Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

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Maapäev. The Maapäev, or “Land Council,” was the name given to the diet of the Autonomous Governate of Estonia, which was created on 14 July 1917 by the Russian Provisional Government from Estland guberniia and the northern (Estonian-speaking) uezdy of Livland guberniia. By autumn 1917, 62 deputies had been elected to it (by indirect elections). Three of these were independent, one represented the Baltic Germans and one the Swedish minority, while the others represented six political parties: the Eesti Maarahva Liit (Agrarian Party, 13 seats), the Eesti Demokraatlik Erakond (Democratic Party, 11 seats), the Radical Socialists (11 seats), the Mensheviks (Eesti Sotsiaaldemokraatlik Tööliste Partei, 9 seats), the Estonian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (8 seats), and the Bolsheviks (5 seats). Following the October Revolution, on 15 November 1917 a majority of delegates voted to refuse recognition to the Soviet government, and the Maapäev proclaimed itself the sole legal government of Estonia until the meeting of the Constituent Assembly.

In response to the subsequent attempts by Jaan Anvelt’s Estonian Bolsheviks to seize power in the region through the Estonian Workers’ Commune, the council helped form the Estonian Army under Johan Laidoner, and formal independence was proclaimed by a Committee of Elders of the Council (also known as the Salvation Committee) at Pärnu on 23 February 1918. However, at that very moment the country was being overrun by German forces. Over the following months, the activities of the Maapäev and all nationalist parties were severely curtailed by the occupying forces, which promoted the interests of the Baltic German minority, who were attempting to establish the United Baltic Duchy. When the Germans began to withdraw, in November 1918, the Maapäev reconvened (11 November 1918) to serve as the supreme authority in Estonia, as the country sought to establish itself during the Estonian War of Independence. It remained in operation until 23 April 1919 and the summoning of the Estonian Constituent Assembly.

MADAMIN-BEK (?–14 May 1920). The leader of one of the major Basmachi groups at Ferghana in 1918–1920, Madamin-Bek had served as chief of the militia of the local soviet at Margilan (December 1917–June 1918). It was from the members of that force that he recruited his own rebel unit, which soon grew to be some 600 strong. Having united with the group led by Igrash Bey, he engaged with local forces of the Red Army over the summer of 1918 and in 1919 (latterly in alliance with the Ferghana Peasant Army and as leader of the Provisional Ferghana Government). In February 1920, reinforced Red units on the Ferghana Front surrounded Madamin-Bek’s group, which by this time numbered almost 1,200 men, and forced him to sign an agreement to transfer his allegiance to the Bolsheviks. His force, now renamed the Turkic Soviet Brigade, was then deployed against other local rebels, and Madamin-Bek achieved some success in persuading many of them to join him, notably the powerful army of the Basmachi leader Kurshirmat. Eventually, however, he was betrayed by Kurshirmat and fell into the hands of his mortal enemy Khal-Khodzha, who personally beheaded him on 14 May 1920. (Khal-Khodzha was himself killed later that day, in fighting with yet another Basmachi group.)

MAIGUR, PARFENII MATVEEVICH (?–?). Captain (1917). The military specialist of the civil-wars years, P. M. Maigur, who had previously (from 1914) served as a junior officer with the 106th Ufa Infantry Regiment, graduated from an accelerated course at the Academy of the General Staff in 1917 and was assigned to the staff of the Ural Military District. On 26 June 1918, he was assigned to All-Russian Main Staff, having voluntarily joined the Red Army. He subsequently served as chief of staff of the Eastern Front (23 July–27 September 1918), the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia (6 January–7 June 1919), the 15th Red Army (7–14 June 1919), the Railroad Forces of the Republic, and VOKhR. Maigur’s subsequent fate is unknown; his name appears on Red Army lists to 7 August 1920, but not thereafter.

Mai-Maevskii, Vladimir Zinov′evich (Zenonovich) (15 September 1867–30 October 1920?). Colonel (6 December 1904), major general (28 November 1914), lieutenant general (July 1917). One of the most brilliant but irresponsible White commanders, V. Z. Mai-Maevskii (or Maj-Majewski) was born into a landless, Polish noble family in Mogilev guberniia and was a graduate of the 1st Cadet Corps (1885), the Nicholas Engineering School (1888), and the Academy of the General Staff (1896). During the Russo–Japanese War, he was chief of staff of the 8th East Siberian Rifle Division (10 May 1904–19 September 1906) and, after commanding the 44th (Kamchatka) Infantry Regiment (from 2 August 1910) in the First World War was, successively, chief of staff of the 11th Infantry Division (August 1914–December 1915), a staff officer with the 11th Army (17 December 1915–8 October 1916), commander of the 35th Infantry Division (8 October 1916–July 1917), and commander of the 1st Guards Corps (July 1917–January 1918).

Following the October Revolution, Mai-Maevskii made his way to the Kuban and joined the ranks of the Volunteer Army in March 1918. He subsequently became commander of the 3rd Infantry Division (the Drozdovtsy, 19 November 1918–February 1919, temporary commander until 1 January 1919), following the wounding and then death of its original commander, and from 15 February 1919 was successively commander of the Azov Army Group and the Don Army Group of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR). In that capacity, he was responsible for the White occupation of the Donbass, in the aftermath of the withdrawal of German forces, and for seeing off numerous Red offensives in a series of brilliantly executed defensive campaigns. He then was made commander of the Volunteer Army (10 May–27 November 1919), simultaneously acting (after the Whites’ capture of Khar′kov on 25 June 1919) as commander of forces of the Khar′kov region. It was his forces that acted as the spearhead of the Moscow Offensive of the AFSR during the summer and autumn of 1919 and that got closest to the capital. However, Mai-Maevskii was removed from his posts by General A. I. Denikin on 27 November 1919 and placed in the reserve of the AFSR, accused of incompetence in allowing the Reds to recapture Orel. He was charged also with habitual drunkenness and permitting the men under his command to engage in looting on an epic scale. While the first of these charges might be open to debate, there is little doubt that Mai-Maevskii was guilty of the others (although he seems not to have profited personally from the looting). He was evacuated from Novorossiisk to Crimea in February 1920, and later seems to have died of a heart attack at Sevastopol′, although there is some suggestion that he was murdered.

Main Political-Educational Committee of the Republic. See GLAVPOLITPROSOVET.

MAISKII (LiaChoWiecki), IVAN (JAN) MIKHAILOVICH (7 January 1884–3 September 1975). The Soviet diplomat, historian, and politician I. M. Maiskii, best known as the USSR’s ambassador to London during much of the Second World War, although he was active during the civil wars, was the son of a military doctor. He was born into a Polish family at Kirillov, Vologda guberniia, and studied at the Historical-Philosophical Faculty of St. Petersburg University (expelled 1902) and at Munich University (graduated 1912). He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903 and quickly gravitated toward the Mensheviks. He left Russia in 1908 and lived in Switzerland, Germany, and (from 1912) England, returning to Russia only in May 1917, to work in the apparatus of the Petrograd Soviet.

Following the October Revolution, Maiskii joined the forces of the Democratic Counter-Revolution in eastern Russia. He made his way to Samara and became the only Menshevik to join Komuch (as head of its Department of Labor), for which he was expelled from the Menshevik party. Following the Omsk coup, he fled to Mongolia, returning to Russia only at the end of the civil wars. In May 1921, he joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), became editor of the journal Zvezda (“The Star”), and the following year appeared as a witness for the prosecution in the trial of the leader of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries. Thereafter, he was assigned to numerous diplomatic posts and became a close associate of M. M. Litvinov. He served as Soviet ambassador to Finland (from 1927) and Great Britain (1932–1943). He was then named deputy commissar for foreign affairs, attending the conferences at Yalta and Potsdam at the end of the Second World War. He retired in 1945 and devoted his time to researching and writing history (lecturing, among other institutions, at Moscow State University, 1948–1953). From 1941 to 1947, he was a candidate member of the Central committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and from 1946 he was also a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In February 1953, on the eve of J. V. Stalin’s death, Maiskii was expelled from the Communist Party and arrested for, charged with, and found guilty of espionage and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. He was released in 1955 and in 1960 was rehabilitated and had his party membership restored.

MAKHARADZE, FILIPP (9 March 1868–10 December 1941). A prominent figure among Georgian Bolsheviks, Fillip Makharadze was born in the village of Shemokmedi, in Kutaisi guberniia, western Georgia. He was the son of a priest and was a graduate of the Ozurgeti Seminary (1884). He also attended the Tiflis Theological Seminary and studied at the Warsaw Veterinary Institute, but did not complete either of those courses, on the latter occasion due to his having been arrested and exiled back to Georgia in 1893. He had joined the revolutionary movement in 1891 and was active among social-democratic circles in Georgia and Azerbaijan. From 1903, he was a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Party’s Joint Caucasian Committee, leading workers’ groups during the 1905 Revolution and afterward, and allegedly was involved in terrorist work (notably the assassination of the Georgian nationalist and poet Ilia Chavchavadze in 1907) in collaboration with J. V. Stalin. He was arrested, imprisoned, and exiled on numerous occasions.

Following the February Revolution, Makharadze helped found the Tiflis Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and edited the newspaper Kavkazskii rabochii (“Caucasian Worker”). From November 1917, he was a member of the Bolsheviks’ Caucasian Regional Committee. With the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Georgia in 1918, Makharadze went underground and was the leader of Bolshevik opposition to the government, which was dominated by Mensheviks of the Georgian Democratic Party.

As the Georgian government was toppled by the Red Army at the conclusion of the Soviet–Georgian War in February 1921, Makharadze became chairman of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee (16 February–7 July 1921) and was then first secretary of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party (Bolshevik) (1921–1923), chairman of the All-Georgian Central Executive Committee (7 March–October 1922), head of the Georgian Sovnarkom (1929–1930), and chairman of the central executive committee of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (1931–5 December 1936). On 10 July 1938, he was named chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic and was then promoted to deputy chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

Makharadze, one of the few Old Bolsheviks to survive Stalin’s purges and to die of natural causes, was the author of many published works on Russian literature and the revolutionary movement in Transcaucasia. From 1934 to 1989 the town of Ozurgeti was named in his honor.

MAKHIN, FEDOR EVDOKIMOVICH (15 April 1882–2 June 1945). Captain (10 August 1913), lieutenant colonel (1916), colonel (20 August 1918). F. M. Makhin was born into the family of an Orenburg Cossack who had been exiled to Siberia for insulting an officer. Following the amnesty of his father in 1895, the family returned to the territory of the Orenburg Cossack Host, settling at Buranaia stanitsa. Makhin entered military service in 1900, as a clerk with the Host’s economic directorate, and in 1904 graduated from the Orenburg Military School. In 1913, he also graduated, on his second attempt, from the Academy of the General Staff. During the First World War, he occupied several junior staff posts and on 27 June 1917 was named chief of staff of the 3rd Rifle Division. During 1917, he also joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) and became head of the staff of its military organization.

In early 1918, on the orders of the PSR Central Committee, Makhin joined the Red Army and was made commander of the 2nd Red Army on the Eastern Front (from 26 June 1918). On 3 July 1918, as forces of the Czechoslovak Legion approached Ufa, he deserted and offered his services to the Czech commander, Stanislav čeček. He subsequently (from 15 July 1918) commanded forces of the People’s Army in the Khval′insk region, capturing Vol′sk, before retiring to Syzran′ and then Samara and eventually being transferred to the Aktiubinsk region by Komuch to assist the Orenburg Cossack forces of General A. I. Dutov, as commander of the 1st Orenburg Cossack Infantry Division (from 23 October–24 December 1918). Following the Omsk coup and the subordination of Dutov to Admiral A. V. Kolchak, Makhin became involved in a plot to unseat the Cossack leader (his co-conspirators included the SR V. A. Chaikin, the Bashkir leader A. V. Validov and the Muslim politician Mustafa Chokay-oghlu). When the plot was uncovered, Makhin was arrested and sent first to Omsk and then Vladivostok.

From the Far East, Makhin went into emigration in Europe, spending time in Paris, Berlin, and Prague as a contributor to the journals Volia Rossii (“The Will of Russia”) and Pour la Russie (“For Russia”) and being associated with Leftist-SR circles. In 1923, he moved to Yugoslavia, where he led a section of Zemgor and worked on the Serbo-Croat journal Russki arkhiv (“The Russian Archive,” 1928–1937). With the rise of fascism across Europe, Makhin offered his support to the USSR, and in 1939 he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. During the Second World War, he worked initially around Sarajevo with the chetnik forces of Dragoljub (“Draža”) Mihailović and then in Montenegro with the partisans of Josip Tito, as a radio broadcaster, propagandist, and journalist. His reports were published in the Soviet journal Krasnaia zvezda (“Red Star”), and in 1944 he even visited the USSR. At the end of the war in Europe, Makhin was made head of military archives in Belgrade, but he died soon thereafter—it has been suggested at the hands of the Soviet secret services. He was buried as a national hero in Belgrade, where a street still bears his name.

Makhno, Nestor (“Batko”) ivanovich (26 October 1888–6 July 1934). The civil-war leader of an insurgent peasant army and subsequent hero of the libertarian Left, Batko (“Little Father”) Makhno was born of poor peasant stock in Guliai-Pole (Huliai-Pole), Ekaterinoslav guberniia, and was converted to anarchism during the 1905 Revolution, as a member of the Union of Poor Farmers. His father had died when he was an infant, so he worked as a shepherd from the age of seven and as a metalworker in his teens, attending school only briefly. Following his arrest in 1908, for killing a policeman, in 1910 Makhno was condemned to death by the court of the Odessa Military District; however, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment because of his youth. Freed in 1917 from Moscow’s Butyrka prison, in which he had befriended the anarchist P. A. Arshinov, he returned to Guliai-Pole to chair its Soviet and to organize numerous revolutionary communes. Evading capture by forces of the Austro-German intervention that occupied Ukraine in the aftermath of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (27 January 1918), in June 1918 he visited Moscow and met V. I. Lenin, Ia. M. Sverdlov, and Peter Kropotkin, before establishing a peasant army in southeastern Ukraine.

During the civil wars, when he proved himself to be a brilliant and innovative (if unorthodox) military commander, Makhno’s forces battled the Central Powers, Ukrainian nationalists, the Whites, and the Reds, although he also periodically collaborated with the latter. Indeed, Makhno’s Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine played a decisive role in the defeat of both A. I. Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) and the Ukrainian Army of Symon Petliura in 1919. In February 1919, Makhno’s forces merged with the Red Army, forming the 3rd Brigade of its Trans-Dnepr Rifle Division. In April 1919, the brigade was attached to the 7th Ukrainian Rifle Division, which then became the 2nd Ukrainian Soviet Army. On 3 June 1919, however, Makhno was denounced as a traitor by the Soviet high command and an order was issued for his arrest. That autumn his army (now some 60,000 strong) waged effective campaigns in the rear of Denikin’s forces. Makhno himself spent most of his time and energies at the front, but in the areas occupied by his forces, his supporters (among them Arshinov, Voline, and other anarchist adherents of the Nabat group) oversaw an enduringly influential anarchist revolution (the Makhnovshchina) in southern Ukraine, summoning nonparty congresses of workers and peasants and exhorting them to organize and govern themselves. In October 1920, Makhno formed another agreement with the Soviet leadership, and his forces played a key role in defeating General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army, utilizing techniques of partisan and guerrilla warfare to dramatic effect (notably the deployment of the tachanka). In late 1920, having refused to integrate his forces with the Red Army and relocate to the front against Poland, and being outspokenly hostile to what he perceived as the Bolsheviks’ growing authoritarianism, Makhno was again declared to be an outlaw on Soviet territory.

Over the following months, Makhno waged an itinerant struggle against the Soviet government along the shores of the Sea of Azov and the Don River and in the Volga region, but in August 1921 Red forces chased him and 83 of his followers into Romania, having crushed the Makhnovshchina. After enduring internment in Romania, Makhno moved to Poland, only to be arrested in October 1922 and charged with an attempt, in league with Soviet diplomats, to incite an anti-Polish rebellion in Eastern Galicia (Western Ukraine). He denied the charge, adding that he personally had saved Poland in 1920 by refusing to join the Soviet offensive on Warsaw. He was acquitted on 27 November 1922 and subsequently moved to Danzig to evade the attentions of the Polish police, but was arrested there also. Eventually, in April 1925, Makhno settled in the Vincennes district of Paris, where he was sometimes employed as a carpenter and as a stagehand at the opera and in various film studios, as well as working at the Renault factory. In 1926, in collaboration with Arshinov, he promoted the influential but controversial Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, advocating a party-like structure for the anarchists, but broke with his former mentor when Arshinov came to terms with Moscow. Thereafter, Makhno devoted himself to writing his memoirs, three volumes of which were published from 1929 to 1937. In 1934, in poverty and isolation, he died of the tuberculosis he had originally contracted in tsarist prisons, but his name and achievements remain revered among anarchists the world over. His ashes were interred near the Wall of the Communards in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Exhibitions relating to Makhno now feature prominently in the Huliai-Pole Regional Museum in his hometown. Makhno’s younger brother, Grigorii, was killed in battle against the AFSR at Uman in September 1919; his older brother, Savva, was executed by the Reds at Guliai-Pole in early 1920.

MAKHNOVSHCHINA. This term refers to the political, economic, and military structures constructed in southern Ukraine from 1918 to 1921 by the revolutionary leader Nestor Makhno, an adherent of anarchism. The regions concerned (centered on Makhno’s home village of Huliai-Pole in Ekaterinoslav guberniia) are sometimes referred to as the “Free Territory.” The Makhnovshchina initially developed during the summer of 1918, as a form of spontaneous resistance to the Austro-German intervention, which in alliance with the puppet Ukrainian State was intent on smothering the revolution in Ukraine and extracting food and other resources to feed the war effort of the Central Powers. Subsequently, during the course of the civil wars, Makhno’s followers, organized into the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine (RIAU), found themselves in conflict with forces of the Ukrainian National Republic Directory, White forces of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), and the Red Army, as well as with other partisan groups (such as that of Ataman Nykyfor Hryhoriiv). The high tide of the Makhnovshchina lasted from November 1918 (when the Central Powers withdrew from Ukraine) to June 1919, in which period the Free Territory extended from Berdiansk through Donetsk, Aleksandrovsk, and Ekaterinoslav.

In areas where the Makhnovists were dominant, the laboring population was urged to abolish capitalism, to expropriate private land and factories, to organize itself through popular assemblies, and to implement the free exchange of goods between town and countryside. Peasants were advised to establish producer communes and to work collectively; workers were informed of the advantages of self-management. Some educational experiments were also introduced, with schools run along the lines advocated by the Catalan anarchist Francesc Ferrer. Political parties were expressly forbidden to function there, and a system of “free soviets” was insisted upon; unlike the tyrannical “political soviets” of the Bolsheviks and other socialists, the Makhnovists claimed, “the free Soviets of workers and peasants were to be organs of social-economic self-management. Each soviet was only to carry out the will of the local workers and their organizations.” Thus, when the Makhnovists captured an area they put up posters reading, “The freedom of the workers and peasants is their own and is not subject to any restriction. It is for the workers and peasants themselves to act, to organize themselves, to agree among themselves in all aspects of their lives, as they themselves see fit and desire. . . . The Makhnovists can do no more than give aid and counsel. . . . In no circumstances can they, nor do they wish to, govern.”

Makhno was himself preoccupied with leading the army, and the ideological backbone of the movement was therefore supplied chiefly by members of the anarchist federation Nabat (among them Voline and Peter Arshinov), who flocked to the Free Territory. Undoubtedly, the movement was a high-minded and principled one; it may have attracted its share of wayward and even criminal elements, as did all sides in the civil wars, but the Makhnovists were far from the gang of debauched bandits featured in Red propaganda portraying them. On the other hand, for all Makhno’s talk of freedom and hostility to the state, the exigencies of the civil wars meant that he had sometimes to resort to conscription and that he had to run a secret police force of his own (the Kropotkin Guard) to hunt down enemies and infiltrators within the anarchist camp. As Voline later noted, “the constant state of war in the entire region made the creation and functioning of [free soviets] very difficult, and the organization was never carried through to its logical conclusions.”

The Makhnovists were twice allied with the Reds to jointly oppose the Whites. The first occasion was the spring and summer of 1919, to fight the AFSR of General A. I. Denikin as it pushed through the Donbass into Ukraine. However, fearful of the spread of libertarian ideas into the ranks of the Red Army and angry that the Makhnovists had failed to hold the line against White advances in southeast Ukraine, thereby contributing to the collapse of the Southern Front, War Commissar L. D. Trotsky broke that alliance and in July 1919 declared Makhno to be an outlaw. As the Reds were expelled from Ukraine and Denikin swept in, the Makhnovists were pushed westward to Peregonovka, in right-bank Ukraine, by October 1919. There they turned, defeated the Whites (who were preoccupied with the front against the Red Army, which was by then approaching Orel), held off forces of the Ukrainian Army, and turned back east, toward Guliai-Pole, cutting a huge swath through Denikin’s rear; severing AFSR lines of communication with the front; and facilitating the Red Army’s drive toward the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov, and the North Caucasus.

In the summer of 1920, a second Red–Black alliance was forged to fight the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel when it burst out of Crimea. The RIAU subsequently played a very significant part in storming the Perekop isthmus and driving Wrangel’s forces out of Crimea in October–November 1920, but again the alliance was broken by the Reds, and Makhno was again declared to be an outlaw (and several of his commanders were executed, among them Mikhail Brova, Petr Gavrilenko, S. N. Karetnikov, D. I. Popov, T. I. Vdovichenko, C. Zhivoder, and possibly Mariia Nikiforova). Thereafter, despite occasional large-scale desertions from the Red Army to the Makhnovists (as, for example, in the case of the Maslakov mutiny), the Free Territory was absorbed into the Soviet state and the Makhnovshchina was extinguished, although embers of anarchist rebellion would occasionally flare up in southern Ukraine throughout the Soviet period.

Makhrov, Petr Semenovich (1 September 1876–29 February 1964). Major general (September 1917), lieutenant general (8 June 1920). P. S. Makhrov, the White commander who was trusted by General P. N. Wrangel to oversee the reorganization of the demoralized Armed Forces of South Russia into a new Russian Army in the spring of 1920, was a graduate of the Vil′na Infantry Officers School (1897) and the Academy of the General Staff (1907). In the Russo–Japanese War, Makhrov served with the 3rd Manchurian Army, and in the First World War was initially chief of staff of the 34th Infantry Division (August–September 1914). He subsequently served on the operational section of the Staff of the 8th Army (September 1914–September 1916) and was commander of the 13th Siberian Regiment (December 1916–August 1917), quartermaster general of the 12th Army (September 1917), and chief of staff of the South-West Front (September–November 1917).

Makhrov retired from the service in January 1918 and lived with his family at Poltava, before fleeing the Bolshevik advance into Ukraine and making his way to Odessa, where he joined the White movement as chief of military communications on the staff of the Crimean-Azov Army (21 February–April 1919). He subsequently held the same post in the Caucasian Army and the Kuban Army (April 1919–21 February 1920), before being made quartermaster general and chief of staff of A. I. Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia (16–26 March 1920) and then of Wrangel’s Russian Army (11 May–16 June 1920). At the time of the putative alliance between the Whites and Poland, at the beginning of the Soviet–Polish War, he then served (July–October 1920) as Wrangel’s representative in Poland and as commander of the army being created there from Russian POWs (the 3rd Army).

Following the collapse of Wrangel’s efforts and the signing of the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921) between Moscow and Warsaw, Makhrov remained in exile, living in Poland until December 1924, then moving to Paris and (from 1932) Cannes. Following the German invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941, he wrote to the Soviet ambassador in Paris, appealing to be allowed to return to Russia and offering to serve, if necessary as an ordinary soldier, in the Red Army. His letter was intercepted by the Vichy authorities; consequently, on 19 August 1941, Makhrov was arrested and interned in a prison camp in southern France. He was released in December 1941 as a result of the intervention of General Henri Niessel, whom he had known in Warsaw, but was deprived of his refugee status. He died at Cannes on 29 February 1964 and is buried in a local cemetery.

Maklakov, Vasilii Alekseevich (8 May 1869/10 May 1870–15 July 1957). The chief Russian advocate of the White cause to the Allies, both during and after the Paris Peace Conference, the influential right-liberal politician V. A. Maklakov was born in Moscow, the son of a professor of ophthalmology who was also a great landowner. He was a graduate of the Historical-Philological Faculty of Moscow University (1894) and subsequently, as an external student, was awarded a degree in law (1895), having earlier been expelled from the Natural Sciences Department for his political activities. Already a leading Russian liberal and an influential lawyer, in 1905 Maklakov was one of the founders of the Kadets, occupying the most right-wing position in the party and finding himself in frequent disputes in the party Central Committee with P. N. Miliukov. He was elected to the Second, Third, and Fourth State Dumas and in 1913 served as one of the defense lawyers in the infamous trial of Mendel Beilis (the Ukrainian Jew accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child). He was a firm advocate of the rule of law and was innately suspicious of all revolutionary tendencies, but rumors persist that he was involved in the plot to assassinate Rasputin in December 1916. In 1917, Maklakov seemed certain to become minister of justice in the Russian Provisional Government, until that post was claimed by the socialist A. F. Kerensky. He served instead as a member of the regime’s Juridical Council and then as a member of the electoral commission for the Constituent Assembly (to which he was later elected) before, in September 1917, being named ambassador to France.

During the civil wars, he was a leading member of the Russian Political Conference in Paris, attempting to muster political and financial support for the White cause. In that capacity, in September 1920 he visited Crimea and met with P. N. Wrangel. Although he remained unaccredited as an ambassador in Paris (having arrived there as the Bolsheviks took power), until 1924, when France recognized the USSR, he nevertheless occupied the French Embassy in that city and was chairman of the Council of Ambassadors, which sought to coordinate the activities of the various Russian embassies in Europe. (Before leaving the embassy, he ensured that the archive of the Okhrana’s Foreign Agency, which had been housed in its basement, was transferred to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California.) Thereafter, he headed the Russian Immigration Committee in France, representing the interests of the émigré community to the French government.

During the Second World War, Maklakov adopted an antifascist position, and in 1940 he was arrested by the invading Germans and spent five months in prison. In February 1945, he was the leader of a group of Russian émigrés who visited the Soviet embassy in Paris to express their gratitude for the USSR’s part in the defeat of Hitler, although he subsequently distanced himself from pro-Soviet elements in the Russian community. He died at Baden in Switzerland and is buried in the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Paris.

Maksudov, Sadreddin Nizamettinovich (1878–20 February 1957). The statesman, scholar, and philosopher S. N. Maksudov (also known as Sadri Maksudi Arsal) was head of the Kazan′-centered Idel-Urals Republic that was destroyed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. He was born into a religious family near Kazan′, the younger brother of the renowned proponent of Jadidism Hadi Maksudi, and took the unusual step for a Muslim of entering the Russian Teaching College at Kazan′, then later moved to Paris, where he studied law. He returned to Russia following the 1905 Revolution and was elected to the Second and Third State Dumas as a member of the Kadets, gaining national (and even international) fame for his campaigning activities (once visiting Britain as part of a Duma delegation). In 1917, he penned the constitution of the putative Idel-Urals Republic, was a member of its three-man National Council, and in November was elected president by its National Assembly (the Milli Meclis).

When the Bolsheviks disbanded the Republic in April 1918, Maksudov fled via Finland to Paris, where he would fruitlessly plead for the recognition of his state by the Allied governments. Thereafter, he taught Turkish history at the Sorbonne before, in 1925, accepting a personal invitation from Kemal Atatürk to move to Turkey. There, he became an influential government advisor on language reform and a leading scholar in the fields of law, history, philosophy, linguistics, and sociology. He was also a member of the Turkish parliament from 1931 to 1939 (representing Şebinkarahisar), from 1950 to 1954 (representing Giresun and Ankara), and in 1950 was nominated as a candidate in the presidential elections. He died at Istanbul and is buried in that city’s Zincirlikuyu Cemetery, leaving behind him a legacy of several hundred published works.

MALININ, IVAN MIKHAILOVICH (1883–no later than 1945). A key White politician in South Russia, but one about whom next to nothing is known, I. M. Malinin served as head of the Directorate of Public Education in the Special Council of General A. I. Denikin and as minister of education in the South Russian Government of General P. N. Wrangel. In emigration he worked as director of the Russian Girls’ Gymnasium in Belgrade.

Malleson, Wilfred (1866–1946). Major general (19??). The commander of British forces in Central Asia during the “Russian” Civil Wars, General (from 1920, as a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire, Sir) Wilfred Malleson joined the Royal Artillery in 1886 and in 1904 transferred to the Indian Army as an intelligence officer. During the First World War, he was stationed in East Africa, where he saw action against German forces in the battles of Salaita and Latema Nek in 1916. On 16 July 1918, he was placed in command of the British Military Mission to Turkestan and oversaw the supply of arms, intelligence, and support to anti-Bolshevik forces across Transcaspia (notably the Transcaspian Provisional Government). He was also involved at this time in the Third Anglo–Afghan War (1919) and in running an intelligence network based at Meshed in Persia, designed to combat Russian penetration of that country.

Mamontov (Mamantov), Konstantin Konstantinovich (16 October 1869–14 February 1920). Colonel (24 August 1912), major general (April 1917), lieutenant general (February 1919). For the Cossacks a hero of the civil wars, but a commander whom many Russian Whites came to regard as typifying the willfulness and indiscipline of their Cossack allies, K. K. Mamontov was a graduate of the Nicholas Cadet Corps (1888) and the Nicholas Cavalry School (1898). He participated in the Russo–Japanese War as commander of the 1st Chita Regiment of the Transbaikal Cossack Host, and in the First World War commanded the 19th and 6th Don Cossack Regiments before being promoted to the command of the 6th Don Cossack Division (April 1917–January 1918).

In the White movement, Mamontov initially led the Nizhnenechirsk partisan column, organizing Cossack uprisings against the Soviet government across the southern Don (January–April 1918), and then commanded the Tsaritsyn Cavalry Group of the Don Army (April 1918–July 1919). In the Armed Forces of South Russia, he commanded the 4th Don Mounted Corps (July–November 1919) and in August–September 1919 led the famous Mamontov raid behind the Red lines. In November 1919, the 4th Corps, whose complement Mamontov had allowed to fall disastrously, was smashed by the Reds’ 1st Cavalry Army, and Mamontov was subsequently removed from his post by General P. N. Wrangel, who accused him of “criminal inactivity.” However, the administrative confusion at this time of the collapse of the White forces in South Russia meant that this dismissal was not confirmed, and in January 1920, a Supreme Krug of the Don, Kuban, and Terek Cossack Hosts was even prepared to offer Mamontov the command of all Cossack forces, but he fell ill and died, probably of typhus, on 14 February 1920 at Ekaterinodar (although some sources have it that he was poisoned during his recovery from the illness). He is buried in the vaults of the St. Catherine Cathedral in Ekaterinodar (Krasnodar).

MAMONTOV RAID. A 40-day, 500-mile raid undertaken in August–September 1919 by a chiefly Cossack force, led by K. K. Mamontov, with the aim of disrupting the rear of Soviet forces on the Southern Front, in order to disturb Red Army preparations for a planned offensive.

On the morning of 10 August 1919, Mamontov’s 4th Don Mounted Corps (comprised of 9,000 men with 12 field guns, 7 armored trains, and 3 armored cars), which was part of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), broke through a poorly defended gap between the 8th Red Army and the 9th Red Army near Novokhopersk (Voronezh guberniia). On 18 August 1919, they reached and captured the city of Tambov, 125 miles behind the Red Army’s front lines, and then moved on to occupy the important railway junction of Kozlov (which was also the headquarters of the Reds’ Southern Front) on 22 August 1919. During the raid, Mamontov’s troops engaged in widespread sabotage of railway lines, telegraph wires, bridges, and other means of communication, as well as extensive looting. In response, the Soviet authorities placed a broad region across Riazan′, Tula, Orel′, Voronezh, Tambov, and Penza gubernii under a state of siege and directed a counterforce of 12,000 men with air support (commanded by M. M. Lashevich) against the raiders, as well as raising a local force of 11,000 volunteers, but could not prevent Mamontov from capturing the city of Voronezh on 11 September 1919. That, however, was Mamontov’s final success; his forces were driven from Voronezh on 12 September 1919 and, laden with booty, passed back across the front into AFSR-controlled territory on 18–19 September 1919.

It was in response to this raid that the Soviet authorities belatedly created their own major mounted formations, including the 1st Cavalry Army, which was to play a vital part in the forthcoming operations of the Red Army. It has been argued that the experience of looting fatally undermined the discipline of the Don Cossack Host’s forces in the AFSR and at the same time turned the peasant population of the affected region decisively against the Whites.

MANIKOVSKII, ALEKSEI ALEKSEEVICH (13 March 1865–January 1920). Major general (31 May 1907), lieutenant general (31 May 1913), general of artillery (6 December 1916). The founder of Red artillery forces during the civil wars, A. A. Manikovskii was a graduate of the Mikhail Artillery School (1886) and the Mikhail Artillery Academy (1891). He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War and subsequently served as commander of the Ust-Dvinsk Fortress (from 9 February 1906), commander of artillery at Kronshtadt (from 25 September 1906), and commander of the Kronshtadt Fortress (from 23 March 1914); from the summer of 1915 he was chief of the Main Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of War. Like many members of the Russian Provisional Government, Manikovskii was an active Freemason, which may have influenced the decision to appoint him as assistant minister of war to A. I. Guchkov on 6 March 1917, in the aftermath of the February Revolution. (In effect, Manikovskii ran the ministry, as Guchkov lacked the experience to do so.) Following Guchkov’s resignation as minister of war on 30 April 1917, Manikovskii became director of the Ministry of War and subsequently served again as chief assistant to the new war minister, A. F. Kerensky.

He was arrested on 25 October 1917, during the Bolsheviks’ storming of the Winter Palace, but was quickly released when he agreed to serve the Soviet government. He was rearrested by the Cheka on 20 November 1917, but 10 days later was again released and subsequently served as a military specialist in the Red Army, as chief of the Artillery Board of the Supply Directorate. In that capacity Manikovskii exerted a huge influence over Red artillery and supply tactics in the civil wars. He died in a train crash en route to a new posting in Tashkent in early 1920.

Mannerheim, Carl Gustav emil (4 June 1867–27 January 1951). Major general (February 1912), lieutenant general (July 1917), general of cavalry (Finnish Army, March 1918), field marshal (Finnish Army, 1933), marshal of Finland (4 June 1942). Born at Askainen (western Finland) into a noble family of Swedish and German descent, Baron (Friherre) Carl Mannerheim, the leader of Finnish Whites in the Finnish Civil War, had a somewhat troubled youth, as his father went bankrupt and he himself was expelled from the Finnish Cadet Corps for indiscipline in 1886. With a career in the Finnish Army thereby closed to him, he gained entry to the Russian service, graduating from the Nicholas Cavalry School (1889). He subsequently became an equestrian expert in the Russian Army and was posted to the Imperial Court Stables Administration from 1897 to 1903. In the Russo–Japanese War, he commanded a cavalry division, and in the First World War served as commander of the Independent Guards Cavalry Brigade (December 1913–July 1915) and commander of the 12th Cavalry Division (July 1915–April 1917). Being hostile to the Russian Provisional Government that assumed power during the February Revolution, he was retired from the army in the summer of 1917.

After a period of rest at Odessa, Mannerheim arrived back in Finland in late December 1917 and the following month was made commander in chief of the (White) Finnish Army, leading the brutal suppression of the revolution in Finland in the first months of 1918 and the accompanying cleansing of the country of Russian and pro-Russian elements. This was done with German military assistance, although Mannerheim personally opposed this intervention and resigned in protest once the civil war was won (June 1918). Following a series of missions to Allied countries to seek recognition of Finnish independence, on 12 December 1918 he was elected Regent (Valtionhoitaja/Riksföreståndare) of Finland. He retired from public life on 25 July 1919, following his defeat to Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg in Finland’s first presidential election. During the interwar years, he devoted himself to charitable causes.

However, Mannerheim remained a controversial figure in Finland, lauded by the Right and excoriated by the Left. In 1931, he was made chairman of the Council of State Defense and received a promise from President Pehr Evind Svinhufvud that he would be made commander in chief of the army if Finland found itself at war. With the outbreak of the Soviet–Finnish Winter War in November 1939, that promise was kept, and Mannerheim remained commander of Finnish forces until 1944. From August 1944 to March 1946, he was president of Finland, but had to retire due to ill health. He died at Lausanne in Switzerland on 28 January 1951 and was buried in the Hietaniemi Cemetery, Helsinki, in a state funeral.

Although not without his critics, he is now widely regarded as a national hero in Finland, and his birthday is celebrated as the flag day of the Finnish Defense Forces. Mannerheim’s modest home (1924–1951), near Kaivopuisto Park in central Helsinki, is preserved as a museum of his life, while an imposing equestrian statue of him (by Aimo Tukiainen, 1960) stands outside the Finnish capital’s museum of modern Art (Kiasma) on Mannerheimwägen. Mannerheim has also been the subject of many plays and novels, and his image has adorned many Finnish bank notes, coins, and stamps.

Manukian (MANOUGIAN), aram (hovanessian, sARKIS) (1879–19 January 1919). Held by the Dashnaks to be the spiritual founder of the Armenian Democratic Republic, Aram Manukian (or “Aram of Van”) was born at Zelva, near Ghapan (in the Zangezur region of Elizavetpol′ guberniia, now David bek in Armenia) and was educated at Shushi and Yerevan. In 1896, he played a leading role in the first Van revolt against Ottoman rule, fleeing to Russia when it was suppressed. From 1901, he was active among workers’ groups at Baku and in 1903 moved to Elizavetpol′ to organize an Armenian self-defense militia. From that point on, he worked for the Dashnaks. He then moved to Kars and, in 1904, returned to Van. Following the Young Turks’ revolution of 1908, he found work as a teacher at Ordu and was later a regional inspector of Armenian schools. Following a visit to Geneva in 1911, he returned to Van in 1912, as head of the city’s Dashnak committee, and may have been behind the assassination there of Bedros Kapamacian, the integrationist Armenian mayor. On another occasion he was condemned to death for the assassination of the governor of Van, Ali Pasha, but was reprieved at the last minute and released. In 1915, he organized self-defense forces at Van and, following the success of the Van resistance, he was proclaimed governor of the Administration for Western Armenia (April 1915–December 1917).

When Russian forces withdrew from the area in late 1917, Manukian moved to Tiflis, where he chaired the Congress of Eastern Armenians, and in 1918 was sent from there to Yerevan by the Armenian National Council. From May to July 1918, he served as “Dictator of the Arat Region,” helping to organize defense forces against the invading Turkish Army of Islam (in the battles of Sardarapat, Bash Abaran, and Karakiliseh), and from June 1918 until his death from typhus in early 1919, he served as minister of the interior and minister of supply (and also briefly as minister of labor and minister of defense, 15 November–13 December 1918) in the cabinet of Hovannes Kachaznuni. He is buried in the Tokhmakh Central Cemetery, Yerevan.

MARCH DAYS. This term (sometimes rendered “March Events”) denotes the events in and around Baku of March–April 1918, when many thousands of Azeri Muslims were massacred by local Armenians and Russians. This was a reprise of the interethnic conflicts that had plagued the region during the revolutionary disturbances across Transcaucasia in 1905–1907. In Soviet historiography the event was always described as the suppression of a “Muslim uprising” against Soviet power by Azeris, but the truth is far more complex.

In the aftermath of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), both Allied forces (Dunsterforce) and German forces (the German Caucasus Expedition) were closing on Baku, attracted by its oil. (At that time, Baku accounted for about 15 percent of world oil production.) This was also of significance to the Soviet government, represented in the city by the Baku Soviet, led by Stepan Shahumian, because the Bolsheviks had recently lost control of the second major oil field of the Russian Empire at Groznyi, in the North Caucasus. Armenian soldiers and officers were concentrating in the city (which already had a large Armenian population), awaiting transport to Yerevan and Tiflis, where they hoped to resist the Turkish incursion into Transcaucasia that the Soviet government had reluctantly sanctioned at Brest-Litovsk. Control of the oil fields, however, rested with the Azeris, who made up around 25 percent of the local population. (Armenians accounted for around 12 percent and Russians around 30 percent of Baku’s population.) All sides were well-armed; the Armenians boasted a force of some 6,000 volunteers, most of whom had previously served on the Caucasian Front, plus at least 4,000 more Dashnak fighters; the Azeris had their own militia forces (numbering around 10,000), controlled by the Musavat; and Russian Red Guards were also in evidence, as were (outside the city) a number of anti-Bolshevik forces (such as the approaching Cossack force of L. F. Bicherakhov).

Clashes among the contending sides were frequent, one of the most notable being the killing by Russian and Armenian forces of Mamed Taghiyev (son of the Azeri oil magnate Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev). On the day of his funeral, 18 March 1918, which became a huge public event, Azeri forces engaged with Armenian and Russian units around the city’s docks and were subsequently disarmed. Who fired the first shot is impossible to determine, as is the veracity of later Soviet claims that the Azeris intended to use the occasion of the funeral to stage an armed uprising but were forestalled (although that version seems to be at odds with the very light punishments subsequently meted out against the Musavat by the Baku Commune). An attempt to mediate by the Azeri Bolshevik Nariman Narimanov proved abortive, and by 30 March 1918 fighting had commenced around the city. (Azeri sources insist that the Bolsheviks deliberately provoked Azeri attacks, as an excuse to end negotiations and begin the armed struggle.) As the fighting spread, Armenian forces began attacking Azeri civilians and either slaughtering them or driving them from the city; it has been suggested, in revenge for the hundreds of thousands of Armenians killed by the Muslim Ottomans in the course of the First World War. (Again, according to Azeri sources, the Bolshevik leadership could have prevented this slaughter but chose not to, instead using the confusion to install the rule of the Baku Commune.)

By 3 April 1918, when the fighting petered out, much of the city was ablaze and at least 3,500 Muslims were dead—Azeri sources often cite a figure of 12,000 dead—while tens of thousand more had become refugees. In the aftermath of these events, the Azeri National Council abandoned any hope of a secure autonomy for Azerbaijan within the Transcaucasian Federation and looked to the Ottoman Empire and the approaching Army of Islam for protection. Some months later, when the Army of Islam reached Baku, Azeris would extract a bloody revenge for the March Days in the massacre of Baku’s Armenian population during the September Days. In 1998, the president of Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev, proclaimed 31 March the “Day of National Suffering,” in memory of the March Days of 1918.

MARCHLEWSKI, JULIAN BALTHASAR (17 May 1866–22 March 1925). A prominent activist among socialists in Poland, Julian Marchlewski (also known by the aliases “Karski” and “Kujawiak”) was born into an impoverished Jewish family at Włocławek and, after some years working as a dyer in Germany and Switzerland, earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Zurich (1896). In 1889, he helped found the Polish Workers’ Union, and in 1893, with Rosa Luxemburg, he cofounded the Social-Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1906 and soon gravitated toward the Bolsheviks, but was forced to emigrate to Germany following the suppression of the 1905 Revolution. There, he became involved with the German Social-Democratic Party and was a cofounder of the Spartacist League. He was arrested by the German authorities in 1916 and subsequently, in 1918, returned to Soviet Russia as part of a prisoner exchange.

In 1919, Marchlewski briefly returned to Germany, as an agent of the Komintern, but was forced to flee to escape arrest. From 23 July 1920, he chaired the Polrevkom and, but for the defeat of the Red Army in the Soviet–Polish War, would probably have led the planned Polish Soviet Socialist Republic. Instead, he became involved in agricultural affairs in the USSR, until his death while on holiday at Neri in Italy. In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were interred near the grave of Rosa Luxemburg, in the Berlin-Friedrichsfelde cemetery. The Polish Autonomous District of Marchlewszczyzna in Ukraine was named in his honor in 1926, and a street in Warsaw (now Jan Paweł II Street) bore his name under the People’s Republic of Poland, while what since 1992 has been called the Weberwiese station on Berlin’s U-Bahn was from 1950 called the Marchlewskistrasse, as was a nearby street.

MARITIME REGION ZEMSTVO BOARD (THE ZEMSTVO BOARD OF VLADIVOSTOK), PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE. This Far Eastern polity was established, with its capital at Vladivostok, following the overthrow on 31 January 1920 of the White authorities in the region (under General S. N. Rozanov) that had formerly been loyal to the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. A broad coalition government, including Mensheviks, Kadets, members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR), and even Bolsheviks, it was headed by A. S. Medvedev of the PSR. In December 1920, the regime recognized the regional authority of the Far Eastern Republic and formally subordinated itself to it. In loose coordination, forces of Medvedev’s regime and the FER battled White units that had been mustering in the Maritime Province since the collapse of their efforts in Siberia, until on 26–27 May 1921 a coup in Vladivostok toppled Medvedev and led to the establishment of the more conservative “Merkulov regime,” the Provisional Priamur (People’s) Government (the Maritime Zemstvo Government).

MARITIME ZEMSTVO GOVERNMENT. This anti-Bolshevik government, which until its final months was known as the Provisional Priamur (People’s) Government (and which is often also referred to as the “Merkulov regime”), existed (with its base at Vladivostok) from 27 May 1921 to 25 October 1922. It had its origins in a military coup organized at Vladivostok, on 23 May 1921, by G. A. Verzhbitskii and others, using remnants of the White forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (notably the remnants of the followers of the late General V. O. Kappel’, the kappel′evtsy), against the (nominal) rule in the port of the Far Eastern Republic (FER), which had been recognized by the previous Provisional Government of the Maritime Region Zemstvo Board (the Zemstvo Board of Vladivostok). Japanese interventionist forces subsequently formed a cordon sanitaire around Vladivostok, protecting the new government from the FER’s People’s-Revolutionary Army and Red partisans in the Maritime Province.

The government was initially headed by the brothers N. D. and S. D. Merkulov. From August 1921, its armed forces launched offensives northward, capturing the Red partisan stronghold of Spassk and the city of Khabarovsk from the FER on 22 December 1921. A Red counteroffensive led by M. K. Bliukher in February 1922 drove the Whites from Khabarovsk and, in June 1922, the Merkulovs were removed and replaced by General M. K. Diterikhs. The following month, a regional Zemskii sobor′ (“Congress of the Land”) was summoned at Vladivostok, with Patriarch Tikhon of the Russian Orthodox Church named as its honorary chairman. It recognized the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich Romanov as rightful tsar of Russia, thereby (in theory) resurrecting tsarist rule over the last foothold of the Whites on Russian territory. At the same time, Diterikhs began to style himself as “Voevoda” (military governor) of the territory (which was renamed the Maritime Zemstvo Government) and rechristened his armed forces in equally archaic terms as the Zemskaia rat′ (Zemstvo Host). When Japanese forces were evacuated from the Russian mainland in October 1922, the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the FER closed rapidly on Vladivostok, and the regime collapsed.

MARKIN, NIKOLAI GRIGOR′EVICH (9 May 1893–1 October 1918). One of the first commanders of the Red Fleet, N. G. Markin was born into a peasant family at Syromias (now Markino) in the Sosnovorsk district of Penza oblast′. He was mobilized in 1914 and was serving as an NCO in a mine-laying unit at Kronshtadt when he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1916. Following the February Revolution, he was elected to the Petrograd Soviet as a representative of the sailors of the Baltic Fleet and subsequently served on the first VTsIK (June–October 1917) and on Tsentrobalt.

Following the October Revolution, Markin became secretary and then controller of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, in which role he was responsible for the publication of seven volumes of documents from the imperial archives, including the secret treaties signed by the Allies during the First World War. From June 1918, he served as a special commissar for military and naval affairs at Nizhnii Novgorod and that same month oversaw the creation there of the Red Volga Military Flotilla. On 18 August 1918, he was named a naval commissar, and on 22 August 1918 became assistant commander of the flotilla. In that capacity, he commanded the flotilla during operations to retake Kazan′ in September 1918 and then in operations along the Kama River. He was killed in action on board the armored vessel Vania-kommunist. Numerous ships, streets, a square in Nizhnii Novgorod, and other locations, including (in 1960) his home village, were subsequently renamed in his honor. A memorial museum to him was opened at Markino in 1963, and a monument to him was also raised there in 1967.

Markov, Sergei Leonidovich (7 July 1878–25 June 1918). Lieutenant colonel (29 March 1909), colonel (6 December 1913), major general (6 December 1915), lieutenant general (16 August 1917). One of the iconic figures of the White movement in South Russia and a soldier of outstanding bravery—he was known to his men as “General Forward” due to his propensity to always attack—S. L. Markov was born into an impoverished noble family in Moscow guberniia and was a graduate of the 1st Moscow Cadet Corps (1895), the Constantine Artillery School (1898), and the Academy of the General Staff (1904). In the Russo–Japanese War, he served as a staff officer with the 1st Siberian Corps and, from 8 October 1911, he lectured at the academy. During the First World War, after heading a section of the quartermaster general’s staff on the South-west Front, he was chief of staff of the 4th Rifle (“Iron”) Division under General A. I. Denikin (from March 1915), commander of the 13th Rifle Regiment (from 22 September 1915), deputy chief of the operational section of the staff of the main commander in chief (March–July, 1917), and chief of staff of the Western and South-West Fronts (from August 1917). He was arrested, with Denikin, on 1 September 1917 for participation in the Kornilov affair and was imprisoned at Bykhov.

Markov escaped from Bykhov on 19 November 1917 and, with other future leaders of the White movement, made his way undercover to Novocherkassk to help found the Volunteer Army. In that force, he participated in the First Kuban (Ice) March, as commander of the 1st Officer (Volunteer) Regiment (12 February–22 March 1918) and (from 22 March 1918) of the 1st Infantry Brigade (from June 1918, Division). He was fatally wounded in battle near Shablievka stanitsa on 25 June 1918, at the commencement of the Second Kuban March, and subsequently died at Sal′sk (now in Rostov oblast′). His name was immediately adopted by the 1st Officer Regiment and then the 2nd (Markov) Infantry Division, the Markovtsy becoming renowned as one of the colorful units of the White armies in South Russia). At Sal′sk, on 13 December 2003, a statue of Markov by the sculptor V. A. Surovets was unveiled, the first such monument to an active participant in the White armies to be raised in Russia.

Markovtsy. This was the name given to one group of the colorful units of the Volunteer Army and the Armed Forces of South Russia that was named in honor of General S. L. Markov. The 1st Officers’ Regiment (later the 1st Officers’ General Markov Regiment and, from April 1920, the 1st General Markov Infantry Regiment) was created on 12 February 1918, at Ol′ginsk stanitsa, as the Volunteer Army was reorganized in preparation for the 1st Kuban (Ice) March. It consisted initially of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Officer Battalions; the Shock Division of the Caucasian Cavalry; units of the 3rd Kiev Ensign School; and the Rostov Officer and Naval Company. In mid-March 1918, the Special Junker Battalion was added to its complement. Its 2,000 men (almost all of them officers or officer cadets) were reduced to less than 400 following the failed attempts to capture Ekaterinodar in April 1918. Its complement subsequently ebbed and flowed, reaching a peak of 3,000 men on 1 October 1919. On 14 October 1919, the regiment was combined with others to form the Markov Division. By the time the Markovtsy had been driven back into the Kuban by the Reds and then, in March 1920, transported to Crimea, they numbered less than 300. By that time, it has been estimated, more than 10,000 men had passed through the regiment’s ranks.

The Markovtsy wore a forage cap with a white crown and a black band and black epaulettes emblazoned with a white letter “M” (all with white edging).

Commanders of the Markovtsy were Lieutenant General S. L. Markov (12 February–22 March 1918); Major General A. A. Borovskii (22 March–20 April 1918); Colonel N. N. Doroshevich (20–21 April 1918); Colonel Prince I. K. Khovanskii (21–27 April 1918); Colonel N. S. Timanovskii (27 April–9 October 1918); Major General N. N. Khodakovskii (9–26 October 1918); Colonel Narkevich (acting, 26 October–19 November 1918); Colonel V. I. Geideman (19–27 November 1918); Colonel D. N. Sal′nikov (27 November 1918–March 1919); Colonel A. N. Bleish (from March 1919); D. A. Marchenko (22 December 1919–October 1920); Lieutenant Colonel G.A. Lebedev (October 1920); and Captain V. Kolomatskii (acting, October 1920).

MARTIROSOV, SUREN KARPOVICH. See AVANESOV, VARLAAM ALEKSANDROVICH (MARTIROSOV, SUREN KARPOVICH).

MARTOS, BORYS (1 June 1879–19 September 1977). The Ukrainian politician and scholar Borys Martos was born at Horodyshche (Gradizk), near Kremenchuk (Poltava guberniia), and was a graduate of the Mathematics Faculty of Khar′kov University (1908). As a student, he was active with a Ukrainian nationalist hromada (brotherhood) and in 1905 joined the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor Party. He worked with various branches of the cooperative movement in Ukraine in 1910–1911, then as a financial director of the Black Sea–Kuban Railway, as a director of the Kuban Cooperative Bank and, finally, as inspector of cooperatives for the Poltava guberniia zemstvo (1913–1917).

In 1917–1918, Martos was elected to the Ukrainian Central Rada and served on the General Secretariat of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR). With the establishment of the Ukrainian State in April 1918, he was excluded from government and devoted himself again to the cooperative movement (as chair of the executive committee of the Central Ukrainian Cooperative Committee and of the board of Dniprosoiuz and chief organizer of the Cooperative Institute at Kiev). After the reestablishment of the UNR, he again entered government, as minister of food supplies in the government of Volodymyr Chekhivsky (26 December 1918–13 February 1919), and was subsequently (and jointly) premier of the UNR and its minister of finance (9 April–27 August 1919).

After the collapse of the UNR in 1920, Martos emigrated to Czechoslovakia, settling in Prague and again engaging in cooperative work (founding the Society of Ukrainian Cooperative Leaders), as well as teaching at a variety of émigré institutions. After the Second World War, he moved to Munich and there became rector of the Ukrainian Higher School of Economics (1945–1949) and a senior associate of the Institute for the Study of the USSR (also its vice president, 1954–1956, and secretary of its Learned Council, 1957–1958). In 1958, he emigrated to the United States. He died and is buried in New Jersey.

MARTOS, NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH (20 November 1858–14 October 1933). Major general (1902), lieutenant general (31 May 1907), general of infantry (3 May 1913). Born at Poltava, the anti-Bolshevik commander N. N. Martos was a graduate of the Petrovsk-Poltava Military Gymnasium, the First Pavlovsk Military School (1877), and the Academy of the General Staff (1883). He was a veteran of the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–1878 and the Russian expedition to China in 1900 and, during the Russo–Japanese War, was chief of staff of the 8th Army (from 16 February 1905) and commander of the 15th Infantry Division (from 6 August 1905). During the opening days of the First World War, he was captured (on 15 August 1915) by German forces at Neidenburg, East Prussia (now Nidzica in Poland), and spent the remainder of the war in Germany as a POW.

Martos returned to Russia in early 1918, and after some time in hospital at Mtsensk and Moscow made his way to Kiev. There he was immediately arrested by the security forces of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii, on suspicion of being a Soviet agent, and was sent to the Luk′ianovsk prison, but was soon released on the orders of his old friend, the Hetman’s minister of war, General A. F. Rogoza. He subsequently made his way to Crimea, where, following the end of the Austro-German intervention in the region in late 1918, he participated in the formation of the Whites’ Crimean-Azov Army, subsequently heading the sanitation section of its general staff. In April 1919, he moved to Ekaterinodar, where on 19 September 1919 General A. I. Denikin named him chief of state security of the Armed Forces of South Russia (that is, commander of the State Guard). He remained in that post until the evacuation of White forces from Novorossiisk in March 1920. In emigration, Martos moved from Salonika to Yugoslavia, where he worked in military institutions in Zagreb and was active in ROVS. He died at Zagreb and is buried in the military section of the local cemetery.

MARTOV (TSEDERBAUM), IULII OSIPOVICH (12 November 1873–24 April 1923). The chief ideologist of the Mensheviks and that party’s acknowledged leader during the civil-war era, Iulii Martov was born into a middle-class, politicized Jewish family in Constantinople, where his father worked as a newspaper correspondent. His family moved back to Odessa in 1877, and in 1891 he entered the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of St. Petersburg University. There, he became involved with Populist groups and was soon expelled. From 1892, he was associated with social-democratic circles and spent two years at Vil′na (Vilnius) developing his influential ideas on mass agitation. In 1895–1896, Martov collaborated with V. I. Lenin in founding and leading the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class and, from 1898 (after three years of in exile at Turukhansk, western Siberia) on the newspaper of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, Iskra (“The Spark”), but they differed on the issue of party membership (Martov favored a broad-based party with a mass membership) and from 1903 were engaged in increasingly fraught arguments as exiled leaders, respectively, of the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions of the party. Martov spent the First World War in Switzerland and, following the February Revolution, returned to St. Petersburg on 9 May 1917—like Lenin, he traveled on a “sealed train” supplied by the Germans—to lead the group of Mensheviks-Internationalists who rejected the defensism of the party leadership and the Russian Provisional Government while also opposing the Bolsheviks’ defeatism and Lenin’s ambition to transform the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war. Instead, Martov, like Vikzhel′, advocated an “all-socialist” coalition government and was a proponent of a negotiated end to the war.

Following the October Revolution, Martov remained a critic of the “barracks socialism” of what he saw as an increasingly despotic Soviet regime and denounced the Red Terror, while at the same time supporting the struggle against the Whites and the Allied intervention, but he and his supporters were expelled from VTsIK on 14 June 1918. He was reelected to that body in December 1919, and from 1919 to 1920 was also an elected member of the Moscow Soviet, but found himself increasingly marginalized as the civil wars wound down.

To ease his ill-health and to escape harassment from the Soviet authorities, Martov left Russia in September 1920 and moved to Berlin, where he founded and edited the newspaper Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (“The Socialist Courier”) and helped organize the so-called “2½ International,” hoping to prevent the Komintern taking over European socialist parties. He died from tuberculosis at the spa town of Schömberg, in the Black Forest in 1923 and was buried there. On the occasion of his death, A. V. Lunacharskii described him as the Bolsheviks’ “most sincere and selfless opponent,” while in an obituary in Pravda Karl Radek called him “the Hamlet of the Russian Revolution.” His chief biographer, Israel Getzler, concluded that Martov was too honest, too principled, and too humane to be a successful revolutionary leader but that he personified social democracy’s moral conscience.

Martusevičs, Antons (25 February 1863–9 September 1944). Major general (?). The divisional commander of the Latvian Riflemen from 27 March 1919, Antons Martusevičs was mobilized into the forces of the quondam Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic in early 1919, initially serving as head of artillery of the 1st Rifle Division of that mythical state’s armed forces, the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia. On 20 October 1919, he was removed from his post for failing to achieve the targets set for the 20,000-strong strike group of Red Latvian and Estonian forces under his command. This was during the battles for Orel, in which that group would actually play a decisive role in turning the advance of the Armed Forces of South Russia. He subsequently became a member of the Commissariat for Military Affairs of the Latvian Sovnarkom before retiring due to ill health in August 1920.

Martynov, Matvei Filaretovich (16 May 1881–31 March 1919). Major general (July 1918), lieutenant general (19 November 1918). The ataman of the Urals Cossack Host (November 1917–March 1918), M. F. Martynov, who led the Host’s uprising against Soviet power in early 1918, was a graduate of the Moscow Infantry Officers School (1904) and during the First World War had commanded the 3rd Urals Cossack Regiment of the 3rd Army Corps. In August 1917, he led his regiment in the 3rd Corps’ march on Petrograd during the Kornilov affair.

After the October Revolution, Martynov formed a volunteer Cossack sotnia (squadron) and in January 1918 headed for Astrakhan to participate in the Cossacks’ challenge to Soviet power in that region. On 19 February 1918, he was chosen as commander of forces in the Urals region and (as formal commander of the Urals Army from April to September 1918) could take much of the credit for overseeing the operations that cleared most of the southern Urals of Soviet forces during the summer of 1918. He was badly wounded in action near Samara in August 1918, while attempting to open communications with Komuch, but survived to lead the Cossacks’ defense of Ural′sk until its capture by Red forces in January 1919. However, during these battles he was again badly wounded, and he eventually died of his wounds at Gur′ev on 31 March 1919.

Marushevskii, Vladimir Vladimirovich (12 July 1874–24 November 1951). Colonel (6 December 1911), major general (6 December 1915), lieutenant general (30 May 1919). Born into the nobility of St. Petersburg guberniia, V. V. Marushevskii was one of the leading military figures in the White movement in North Russia. A graduate of the Nicholas Engineering School (1894) and the Academy of the General Staff (1902), he served in the Russo–Japanese War (rising to senior adjutant on the staff of the quartermaster general of the 1st Manchurian Army). He spent much of the First World War in France, as commander of the 3rd (Russian) Special Infantry Brigade, before returning to Russia in April 1917 to serve (from 26 September 1917) as the last chief of the general staff of the Russian Army.

Marushevskii was arrested by the Soviet government on 20 November 1917, for plotting against the new regime and for obstructing efforts to secure an armistice with Germany, but was released from the Khresty Prison in Petrograd in January 1918. After living underground, he made his way via Finland to Stockholm in August 1918 and thence joined the White movement in North Russia. On 19 November 1918, he succeeded Colonel N. A. Durov as commander of the Forces of the Northern Front and at the same time entered the Provisional Government of the Northern Region, as governor-general, military commander, and director of the Department of War, the Department of Internal Affairs, the Department of Ways and Communications, and the Department of Post and Telegraph. In January 1919, he was succeeded as governor-general by General E. K. Miller and in May 1919 transferred to him also the post of military commander, serving thereafter (from 13 January 1919) as chief of staff to the commander of the Northern Army, but in practice remaining at the helm of the White military efforts in the North.

Although Marushevskii managed to raise an army of some 20,000 men, successes at the front were few, and on 1 August 1919 he was removed from his post; soon afterward (26 August 1919) he was sent abroad, to Scandinavia and Britain, to purchase supplies. After the collapse of the Northern Army and the evacuation of the Whites from North Russia in February 1920, Marushevskii remained in emigration, settling first in Sweden and then in Yugoslavia, where he worked as an assistant attaché at the French consulate (and in 1935 attained French citizenship). He died and is buried in Zagreb.

MASLAKOV, GRIGORII SAVEL′EVICH (1877–1921). The Red Army commander and rebel leader G. S. Maslakov was born into a poor peasant family in Stavropol′ guberniia and worked as a horse trainer on a stud farm in the Sal′ district of the territory of the Don Cossack Host. He was mobilized into the Russian Army during the First World War and served in artillery formations, and in late 1917 organized a partisan unit of frontoviki who fought against the Don Cossacks and the Volunteer Army around Manich in defense of the October Revolution.

Maslakov’s band was subsequently absorbed into Red forces on the Don commanded by B. M. Dumenko and subsequently became part of the 1st Cavalry Army of S. M. Budennyi. Maslakov was named commander of the 1st Division of the 4th Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Army. In that capacity, he played a key part in the arrest of the alleged traitor F. K. Mironov in September 1919. By early 1920, he was in command of the 14th Cavalry Division, although he was subsequently demoted for insubordination. He joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) during the summer of 1920, while fighting in the Soviet–Polish War.

In January–February 1921, Maslakov led a rebellion against Soviet power of elements of the 1st Cavalry Army (the Maslakov Mutiny) and declared his support for the Ukrainian anarchist leader Nestor Makhno. He was subsequently captured and shot by the Soviet authorities, although there are contradictory versions of the details of his demise. One version has it that he was betrayed and killed by his own men in the mountains of Ossetia in September 1921. Another is that he met his end in the Tsaritsyn region. Maslakov appears as the “incorrigible partisan” in Isaak Babel’s story “Afonkina Bida,” part of the Red Cavalry collection.

Maslakov mutiny. During the winter of 1920–1921, conditions in the Reds’ 1st Cavalry Army were becoming unstable, as food and forage were short in the areas of southeastern Ukraine in which it was deployed against Nestor Makhno’s Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine. In January 1921, elements of the army’s 4th Division, commanded by G. S. Maslakov, refused to attack the Makhnovists, describing them as fellow revolutionaries. Subsequently, on 8 February 1921 (at the time of the Kronshtadt Revolt), Maslakov issued a proclamation calling for the overthrow of Bolshevik rule and the election of “free soviets” and declared himself to be a supporter of Makhno. Maslakov’s group then united with the Makhnovist detachment of Mikhail Brova near Pavlograd.

On 11 February 1921, Maslakov was declared to be a traitor by the Revvoensovet of the 1st Cavalry Army. The following month, Maslakov’s group made its way through the Don territory into the Kalmyk steppe. There, on 23 March 1921, they were surrounded by Red forces at Roguli and virtually annihilated. The few who escaped, with Maslakov among them, then joined with a Kalmyk force to capture Elista, where they shot around 100 Soviet officials. After several failed attempts to rejoin the main body of the Makhnovists (and apparently having failed also in an effort to link up with the rebel forces of A. S. Antonov in Tambov guberniia), Maslakov’s men eventually broke through Red lines in the Don region and, on 26 July 1921, were reunited with the Makhnovists in eastern Ukraine. Soon afterward, however, Maslakov and his rebel followers were smashed by the Reds, although there are contradictory versions of precisely how, when, and where.

MASLOV, SERGEI NIKOLAEVICH (1866–?). The White politician S. N. Maslov had been a state councilor in tsarist Russia and a member of the right-liberal Octobrist Party. In 1917, he was chairman of the Orel guberniia zemstvo and was provincial commissar of the Russian Provisional Government. He also stood as a candidate for the Constituent Assembly, as a representative of the All-Russian Union of Landowners.

Following the October Revolution, Maslov made his way to South Russia and offered his services to the Volunteer Army, acting as head of the Directorate of Food Supplies on the Special Council of General A. I. Denikin. He was also a member of the main committee of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos and participated in the standing conference on the regulation of trade relations between the Volunteers and the Don Cossack Host and the Kuban Cossack Host. He was evacuated from Novorossiisk in March 1920 and, after passing through Constantinople, settled in emigration in Alexandria.

Maslovskii, Evgenii Vasil′evich (4 October 1876–29 January 1971). Lieutenant colonel (1914), colonel (3 January 1917), major general (1917). One of the leading staff officers of the White movement in South Russia, E. V. Maslovskii was a graduate of the Tiflis Cadet Corps, the Mikhail Artillery School, and the Academy of the General Staff (1906), following which he was assigned to the staff of the Caucasus Military District. During the First World War, he was on the staff of General N. N. Iudenich, rising to quartermaster general of the Caucasus Front by 1917. In September 1917, he was briefly arrested under suspicion of participation in the Kornilov affair, but was soon released.

Following the October Revolution, Maslovskii made his way from Tiflis to the Don territory to join the Volunteer Army (May 1918), serving as a staff officer with the partisan detachments of General V. P. Liakhov and General A. G. Shkuro before becoming chief of staff of the 3rd Army Corps (November 1918) and acting commander of the Forces of the Terek-Daghestan Region (March–April 1919), returning to the post of chief of staff of General I. G. Erdeli (when the latter formally replaced Liakhov as commander of the Terek). With the collapse of the Armed Forces of South Russia in early 1920, Maslovskii successfully organized the evacuation of men and supplies along the Georgian Military Highway into Georgia. Subsequently, in July 1920, he made his way to Crimea and, in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, was attached to the staff of General P. N. Shatilov, deputizing for him as chief of staff to Wrangel on a number of occasions before becoming chief of staff of the 2nd Army (August 1920). He was retired in September 1920, following the failure of the Russian Army’s Trans-Dnepr operation, and went into emigration.

After some time in the camps around Constantinople, in 1921 Maslovskii settled at Iambol, in southeastern Bulgaria, and found work as a surveyor and engineer on various damn- and railway-building projects. In 1927, he moved to Paris, where he rejoined Iudenich, worked in a car factory, and wrote a major historical study of the Caucasian Front during the First World War (Mirovaia voina na Kavkazkom fronte, 1914–1917 g.: Strategicheskii ocherk, 1933). In 1940, he became involved with the Nice Church Library, one of the great Russian émigré collections, and remained active in that capacity for the next 23 years. He died in an old people’s home at Menton on the French Riviera in 1971 and is buried in a local cemetery.

Matiiasevich, mikhail stepanovich (23 May 1878–5 August 1941). Colonel (1916). One of the most prominent military specialists of the Red Army, M. S. Matiiasevich was born into a military family at Smolensk and was a graduate of the Iaroslavl′ Military School (1900) and the Odessa Officer School (1905). He served with the 222nd Infantry Regiment during the Russo–Japanese War (and was badly wounded), and during the First World War rose to the command of the 726th Infantry Regiment, seeing action on the Northern and Western Fronts.

Matiiasevich voluntarily joined the Red Army early in 1918, apparently out of political convictions, initially serving as assistant commander and then commander of the Vitebsk detachment of the Western Screen (from April 1918). From July 1918, he was commander of the 1st Smolensk Division, and from September of the Right Group (later the famous 26th Rifle Division) of the 5th Red Army. From 1 July to 26 September 1919, he commanded the 7th Red Army on the Western Front, successfully repulsing the attacks launched by the White forces of General N. N. Iudenich, before transferring to the command of the 3rd Red Army on the Eastern Front (7 October 1919–15 January 1920). In the latter capacity, he played a leading role in the Reds’ capture of Omsk, the capital of White Siberia, in November 1919. From 8 February 1920 to 27 August 1921, he commanded the 5th Red Army, fighting pockets of White resistance and peasant partisans in Eastern Siberia and acting as an advisor to V. K. Bliukher and the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic, as well as intervening in Mongolia to confront and defeat the forces of R. F. Ungern von Sternberg.

Following the civil wars, Matiiasevich worked as head of the Higher Military School at Kazan′ (from November 1921) and head of the Higher Unified (S. S. Kamenev) Military School (February 1922–April 1924). He retired in 1924, but continued to teach at the Kiev Institute of Higher Education. He was arrested in January 1931 (during Operation “Spring”), charged with membership in a “counterrevolutionary officers’ organization,” was tortured during his interrogation, and was sentenced to 10 years’ forced labor. He was released from the camps in 1933, but arrested again in 1937 and spent two more years in prison. He died in 1941 and is buried in the Lukianonskii cemetery in Kiev.

Matkovskii, Aleksei Filippovich (felitsianovich) (17 March 1877–8 June 1920). Colonel (25 March 1912), major general (1918), lieutenant general (1919). One of the most senior military figures in White Siberia, A. F. Matkovskii was born into an impoverished noble family in Podol′sk guberniia and was a graduate of the 1st Cadet Corps, the Mikhail Artillery School (1897), the Academy of the General Staff (1903), and the Cavalry Officers School (1904). A member of the Dragoon Life Guards Regiment, he worked in various staff posts in St. Petersburg Military District and on the General Staff and (from 1913) was a teacher at the academy. During the First World War, he served, successively, as commander of the 12th Uhlan Belgorod Regiment (4 September 1914–17 January 1915), chief of staff of the 1st Guards Cavalry Division (1 February 1915–16 November 1915), chief of staff of General Kaznakov’s cavalry detachment (November 1915–October 1916), commander of the 2nd Courland (Alexander II) Life Guards Regiment (from 10 November 1916), chief of staff of the 11th Cavalry Division (from 17 January 1917), and chief of staff of the 5th Cavalry Corps (from 5 May 1917). Following a bout of illness, he was placed on the teaching staff of the academy on 4 September 1917 and was evacuated with it to Ekaterinburg after the October Revolution.

With the seizure of Ekaterinburg by anti-Bolshevik forces in July 1918, Matkovskii joined the staff of the director of the Ministry of War of the Provisional Siberian Government and became inspector of cavalry of the Siberian Army (from 5 September 1918) and commander of the 2nd Steppe Siberian Independent Corps (6 September–13 November 1918). In September 1918, he was also named director of the war ministry of the Provisional Siberian Government and from 15–24 December 1918 was acting commander of the Siberian Army. Finally, in November–December 1918 (and again from 9–14 November 1919), he served as head of the garrison and commandant of Omsk, in which capacity one of his first tasks was to oversee the sham trial of the Cossack officers who had staged the Omsk coup, although he spent most of 1919 once again lecturing at the academy. He was arrested at Irkutsk on 5 January 1920, by forces of the Political Center; fell subsequently into the hands of the Bolsheviks; and on the orders of a Cheka tribunal, was executed at Omsk, alongside other leading figures of the regime of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, on 8 June 1920, having been found culpable for the Omsk massacre of December 1918. Matkovskii was posthumously rehabilitated by the procurator of the Omsk oblast′ of the Russian Federation on 12 July 1995.

MATVEEV, IVAN IVANOVICH (1890–8 October 1918). The Soviet commander I. I. Matveev was born at Asheshki (now Tsiurupinsk), near Kherson, into the family of a sailor. He worked on military transports with the Black Sea Fleet during the First World War. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in February 1917, and from early 1918, commanded Red Guards units around Odessa, later (from April 1918) combating forces of the Austro-German intervention around Nikolaevsk and Kherson, before retreating into the Crimea and thence across the Kerch Strait to the Taman Peninsula. In May 1918, at Ekaterinodar, Matveev’s unit combined with others to form the 4th Dnepr Infantry Regiment, which undertook operations along the Black Sea littoral from Taman to Novorossiisk, and from June to August 1918 he commanded the 3rd Taman Column on the left flank of the Taman Front, fighting off pursuing forces of the Volunteer Army. On 27 August 1918, at a military council at Gelendzhik, Matveev was elected commander of the Taman (Red) Army, which he then led on its celebrated forced march across the region to unite with the Red Army of the North Caucasus at Armavir.

On 8 October 1918, at Piatigorsk, Matveev was among those Bolsheviks executed on the orders of the rebel commander of the 11th Red Army, I. L. Sorokin. He was subsequently regarded as a martyr to the Red cause in the Soviet Union; numerous streets were named in his honor, as was the ship Komandir Matveev, launched on the Black Sea in 1969.

Matveev, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1877–26 April 1951). The second (and last) head of the Far Eastern Republic (FER), N. M. Matveev was born at the village of Bogdat, in Transbaikalia, and was a graduate of the Irkutsk Officer School. After graduation, he worked as a surveyor with the Transbaikal Cossack Host but was also involved in revolutionary work, as a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party from 1900. He joined the Bolshevik faction of the party in 1917, and, from April to August that year, was chairman of the Military Committee of the Transbaikal Cossack Host. From February 1918, he was chairman of the Sovnarkom of Transbaikal oblast′, in that capacity organizing forces to combat the Special Manchurian Detachment of Ataman G. M. Semenov around Chita. After the fall of Soviet power in Siberia in the summer of 1918, he joined a partisan unit, but was captured by Japanese interventionist forces and imprisoned at Khabarovsk, only being released in February 1920. He then joined a partisan force in the Amur region, before entering the government of the FER in December 1920 as minister of war. He was made chairman of the FER government in December 1921 and remained in that post until the FER united with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic on 15 November 1922. He was also a member of the Dal′biuro of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). After the civil wars, he was occupied with numerous state posts. He died in Moscow.

MAXIMALISTS. This party (formally the Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries-Maximalists and sometimes rendered as the SR-Maximalists) had its origins in an extremist faction within the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) dating back to at least 1904. It was established as a separate organization (led by I. Pavlov, M. I. Sokolov, V. V. Mazurin, G. A. Nestorov, and others) in October 1906, at a conference at Åbo (Turku) in Finland, after the expulsion of its members from the PSR. The Maximalists had a political program that bordered on anarchism. They were opposed to formal party organization (hence the “union” in their name), had no faith in the progressive possibilities of a bourgeois revolution or liberal parties, and during the 1905 Revolution, demanded that the PSR should campaign on and work for the immediate introduction of the maximum program of the PSR (hence “Maximalists”): immediate agrarian and urban social revolution to establish a “Republic of Toilers.” The latter would be a pure democracy, built on soviets, and, the Maximalists believed, could be hastened into existence through individual terrorism, both political (the killing of officials and policemen) and economic (the killing of landlords and factory owners). Terrorism, however, proved to be the group’s undoing, as their activities, especially bank robberies and hold-ups (which they called “expropriations”) were portrayed by the authorities as banditry and hooliganism; the Maximalists undoubtedly had many apolitical criminals among their number. Especially damaging to their image was a failed assassination attempt against the prime minister, P. A. Stolypin, on 12 August 1906, that missed its target but killed around 30 people and injured almost 100 others, including Stolypin’s two children. Subsequently, the majority of the original Maximalist leaders were hunted down and executed by the authorities.

The group revived, however, in 1917, especially at Kronshtadt, where the Maximalist faction (led by Grigori Rivkin, Arseni Zverin, and A. N. Lamanov) were as strong as the Bolsheviks in the local soviet. National membership was more than 3,000 by the end of the year. The Maximalists supported the October Revolution and allied with the Bolsheviks in the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, but in 1918 (like the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries) came to criticize the regime over the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which they regarded as a capitulation to imperialism), the prodrazverstka (which they regarded as an “urban war on the village”), the Bolshevization of the soviets that followed the expulsion of the SRs and the Mensheviks from VTsIK and many local soviets in June 1918, and the promulgation of the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (which the Maximalists now despised as a “commissarocracy”). Thus, from July 1918, the group campaigned for “soviets without parties.”

In December 1919, the entire Council of the Maximalists and many other of its leaders (including Rivkin and Zverin) were arrested and imprisoned by the Cheka. A pro-Bolshevik faction (headed by N. V. Arkhangel′skii, A. I. Berdnikov, and F. Iu. Svetlov) had already left the group in May 1919, to form the Union of Maximalists. The latter joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) en bloc in May 1919. The Union of SR-Maximalists made a brief comeback when it was relegalized in early 1921, but its perceived inspiration of the Kronshtadt Revolt and its criticisms of the new “capitulation” of the New Economic Policy led to further arrests and repressions at the hands of the Cheka, and the group soon disappeared from Soviet politics.

MAXIMOFF (MAKSIMOV), GREGORY (GRIGORII) PETROVITCH (10 November 1893–16 March 1950). A Russian American anarchist who came to prominence in the civil-war period (and later wrote extensively about it), Gregory Maximoff was born in the village of Mitushino, Smolensk guberniia. He initially trained to be a priest, but graduated as an agronomist from St. Petersburg’s Agricultural School (1915). He joined the revolutionary movement as a student, supported the October Revolution, and subsequently enlisted in the Red Army, but refused to participate in police actions to disarm workers and was sentenced to death. Only the intervention of the steelworkers’ union saved his life. In 1918, he edited the anarchist newspaper Golos truda (“The Voice of Labor”) and, when that was closed, Novyi golos truda (“The New Voice of Labor”) and Vol′nyi golos truda (“The Free Voice of Labor”), and became a leading figure in Nabat. He was also secretary of the Russian Confederation of Anarchists-Syndicalists.

Maximoff was arrested on numerous occasions by the Cheka in the course of the civil wars, due to his sharp criticisms of the authoritarian nature of the Soviet regime; finally, alongside other anarchist activists, he was imprisoned on 8 March 1921, at the time of the Kronshtadt Revolt, and held at the Taganka prison in Moscow. He was released and expelled from Soviet Russia alongside Voline and others in September 1921, making his way to Berlin, where he later edited the newspaper Rabochii put′ (“The Worker’s Path”). He subsequently moved to Paris, in 1924, and then to the United States, settling in Chicago. There, he worked as a tapestry maker, was active in the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), and edited the newspapers Golos truzhenika (“The Toiler’s Voice”) and Delo truda-probuzhdenie (“The Cause of Labor-Awakening”) until his death from heart disease in 1950.

MAYNARD, CHARLES CLARKSON MARTIN (1870–1945). The commander of the forces of the Allied intervention at Murmansk (23 June 1918–20 September 1919), General Charles Maynard was born in Burma and was a graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst (1890). Having already served in Burma, Malta, India, and South Africa, during the First World War he occupied numerous staff positions in the British Army before being invalided home from France in 1918. He was then selected for the Murmansk command in May 1918, arriving there on 23 June 1918. Within two weeks he had overseen operations that extended Allied control of the Murmansk railway 250 miles to the south, as far as Soroka (Belomorsk). Over the winter of 1918–1919, he then pushed his men a farther 60 miles south (to Segezha); in the spring, supported by two newly arrived companies of U.S. transportation troops, launched a new offensive that took the front line to Kiappesel′ga, 550 miles south of Murmansk.

In mid-September 1919, having commanded a successful disengagement operation at Lizhma, Maynard was taken ill and was replaced by General H. C. Jackson, who oversaw the Allied evacuation of Murmansk on 12 October 1919. After his return to Britain, Maynard headed the administration of Western Command before retiring in 1925 with the rank of major general.

MAZEPA, ISAAK PROKHOROVYCH (16 August 1884–18 March 1952). The acknowledged leader of the social-democratic movement in Ukraine (and one-time premier of the independent Ukraine), Isaak Mazepa was born at Kostobobra, Chernigov guberniia, and was a graduate of the Natural Sciences Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1907). He joined the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor Party (USDLP) as a student in 1905 and subsequently helped build its membership at Ekaterinoslav, where he was employed as an agronomist by the local zemstvo. Following the February Revolution, he was elected to both the city duma and the city soviet at Ekaterinoslav and, from April 1918, headed the Ekaterinoslav Guberniia Revolutionary Committee, a center of resistance to the Ukrainian State of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii. Following the reestablishment of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) in late 1918, Mazepa became its minister of the interior (from 9 April 1919), subsequently combining that post with that of prime minister (29 August 1919–25 May 1920), as well as serving at various times as foreign minister (from 11 October 1919) and minister of agriculture (May–June 1920).

With the final collapse of the UNR in November 1920, Mazepa went into emigration, first settling at Lwów, as editor of Vil′na Ukraina (“Free Ukraine”). In March 1923, he moved to Czechoslovakia, where he was employed as a teacher at the Ukrainian Economic Academy in Poděbrady. During the interwar period, he also represented the USDLP at numerous socialist conferences. After the Second World War, he taught at the Ukrainian Technical and Animal Husbandry Institute at Munich and from 1947 to 1952 was co-organizer of the Ukrainian National Council in exile (and from 1948 to 1950 was chairman of its executive committee). He was the author of numerous historical works on the revolutionary period, as well as some well-respected works on agronomy. He is buried at Augsburg, in Bavaria.

MAZNIASHVILI (MAZNIEV), GEORGI (1872–7 September 1937). A prominent military leader in the Democratic Republic of Georgia, Georgi Mazniashvili was born in the village of Sasireti, in northern Georgia, and was a veteran of the Russo–Japanese War and the First World War. Following the February Revolution, he returned to Georgia and formed two national volunteer divisions that secured Tiflis from the increasingly Bolshevized elements of the Russian Army. In April 1918, he commanded Georgian forces that secured the southwestern province of Guria from the Ottoman Army of Islam and, in June 1918, he led Georgian units into Abkhazia to crush, mercilessly, the pro-Bolshevik rising there, before advancing to capture Gagra, Sochi, and Tuapse in the opening stage of the Sochi conflict.

In December 1918, during the Georgia–Armenian War, Mazniashvili was made commander in chief of the Georgian Army and successfully held off the advance of the Armenian forces of General Dro. Subsequently, in 1919, he was named governor-general of Akhaltsikhe and Akhalkalaki. On 6 October 1920, he became governor-general of Tiflis. During the Soviet invasion of Georgia of February 1921, Mazniashvili initially attempted to organize resistance to the Red Army, but then diverted his attention to assisting the 11th Red Army in seizing the Turkish-occupied city of Batumi. He was subsequently declared an outlaw by the new Soviet authorities, but in April 1921 was offered the post of divisional commander in the Georgian Red Army by G. K. Ordzhonikidze and in July 1921 was named inspector of infantry of Georgia.

Mazniashvili was subsequently, however, arrested and was imprisoned until 1923. In May 1923, he left Georgia and traveled, via Baku, to Persia. He subsequently settled in Paris, where he worked for the Government-in-Exile of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (and was commissioned to negotiate with the French Army for assistance in overthrowing Soviet rule in Georgia) before, in 1925, being allowed to return to Soviet Georgia and to live in retirement at his home village. However, apparently on the initiative of Lavrenty Beria, he was arrested and, together with one of his sons, was shot during the Terror. His gravesite remains unknown. Efforts by another of Mazniashvili’s sons (Boris) to have him posthumously rehabilitated in the Brezhnev period were turned down by the authorities (on 3 April 1979).

MDIVANI, BUDU (POLIKARP GURGENOVICH) (1877–19 July 1937). The Soviet politician Budu Mdivani was a Georgian. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903 and became, alongside J. V. Stalin, one of the Bolsheviks’ most prominent organizers in Transcaucasia. He was an active participant in the revolution and civil wars in Transcaucasia, as a member of the Revvoensovet of the 11th Red Army (30 November 1918–13 February 1919), head of the PUR with the 10th Red Army (1919–March 1920), and chairman of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Georgia (1920–1921). He was also a member of the Kavbiuro of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (1920–1921), chairman of the Georgian revkom (from July 1921), and a member of the presidium of the Communist Party of Georgia (from 1922). In those capacities, he oversaw the dismantling of the state apparatus of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, following the Red Army invasion of the country in February 1921, and the Sovietization of his native land, but at the same time came into dispute with Stalin, then head of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, over the degree of autonomy allowed to Georgia (the “Georgian affair”). He also served briefly as ambassador to Ankara for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (19 February–May 1921), in the period of negotiations that led to the Soviet–Kemalist Treaty of Moscow (16 March 1921).

From 12 March to 13 December 1922, Mdivani was chairman of the Union Council of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, but was removed from his post with the rise to power of Stalin and sent into diplomatic exile, as Soviet representative in France. In 1928, he was recalled from that post and lost his membership in the party, as an alleged supporter of L. D. Trotsky. Having recanted, he was restored to the party and served from 1931 as chairman of Georgia’s VSNKh, people’s commissar for light industry of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, and first deputy chairman of the Georgian Sovnarkom. He was again removed from his posts in June 1936, charged with membership in a Trotskyite-terrorist organization on 9 July 1937, and subsequently executed on the outskirts of Tbilisi.

Mehmandarov, Samad bey (SAMEDBEY SADYKHBEY OGLU) (16 October 1855–12 February 1931). Lieutenant colonel (1 January 1898), colonel (31 January 1901), major general (1905), lieutenant general (1908), general of artillery (22 March 1915). The military leader of independent Azerbaijan during the civil-war period, and prior to that one of the few Azeris to rise to high rank in the Russian Army, Samad Bey Mehmandarov was born at Lankaran (near the Persian border) into a noble Azeri family from Susha. He graduated from the 2nd Constantine Military School in St. Petersburg (1875) and saw action in the China expedition in 1900–1901 and in the Russo–Japanese War, before entering the First World War as commander of the 21st Infantry Division (from 31 December 1913). He subsequently served as commander of the 2nd Caucasian Corps (from 11 December 1914) and received numerous honors and decorations, from Russia’s allies as well as from Russia itself.

Mehmandarov left the army following the February Revolution and retired to Baku, where, from 21 December 1918, he served as the minister of defense of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (having been assistant minister since 1 November 1918), directing the country’s forces in the Armenian–Azerbaijan War and in other regional conflicts. He remained as war minister until 28 April 1920, when he was arrested by invading Soviet forces. After just two months’ imprisonment, however, he was released, and he subsequently became an advisor to the Commissariat for War of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic and lectured at an army college in Baku, until his retirement in 1928. He died in Baku in 1931 and was buried in the city’s Chemberekend cemetery. A tanker of the Azerbaijan merchant fleet was subsequently named in his honor, as was a street in Baku.

MEKHONOSHIN, KONSTANTIN ALEKSEEVICH (30 October 1889–7 May 1938). One of the most active (but little known) organizers of Red forces in the civil wars, K. A. Mekhonoshin was born at Zavod-Aleksandrovskii, Perm′ guberniia, where both his father and mother were teachers in the factory school. He studied at St. Petersburg University from 1909, but did not graduate, having devoted himself to the revolutionary movement. In 1906, he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party and adhered to the Bolshevik faction. In 1914–1915, he worked with a naval expedition on the Caspian and in 1915 was mobilized into the Russian Army, serving with a reserve battalion of the Pavlovsk Life Guard Regiment in St. Petersburg. Following the February Revolution, he became a member of the Petrograd Soviet, representing the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), and a member of the Bolshevik Petrograd Committee, and from April 1917 was a leading member of the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b).

Mekhonoshin was arrested by the Russian Provisional Government in the aftermath of the July Days, accused of treason, and was imprisoned. Like other arrested Bolsheviks, though, he was not brought to trial. Instead, he was released in early October 1917 and was one of the leaders of the October Revolution, as a member (from 1 November 1917, chief of staff) of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the St. Petersburg Soviet. He became a member of VTsIK on 20 November 1917 and held numerous senior military positions during the civil wars, including deputy people’s commissar for military affairs (from 20 November 1917); member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs (December 1917–September 1918); member of the All-Russian Collegium for the Organization of the Red Army (from 21 January 1918); deputy chairman of the Supreme Military Council (March–September 1918); and member of the Revvoensovet of the Eastern Front (June–August, 1918). In that last capacity he played a leading role in the liquidation of the Left-SR Uprising of July 1918. From 6 September 1918 to 8 July 1919, Mekhonoshin was a founding member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, wherein he worked closely with L. D. Trotsky. He served also on the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front (3 October 1918–26 January 1919 and 15 June–13 July 1919) and that of the Caspian–Caucasian Front (26 January–13 March 1919) and was chairman of the Revvoensovet of the 11th Red Army (20 March–25 June 1919). Here he clashed on a number of occasions with J. V. Stalin. As the wars against the Whites wound down, and the Soviet–Polish War became the priority, he was transferred to the Western Front, as a member of the Revvoensovet of the 11th Red Army (24 December 1919–5 May 1920), the 15th Red Army (4–20 June 1920), and the 3rd Red Army (11 June–31 December 1920). From 1921 to 1926, he was initially deputy chairman and then chairman of Vsevobuch.

A keen (and expert) chess player, in the early 1920s Mekhonoshin was also active in various aspects of Soviet sport (including serving as chairman of the Supreme Council of Physical Culture and Sport). From 1926 to 1927, he was Soviet military attaché in Poland, and from 1927 to 1931, worked for the State Planning Commission (Gosplan). From 1931 to 1934, he was a member of the collegium of the Commissariat for Communications of the USSR, and finally, became director of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Oceanography and Naval Economics. He was arrested on 28 November 1937 and was sentenced to death as a counterrevolutionary by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on 7 May 1938. He was executed the same day at Kommunarka, Moscow, and was buried in a mass grave. Mekhonoshin was posthumously rehabilitated in October 1956.

MEL′GUNOV, SERGEI PETROVICH (25 december 1879–26 May 1956). A socialist opponent of the Soviet government, who was active in the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918 and the anti-Bolshevik underground, S. P. Mel′gunov was born into an aristocratic Moscow family (his father was a historian) and was a graduate of the Historical and Philosophical Faculty of Moscow University (1904). After graduation, he worked as a teacher of history at a number of schools around Moscow and contributed articles on historical and social themes to many newspapers and journals, including Russkie vedomosti (“The Russian Register”). He joined the Kadets in 1906, but left them to help found the Party of Popular Socialists in 1907. In 1911, he founded the successful publishing house Zadruga (Commune), and from 1913 he edited the journal Golos minuvshego (“Voice of the Past”). In 1917, he was named by the Russian Provisional Government as chief inspector of Moscow archives.

Following the October Revolution, Mel′gunov became an active opponent of the Bolshevik regime, as a leading member of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia. He was arrested in 1919, as a member of the Tactical Center, and sentenced to death, although this was commuted to 10 years’ imprisonment. He was released in 1921 and forced into exile in 1922. (In that year also Zadruga was forced to close when its type was “nationalized” by the government.) In emigration, Mel′gunov went first to Warsaw but soon settled in Paris, where he devoted himself to historical research and writing and edited a number of key émigré journals, including Na Chuzhoi storone (“On the Other Side,” 1923–1928), Bor′ba za Rossiiu (“The Struggle for Russia,” from 1926) and Vozrozhdenie (“Resurrection,” 1949–1954). He remained an advocate of armed struggle against the Soviet government throughout his life, but during the Second World War opposed any form of collaboration with Nazi Germany. He died near Paris. In 1992, Mel′gunov was posthumously rehabilitated of all crimes by the courts of the Russian Federation.

MELLER-ZAKOMEL′SKII, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH (31 March 1863–1920). A White politician of the civil-war years, Baron V. V. Meller-Zakomel′skii was the scion of a great landowning family of St. Petersburg guberniia; he is reported to have owned 3,400 desiatiny in Iamburg uezd in 1912. He was a graduate of the elite Corps of Pages and a member of the equally exclusive Life Guards Regiment (in the reserve from 1886). From 1899 to 1903, he served as head of the local nobility in Iamburg and, from 1904 to 1906, was overseer of the “cabinet lands” (i.e., those belonging to the tsar) in the Altai region. He also served, from December 1905, as head of the St. Petersburg guberniia zemstvo, and from 1912 (with the rank of state counselor) was a member of the imperial Council of State. In 1915, he was one of the supporters of the Progressive Bloc within the State Duma that sought to have Nicholas II appoint a government enjoying the confidence of the people.

Following the October Revolution, Meller-Zakomel′skii made his way to Ukraine. There, in October 1918, he helped found (and led) the anti-Bolshevik State Unity Council of Russia, which immediately promised its support to the Volunteer Army. The following month, he played a leading role in the Jassy Conference, in an attempt to foster more extensive and effective Allied intervention in Russia. When the socialist-dominated Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic captured Kiev, in December 1918, Meller-Zakomel′skii and members of his State Unity Council moved to Odessa, where Allied troops were disembarking; when the latter withdrew, in April 1919, he lost all real influence over political affairs and the following year went into emigration.

Mel′nikov, Nikolai Mikhailovich (23 September 1882–11 December 1972). A leading figure among the Don Cossack Host both in the civil-war period and in emigration, N. M. Mel′nikov was born into the family of a winemaker at Trekhostrovianskaia stanitsa, in the Don oblast′. He was a graduate of the Law Faculty of Moscow University and studied also in Paris. In 1917, he served as deputy chairman of the Don Cossack Military Council (Krug) and was elected to the Constituent Assembly as a representative of the Don territory.

In the civil-war period, Mel′nikov was a mainstay of various Cossack and White organizations, serving as chairman of the government of the Don Republic in 1919, and in February 1920 acting briefly as chief political advisor to General A. I. Denikin and the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), as head of the Government of the Main Commander of the AFSR. In emigration, he lived briefly in Yugoslavia before becoming (from 1923) chairman of the Don government-in-exile and (from 1924) chairman of the Cossack Union in Paris and editor of its journal, the Vestnik Kazach′ego soiuza (“Herald of the Cossack Union”). He died in a nursing home in Paris at the age of 90.

Mensheviks. This was the name of the more moderate faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) that emerged in 1903, at the party’s Second Congress (in London), in support of Iu. O. Martov’s efforts to prevent V. I. Lenin from restricting party membership to a narrow elite of “professional revolutionaries.” The Mensheviks actually won a majority in the congress’s vote on that issue, but acquired their name (which translates as “Minoritarians”) when they lost a vote on the narrower issue of membership on the editorial board of the party newspaper, Iskra (“The Spark”). Like their rivals, the Bolsheviks (the “Majoritarians”), the Mensheviks had a predominantly urban support base, but theirs was markedly more multiethnic (attracting many Jews and Georgians, in particular). In their ideology, the Mensheviks retained an adherence to the teachings of G. V. Plekhanov (the “father of Russian Marxism”) that Russia must undergo a period of capitalist development, under a bourgeois government, before socialism could be established, and opposed any attempt to move prematurely to socialism, although they held that the process could be speeded up by socialists working to raise the class consciousness of the proletariat and by placing pressure on the government through a network of workers’ organizations (such as trade unions and soviets). An attempt to reunite with the Bolsheviks at a Unification Congress held at Stockholm in 1906 was stillborn, and from 1907 onward, the two factions drifted apart. In this period, some Mensheviks, notably A. N. Potresov, called for an end to the underground, illegal work of the party and for a switch to open and legal work. For this, the Mensheviks were condemned as “liquidators” by Lenin, who worked and schemed successfully to oust them from party institutions until the RSDLP finally split in 1912, with the foundation of a separate central committee and party organization for the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks).

During the First World War, the Mensheviks were divided between those (like N. S. Chkheidze) who adopted a defensist position, supported the Russian war effort, and even joined the regime’s War Industries Committees, and those (chiefly émigrés, like Martov) who opposed the war and looked to the Socialist International to impose a universal and just peace on the warring powers. The latter formed a faction within a faction, the Mensheviks-Internationalists. Following the February Revolution, the party majority supported the system of “dual power” and, in I. G. Tsereteli, found a leader who wielded more authority than anyone else in the Petrograd Soviet. He and other Menshevik defensists joined the first coalition of the Russian Provisional Government on 4–6 May 1917 and worked in it alongside the Kadets, seeking to unite “all the vital forces of the country,” while Martov unsuccessfully demanded an all-socialist coalition.

Following the October Revolution, the Mensheviks—who, chastened by the experience of 1917, returned the party leadership to Martov at an Extraordinary Congress in November 1917—retained a precarious (if sometimes interrupted) legality on Soviet territory, as they supported the struggle against the Whites and the Allied intervention and forbade their members to join the Democratic Counter-Revolution (although I. M. Maiskii disobeyed and entered Komuch). The party’s divisions, however, and its association in the popular mind with the failed Provisional Government of 1917, had cost it much support, and in the elections to the Constituent Assembly it won less than 3 percent of the vote. In Transcaucasia, however, Mensheviks of the Georgian Social-Democratic Labor Party (among them Chkheidze, Noe Zhordania, Noe Ramishvili, Evgeni Gegechkori, and Akaki Chkhenkeli) were the dominant force in the Democratic Republic of Georgia throughout its existence.

As the civil wars wound down, from late 1920 some Russian workers were seen to adopt Menshevik criticisms of the Soviet government, leading to a wave of arrests of party leaders. In 1922, 10 of the latter were forced into exile, although many others remained and worked for the Soviet regime, often in its economic apparatus. Many of these latter were put on trial in 1931, accused of wrecking and espionage. Those in emigration, meanwhile, followed Martov’s line of shunning both the Whites and the Bolsheviks. They initially gathered in Berlin, around the fortnightly newspaper Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (“The Socialist Herald”), but moved on to Paris in the 1930s to escape the Nazis and then, upon the outbreak of the Second World War, to the United States, where their newspaper continued to be published until December 1963. Its final issue cited “the inexorable laws of biology” as having robbed it of its last editor and most of its contributors and readers, but for 40 years in emigration the Mensheviks had been extremely influential in guiding Western opinion on Russia, as political analysts (F. I. Dan, R. A. Abramovich, David Dallin, P. A. Garvi), historians (Dan, Boris Nicolaevsky), and experts on various aspects of Soviet society.

Mensheviks-Internationalists. Having its origin in the internal divisions that arose among the Mensheviks over whether or not to support Russia’s efforts in the First World War, this Leftist grouping coalesced around Iu. O. Martov, O. A. Ermanskii, I. S. Astrov, Iu. Larin, A. S. Martynov, R. Abramovich, N. N. Sukhanov, and others in 1917, as an opposition faction within the Menshevik party, which was at that time dominated by figures of the center (F. I. Dan) and center-right (I. G. Tsereteli). Its views were articulated through the newspapers Rabochii internatsional (“Worker’s International,” January–April 1918), which was published in Moscow, and Mysl′ (“Thought,” Khar′kov, January–July 1919), published at Khar′kov.

At the time of the October Revolution, the Mensheviks-Internationalists refused to enter the Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland and the Revolution to oppose the Soviet government by force, believing that this would merely nurture the counterrevolution. Martov and his group supported instead the negotiations sponsored by Vikzhel′ in early November 1917, aimed at the formation of a coalition socialist government. When those negotiations failed, the Mensheviks-Internationalists remained active in VTsIK and participated in the Third and Fourth All-Russian Congresses of Soviets (January and June 1918), using those platforms to criticize both the dictatorial tendencies of the Bolsheviks and, especially, the mounting counterrevolution; when, for example, Rightist Mensheviks (including A. N. Potresov and V. O. Levitskii, Martov’s younger brother) broke ranks and joined anti-Bolshevik organizations such as the Union for the Regeneration of Russia and Komuch, they were excoriated by Martov and expelled from the party. Nevertheless, along with other non-Bolshevik groups, the Mensheviks-Internationalists were expelled from Soviet organizations by the VTsIK decree of 14 June 1918 (although the party was not banned).

By this time, with Rightist Mensheviks having gone underground or fled abroad, Martov’s group was the dominant force within Menshevism (a stark contrast to the position in August 1917, when only a third of the delegates at the Mensheviks’ “Reunification Congress” had supported him), and in October 1918 the party Central Committee passed a resolution that jettisoned support for a reconvening of the Constituent Assembly and committed itself to defending the Soviet republic. In 1919, the Mensheviks-Internationalists were particularly vocal in calling for support for the Red Army in its struggle against the Whites and were rewarded by being allowed to participate in the Seventh All-Russian Congress of Soviets (5–9 December 1919); some of their members were elected to VTsIK (Martov, for example, representing the Moscow Soviet from 1919 to 1920). By late 1920, however, with the civil wars waning and a Soviet victory all but guaranteed, the Mensheviks-Internationalists came to be increasingly pressured by the Soviet government and persecuted by the Cheka and found themselves no longer able to function. Some went into emigration (e.g., Martov and Abramovich), chiefly settling in Berlin; some went underground; others, like Sukhanov and Ermanskii, abandoned political activity and turned to literary work or found employment in the Soviet administration (especially its economic apparatus). The latter were purged in 1931, and few of them survived the Terror of the 1930s.

MENZHINSKII, VIACHESLAV RUDOL′OVICH (19 August 1874–10 May 1934). The Chekist V. R. Menzhinskii (Wiaczesław Mienżynski) was born into a Polish family of noble lineage in St. Petersburg and was a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1898). He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1902, while working as a teacher. He was arrested in 1906, but escaped abroad and lived in emigration in France, Switzerland, Belgium, the United States, Italy, and Great Britain. He returned to Russia in July 1917 and joined the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b). During the October Revolution, he was a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet (from 25 October 1917).

Menzhinskii then served as acting (from 30 October 1917), then full, People’s Commissar for Finance in Sovnarkom (20 January–21 March 1918). After a period (April–November 1918) of diplomatic work in Berlin (Menzhinskii was fluent in a number of languages) and as a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (December 1918), he became head of Rabkrin in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and was at the same time a member of the collegium of the Cheka in Ukraine (January–August 1919). This was the first of a series of appointments with the Cheka and its successors for Menzhinskii, who became a member of the Special Department of the Vcheka (from 15 September 1919); member of the presidium of the Vcheka (from 15 September 1919); deputy head of the Special Department of the Vcheka (February–20 July 1920); head of the Secret Operational Directorate of the Vcheka (from 14 January 1921); member of the collegium of the GPU (from July 1922); first deputy chairman of the GPU (18 September–2 November 1923) and then the OGPU (2 November 1923–30 July 1926); and, as successor to Feliks Dzierżyński, chairman of the OGPU (30 July 1926–10 May 1934).

In the early 1920s, Menzhinskii played a leading role in Operation “Trust,” luring White émigrés back to Russia (and usually to their doom). He was also close to J. V. Stalin in this period. He died, apparently of natural causes, in 1934, having suffered for years with acute angina, and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The later confession of his successor, G. G. Iagoda, that he had poisoned Menzhinskii, can probably be discounted as a fiction.

Merkulov regime. See MARITIME ZEMSTVO GOVERNMENT.

Merkulov, Spiridon Dionisovich (1870–1957). S. D. Merkulov, who during the civil wars became a prominent local politician in the Russian Far East, was born into a peasant family in the Amur region and was a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University. Before the revolutions of 1917, he worked as a legal consultant to the local authorities at Vladivostok and as chief inspector of the Northern Insurance Society. During the civil wars, he and his brother Nikolai, the owner of a local match factory, were active in the right-liberal National Democratic Union.

From March 1921, Merkulov headed the Union of Non-Socialist Organizations at Vladivostok, which on 21 May 1921 launched the coup that overthrew the zemstvo government in Vladivostok. Spiridon became chairman of the Provisional Priamur (People’s) Government in the port, while Nikolai was given the dual posts of minister of foreign affairs and minister of war and marine. As the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic advanced south toward Vladivostok, in June 1922 he transferred power in the city to General M. K. Diterikhs and went into emigration, living in the United States from 1922. He died in San Francisco and is buried there, in the Serbian cemetery at Colma.

MEZHENINOV, SERGEI ALEKSANDROVICH (7 January 1890–28 September 1937). Captain (1917), komkor (November 1935). Born into a noble family in the ancient town of Kashira, 70 miles south of Moscow, the military specialist of the civil-war era S. A. Mezheninov was a graduate of the Kazan′ Military School (1910), the Academy of the General Staff (1914), and the Kiev Aviation School (1916).

After service in the Russian Army during the First World War, Mezheninov was mobilized into the Red Army in August 1918. In 1919, he was active on the Eastern Front, as chief of staff of the 3rd Red Army and then commander of the 3rd Red Army (5 March–26 August 1919) and the 12th Red Army (10 September 1919–10 June 1920). He then commanded the 15th Red Army (25 October–26 December 1920) in Ukraine. From March to November 1921, he served as chief of staff and commander of forces of the Orel Military District and was then made chief of staff of the Western Front (23 November 1921–6 July 1923) and of the Urals Military District. From December 1921 to November 1924, he was also chief of staff of the 1st Red Army and deputy chief of the main board of the Red air forces, and from 1924 to 1925 was chief of staff of the Ukraine Military District.

From 1925 to 1931, Mezheninov was assistant and deputy chief of the Red Air Fleet and from 1933 was deputy chief of staff of the Red Army. He served simultaneously (from 1934) as a member of the military council of the People’s Commissariat for Defense of the USSR. He joined the All-Union Communist Party in 1931. Anticipating his arrest during the purges of the officer corps that began in 1937, he attempted suicide, shooting himself twice, but survived. He was arrested on 20 June 1937, while still in hospital, and on 28 September 1937 was found guilty of espionage on behalf of Germany and Poland. He was executed in Moscow that same day, but posthumously rehabilitated on 11 July 1957. Mezheninov, whose son was also executed during the purges, was the author of a number of books on the subject of military aviation.

MIAKOTIN, VENEDIKT ALEKSANDROVICH (12 March 1867–11 September 1937). The son of a postmaster, V. A. Miakotin was a notable historian (specializing in Ukrainian and Polish affairs of the 17th and 18th centuries) and a political activist of the moderate Left who was prominent during the civil-war period. He was a graduate of the Historical-Philosophical Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1891), taught Russian history at the Alexander Lyceum and the Alexander Military-Juridical School (from 1891), and worked on the journal Russkoe bogatstvo (“Russian Wealth,” from 1904 as a member of the editorial board). He joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) soon after its founding in 1900 (and was subsequently arrested and exiled from St. Petersburg from April 1901 to November 1904), but (being opposed to the PSR’s commitment to terrorism) left that party to help found the Party of Popular Socialists in 1906. In 1911, he was imprisoned for a year for a pamphlet he had written in 1906, when he was a leading member of the Union of Unions. During the First World War, he adopted a defensist position, in 1917 headed the small Working People’s Socialist Party, and was an advocate of socialist–liberal coalition government. He was a member of the Petrograd Soviet from March 1917 and deputy chairman of VTsIK from 25 May 1917; that month he was also appointed to the governmental commission framing the electoral law for the Constituent Assembly.

In April 1918, as an opponent of the October Revolution, Miakotin became a founding member of the underground Union for the Regeneration of Russia (URR). Having left Petrograd for Kiev, Odessa, Novorossiisk, and Rostov-on-Don on URR business, despite his failure to negotiate an agreement with the Whites, Miakotin was among those arrested by the Soviet authorities in 1920 as part of the so-called Tactical Center. He was released from Moscow’s Butyrki prison in April 1921, but was subsequently expelled from Soviet Russia (on one of the Philosophers’ Ships) in late 1922. In emigration, he lived in Berlin, then Prague (where he was a professor at the Russian People’s University from 1924), and finally Sofia, where he was professor of Russian history at the Bulgarian capital’s university from 1928. He was also a member of the board of the Russian Foreign Historical Archive in Prague and a member of the Czech–Russian Union (Ednota), as well as working with the Russian Historical Society and the Union of Russian Writers and Journalists.

MIASNIKOV (MIASNIKIAN), ALEKSANDR FEDOROVICH (28 January 1886–22 March 1925). One of the foremost Armenian Bolsheviks of the civil-war era, A. F. Miasnikov (real name Miasnikian and also known as “Martuni”) was born at Nor Nakhchivan (an Armenian-populated region adjacent to the city of Rostov-on-Don) and was a graduate of the Moscow Armenian Seminary (1903), the Moscow Lazarian Institute (1906), and the Law Faculty of Moscow University (1911). He joined the Bolsheviks in 1906, was arrested and exiled to Baku, but later returned to Moscow. In 1914, he was mobilized into the Russian Army and saw service at the front.

Following the February Revolution, Miasnikian was, with M. V. Frunze, one of the editors of the Bolshevik newspaper Zvezda (“The Star”) at Minsk. He remained in Belorussia until the spring of 1918, serving as chairman of the North-West Regional Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) (from September 1917) and, after the October Revolution, commander of the Western Front (from November 1917) and head of the Executive Committee of the Western Front (from January 1918). From 30 May 1918 to 11 July 1918, he served as commander of the Volga Front. He then became chairman of the Central Bureau of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Belorussia and chairman of the council of ministers of the short-lived Belorussian Soviet Socialist Soviet Republic, before returning to Moscow as military organizer of the Bolshevik city committee in the capital (1919–1920), secretary of the party’s Moscow city committee (13 January–21 May 1920), and secretary of its Moscow guberniia committee (21 May–June 1920). After further service in 1920 as head of the Political Directorate (PUR) of the Western Front, and following the Red Army invasion of the Democratic Republic of Armenia, he returned to Baku as chairman of the Armenian Revolutionary Committee (March–May 1921), chairman of the Armenian Sovnarkom (21 May 1921–2 February 1922), and people’s commissar for military affairs of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (21 May 1921–2 February 1922). With the establishment of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, he became chairman of its Union Council (12 March–13 December 1922).

From 1922, Miasnikian was also a member of the presidium of the VTsIK of the USSR, first secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party, and an editor of Zaria vostoka (“Star of the East”). Finally, he was made a member of the Revvoensovet of the USSR (from 28 March 1923). Miasnikian, who was the author of numerous works on Marxist-Leninist theory, died in a plane crash near Tiflis in March 1925.

Miasnikov, gavril il′ich (1889–16 November 1945). The rebel Bolshevik (and allegedly, the instigator of the murder of Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich Romanov) G. I. Miasnikov was born in the village of Berezovka in Kazan′ guberniia, trained as a metalworker at a local trade school, and found work at Motovilikha, near Perm′. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1906 and sided with the Bolsheviks; he was arrested by the tsarist authorities on several occasions and spent seven years in exile and prison prior to the February Revolution.

Miasnikov returned to Motovilikha in 1917 and worked as a party activist and, in 1918, sided with the Left Bolsheviks over the question of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and other issues. As a leading member (and from 1920 chairman) of the Perm′ guberniia committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Miasnikov played an active role in the civil wars. Although not part of the Workers’ Opposition, as an advocate of “producers’ soviets” he was close to them and, along with members of the Workers’ Opposition, signed the “Letter of the 22” to the Komintern in 1922, criticizing the RKP(b) leadership’s suppression of dissent among proletarian elements of the party, as well as authoring other criticisms of the leadership. Consequently, on 22 February 1922, Miasnikov was expelled from the RKP(b). The following year, he formed the Workers’ Group of the Russian Communist Party as a platform for opposition to the New Economic Policy.

Miasnikov was arrested in early 1923 and in May of that year assigned to a trade mission to Germany, in an effort to isolate him from his supporters. In Germany, however, he immediately established contacts with the German Communist Workers Party, who helped him publish a manifesto of the Russian Workers’ Group. Consequently, when he returned to Soviet Russia in November 1923, he was again arrested and imprisoned. In 1927, he was released into exile in Yerevan, Armenia, but in November 1928 he fled across the border to Persia. From there, he was deported to Turkey in April 1929, whence he made his way to France the following year. He worked thereafter in a number of factories, wrote his memoirs, and organized workers’ groups. He was arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo in Paris on 23 June 1941, but escaped and fled. He was then arrested by the French authorities at Vichy, but again escaped. Having received an invitation from the Soviet embassy in Paris to return to Moscow to be pardoned, Miasnikov set out for the USSR on 18 December 1944. Upon his return, however, he was not pardoned, but rather arrested, on 17 January 1945. On 24 October 1945, he was sentenced to death, and was subsequently shot. He was posthumously rehabilitated by the Russian authorities on 25 December 2001.

Mickevičius-KAPSUKAS, Vincas Simanovich. See Kapsukas (Mickevičius-KAPSUKAS), Vincas Simanovich.

MIKHAILOV, IVAN ADRIANOVICH (29 December 1891–30 August 1946). One of the most controversial figures among the White political leadership of Siberia during the civil wars, I. A. Mikhailov was born at Kariisk exile prison in Transbaikal oblast′. He was the son of Adrian Fedorovich Mikhailov, who had been sentenced to death for revolutionary-Populist activities but had had that sentence commuted to hard labor and exile for life. He was a graduate of the Chita Gymnasium and the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1913). Following his graduation, Mikhailov was retained by the Economics Department of the university and began training toward a professorship. He was briefly arrested in 1914, on a political charge, but was soon released, and during the First World War led the St. Petersburg section of the economics department of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos. Following the February Revolution of 1917, he was appointed to various posts in the ministries of agriculture, supply, and finance of the Russian Provisional Government and was a close associate of A. I. Shingarev. He also served the regime of A. F. Kerensky as secretary of the Provisional Government’s Economic Council.

Following the October Revolution, Mikhailov joined (and became deputy chairman of) the St. Petersburg Union of Siberian Regionalists (although he had had no apparent prior attraction to Siberian regionalism) and was elected to the Constituent Assembly as a nonparty representative (although at this time he appears to have been close to the right wing of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries). He journeyed to Omsk in January 1918, to become head of the financial department of the huge Tsentrosibir′ organization in the cooperative movement, and at the end of that month was elected minister of finance of the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia (PGAS). Having spent some months in the anti-Bolshevik underground at Novonikolaevsk, when Soviet rule in Siberia was overthrown in June 1918, he retained that post in the new Provisional Siberian Government and its successor (from 4 November 1918), the Provisional All-Russian Government of the Ufa Directory. Following the Omsk coup of 18 November 1918, he remained, again as minister of finance, in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. From 6 May 1919, he was also minister of trade and industry in the Kolchak government.

Despite his flirtations with the Left and with Siberian regionalism in 1917, in 1918–1919 Mikhailov was the focus of ceaseless and sharp criticism from politically moderate forces in Siberia. His careerism seemed unabashed, and his hands could be detected behind each step toward the establishment of a military dictatorship in Siberia: the alienation of the PGAS, the closure of the Siberian Regional Duma, the Novoselov affair, and the Omsk coup. Moreover, with Kolchak in power, it was Mikhailov and his ministerial and military allies (notably I. I. Sukin and D. A. Lebedev)—the “Mikhailov group”—who dominated the government, while intriguing against any potential rivals. Meanwhile, the economy of the region, which Mikhailov was supposed to be running, collapsed dramatically, and his efforts at currency reform and the introduction of the Siberian (Kolchak) ruble to stabilize the value of currency in the region in the summer of 1919 proved disastrous. He was dismissed from his ministerial posts by Kolchak on 16 August 1919, following a concerted effort to oust him by his opponents on the Council of Ministers, but remained a member of the State Economic Conference.

Following the collapse of the Kolchak regime, Mikhailov went into emigration at Harbin. There, he worked as an economist with the Chinese Eastern Railway from 1920 to 1924, when the Soviet government apparently engineered his dismissal. In the 1930s, he worked for the Japanese occupiers of Manchuria (Manchukuo) and was close to the leader of the Russian fascist movement in the region, K. V. Rodzaevskii. He also edited the popular anti-Chinese and anti-Soviet newspaper Kharbinskoe vremia (“The Harbin Times”). In August 1945, following the USSR’s invasion of Manchuria, Mikhailov was arrested by Soviet intelligence forces and flown to Moscow. There, he was tried and found guilty of aiding Japan against the USSR, condemned to death, and shot.

MIKHNOVSKY, MYKOLA IVANOVICH (1873–3 March 1924). The prime ideologue of conservative Ukrainian nationalism during the revolutionary period, Mykola Mikhnovsky was born into a noble family at Turivka, Poltava guberniia, and was a graduate of Kiev University (1894). He subsequently worked as a lawyer at Khar′kov and was a member of a number of nationalist organizations, but went against the Populist grain that was prevalent within the Ukrainian national movement at that time. Consequently, in 1902 he helped found the Ukrainian People’s Party, which advocated a “unitary, indivisible Ukraine, from the Carpathians to the Caucasus” and “Ukraine for Ukrainians.” After military service in the First World War, during the February Revolution he immediately became an advocate of an independent Ukrainian army and, on 18 April 1917, was one of the founders of the first such national unit, the 1st Bohdan Khmelnytsky Ukrainian Cossack Regiment. He was also prominent on the General Military Committee of the Ukrainian Central Rada, but was arrested on 5 July 1917, charged with attempting to overthrow the regime in a military coup.

In 1918–1919, Mikhnovsky campaigned against both the Ukrainian State and the Ukrainian National Republic and narrowly escaped execution by the Bolsheviks. He subsequently fled to the Kuban, where he worked as a teacher and in the cooperative movement. In 1924, he returned to Kiev but died almost immediately, according to some sources by his own hand, but according to others, at the hands of the OGPU. The nationalist Student Organization of Mykola Mikhnovsky, which organizes among U.S. college students of Ukrainian background, is named in his honor.

MILITARY AND NAVAL DIRECTORATE OF THE ARMED FORCES OF SOUTH RUSSIA. See ARMED FORCES OF SOUTH RUSSIA, MILITARY AND NAVAL DIRECTORATE OF THE.

MILITARY COLLEGIUM OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE USSR. This institution, which played a key role in the repression of the 1930s and 1940s, was formed in 1923 as a court of first instance for the examination of exceptionally important cases and to supervise military tribunals at lower levels. From July 1934 onward, all cases relating to alleged counterrevolutionary crimes (including treason, espionage, terror, sabotage, etc.) were transferred from the OGPU Collegium to the Military Collegium. Consequently, the Military Collegium’s importance as a court of first instance expanded greatly. Moreover, immediately after the assassination in Leningrad of S. M. Kirov on 1 December 1934, a joint decree issued by VTsIK and Sovnarkom determined that persons accused of terrorist activities were to be tried in an accelerated and simplified procedure: the accused would receive the indictment only 24 hours prior to the trial; the case was to be heard without prosecutors, defenders, or witnesses; appeals against a sentence or pleading for pardon were not allowed; and a death sentence was to be carried out immediately after being passed. Between 1934 and 1955, the Military Collegium dealt with the cases of 47,459 accused, the overwhelming majority of whom received the death sentence. Included in that figure were thousands of veterans from all sides of the civil wars. The Military Collegium was also involved in the first (roughly 1955 to 1963) round of rehabilitations of those falsely convicted of crimes in the Stalin era.

Chairmen of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR were V. A. Trifonof (1923–January 1926) and V. V. Ul′rikh (January 1926–1948).

MILITARY COMMISSARS. Although this office was based on the distant precedent of a similarly named institution at the time of the French revolutionary wars, and while the Russian Provisional Government of 1917 had also named its observers at the front and plenipotentiaries to the regions “commissars,” the military commissar was one of the key military innovations of the Reds during the civil wars. These commissars acted as the representatives of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Soviet government and were attached to military formations and fleets, and military institutions and organizations, at all levels, so as to ensure political control over them and to guarantee the loyalty of the professional soldiers (especially the military specialists) who staffed them. When, over the course of 1918, the Red Army became a mass conscript army, dominated by peasants, the military commissars (or voenkomy) assumed also a larger ideological and agitational role (notably through PUR).

On 4 March 1918, by a decree of Sovnarkom, the Supreme Military Council of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was established, in which one military commander and two political commissars served. This same leadership principle was then applied to other, lower organs of the army and the navy. With the aim of standardizing the activities of military commissars across the country (and of ensuring control over them), on 8 April 1918 the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs proclaimed the formation of the All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars (Vsebiurvoenkom). In April 1919, following discussion at the 8th Party Congress of the view held by some Bolsheviks (notably the Military Opposition) that too much authority was being granted to the voenspetsy and too little to the military commissars, the bureau was transformed into the Political Section of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. On 15 May 1919, this became the Political Directorate of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, known as PUR, a full military section of the Central Committee of the RKP(b). By 1919, military commissars came more frequently to be called political commissars or, at the lower levels, politruki (“political leaders”).

Among Bolshevik leaders who served as commissars for significant periods during the civil-war period were B. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, R. I. Berzin, A. S. Bubnov, S. I. Gusev, S. M. Kirov, V. V. Kuibyshev, M. M. Lashevich, K. A. Mekhonoshin, G. K. Ordzhonikidze, N. I. Podvoiskii, J. V. Stalin, I. S. Unslikht, and V. P. Zatonskii, although prior to the Left-SR Uprising in July 1918, many members of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries had also served in this capacity. The revered commander M. V. Frunze and the future marshals of the Red Army V. K. Bliukher, K. E. Voroshilov, and I. E. Iakir also began their military careers with the Red Army as military commissars. From 1925 onward, the institution fell into disfavor, and by 1928 it had been replaced by the principle of one-man command at all levels, although it was revived from 1937 to 1942 in some parts of the Soviet armed services.

Military Commissars, All-Russian Bureau of. See Vsebiurvoenkom.

MILITARY DECORATIONS (RED). Just as it abjured the ranks and insignia of the old regime, the Soviet government abolished all the military decorations and orders of imperial Russia. Nor was there any immediate attempt, or desire, to replace them with new, revolutionary decorations and orders. Rather, in the first half of 1918, Red Amy soldiers were rewarded for bravery or other distinguished service with practical gifts, such as clothing (especially boots, which were highly valued because of their scarcity), a watch, or a pair of binoculars. However, on 16 September 1918, the Order of the Red Banner of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) was introduced, to be awarded for merit in battle or in the building of socialism. Initially, only VTsIK had the right to award this order. From 25 October 1918, that right was passed to the Revvoensovet of the Republic; subsequently, the right of award was further devolved to commanders of fronts and then armies. The first recipient was V. K. Bliukher (28 September 1918). In the course of the civil wars, other Red-held territories instituted their own equivalent. On 1 August 1924, these were unified as the All-Union Order of the Red Banner.

The Order of the Red Banner of the RSFSR originally consisted of a white enamel badge (to be worn on the left side of the chest) displaying a gold hammer and sickle, supported by two panicles of wheat, all set against a red star and backed with a crossed hammer, a plough, a flaming torch, and a red flag. On the flag, in gold, was the motto “Workers of the World, Unite!” Later, a ribbon attachment was added so that the order could be worn as a medal. The ribbon was red, with a broad central white stripe and narrow white stripes along each edge. Prior to the establishment of the Order of Lenin (6 April 1930), the Order of the Red Banner was the highest military decoration in Soviet Russia. By 1 September 1928, 14,678 people had won the order; 285 people had won it twice and 31 had won it three times.

One of the few other Red awards was the Honored Revolutionary Weapon. This was awarded to commanders of the Red Army by VTsIK and the Revvoensovet of the Republic for distinguished military service. A decree on the subject was issued by VTsIK on 8 April 1920, although the practice had begun in 1919. The award officially took the form of a gold-plated sword for the army and a gold-plated dirk for the navy, in both cases with an Order of the Red Banner attached to the hand-guard (although some early recipients, prior to the VTsIK order of 1920, received a decorated machine pistol). There were only 20 recipients of the Honored Revolutionary Weapon in the course of the civil wars: S. S. Kamenev (8 April 1919), V. I. Shorin (8 August 1919), S. M. Budennyi (20 November 1919), M. N. Tukhachevskii (17 December 1919), I. P. Uborovich (8 April 1920), M. V. Frunze (25 November 1920), K. E. Voroshilov (25 November 1920), F. K. Mironov (25 November 1920), A. I. Kork (25 November 1920), N. D. Kashirin (25 November 1920), S. K. Timoshenko (25 November 1920), V. S. Nesterovich (5 January 1921), Ia. F. Balakhanov (2 February 1921), V. G. Vinnikov-Bessmertnyi (2 February 1921), A. I. Egorov (17 February 1921), E. S. Kazanskii (3 June 1921), G. I. Kotovskii (20 September 1921), V. R. Roze (12 December 1921), G. D. Khakhan′ian (12 December 1921), and I. S. Kutiakov (28 April 1922).

From 3 August 1918, VTsIK could also award the Honored Revolutionary Red Banner to entire units. It consisted of a red flag decorated with a red star against a yellow sun beneath the legend “From VtsIK.” Soldiers of such decorated units wore a narrow gold edge on their branch-of-service badges; commanders wore an identical edge on their rank badges. The first recipients were the 5th Zemgalian Latvian Riflemen (20 August 1918), who were honored for their service on the Volga Front. In all, 2 armies, 39 divisions, 4 brigades, and 175 regiments were so honored.

MILITARY DECORATIONS (WHITE). In imperial Russia, the best known of a complex system of decorations was the Cross of St. George: a cross patté, in plain gold or silver, with a central disc bearing the image of a mounted St. George slaying the dragon. It was worn on the left side of the chest, on an orange ribbon with three black stripes (said to represent fire and death). The order, for bravery, had been established in 1769, and in 1856 was split into four degrees (the fourth being the lowest). One who had been awarded all four degrees was dubbed a Full Cavalier of St. George. During the civil wars, many White leaders felt that the Cross of St. George should not be awarded in a conflict of Russian against Russian, but Admiral A. V. Kolchak continued to award it (as well as the imperial orders of St. Vladimir, St. Ann, St. Stanislas, and others).

In South Russia, Generals L. G. Kornilov, M. V. Alekseev, and A. I. Denikin did not issue the old orders, but did issue numerous campaign medals, the most famous of which was that distinguishing the Pervopokhodniki, the participants of the First Kuban (Ice) March, featuring a sword on a crown of thorns. They also issued numerous awards to distinguish particularly notable units (the so-called colorful units). To reward acts of bravery, in 1919 Denikin tended to resort to promotions, with the result that by the time General P. N. Wrangel came to power in 1920, the Armed Forces of South Russia were flooded with very young colonels and generals. On 30 April 1920, Wrangel therefore introduced a new award, the Order of the Holy Nicholas the Miracle-Worker, for his newly organized Russian Army. This was a cross patté, of dark blue enamel, with a central disc bearing an image of the saint, surrounded by a laurel wreath with the inscription “Russia Saved Through Faith.” It was worn on a ribbon of white, blue, and red, the Russian national colors.

Other White decorations include the following:

South Russia: Jeton of the Kornilov Shock Regiment, Badge of the Kornilov Shock Regiment, Badge of the 1st General Markov Officers’ Regiment, Badge of the Markov Artillery Battalion, Badge of the Alekseev Infantry Regiment, Badge of the Alekseev Artillery Battalion, Badge of the 1st General Alekseev Cavalry Regiment, Medal for the Drozdovtsy, Badge of the 2nd General Drozdovskii Officers’ Rifle Regiment, Badge of the 2nd General Drozdovskii Officers’ Cavalry Regiment, Cross of the Partisans-Chernetsovtsy, Cross for the Steppe Campaign, Cross for the Saving of the Kuban, Medal for the for the Liberation of the Kuban, Cross of the Ekaterinoslav Campaign, Cross of General Bredov’s Campaign.

West and North-West Russia: Cross of General Keller, Badge for Members of the Army of General Bermondt-Avalov, Bermondt-Avalov Medal for Participating in the Battles in Courland, 1st and 2nd Class Cross of General Bermondt-Avalov, 13 May 1919 Cross of the North-West Army, Order of St George the Bringer of Victory of the North-West Army, Ataman Bulak-Bulakhovich’s Star of the Brave, Ataman Bulak-Bulakhovich’s Cross of the Brave, Badge of the Lithuanian Belorussian Division, Cross of the Baltic Landeswehr, Badge of the Landeswehr, Medal for Veterans of the Iron Division, The Cross of 13 May 1919, Badge of the Union of North-Westerners, Badge of the Liventsy.

North Russia: Medal in Memory of the Liberation of the Northern Region.

Siberia: Archangel Michael Cross of the Urals Cossack Host, Order of the Liberation of Siberia, Order of the Great Siberian (Ice) March, Cross of the Achinsk Mounted Partisan Column, Cross For Courage of the Special Manchurian Detachment of Ataman Semenov, Badge for Members of the Special Manchurian Detachment, Medal of the Amur Zemstvo Council.

Following the evacuation of Wrangel’s Russian Army from Crimea to Turkey in November 1920, badges were also issued to commemorate the men’s experience of the various internment camps to which they were assigned. The badge “Gallipoli,” with the date “1920–1921,” was instituted on 15 November 1921, with the right to wear it extended to residents of other camps with the corresponding inscriptions: Kabakdzha-Gallipoli, Bizerte, Lemnos, Chataldzha, Chilingir, and Sandzhak-Tepeke. For members of the Russian Army on active service who were not in the camps, there was established a special cross, with no camp name and only the date “1920–1921.” For crew members of the yacht Lukull (which served as Wrangel’s official residence during his stay in Constantinople), on 3 January 1922 there was established a Lukull Cross, with the years 1920 and 1921 on its vertical arms.

MILITARY FLOTILLAS. These formations of the Red Fleet were often operationally subordinated to fronts, or to smaller formations of the Red Army. They offered ground forces transportation facilities and artillery support for operations, often in the rear of the enemy. More than 30 Red river and lake military flotillas existed in the course of the civil wars, the most important of which were the Volga Military Flotilla, the Volga–Caspian Military Flotilla, the Astrakhan–Caspian Military Flotilla, the Dnepr Military Flotilla, the Onega Military Flotilla, and the Northern Dvina Military Flotilla.

The Whites also created a number of military flotillas, among them the Caspian Flotilla, the Kama Flotilla, and the Flotilla of the Northern (Arctic) Ocean.

MILITARY OPPOSITION. The Military Opposition was a faction of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) that arose in 1918–1919, chiefly among Bolsheviks serving in the Red Army (many of them former Left Bolsheviks), that opposed L. D. Trotsky’s efforts to organize the army along conventional lines. The high point of its influence was reached at the Eighth Party Congress (18–23 March 1919), when I. N. Smirnov and others (including G. I. Safarov, G. L. Piatakov, A. S. Bubnov, E. M. Iaroslavskii, V. G. Sorin, F. I Goloshchekin, A. F. Miasnikov, N. G. Tomachev, R. S. Samoilov, and S. K. Minin) criticized the amount of authority enjoyed by military specialists in the Red Army and demanded that more faith be placed in military commissars. Although by then, earlier demands of the Left that there should be a return to a militia army, with elected officers, the abolition of all ranks, and the abolition of the death penalty, had largely been silenced by the crisis of the civil wars, at the congress resentment against Trotsky’s high-handed manner was nevertheless palpable; at a closed meeting, the Military Opposition won a vote on the military question by 37 votes to 20, although in the congress itself Trotsky won by a vote of 174 to 95.

To placate the opposition, the apparatus was subsequently put in place to train increased numbers of “Red commanders” (i.e., officers of proletarian origins) at the Red Military Academy and other institutions, to replace the voenspetsy. Even so, the issue flared up again at both the 9th Party Congress in 1920 and the 10th Party Congress in 1921. During these debates, Trotsky was opposed by many (e.g., K. E. Voroshilov) who would assume leading positions in the struggle to remove him from power following the death of V. I. Lenin in 1924.

Military Organization of the RSDLP(b). See RSDLP(b), Military Organization of the.

Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. The Military-Revolutionary Committee (MRC, or Milrevkom) of the Petrograd Soviet was established on 16 October 1917, partly on the initiative of L. D. Trotsky. Its ostensible purpose was to defend the Petrograd Soviet and the forthcoming Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets against incursions by the advancing Germans, to prevent the removal of revolutionary troops from Petrograd, and to stave off attacks said to be expected from the Russian Provisional Government. Housed at the Smolny Institute (a former school for girls of noble families), it initially had seven departments (Defense, Supplies, Communications, Information Bureau, Workers’ Militia, Reporting Section, and Commandant’s Office) to which a Department of Revolutionary Air Services was added on 20 October 1917 and a Motor Transport Allocation Section appended on 24 October 1917. Of its original 66 identified members, 48 were Bolsheviks and 14 were members of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries, with the remaining four expressing adherence to anarchism. The MRC was chaired by the Left-SR P. E. Lazimir, but as it became the key organizational center for the October Revolution, a more prominent part in its deliberations and actions was assumed by Bolsheviks, notably N. I. Podvoiskii and V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko.

The first decree of Soviet power (“To the Citizens of Russia,” issued at 10:00 a.m. on 25 October 1917) appeared above the MRC’s name, and that body continued to organize the defense and security of the capital over the coming days (notably during the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising and the Junker revolt), also taking charge of such tasks as food supply, press censorship, and the allocation of housing. By 28 October 1917, 185 MRC commissars had been placed in charge of a range of civil bodies. As Sovnarkom and VTsIK became fully operational, however, the MRC lost its functions, and it was abolished on 5 December 1917. Nevertheless, it has some claim to be regarded as the first Soviet government (as, indeed, it was dubbed in an article by A. A. Ioffe in 1919).

military-revolutionary council of the republic. See REVVOENSOVET OF THE REPUBLIC

Military specialists. Military specialists (in Russian, generally known by the acronym voenspetsy) were officers and other specialists of the former Imperial Russian Army and Navy who served, either voluntarily or under compulsion, in the Red Army during the civil-war years. Although, from the point of view of the Bolsheviks, officers were innately hostile to the Soviet cause, in early 1918 L. D. Trotsky pressed the case that military necessity required that the revolution make use of their expertise. At least 30,000 former officers were serving in the ranks of the Red Army by October 1918, and 48,409 of them had been recruited by 15 August 1920 (i.e., approximately one-fifth of the old army’s officer corps). Of these, 391 had the rank of major general or above, of whom 16 were general of infantry, 3 were generals of cavalry, 3 were generals of artillery, and 68 were of the rank of lieutenant general. (At least 90 percent of these generals would have been of hereditary noble status.) Alongside the officers, a further 10,339 military administrators, 13,949 military doctors, and 26,766 army medical assistants of the old army (a total of 72,697 men of officer rank) served the Reds. The best estimates indicate that during the civil wars more than 20 percent of the generals and 33 percent of former staff officers of the old army fought for the Reds. About two-thirds of the remainder fought for the Whites, the rest serving with nationalist forces (especially the Ukrainian Army), taking civilian jobs, or fleeing abroad. Consequently, in 1918, at least 75 percent of the command staff of the Red Army was made up of military specialists; in 1919, that figure fell to 53 percent; in 1920, it fell again to 42 percent; and in 1921, it fell again to 34 percent.

Some voenspetsy—probably a small minority, since even Soviet sources only claim 8,000—served voluntarily, either for ideological or more material reasons, or came to embrace Soviet patriotism at the time of the Soviet–Polish War and the reconquest of Transcaucasia in 1920–1921. Examples of prominent volunteers are V. M. Al′tfater, M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, A. A. Brusilov, A. I. Egorov, D. M. Karbyshev, A. I. Kork, S. S. Kamenev, F. F. Novitskii, A. A. Samoilo, B. M. Shaposhnikov, and Jukums Vācietis. Others were compelled to serve. (In some cases, officers’ families were held hostage to ensure their loyalty.) Indeed, from 29 June 1918, according to a decree of Sovnarkom, all former officers, bureaucrats, and medical personnel were compelled by law to serve in the Red Army. Their loyalty was supposed to be guaranteed by the presence at their side of military commissars (usually two per voenspets), but there were cases of treachery and desertion (although fewer than has generally been supposed; only 5 out of 82 voenspetsy army commanders deserted), while the prominence accorded to the military specialists by Trotsky angered other Bolsheviks (notably J. V. Stalin at the time of the Tsaritsyn affair) and gave rise to the Military Opposition in 1919.

As the civil wars wound down in 1920–1922, and as the Red Military Academy began to produce increasing numbers of Red commanders, the majority of the voenspetsy were removed from command positions and either left the army or were transferred to teaching posts in military academies and schools. At the same time, former White officers (mostly of junior rank) were recruited at a surprising rate, some 12,000 making the conversion in total (and some of them advancing to very senior command posts, e.g., L. A. Govorov becoming a marshall of the Soviet Union in 1944). Many military specialists suffered repression, imprisonment, exile, or execution in the early 1930s, notably during the purge known as Operation “Spring.”

MILIUKOV, PAVEL NIKOLAEVICH (15 January 1859–31 March 1943). The Russian liberal politician P. N. Miliukov was one of the most prominent and controversial public figures of the revolutionary era, although his star faded somewhat in the civil-war years. He was born in Moscow, the son of a municipal architect of middling means, and graduated from the First Moscow Gymnasium and the History and Philosophy Faculty of Moscow University (1882). He then worked as an assistant professor of history at his alma mater (1886–1895), defending his master’s thesis there in 1892. One of his most influential early works was the three-volume collection Essays on the History of Russian Culture (1896–1903), which suggested that Russia was following the path of Western development, albeit more slowly. By the time that work appeared, however, its author had been fired from the university for his radical political views and exiled to Riazan′.

Miliukov spent much of the following decade abroad, lecturing in Bulgaria, the United States, and Western Europe, suffering arrests and police harassment whenever he returned to Russia. During the 1905 Revolution, however, he played a key part in the liberation movement, as chairman of the Union of Unions. He was arrested in August 1905, but released without charge and set about drafting the program of the Kadets (the Constitutional Democratic Party), who would become the major liberal party in Russia over the following years. He also jointly edited the party’s newspaper, Rech′ (“Speech”), from 1906 and led the party faction in the Third and Fourth State Dumas, finding himself dominant in that role, as many other Kadet leaders had been banned from Duma elections for signing the inflammatory Vyborg Manifesto in 1906, protesting the dissolution of the First State Duma. (Ironically, Miliukov had helped draft the manifesto, but for technical reasons had not signed it.) He remained skeptical about the Duma system, but favored “preservation of the Duma” over the risk of its dissolution and the outbreak of revolutionary violence.

Already renowned as an expert on Russian foreign policy, Miliukov adopted a defensist position during the First World War and spoke frequently about the need for Russia to obtain control of the Turkish Straits to survive as a great power. Indeed, such was his vehemence in this regard that he came to be dubbed “Miliukov-Dardanel′skii.” In August 1915, he was the chief mover behind the Progressive Bloc in the Duma that sought to pressure Nicholas II into forming a “government that enjoys the confidence of the people,” but was dismayed by the intransigence of the monarch. On 1 November 1916, he delivered a speech in the Duma, during which he listed all the failings of the regime and asked, repeatedly, “What is this? Is it stupidity or is it treason?” This has been frequently cited as fatally undermining the tsarist system.

Still, Miliukov was dismayed by the total collapse of tsarism in February–March 1917, believing that some continuity was necessary between the old regime and the new if the Russian Provisional Government was to enjoy legitimacy, but failing in his efforts to have the Grand Duke Mikhail (Nicholas II’s younger brother) accept the throne. He nevertheless took the post of foreign minister in the first Provisional Government, but was forced to resign on 2 May 1917, when, in what became known as the “Miliukov note,” he promised the Allies that Russia would remain true to the (annexationist) war aims of the old regime and the notion of a “war to victory” and rejected the policy of a general “peace without annexations or indemnities,” which was the policy of the Petrograd Soviet, thereby causing a popular outcry. For the rest of the year, he remained a vocal thorn in the side of the Provisional Government, accusing it of cowardice in the face of the threat from the Bolsheviks. During the Kornilov affair, he became a proponent of military dictatorship as the solution to Russia’s ills.

In November 1917, following the October Revolution, Miliukov traveled to the Don territory, where he authored the inaugural “Declaration” of the Volunteer Army at the behest of General M. V. Alekseev and joined the Don Civil Council. In May 1918, however, he diverged dramatically from the staunchly pro-Allied Volunteers, adopted a pro-German “orientation,” and went to Kiev, where he hoped to win the support of the Central Powers in a struggle against the Soviet government. To most Kadets, this was anathema, and Miliukov was forced to resign from his post as chairman of the party, although he remained politically active for a while, having renounced his courting of the kaiser in the summer of 1918, as a member of the National Center and as a delegate at the Jassy Conference. He then (in November 1918) moved abroad, first to London, where he helped found the pro-White Russian Liberation Committee and edited the weekly The New Russia, and then, in 1920, to Paris, where he edited the influential Poslednie novosti (“The Latest News”) and led the less influential Kadet splinter-group, the Paris Democratic Group (from 1924 the Republican-Democratic Union). With the latter, he sought to define a set of “New Tactics,” predicated on working (with socialists) for the internal evolution of the Soviet state into a more democratic entity. This caused controversy among many émigrés (especially monarchists), and Miliukov was subject to several assassination attempts (one of which cost the life of his associate, V. D. Nabokov).

During the interwar years, Miliukov published numerous works on the revolution and civil wars and several volumes of memoirs. In 1940, having shunned German overtures for him to serve in the government of a future “Vichy Russia,” he fled to southern France to escape the Nazi invasion. From there, he wrote several works praising the accomplishments of the regime of J. V. Stalin in resisting Hitler and in strengthening Russian statehood. He died in 1943 at Aix-les-Bains, Savoy, and was initially buried there, but in 1954 his casket was transferred to the Batignolles cemetery, Paris. Miliukov’s legacy remains mixed: for some, his fate illustrates the unpropitious circumstances for the development of liberalism in Russia in the early 20th century; for others, he was a tactless authoritarian who damaged Russian liberalism by a series of crass political misjudgments.

MILIUTIN, VLADIMIR PAVLOVICH (24 October 1884–30 October 1937). The Soviet politician and economist V. P. Miliutin, who was the son of a village schoolteacher, was born near Aleksandrovo, in Kursk guberniia, and was educated at St. Petersburg University. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903, and gravitated initially toward the Mensheviks, then sided with the Bolsheviks from 1910. He was arrested on eight occasions prior to the February Revolution and spent five years in prison and exile. In 1917, he was elected chairman of the Saratov Soviet, and on 29 April 1917 joined the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks). He resigned from the Central Committee on 4 November 1917, following the October Revolution, having stated a preference for the sort of coalition government campaigned for by Vikzhel, but rejoined it on 29 November 1917. He had also resigned from his initial government post as People’s Commissar for Agriculture (26 October–4 November), but subsequently rejoined Sovnarkom as acting chairman (March–April 1918) and then deputy chairman (November 1918–March 1921) of VSNKh; in effect, he was one of the chief managers of War Communism.

Among numerous other posts, Miliutin subsequently served as the Komintern’s representative to Austria and the Balkans (1922–1924), as a member of the collegium of Rabkrin (1924–1928), as director of the Central Statistical Directorate of the USSR, and at the same time as deputy chairman of the State Planning Commission, Gosplan (3 March 1928–April 1934). He was also a member of the Central Control Commission of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (31 May 1924–26 January 1934). He was arrested on 26 July 1937 and subsequently was shot as a “counterrevolutionary.” Miliutin was posthumously rehabilitated in May 1956.

Miller, Evgenii Karlovich (25 September 1867–11 May 1939). Colonel (1901), major general (6 December 1909), lieutenant general (31 December 1914), general of cavalry (30 May 1919). The most prominent leader of the White movement in North Russia, E. K. Miller was born into a Baltic German family at Dvinsk (Daugavpils). He was a graduate of the Nicholas Cadet Corps (1884), the Nicholas Cavalry School (1886), and the Academy of the General Staff (1892), and served as a military attaché in Belgium (1898–1901) and Italy (1907–1909) before becoming quartermaster general of the Main Directorate of the General Staff and head of the Nicholas Cavalry School (1910–1912). In the First World War, he served conjointly as commander of the Moscow Military District and chief of staff of the 5th Army (July 1914–28 December 1916) and commander of the 26th Army Corps (January–April 1917). This last posting was terminated when he was attacked, wounded, arrested, and imprisoned by his own men after he had attempted to ban the wearing of red ribbons on their uniforms. He was sent under guard to Petrograd, where the Provisional Government decided to send him to Rome, as its representative with the Italian Army (one could compare this with the dispatch of Admiral A. V. Kolchak to the United States in similarly fraught circumstances in July 1917).

After the October Revolution, Miller refused to recognize the Soviet government and worked for the anti-Bolshevik cause in Paris, then was invited to become governor-general of North Russia by the Provisional Government of the Northern Region (2 November 1918). He arrived in North Russia on 1 January 1919, took up the post of governor-general on 15 January 1919, and was appointed also to the post of director of foreign affairs in the government (January–August 1919). In May 1919, he was named by Admiral Kolchak as commander in chief of the Forces of the Northern Region and, from 10 June 1919, took on the additional duties of commander of the Northern Front. From September 1919, he was also main commander of the Northern Region.

There was some overlap in Miller’s responsibilities with those of General V. V. Marushevskii, but this dual command was ended in August 1919, when Marushevskii was sent abroad by Miller, the latter becoming, in effect, military dictator of the Northern oblast′. With the limited resources at his command, however, Miller was unable to forge a tenable regime in North Russia, and once British and other forces of the Allied intervention began to evacuate from Arkhangel′sk in June 1919, the White forces of the Murmansk Volunteer Army, the Olonets Volunteer Army, and the Northern Army (although, on paper, numerically stronger than they ever had been) rapidly crumbled under offensives of the 6th Red Army and the 7th Red Army.

Miller was evacuated from Arkhangel′sk on 19 February 1920. He went first to Norway, but in March 1920 moved to Paris, where he acted as chief plenipotentiary for military and naval affairs in France for General P. N. Wrangel (from May 1920) and then (from April 1922) as Wrangel’s chief of staff. From June 1923, he was in the service of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich Romanov in France and, from 1925, was senior deputy chairman of the émigré organization ROVS. In May 1930, he succeeded General A. T. Kutepov (who had been abducted by Soviet agents) as head of ROVS. In that capacity, he sought to revitalize the organization and to provide regular and structured military training for the émigrés of his own and the next generation, while opposing those (such as General A. V. Turkul) who wanted to expand ROVS’s role in organizing terrorist attacks within the Soviet Union, for fear of succumbing to more Soviet acts of provocation such as those organized by the Cheka during Operation “Trust.”

On 22 September 1937, Miller was kidnapped by the NKVD, in a plot realized by the Soviet agent General N. V. Skoblin. (Aside from it being part of a fantastical scheme to have the NKVD agent Skoblin made head of ROVS, it is possible that Miller was abducted because he knew too much about the NKVD’s forging of the evidence that had led to the case against and recent execution of Marshal M. N. Tukhachevskii.) Miller was smuggled on board a Soviet vessel, the Mariia Ul′ianova, at Marseille and taken to Moscow, where he was imprisoned in the Lubianka and given the name Petr Vasil′evich Ivanov as a security measure. He was executed on 11 May 1939, on the orders of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. The events surrounding Miller’s disappearance formed the basis of several historical novels, as well as the film Triple Agent (2004), directed by Éric Rohmer.

MILLIY FIRQA. The national party of the Crimean Tatars was founded (as the Tatar Party) in July 1917, by elements of the local intelligentsia, led by Noman Çelebicihan and Dzhafer Seydamet. The party program, drawn up in November 1917, which was strongly influenced by progressive Jadidism, aimed at the establishment of national cultural autonomy for the Crimean Tatars within a federal Russian state, although some elements of the party hoped for full independence. Very soon the party was split into moderate and radical factions, with the latter oriented toward the Bolsheviks and the former seeking cooperation in 1918 with the forces of the Austro-German intervention.

Milliy Firqa led a precarious existence under both the Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic in 1919 and the subsequent occupation of the peninsula by the Whites. In 1920, with the firm establishment of Soviet power in the region, it was driven underground. Mass arrests of former party members were undertaken by the OGPU from January 1931. In 2006, a group of Crimean Tatar notables proclaimed the foundation of a new party with the same name.

Ministry of war of the All-Russian (Omsk) Government. See Omsk Government, Ministry of war of the.

MIRBACH-HARFF, WILHELM VON (2 July 1871–6 July 1918). The German diplomat Count Wilhelm von Mirbach was born into the Rhenish nobility at Bad Ischl, in Upper Austria. Prior to the First World War, among other postings, he had served as a counselor at the German embassy in St. Petersburg, from 1908 to 1911. He participated in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and was subsequently (2 April 1918) named German ambassador to Soviet Russia. In that post, he became an advocate of Germany’s financial support to the Soviet government. On 6 July 1918, he was assassinated in his office by Ia. G. Bliumkin, signaling the beginning of the Left-SR Uprising in Moscow. Mirbach was succeeded as ambassador by Karl Theodor Helfferich.

MIRONOV, FILIPP KUZ′MICH (14 October 1872–2 April 1921). F. M. Mironov, the Red Cossack commander who was executed for treachery in 1921, was born into a poor family of the Don Cossack Host at Buerak-Seniutkin khutor and graduated from the Novocherkassk Cossack Officer School in 1898. He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War, but was thrown out of the army for participating in antigovernment demonstrations during the 1905 Revolution, and thereafter worked mostly in local government at Novocherkassk. In 1914, he volunteered for service, and during the First World War rose to the command of the 32nd Don Cossack Regiment (from December 1917).

Mironov was active in Red Cossack formations from as early as January 1918, engaging with anti-Soviet forces at Aleksandrovsk, and by 31 May 1919 had risen to the command of the Red Lithuanian-Belorussian (Red) Army, remaining briefly as acting commander (9–14 June 1919) when that force was redesignated as the 16th Red Army. In late September 1919, he was arrested on the orders of S. M. Budennyi for leading Cossack units into action against the Whites on the Southern Front without orders to do so and for issuing leaflets savaging “the autocracy of the commissars” and demanding new Soviet elections on the basis of “free socialist agitation.” L. D. Trotsky, having drawn comparisons with the Hryhoriiv Uprising, proclaimed, “Every honorable citizen who encounters Mironov has the duty to shoot him down like a mad dog,” and the following month Mironov was sentenced to death by a revolutionary tribunal. However, he was quickly pardoned on the order of VTsIK. In 1920, he joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and on 25 November of that year was awarded an Honored Revolutionary Weapon and the Order of the Red Banner for his part in the defeat of General P. N. Wrangel as commander of the 2nd Cavalry Army (6 September–6 December 1920). He then served as inspector of cavalry of the Red Army, but in February 1921, he was again arrested (possibly for his outspoken stance against de-Cossackization) and was later shot without trial in the Butyrki prison. Notification was subsequently published by the Cheka that he was guilty of “preparation of a counter-revolutionary uprising on the Don.” In 1960, he was fully rehabilitated by order of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. Mironov is thought to have been the model for the hero of Iu. V. Trifonov’s novel Starik (“The Old Man,” 1978).

Moiseenko, Boris Nikolaevich (?–27 October 1918). A veteran (and notoriously fanatical) member of the Fighting Organization (i.e., terrorist wing) of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR), B. N. Moiseenko participated in the operation that led to the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich in February 1905. He subsequently escaped into exile in Paris, but returned to Russia and was arrested on a number of occasions. In 1912, he was arrested at Irkutsk while on a mission to liberate the imprisoned “Grandmother of the Russian Revolution,” E. K. Breshko-Breshkovskaia, and exiled to Bulun, on the lower Lena. He escaped and fled abroad, but returned to Russia after the February Revolution and in 1917 served as a Provisional Government commissar on the South-West Front and was elected to the Constituent Assembly on the PSR list.

Although he was a participant in the Democratic Counter-Revolution, Moiseenko did not enter Komuch, but served as secretary at the Ufa State Conference (September 1918) and later as secretary to the Congress of Members of the Constituent Assembly. On 24 October 1918, he was abducted on the streets of Omsk by a group of officers and bundled into a car. A few days later, his body was found on the banks of the Irtysh River. Moiseenko’s murderers were never identified.

Molchanov, Viktorin Mikhailovich (23 January 1886–10 January 1975). Colonel (1918), major general (20 April 1919), lieutenant general (30 June 1920). A commander of anti-Bolshevik forces from the beginning to the very end of the civil wars, V. M. Molchanov was born into the family of a bureaucrat at Chistopol′ (Kazan′ guberniia) and was a graduate of the Moscow Infantry Officer School and the Alekseev Military School (1906). During the First World War, he rose to the command of the 3rd Independent Engineering Company of the 3rd Rifle Regiment (1914–1917) and saw action at the front. On 20 February 1918, he was seriously wounded as German forces advanced near Riga. He was imprisoned by the Germans but escaped in April 1918 and managed to return to his home region, initially settling at Elabuga, on the Kama River. From there, he organized and led a peasant partisan army in opposition to Soviet rule that, over the summer of 1918, grew to a strength of 9,000 men.

In September 1918 (by which time the force had shrunk to just 4,000 men), Molchanov’s unit was incorporated into the forces of the Ufa Directory, as the 32nd Kama Rifle Regiment. When the remnants of the Izhevsk People’s Army were reformed into the Izhevsk Brigade of the 2nd Ufa Army Corps, Molchanov was named as its commander (3 January 1919). He remained in command of the brigade (which was expanded into a division in August 1919) until early 1920, participating in some of the most successful operations of the spring offensive of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and suffering the horrors of the Great Siberian (Ice) March, as Kolchak’s forces retreated eastward through the winter of 1919–1920.

Arriving at Chita in February 1920, Molchanov became deputy commander in chief of the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov (February–December 1920). In late 1920, as the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic (FER) closed on Chita, he led the 3rd Siberian Corps of that force into Manchuria and then, via the Chinese Eastern Railway, into the Maritime Province, where, having united with the forces of the 1st (Independent) Cossacks (under General V. A. Borodin) and the 2nd Cossacks (under General I. S. Smolin), he became to all intents and purposes the commander in chief of the White forces in the Maritime Province. On 13 June 1921, he was named commander of the garrison at Vladivostok, and over the following months (to December 1921) he oversaw most of the operations of the White Insurgent Army that cleared the Maritime Province of Bolshevik forces and recaptured Khabarovsk (22 December 1921), before being forced to retreat southward following a series of defeats in February 1922 at the hands of the FER’s People’s-Revolutionary Army. When power at Vladivostok was transferred to General M. K. Diterikhs (31 May 1922), Molchanov (who had been one of the engineers of this coup) became commander of the Volga Group of forces of the Zemstvo Host (July–October 1922). Together with Diterikhs and his staff, he was among the last group of White fighters to be evacuated from mainland Russia (at Pos′et Bay) by Admiral Iu. K. Stark in late October 1922. In emigration, he lived in China and later in the United States, where he was employed as a superintendent in the Satter and Montgomery factory in San Francisco from 1928 until his retirement on 24 January 1967. He died a year later and was buried in the Serbian cemetery at Colma, near San Francisco, California.

MOLDAVIAN PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC. This short-lived state (also known as the Bessarabian Republic), with its capital at Kishinev (Chişinău), was proclaimed on 2 December 1917 by Sfatul Ţării, the national assembly of Russia’s Bessarabia guberniia. Full independence from Russia was proclaimed on 24 January 1918, in the wake of the declaration of independence of the Ukrainian National Republic (which had cut Bessarabia off from Russia) and an attempted Bolshevik coup in the area of 5–12 January 1918. The chairman of its Council of Directors General was Pantelimon Erhan, who served also as minister of agriculture (succeeded as chairman of the council of ministers after independence by Daniil Ciugureanu), and its president was Ion C. Inculeţ (who also served as minister for Bessarabia in the Romanian government). Other members of the council (elected on 8 December 1917) were Vladimir Criste (Internal Affairs), Ştefan Ciobanu (Education), Teofil Ioncu (Finance), Nicolae N. Codreanu (Railroads), Major T. Cojocaru (Armed Forces), Mihail Savenco (Justice), E. Grinfeld (Trade and Industry), and Ion Pelivan (Foreign Affairs).

On 6 January 1918, on the invitation of Sfatul Ţării, forces of the Romanian 9th Army entered the region and soon drove pro-Bolshevik troops and Red Guards associated with Rumcherod back across the Dnestr, before negotiating a cease-fire. Following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), the Austro-German occupiers of Ukraine permitted the Romanians to remain in the region (under Article IV of the Treaty of Bucharest of 7 May 1918). On 9 April 1918, Sfatul Ţării voted in favor of union with Romania (by 86 votes to 3, with 36 abstentions), and during the autumn of that year elections to the Romanian Constituent Assembly took place on the territory of the Republic. On 20 December 1918, those elected to the Constituent Assembly from the Moldavian republic, together with the representatives of other Romanian regions, voted to ratify Sfatul Ţării’s unification act (as well as similar acts approved by national congresses in Transylvania and Bukovina), with the condition that Moldavian autonomy be maintained. This gained the approval of King Ferdinand I of Romania that same day, and the act of union was confirmed by Britain, France, Italy, and Japan at the Treaty of Paris on 28 October 1920. The United States, however, refused to sign the treaty, as no Russian authority had been consulted, and Soviet Russia too did not recognize its legality.