, was deputy chairman of that institution. In that capacity, he was closely involved in the investigation of those arrested during the Left-SR Uprising of July 1918. From October 1919 to April 1920, Ksenofontov also chaired the Cheka’s Special Revolutionary Tribunal. Indeed, for long periods of 1920 and 1921, during the absence in Ukraine of his boss, F. E. Dzierżyński, Ksenofontov was practically in charge of the Cheka, overseeing the investigations into the Tactical Center, as well as the arrest of numerous political opponents of the Soviet regime in the immediate aftermath of the Kronshtadt Revolt. He left the Cheka in 1921, to work for the organizational apparatus of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and in February 1925 became deputy people’s commissar for social security. He died of stomach ulcers on 23 March 1926, and was buried in the Novodevich′e cemetery, Moscow.

KUBAN ARMY. This contingent of the Whites’ Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) was created on 8 February 1920, through the renaming of the Caucasian Army. It remained in existence until 17 April 1920. As of 1 March 1920, it consisted of the 1st Composite Kuban Corps (under General P. K. Pisarev), the 2nd Kuban Corps (under General V. K. Naumov), and the 3rd Kuban Corps (under General S. G. Toporkov). The force occupied the right flank of the AFSR, as it retreated southward following the collapse of the advance on Moscow of General A. I. Denikin’s armies. Retreating from Tsaritsyn toward the territories of the Kuban Cossack Host, the Kuban Army suffered terrible loses in battles against the pursuing 10th Red Army and 1st Cavalry Army. Also, as they approached their home territory, many of the men of the Kuban Cossack Host who made up the army lost the will to fight, deserted, and returned to their home villages. By mid-March 1920, Red forces had captured Ekaterinodar, Stavropol′, and Armavir. Some units of the Kuban Army nevertheless remained in the field, under General Pisarev, in the Tuapse–Sochi region of the Black Sea coast. These were evacuated to Crimea on 17 April 1920, on vessels of the Black Sea Fleet that had been sent by General P. N. Wrangel, and were subsequently incorporated into the Russian Army, as the Kuban Corps. Other elements of Kuban Army, under General N. A. Morozov, surrendered to the Reds on 18–20 April 1920.

Commanders of the Kuban Army were General A. G. Shkuro (8–29 February 1920); General S. G. Ulagai (29 February–13 April 1920); and General N. A. Morozov (13–18 April 1920).

KUBAN–BLACK SEA SOVIET REPUBLIC. This short-lived polity, a constituent unit of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, was proclaimed at the Third Extraordinary Congress of Soviets of the Kuban and the Black Sea (Ekaterinodar, 28–30 May 1918) as a consequence of the merger of the Kuban Soviet Republic with the Black Sea Soviet Republic. It followed upon the union of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) organizations in each region, as well as that of the command of Red military formations, and was governed by a central executive committee chaired by the Bolshevik A. I. Rubin. It took measures to Sovietize the region and attempted to send supplies of food north to Russia, but was largely preoccupied with military issues, being confronted not only by the forces of the Volunteer Army and their allies in the Kuban Cossack Host, but also by those of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, which occupied the Black Sea coast as far north as Tuapse, as well as forces of the Austro-German intervention (notably the 58th Berlin Regiment, which landed on the Taman peninsula on 15 June 1918).

Following a decision of the First Congress of Soviets of the North Caucasus (Ekaterinodar, 5–7 July 1918), the Kuban–Black Sea Republic joined the North Caucasus Soviet Republic.

Kuban Cossack Host. One of the most significant sources of Cossack support for the White movement, the Kuban Host was quartered in the Kuban oblast′, with its capital at Ekaterinodar, and had a population of some 1,300,000 in 1917 (43 percent of the oblast′ population). The Host was divided into seven sections (totaling 278 stanitsy and 32 khutora): Ekaterinodar, Taman, Labinsk, Caucasus, Eisk, Maikop, and Batalpashinsk. It had been formed, in 1860, by combining the Black Sea Cossack Host and the Caucasus (“Line”) Cossack Host. The former were the descendants of the unruly Zaporozhian Cossacks, who had been resettled in the region following their expulsion from Ukraine by Catherine the Great in the 1790s, and frictions between them and the Line Cossacks (who occupied the poorer, eastern parts of the Kuban) complicated the politics of the region, especially in the revolutionary period. Also of significance were class differences (between the wealthy and the poor) within the Cossack community and competition for land between the Cossacks and the non-Cossack settlers (inogorodnie).

During the First World War, the Kuban Cossack Host had mustered 89,000 fighters for the Russian Army. Its Host government (termed the Rada, in Ukrainian style, rather than the Krug), which was resurrected in 1917, refused to recognize the Bolshevik regime and declared a Kuban People’s Republic on 28 January 1918, in opposition to the Kuban Soviet Republic. On 16 February 1918, the Kuban People’s Republic declared its independence from Russia, while large numbers of Cossacks accompanied the Volunteer Army on the First Kuban (Ice) March (following the agreement signed at Novo-Dimitrievskii stanitsa on 17 March 1918, by Ataman A. P. Filimonov, which subordinated the Kuban Cossacks to the command of General L. G. Kornilov). Subsequently, in support of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), the Host raised 6 cavalry divisions, 3 independent cavalry brigades, 3 infantry (plastun) brigades, 23 batteries, and a number of other smaller units. In total, some 110,000 Kuban Cossacks fought for the Whites, mostly in the Kuban Army (later the Kuban Cossack Corps), commanded by Generals A. G. Shkuro, S. G. Ulagai, and N. A. Morozov, but frictions arose over the demands of the Kuban Rada for significant autonomy from Russia, a policy strongly advocated by the Black Sea Cossacks, in contrast to the more pro-Russian Line Cossacks. On 6 November 1919, tired of what he regarded as the treachery of the Kuban government, General A. I. Denikin had the Rada building surrounded and arrested 10 of its members. The Host ataman, A. P. Filimonov, then resigned and was replaced by the more pro-Russian N. M. Uspenskii. However, Kuban separatism could not easily be expunged, and as the AFSR collapsed during the winter of 1919–1920, elements of the Host sought to break away from the Whites and attempted instead to continue to resist the Red Army in alliance with Ukrainian nationalists and the Georgian Democratic Republic.

The Kuban Host was abolished by the Soviet government in 1920 (and a policy of de-Cossackization was immediately and brutally implemented), although elements of it continued to resist in the North Caucasus in the guise of the partisan People’s Army for the Regeneration of Russia (under General P. P. Fostikov), while some 3,300 Host members made their way to Crimea to form the 1st and 2nd Kuban Cossack Divisions in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel.

The Host atamans during the civil-war period were A. P. Filimonov (October 1917–10 November 1919), N. M. Uspenskii (11 November 1919–January 1920), N. A. Bukretov (January–April 1920), and V. G. Naumenko (April 1920–30 October 1979).

KUBAN PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC. This anti-Bolshevik polity, with its capital at Ekaterinodar, governed Kuban oblast′ (with a population of some 3,500,000) during much of the civil wars. Its existence was declared by the Kuban Rada of the Kuban Cossack Host on 28 January 1918, and its putative independence from Russia was announced on 16 February 1918, but it was soon overthrown by Soviet forces and replaced by the Kuban Soviet Republic. When, in turn, that entity was driven from Ekaterinodar (on 18 August 1918) by the Volunteer Army, the republic was reestablished in alliance with the Whites. Differences soon arose, however, between the two chief groups of Cossacks that made up the Kuban Host: the Black Sea Cossacks, who strove for independence from Russia and sought alliance with Ukraine, and the Line Cossacks (Lineitsy), who would have been satisfied with autonomy within a re-created Russian state. Relations with the White leadership also became strained as the Rada sought to establish its own foreign policy, sending delegates to Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Georgia to seek alliances and dispatching its own delegation, led by L. L. Bych and A. I. Kulabukhov, to the Paris Peace Conference. When General A. I. Denikin heard, on 6 November 1919, that the Kuban delegation in Paris had announced that the Kuban had broken with the Whites and sought to gain recognition of the Kuban as an independent state, his patience ran out; with the assistance of Ataman A. P. Filimonov, he had the Rada building surrounded and 10 of its members arrested. (One of them, the aforementioned Kulabukhov, was publicly hanged for treason.) The Rada was then officially dispersed and the republic collapsed, as the Armed Forces of South Russia disintegrated and Red Army forces invaded Kuban in early 1920, although it officially remained in existence until 17 March 1920. Efforts to unite with the Mountain Republic of peoples of the North Caucasus proved abortive.

KUBAN RADA. This supreme governmental organization of the Kuban Cossack Host contained representatives of all the heads of districts within the Kuban territory. In the aftermath of the February Revolution, in April 1917 the Rada proclaimed itself the sovereign government of the Kuban oblast′; on 24 September 1917, it formed its own legislature (which first convened on 1–11 November 1917); in October of that year it began to elect its own Host ataman; on 28 January 1918, it proclaimed the existence of the Kuban People’s Republic; and on 16 February 1918, it declared independence from Russia. Following clashes with General A. I. Denikin (during which the prominent Kuban politician A. I. Kulabukhov was publicly hanged for treason), the head of the Armed Forces of South Russia proclaimed the Rada to be disbanded in January 1920, although it continued its operations until 17 March of that year, when it was driven from its base in Ekaterinodar by the advancing Red Army.

KUBAN SOVIET REPUBLIC. This short-lived entity was proclaimed as a constituent unit of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic at Ekaterinodar by the Second Congress of Soviets of the Kuban (1–16 April 1918), as the city came under attack by the Volunteer Army. Governed by a central executive committee led by the Bolshevik Ia. V. Polian, it issued decrees aimed at the Sovietization of the region (nationalizing large industries, banks, lands, and forests, etc.), but was largely preoccupied with combating the Volunteers and their allies, the Kuban Cossack Host. To that end, the republic’s commissar of war, F. Ia. Volik, oversaw the creation of a number of military units, including the 1st Ekaterinodar Communist Regiment (under M. N. Demus), the 2nd Ekaterinodar Regiment, and the North Caucasus Regiment. At the Third Extraordinary Congress of Soviets of the Kuban and the Black Sea (Ekaterinodar, 28–30 May 1918), it was decided that, in order to maximize military efficiency, the Kuban Soviet Republic should merge with the Black Sea Soviet Republic to form the Kuban–Black Sea Soviet Republic.

KUCHUK (KOUCHEK) KHAN, MIRZA (1880–2 December 1921). Now widely considered a national hero in Iran, Mirza Kuchuk Khan was the leader of the Jangali (“forest”) movement in northern Iran that erupted in 1914. He was born at Younes and attended religious schools at Rasht (Resht) and Tehran, but abandoned his studies to join the constitutional movement opposing Shah Muzaffar al-Din in 1905. He was subsequently active at Tabriz and, in 1908, was wounded during the fighting there between oppositionist and loyalist forces. In 1909, he served as a junior commander with the oppositionist forces from Gīlān that attacked and briefly captured Tehran. Retreating to the forests of the north, he then founded the Jangali movement to continue the constitutionalists’ campaign, battling governmental and Russian forces. By the summer of 1918, he was embroiled in fighting with British forces in the region (Dunsterforce), as well as with the White Russian forces of L. F. Bicherakhov.

In May–June 1920, in the wake of the landing of Soviet forces at Enzeli (Anzali), Kuchuk Khan entered into an alliance with Moscow and established the Soviet Republic of Gīlān. In 1921, however, as Soviet support was withdrawn (in the wake of the Soviet–Persian Treaty of Friendship of 21 February 1921) and as government forces mopped up the Jangalists, Kuchuk Khan was forced to flee into the Khalkhal Mountains, where he died of frostbite. His severed head was later put on display by the authorities in Resht and Tehran in an attempt to symbolize the death of the Jangali revolution.

KUITUN AGREEMENT. This agreement, amounting to a truce, was signed at the village of Kuitun, in Irkutsk guberniia, between representatives of the Czechoslovak Legion and the 5th Red Army, on 7 February 1920. As White forces in the region fled east in disarray over the winter of 1919–1920, a tacit truce had been observed for some weeks between the Czechoslovaks and the pursuing Reds, but it had been tested by breaches on both sides—for example, a Czech officer had been shot by forces of A. N. Kalandarishvili at Irkutsk, while the Legionnaires had deliberately destroyed a railway bridge at Biriusa—that had led to retaliation. Under the terms of the formal truce, the Soviet government agreed to allow the legion to continue, unmolested, with its evacuation to the Far East, while the Czechs agreed to evacuate peacefully; to offer no more support to the Whites; to refrain from interference in the fate of the White leader, Admiral A. V. Kolchak, and his companions; and to hand over to the Soviet authorities that part of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve that was in the legion’s charge at Irkutsk.

KUK (KUKK), ALEKSANDER IVANOVICH (6 January 1886–31 May 1932). Sublieutenant (6 August 1909), lieutenant (15 October 1912), staff captain (22 February 1916). The Red Army commander and military specialist A. I. Kuk was born into a Lutheran peasant family of Latvian nationality (although he was born and raised at Kurist in Estland guberniia). After a domestic education, he entered military service, graduated from the St. Petersburg Infantry Officers School (1909), and joined the 1st East Siberian Rifle Regiment as commander of a machine gun company. He entered the Academy of the General Staff in 1914, but because of the mobilization of August that year did not graduate. During the First World War, he occupied a number of staff posts, including senior errant officer on the staff of the 4th Army Corps (from 22 June 1916). In 1917, he completed an accelerated course at the academy and was then attached to the staff of the Romanian Front (29 May 1917), before being named senior adjutant on the staff of the 30th Infantry Division (from 19 June 1917), then acting commander of that same unit (from 13 September 1917).

Kuk volunteered for service with the Red Army in 1918 and initially served as chief of the intelligence section of the Smolensk Defensive Region (from 27 March 1918). He was subsequently head of the operations section of the staff of the Estonian Red Army (12 March–4 June 1919), staff officer with the Southern Group of forces of the 7th Red Army (June–July 1919), chief of staff of the 15th Red Army (18–31 August 1919), then acting chief of staff (26 September 1919–24 September 1920) of that same force. In those latter capacities, Kuk saw action in the battles against the North-West Army of General N. N. Iudenich. He was then made commander of the 16th Red Army (26 September 1920–24 April 1921), before becoming assistant chief of the intelligence section of the Main Staff of the Red Army (21 May 1921–1923). He was subsequently chief of staff of the Western Front (August 1923–April 1924) and chief of staff of the Western Military District (April 1924–December 1926), then assistant commander of the Forces of the Leningrad Military District (December 1926–January 1928) and commander of the Karelian Fortified Region (February 1928–March 1930). Kuk joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1930 and was made military attaché in Japan (March 1931–May 1932). He died in Yalta and is buried in the Novodevich′e cemetery in Moscow.

KULABUKHOV, ALEKSEI (OLEKSII) IVANOVICH (1880–7 November 1919). The controversial Kuban clergyman, politician, and diplomat Aleksei (sometimes rendered in its Ukrainian form as Oleksii) Kulabukhov was born at Novopokrovskaia stanitsa, in the eastern Kuban, and graduated from the Stavropol′ Seminary (1901). Following a spell at Iur′ev (Dorpat) University, prior to 1917 he ministered as an Orthodox priest, but subsequently devoted himself to public affairs, initially as a justice of the peace and later, following the February Revolution, as his home district’s representative in the reestablished Kuban Rada (from April 1917).

When, in late 1917, K. L. Bardizh resigned from his post as minister of the interior in the Rada government, Kulabukhov was selected to replace him. He thereafter became an outspoken proponent of Kuban autonomy. When Red forces captured Ekaterinodar on 1 March 1918, he fled the town and was briefly captured by a Red unit at Rasshevatskaia stanitsa, but managed to escape to Stavropol′. When the Kuban Rada reestablished itself at Ekaterinodar in August 1918, following the Second Kuban March, Kulabukhov briefly resumed his ministerial post in the cabinet of L. L. Bych, but because of the government’s repeated clashes with the leadership of the Volunteer Army over the issue of Kuban autonomy, he and other ministers were soon forced to resign (December 1918). Kulabukhov was then assigned to the Kuban’s delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. He remained in France for seven months and was one of the negotiators of the treaty of friendship signed by the Kuban and the Mountain Republic of the peoples of the North Caucasus that spoke of “the full political independence of the Kuban.” In September 1919, he returned to Ekaterinodar to report on his work, but supporters of A. I. Denikin seized the opportunity to arrest him and other delegates, citing the treaty with the Mountaineers as an act of treason that usurped the authority of the leadership of the Armed Forces of South Russia. Kulabukhov was subsequently hanged in public as a traitor. Later Kuban accounts of the civil wars frequently cite the execution of Kulabukhov as a root cause of the disaffection of the Cossack masses, their loss of trust in the military leadership, and the relative ease with which the Red Army subsequently overran the Kuban.

KUN (KOHN), Béla (20 February 1886–29 August 1938). Ensign (Austro-Hungarian Army, 1915). The Hungarian revolutionary Béla Kun (who Magyarized his name in 1906) was born at Szilágy-Cseh in Transylvania (now Cehu Silvaniei in Romania), the son of a village notary and secularized Jew. He was a graduate of the prestigious Reformed Kollegium at Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca in Romania) and later a local Gymnasium, and studied for one year at the Law Faculty of Kolozsvár University (1904–1905). Before the First World War, he worked as a journalist and for an insurance company at Kolozsvár and was an activist in the Hungarian Social-Democratic Party (which he had joined in 1902). He was mobilized into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1914, but was made a prisoner of war by the Russians in 1916 and sent to a camp in the Urals.

In 1917, Kun joined the Bolsheviks at Tomsk, working on their newspapers Sibirskii rabochii (“Siberian Worker”) and Znamia revoliutsii (“Banner of the Revolution”). After moving to Petrograd and then Moscow, where he first met V. I. Lenin, in March 1918 he became cofounder of the Hungarian Section of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and from May 1918 was chairman of the Federation of Foreign Groups of the Central Committee of the RKP(b). In that capacity he traveled widely around Soviet Russia, organizing pro-Bolshevik detachments of internationalists from former POWs, and was a fiery advocate of Left Communism (although he participated enthusiastically in the suppression of the Left-SR Uprising). From August 1918, he commanded the 3rd Brigade of the Sredneural′sk Internationalist Division on the Eastern Front. (A comparison could be made here with the relative inactivity in Russia, during the civil wars, of the Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito.)

In November 1918, Kun and a group of some 100 supporters, funded by Moscow, returned to Budapest with the aim of exporting the revolution. On 24 November 1918, they founded the Hungarian Communist Party, with Kun as its chairman, and set about building opposition to the democratic coalition government that had assumed power in Hungary as the First World War came to a close and the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed. Kun was imprisoned by the Hungarian authorities on 22 February 1919, charged with treason following a violent Communist demonstration at which several policemen were killed. However, when the extent of the likely reduction of Hungary’s borders by the Paris Peace Conference became clear (through the “Vyx ultimatum”), and the ruling social democrats consequently decided to seek Soviet aid to resist the Allies’ will, he was released and became the dominant force and commissar for foreign affairs in the social-democrat–communist coalition government of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (from 21 March 1919). He was subsequently named commissar for military and naval affairs. In these capacities, he pursued an ultra-Leftist line, nationalizing all property, attempting to create collective farms out of former estates (rather than distribute the land to the peasants, as he was advised by Lenin), instigating a regime of Red Terror, and invading Slovakia. When, following an invasion by Romanian forces, the Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed on 1 August 1919 (it had received none of the aid from the Red Army that Kun had promised he could secure), he fled to Vienna. He was arrested by the authorities there, but in July 1920 was exchanged for Austrian prisoners in Soviet Russia. He was then quickly dispatched to the Southern Front to become a member of its Revvoensovet (1 October–20 November 1920), and from 16 November 1920 to 20 February 1921 was chairman of the Crimean revkom. In that latter capacity, he became notorious for his brutal repression of the remnants of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel and its alleged supporters (especially among the local Tatar population).

Kun subsequently became a leading figure in the executive committee of the Komintern (from February 1921) and a member of its presidium (July 1921–February 1922) and was also a member of VTsIK (from 1921). In March 1921, he went to Germany, where he inspired the disastrous attempt at a Communist seizure of power (the “Marzaktion”). He subsequently worked on the Ural′biuro of the Central Committee of the RKP(b), before being charged with undercover operations across eastern and central Europe. Following his arrest in Vienna in April 1928, he settled in Moscow, as a member of the presidium of the executive committee of the Komintern (3 September 1928–July 1935). He was then made head of Sotsekgiz publishing house, but on 28 June 1937, he was arrested and accused of Trotskyism. Despite his posthumous rehabilitation in 1956, his subsequent fate remained obscure until, in 1989, the Soviet government confirmed that he had been sent to a prison camp in 1937 and executed by firing squad on 29 August 1938. Many of the monuments to Béla Kun that were raised in Communist Hungary were toppled and destroyed after 1989, although a number have been preserved in the Szoborpark (Statue Park) outside Budapest (including a remarkable example from 1986 by Imre Varga).

KUPERJANOV, JULIUS (11 October 1894–2 February 1919). Ensign (1915), lieutenant (Estonian Army, 1918). The Estonian anti-Bolshevik partisan leader Julius Kuperjanov, commemorated by the post–Second World War anti-Soviet Estonian resistance movements, the Julius Kuperjanovi Pojad (the Sons of Julius Kuperjanov) and the Võru Salajane Kuperjanovlaste Organisatsioon (the Secret Organization of Followers of Kuperjanov), was born at Novorzhev, Pskov guberniia, and was a graduate of the Iur′ev (Tartu) Seminary (1914) and the St. Petersburg Ensign School (1915). He worked as a schoolteacher at Kambja, but was mobilized in 1914. In 1917, he became deputy commander of the Estonian Reserve Brigade and, on 20 February 1918, he led the Estonian uprising against Bolshevik power at Tartu, just prior to the arrival in the city of German forces.

Kuperjanov went underground during the period of German occupation, organizing a 1,200-strong partisan detachment in southern Estonia that, on 14 January 1919, during the Estonian War of Independence, participated in the capture of Tartu for the nationalist government of Kārlis Ulmanis. He was fatally wounded in the Battle of Paju, on 31 January 1919, and died two days later. In 1925, an impressive monument in his memory was raised in the Raad cemetery in Tartu, where it still stands (one of the few interwar nationalist monuments to survive the Soviet occupation), while since 1991 streets in Tartu, Valga, and Mustvee have also been renamed in his honor. In 1928, the unit he had founded was officially renamed the Kuperjanov Partisan Battalion. In post-Soviet Estonia, this was resurrected as the elite Kuperjanov Independent Infantry Battalion of the Estonian Defense Forces. It has attracted some controversy for retaining its original death’s-head insignia, reminiscent of the insignia of the SS.

KURSKII, DMITRII IVANOVICH (10 October 1874–20 December 1932). Ensign (1914). A leading Red military and judicial organizer, D. I. Kurskii was born at Kiev, the son of a railway engineer. He was a graduate of the Law Faculty of Moscow University (1900) and subsequently worked as a lawyer, but devoted himself to the revolutionary movement from an early age. He had first been arrested and imprisoned for his political activities in 1895 (and was arrested again in 1909), joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1904, and was a leader of the December uprising in Moscow in 1905. After the 1905 Revolution, he was active as a journalist and from 1907 was a member of the Moscow Oblast′ Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. He was mobilized into the Russian Army in 1914, and from May to August 1917 was chairman of the Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies of the 4th Army, on the Romanian Front.

During the October Revolution, Kurskii was an active member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee at Odessa, defending Rumcherod, and during the civil wars he held senior military posts as a commissar with Vseroglavshtab and as a member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (2 December 1919–5 January 1921), attached to the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. He central field of activity, however, was the Soviet legal system. He held, for a decade, the government post of commissar for justice of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (4 September 1918–1928), in which capacity his first task was to sign the decree “On Red Terror” (5 September 1918), and was the first procurator general of the Soviet Union (28 May 1922–1928). From 1921, he was a member of the presidium of VTsIK, and from 1923 was a member of the presidium of the central executive committee of the USSR. He also served on the Central Auditing Commission (the “purge commission”) of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (23 March 1919–2 December 1927, as its chairman from 2 June 1924) and was a member of the party’s Central Control Commission (19 December 1927–26 June 1930). From 1928, he was Soviet ambassador to Italy. In November 1932, Kurskii was recalled to Moscow and the following month, anticipating imprisonment or worse, he committed suicide. In 1994, the Saratov Juridical Institute was renamed in his honor.

Kusonskii, Pavel Alekseevich (7 January 1880–22 August 1941). Colonel (August 1917), major general (June 1919), lieutenant general (16 February 1922). The White commander P. A. Kusonskii was a graduate of the Mikhail Artillery School (1900) and the Academy of the General Staff (1911), and rose in his prewar military career to the post of assistant senior adjutant on the staff of the Kiev Military District (from 19 May 1914). For most of the First World War, he served as a staff officer in the 8th Army (from 30 November 1915), then, from April to October 1917, was attached to the staff of the quartermaster general of the Main Staff, General N. N. Dukhonin. In November 1917, he was sent by Dukhonin to Bykhov to warn the arrested General L. G. Kornilov and his companions of the approach of Bolshevik forces, prompting the flight of the “Bykhov generals” to the Don.

Kusonskii followed them south, joined the Volunteer Army in December 1917, and held numerous senior positions in it, in the Armed Forces of South Russia, and in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel: he was staff officer attached to A. I. Denikin (June 1918–January 1919), quartermaster general of the Caucasian Volunteer Army (January–May 1919), chief of staff of the 5th Cavalry Corps (May–December 1919), commandant of the city of Simferopol′ (April–August 1920), chief of staff of the 3rd Army Corps (August–October 1920), and chief of staff of the 2nd Army (October–November 1920).

After being evacuated from Crimea in November 1920, in emigration Kusonskii lived in Turkey, then Belgium, then France (from 1922, with a period from 1923 to 1925 as Wrangel’s assistant chief of staff in Serbia), then again Belgium (from 1938). In Belgium, he worked as a taxi driver, whereas in Paris he had been attached to the staff of General E. K. Miller, the head of ROVS, and from 1934 until Miller’s abduction by the NKVD in 1937, had served as chief of the military chancellery of that organization. This and other circumstances have led to suspicions that Kusonskii was in some way party to the betrayal of Miller by General N. V. Skoblin. On 22 June 1941, he was arrested by the Gestapo in Brussels and interned as a Soviet agent. He was beaten to death on 22 August 1941, in the Breendonk concentration camp. On 30 November 1944, the Belgian authorities had Kusonskii’s remains reburied, with military honors, in a reserved quarter of the Ukkel (Uccle) cemetery in Brussels.

Kutepov, Aleksandr Pavlovich (16 September 1882–January 1930). Colonel (25 November 1916), major general (12 November 1918), lieutenant general (23 June 1919), general of infantry (20 November 1920). One of the most reliable, competent, and highly regarded generals of the White forces in South Russia, A. P. Kutepov was born at Cherepovets, Novgorod guberniia, into the family of an impoverished noble who worked as a forester. He was a graduate of the Arkhangel′sk Gymnasium and the St. Petersburg Infantry Officers School (1904) and participated in the Russo–Japanese War as an officer with the 85th Vyborg Infantry Regiment. During the war he was badly wounded, but he was also several times decorated for bravery. His outstanding service record was rewarded, in 1907, with a transfer to the elite Preobrazhenskii Life Guards, to the command of which he rose during the First World War (from 27 April 1917). Once again, he was several times wounded and several times decorated during the course of the war.

Following the October Revolution, Kutepov made his way to South Russia to join the Volunteer Army (24 December 1917), serving as commander of a company and then a battalion in the Kornilov Regiment (the Kornilovtsy) and head of the Taganrog Garrison. He was a participant in the First Kuban (Ice) March (December 1917–March 1918), as commander of the 3rd Company of the 1st Officer Regiment, and then became, in succession, assistant commander of the 1st Officer Regiment (15–30 March 1918), commander of the 1st General Kornilov Regiment (30 March–12 June 1918), commander of the 1st Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division (2 July–13 August 1918), and governor-general of the Black Sea Region (13 August–24 December 1918). In the Armed Forces of South Russia, he was commander of the 1st Army Corps (26 January 1919–April 1920), leading his men in the White advance through Khar′kov to Orel and then back to Novorossiisk for evacuation to Crimea, where he arrived in March 1920. He was also commander of the 1st Army Corps in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel (April–September 1920) and was then named commander of the 1st Army (4 September–16 November 1920).

Kutepov was evacuated from Crimea in November 1920 and for the next year dwelt with his men in the refugee camps at Gallipoli. His strict governance of the camps, although initially resented by the Gallipoliitsi, has been credited as the foundation stone of the “Gallipoli miracle” (the survival of the Russian Army in exile). He subsequently lived in emigration in Bulgaria (from December 1921); Serbia (from May 1922), where he was named by Wrangel as assistant commander in chief of the Russian Army (8 November 1922); and France (from 1924), where he stepped down from his post as assistant commander of the Russian Army and joined the staff of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich.

Following the death of Wrangel, Kutepov served as head of ROVS from 29 April 1928 to January 1930, in which capacity he sought to expand the organization’s contacts and terrorist activities within the USSR. On 26 January 1930, he was abducted, in broad daylight, on the streets of Paris, by Soviet agents. He died shortly thereafter. Although the precise details of his fate remain obscure, it seems likely that sedatives administered to him by his captors induced a fatal heart attack before, during, or immediately after he (or his body) was secretly transported from Marseille to Novorossiisk on a Soviet vessel. Whatever was Kutepov’s fate, he certainly did not arrive alive in Moscow for the interrogation that the NKVD had planned for him.

A monument in Kutepov’s memory stands, in lieu of a grave, in the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Paris. It was long suspected that Kutepov had been betrayed by General N. V. Skoblin, but it is now known that Skoblin was only recruited by the NKVD after Kutepov’s abduction. More recently, suspicion has fallen on General B. A. Shteifon, with whom Kutepov had quarreled in the 1920s and who had subsequently been dismissed from ROVS, but no hard evidence of his involvement has been found.

KUUSINEN, OTTO Wilhem (Wille) (4 October 1881–17 May 1964). Otto Kuusinen, the Finnish and Soviet political activist and author, who has been celebrated and reviled in equal measure, was born, the son of a tailor, at Laukaa (in the Grand Duchy of Finland) and was a graduate of the Historical-Philosophical Faculty of Helsingfors (Helsinki) University (1905). He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party as a student in 1904, sided with the Bolsheviks, and dominated the Finnish Social-Democratic Party from 1906 onward, after ousting its previous leader, J. K. Kari. He served as that party’s chairman, from 1911 to 1918, and was a member of the Finnish Diet from 1908 to 1917.

In January 1918, Kuusinen led the pro-Soviet revolution that established the Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic. When the republic was defeated in the Finnish Civil War by the White Finnish forces of General Gustav Mannerheim, he fled to Moscow, where he became a founding member and leader of the Finnish Communist Party and a member of the Komintern (serving on its executive committee and as a secretary from 1921 to 15 May 1943). On several occasions, from 1919 to 1921, he returned secretly to Finland on party missions. In interwar Finland, he was officially execrated for having allegedly caused the civil war and earned further condemnation when, suspiciously, he was one of the few Finnish communists in Russia not to suffer death or imprisonment during the purges (the suspicion being raised that he had betrayed his comrades). On 30 November 1940, during the Soviet–Finnish Winter War, he was named head of the Terijoki government that J. V. Stalin planned to install as the puppet leadership of the putative Finnish Democratic Republic. When the USSR failed to subjugate Finland, he was named chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic (9 July 1940–20 August 56). A political moderate in Soviet terms, Kuusinen achieved his highest office under N. S. Khrushchev, becoming a member of the presidium of the USSR in 1952 and 1957 and then secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (29 June 1957–17 May 1964). A prolific author of works on ideological matters and also a poet of some repute, he was elected to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR on 20 June 1958. He died in Moscow and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Shortly before his death, the Finnish government refused the terminally ill Kuusinen permission to visit Laukaa as a private person.

Kuzis, Pēteris. See Bērziņš, Jānis (Kuzis, Pēteris).

KUZ′MIN, NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH (22 March 1883–8 February 1938). The Soviet military commander and politician N. N. Kuz′min was born into a middle-class family in St. Petersburg—his father was a junior officer in a guards regiment—and was educated at St. Petersburg University from 1901, but was soon expelled for his political activities. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party in February 1903 and gravitated toward the Bolsheviks. He was a participant in the 1905 Revolution, then fled abroad to escape arrest, spending the years 1909–1914 on Capri and in party work around Europe.

Having returned to Russia in 1914, in 1917 Kuz′min chaired the Gatchina Soviet and edited the newspapers Soldatskaia pravda (“Soldier’s Truth”) and Derevenskaia bednota (“The Village Poor”). He was an active participant in the October Revolution, as a member of the Petrograd Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), and from November 1917 to March 1918 was chief military commissar on the South-West Front of the demobilizing imperial army, participating in the opening battles of the Soviet–Ukrainian War. From March to September 1918, he worked on the All-Russian Collegium for the Formation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs. He subsequently served, at Vologda, as a member of the Revvoensovet of the 6th Red Army (September 1918–April 1919, and December 1919–April 1920), organizing resistance to Allied intervention in North Russia. From April to November 1919, he was a member of the Revvoensovet of the 3rd Red Army, as it advanced across the Urals as far as Omsk, in the battles against the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, and from April 1920 he was a member of the Revvoensovet of the Baltic Fleet and the 12th Red Army and was also acting commander of the 12th Red Army (20 August–26 October 1920). He then became chief military commissar of the Baltic Fleet (December 1920–May 1921), and in that capacity (after having been briefly held hostage by the rebel sailors) was a participant in the suppression of the Kronshtadt Revolt. In 1924, he became chief assistant prosecutor in the Supreme Court of the USSR, but was removed from that post for his criticisms of the OGPU.

Kuz′min’s later postings included being head of PUR in the Central Asian Military District and (from 1925) head of the directorate of military schools of the Red Army. From 1931 to 1932, he was also head of the Siberian Military District, before moving into civilian life as head of the Omsk branch of the administration of the Northern Sea Route (Sevmorput′). He was arrested on either 15 or 28 May 1937 (sources differ), found guilty of membership in a “counterrevolutionary terrorist organization” in a trial at Novosibirsk, and shot. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 26 May 1956.

KVINITADZE (CHIKOVANI), GIORGI (21 August 1874–7 August 1970). Lieutenant (7 August 1897), lieutenant colonel (15 June 1915), colonel (6 December 1916), major general (September 1917). The commander in chief of the Georgian Army during the civil-war period, Giorgi Kvinitadze was born into a military family in Daghestan and was a graduate of the Tiflis Cadet Corps (1884), the Constantine Infantry School (1894), and the Academy of the General Staff (1910). He entered military service on 1 September 1892, and from 8 August 1894 served as a sublieutenant with the 152nd (Vladikavkaz) Infantry Regiment. He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War with the 9th East Siberian Rifle Regiment, and subsequently served as a battalion commander with the 16th Mingrelian Grenadiers (4 November 1910–6 November 1911), before becoming a senior errand officer on the staff of the Cuacasian Military District (from 1 April 1912). During the First World War, he served as chief of staff of the 4th Caucasian Rifle Division (from 25 June 1915), in which capacity he assisted in the capture of Erzurum, and as commander of the 15th Caucasus Rifle regiment (from 10 September 1917).

Following the October Revolution and the collapse of the Caucasus Front, Kvinitadze became assistant minister of war and commander in chief of the forces of the Transcaucasian Commissariat. In May 1918, he became chief of staff, then commander in chief, of the forces of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, but quickly resigned due to his political differences with the Mensheviks, who dominated the state’s government. For some time he then ran a military school in Tiflis. Later that year, however, he returned to active service as chief of staff during the Georgian–Armenian War and, in May 1920, was again named as commander in chief. He served in that capacity during the Soviet invasion of Georgia in February 1921 and went into emigration in March 1921, spending some time in Constantinople before settling in France.

Kvinitadze lived thereafter in Paris and worked initially in the Pathé phonogram factory before training as a mason. He was also active during the 1930s and 1940s as chairman of the Union of Graduates of the Tiflis Cadet Corps, and in the 1940s led the group of Georgian Traditionalists who sought the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in Georgia. He died in 1970, and is buried at the Georgian cemetery at Leuville-sur-Orge. On 12 April 2006, the street in Tblisi where the Georgian Ministry of Defense is located (formerly Khvamli Street) was renamed in his honor.