Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

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LABOR ARMIES. The notion of the labor army was developed in Soviet Russia during the civil wars, at what might be regarded as the high-water mark of War Communism. The term was applied to units of the Red Army that, having achieved military victory in a region, were not disbanded or demobilized, but instead were transferred from martial activity to economic tasks, such as logging, mining, and transport duties, but remained subject to military discipline. The first such force, the 1st (Urals) Revolutionary Army of Labor, under the command of M. S. Matiiasevich, was created from elements of the 3rd Red Army in the Urals on 15 January 1920. This was followed by the creation of the Ukrainian Labor Army, from forces on the South-West Front (on 21 January 1920, although with the onset of the Soviet–Polish War in April 1920 this force was reassigned to military work); the Caucasian Labor Army (also known as the Labor Army of South-East Russia), which was created from the 8th Red Army (23 January 1920); the Reserve Army of the Republic, formed from the 2nd Red Army (23 January 1920), which worked to reconstruct the Moscow–Ekaterinburg railway; the Petrograd Labor Army, formed from the 7th Red Army (10 February 1920); the 2nd Special Railway Labor Army (also known as the Labor Railway Army of the Caucasian Front), formed from the 2nd Red Army (27 February 1920); and the 2nd (Turkestan) Revolutionary Army of Labor, formed from the 4th Red Army (April 1920). In December 1920, the Donetsk Labor Army was added to the list, followed on 15 January 1921 by the Siberian Labor Army. According to Soviet sources, between 15 April and 1 July 1920, 2,500,000 Red soldiers were engaged in various forms of economic work.

The idea of labor armies was propounded by, among others, L. D. Trotsky, who argued that the economic crisis in Russia could best be solved by transforming the obligation for universal military service (Vsevobuch) into a duty of universal labor service. The idea was never popular, however, with critics likening it to serfdom or slavery, and it died out very rapidly with the introduction of the mixed-economy NEP in the spring of 1921. Finally, on 30 December 1921, the labor armies were formally demobilized by an order of the Council of Labor and Defense, which had been responsible for administering the system.

Lācis, Mārtiņš. See Latsis, Martyn IVANOVICH (Lācis, Mārtiņš).

Laidoner, Johan (12 February 1884–14 March 1953). Lieutenant colonel (1916), major general (Estonian Army, 1918), lieutenant general (Estonian Army, 1920), general (Estonian Army, 1939). The commander of the Estonian Army during the Estonian War of Independence, Johan Laidoner was born into the family of an agricultural laborer at Viiratsi, in central Estland guberniia. He worked as a shepherd before volunteering for the army in 1901, and was a graduate of the Vil′na Infantry Officers School (1905) and the Academy of the General Staff (1912). During the First World War, he served on the staff of the 21st Infantry Division and then as deputy chief of the intelligence department of the Western Front. In December 1917, he took command of the 1st Estonian Division in the Russian Army and, during the German occupation of Estonia (February–November 1918), he worked in Russia to gather an underground organization of Estonian officers.

In early December 1918, Laidoner returned, via Finland, to his homeland and was made commander in chief of the Estonian Army (23 December 1918), after a brief stint as chief of the operational staff. As army commander, he masterminded its victories against both the Red Army and the German Freikorps (in the Landeswehr War), as well as founding the Estonian Military Academy in 1919. He left the armed forces on 27 March 1920, to represent Estonia at the League of Nations, but briefly resumed the duties of commander in chief in 1924 (to thwart a rising by the Estonian Communists) and again in 1934 (to crush the quasi-fascist League of Liberators). Thereafter, he became a mainstay of the authoritarian regime of Konstantin Päts, as commander in chief of the Estonian Army (12 March 1934–22 June 1940).

When the USSR invaded Estonia in June 1940, Laidoner was immediately arrested and deported to Penza. There, on 26 July 1941, he was arrested by the NKVD. He died in Vladimir Central prison, near Kirov (Viatka), in 1953, having been sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment in 1952. A notable equestrian statue of Laidoner was unveiled in 2004, in the central square at Viljandi (close to his place of birth), and Estonia’s National War Museum, in Tallinn, is now named in his honor.

LAMANOV (LOMANOV), ANATOLII NIKOLAEVICH (1889/1890–21 April 1921). One of the central figures of the Kronshtadt Revolt of 1921, as a third-year student at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute in 1917 A. N. Lamanov had been chairman of the Kronshtadt Soviet. He was the son of Lieutenant Colonel N. P. Lamanov, equipagemeister of the Kronshtadt port, while his mother is known to have had Populist sympathies. His early life remains obscure, but it is known that he was a member of the Non-Party Group of the Kronshtadt Soviet, which in August 1917 merged with the Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries-Maximalists. He later joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), but renounced his membership on 4 March 1921, at the beginning of the uprising, during which he worked on the editorial board of the Kronshtadt Izvestiia, the mouthpiece of the rebel sailors, and had some claim to be their chief ideologist; it was he, for example, who coined the slogan “The Third Revolution” to describe the rebellion and who first voiced the demand for “Soviets without Communists.” Lamanov was captured by Red forces on 18 March 1921, during the storming of Kronshtadt, and following an interrogation in which (probably under torture) he testified against other Kronshtadters and implicated members of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries in fomenting the uprising, he was executed.

Lampe, Aleksandr (Aleksei) Aleksandrovich von (18 July 1885–28 May 1967). Lieutenant colonel (15 August 1916), major general (1921). A. A. von Lampe, who was one of the closest political advisors to General P. N. Wrangel during and after the civil wars, was born at Verzhbolovo (Wirballen, now Virbalis), in Livland guberniia, the son of a Lutheran officer of noble birth. He was a graduate of the 1st Cadet Corps (1902), the Nicholas Engineering School (1904), and the Academy of the General Staff (1913). Having entered military service on 1 October 1902, he served with the 6th Sapper Battalion during the Russo–Japanese War, and after subsequent service in the Semenovskii Guards Regiment, during the First World War he rose to quartermaster general of the 8th Army. In 1917–1918, he turned to journalism, as editor of the right-wing newspapers Vozrozhdenie (“Resurrection”), Rossiia (“Russia”), and Velikaia Rossiia (“Great Russia”) at Khar′kov.

During the spring and summer of 1918, together with B. A. Shteifon, von Lampe led the underground branch of the Volunteer Army at Khar′kov that channelled recruits toward the south and worked in association with Azbuka. He then moved south to the North Caucasus, to join the Volunteers, in December 1918. In the Armed Forces of South Russia, from early 1919, he headed the Operations Department on the staff of General Wrangel, before serving as quartermaster general of the Caucasian Volunteer Army; at the same time, he was engaged in propaganda work, editing a series of newspapers, notably, again, Velikaia Rossiia. During the White advance in the summer of 1919, he was transferred to the staff of the Kiev Military District and was subsequently evacuated to Crimea from Odessa.

In Crimea, in 1920, and afterward in emigration in Turkey, von Lampe acted as a personal aide to Wrangel, before serving as his military representative in Denmark (from 1920), Hungary, and (from 1923) Berlin, where he later also (from 1924) chaired the 2nd Department of ROVS. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was again involved in publishing, notably being chiefly responsible for the appearance of seven volumes of the important documentary and memoir collection Beloe delo (“The White Cause”). In this period, he was also involved in the film industry. Despite (according to some sources) his efforts to collaborate with the Nazis, he was arrested by the Gestapo during the Second World War, but survived and after the war moved to France, where he served (from 1946) as deputy chief of ROVS under General A. P. Arkhangel′skii. Following the death of the latter, in 1957 von Lampe succeeded him as head of the organization, a role he fulfilled until his own death, in Paris, in 1967. Von Lampe was buried in the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois in Paris.

LANDESWEHR WAR. This term denotes the conflict of April to July 1919 between German Freikorps forces in Latvia (chiefly the Baltische Landeswehr) and the armies of the newly established nationalist governments of Latvia and Estonia. On 16 April 1919, the Latvian government of Kārlis Ulmanis was overthrown by German forces commanded by General Rüdiger von der Goltz. The latter then, on 22–23 May 1919, captured Riga from the Red forces that had held the city since January 1919 and established a pro-German puppet regime under Andrievs Niedra. The Landeswehr then moved north to confront Estonian forces that were moving into northern Latvia, clearing the remaining Soviet contingents from the region as they arrived. Von der Goltz probably hoped to occupy Estonia and force its incorporation into the United Baltic Duchy.

Hostilities commenced on 5 June 1919, with the Germans capturing the town of Cēsis (Wenden) the following day. Allied agents in the region brokered a cease-fire on 10 June, but fighting recommenced on 19 June 1919, when the German Iron Division attacked Estonian forces at Limbaži (Lemsal). The Germans, numbering 5,200 men, had a strong advantage in terms of machine guns and artillery, but were soon outnumbered by the 8,000-strong Estonian 3rd Division (incorporating the Latvian Northern Brigade of Jorģis Zemitāns), which could also deploy armored trains captured from the Red Army, and the battle-hardened partisan unit founded by Julius Kuperjanov. After a major battle on 23 June 1919, the Estonians recaptured Cēsis, and the Germans hastily began to retreat toward Riga. On 3 July 1919, with Estonian and Latvian forces at the gates of Riga, a cease-fire was imposed by the Allies, and German forces were ordered to leave Latvia (although many joined the anti-Bolshevik Western Volunteer Army of General P. R. Bermondt-Avalov). The anniversary of the Battle of Cēsis (23 June) is still celebrated in Estonia as “Victory Day” (Võidupüha), a major public holiday.

LARIONOV, ALEKSEI MIKHAILOVICH (1872–23/27 June 1920). An otherwise quite obscure figure, A. M. Larionov came briefly to the fore as the White regime in Siberia collapsed during the winter of 1919–1920. He was a graduate of the St. Petersburg Institute of Transport Engineering (1900) and, as an employee of the Ministry of Ways and Communications, worked in railway construction projects in Transcaucasia, northern Russia, and in 1917–1918, the Altai (where he became chief administrator of local railways). He also authored a number of books on railway construction in the prewar period.

In July 1918, Larionov’s expertise earned him the post of assistant director of the Ministry of Ways and Communications of the Provisional Siberian Government and then (from 7 September 1918) acting director of that ministry. He also held that post under the Ufa Directory (from 4 November 1918) and in the Omsk government (from 18 November 1918), prior to the appointment of L. A. Ustrugov as communications minister. When, as the White regime in Siberia collapsed, a governing triumvirate emerged at Irkutsk on 28 December 1919, Larionov was named a member of it (alongside A. A. Cherven-Vodali and M. V. Khanzhin). When the revolutionary Political Center came to power in Irkutsk, he was arrested and then, although he was released by the local Cheka on 19 February 1920, was rearrested and was subsequently one of those former ministers of the regime of Admiral A. V. Kolchak arraigned at a revolutionary tribunal at Omsk in May 1920. On 30 May 1920, he was sentenced to death. Petitions for clemency were filed—by among others, L. D. Trotsky, who wished to utilize Larionov’s expertise—but on 10 June 1920, VTsIK rejected all such pleas and subsequently Larionov was executed at Omsk, alongside other former ministers of the Kolchak government.

LARKA (LARKO), ANDRES (ANDREI IVANOVICH) (21 February 1879–8 January 1942). Captain (1 September 1912), lieutenant colonel (1916), major general (Estonian Army, 25 March 1918). A leading commander of nationalist forces during the Estonian War of Independence, Andres Larka was born at Pällastvere, in Estland guberniia, and was a graduate of the Vil′na Military Academy (1902) and the Academy of the General Staff (1912). Having entered military service on 3 September 1899, he saw action in the Russo–Japanese War, and before the First World War had risen to the command of a battalion of the 116th Maloiaroslavskii Infantry Regiment. During the war, he served as a senior adjutant on the staff of the 40th Infantry Division; was subsequently on the staff of the 5th Siberian Army Corps (from 1 November 1915); and on 20 May 1917, was named acting chief of staff of the 159th Infantry Division. His final posting with the Russian Army was as chief of staff of the Trans-Amur Border Division.

Following the October Revolution and the collapse of the Russian Army, Larka commanded the 1st Estonian Army Brigade (from 3 January 1918), and on 24 February 1918, immediately prior to the occupation of the region by German forces, was named as the minister of war in the Estonian government. During the subsequent German occupation of the Baltic provinces, Larka was engaged in forming partisan units (the Defense League), although he was forced to flee to Finland in September 1918 to escape arrest by the occupying authorities. Upon his return following the armistice, he transferred to the post of chief of staff (26 November 1918), although remaining as an aide to the new war minister. He retired from that post in 1925, due to ill health (he had contracted tuberculosis), but remained prominent in interwar Estonian politics, as the leader of the right-wing, paramilitary Vaps movement (Eesti Vabadussõjalaste Keskliit), which sought to replace the government of Konstantin Päts with a more authoritarian regime. Following Päts’s banning of the Vaps movement in March 1934, Larka spent most of the next three years in prison. He was again arrested, this time by the occupying Soviet authorities, on 23 July 1940, and was subsequently deported to the USSR. He died in 1942, at a camp at Malmyzh in Kirov (Viatka) oblast′. The cause of his death and the site of his grave are unknown, but in 1997 a memorial was raised to him in his home village.

LASHEVICH, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH (1884–30 August 1928). Born at Odessa, the son of a merchant, the future Red Army commander M. M. Lashevich did not finish his education at the local Gymnasium, having been expelled for the possession and distribution of revolutionary literature. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1901, supported the Bolsheviks following the party schism in 1903, and was subsequently engaged in party work across Russia (at Odessa, Nikolaev, Ekaterinburg, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere). He was frequently arrested and spent some time in exile in Vologda guberniia, before he was called up into the army in 1915. He served as an NCO during the First World War and was twice wounded. In 1917, he served first as secretary, then as chairman, of the Bolshevik caucus in the Petrograd Soviet and was a member of the party’s Petersburg Committee.

Lashevich played a very prominent role in the October Revolution, as a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and as commander of the Red Guards detachments that captured the State Bank and the Central Post and Telegraph Office and then, during the suppression of the Junker revolt, captured the Pavlovsk Officer School. He subsequently was a member of the presidium of the Petrograd Soviet, a member of VTsIK (from October 1917), and (from March 1918) a member of the Petrograd bureau of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). From 15 April to 11 September 1918, he was a political commissar on the Northern Screen, and from 30 November 1918 to 5 March 1919 served as commander of the 3rd Red Army (and was also a member of its Revvoensovet from 7 August to 29 November 1918). He was also a member of the Revvoensovet of the Eastern Front (23 March–16 August 1919), in which role he clashed with Jukums Vācietis and L. D. Trotsky when they attempted, in June 1919, to bring to a halt the Red advances in the east and to prioritize the Southern Front instead. Lashevich served also on the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front (1 August 1919–10 January 1920). In the latter role, he took charge of operations to combat the Mamontov raid. From 23 October 1919 to 30 November 1920, he was a member of the Revvoensovet of the 7th Red Army, for a time (during the climactic stages of the Soviet–Polish War) serving simultaneously as its temporary commander (30 July–25 August 1920) on the Western Front. From 29 August to 26 December 1920, he was a member of the Revvoensovet of the 15th Red Army, on the Western Front. From October 1920 to 1922, he was commander of forces of the Siberian Military District and was also (1922–1925) chairman of the Siberian Revolutionary Committee.

From 25 April 1923 to 18 December 1925, Lashevich was a member of the Central Committee of the RKP(b); on 6 November 1925, he was named deputy people’s commissar for military and naval affairs and deputy chairman of the Revvoensovet of the USSR. From 21 December 1925, he was a member of the presidium of VSNKh. Lashevich was a supporter of G. E. Zinov′ev during the power struggles of the 1920s, and in December 1927, alongside other “oppositionists,” was expelled from the party (having been dismissed from the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs in July 1926). He quickly recanted, and in 1928, was restored to his party membership and to the job he had performed since 1926, as deputy chairman of the board of the Chinese Eastern Railway. He died at Harbin and was buried alongside the monument to the martyrs of the revolution on the Field of Mars in Leningrad.

Lastochkin, Vladimir Gur′evich (18 February 1871–1920). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1903), colonel (6 December 1907), major general (22 March 1915). The White commander V. G. Lastochkin was born in Kazan′ guberniia, entered military service with the Russian Army on 2 June 1890, and graduated from the Moscow Infantry Officers School (1892) and the Academy of the General Staff (1899). He served, before the First World War, in a variety of staff and command posts in the Caucasus and the Turkestan Military Districts, before becoming commander of the 15th Turkestan Rifle Regiment (from 2 June 1913). During the First World War, he served as chief of staff of the 1st Caucasus Army Corps (17 January 1915–3 June 1917), then as commander of the 4th Caucasian Rifle Division (3–19 June 1917), before being placed in the reserve of the Caucasian Military District (from 22 July 1917). In the White movement, he served as chief of staff of the Turkestan Army (22 January–7 December 1919). Lastochkin was arrested by the Soviet authorities on 25 April 1920, and on 12 August 1920 was sentenced to death by the Piatigorsk regional Cheka.

Latsis, Martyn IVANOVICH (Lācis, Mārtiņš) (13 April 1888–11 February 1938). One of the leading Chekists of the civil-war era, Martyn Latsis (also known as Jānis Sudrabs) was born into a poor Latvian peasant family at Ragaini, in Livland guberniia. He was sent out to work at the age of eight, finding employment as a herdsman, then as an apprentice joiner, and finally as a shop assistant, but in his teens managed to complete his education at night school in Riga, where he trained as a schoolteacher. From 1912 to 1915, he also studied at the A. L. Shaniavskii University in Moscow. He joined the Latvian Social-Democratic Party in 1905 and was subsequently engaged in underground work for the party in the Caucasus and in Moscow. In 1916, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia, but escaped and returned to European Russia. In 1917, he worked on the Petrograd Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks).

Following the October Revolution, Latsis became a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (November 1917–1919), with responsibility for local government affairs. From May 1918 to 1921, he also served with the Cheka, notably as head of its operations on the Eastern Front (July–November 1918) at the time of the introduction of the Red Terror, when he infamously pronounced that the institution’s task was the “extermination of the bourgeoisie as a class” and that a suspect’s class, not the evidence against him, should determine his fate. He subsequently headed the Secret-Operational Department of the Cheka (November 1918–March 1919 and 17 September 1919–September 1920) and headed the Cheka in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Latsis was the author of a number of historical works on the Cheka and in 1920–1921 published two handbooks on Cheka policy. After the civil wars, he worked in the apparatus of the Bolshevik Central Committee and in a variety of economic ministries; from 1935 to 1937, he was director of the Moscow Institute of Economics (the Plekhanov Academy). He was arrested for “counterrevolutionary activities” on 29 November 1937 and was shot in early 1938, having been sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 2 June 1956.

Latvian People’s Council. See TAUTAS PADOME.

LATVIAN RIFLEMEN. One of the most disciplined and effective fighting units of the Red Army during the civil wars (especially its early stages), the Latvian Riflemen (Latviešu strēlnieki) had their origin in volunteer units created in Russia’s Latvian provinces in the summer of 1915 to resist the advancing German Army. Among those who helped coordinate the initiative, which was initially opposed by the high command of the Russian Army, was the State Duma deputy Jānis Goldmanis.

The tsarist regime was generally reluctant to organize armed units on the basis of nationality (for fear of what that might herald for the multinational empire) but, nevertheless, formal regulations governing the mustering of the Latvian volunteer units were issued on 27 July 1915; by the end of that year eight battalions had been raised and were at the front, with a reserve battalion stationed in Estonia. The following year, these were compounded as a division. Conscription, introduced to the Livland and Courland gubernii in 1916, helped raise the Latvian Riflemen’s complement to 40,000 by 1917, despite heavy losses in the winter of 1916–1917. Those losses led to strong resentment of the tsarist regime among the Riflemen and a rapid radicalization of the rank and file. Consequently, following the February Revolution of 1917 many of them turned to the Bolsheviks, who promised to bring an end to the war (as well as offering self-determination to the non-Russian peoples of the empire).

The Latvian Riflemen formally joined the Red Army on 13 April 1918, by which time the division consisted of three brigades, each containing three rifle regiments and two artillery regiments. In the summer of 1918, the Latvian Riflemen, now numbering more than 20,000 men, participated in the suppression of the Left-SR Uprising in Moscow, the Iaroslavl′ Revolt, and the Murav′ev uprising, before being deployed on the Volga Front against the People’s Army of Komuch and the Czechoslovak Legion. They had earlier participated in the suppression of the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising. and the Dowbor-Muśnicki uprising and were effectively established as the Soviet regime’s Praetorian Guard. They subsequently fought against the White forces of Generals A. I. Denikin, N. N. Iudenich, and P. N. Wrangel, and as the backbone of the army of the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic, the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia (January–June 1919), against the Latvian national army and the Baltische Landeswehr during the Latvian War of Independence. In 1919, the unit was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, while one of its commanders, Jukums Vācietis, served as the first commander in chief of the Red Army (2 September 1918–8 July 1919). However, support for the Soviet government was waning among the Riflemen, and following the Soviet–Latvian Treaty of Riga (11 August 1920), some 11,395 of their number returned to Latvia. In November 1920, the force was formally disestablished.

In post-1945 Soviet Latvia, the Riflemen were lauded, with all kinds of memorials to them being raised and a number of fictional works and feature films commemorating them: for example, Latviešu strēlnieka stāsts/Povest′ o latyshkom strelke (“Tale of the Latvian Rifleman,” dir. Pavel Armand, 1958). However, the legacy of the Latvian Riflemen in today’s independent Latvia is a mixed one, and controversy surrounds the statue (by B. Alberg) commemorating them that stands outside the Occupation Museum of Latvia (formerly the Latvian Red Riflemen’s Museum) in Riga. Anticommunists want the statue to be removed, but others regard the Riflemen as pro-Latvian heroes and demand that it remain intact.

Commanders of the Latvian Riflemen during the civil-war period were Jukums Vācietis (13 April–17 July 1918); A. V. Kosmatov (acting, 18–25 July 1918); Pēteris Avens (25 July 1918–11 January 1919); G. G. Magul (12 January–26 March 1919); Antons Martusevičs (27 March–20 October 1919); Frīdrihs Kalniņš (20 October 1919–4 July 1920); J. J. Lācis (4–15 July 1920); and K. A. Stučka (15 July–28 November 1920).

Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic. This short-lived polity, headed by Pēteris Stučka but controlled by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), was proclaimed on 17 December 1918 (and recognized by the RSFSR on 22 December 1918), during the Latvian War of Independence. The republic’s armed forces, consisting of units of the Latvian Riflemen and other elements of the Red Army, which were reconfigured as the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia in January 1919, rapidly overran most of Latvia, capturing Riga on 3 January 1919 and confining the Latvian nationalist government of Kārlis Ulmanis to a small enclave around Liepāja (Libau). Its government, which can be regarded as a continuation of the abortive Iskolat regime, included Stučka (as chairman and commissar of justice), Kàrlis Petersons (commissar for war), Jànis Lencmanis (commissar for internal affairs), and Rudolfs Endrups and Oto Kàrkliñš (successive commissars of finance). It introduced a radical program of the nationalization of industry and land and directed a wave of Red Terror against its opponents.

In accordance with a decree of VTsIK of 1 June 1919, the forces of the Latvian SSR (together with those of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic) were united with those of the RSFSR as constituent parts of the Red Army. However, combined attacks from the army of the Ulmanis regime, which had secured Allied support, and from German forces in the region (notably those of Colonel P. R. Bermondt-Avalov), drove the Latvian Soviet government from Riga on 22 May 1919. It was able to hold out in part of Latgale until that region was reconquered by Latvian and Polish forces in early 1920, and the Latvian SSR was disestablished on 13 January 1920.

LATVIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE. Also known as the Latvian War of Liberation (in Latvian, Latvijas brīvības cīņas), this term refers to the series of conflicts involving Latvia between the declaration of the country’s independence by the Tautas Padome on 18 November 1918 and the Soviet–Latvian Treaty of Riga of 11 August 1920. In these conflicts, Latvia was supported by Estonia and the Allies (chiefly Britain) against the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the short-lived Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, while German Freikorps forces in the region frequently intervened in an effort to extend German influence in the Baltic and to establish the dominance of the United Baltic Duchy. In the course of the independence war, Latvia mobilized an army of some 40,000 men, under the command of Oskars Kalpaks and (from March 1919) Jānis Balodis.

In the aftermath of the revolution in Germany and armistice of 11 November 1918, the Soviet government renounced the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and sought to reoccupy lands lost by that settlement. Accordingly, on 1 December 1918, the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia entered Latvian territory; three days later, the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed under Pēteris Stučka. By the end of January 1919, Red forces had occupied almost all the territory claimed by independent Latvia, with the government of Kārlis Ulmanis hemmed in to a small enclave around Liepāja (Libau). On 16 April 1919, German forces under General Rüdiger von der Goltz organized a coup and seized control of Liepāja, forcing the Latvian government to flee on board the steamship Saratov and marking the beginning of the Landeswehr War. The Germans then captured Riga from the Red Army on 22 May 1919, but were chased out by the 1st Latvian Independent Brigade on the following day and headed north to Cēsis (Wenden). There, the Germans were defeated by a joint offensive of the Latvian Northern Army and the Estonian Army in a series of battles that raged from 6 June to 3 July 1919.

The front against the Bolsheviks then stabilized, leaving Soviet forces in control only of most of Latgale, but in the autumn of 1919 a new threat to Riga was posed by the advance northward from Lithuania of the Western Volunteer Army of Colonel P. R. Bermondt-Avalov, which captured the capital’s Pārdaugava suburb on 8 October 1919. A Latvian counterattack against the “Bermontians” was launched on 3 November 1919, which drove the latter from Riga on 11 November 1919. Bermondt-Avalov’s forces subsequently retreated into western Lithuania, where they were defeated by the Lithuanian Army at Radviliškis on 22 November 1919, then expelled from the Baltic region.

After a brief respite, the Latvian Army then joined the Poles in attacking Bolshevik forces in Latgale, capturing Daugavpils (Dvinsk) on 3 January 1920. With Latvian forces now in control of virtually all the territory claimed by the new state, the Latvian SSR was dissolved on Moscow’s orders on 13 January 1920, and a Soviet–Latvian cease-fire was arranged on 1 February. This was followed by a full peace treaty, the Treaty of Riga (11 August 1920), which gave Soviet recognition to the independence of Latvia.

Soviet casualties in the war are a matter of dispute. The number of Latvian losses is sometimes placed at 3,046 dead and 4,085 wounded. They are now commemorated by numerous memorials and museums across independent Latvia, notably the 50-foot Freedom Movement (Brīvības piemineklis) column on Brīvības bulvāris (“Freedom Boulevard”) in central Riga, which was unveiled in 1935 and restored from 1998 to 2001.

LAZAREVICH, VLADIMIR SOLOMONOVICH (SALAMANOVICH) (2 September 1882–20 June 1938). Lieutenant (1917), komdiv (23 November 1935). The Soviet military specialist V. S. Lazarevich was born into a noble family in Grodno guberniia and was a graduate of the Lithuanian Seminary, the Vil′na Infantry Officers School (1906), and the Academy of the General Staff (1912). He entered military service on 1 September 1903, initially serving with the 1st Life Guards. During the First World War, he served as a senior adjutant on the staff of the 2nd Army Corps (from November 1914), a senior adjutant on the staff of the 7th Siberian Rifle Division (from 21 April 1915), a staff officer with the 5th Army Corps (from 31 March 1916), a staff officer with the quartermaster general of the Special Army Group (3 January–8 February 1917), and acting chief of staff of the 166th and then 23rd Infantry Divisions (from 8 February 1917).

Lazarevich volunteered for service with the Red Army in early 1918 and joined Vseroglavshtab as head of its Military-Statistical Office (from May 1918), then chief of its Field Directorate (from September 1918). He was subsequently head of the Operational Department of the staff of the 4th Red Army (from September 1918), was then chief of staff of the southern group of forces on the Eastern Front (March–August 1919) and at the same time chief of staff of the Turkestan Red Army (24 May–15 June 1919), and then commanded the 4th Red Army (6 August–8 October 1919). From 13 October 1919 to 9 February 1920, he was chief of staff of the Western Front; during the Soviet–Polish War, he served as commander of the 3rd Red Army (12 June–18 October 1920); and then served once more as commander of the 4th Red Army (22 October 1920–10 February 1921). During these years, he was twice awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

From 8 March 1921 to 11 February 1922, Lazarevich was commander of the Turkestan Front, leading the struggle against the Basmachi. He then became, jointly, deputy head of the Main Directorate of the Military-Scientific Institution of the Red Army and head of the Military Aviation Academy (25 March 1922–1934). He joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1932, but was arrested on 4 February 1938, and having been found guilty of membership in a “counterrevolutionary terrorist organization” by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on 20 June 1938, was executed at Kommunarka, Moscow, and buried in a mass grave. Lazarevich was posthumously rehabilitated on 5 May 1956.

LAZO, SERGEI GEORGEVICH (23 February 1892/1894–May 1920). Ensign (1916). One of the most celebrated Soviet martyrs of the civil-war era, S. G. Lazo, who was born at Piatra-Neamt in Bessarabia, was a junior tsarist officer of Moldavian nationality. He was a graduate of the St. Petersburg Technological Institute and studied at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University, but did not graduate from the latter due to the outbreak of the First World War. Having joined the Russian Army, in 1916 he passed out from Moscow’s Alekseev Infantry School and was subsequently stationed at Krasnoiarsk with the 15th Siberian Reserve Regiment. As a member of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries and chairman of the Soldiers’ Section of the Krasnoiarsk Soviet in 1917, he played a leading role in the establishment of Soviet power in Siberia after the October Revolution: he won a majority of delegates over to the Bolshevik–Left-SR position at the First Siberian Congress of Soviets at Irkutsk (16–23 October 1917), commanded the Red Guards and Hungarian internationalists detachments that seized power at Krasnoiarsk on 28 October 1917, and led the Soviet forces that crushed a rising by White officer cadets under General L. N. Skipetrov at Irkutsk in December 1917.

In February 1918, as a member of Tsentrosibir′ and having joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), Lazo was named commander of the Transbaikal Front against the White forces of Ataman G. M. Semenov and succeeded in driving them back into Manchuria. With the collapse of Soviet power in Siberia during the summer of 1918, Lazo went underground, then emerged as a commander of Red partisans in the Far East. From January 1920, he was chairman of the Military Council of the Provisional Government of the Maritime Region Zemstvo Board, and from March 1920 was a member of the Dal′biuro of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). On 5 April 1920, he was arrested by Japanese interventionist forces at Vladivostok (apparently in retaliation for the Nikolaevsk massacre) and handed over to Semenov. According to Soviet sources, Semenov had Lazo burned alive in the furnace of a locomotive at Murav′evo-Amurskaia Station, although recent Russian accounts cast doubt on this, alleging that he was shot by the Japanese. Nevertheless, the station and numerous other places, buildings, etc. in the Soviet Far East were subsequently renamed in his honor (as was, from 1944 to 1991, the Moldavian city of Sîngerei, while two Moldovan villages, including that in which he was born, retain his name to this day), and (controversially) a statue of him still occupies the site on Svetlanskaia Street, Vladivostok, that until 1975 was occupied by a statue of Admiral V. S. Zavoiko, the city’s founder. There are also many fictional accounts of Lazo’s life and deeds, including a 1967 film (Sergei Lazo) by Soviet director Aleksandr Gordon.

LEBEDEV, DMITRII ANTONOVICH (25 December 1882–6 March 1928?). Staff captain (13 August 1909), captain (7 May 1911), lieutenant colonel (10 April 1916), colonel (15 August 1917), major general (6 January 1919). One of the leading figures in the White movement in Siberia, D. A. Lebedev was the son of an officer and nobleman from Saratov guberniia and was a graduate of the Siberian Cadet Corps (1900), the Mikhail Artillery School (1903). and the Academy of the General Staff (1911). Having entered military service on 31 August 1900, he served initially with the 3rd Reserve Artillery Brigade (from 10 August 1903) and subsequently with the 35th Artillery Brigade and the 17th Mortar Artillery Division and saw action in the Russo–Japanese War. From 26 November 1913, he was a senior adjutant with the 24th Army Corps. During the First World War, he served as a staff officer with the quartermaster general of the 3rd Army (from 5 December 1915) and was then on the staff of the main commander in chief (from 20 December 1916). In 1917, as a leading teacher at the Academy of the General Staff, he was one of the founders of the Union of Officers of the Army and Navy, but failed to become a member of its Main Committee. That August, he was arrested as one of the instigators of the Kornilov affair. On 13 November 1917, he escaped from imprisonment at Bykhov and fled to the Don, where he helped found the Volunteer Army and, from 30 December 1917, served as chief of staff of its 1st Detachment.

In February 1918, Lebedev traveled to Siberia, probably as a plenipotentiary of General L. G. Kornilov (although later rumors had it that he had been dismissed from the Volunteer Army), and there became one of the chief instigators of the Omsk coup that brought Admiral A. V. Kolchak to power that November. From 21 November 1918, he served as chief of staff to Kolchak (that is, head of the Staff of the Supreme Ruler) and from 23 May 1919 added the role of minister of war in the Omsk government to his portfolio, having long intrigued to remove the previous incumbent, General N. A. Stepanov. On 10 August 1919, Lebedev was removed from his post as chief of staff and two days later was also replaced as minister of war, being widely blamed for the catastrophic failure of the counterattack launched by Kolchak’s forces at Cheliabinsk in late July. He subsequently commanded the Independent (Southern) Steppe Group and then (from 16 November 1919) the Urals Group of Kolchak’s retreating forces, taking part, with the latter, in the Great Siberian (Ice) March.

In February 1920, having joined the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov, Lebedev was named commander of the Russian Eastern Cadet Corps at Vladivostok and in 1921 participated in the overthrow of the Provisional Government of the Maritime Region Zemstvo Board in the port. He is also reported as serving in 1922 as assistant to M. K. Diterikhs, as head of military forces in Vladivostok. However, the details of Lebedev’s life (and death) in the Russian Far East and in emigration remain obscure. According to some sources, he was actually killed at Vladivostok in 1921,but according to others (probably the most reliable), he went abroad in 1922, lived in Shanghai, briefly edited the newspaper Russkaia mysl′ (“Russian Thought”), and died there in 1928. Yet others have it that he lived and worked at Harbin until the mid-1930s. Historians of all stamps agree, however, that Lebedev was an incorrigibly hubristic figure, citing his inexperience and taste for intrigue as among the chief causes of the failure of Kolchak’s army in 1919.

LEBEDEV, PAVEL PAVLOVICH (21 April 1872–2 July 1933). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1904), major general (6 December 1915). One of the first, most senior, and most influential tsarist officers to serve with the Reds as a military specialist, P. P. Lebedev was born into a noble family at Cheboksary, a Volga port in the Chuvash region, and was a graduate of the Alexander Military School (1892) and the Academy of the General Staff (1900). Following numerous prewar appointments on the general staff of the Russian Army, during the First World War he served as assistant quartermaster general of the North-West Front (from 12 July 1915), quartermaster general of the Western Front (from 10 September 1915), and chief of staff of the 3rd Army (from 17 April 1917). He was described at this time by the British military attaché General Alfred Knox as one of the most able officers in the Russian Army and “a most ardent patriot.”

Nevertheless, Lebedev volunteered for service in the Red Army in early 1918 and became chief of the Mobilization Directorate of Vseroglavshtab (April 1918–March 1919), chief of staff (April–July 1919), and briefly, commander of the Eastern Front (8–19 July 1919). He subsequently served as the primary assistant of the main commander in chief of the Red Army, S. S. Kamenev, as chief of the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (from July 1919). In that capacity, he was one of the architects of the Red Army’s defeat of the Armed Forces of South Russia at Orel and the subsequent counterattacks that drove the Whites from South Russia in late 1919, and was also involved in the planning of operations against the North-West Army of General N. N. Iudenich and the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak.

Lebedev was subsequently chief of staff of the Red Army (February 1921–April 1924) and simultaneously head of the Red Military Academy (August 1922 to April 1924). From 20 March 1923 to 2 February 1924, he was also a member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. From 1925 to 1928 he was commander of the Ukraine Military District. He died in Khar′kov, where a street was named in his honor (as was, from 3 July 1933, the Kiev Artillery School).

Lebedev, Vladimir Ivanovich (1883–30 March 1956). Lieutenant (French Army, 1916). Born at Omsk (into a family with literary connections ranging from Ivan Chekhov to Mariia Tsvetaeva) and educated at the Tiflis Infantry School, V. I. Lebedev led a colorful life as a revolutionary journalist and exile, editing the Paris-based Za narod (“For the People”), and as a soldier (including service in the Russo–Japanese War and a stint with the French Foreign Legion from 1914 to 1917, with a period on the Salonika front). A Rightist member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR), Lebedev first rose to prominence in Russian national politics as director of the ministry of marine of the Russian Provisional Government (April–August 1917). He was also elected to the Constituent Assembly on the PSR list and became a central figure of the Democratic Counter-Revolution on the Volga in the summer of 1918. After helping to found the People’s Army (and serving on Komuch’s military council from 19 June 1918), Lebedev played a key role in that force’s capture of Kazan′ (6–7 August 1918) and subsequently served as the chief plenipotentiary of Komuch in that city. He was also a Komuch delegate to the Ufa State Conference.

In November 1918, he was dispatched to the United States and France to promote the cause of Allied intervention in Russia. (It was at this time that he authored the widely published pamphlet The Russian Democracy and Its Struggle against Bolsheviks.) After the civil wars, Lebedev remained in emigration, at first in Prague and then in Belgrade, as a member of the Above-Party Democratic Union, coeditor (1920–1932) of the journal Volia Rossii (“The Will of Russia”), coeditor of the Serbo-Croat journal Russki arkhiv (“The Russian Archive,” 1928–1939), and a Zemgor activist. He then moved to the United States in 1936 to become assistant editor of the New York–based Novoe russkoe slovo (“New Russian Word”) and editor of the Chicago-based Rassvet (“The Dawn”). He is buried in the St. Vladimir Russian Orthodox cemetery at Jackson, New Jersey.

LEBEDEV, Vladmir Aleksandrovich (1867–?). A White politician in South Russia whose biographical details remain somewhat obscure, V. A. Lebedev was a pilot and the owner of an aircraft factory. He was elected to the government of the Don Republic on 25 May 1918 and named as director of its department of trade and industry. He subsequently joined the Special Council of the Volunteer Army on 28 September 1918, as head of the directorate of trade, industry, and supply, and also chaired the council on foreign trade and oversaw the regulation of trade between areas occupied by the Armed Forces of South Russia and the Don Cossack Host. He escaped from the Reds’ capture of Novorossiisk in March 1920 and went into emigration, settling in Belgrade, where he worked in a bank.

LEFT BOLSHEVIKS. This faction within the Russian Social-Democratic Party (Bolsheviks) came to the fore in early 1918, during the debates within the party on the issue of signing a separate peace with the Central Powers. The group opposed the signing of such a peace; advocated “revolutionary war” to foment revolution in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere; and subscribed to a radical interpretation of Communist doctrine in relation to economic and social policies and military organization. They were also opposed to the notion of the right of nations to self-determination (and were particularly hostile to the notion of an independent Poland, a tendency reinforced by the numerous Poles among the group). The Left Bolsheviks also held radical views about cultural, educational, and family policies. Among the most prominent members of the group were A. S. Bubnov, N. I. Bukharin, A. M. Kollontai, N. Osinskii, G. L. Piatakov, E. A. Preobrazhenskii, Karl Radek, and V. M. Smirnov. The group was particularly powerful in the Moscow regional bureau of the party and in Petrograd.

At the RSDLP(b)’s Seventh Congress (March 1918), which V. I. Lenin and Ia. M. Sverdlov had packed with supporters of the peace, the Left Bolsheviks abstained from the vote that called for the ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). They subsequently abandoned their advocacy of revolutionary war, but in their journal, Kommunist (four issues of which were published in Moscow from April to June 1918), they continued to criticize the pragmatism and conservatism of Lenin and his allies at the head of the party, urging the immediate nationalization of industry, workers’ control, and the rejection of all compromises with capitalist forces, both domestic and foreign. As Left Bolsheviks were dominant in VSNKh from 1917 to 1918, they were able to wield considerable influence in this regard, until their members were removed from their posts and replaced by moderates such as A. I. Rykov, V. P. Miliutin, and Iurii Larin (M. A. Lur′e).

The faction had largely died out by the end of 1918; on the one hand, its leaders accepted that much of their program was unrealistic in the circumstances, and on the other, they rallied to the party as the civil-war emergency developed and as the policies of War Communism seemed to satisfy their demands for a radical transformation of the economy. The Military Opposition and the Workers’ Opposition inherited some characteristics (and some members) of the Left Bolsheviks, and the tendency would reemerge with G. I. Miasnikov’s “Workers’ Group” of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in relation to the debates over the direction of the New Economic Policy and the succession to Lenin. Most Left Communists were affiliated with the so-called Left Opposition in the 1920s and were expelled from the party at the 15th Party Congress of 2–19 December 1927. Although many subsequently recanted their “errors,” they were wiped out in the purges of the 1930s.

LEFT SOCIALISTS-REVOLUTIONARIES, PARTY OF. This political party (formally constituted in November 1917 and generally known as the Left-SRs), which sought a radical socialist transformation of society by workers, peasants, and the intelligentsia in combination, was an offshoot of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR). Divisions within that party were evident from its inception; in 1906, those in favor of an immediate implementation of the “maximum” version of its party program left the SRs to form the SR-Maximalists. Further differences surfaced with the party’s debate on terrorism, with the Left generally favoring the continued employment of terrorist tactics, despite the debacle of the Azef affair in 1908 (when the head of the PSR terrorist organization was revealed to be in the pay of the tsarist police), and the Right favoring the transformation of the PSR into a legal organization. The schism was exacerbated by the war, when so-called SR-Internationalists around V. K. Chernov and M. A. Natanson abjured the defensist line adopted by other party leaders (including E. K. Breshko-Brezhkovskaia, A. A. Argunov, and N. D. Avksent′ev) and steadfastly opposed the war, with some arch-Leftists even hoping for Russia’s defeat in the conflict as a preliminary to the collapse of tsarism. Although the intelligentsia of the party (and its émigrés) largely cleaved to defensism, its worker, peasant, and soldier rank and file came increasingly under the sway of the Internationalists as the war progressed. By 1916, in villages, factories, and trenches, SR-Internationalist agitators disseminated antiwar propaganda and encouraged strikes and all kinds of seditious activity, in close cooperation with Bolsheviks, Menshevik-Internationalists, and anarchists. (Indeed, the Left-SR’s outlook had much in common with anarchism.)

In the aftermath of the February Revolution, under the influence of Chernov, the Internationalists accepted a truce with the PSR mainstream, but this was gradually eroded by the Left’s disillusionment with the Russian Provisional Government and its failure to end the war and implement land reform. They also came to distrust the Kadets and to call for an end to the coalition and the establishment of an all-socialist government. By September 1917, the Left-SRs, now led by B. D. Kamkov and M. A. Spiridonova and united around the newspapers Znamia truda (“The Banner of Labor”) and Novyi put′ (“The New Path”), were acting as a de facto party within a party and, in contravention of the policy of the PSR Central Committee, were doing as much as the Bolsheviks to prepare for a seizure of power and the creation of a Soviet government. (The Petrograd SR organization was expelled from the PSR for such radicalism in September 1917, while Kronshtadt, Revel, Helsingfors, Pskov, Samara, Tashkent, and other centers were Leftist bastions.) The Left-SRs, however, wanted a coalition socialist government and opposed the Bolsheviks’ unilateralism in seizing power for themselves during the October Revolution (although many individual Left-SRs participated in the seizure of power through the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, Red Guards detachments, and other organizations). But when the PSR mainstream refused to compromise with them at the party’s Fourth Congress in November 1917 and expelled 179 leftists from the party, the Left-SRs convened their own congress and became an independent party.

Their initial power base was in VTsIK, wherein, after the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, there were 29 Left-SRs (alongside 62 Bolsheviks, 1 SR-Maximalist, and 10 others). Subsequently, in December 1917, several Left-SRS were offered and accepted portfolios within Sovnarkom: V. A. Algasov (People’s Commissar without Portfolio); I. N. Steinberg (People’s Commissar for Justice); P. P. Prosh′ian (People’s Commissar for Post and Telegraph); M. A. Brilliantov (Member with Casting Vote of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Finance); A. L. Kolegaev (People’s Commissar for Agriculture); and V. A. Karelin (People’s Commissar for State Properties). Meanwhile, Spiridonova defeated Chernov in the election to the chair of the Second All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets. Left-SRs were also prominent within the Cheka (where V. A. Aleksandrovich became assistant to F. E. Dzierżyński), the Supreme Military Council, and other Red Army command structures.

Like the Bolsheviks, the Left-SRs favored the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly (in which around 40 of the 420 elected SR deputies were Left-SRs), but when the Bolshevik leadership agreed to sign a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers, the Left-SR commissars all resigned in protest (on 18 March 1918). Like the Left Bolsheviks, the Left-SRs favored a policy of revolutionary war to consolidate the revolution in Russia and to spread it westward into Europe. The Left-SRs remained, however, in the soviets and in VTsIK, from where they voiced increasingly vehement denunciations of Bolshevik policy, not only with regard to the peace treaty but also regarding the Committees of the Village Poor and the grain requisitioning policies of the Food Army, which they regarded as anti-peasant. They were critical also of the Bolsheviks’ blatant falsification of the results of elections to the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in early July 1918, in which the Left-SRs could realistically have hoped for a majority; when that congress met, the Left-SRs were in a surprisingly small minority (350 out of 1,164 delegates).

The Bolsheviks’ unwillingness to compromise at the congress, which met on 5 July 1918, led the Left-SRs to determine that their resolution (at their Third Party Congress in late June) to “rectify the line of Soviet policy” would only be achieved through direct action. The following day, 6 July 1918, the Left-SRs Ia. G. Bliumkin and N. A. Andreev assassinated the German ambassador to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Count Wilhelm Mirbach, giving the signal for an uprising in Moscow by the party. This Left-SR Uprising was forcibly crushed by Red Army units (notably the Latvian Riflemen). Subsequently, the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets voted to outlaw the Left-SRs and to exclude them from the soviets.

Many of the party’s leaders were then arrested and imprisoned or executed or were forced underground, and the party disintegrated (although elements of it remained strong in, for example, Ukraine, where in late July they would assassinate the German governor-general, Herman von Eichhorn). Some of its former members operated also, from September 1918, within the Party of Populists-Communists and the Party of Revolutionary Communism, which were subsequently to merge with the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Others organized peasant uprisings, mutinies, and strikes against the Soviet government in the civil-war period. However, the party could not operate on a national level or in a coordinated fashion. In 1923, representatives of those Left-SRs who remained at liberty declared the party to be formally disbanded. This failed to prevent former members being persecuted before and during the Terror of the 1930s.

LEFT-SR UPRISING. This is the term that is usually applied to the events in and around Moscow of early July 1918, when the Bolsheviks’ control of the Soviet government was challenged by the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries.

Having entered the Soviet government in December 1917, the Left-SRs came quickly into dispute with the Bolsheviks over the issue of peace and resigned from their commissariats following the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), but remained active within VTsIK, the Cheka, and other Soviet organizations. In these fora they denounced not only the Bolsheviks’ “betrayal” of the international revolution through signing a peace treaty with the Central Powers, but also the party’s alleged anti-peasant bias, as manifested in the policy of food requisitioning and the Committees of the Village Poor, and criticized the reliance on military specialists in the Red Army. Somewhat puzzlingly, the Left-SRs agreed with extrajudicial execution of political opponents by the Cheka, but opposed having the government legally pronounce death sentences through Revolutionary Tribunals. (This unusual position is best understood within the context of the SRs’ terrorist past.) Having won only a minority of seats at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets that assembled in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on 5 July 1918 (350 out of 1,164 delegates)—as a consequence of Bolshevik gerrymandering, they claimed—and faced with the Bolsheviks’ unwillingness to compromise, the Left-SRs determined on 5 July that their resolution (at their Third Party Congress of 28 June–1 July 1918) to “rectify the line of Soviet policy” would only be achieved through direct action. The following day, 6 July 1918, the Left-SRs Ia. G. Bliumkin and N. A. Andreev assassinated the German ambassador to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Count Wilhelm Mirbach, giving the signal, they hoped, for a popular uprising in Moscow (although they were keen to emphasize both at the time and thereafter that the revolt was aimed at rekindling the war against Germany and not against the Bolsheviks per se, and certainly not against the concept of Soviet power).

The main rebel force, some 1,800 strong, was commanded by D. I. Popov, a prominent member of the Cheka. They bombarded the Moscow Kremlin; seized the telephone exchange and the telegraph office; took several Bolsheviks hostage, including the head of the Cheka, Feliks Dzierżyński; and issued a number of declarations and manifestos. However, the Soviet government arrested the Left-SR leadership, who were still present and correct in their seats at the Bolshoi, and assembled sufficient Cheka and Red Army units (notably from the Latvian Riflemen), under N. I. Podvoiskii and I. I. Vācietis, to suppress the uprising within two days. It was nevertheless regarded as an extremely dangerous and hostile act on the part of the Left-SRs, as it coincided suspiciously closely with both the Iaroslavl′ Revolt and the mutiny on the Eastern Front organized by the Left-SR military commander M. A. Murav′ev. In the aftermath of the uprising, 13 Left-SR Chekists were executed, and the majority of Left-SR leaders were arrested and imprisoned, although some, like Bliumkhin, were later pardoned.

The 1968 historical drama Shestoe iulia (“The Sixth of July,” dir. Iu. Iu. Karasik) offered Soviet cinema-goers a succinct visual version of the official line on the Left-SRs’ action and included characterizations of all the leading participants on both sides.

Lemko-Rusyn Republic. See Florynka Republic.

LENIN (UL′IANOV), VLADIMIR IL′YCH (10 April 1870–21 January 1924). V. I. Lenin, the founder and leader of the Bolsheviks, was born in the Volga town of Simbirsk (since 1924, Uli′ianovsk) into a family of minor noble status (his father was the province’s chief inspector of schools) and of liberal-radical temperament. Soon after his father’s death in 1886, in May 1887 Lenin’s eldest brother, Aleksandr, was hanged for his part in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. All his other siblings were also involved in the revolutionary movement. Lenin was associated with Populist circles in his youth and, as a consequence of such activity, was sent down from Kazan′ University in December 1887, after just three months as a student. He completed his law degree as an external student of St. Petersburg University in 1891, but never practiced his profession. Instead, upon moving to St. Petersburg in 1893, the young Lenin (at that time still known by his birth name, Ul′ianov) became a devoted Marxist, initially in thrall to P. B. Struve. On 8 December 1895, he was arrested for his role, alongside Iulii Martov, in organizing a workers’ group (the Union for the Struggle for the Emancipation of Labor) in the capital and in February 1897 was exiled for three years to Shushenskoe in Siberia (Eniseisk guberniia), where he completed his first major work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899). In this he offered a critique of peasant-based Russian Populism on the grounds that capitalism had taken root in the country. (Indeed, much of the rest of Lenin’s life can be read as an attempt to reconcile the self-evident weakness of proletarian forces in Russia with the country’s undoubted potential for a revolution of some kind and to ensure Marxist and proletarian dominance in any such revolt.)

After his release from exile on 29 January 1900, and after a brief period of renewed imprisonment that June, Lenin (having apparently adopted that name from the proximity he had enjoyed while in exile to the Lena River) moved to Western Europe on 16 July 1900 to join the leadership of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), of which he had been a member since the party’s foundation in 1898, and to run its newspaper, Iskra (“The Spark”). At this time, he developed his exclusivist ideas on membership of the “vanguard” party, espoused in the book What Is to Be Done? (1902), which prefigured the schism in the RSDLP at its second congress, in London in 1903. Although he actually lost the vote on party membership, Lenin termed his group the “Majoritarians” (Bolsheviki, Bolsheviks) and his opponents, led by Martov, the “Minoritarians” (Mensheviki, Mensheviks), after winning a vote on the composition of the Iskra editorial board. He was a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP from 8 November 1903, but increasingly sought to establish the primacy of his own faction, the Bolsheviks.

Lenin returned to Russia briefly in November 1905, but played no significant part in the revolution of that year and soon moved to Finland and then back to Europe in December 1907. Thereafter, he was chiefly occupied with establishing the Bolsheviks’ credentials as the true Russian heirs of Karl Marx and in strengthening his own hold on the faction in the face of challenges from ultra-Leftists such as A. A. Bogdanov. Lenin was a member of the Foreign Bureau of the RSDLP from August 1908 to January 1912 and then, following the establishment of a separate central committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), was a member of it from 17 January 1912 until his death.

Lenin spent most of the First World War in Switzerland, arguing that the war was a consequence of imperialism (as espoused in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916) and that international finance capital was now so interdependent that its chain might be broken at its weakest link, in Russia. Nevertheless, the February Revolution took him as much by surprise as it did other socialists. Having been refused permission to return to Russia via France and Britain, he (and other Russian socialists) accepted the Germans’ offer of transport to a Baltic port on a sealed train. From Germany, he traveled (from the port of Sassnitz) via Sweden and Finland, arriving back in Petrograd on 4 April 1917. There he stunned his party colleagues by delivering his “April Theses,” demanding no support for the Russian Provisional Government and that his party adopt the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” He dropped that slogan when the Petrograd Soviet and VTsIK supported the Provisional Government in its suppression of the Bolshevik Party following the July Days, but turned to it again in September 1917, when Bolshevik strength within the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets reached majority status in the aftermath of the Kornilov affair.

To evade arrest in July 1917, Lenin had gone into hiding at Razliv, on the Gulf of Finland. From there, he urged the party Central Committee to prepare to seize power, but only had that made an “order of the day” at a secret Central Committee meeting on 10 October 1917. Even then he faced stiff resistance from some elements of the party (led by G. E. Zinov′ev and L. B. Kamenev) and inertia from others. Moreover, as there was still an active warrant for Lenin’s arrest, most of the detailed preparation of the October Revolution was left to L. D. Trotsky.

Following the seizure of power, Lenin held fewer posts than most of his comrades (although they were key posts): he was a member of the Politbiuro of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b) and later the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (10 October 1917–21 January 1924); chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) (27 October 1917–21 January 1924); chairman of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defense of the RSFSR (30 November 1918–6 July 1923); a candidate member (August 1920–June 1921), then a full member (June 1921–November 1922), then again a candidate member (December 1922–21 January 1924), of the executive committee of the Komintern; and chairman of the Sovnarkom and the Council of Labor and Defense of the USSR (6 July 1923–21 January 1924). Lenin authored the Decree on Land, the Decree on Peace, the Declaration on the Rights of the Toiling Peoples, and other foundational documents of the Soviet state and was instrumental in virtually all key political decisions made by the Soviet government during the civil-war years: to abandon the talks on the establishment of an all-socialist government sponsored by Vikzhel, to establish the Cheka, to close down the Constituent Assembly, to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), to establish a Food Army and the Committees of the Village Poor, to employ Red Terror against class enemies, to suppress the Kronshtadt Revolt and other political parties, to introduce the New Economic Policy and the Ban on Factions; etc. He also authored a number of works defining the meaning of the Russian Revolution (such as State and Revolution, 1918) and defending it from socialist critics on the right (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918) and the left (Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder, 1920). However, he tended to leave military affairs and strategy to Trotsky; only once did Lenin intervene significantly in a military debate, supporting the move (against Trotsky’s wishes) to have I. I. Vācietis replace S. S. Kamenev as main commander in chief of the Red Army in July 1919.

In the civil-war era, Lenin suffered from fatigue, exacerbated by the attempt upon his life launched by Fania Kaplan on 30 August 1918 (and according to some—notably A. F. Kerensky, in the British weekly Sunday Telegraph, in the last article he ever wrote, in April 1970—by the debilitating effects of the syphilis he had contracted from a Parisian prostitute in 1902). He suffered the first of several strokes in late 1921, undermining his efforts to combat the rising tide of bureaucracy in the party, the Russian chauvinism it exhibited toward the national minorities, and (intimately connected with these) the rise of J. V. Stalin. He was incapacitated by a second stroke on 26 May 1922, a third on 16 December 1922, and another on 9 March 1923. He spent most of the remainder of his life at a rest home at Gorky, outside Moscow, unable to walk or talk. Following his death in January 1924, Lenin’s body was preserved, and it remains on display in the mausoleum designed for it by A. V. Shchusev, which was completed on Red Square in Moscow in October 1930. (A wooden structure on the same spot had housed the corpse until then.)

Lenin has been the subject of numerous films and works of fiction. Of the Soviet films idolizing him, the best include M. I. Romm’s Lenin v Okt′iabre (“Lenin in October,” 1937) and Lenin v 1918 godu (“Lenin in 1918,” 1939); less memorable are Rasskazy o Lenine (“Tales of Lenin,” dir. S. I. Iutkevich, 1957) and Na odnoi planete (“On a Certain Planet,” dir. I. S. Olshanger, 1965). In contrast, of émigré novels traducing him, probably the best known is A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin in Zürich (1976). These works endure (as do thousands of paintings), but of the thousands of statues of Lenin that once adorned towns and cities across Russia and Eastern Europe, few now remain, and those that survive are subjected to frequent attacks. Innumerable places and institutions across the former USSR were also renamed in Lenin’s honor, including the city of St. Petersburg (Petrograd), which was called Leningrad from 26 January 1924 until 6 September 1991, and his birthplace, Simbirsk, which was renamed as Ul′ianovsk in 1924 and retains that name to this day. After the Second World War, his name was also attached to many locations and institutions across Eastern Europe, although most of these dropped the name after 1991. There remain, however, almost 50 streets named after Lenin in France, a dozen in Germany, at least 18 in Italy, several more in Africa and Asia, and two in the United Kingdom: Lenin Terrace in Stanley, County Durham, and Marx and Lenin Terrace in Chopwell, Tyne and Wear.

Levandovskii, Mikhail Karlovich (3 May 1890–29 July 1937). Staff captain (1916), komandarm, second rank (November 1935). The eminent Soviet commander M. K. Levandovskii was born at Tiflis, the son of a Russified Polish NCO in the Russian Army, and was a graduate of the Vladimir Military School (1912). After his father died suddenly in 1892, his Russian mother remarried a Terek Cossack, and the family moved to the Nikolaevsk stanitsa (Sunzhensk district) in the territory of the Terek Cossack Host and later to Groznyi. He saw action in the First World War with the 202nd Mountain Infantry Regiment in East Prussia, Poland, and Galicia, and after graduating from the Tiflis Ensign School in 1916, was later stationed with the 1st Armored Car Division in Petrograd. As a commander of armored car units in 1917, he distinguished himself during the suppression of the Kornilov affair and the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising. He joined the SR-Maximalists in early 1918 and the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1920.

When the Russian Army demobilized in late 1917, Levandovskii returned to Chechnia, where he helped organize units of Red Guards and became the Red military commander of Groznyi and Vladikavkaz. From August 1918, he was people’s commissar for military affairs of the Terek Soviet Republic, commanding the operations that saw White forces expelled from Vladikavkaz in August 1818, and was at the same time, having formally joined the Red Army, commander of the Vladikavkaz–Groznyi Red Army Group. From December 1918, he served as chief of the operations department of staff of the 11th Red Army in the North Caucasus during its retreat to Astrakhan (although he was senseless with typhus at the time) and from 3 January–13 February 1919 was commander of that force. He subsequently served (from March 1919) as commander of the western region of the Caucasian–Caspian Front, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, and commander of the 7th Rifle Division. From May 1919, he operated in the Don region against the forces of General K. Mamontov, as commander of the 33rd Rifle Division, distinguishing himself in the capture of Rostov-on-Don in early 1920. From 29 March to 12 July 1920, he was commander of the 11th Red Army, overseeing its operations against the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, and was subsequently three times named commander of the 9th Red Army (19 July–5 October 1920, 21 November 1920–26 January 1921, and 22 April–13 June 1921), at the head of which he oversaw the defeat of the landings on the Taman peninsula of the Kuban Cossack expeditionary force commanded by General S. G. Ulagai in August 1920. From 7 March to 18 April 1921, he also commanded the 10th Terek-Daghestan Red Army. He was then made regional military commissar of Tambov guberniia (June–September 1921), directing the mopping up of what was left of the Tambov Rebellion, and from September 1921 was assistant commander and then commander of the North Caucasus Military District.

After recuperating from injuries sustained in a car crash, from 30 April 1924 to 2 December 1925, Levandovskii was commander of the Turkestan Front in battles against the Basmachi. From January 1926, he commanded the Red Banner Caucasian Army and from 1928 was the plenipotentiary to the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of the People’s Commissariat of Military and Naval Affairs of the USSR. From December 1929, he was commander of forces of the Siberian Military District and from 1932 to 1933 was assigned to work in Berlin with the German Reichswehr. He returned to command the North Caucasus Red Banner Army for a second time (from 1934) and then the newly created North Caucasus Military District (from 1935). From 1934, he served as a member of the military council of the Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs of the USSR and in 1937 was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Finally, in January 1937 he was placed in command of the Primorskoi group of forces of the Independent Red Banner Far Eastern Army. He was arrested on 23 February 1937, and some months later was charged by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR with belonging to an “anti-Soviet, Trotskyist military-fascist organization.” He pleaded guilty and was immediately executed. Levandovskii was posthumously rehabilitated on 28 April 1956.

Liakhov, Vladimir Platonovich (20 June 1869–30 April 1920). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1900), colonel (6 December 1904), major general (13 May 1912), lieutenant general (13 May 1916). One of the most prominent commanders of White forces in the North Caucasus, V. P. Liakhov was born into a family of the Kuban Cossack Host at Novosuvorovsk stanitsa, in the Kuban oblast′, and was a graduate of the 1st Moscow Cadet Corps (1887), the 3rd Alekseev Military School (1889), and the Academy of the General Staff (1896). Following a series of postings in the Caucasus and Transcaucasia (as well as a stint as commander of Russia’s Persian Cossack Brigade, during which he became notorious for the shelling of the National Assembly at Tehran and for ordering the execution of several constitutionalist leaders), from 13 May 1912 he was chief of staff of the Kuban Cossack Host. During the First World War, he served with the Ismailovskii Guards Regiment (1914–1915) and was commandant of the Mikhailovskii Fortress (from 21 January 1915), commander of the 39th Infantry Division of the 1st Caucasian Army Corps (from 22 May 1916), and commander of the 1st Caucasus Army Corps (from 12 March 1917). He was also commander of the Maritime Forces of the Caucasian Army Corps (January 1915–June 1916) and in that capacity played a leading role in capturing the port of Trabzon (Trebizond) from the 3rd Turkish Army (15 April 1916).

Following the collapse of the Russian Army in 1917–1918, Liakhov remained in the Caucasus and joined the White movement, initially commanding a partisan detachment on the Vladikavkaz railway, before, on 15 November 1918, being placed at the head of the 3rd Army Corps of the Volunteer Army during the Second Kuban March. At the climax of that campaign, he led the capture of Piatigorsk (8 January 1919). He was then (from 10 January 1919) given the command of the Forces of the Terek-Daghestan Region within the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) and worked to raise troops from the Mountain Peoples and the Terek Cossack Host, but was forced to retire from that post in connection with an investigation into a fraud allegedly committed by his staff (16 April 1919). He was subsequently placed in the reserve of the AFSR and moved to Georgia. Liakhov was killed at his home in the outer suburbs of Batumi on 30 April 1920 (apparently by bandits during a robbery, but according to some sources he was assassinated).

Lianozov, STEPAN GEORGIEVICH (9 August 1873–1951). One of imperial Russia’s most prominent oil barons (he was sometimes referred to as “the Russian Rockefeller”), the White politician S. G. Lianozov, who was of Armenian decent, was a graduate of the Law Faculty of Moscow University (1898) and served on the boards of directors of more than 20 companies prior to the revolution. He was one of the prime movers behind the “Oil” conglomerate that sought to limit the control over Russia’s reserves of the Nobel brothers, Shell, and other foreign concerns.

Following the October Revolution, Lianozov went into emigration and became an active opponent of Soviet power, being elected chairman of the White North-West Government (11 August–5 December 1919) and serving also as minister of foreign affairs and minister of finance in that regime. In 1920 in Paris, together with G. N. Nobel and P. P. Riabushinskii, he founded the Trade-Finance and Industrial Committee (“Torgprom”) to defend the interests of exiled Russian capitalists. Its stated aim was to fight the Bolsheviks “on the economic front.” From December 1920, he pursued business interests in the Far East, notably (from August 1922) as chairman of the board of directors of a Russian–Japanese–American consortium called Sakhalin Oil that looked to exploit the natural resources of the island, which was then under Japanese occupation. He died in Paris and is buried at the Passy cemetery.

LIBER, MARC (24 May 1880–4 October 1937). Marc Liber (born Michael Goldman), who was to become the leader of the Bund, was born at Vil′na into the family of a Hebrew poet and follower of Hovev Zion. Like his two brothers and two sisters, he became active in the revolutionary movement from an early age, falling in with Lithuanian social-democratic circles at the age of 12 and joining the party in 1896, while at secondary school. He also at this time met and befriended Feliks Dzierżyński, who would later marry Liber’s sister. Liber joined the Bund in 1900 and thereafter spent most of the prewar period in exile in Europe. In 1903, he was the Bund’s chief spokesman at the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in London, where he clashed with the Russians on the issues of national party branches’ organizational autonomy and led the Bund out of its association with the RSDLP. He was also prominent during the 1905 Revolution, as an agitator and as the chief representative of the Bund Central Committee (to which he had been elected in 1902) in the St. Petersburg Soviet. During the subsequent period of reaction in Russia, Liber preached the reunion of the Bund and the RSDLP and advocated legal activities. Consequently, he was one of the chief among those criticized by V. I. Lenin as a “liquidationist” (i.e., one who wanted to disestablish the underground party). He was reelected to the RSDLP Central Committee in 1907. Despite his moderate beliefs, he was arrested by the tsarist authorities in 1910 and fled abroad. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1914 and became an advocate of “defensism” during the war, but was nevertheless arrested as a subversive and remained in prison until the post-February 1917 amnesty.

In 1917, Liber was prominent as a rightist leader of the Mensheviks and the Bund, which he again represented on the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and (from June 1917) as a deputy chairman of VTsIK. Following the October Revolution, he resigned from the Menshevik Central Committee and VtsIK in protest at efforts to negotiate for a coalition government with the Bolsheviks, arguing that Lenin’s party would never adhere to such an agreement. He adopted the same stance at the Bund’s Eighth Congress and, probably as a consequence, was not reelected to its Central Committee. During the civil wars, having rejoined the Menshevik Central Committee in May 1918, he lived mostly in Ukraine, from where, in the newspaper he edited at Khar′kov, Mysl′ (“Thought”), he kept up a barrage of criticism of the Soviet government and campaigned in favor of Allied intervention in Russia and an anti-Bolshevik alliance with the Kadets. As a consequence, Liber was frequently excoriated as a counterrevolutionary by the Bolsheviks and linked in their lexicon with the Right-Mensheviks F. I. Dan and Abram Gots as the hybrid monster “Gotsliberdan.” That he escaped execution has often been ascribed to his close relationship with Dzierżyński. Nevertheless, he was arrested at Saratov in 1921 and spent most of the the rest of his life in prison and Siberian and Central Asian exile, before being arrested a final time at Alma Ata on 14 March 1937 and subsequently executed. He was posthumously rehabilitated (on 17 May 1958) for the crimes for which he was convicted in 1938, and in 1990 was rehabiltated for all crimes.

LIKBEZ. The Russian acronym for Likvidatsiia bezgramotnosti (“Liquidation of Illiteracy”), one of the first and most successful of the social reform campaigns of the Soviet government. It was launched by a Sovnarkom decree of 26 December 1919 and aimed to achieve universal literacy (in their native languages) of all Soviet citizens aged 8 to 50.

lisovskii, nikolai vasil′evich (1 December 1885–18 February 1957). Staff captain (24 March 1914), captain (24 March 1915), lieutenant colonel (1917), lieutenant general (1957). The Soviet commander N. V. Lisovskii, who was the son of a village priest, was born at Adakhovshchina, in Minsk guberniia and studied at the Minsk Seminary (from which he was expelled in 1905, for organizing a student strike). He volunteered for military service in September 1905 and subsequently graduated from the Vil′na Officer School (1907) and the Academy of the General Staff (1914). During the First World War, after holding command posts at company and battalion level, he served as a senior adjutant on the staff of the 101st Infantry Division (from 14 July 1916) and in 1917 was chief of the operational section of the staff of the South-West Front.

Following the October Revolution, in February 1918 Lisovskii volunteered for service with the Red Army. During the civil wars, he held numerous important posts, including head of the operational section of the White Sea Military District (15 May–6 August 1918), chief of staff of forces of the Kotlas region (6 August–26 November 1918), commander of the 1st Independent Rifle Brigade (26 November 1918–12 January 1919), commander of forces of the Dvinsk–Mezensk region (12 January–26 November 1919), commander of the 54th Rifle Division (7 August–27 October 1919), chief of staff of the 6th Red Army (27 October–22 November 1919 and 2 January–10 April 1920), commander of forces of the Belorussian Military District (10 April–26 June 1920), chief of staff of the 3rd Red Army (4 July–20 October 1920), and commander of the 12th Red Army (26 October–25 December 1920). He subsequently served in senior staff posts across Soviet Russia and, from 1933 to 1935, was deputy chief of staff of the Red Army. Lisovskii joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1932, but was arrested as a counterrevolutionary on 22 February 1938 and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. He was freed on 22 February 1948, and found work at Biisk (in the Altai), but was again arrested on 26 November 1949 and sent to a camp in Siberia. Lisovskii was finally freed in August 1954, and lived to see his rehabilitation in 1955, although he died in 1957, in Moscow, before receiving notification of his promotion to the rank of lieutenant general.

LITBEL. The acronym by which was generally known the Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic—generally regarded as a puppet regime of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic—which arose from the union on 27 February 1919 of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus and the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. The head of state (chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets) was Kazimierz Cichowski; the head of the government (chairman of the Council of Ministers) was Vincas Kapsukas, although a Council of Defense under the latter assumed full military and civil authority from 19 April 1919. The regime was initially based at Vilnius, but the invasion of that city by Poland at the onset of the Soviet–Polish War necessitated relocation first to Minsk (April 1919) and then Smolensk (August 1919). From 9 June 1919, the forces at its command, known as the Lithuanian–Belorussian (Red) Army, were reunited with the Red Army (as the 16th Red Army) and placed under its direct command; on 17 July 1919, the Council of Defense was disbanded. Litbel itself was dissolved on 25 August 1919, by which time almost all the territory it had claimed was under the control of either Poland or the forces of the Lithuanian Taryba.

LITERATURE. See FICTION.

Lithuania, Kingdom of. This short-lived state, of indeterminate borders, was created on 4 July 1918 by the Lithuanian Taryba, which offered the throne of Lithuania to Duke Wilhelm of Urach. He accepted the offer on 13 July 1918 and took the name King Mindaugas II, but did not move to Lithuania (even though it was entirely occupied by German forces). On 2 November 1918, as Germany collapsed at the end of the First World War, the Taryba adopted a republican constitution, bringing an end to the phantom reign of Mindaugas II.

LITHUANIAN–BELORUSSIAN (RED) ARMY. This Red military force was created according to an order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic on 13 March 1919, from forces previously incorporated into the 16th Red Army on the Western Front. Its complement included the 8th Rifle Division (March–June 1919), the 2nd Border Division (March–June 1919), the Lithuanian Rifle Division (March–April 1919), the 17th Rifle Division (March–June 1919), and the 52nd Rifle Division (March–June 1919). It was formally the army of Litbel and was engaged, across Lithuania and Belorussia, in battles with German and then Polish forces. Having been driven out of Lithuania in the Lithuanian Wars of Independence, on 9 June 1919 its forces were returned to the 16th Red Army.

Commanders of the Lithuanian–Belorussian (Red) Army were A. E. Snesarev (13 March–31 May 1919) and F. K. Mironov (acting, 31 May–9 June 1919). Its chief of staff was A. V. Novikov (13 March–9 June 1919).

LITHUANIAN–BELORUSSIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. See LITBEL.

LITHUANIAN COUNCIL. See TARYBA.

LITHUANIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. This short-lived entity, led by Vincas Kapsukas, claiming authority over the Kovno and Vil′na gubernii of the former Russian Empire and representing one of the contending sides in the Lithuanian Wars of Independence, was proclaimed by the Lithuanian Bolsheviks (allegedly at Vilnius, although some historians doubt that it ever met there) on 16 December 1918. Other members of the government (Sovnarkom) were Zigmas Aleksa-Angarietis, Pranas Svotelis-Proletaras, Semen Dimanstein, Kazimierz Cichowski, Aleksandras Jakševičius, Konstantinas Kernovičius, and A. Weinstein. It was recognized by the Sovnarkom of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic on 22 December 1918 and was offered financial and military assistance from Soviet Russia (including the dispatch from Moscow of the hurriedly raised 5th Vilnius Regiment).

The Lithuanian SSR announced, but did not have the chance to implement, a program of land nationalization and was forced to evacuate Vilnius on 2 January 1919, when the city was occupied by Polish forces. On 6 January 1919, Red Army forces, which had been advancing into Lithuania since December 1918 in the aftermath of the Soviet government’s renunciation (on 13 November 1918) of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which had secured Lithuania’s separation from Russia), reoccupied the city, and the government returned. By late January 1919, Red forces occupied about two-thirds of the territory of Lithuania, but combined Lithuanian nationalist forces and German Freikorps prevented them from reaching Kaunas (Kovno). Moreover, the regime faced widespread opposition from the Lithuanian peasant population, the nationalist government of Antanas Smetona, and the Polish Army. In view of that, on 18–20 February 1919 the First Lithuanian Congress of Soviets of Workers, Landless and Poor Peasants and Red Army Deputies voted for union with the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, as Litbel, a union formally proclaimed on 27 February 1919.

LITHUANIAN WARS OF INDEPENDENCE. This term (in Lithuanian, Laisvės kovos) denotes the series of conflicts involving the Lithuanian state in the years following the declaration of independence: against the Red Army and its Belorussian allies (December 1918–August 1919), against the West Russian Volunteer Army of General P. R. Bermondt-Avalov (June–December 1919), and against Poland (August–November 1920, including the Polish–Lithuanian War).

Although Lithuanian independence was proclaimed by the Taryba on 16 February 1918, German occupation forces suppressed any meaningful expression of independence until the armistice of 11 November 1918, when a government led by Augustinas Voldemaras was formed (even though, in the summer of 1918, the Taryba had proclaimed a Kingdom of Lithuania and offered the throne to a German prince). Although Voldemaras initially declared that Lithuania needed no formal army, as threats to the state’s existence closed in on various fronts (both internal and external) from December 1918, a volunteer army was formed, with German assistance, and on 5 March 1919 a mobilization was declared of the 1897–1899 age group. By mid-1919, the Lithuanian Army was 8,000–10,000 strong. Of these, some 1,700 were killed in the battles that followed, 2,600 wounded, and 800 listed as missing in action.

On 16 December 1918, the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic was declared at Vil′na (Vilnius) and, following the withdrawal of German forces from the city (on 31 December 1918), on 5 January 1919 units of the Lithuanian–Belorussian (Red) Army entered the city that Voldemaras’s government had claimed as its capital. They were supported by a local Red militia from Šiauliai (the “Samogotian Platoon”) and Belorussian forces to the south (which united with the Lithuanian SSR as Litbel on 27 February 1919), but were opposed not only by Lithuanian forces (under the leadership of General Silvestras Žukauskis) but also by various German Freikorps units (including that of Rüdiger von der Goltz), which (in the period April–June 1919) pushed Red forces eastward, causing the dissolution of Litbel. At that point, the front stabilized, as the Red Army became fully occupied with the successive advances of White forces from Siberia, South Russia, and the Baltic.

On 19 April 1919, Polish forces captured Vil′na (which they called Wilno). On 12 July 1920, a Soviet–Lithuanian peace treaty was signed (the Treaty of Moscow) that recognized Lithuania’s independence and its possession of the Vilnius region, although many historians argue that had Soviet Russia triumphed in the Soviet–Polish War, the opportunity would have been taken to Sovietize Lithuania. A further threat to Lithuanian independence arrived with the incursion into its territory of the West Russian Volunteer Army, which in June moved south from Latvia and captured the town of Kuršėnai. By October 1919, Bermondt-Avalov’s forces had control of most of Samogitia (western Lithuania), despite the formation of Lithuanian partisan detachments in the region. However, a determined offensive by the Lithuanian Army was launched in October–November 1919 that culminated in Lithuania’s recapture of the major railway center Radviliškis (21–22 November 1919). At this point, the Allied mission in the region stepped in to mediate, and the Bermondtians were ushered off Lithuanian territory by mid-December 1919.

Finally, the Lithuanian state was challenged by Poland in the Polish–Lithuanian War, which (following the abrogation of the Allied-brokered settlement of the Suwałki Agreement during the Żeligowski mutiny) resulted in the regions of Vilnius and Suvalki falling under the control of Poland in the interwar years and a new (according to the constitution, temporary) Lithuanian capital being established at Kaunas. The Polish and Latvian occupation of Daugavpils, in January 1920, meant also that, during its interwar period of independence, Lithuania had no common frontier with Soviet Russia.

little international. See CENTRAL BUREAU OF COMMUNIST ORGANIZATIONS OF THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES.

Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich (5 July 1876–31 December 1951). The Soviet diplomat M. M. Litvinov (real name Meier Genokh Moisevich Wallakh-Finkelstein) was born at Białystok, Grodno guberniia, in Russian Poland, into the family of a Jewish bank clerk. Having graduated from the local Realschule in 1893, he volunteered for military service and served in the Russian Army in Baku. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party upon its foundation in 1898 and gravitated toward the Bolsheviks following the party schism of 1903. Litvinov was initially active (often under the pseudonym “Papasha”) in recruiting party members around Kiev and was imprisoned in 1901 by the tsarist authorities. He escaped from Kiev’s Lukianivska Prison in 1902 and fled to Switzerland, where he worked with V. I. Lenin on Iskra (“The Spark”), organizing the smuggling of copies of the newspaper into Russia. He returned to Russia in 1905 and participated in the revolution of that year, but was forced into exile again in 1906. He settled in France, but was expelled from there in 1908 for revolutionary activities (including running arms back to Russia and money laundering). He then settled in London, where he married an Englishwoman (Ivy Lowe) and worked for the publisher Williams and Norgate. From 1914, he was the Bolsheviks’ representative on the Second International’s International Socialist Bureau at Brussels.

Following the October Revolution, Litvinov was named by Lenin as the Soviet government’s plenipotentiary in Britain, but he was not recognized as such by the British authorities, who arrested him following the Lockhart plot and exchanged him for the imprisoned Robert Bruce Lockhart in October 1918. (Ironically, in January 1918 Litvinov had supplied Lockhart with a letter of recommendation addressed to L. D. Trotsky.) Back in Russia, he served on the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and was responsible for efforts to normalize relations with other states. From 1918 to 1919, he headed the Soviet mission in Copenhagen, from where he sought to breach the Allied blockade of Soviet Russia and where he negotiated the Anglo-Soviet Copenhagen Agreement (12 February 1920) on the exchange of prisoners. He also served as chief Soviet plenipotentiary to Estonia (26 December 1920–12 September 1921). In May 1921, he became deputy commissar for foreign affairs and in the 1920s made a mark at several international conferences, as well as negotiating a number of trade agreements.

Litvinov succeeded G. V. Chicherin as commissar for foreign affairs on 21 July 1930 (although Chicherin’s ill health had meant that Molotov had effectively filled that role since 1926), and with the rise to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler became the chief proponent of collective security, achieving the entry of the USSR into the League of Nations in 1934 and signing mutual defense pacts with France and Czechoslovakia in 1935.

When Stalin changed his line on collective security, Litvinov was replaced as foreign minister by V. M. Molotov on 3 May 1939, in anticipation of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, and on 20 February 1941 was also relieved of the seat on the party Central Committee that he had occupied since 10 February 1934. However, he had survived the purges (although evidence suggests that J. V. Stalin had planned to have him killed), and upon the German invasion of the USSR was brought out of retirement and named the USSR’s extraordinary ambassador to the United States (from 10 November 1941), as a symbol of collective antifascism. He was recalled to Russia on 22 August 1943, largely due to his failure to persuade the Americans to open a second front on mainland Europe. After his return to Moscow, he carried out numerous roles in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (where he was again deputy people’s commissar from 10 November 1941), before retiring in August 1946. He subsequently lived in seclusion until his death from a heart attack. Litvinov was buried in Moscow’s Novodevich′e cemetery. His grandson, P. M. Litvinov, became a noted Soviet dissident in the Brezhnev era.

LITVINOV–O’GRADY AGREEMENT. See COPENHAGEN AGREEMENT.

LIUBIMOV, VLADIMIR VISSARIONOVICH (1881–10 December 1937). Captain (10 August 1915), lieutenant (1917), kombrig (13 March 1936). The Soviet military specialist and commander V. V. Liubimov was born at Gubinko, in Samara guberniia, and was a graduate of the Academy of the General Staff (1914). During the First World War, he served with the 51st Lithuanian Infantry Division before (from 1915) being attached to the general staff of the Russian Army, then serving as assistant senior adjutant with the quartermaster general of the 11th Army (from 14 July 1916), then as a senior adjutant with the staff of the 5th Siberian Army Corps.

In early 1918, Liubimov volunteered for service with the Red Army, became chief of staff of the 8th Red Army (from 3 April–8 May 1919), and was then commander of that force (8 May–2 July 1919). He subsequently served in Siberia, as temporary chief of staff of the 3rd Red Army (27 November–19 December 1919) and later, as chief of staff of the 5th Red Army (4 September 1920–6 July 1922). From 14 to 24 August 1922, he was also acting commander of the 5th Red Army. He later served as commander of the 16th Rifle Corps (1928–1934) and taught at various military academies. Liubimov was arrested on 23 July 1937 and, having been found guilty of membership in a “counterrevolutionary military organization” by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on 10 December 1937, was executed at Kommunarka, Moscow, and buried in a mass grave. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 24 January 1963.

Liven, Anatolii Pavlovich (2 November 1873–3 April 1937). Colonel (January 1919). A scion of an eminent Baltic German noble family, Prince A. P. Liven was born in St. Petersburg and was a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1894) and the Nicholas Cavalry School (1896); he served thereafter in the Chevalier Guards, before retiring from the service in 1908. He reenlisted during the First World War, but following the February Revolution returned to his family estates at Mitava (Jelgava). He was arrested there, as a suspected counterrevolutionary, by Red forces on 18 February 1918 and imprisoned at Ekaterinburg, but was released following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and handed over to German forces at Orsha. From there, he made his way back to Latvia, where he entered the White movement.

At Riga, in December 1918, together with General A. P. Rodzianko, Liven met Admiral E. A. Sinclair, the commander of the Royal Navy squadron in the Baltic, to request Allied assistance in equipping an anti-Bolshevik army to advance on Petrograd. When Sinclair could offer no definite promise of assistance, Liven set about creating his own Libau Volunteer Detachment (from May 1919, the Liven Detachment) of Russian officers in the area and other elements. In battles against Red forces around Riga in May 1919, Liven was severely wounded in the thigh and stomach and was forced to hand over command to his subordinate (Captain Dydorov). Liven would spend the rest of his life on crutches and underwent numerous operations, but remained active in the White movement, undertaking a mission to London and Paris in August 1919, on behalf of General N. N. Iudenich. He moved to Paris in 1920, but settled near Riga from 1924. Liven’s family estates were lost during the land reform in independent Latvia, but he enjoyed a state pension and some esteem as a hero of the Latvian War of Liberation. In his later years, he was involved in publishing and literary work.

Livytskyi, Andriy mykolaivych (9 April 1879–17 January 1954). The Ukrainian politician Andriy Livytskyi was born at Lyplavo into an ancient Cossack family and was a graduate of the Mathematical and Juridical Faculties of Kiev’s St Vladimir University (1903). He worked as a barrister at Khar′kov from 1905, and from 1913 to 1917 was an elected judge of the Zolotonoshskyi region of Poltava guberniia. From his student days onward, he participated in Ukrainian nationalist parties, and from 1901 was a member of the illegal Revolutionary Party of Ukraine. Consequently, he was arrested and exiled on several occasions by the tsarist authorities.

In 1917, Livytskyi was elected to the Ukrainian Central Rada, and the following year he joined the Ukrainian National Union, as an opponent of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii’s Ukrainian State. With the rise of the Ukrainian National Republic Directory, in December 1918 he helped found the Labor Congress of Ukraine, then served as minister of justice and later minister of foreign affairs in the Ukrainian National Republic; from 14 October to 18 November 1920 he was briefly prime minister of that state. He was also, from November 1919, a member of the Ukrainian delegation that signed the Treaty of Warsaw (21–24 April 1920), which brought to an end the Ukrainian–Polish War. He then became head of the Ukrainian government-in-exile from 1922 to 1948, assuming also, in 1926 (after the assassination of S. V. Petliura), the title of Chief Otaman of the Ukrainian People’s Army in Exile. He remained in Warsaw throughout the interwar years, constantly under the surveillance of the Polish police. At the end of the Second World War, he moved to Germany to escape the Soviet invasion. He died at Karlsruhe and was initially buried in Munich, but his ashes were later reinterred in the United States, at the Ukrainian Memorial Cemetery at Bound Brook, New Jersey.

LOCKHART PLOT. This still murky affair, sometimes also referred to as the “Three Ambassadors’ Plot,” exploded in Moscow in late August 1918. According to Soviet accounts, the British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, together with the French ambassador to Russia, Joseph Noulens, and U.S. ambassador Joseph Francis, were involved in a scheme to bring down the Soviet government through the funding of armed risings by various anti-Bolshevik organizations and bribery of the Kremlin guard. Also involved, it was alleged, were the British naval attaché Captain Francis Cromie, the American spy Xenophon Kalamatiano, French consul Joseph Fernand Grenard, and several other Allied diplomats and military personnel. The charges were not altogether groundless, as since May 1918 the British and the French had certainly been in contact with underground anti-Bolshevik organizations in Moscow, and Lockhart had supplied funds to the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, the National Center, and B.V. Savinkov’s Society for Defense of the Motherland and Freedom, but how much of the detailed evidence of these transactions was known by the Cheka at the time is uncertain, as is the involvement in Lockhart’s activities of all those arrested on the night of 31 August–1 September 1918. The shady role in these events of the British agent Sydney Reilly is also a feature of the affair, and it has been suggested that Lockhart and the ambassadors were blamed for machinations that had been concocted independently by him. It has also been suggested that at least part of the “Lockhart plot” was a provocation, masterminded by the Cheka boss Feliks Dzierżyński and designed to uncover a plot that he suspected might exist but lacked the hard evidence to prove. It is also possible that the Soviet authorities simply panicked in the wake of the attempt on Lenin’s life in Moscow (on 30 August 1918) and the escalation of the Allied intervention in Russia earlier in the month (including the landings at Arkhangel′sk on 2 August 1918 and at Krasnovodsk four days later).

Lockhart and Grenard were briefly arrested and subsequently, in October 1918, exchanged for Soviet representatives held abroad (among them M. M. Litvinov), but Kalamatiano would languish in a Moscow prison until 1921, and Cromie lost his life when an angry mob stormed the British embassy in Petrograd. Whatever was the truth behind the affair, the “Lockhart plot” led to an open breach in relations between Soviet Russia and the Allies (who until then had been keeping open a number of semiofficial lines of communication to the Kremlin) and gave weight to the arguments of those on both sides who held that there could be no accommodation between the Allies and Soviet Russia.

The Lockhart plot was frequently raised in Soviet attacks on the West, especially, during the Cold War, and was the subject of the feature film Zagovor poslov (“The Ambassadors’ Plot,” dir. N. V. Rozantsev, 1965).

LOCKHART, ROBERT HAMILTON BRUCE (2 September 1887–27 February 1970). The focal point of one of the most dramatic incidents of the civil wars, the so-called Lockhart plot, the British diplomat and author Robert Bruce Lockhart was born in Anstruther, Scotland, the son of a schoolmaster. He attended Fettes College, Edinburgh, and schools in France and Germany, and worked as a rubber planter in Malaysia before entering the British consular service. Having served as vice consul and acting consul general in Moscow from 1912 to September 1917, he returned to Russia after the departure of the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, as head of a special mission to maintain semiofficial contacts with the Soviet government (a role comparable to that of Jacques Sadoul for France).

Initially, Lockhart enjoyed good relations with People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs L. D. Trotsky and was a strong opponent of Allied intervention in Russia. Even after the Soviet government had signed and ratified the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), he continued to argue that there was a good chance of inducing the Bolsheviks to rejoin the war against the Central Powers. By mid-May 1918, however, he had changed his mind and was offering moral and financial support to underground anti-Bolshevik organizations such as the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, the Society for Defense of the Motherland and Freedom, and the National Center. Then, in July–August 1918, he became the focal point of what was probably an elaborate “sting” operation, the so-called Lockhart plot, orchestrated by the head of the Cheka, F. E. Dzierżyński. In the aftermath of the assassination attempt against V. I. Lenin, Lockhart was arrested on 1 September 1918, released and then rearrested, and subsequently imprisoned for several periods (at one point in the Kremlin), under suspicion of plotting to overthrow the Soviet regime, but in October 1918, he was exchanged for the Soviet diplomat M. M. Litvinov, who had been detained in retaliation in Britain. He was subsequently posted to Prague before resigning from the diplomatic service and working in banking and journalism. On the outbreak of the Second World War, Lockhart returned to the Foreign Office and served as director general of the Political Warfare Executive (1941–1945). In 1943, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. After the war, he concentrated on writing and broadcasting.

Lokhvitskii, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (7 October 1867–5 November 1935). Colonel (6 December 1906), major general (11 February 1915), lieutenant general (1917), general of infantry (1931). Born into an impoverished noble family in St. Petersburg, the White commander N. A. Lokhvitskii was a graduate of the Second Constantine Military School (1889) and the Academy of the General Staff (1900) and a veteran of the Russo–Japanese War; during the First World War, he commanded the 1st Brigade of the Russian Expeditionary Force in France (January 1916–January 1918).

In April 1919, with a group of other officers, Lokhvitskii moved to Siberia to work on the staff of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (from 30 June 1919) and subsequently to command the 2nd Army on the Eastern Front (22 July–1 September 1919). In October 1919, he was sent by Kolchak to Irkutsk to prepare for the transfer there of the military and political establishments of the Omsk government. Following the collapse of the White movement in Siberia, he worked on the staff of the forces of Ataman G. M. Semenov in Transbaikalia (March–December 1920), rising to the post of chief of staff of the Far Eastern (White) Army. He was evacuated from Vladivostok in October 1922, as Red forces closed on the port. In emigration, he spent some time in China before, in 1923, moving to France, where he worked for the ministry of war and, from 1927, was head of the Russian Society of Monarchists-Legitimists. Lokhvitskii was the brother of the poet Mirra (Mariia) Lokhvitskaia and the writer Nadezhda Teffi. He is buried in the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, in Paris.

LOMANOV, ANATOLII NIKOLAEVICH. See LAMANOV (LOMANOV), ANATOLII NIKOLAEVICH.

Lukomskii, Aleksandr Sergeevich (10 July 1868–25 January 1939). Lieutenant-colonel (6 April 1903), colonel (22 April 1907), major general (6 December 1910), lieutenant general (8 November 1914). One of the architects of and leading figures in the White movement in South Russia, A. S. Lukomskii was a graduate of the Petrovsk-Poltava Cadet Corps, the Nicholas Engineering School (1888), and the Academy of the General Staff (1897). He subsequently filled a variety of staff posts, including senior adjutant on the staff of the 12th Infantry Division (17 January–6 May 1898); assistant senior adjutant (6 May 1898–16 December 1902), then senior adjutant (16 December 1902–4 December 1907), with the Kiev Military District; chief of staff of the 42nd Infantry Division (4 December 1907–3 January 1909); and acting head (3 January–14 March 1909), then head (14 March 1909–29 January 1913), of the mobilization department of the General Staff. He then became assistant head of the chancery of the Ministry of War (29 January 1913–April 1916) and assistant minister of war (June 1915–April 1916). He was then transferred to the command of the 32nd Rifle Division (from 2 April 1916), with which he participated in the Brusilov Offensive of 1916, and afterward became quartermaster general on the Staff of the Supreme Commander in Chief, Nicholas II (from December 1916). In that capacity, with General V. I. Gurko, he elaborated plans for the Russian Army’s campaigning for 1917 that would have involved a concentration on the Romanian Front, but these were subsequently scuppered by the opposition of frontline commanders (notably Generals N. V. Ruzskii and A. I. Evert). Following the February Revolution, Lukomskii was made commander of the 1st Army Corps (2 April 1917). He was subsequently chief of staff under General L. G. Kornilov (20 July–28 August 1917) and, together with the latter, was arrested for plotting against the Provisional Government during the Kornilov affair. He was imprisoned at Bykhov, together with Kornilov, A. I. Denikin, and other future leaders of the White movement, and with them escaped in November 1917, making his way (disguised as a German colonist) to the Don, arriving at Novocherkassk on 23 November 1917, and helped to found the Volunteer Army.

Lukomskii acted initially as Kornilov’s chief of staff (27 December 1917 to 9 February 1918), and in early 1918 was his special emissary to the governments of the Don Cossack Host and the Kuban Cossack Host. He was with the latter, at Ekaterinodar, in February 1918, when the town was captured by Red forces. Narrowly evading arrest, he managed to flee to Tsaritsyn, and from there he made his way, via Kiev and Odessa, to rejoin the Volunteers. He was a member of the Don Civil Council (December 1917–August 1918) and was third assistant chairman of the Special Council under General M. V. Alekseev (31 August–October 1918), as well as simultaneously serving as assistant commander of the Volunteer Army (April–October 1918). He subsequently worked as head of the Military and Marine Directorate (i.e., as minister of war, January 1919–8 February 1920) and as assistant commander in chief in the Denikin regime (October 1918–September 1919) and then chairman of the Special Council (from 27 October–December 1919) and head of the Government of the Main Commander of the Armed Forces of South Russia (from 30 December 1919).

On 8 February 1920, together with Generals P. N. Wrangel and P. N. Shatilov and Admirals D. V. Neniukov and A. D. Bubnov, Lukomskii was removed from his posts, for plotting to have Wrangel replace General N. N. Shilling as commandant of Crimea. When Wrangel succeeded Denikin, he named Lukomskii as his representative to the Allied staffs at Constantinople and dispatched him to Turkey (March–November 1920). In the early 1920s, in emigration, he served as a senior advisor to Wrangel and subsequently, based at Nice, to the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich Romanov. It was on the latter’s initiative that (on 31 July 1926) Lukomskii was named head of all émigré military organizations connected to ROVS in the United States and the Far East, in which capacity he subsequently worked closely with General E. K. Miller. He died in Paris and is buried there, in the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.

Lunacharskii, Anatolii Vasil′evich (11 November 1875–26 December 1933). The phenomenally cultured A. V. Lunacharskii—a man who once characterized himself as “an intellectual among Bolsheviks but a Bolshevik among intellectuals”—was born at Poltava, the illegitimate son of a tsarist bureaucrat (a state councillor) of enlightened views. Lunacharskii was attracted to Marxism while still in his teens, once reminiscing that “I became a revolutionary so early in life that I don’t remember when I was not one.” He became a convinced adherent to the creed after meeting Rosa Luxemburg during a period as a student at the Philosophy and Natural Sciences Faculty of Zurich University (1895–1897), at that time also becoming an advocate of the positivist philosophy of his teacher, Richard Avenarius. After his studies, Lunacharskii returned to Russia and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) upon its foundation in 1898, but was arrested in 1899 and exiled to Kaluga. He was arrested again in March 1901 and briefly exiled to Vologda. Having returned to Switzerland, in 1902 he became an adherent of A. A. Bogdanov (whom he had first met in exile in Kaluga and whose sister became his first wife), and in 1904 he met V. I. Lenin in Paris. Then, based in Geneva, he became editor of the Bolshevik newspapers Vpered (“Forward”) and Proletary (“Proletarian”). He returned briefly to Russia in late 1905, working with Maxim Gorky on Novaia Zhizn′ (“The New Life”). Subsequently, however, he quarreled with Lenin, who in his Materialism and Empiro-Criticism (1909) attacked Lunacharskii’s “God-building” (i.e., the attempt to find in Bolshevism a substitute for theistic religion, in order to satisfy the human “soul”). Lunacharskii then moved back to Switzerland and during the First World War, in Paris, became close to L. D. Trotsky and the Mezhraiontsy (the “Interdistrict” group of the RSDLP), helping edit the anti-war Nashe slovo (“Our Word”).

Following the February Revolution, Lunacharskii returned to Russia, arriving in Petrograd on 9 May 1917; the following month, with Trotsky, he joined the Bolsheviks. That summer, he earned a reputation as an inspired and inspiring orator; only Trotsky was more effective in that regard, it is reported. Following the October Revolution, during which he had been an active member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, he was named the first People’s Commissar of Enlightenment (26 October 1917). He remained in that post until September 1929, conducting extensive propaganda tours among Red forces during the civil wars, as a representative of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, and was also associated with Prol′etkult.

In the 1920s, Lunacharskii steered clear of the leadership struggles that wracked the party, concentrating instead on the very successful Soviet “Liquidation of Illiteracy” campaign (Likbez). He also played a key part in encouraging the great flowering of creativity in the literary and visual arts that characterized the period and authored hundreds of works on those subjects, as well plays and screenplays and the famous Revolutionary Silhouettes (1923), in which he offered pen portraits of Lenin, Trotsky, and eight other Russian revolutionaries (G. O. Zinov′ev, G. V. Plekhanov, Ia. M. Sverdlov, V. Volodarskii, M. S. Uritskii, Iu. O. Martov, F. I. Kalinin, and P. Bessalko). In 1930, he was a made a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. As a sponsor and defender of the intelligentsia, however, and one who, rather than encourage the persecution of the old intelligentsia, sought to persuade them to accept Bolshevism, Lunacharskii came to be regarded as too “soft” as J. V. Stalin’s dominance of the party grew, and he was increasingly marginalized. He was—conspicuously—never made a member of the party Central Committee or the Politbiuro. From 1930 to 1932, he and M. M. Litvinov represented the Soviet Union at the League of Nations.

On 20 August 1933, Lunacharskii was appointed Soviet ambassador to Spain, but he died at Menton, on the French Riviera, before he could take up that post. The cause of death was a heart attack, but malicious rumors persist among anti-Semitic Russian circles that Lunacharskii was murdered by his brother-in-law, Igor Sats. He was buried alongside other heroes of the revolution in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, but his reputation plummeted after his death, and from the late 1930s his publications were banned. From the late 1950s onward, however, largely as a result of the ceaseless efforts of his daughter Irina, in the USSR he became a symbol of a humanistic Bolshevism that was protective of the intelligentsia and high culture. Streets and squares were named or renamed in his honor in Leningrad, Kiev, Perm′, Kaluga, and many other cities, as were theaters in Sevastopol′ and Vladimir, as was also Asteroid 2446.

L′vov, Georgii Evgen′evich (21 October 1861–6 March 1925). One of the leading advocates of the White cause in the capitals of the Allies in 1919 and a prominent humanitarian, Prince G. E. L′vov was born into an ancient Russian noble family at Dresden, Saxony, and raised (by his Polish mother) at Popovka, in the Aleksin district of Tula guberniia. He graduated from the Law Faculty of Moscow University (1885) and worked mostly in the zemstvo movement (becoming chairman of the Tula guberniia zemstvo in 1902), before being elected to the First State Duma in 1906 and the Second State Duma in 1907, as a representative of the Kadets. He subsequently left the party to become one of the most prominent independent liberal activists in Russia. Unlike many Kadets, L′vov had a strong faith in “the people” and had developed a natural affinity with the Russian peasantry. He was elected mayor of Moscow in 1913, but the result was pronounced void because of his critical attitude to the government. During the First World War, he was chairman of Zemgor—a role in which the obstructionist attitude of the government led him into closer contact and sympathies with radical oppositionist groups—and on 2 March 1917, in the aftermath of the February Revolution, he was chosen (partly at the urging of P. N. Miliukov) to serve as prime minister and minister of the interior of the Russian Provisional Government, being regarded as a neutral, trustworthy, nonparty figure, who was acceptable to most political factions. The task of holding together the government and running the war effort, however, were too much for him, and on 7 July 1917 he stepped down, recommending that his close collaborator in the government, A. F. Kerensky, become his successor.

L′vov then left politics and moved with his family to Tiumen′, where in February 1918 he was arrested by the Soviet authorities and then imprisoned at Ekaterinburg. In May 1918, he managed to escape and went to Omsk, where, following the collapse of Soviet power, he was commissioned by the Provisional Siberian Government to travel to the United States and Europe to garner Allied support for the White cause. He left Russia in early October 1918, and by December of that year was in Paris, where he was one of the founders and leaders of the Russian Political Conference. After the civil wars, he remained in emigration in France, using the funds of Zemgor to run (from April 1920) a labor exchange for Russian refugees and working in a number of organizations that provided relief for Russian émigrés. He died in Paris and was buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois cemetery. Memorials to L′vov have recently been raised at both Aleksin and Popovka.

Lyzohub, Fedir andriiovich (6 November 1851–1928). The Ukrainian politician Fedir Lyzohub was born at Sedniv, Chernigov guberniia, into a wealthy family descended from a line of 17th-century Cossack leaders of the same name. He was a member of the Chernigov guberniia zemstvo from 1886 to 1901 and thereafter served as chairman of the Poltava guberniia zemstvo (1901–1915). In the latter role, he was associated with the Octobrist Party, but he also became a noted philanthropist and defender of Ukrainian cultural interests, in the face of the Russification policies of Nicholas II. For example, he ensured that the Poltava zemstvo building was constructed in the Ukrainian style, helped found the Poltava Museum, and organized funding for the erection of a monument in Poltava to the poet Ivan Kotliarevsky (1769–1838), as well as overseeing the publication of Kotliarevsky’s collected works. (Lyzohub’s father had been a close friend of the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko.) During the First World War, he served as an advisor to Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich in Transcaucasia, and in 1917 worked in the ministry of foreign affairs of the Russian Provisional Government.

Lyzohub moved to Ukraine following the October Revolution and, with the establishment of the Ukrainian State in 1918, Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii chose him to be his prime minister (10 May–14 November 1918). From 10 May to 8 July, he was also minister of internal affairs in the Hetmanite regime. In those capacities, he strove to implement a moderately conservative line and (unsuccessfully) sought compromise with the Ukrainian National Union. He also traveled to Berlin to negotiate with the German government over Ukrainian territorial and other claims against Russia. He oversaw the Ukrainization of his country’s educational system, with the foundation under his premiership of two new universities and the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and the printing of thousands of textbooks in the Ukrainian language (facilitating its use in schools). Following the armistice of 11 November 1918 and the decision of Skoropadskii to seek a federal union with all Russian anti-Bolshevik forces, Lyzohub resigned from the cabinet (to be replaced by S. M. Gerbel). He subsequently moved to Crimea and thereafter went into emigration, settling in Yugoslavia. He died and is buried in Belgrade.