Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

P

Pahlen, Aleksei Petrovich Von der (25 March 1874–6 June 1938). Colonel (1 December 1912), major general (30 May 1919), lieutenant general (12 October 1919). One of the senior and successful officers in the White forces of General N. N. Iudenich in northwest Russia, Count A. P. von der Pahlen was born into an ancient noble family of Baltic German origin and was a graduate of St. Petersburg University and the Nicholas Cavalry School (1897). He served in a number of prestigious Guards units; in the First World War, he commanded a Life Guard cavalry regiment (from 7 December 1915) and from January to March 1917 was commander of a rifle regiment of the 1st Guards Cavalry Division. Having been removed, as a suspected monarchist, from his command post following the February Revolution, during 1917 he was involved with a number of officer organizations in Petrograd that were opposed to the Russian Provisional Government, but following the October Revolution he fled to his estate in Latvia rather than join any of the nascent anti-Bolshevik armies.

As Red troops closed on Riga in December 1917, together with General A. P. Rodzianko, von der Pahlen left there by ship, bound for Revel (Tallinn). In Estonia, he assisted in the organization of a number of White units and rose to the command of the 1st Rifle Corps (28 June–15 November 1919). He participated in the North-West Army’s advances in May and October 1919, on the latter occasion commanding units that captured Tsarskoe Selo and reached the very outskirts of Petrograd, before being forced to fall back by the counterattack of the 7th Red Army. With the disbanding of the North-West Army, Palen left Estonia for Riga in March 1920, having agreed to take command of the 2nd Division of the 3rd Army of General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army, which was then being formed from scattered Russian units and personnel in Poland. However, when the armistice was signed at Riga that suspended fighting in the Soviet–Polish War (12 October 1920), his commission also came to an end, and he retired to Danzig, before making his way back to his family estates at Kautsemunde in Latvia. He devoted much of the rest of his life to the commercial distilling of cognac.

PANTSERZHANSKII, EDUARD SAMUILOVICH (30 September 1887–26 September 1937). Midshipman (1911), lieutenant (6 December 1914), flag officer, first rank (1935). The Red military and naval commander E. S. Pantserzhanskii was born at Libau (Liepāja) in Courland guberniia, the son of a Polish nobleman, and was a graduate of the Riga Polytechnical Institute and the Naval Cadet Corps (1910). During the First World War, he served as a junior officer in the Baltic Fleet, seeing action at the Battle of Moon Sound (Moonsund) of 17 October 1917.

During the civil wars, Pantserzhanskii sided with the Reds, served as commander of the Onega Military Flotilla (from November 1918), and saw action against the White Finns in 1919. In 1920, he was made chief of defense of the Kola Peninsula, then head of naval forces on the Caspian Sea, and from November 1920 to December 1921, was commander of the Naval Forces of the Ukraine and Crimea. From 22 December 1921 to April 1924, he was commander in chief of the Naval Forces of the Republic and from April to 9 December 1924 was commander of the Naval Forces of the USSR. In 1925, he was demoted to commander of the Naval Forces of the Black Sea, and from 1932 served as head of the directorate of the Military Naval Forces of the Red Army. In 1937, he became head of the Naval Department of the Military Academy of the Red Army General Staff.

On 13 June 1937, Pantserzhanskii was arrested as an alleged member of a “military-fascist conspiracy.” He was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on 26 September 1937 and was executed the same day at Kommunarka, Moscow, then buried in a mass grave. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 7 July 1956.

Paris Peace Conference. This meeting of the victorious nations of the First World War convened in various venues across the French capital on 18 January 1919. its purpose was to draft the series of peace treaties and other agreements that were eventually presented to the Central Powers (who were not invited to debate the terms of the treaties) and which, it was hoped, would punish those guilty for starting the war (explicitly held to be Germany and its allies) and prevent the repetition of such a catastrophe in the future. It involved diplomats from more than 30 countries from around the globe, but was dominated by the “Big Four”—President Woodrow Wilson of the United States and Prime Ministers David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy—who met separately on an almost daily basis. They dictated peace terms to the defeated nations in the Treaty of Versailles with Germany (28 June 1919), the Treaty of St. Germain with Austria (10 September 1919), the Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria (27 November 1919), the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary (4 June 1920), and the Treaty of Sèvres with the Ottoman Empire (10 August 1920, later supplanted by the Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey, 24 July 1923).

Soviet Russia, having withdrawn from the war through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and being currently in an undeclared state of war with forces of the Allied intervention, was not invited to the conference. Issues pertaining to Russia were, however, discussed, and borders were drawn in Eastern Europe (such as the Curzon Line), Transcaucasia, and elsewhere that effectively removed from Russian control territories that had been part of the Russian Empire (e.g., Bessarabia). Representatives of the Whites who gathered in Paris under the aegis of the Russian Political Conference were unable to prevent this and were equally frustrated in their attempts to gain official accreditation, although at the height of the success of the offensive of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, in May–June 1919, the Big Four did consider offering recognition to the Omsk government as the provisional government of all Russia, but backed away when the tide turned in favor of the Red Army. Delegations from Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the peoples of the North Caucasus, the Don Cossack Host and the Kuban Cossack Host, the Ukrainian National Republic, and other regions of the old Russian Empire were no more successful in gaining accreditation, although all sent delegations to Paris. The conference closed on 21 January 1921, with the inaugural meeting of the Assembly of the League of Nations.

PARKHOMENKO, ALEKSANDR IAKOVLEVICH (12 December 1886–3 January 1921). A posthumously lauded Red hero of the civil wars, A. I. Parkhomenko was born at Makarov Iar (now Parkhomenko), Ekaterinoslav guberniia, into a peasant family. He left the local school at the age of 10 and worked as a shepherd, then in a mine, and from 1900 at the Hartman engine works at Lugansk. Soviet sources indicate that he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1904. He was active in the 1905 Revolution, as leader of a peasant militia around his home village, and was arrested on several occasions. In 1916, he was drafted into the army as punishment for having organized a strike at Lugansk.

Parkhomenko returned to Lugansk in 1917 and, in the aftermath of the October Revolution, led Red Guards detachments in resistance to the Don Cossacks of Ataman A. M. Kaledin and the forces of the Austro-German intervention in Ukraine. In October 1918, he was named as a special commissar of the Revvoensovet of the 10th Red Army at Tsaritsyn (where he found favor with J. V. Stalin and K. E. Voroshilov), and in January 1919 was appointed commissar of Khar′kov guberniia. He subsequently commanded forces directed at the suppression of the Hryhoriiv Uprising, became a representative of the 1st Cavalry Army in December 1919, and became commander of its 14th Cavalry Division in April 1920 (as successor to G. S. Maslakov, following the Maslakov mutiny).

Having participated in the battles for Kiev and L′vov during the Soviet–Polish War in April–May 1920, and then (in August–October of that same year) battles against the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel in Tauride, Parkhomenko died at Buzovtsa, fighting against the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine. He was twice awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Numerous streets, squares, settlements, and institutions were named in his honor, while Parkhomenko was also the subject of a popular eponymous novel by Vsevolod Ivanov (Parkhomenko, 1939) and an eponymous feature film, Aleksandr Parkhomenko (dir. L. D. Lukov, 1942), in which he is portrayed as the model Bolshevik—a sort of antidote to his anarchic fellow countryman, Nestor Makhno—and his image was still to be found adorning Soviet postage stamps as late as 1986. The novel and film, however, ignore the more unsavory parts of Parkhomenko’s civil-war career (such as the pogroms instigated by his men around Rostov-on-Don in January 1920). Moreover, the fictional Parkhomenko is portrayed as being gunned down in battle by Makhno himself; in reality, he was captured without a fight and executed after, in an attempt to save himself, volunteering all the information he had about local Red Army troop movements. The fictional accounts fail also to mention that Parkhomenko’s youngest brother led anarchist formations in association with Makhno and with A. S. Antonov during the Tambov Rebellion.

Parkhomov, Dmitrii nikolaevich (5 September 1871–16 March 1925). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1904), colonel (6 December 1908), major general (14 January 1915), lieutenant general (1 July 1917). The White commander D. N. Parkhomov was a graduate of the 4th Moscow Cadet Corps, the 3rd Alexander School (1891), and the Academy of the General Staff. He entered military service on 1 September 1889, served with the 9th Staroingerman Regiment, and served in various staff posts with the Warsaw Military District, before seeing action in the Russo–Japanese War on the staff of the 3rd Manchurian Army. During the First World War, he rose to the command of the 11th Army Corps (7 June 1916–15 June 1917) and was then placed on the staff of the Northern Front.

Parkhomov refused to recognize the Soviet government following the October Revolution. He made his way to South Russia and joined the Volunteer Army in 1918, then served as chief of staff of the Crimean–Azov Volunteer Army (29 November 1918–12 May 1919). When that force was disestablished in March 1919, Parkhomov was placed on the staff of the Armed Forces of South Russia and was then (from 6 November 1919) chief of staff of the State Guard. Having been evacuated from South Russia in March 1920, Parkhomov lived in emigration in Yugoslavia, initially at Banja Luka and then at Belgrade, where he died in 1925 and was buried in the New Cemetery.

PARSKII, DMITRII PAVLOVICH (17 October 1866–20 December 1921). Colonel (1910), major general (17 June 1910), lieutenant general (1915). One of the leading military specialists in the Red forces during the civil wars, D. P. Parskii was born into the nobility of Tula guberniia and was a graduate of the Constantine Military School (1885) and the Academy of the General Staff (1893). He saw service in the Russo–Japanese War (from 6 November 1904, as senior adjutant to the quartermaster general of the Manchurian Army) and subsequently, while serving on the main directorate of the General Staff, became an outspoken advocate of reform in the Russian Army. During the First World War, he rose to the command of the Grenadier Corps (from 20 February 1916) and subsequently commanded the 12th Army (from 20 July 1917)—successfully overseeing its withdrawal from Riga—and the 3rd Army (from 9 September 1917).

Parskii was removed from his command in November 1917, for refusing to obey the Soviet government’s demand that he enter into peace negotiations with the Germans, but joined the Red Army as a volunteer in February 1918 and was immediately placed in command of forces around Iamburg and Narva during the German advance in that month (the Eleven-Days War), then became commander of the Narva Defensive Region the following month. From May 1918, he commanded the Northern Screen, and from 15 September to 26 November 1918 he was commander of the Northern Front. From June 1919, he chaired a military-historical commission investigating the lessons of the war of 1914–1918, and from November 1919 he was a member of the Special Conference on the Elaboration of Regulations attached to the Main Staff of the Red Army. He died of typhus in Moscow in 1921.

Partizanshchina. Translating literally as “partisanism,” but with the negative or critical undertones implied by the Russian suffix -shchina, this was the term applied from early 1918, by Bolsheviks supportive of L. D. Trotsky’s efforts to build a regular, conscript, centralized, and hierarchical army, to the policies of those (such as the Left Bolsheviks, the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries, and proponents of anarchism) who would have preferred to operate a more “revolutionary” army (or militia), on a volunteer basis and with elected, not appointed, officers. As the civil wars deepened in 1918, Left-SRs were suppressed following the Left-SR Uprising, and Left Bolsheviks accommodated themselves to the regime, the proponents of partizanshchina dwindled sharply in number by the end of the year.

Party of LEFT SOCIALISTS-REVOLUTIONARIES. See LEFT SOCIALISTS-REVOLUTIONARIES, PARTY OF.

PARTY OF POPULAR SOCIALISTS. See POPULAR SOCIALISTS, PARTY OF.

Party of Revolutionary Communism. This pro-Bolshevik political party was constituted at a founding conference in Moscow on 25–27 September 1918, chiefly by former members of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries who had opposed the Left-SR Uprising of July 1918. At its height, it had a membership of some 3,000 (mostly concentrated in Moscow and throughout the Volga provinces), and its leaders included A. L. Kolegaev, M. A. Natanson, A. P. Novitskii, and A. M. Ustinov. The party, whose journal was entitled Volia truda (“The Will of Labor”), pledged support for Soviet power, disavowed the use of force to overturn the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), and favored cooperation with the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), in order to defend the revolution (at least during the crisis of the civil wars). It was consequently formally legalized within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic on 28 February 1919 and was represented in VTsIK, but it had substantial ideological differences with the Bolsheviks (notably on the issue of the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat during the transition to Communism and on the policies of prodrazverstka and the Labor Armies) and was frequently traduced as “pro-kulak” in the Soviet press. Nevertheless, most members of the party accepted its merger with the RKP(b) on 4 October 1920, following a ruling by the Komintern that there should be just one Communist party in all constituent countries and a party resolution in favor of such a union that was passed at the 6th Congress of the Revolutionary Communist Party at Moscow on 22 September 1920.

party of socialists-revolutionaries. See SOCIALISTS-REVOLUTIONARIES, PARTY OF.

PARTY OF THE PEOPLE’S FREEDOM. See KADETS.

Päts, Konstantin (11 February 1874–18 January 1956). Of mixed Russian and Estonian parentage, Konstantin Päts, the first president of independent Estonia, was born at Pärnu (Pernau), in Estland guberniia, the son of a builder. He graduated from the Law Faculty of Iur′ev (formerly Dorpat, now Tartu) University in 1898, then served in the Russian Army with the 96th (Omsk) Infantry regiment at Pskov. From 1901, he edited the radical Revel newspaper Teataja (“The Herald”) and was involved in local politics, serving as deputy mayor of Revel (from 1904). He fled to Switzerland following the 1905 Revolution, but was convicted in absentia of political crimes, and upon his return to Russia in 1909, served one year in prison in St. Petersburg. His political sympathies subsequently moved away from socialism toward conservative agrarianism and nationalism.

On 24 February 1918, Päts was one of the signatories of the Maapäev’s Council of Elders’ declaration of Estonian independence; on the same day, he was named chairman of the council of ministers and minister of the interior of the new Republic of Estonia. He was subsequently arrested by the German forces of occupation and imprisoned in Poland (June–November 1918), then returned to Estonia to become prime minister and minister of war of his country during the early months of the Estonian War of Independence (12 November 1918–9 May 1919). He was also a member of the Estonian Provincial Assembly (1917–1919) and the Estonian Constituent Assembly (1919–1920).

Päts subsequently served several terms as State Elder of Estonia (from 25 January 1921) and (from 21 October 1933) as prime minister of the transitional government, pending a new constitution; on 12 March 1934, he launched a coup d’état, proclaiming a state of emergency in the country and assuming semidictatorial powers, allegedly in an effort to stave off a coup by the proto-fascist Vaps movement. This inaugurated the “Era of Silence” in Estonia, during which all opposition parties were banned. On 3 September 1937, Päts became Riigihoidja (president-regent) and then, under the new constitution of 24 April 1938, the (unelected) president of Estonia. Following the Soviet occupation of Estonia, he was forced to resign (22 July 1940) and was then arrested and deported to the USSR (30 July 1940). He died in a psychiatric hospital in Kalinin (Tver′). On 21 October 1990, his remains were reburied in the Metsakalmistu cemetery in Tallinn. Päts remains a controversial figure in Estonian society, history, and memory.

PATUSHINSKII, GRIGORII BORISOVICH (7 April 1873–11 August 1931). One of the foremost proponents of Siberian regionalism active in the period of the Democratic Counter-Revolution, G. B. Patushinskii was born at Irkutsk and educated at Krasnoiarsk Gymnasium and Moscow University, then worked as a lawyer at Chita and Irkutsk. He was frequently harassed and arrested by the tsarist authorities for his liberal-oblastnik activities, particularly after becoming well known for his work (usually unpaid) as counsel for the defense in the trials of those accused of political crimes during the 1905 Revolution and in investigating the Lena massacre in 1912. He also led the “progressive group” in the Irkutsk City Duma for two four-year terms.

During 1917, Patushinskii was active in organizing regionalist conferences and was chosen as minister of justice in the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia in January 1918. He was immediately arrested by the Soviet authorities and held in prison at Krasnoiarsk, but escaped in May 1918, and the following month joined the Provisional Siberian Government at Omsk, once again as minister of justice. A supporter of the Siberian Regional Duma in its tussles with the Omsk government, he soon found himself in conflict with I. A. Mikhailov and General A. N. Grishin-Almazov and was forced to resign his portfolio on 21 September 1918, during the Novoselov affair. He then moved back to Irkutsk, returned to work as a lawyer, and joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries’ (PSR) opposition to the White regime of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in 1919, becoming one of the foremost organizers of the rising of the Political Center at Irkutsk in December of that year. Following the collapse of the Political Center (in which he served as head of its Department of Justice), Patushinskii was arrested by the Soviet authorities and taken to Moscow, where he acted as a witness for the prosecution in the trial of the PSR Central Committee in 1922. Perhaps because of his past associations with figures now close to the Bolshevik regime (as well as his willingness to testify against his former associates), he escaped repression, but suffered restriction of his rights and freedom of movement. He died in Moscow.

Pauka, Jānis KristapS (IVAN KHRISTIANOVICH) (1883–May 1943). Captain (30 April 1915), lieutenant (1917), komdiv (5 December 1935), major general (4 June 1940). The Soviet military commander Jānis Pauka was born into a peasant family in Latvia. He was a graduate of the Vil′na Infantry Officers School (1906) and the Academy of the General Staff (1914). After service with the 3rd Finland Rifle Regiment (from 1 January 1909), during the First World War Pauka served as an adjutant on the staff of the 12th Army Corps (9 October 1915–9 March 1917) and as a senior adjutant with the staff of the quartermaster general of the 8th Army (from 9 March 1917).

He volunteered for service with the Red Army in early 1918 and was attached initially to the staff of the Iaroslavl′ Military District (1 May–20 December 1918). In that capacity, Pauka participated in the suppression of the Iaroslavl′ Revolt in July 1918. From 21 December 1918 to 19 March 1919, he was attached to the intelligence department of the Iaroslavl′ Military District. He then served as chief of staff of the 42nd Rifle Division (27 March–10 September 1919), was then commander of that same unit (10 September 1919–15 February 1920), was commander of the 13th Red Army (18 February–5 June 1920), and from 27 September to 10 December 1920 was chief of staff of the Southern Front. After the defeat of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, Pauka was made chief of staff of the forces of the Kiev region (12 January 1921–4 June 1922), then chief of staff of the Kiev Military District (from 4 June 1922). He was transferred briefly to Siberia in 1923, and from 1924 to 1936 taught at the Red Military Academy in Moscow. He was arrested on 4 June 1941, accused of espionage. He died in custody.

PAVLOV, ALEKSANDR VASIL′EVICH (10 December 1880–14 August 1937). Ensign (1915), komdiv (November 1935). The Soviet military commander A. V. Pavlov was born into a middle-class family at Odessa. He was mobilized in 1914, and following the October Revolution he volunteered for service in the Red Army. He initially served (from January 1918) in the 7th Red Army, in Ukraine, as a regimental commander, and then commanded the 27th Rifle Division on the Eastern Front (May–November 1919). He was subsequently commander of the 10th Red Army (28 December 1919–20 June 1920) on the South-East Front (from 16 May 1920, the Caucasian Front). He was then a member of the VTsIK commission for combating the Tambov Rebellion; from December 1920, he was commander of forces of the Tambov guberniia.

Pavlov subsequently served as inspector of infantry of the forces of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and Crimea and as assistant commander of forces of several military districts (including the Volga Military District from 1926 to 1930). From 1930, he was deputy inspector and from 1931, inspector of infantry of the Red Army and served later as head of faculty and assistant director of the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow. He was arrested and executed as a counterrevolutionary and terrorist at the height of the purges in the 1930s and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

PEASANT ARMY OF FERGHANA. See FERGHANA, PEASANT ARMY OF.

peasants’ union, all-russian. Founded in 1905 by left-leaning liberals and members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries to represent the interests of the peasantry, this organization was crushed by the tsarist authorities in 1906, but reborn in March 1917. During that year, it agitated among the peasantry to forestall unorganized seizures of private land and to inculcate support for the Russian Provisional Government. It opposed the October Revolution and in, 1918–1919 in Ukraine and Siberia, offered support to the regimes of A. I. Denikin and A. V. Kolchak, as it drifted to the right. In April 1920, representatives of the union who had fled from Ukraine gathered in Crimea and pledged support for the regime of P. N. Wrangel, applauding in particular his land reforms. Among the union’s leaders was A. F. Alad′in.

PEOPLE’S ARMY. This anti-Bolshevik force was created on 8 June 1918, at Samara, on the orders of Komuch, on the basis of underground officer groups that had existed in the city since late 1917. It was led by N. A. Galkin. Its Main Staff initially consisted of Galkin (chief of staff and commander in chief), V. Bogoliubov (replaced by V. I. Lebedev), and B. K. Fortunatov, thereby echoing the Red Army system, with Galkin as the military specialist observed by the Komuch commissars. On 29 June 1918, the Main Staff was abolished and a War Department was created (presided over by Galkin). In June–July 1918, four infantry battalions were gathered in Samara, while seven former instructors and 79 former pupils of the Academy of the General Staff were recruited to command them, including the talented V. O. Kappel′. Originally, in line with socialist principles, the People’s Army was a volunteer force, with recruits serving for three months, but on 30 June 1918, a general mobilization of the 1897–1898 age group was declared across five gubernii and two Cossack territories of the Volga and Urals regions, and by 14 August 1918 some 21,000 men had responded. In mid-August 1918, officers age 35 or younger were also mobilized. A military statute was also issued that forbade political agitation within the army, and at the insistence of the officers, reinstalled the hierarchy of ranks and insignia of the tsarist army (although epaulettes were of modest proportions compared to the ostentatious imperial designs).

Thus, by late August 1918 the People’s Army consisted of volunteer detachments, mobilized units, and formations from the Orenburg Cossack Host and the Urals Cossack Host, as well as four aviation units, an aviation school, a small river flotilla, and various other detachments. These acted in coordination with the Volga Group of the Czechoslovak Legion (under Colonel, then from 2 September 1918 Major General, S. čeček) to assist in capturing Ufa (5 July 1918), Orenburg (3 July 1918), Ekaterinburg (25 July), Simbirsk (22 July), and Kazan′ (7 August, where they briefly took control of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve). However, the August 1918 operations of the Red Army on the Volga put the People’s Army back on the defensive, and it subsequently relinquished Kazan′ (10 September 1918), Simbirsk and Vol′sk (12 September 1918), Syzran′ (3 October 1918), and Samara (7 October 1918). By September 1918, the force consisted of some 15,000 men, about half of them in volunteer units such as that commanded by Kappel′.

Following the Ufa State Conference, the People’s Army lost its independent status and was ordered by General V. G. Boldyrev (military commander of the Ufa Directory) to combine with the Siberian Army, mostly as the 1st Volga Army Corps, which was initially commanded by Kappel′. Officers of the Siberian Army, however, to which many People’s Army officers had already deserted, scorned the socialist principles of the People’s Army, despite its half-hearted compromises regarding epaulettes, badges of rank, and disciplinary code.

PEOPLE’S ARMY FOR THE REGENERATION OF RUSSIA. This White military formation was created in June–July 1920, in the North Caucasus and Kuban regions, from the remains of the Kuban Army and other elements of the Armed Forces of South Russia that had been smashed by the Red Army at the beginning of the year. Commanded by Major General M. A. Fostikov and numbering some 5,500 men, it carried out a series of partisan attacks on Red strongholds and on the region’s railways and offered support to the Kuban Cossack forces of General S. G. Ulagai that landed on the Taman Peninsula in August 1920. Having been beaten by Red forces at Armavir, near Krasnodar, in early September 1920, the remnants of the force were evacuated to Crimea and incorporated as the Kuban Brigade of General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army.

PEOPLE’S COMMISSARIAT FOR MILITARY AFFAIRS. The Soviet government’s Narkomvoen, as it was generally termed, was created following the October Revolution through the reorganization of the former ministry of war of the Russian Provisional Government (which itself had largely inherited the organizational structure and many of the personnel of its tsarist predecessor). Its first task was the demobilization of the old army; its second was the creation of the new Red Army and Red Fleet, as well as the introduction of universal military training (Vsevobuch). At the same time, the Narkomvoen sought to purge military institutions of supporters of the Whites, while laying the groundwork for the employment by the Soviet regime of military specialists. Reflecting the Bolsheviks’ fears of militarism and Bonapartism, it was initially run by a collegiate leadership, chaired from December 1917 by N. I. Podvoiskii. On 15 January 1918, Sovnarkom adopted decrees elaborated by the Narkomvoen collegium: “On the Electoral Principle and the Organization of Power in the Army” (16 December 1917), “On the Abolition of All Military and Civil Ranks” (16 December 1917), “On the Worker-Peasant Red Army” (15 January 1918), and “On the All-Russian Collegium for the Formation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army” (15 January 1918).

Narkomvoen’s chief institutions were the Department (later Commissariat) for the Demobilization of the Old Army; the All-Russian Collegium for the Organization and Formation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army; the All-Russian Bureau for Military Commissars (Vsebiurvoenkom, from 8 April 1918); the All-Russian Main Staff (Vseroglavshtab, from 8 May 1918); the Operational Department (from 12 May 1918); the Directorate of the Air Fleet (Glavvozdukhoflot, from 24 May 1918); the Central Directorate of Supply (from 1 June 1918); and the Military-Legal Council (from 1 June 1918). The war commissariat was chiefly concerned with training, supplies, medical support, and administration of the Red Army; operational questions were left to the Revolutionary Field Staff and, subsequently, the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, which remained independent of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs.

People’s Commissars for Military Affairs were N. I. Podvoiskii (to 14 March 1918, effectively as part of a committee including V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, N. V. Krylenko, and P. E. Dybenko); L. D. Trotsky (14 March 1918–6 July 1923, thereafter, until 26 January 1925, People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs); and M. V. Frunze (People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, 26 January–31 October 1925).

PEOPLE’S COMMISSARIAT FOR NATIONALITIES. In the Russian Empire, and in the era of the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, no individual ministry had existed to deal with the non-Russian peoples, even though these constituted an absolute majority of the population of the country (around 67 percent according to the 1897 census). The Bolsheviks, in contrast, had a long-standing (if hardly benevolent) interest in the “national question” in Russia and elsewhere. V. I. Lenin (and his protégé in this area, J. V. Stalin) adopted a pragmatic approach, and at the party’s April Conference in 1917, in the face of opposition from Left Bolsheviks (who feared the corrosive impact of nationalism on proletarian internationalism) pushed through a policy document that recognized, in principle, the right of all ethnic groups to “self-determination.” Lenin and Stalin argued that nationalism arose among the non-Russian peoples because of their distrust of the Russians. Thus, if the right of cultural autonomy, territorial autonomy, or even territorial secession was formally accepted, the causes of nationalism would all the quicker “whither away.” This was the policy pursued following the October Revolution by the new People’s Commissariat for Nationalities (often termed Narkomnats), created 26 October 1917 (with Stalin as People’s Commissar) and enshrined in Sovnarkom’s “Declaration on the Rights of the Peoples of Russia” (2 November 1918) and in the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in July 1918.

In multiethnic civil wars, such as those that raged across the former Russian Empire in the years before and after the October Revolution, Narkomnats had a crucial role to play. Important to remember, however, is that for most of 1918 and 1919 the Soviet government had little means of influencing events around the non-Russian periphery of the old empire, as regions both took the opportunity to claim independence—from Finland, through the Baltic, Poland, Ukraine, the Don and Kuban territories, to Transcaucasia and much of Central Asia and Siberia—and were at the same time subject to occupation by the Whites (as well as, in 1918, by Ottoman forces and the forces of the Austro-German intervention). In those circumstances, acceptance of federalism was the only option, if Moscow was to provide an alternative to alliance with the Whites or subservience to “bourgeois nationalism” to the breakaway peoples. Moreover, whenever the opportunity presented itself, Sovnarkom attempted to export Bolshevism and Soviet rule to the breakaway regions through “revolutionary committees” containing Moscow loyalists supported by the Red Army (or a hastily renamed section thereof). This happened in the Baltic region in late 1918 and early 1919 with the Estonian Workers’ Commune and Litbel; in 1920 in Poland with the Polrevkom and in Galicia with the Galrevkom; and in Transcaucasia in late 1920 and early 1921 with the Caucasian Bureau, to cite just a few examples. On the other hand, local non-Russian Bolsheviks, organized from Moscow by the Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of the Occupied Territories, who often pursued ultra-radical policies, were often restrained by Moscow, both from advocating a centralization of the Soviet state and from mistreating their own minorities (as, for example, in the case of Stalin and G. K. Ordzhonikidze during the “Georgian affair” in 1922).

Organizationally, Narkomnats established its own subcommissions on Armenian affairs, Jewish affairs, Muslim affairs, Polish affairs, and so forth; promoted the careers of innumerable non-Russian Bolsheviks; and was very active as a publishing house, most notably with the newspaper (from 1922, journal) Zhizn′ nationalnostei (“Life of the Nationalities”) and the journal Novyi vostok (“The New East”). From 21 April 1921, attached to Narkomnats was a Council of Nationalities, which included representatives of all autonomous regions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and which, at least in theory, enjoyed broad powers over decisions affecting the economic and political rights of the non-Russian regions. In the early 1920s, the commissariat took on an increasing amount of ethnolinguistic work, in an attempt to define what peoples lived in the new state, what languages they spoke, and what their relationship to each other was. Stalin was also, as the RSFSR grew into an increasingly multinational state (and despite his heavy-handed tactics during the Georgian Affair), at least initially a strong proponent of the policy of korenizatsiia (“indiginization”), meaning the encouragement of local cultures, political elites, and national languages and the reversal of the policy of the Russification of the regions that had characterized the late tsarist period. After the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR (30 December 1922), Narkomnats was dissolved in July 1923, but korenizatsiia remained the official line into the 1930s.

PEOPLE’S COMMISSARIAT FOR NAVAL AFFAIRS. The Narkommor was created by a decree of Sovnarkom on 22 February 1918, on the basis of a reorganization of the naval ministry of the Russian Provisional Government of 1917 (which, in turn, had inherited much of its personnel and organizational structures from its imperial Russian predecessor). It was led by a collegium, consisting of P. E. Dybenko (chairman), I. I. Vakhrameev, F. F. Raskol′nikov, and S. E. Saks, and was charged with the demobilization of the old navy and the creation of a new Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Fleet. On 17 December 1918, by order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, the naval collegium was disbanded, the central institutions of Narkommor were shrunk, and most of its functions were transferred to the Naval Department of the Revvoensovet of the Republic under V. M. Al′tfater. In July 1923, what was left of the Narkommor was merged with the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs.

The People’s Commissars for Naval Affairs were P. E. Dybenko (22 February–15 March 1918) and L. D. Trotsky (from 6 April 1918).

PEOPLE’S COMMISSARIATS. This was the title given to the central institutions of public administration in Soviet Russia (and later the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republics, other Soviet republics, and ultimately, the USSR) that were created according to the decree “On the Formation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government” of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 26 October 1917, in the aftermath of the October Revolution, on the initiative of V. I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Each people’s commissariat was headed by a people’s commissar (“Narkom”)—or, in the case of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs, initially three joint people’s commissars—who could be appointed or dismissed only by VTsIK and the Congress of Soviets. They executed planning and administration within their field of jurisdiction and participated in the drafting of legislation, assisted by their deputies and a collegium of advisors.

Commissariats took over the functions of the former ministries of the Russian Provisional Government and, by mid-November 1917, had relocated to the premises of those institutions. All people’s commissars were, by virtue of their post, members of Sovnarkom; initially, all were members of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), though several members of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries were allocated commissariats in November–December 1917. The latter resigned their posts in protest at the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), and the commissariats (which relocated from Petrograd to Moscow on 10–11 March 1918) then reverted to a uniformly Bolshevik hue.

PEOPLE’S GUARD. This was the name eventually given to the elite militia force of the Democratic Republic of Georgia. It had been founded on 5 September 1917 as the Workers’ Guard and was subsequently known as the Red Guard, before being rechristened as the People’s Guard in May 1918 (in order to distinguish the force from generally pro-Bolshevik Red Guards). The force was a highly politicized one and was controlled directly by the parliament of the Georgian Republic (which was dominated by Mensheviks of the Georgian Social Democratic Labor Party), rather than the war ministry of the Georgian republic (a reflection, perhaps, of the legacy of antimilitarism within the Georgian socialist movement).

During the course of the civil wars in Transcaucasia, the People’s Guard gained a fearsome reputation for the severity with which it dealt with secessionist elements, notably during the Georgian–Ossetian conflict and similar disturbances in Abkhazia. The force was disbanded following the Soviet invasion of Georgia in February–March 1921. Throughout its existence, the People’s Guard was commanded by Vladimir (Valiko) Jugheli.

PEOPLE’S-REVOLUTIONARY ARMY. This was the name given to the armed forces of the Far Eastern Republic (FER)—a satellite of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic—that were formed in March 1920, on the basis of Red Army units and various partisan detachments in eastern Siberia. The force was originally named the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Baikal Region, then (from April 1920) the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Transbaikal Region, and then (from May 1920) the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic. By 1 November 1920, the People’s-Revolutionary Army included the 1st and 2nd Amur and the 1st and 2nd Irkutsk Rifle Divisions, the Transbaikal Cavalry Brigade, and the Amur Cavalry Brigade (a total of some 40,800 men). By 1 May 1921, its complement was the 1st (Chita), the 2nd and 4th (Blagoveshchensk), and the 3rd Amur Rifle Divisions; the Transbaikal Cavalry Division; and the 1st (Troitsk), 2nd (Sretensk), and 3rd (Khabarovsk) Cavalry Brigades (a total of some 36,100 men). By 1 October 1922, it mustered three rifle divisions and one independent cavalry brigade (a total of 19,800 men).

The army was given the operational task of clearing the territory claimed by the FER (essentially, all those parts of the former Russian Empire east of Lake Baikal) of forces of the Japanese intervention and White formations, especially Ataman G. M. Semenov’s Far Eastern (White) Army, based at Chita. Two efforts to oust Semenov in the early summer of 1920 ended in failure, but following the FER’s securing of a treaty with the Japanese (the Gongota agreement, 15 July 1920), forces of the FER drove the Whites from Chita on 22 October 1920 and chased them across the border into Manchuria. At the same time, the Japanese withdrew from Khabarovsk, allowing the People’s-Revolutionary Army to capture that town. Then, in May–August 1921, the People’s-Revolutionary Army, in an action coordinated with the 5th Red Army and pro-Soviet Mongolian forces of Damdin Sükhbaatar, engaged with the White forces of R. F. Ungern von Sternberg that were attempting to invade the FER from their base in Mongolia, eventually driving the Whites from the Mongolian capital, Urga, and facilitating the subsequent establishment of the Mongolian People’s Republic.

Meanwhile, in the Maritime Province, White forces united under the banner of the White Insurgent Army drove north during the autumn of 1921, forcing the People’s-Revolutionary Army to abandon Khabarovsk on 22 December of that year, and then pushed west along the Amur branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway as far as Volochaevka. A People’s-Revolutionary Army counteroffensive in the New Year, however, drove the Whites back, and out of Khabarovsk, on 22 February 1921. The following autumn, in the last major operation of the “Russian” Civil Wars, the People’s-Revolutionary Army undertook a drive southward through the Maritime Province, forcing back the remnants of White forces in the region (now termed the Zemstvo Host), capturing Spassk (8–9 October 1921) and Nikol′sk-Ussuriisk and, on 19 October 1921, reaching the outskirts of Vladivostok, where there remained 20,000 Japanese troops. On 24 October 1921, the People’s-Revolutionary Army command reached an agreement with the Japanese, who then withdrew from the city, allowing the FER forces to enter it the following day and forcing the remaining Whites to flee, by sea, to Korea. On 22 November 1922, following the FER’s entrance into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the People’s Revolutionary Army was absorbed into the 5th Red Army, which from 1 July 1923 was dubbed the 5th Red Banner Red Army.

Commanders of the People’s-Revolutionary Army were G. Kh. Eikhe (17 March 1920–21 January 1921 and 21 February–29 April 1921); S. D. Pavlov (acting, 21 January–21 February 1921); V. I. Burov (30 April–3 May 1921); A. Ia. Lapin (acting, 4 May–25 June 1921); V. K. Bliukher (26 June 1921–14 July 1922); K. A. Avksent′evskii (15 July–16 August 1922); and I. P. Uborevich (17 August–22 November 1922). Its chiefs of staff were P. Ia. Pelenskii (18 March 1920–29 June 1921); V. K. Tokarevskii (30 June 1921–3 May 1922); B. M. Fel′dman (4 May–4 July 1922); A. D. Shuvaev (4 July–21 August 1922); and I. V. Smorodinov (22 August–22 November 1922).

PEOPLE’S UNION FOR THE DEFENSE OF RUSSIA AND FREEDOM. Created in Poland in 1921 by B. V. Savinkov, as a successor to his Union for the Defense of the Fatherland and Freedom, this ephemeral anti-Bolshevik organization merged elements of the former Russian Political Conference, the Russian Evacuation Committee, and other émigré organizations in Warsaw. Apart from Savinkov himself, active in it were his brother, V. V. Savinkov, General G. El′vengren, M. N. Gnilorybov, Professor D. V. Filosov, and the former Moscow journalist A. A. Dikrof-Derental′. It sought to recruit volunteers from among former members of the White armies of Generals N. N. Iudenich and P. N. Wrangel, who were interned in Poland, to undertake armed sorties onto Soviet territory, to engage in sabotage, spread anti-Soviet propaganda, and establish an underground network of supporters.

Under the terms of Article V of the Treaty of Riga (16 March 1921), the Polish government committed itself to prevent such anti-Soviet organizations from operating from its territory, yet by 1922 the Cheka claimed to have arrested 23 of Savinkov’s agents in Moscow, 220 in Petrograd, and 80 in the Western Military District, all of whom were said to have entered Soviet territory from Poland. After a series of complaints from Moscow, the Polish authorities gradually clamped down on the activities of the People’s Union, which seems to have ceased all activities by 1924.

Pepeliaev, Anatolii Nikolaevich (3 July 1891–14 January 1938). Colonel (August 1918), major general (8 September 1918), lieutenant general (July 1919). Born at Tomsk, into the family of a lieutenant general (N. M. Pepeliaev) in the tsarist army, A. N. Pepeliaev (the younger brother of the White politician V. N. Pepeliaev) was one of the most senior and successful officers of the anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia. He was a graduate of the 1st Siberian (Omsk) Cadet Corps (1908) and the Pavlovsk Military School (1910), and subsequently served as a junior officer with a machine gun regiment (from 13 April 1913). During the First World War, he commanded a battalion at the front, distinguishing himself at the battles of Przasnysz and Soldau. Although, following the October Revolution, he was elected as battalion commander by the soldiers’ committee of his unit, he was dismayed by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and decided to work against the Soviet government.

Pepeliaev left the army and made his way home to Siberia, where, during May–June 1918, he organized and led the officers’ unit that overthrew Soviet power at Tomsk (27 May 1918) in the wake of the uprising of the Czechoslovak Legion. He subsequently became commander of the Mid-Siberian (subsequently 1st Mid-Siberian) Corps of the Siberian Army, during the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia and the first six months of the dictatorship of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (13 June 1918–25 April 1919). Pepeliaev was a key participant in the liberation from Soviet rule of much of eastern Siberia and Transbaikalia over the summer of 1918, leading his corps on a remarkable expedition eastward from Tomsk, in which they captured towns from Krasnoiarsk (18 June 1918) to Chita (26 August 1918), among other achievements. He then transferred to the Urals front to participate in the Siberian Army’s capture of Perm′ (24 December 1918). On 25 April 1919, he was named commander of the Northern Group of the Siberian Army (in which capacity he oversaw the capture of Glazov on 6 June 1919); he then became commander of the 1st Army of Kolchak’s Eastern Front (31 August–December 1919).

In November 1919, the 1st Army was withdrawn from the front and concentrated in the region of Tomsk, where it was supposed to be reformed. However, the force disintegrated under enemy pressure, and Tomsk fell to a combination of Red partisans and units of the 3rd Red Army on 20 December 1919. It was during this period that Pepeliaev earned the enmity of the latest commander in chief of Kolchak’s forces, General K. V. Sakharov, when he refused to dispatch any units of his crumbling army to assist in the latter’s doomed scheme to hold the White capital at Omsk, rather than retire in good order. Following discussions with his brother, Viktor, who was by then Kolchak’s prime minister, Pepeliaev arrested Sakharov at Taiga station on 9 December 1919 and jointly authored a demand that the supreme ruler immediately summon a Zemskii sobor′ (“Land Council,” or parliament), “in which the people themselves may take into their hands the reconstruction of Siberia and choose a Siberian government.” These and other statements indicate that, politically, General Pepeliaev’s outlook was close to that of the right wing of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries. The Pepeliaev brothers, however, seem to have lost their nerve, and rather than follow through on his threat to challenge the White dictatorship, Pepeliaev joined the straggling columns retreating on the Great Siberian (Ice) March.

Having arrived in Transbaikalia, Pepeliaev attempted to form a partisan detachment from the remnants of the 1st Army, but was reluctant to subordinate it to the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov, whom he regarded as being in the pocket of the Japanese. He therefore went into emigration, arriving in Manchuria in April 1920, and settled with his family at Harbin, where for the next two years he recuperated from the typhus he had contracted in Siberia. He returned to action in August 1922, however, accepting General M. K. Diterikhs’s invitation to take command of the Siberian Volunteer Druzhina that embarked, via Vladivostok and the Sea of Okhotsk, to participate in the anti-Soviet Iakutsk Revolt, led by Colonel M. Ia. Korobeinikov (October 1922). After a lengthy campaign (the “Iakutsk Ice March”), on 17 June 1923 Pepeliaev and the remainder of his men were surrounded by numerically stronger Soviet forces at Aian and surrendered. He was then taken to Vladivostok and imprisoned, and in January 1924, at Chita, he was sentenced to death by a military tribunal. This was commuted to 10 years’ imprisonment by VTsIK (probably because Pepeliaev had agreed to order his men to surrender their arms without resistance at Aian, although it may also have been taken into account that, in June 1923, a fire had broken out on board the ship that was carrying Pepeliaev and his men from Aian to Vladivostok, and it was only through his taking command of the situation that the vessel was saved). He served 13 years in the Iaroslavl′ Isolation Prison and then the Butyrki prison in Moscow, then was released on 6 July 1936.

Pepeliaev found employment as a carpenter in a factory at Voronezh, but was again arrested on 20 August 1937. He was sent to Novosibirsk and implicated in the ongoing investigations into an anti-Soviet “Kadet-monarchist partisan organization,” allegedly connected to ROVS. On 7 December 1937, a troika of the local NKVD ordered that he be executed, and the sentence was carried out a few weeks later. Pepeliaev was posthumously rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of the USSR on 16 January 1989.

Pepeliaev, Viktor Nikolaevich (27 December 1884–7 February 1920). V. N. Pepeliaev, the man who was executed alongside the White “supreme ruler,” Admiral A. V. Kolchak, and who was his last prime minister, was born at into a military family at Narym, in Tomsk guberniia, the elder brother of the future General A. N. Pepeliaev. He was a graduate of the Law Faculty of Tomsk University (1908) and, from 1909, was employed as a teacher at the Biisk Gymnasium for Girls. In 1912, he was elected as a deputy to the Fourth State Duma, as a member of the Kadets and as a representative of his native province. During the First World War, he volunteered for service at the front in a food supply detachment. Following the February Revolution, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Kadets and performed various tasks in the name of the Russian Provisional Government, most notably becoming commissar to the fortress port of Kronshtadt (14 March 1917), where he was imprisoned by rebellious sailors. During the summer of 1917, he became a vocal supporter of General L. G. Kornilov’s efforts to restore discipline in the army and toured the front as a member of the Kadet “Military Club” (July 1917).

In the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, Pepeliaev was one of the organizers of the failed, anti-Bolshevik Junker revolt in Petrograd. He subsequently joined a number of underground anti-Bolshevik organizations, notably the National Center and the Union for the Regeneration of Russia. It was on behalf of the latter that he journeyed to Siberia in August 1918, but his subsequent behavior demonstrated that his sympathies lay with the more right-wing National Center. In September 1918, he undertook a trip to the Far East, where he entered into negotiations with a number of prominent advocates of military dictatorship, among them General Radola Gajda. Back at Omsk, as one of the founders of (and, from 9 November 1918, chairman of) the Eastern Section of the Central Committee of the Kadet party, he became one of the sharpest critics of the Ufa Directory and one of the chief architects of the Omsk coup. For this, he was rewarded with the post of director of the Department of Militia and State Security within the Ministry of the Interior in the Omsk government (from 18 November 1918). He was subsequently named assistant minister of the interior (from February 1919) and then full minister (28 April 1919) in the Kolchak regime and became one of the most influential of the admiral’s advisors.

On 22 November 1919, Pepeliaev became chairman of the Council of Ministers of Kolchak’s government, after a government reshuffle at Irkutsk. In that role, he failed to convince local socialist and liberal organizations that the regime was intent on forging closer links with Siberian society (his record while a minister as the scourge of Siberian zemstvos was hardly designed to win their trust), but he was, with his brother, responsible for the dismissal of the reactionary General K. V. Sakharov as commander in chief. It was as a consequence of his mission to achieve the latter that he joined Kolchak’s train as it moved slowly eastward from Omsk in December 1919. Consequently, he was arrested, together with the supreme ruler, by the forces of the socialist Political Center on 15 January 1920, as the echelon approached Irkutsk. Following the assumption of power at Irkutsk by the Bolsheviks’ revkom, Pepeliaev was sentenced to death and was executed by firing squad, alongside Kolchak, on 7 February 1920. He body was then pushed through a hole in the ice of the River Ushakovka.

PERKHurOV, ALEKSANDR PETROVICH (1 January 1876–21 July 1922). Colonel (28 January 1916), major general (17 June 1919). A. P. Perukhov, who was one of the leaders of the anti-Bolshevik Iaroslavl′ Revolt of July 1918, was born into a noble family in the village of Sherpovo, in Tver′ guberniia. After graduating from the Aleksandrovsk Military School (1895) and the Academy of the General Staff (1903), he saw action in the Russo–Japanese War with the 1st Siberian Artillery Brigade. From 1907, he served with 3rd East Siberian Artillery at Omsk. During the First World War, he served as commander of the 5th Battery of the 16th Siberian Rifle-Artillery Brigade (from 23 August 1914) and was decorated for bravery. From 20 February 1917, he commanded the 186th Siberian Riflemen and led artillery instruction in the 12th Army on the Northern Front at Iur′ev (Tartu).

Following demobilization in December 1917, Perkhurov joined the Volunteer Army in early 1918 and was sent (on the orders of General L. G. Kornilov) on a secret mission to Moscow. There, he joined B. V. Savinkov’s Union for the Defense of the Fatherland and Freedom, as its chief of staff. He subsequently played a prominent part in the anti-Bolshevik uprising at Iaroslavl′ on 6–22 July 1918. When the rising was crushed by Soviet forces, Perkhurov, at the head of a 50-strong band of fighters, made his way to the Volga, where (on 2 September 1918) he joined the People’s Army of Komuch. Perkhurov’s men were then attached to forces commanded by General V. O. Kappel′ that subsequently joined the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. In that force, Perkhurov (now dubbed “Perkhurov-Iaroslavskii”) commanded the 19th Kazan′ Rifle Division (from February 1919) and then (from July 1919) a special partisan detachment of the 3rd Army. As Kolchak’s regime disintegrated, Perkhurov subsequently participated in the Great Siberian (Ice) March, but on 11 March 1920 his unit was captured by Red partisans at Podymankhinsk, on the Lena River. He was subsequently imprisoned at Irkutsk, Cheliabinsk, and Ekaterinburg, but in January 1921 was released and pressed into service with the Red Army as a military specialist with the staff of the Urals Military District. However, when the Soviet authorities realized his identity, he was rearrested (20 May 1921) and sent to Moscow’s Butyrki prison. Perkhurov was subsequently tried at Iaroslavl′ and then executed in the courtyard of the headquarters of the Cheka. He was reportedly buried in the city’s Leont′ev cemetery.

PERVOPOKHODNIKI. The unofficial but widely used (and proudly borne) name given to those members of the Volunteer Army who had participated in the harrowing First Kuban (Ice) March of 9 February to 30 April 1918, from Rostov-on-Don to Ekaterinodar and then back to the Don territory. In the emigration there was for many years a Union of Pervopokhodniki that published books, periodicals, and newspapers for (and about) its members. Its California branch continued such operations until the 1980s.

Peterss, Jēkabs (Peters, Iakov Khristoforovich) (21 November 1886–25 April 1938). One of the most feared and ruthless leaders of the Cheka, Jēkabs Peterss was of Latvian peasant stock and was born in Gazenpotsk uezd, western Courland guberniia. He joined the Latvian Social-Democratic Party (LSDP) in 1904, at Liepāja (Libau), and the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1906, and was twice imprisoned in 1907–1908. Fearing rearrest, in 1909 he emigrated to London, where he found work as a tailor’s assistant and became attached to the local group of social democrats of the Latvian region. On 22 December 1910, he was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the killing of three police officers in the aftermath of an infamous bungled robbery by an anarchist gang (the “Houndsditch murders”). He was acquitted in May 1911, but many have argued that it was Peterss who fired the fatal shots (certainly the shots were fired from a Dreyse pistol belonging to him). In the aftermath of the February Revolution, he returned to Riga in May 1917 to join the Central Committee of the LSDP and to act as its representative to the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in Petrograd.

Following the October Revolution, Peterss became a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet (from 29 October 1917) and was prominent in the Cheka from the day of its inception (7 December 1917), serving on its collegium. As acting head of the Cheka in July–August 1918, he was closely involved in the suppression of the Left-SR Uprising. He also supervised the secret trial of Fania Kaplan, who attempted to assassinate V. I. Lenin, and conducted much of the investigation of the Lockhart plot in September–October 1918. As the deputy of Cheka chairman F. E. Dzierżyński and head of the central revolutionary tribunal from August 1918 to 27 March 1919, Peterss earned a fearsome reputation for the application of terror, violence, and torture. Thereafter, he became a roving agent of the Cheka, serving in Ukraine, Tula, and the North Caucasus in 1919–1920. From 1920 to 1922, he served as the Cheka’s special plenipotentiary in Turkestan, and from 1923 was a collegium member of the OGPU and head of its Eastern Department.

From 1930 onward, Peterss held numerous important party and governmental posts in the Moscow region and in 1937 was made commander of the Kremlin guard. He was arrested on 26 November 1937, falsely accused of having been an agent of the tsarist secret police prior to the revolution and of thereafter working for the intelligence services of independent Latvia. Peterss was executed on 25 April 1938. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 3 March 1956. Peterss was the subject of the fawning Soviet biopic Peters (dir. S. S. Tarasov, 1972).

petin, nikolai nikolaevich (2 May 1876–7 October 1937). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1913), colonel (6 December 1915). The Red military specialist N. N. Petin was born into a noble family in Vologda. After graduating from the Nizhnii-Novgorod Cadet School (1894), he entered military service on 1 October 1894 and graduated from the Nicholas Engineering School (1897) and the Academy of the General Staff (1907). He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War and occupied numerous staff postings, during the First World War rising to chief of staff of the 34th and 50th Army Corps, in 1917. At the time of the imperial army’s demobilization, he was assistant quartermaster general of the South-West Front (from 7 December 1917).

Petin joined the Red Army voluntarily in early 1918, serving initially as chief of the Mobilization Section of the White Sea Military District (21 May–16 July 1918). His subsequent postings included chief of staff of the 6th Red Army (29 November 1918–22 May 1919), of the Western Front (22 May–14 November 1919), and of the Southern Front (14 November 1919–26 September 1920). Unusually for a voenspets, for his service in the latter post, assisting in the repulsion of the advance of the Armed Forces of South Russia, Petin was subsequently (in 1921) awarded the Order of the Red Banner. He was also (26 September 1920–1 January 1921) chief of staff of the South-West Front. Thereafter, he occupied numerous staff posts in the Caucasus Military District and the Western Siberian Military District, subsequently being named chief inspector of engineering forces of the Red Army (1931–1934). Petin joined the All-Union Communist Party in 1933 and received the Order of Lenin in 1936, but was arrested on 5 June 1937. On 7 October 1937, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR found him guilty of participation in a “military-fascist plot” and sentenced him to death. He was executed that same day in the grounds of the Donskoi cemetery in Moscow. He was rehabilitated in 1956.

Petliura, Simon Vasil′evich (10 May 1879–25 May 1926). Simon Petliura, the influential and controversial Ukrainian journalist and military and political leader of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) during much of the civil-war period, who met a controversial end on the streets of Paris, was born at Poltava, into a pious family of Cossack heritage. He was educated at the Poltava Theological Seminary (1895–1901), but was expelled for membership in a Ukrainian nationalist organization (hromada). In 1898, he had also joined a revolutionary cell that formed the nucleus of the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP), elements of which subsequently founded the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor Party (USDLP). Periodically fleeing Russia to avoid arrest—in 1904, for example, he moved to Austrian Galicia and edited the RUP monthly Selianyn (“The Villager”)—Petliura spent most of the next few years avoiding police harassment by settling in the Kuban and finding work as a teacher and as an archivist with the Kuban Cossack Host. He returned to Kiev after the general amnesty granted in 1905, and early the following year became editor of the USDLP journal Vil′na Ukraina (“Free Ukraine”), which was produced in St. Petersburg. Later in 1906, he returned to Kiev to act as secretary of the Kiev daily Rada (“Council”) and as coeditor (1907–1909) of the monthly Slovo (“The Word”). From 1912, he was active in Moscow as editor of the Russian-language Ukrainskaia zhizn′ (“Ukrainian Life”). In these years, he published thousands of articles, under dozens of noms de plume, and established a network of contacts across Ukraine. It is now recognized that he was one of the key figures in the forging of a Ukrainian national consciousness in the years before the revolution.

During the First World War, Petliura worked for Zemgor. Following the February Revolution, he organized the Ukrainian Front Committee at Kiev and on 18 May 1917, despite his complete lack of military training, was elected chairman of the All-Ukrainian Military Committee of the Ukrainian Central Rada by a joint meeting of local political parties (including the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Federalists, the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, and the USDLP). When the General Secretariat of the Rada was transformed into the Council of People’s Ministers of the Ukrainian National Republic, following the declaration of Ukrainian independence in January 1918, Petliura became minister of war in the cabinet of Volodymyr Vynnychenko, but soon resigned that post and concentrated on the formation of the Haidamak Regiment of Sloboda Ukraine, at Khar′kov, which in January–February 1917 opposed the Bolshevik forces advancing on Kiev in the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War.

Following the overthrow of the UNR by Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii (29 April 1918), Petliura held the posts of chairman of the Kiev Guberniia Zemstvo and chairman of the All-Ukrainian Union of Zemstvos, but was arrested in July as the author of a zemstvo declaration that had denounced the pro-German and antisocialist policies of the government of the Ukrainian State. He was released in time to participate in the uprising against the Hetmanate in November–December 1918, then was named as a member of the Ukrainian National Republic Directory and as commander, or “Supreme Otaman” (Golovnoi otaman), of its forces (14 December 1918). In February 1919, as the UNR attempted to win the support of Allied forces that had landed in Odessa, he left the USDLP and became chairman of the directory, thereby combining the posts of head of state and main commander of the UNR. For the next 10 months, he commanded the somewhat fragmentary Ukrainian Army, but when its forces were smashed by the blows of the Red Army in the north and the advancing Armed Forces of South Russia in the south, he fled to Poland (5 December 1919). There, he felt obliged to sign the Treaty of Warsaw (21–24 April 1920), which in return for Polish military assistance and recognition of the UNR, renounced Ukrainian claims to Western Ukraine (Eastern Galicia) and recognized those of Poland, much to the disgust of the leaders of the Western Ukrainian National Republic.

During the Soviet–Polish War, Petliura commanded the two Ukrainian divisions that, with Polish forces, briefly occupied Kiev in May–June 1920, but when Warsaw and Moscow agreed on an armistice (September 1920) and then signed a peace treaty (the Treaty of Riga, 18 March 1921) that effectively ignored the claims (and even the existence) of the UNR, he was again forced into exile. While the remnants of his own forces were interned by the Poles at Kalisz, from late 1920 he led the government-in-exile of the UNR at Tarnów and later Warsaw and was involved in the planning of cross-border guerrilla attacks on the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Fearing that the Polish authorities might extradite him to Soviet Russia, in December 1923 he went underground and moved to Austria, then Hungary, and then Switzerland before finally settling in Paris in October 1924. There, he oversaw the publication of the Ukrainian nationalist weekly Tryzub (“The Tribune”) and continued to function as head of the directory and Golovnoi otaman of the armed forces of the UNR in exile.

On 25 May 1926, Petliura was shot dead on the streets of Paris by the Bessarabian Jew Shalom Schwartzbard, who claimed to be exacting revenge for the tens of thousands of Jews (among them 15 members of his own immediate family) who had been killed in pogroms in Ukraine during the period of Petliura’s rule. The case became a cause célèbre, as at Schwartzbard’s trial in October 1927 the defense (led by the flamboyant left-wing jurist Henri Torres) attempted to prove Petliura’s culpability for the pogroms, while the prosecution alleged that Schwartzbard was a Soviet agent. Despite admitting to having gunned down Petliura, Schwartzbard was acquitted, with damages of one franc each being awarded to Petliura’s wife and brother. Ukrainian nationalists have fought ever since to establish that the Petliura regime was innocent of organizing pogroms, that the 1927 verdict was a travesty, and that Petliura was a national hero. Although monuments have been erected in his honor in Poltava, Rivne, Kiev, and other cities of Ukraine since 1991; his collected works have been republished there; and (in June 2009) Kominterna Street in the Ukrainian capital was renamed Symon Petliura Street, most Jewish historians still condemn him as a pogromist, and the controversy surrounding Petliura’s name shows no sign of abating. His grave, in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris, has become a place of pilgrimage for Ukrainians, while in Beersheba, in Israel, a street has been named for “The Avenger (Shalom Schwartzbard).”

PETRENKO (PLATONOV), PETR (1890–20 August 1921). Ensign (191?). The anarchist-communist Petr Petrenko, the son of a farm laborer, was born in the village of Bol′shoe Mikhailovko, in the Aleksandrovsk district of Ekaterinoslav guberniia. He was mobilized into the Russian Army in 1914 and was decorated for bravery during the First World War. When the Russian Army disintegrated in 1917, he returned to his home district and, having become attracted to anarchism, became an active participant in peasant insurgency against the Ukrainian State and the forces of the Austro-German intervention.

In May 1919, Petrenko joined the forces of Nestor Makhno, at first as commander of a regiment (operating in the rear of the Armed Forces of South Russia), but by 1920 he had risen to the post of commander of the 2nd Infantry Group of the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine. In that capacity, he participated in the Makhnovites’ joint operations with the Red Army against the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, including the storming of the Perekop isthmus in November 1920. The following year, he was made assistant commander in chief of Makhno’s forces. Petrenko was killed in battle against a Red cavalry group in August 1921.

Petrichenko, Stepan Maksimovich (1892–2 June 1947). The most celebrated leader of the Kronshtadt Revolt in 1921, Stepan Petrichenko, was born in either Kaluga or Poltava guberniia (sources differ) and trained as a metalworker at Zaporozh′e in Ukraine. In 1913, he was called up to the navy and, during the First World War, worked as a clerk on the battleship Petropavlovsk of the Baltic Fleet. During the October Revolution, he was a revolutionary organizer on the island of Nargen (now Naissaar), off Revel, where he was one of the founders of the so-called Soviet Republic of Soldiers and Fortress-Builders that arose in opposition to the Estonian Maapäev. In early 1918, he was evacuated from the island to Kronshtadt, during the Ice March of the Baltic Fleet.

In 1919, Petrichenko joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), but was soon expelled during a purge of alleged “careerists” (that is, inactive members). In February 1921, he was elected chairman of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee that led the Kronshtadt rising, signing and sometimes authoring its decrees and declarations. Following the suppression of the Kronshtadt Revolt, Petrichenko (together with some 8,000 other sailors) fled across the ice to Finland, where he found work in a sawmill. At some point in the 1920s (either 1922 or 1927; sources differ), he approached the Soviet ambassador in Riga, was recruited as an agent of the GPU, and returned to Finland via the USSR. Thereafter, he supplied military intelligence to Moscow, although not always reliably or regularly. Nevertheless, in 1941 he was arrested as a spy by the Finnish authorities. In 1945, he was released and returned to the USSR, but was soon arrested by the Soviet counterintelligence services. On 17 November 1945, a special court of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the USSR found Petrichenko guilty of “participation in a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization and working for the Finnish security services” and sentenced him to 10 years in the Gulag, where he soon perished (while traveling from the Solikamsk camp to Aleksandrovsk prison).

PETROGRAD GOVERNMENT. This putative polity was created in October 1919, by Kadets and other adherents of the National Center, at the height of the anti-Bolshevik North-West Army’s autumn advance on Petrograd. It was intended to serve as an interim administration for Petrograd, once the city had been captured by the forces of General N. N. Iudenich, and would have replaced the largely discredited North-West Government. Its chairman was the Kadet A. N. Bykov.

PETROGRAD MILITARY ORGANIZATION OF PROFESSOR V. N. TAGANTSEV. The alleged members of this chiefly fictional anti-Bolshevik organization (which is best understood in the context of one of the many waves of Red Terror directed against the Russian intelligentsia during the civil wars) were rounded up by the Cheka in 1921. There were 833 arrests and, following trials, 96 of the prisoners were shot, 83 were sent to the camps, and 448 were eventually freed. (The fate of the remainder is unknown.) Those charged were often accused of encouraging or assisting the Kronshtadt Revolt. Those executed ranged from the poet N. S. Gumilev to the former commander of Forces of the Baltic Fleet S. V. Zarubaev. V. N. Tagantsev, himself a relatively minor figure, was a professor of physics attached to the Russia Academy of Sciences and chairman of its Sapropel Committee. A number of his friends and associates had been arrested and shot following the Soviet authorities’ unmasking of the National Center in late 1919, and he was subsequently arrested for attempting to rescue others who might have been targeted by attaching them to scientific expeditions and missions. Tagantsev was executed at some point between 28 and 31 August 1921.

PETROV, NIKOLAI INNOKENT′EVICH (1884–4 March 1921). A relatively obscure but nevertheless important figure in the White administrations in Siberia, N. I. Petrov was born at Kuznetsk, Tomsk guberniia, attended the Barnaul Realschule, and was a graduate of the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute (1908). He made his career as a statistician in the offices of the Akmolinsk resettlement board and (from 1909) as a teacher and in a commercial school in Harbin, and in 1917 began lecturing on the economic geography of Siberia at the Omsk Polytechnical Institute.

On 14 June 1918, Petrov was invited to head the Department of Land Affairs and Colonization of the Western Siberian Commissariat. On 1 July 1918, he then joined the Provisional Siberian Government, as director of its Ministry of Land. On 18 November 1918, he became minister of agriculture in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, a post he held until the Kolchak regime collapsed at Irkutsk in January 1921. In that capacity, he authored the statute on land of 13 April 1919, by which the Omsk government took temporary legal title to all private lands seized in Russia during the revolution, with the aim of then leasing them back to the peasantry, pending a final decision on the land question by a new national assembly. This scheme was vehemently opposed by the All-Russian Union of Landowners and other conservative groups.

The fact that Petrov had once been a member of the Mensheviks was used in governmental propaganda as evidence of the Kolchak regime’s moderation, but in fact he had long since been disowned by the social democrats. He was arrested by forces of the Political Center at Irkutsk on 24 December 1918, during the anti-Kolchak uprising in that town, but managed to escape and emigrated to Harbin, where he subsequently lectured at various émigré institutions of higher education and helped edit the journal Russkoe obozrenie (“The Russian Review”). He died of tuberculosis.

Petrov, Pavel Perovich (14 January 1882–24 July 1967). Lieutenant colonel (1917), colonel (August 1919), major general (November 1919). A senior staff officer with various White forces in Siberia and the Far East, P. P. Petrov was born into a peasant family at Solpekovo, in Pskov guberniia, and was a graduate of the St. Petersburg Officer School (1906) and the Academy of the General Staff (1913). During the First World War, he served briefly on the staff of the 29th Infantry Division of the 2nd Army Corps, before being transferred to the Reconnaissance and Photogrammetry Department of the staff of the 1st Army.

After the October Revolution, Petrov was drafted into the Red Army and worked on the staff of the Volga Military District at Samara. When Komuch seized power on the Volga in June 1918, Petrov deserted to join its People’s Army, as commander of the 3rd Samara Rifle Regiment, before becoming chief of staff of the 6th Urals Rifle Corps in the army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (31 December 1918–26 May 1919). He was then attached to the staff of the Western Army (June 1919), before taking command of the 4th Ufa Rifle Division (18 September 1919–March 1920). (On 14 December 1919, he was named commander of Kolchak’s 3rd Army, but could not take up the post during the chaotic retreat of the White forces.) Having survived the Great Siberian (Ice) March to reach Transbaikalia, he commanded a division in the 3rd Siberian Corps of the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov (April–August 1920), then became chief of staff to General G. A. Verzhbitskii, the commander in chief of Semenov’s army (August–December 1920). Following the defeat of White forces in Transbaikalia in late 1920, Petrov moved with Verzhbitskii into the Maritime Province, where he became chief of staff in the White Insurgent Army (into which the remains of Semenov’s forces had been incorporated, 25 May–25 July 1921), then chief of staff of the Zemstvo Host and of the Vladivostok Military District under General M. K. Diterikhs (10 August–3 November 1922).

In December 1922, Petrov went into emigration, settling from 1923 at Mukden, where he headed the local branch of ROVS and opened his own photographic studio. In 1932 he was sent by General Diterikhs to Japan, in an abortive attempt to recover the case of gold (part of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve) that Petrov had placed for safekeeping with the Japanese Army at Manchuria (Manchuli) station in November 1920, as Semenov’s army had fled from Transbaikalia. He then chaired the Society of Russian Émigrés at Tokyo and was head of the Russian school attached to the local Russian Orthodox church. In 1947, he moved to the United States, where he worked as a language instructor at an army school at Monterey (1948–1955) and was chairman of the Society of Russian Veterans of the Great War at San Francisco (1953–1962). He is buried in the Serbian cemetery at Colma, California.

PETROV, VSEVOLOD NIKOLAEVICH (2 January 1883–10 July 1948). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1915). The Ukrainian military commander and historian Vsevolod Petrov was born into a military family of Swedish ancestry and was a graduate of the Kiev Vladimir Cadet Corps (1900) and the Academy of the General Staff (1910). From 1911, he worked with the Military-Archaeological Society in Kiev, and from 1912 to 1914 taught geography and topography at the Kiev Cadet Corps. During the First World War, he served for many months as chief of staff with the 7th Turkestan Division (9 May 1916–3 January 1917).

During 1917, Petrov was an active supporter of the “Ukrainization” of units of the Russian Army and was named commander of one of the first such regiments, the Gordienkovskii. With that force, he participated, in January–February 1918, in efforts to defend Kiev in the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War, before moving to Crimea as commander of the 3rd Kuren (“Troop”) of the Independent Zaporozhian Detachment, in an effort to secure the peninsula for the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR). With the rise to power of P. P. Skoropadskii in Kiev, Petrov was removed from his command. He managed to rejoin the Hetmanite Army and became chief of staff of its 12th Division (from 29 July 1918), but was again dismissed for expressing his support for UNR and S. V. Petliura.

When the Ukrainian National Republic Directory toppled Skoropadskii, Petrov became head of the Zhitomir Officer School (from 22 December 1918), then was named commander of the Volynsk Group of the Ukrainian Army (from 2 June 1919). He then served as minister of war (from 9 July 1919) and then assistant minister of war (from 5 November 1919) in the directory. From 1 May 1920, by which time the Ukrainian Army had moved onto Polish territory, he became its inspector general, and the following year, still in Poland, was named as first quartermaster general (from 1 March 1921) of the Ukrainian Army, then (19 August 1921) its chief of the general staff. When the Soviet–Polish War was concluded with the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921), Petrov, like many other Ukrainians, was forced to leave Poland. He subsequently taught military history and physical education at the Ukrainian Dragomirov Institute (from 1923) and the Charles University in Prague (1929–1931) and was involved with a variety of Ukrainian émigré nationalist organizations. During the Second World War, he supported Stepan Bandera and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and, on 20 June 1941, was named minister of war in Bandera’s putative government-in-exile, while working in a factory to support himself. In 1945, Petrov moved to Bavaria to escape the advancing Red Army, living in a variety of camps for displaced persons. He died in a camp at Augsburg.

PETROVSKII, GRIGORII IVANOVICH (23 January 1878–9 January 1958). G. I. Petrovskii, the long-serving chairman of the VTsIK of the USSR (30 December 1922–12 January 1938), was the son of a tailor, born at Khar′kov in Ukraine, where he briefly attended the seminary. From his teens, while employed as a turner, he was an active participant in the revolutionary movement, and in 1897 he joined the Ekaterinoslav social-democratic organization, the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party at its inception, in 1898; was an active participant in the 1905 Revolution (as head of the Briansk factory committee and a workers’ militia in Ekaterinoslav); and was elected to the first Bolshevik central committee (January 1913–24 April 1917). From October 1912 to November 1914 (when he was exiled for his antiwar views), he was a member of the Fourth State Duma.

Having been liberated from his exile at Turukhansk (in northern Eniseisk guberniia) by the February Revolution, in 1917 Petrovskii was a member of the Ekaterinoslav committee of the Bolshevik Party and, following the October Revolution, served on Sovnarkom as people’s commissar for internal affairs (17 November 1917–30 March 1919). In that role, he was an enthusiastic proponent of the Red Terror and oversaw the early stages of the development of the security apparatus of the Soviet state. He was also a participant in the negotiation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and helped draft the 1918 Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. From 11 December 1919 to 19 February 1920, he chaired the Ukrainian revkom of the party, and from 1919 he was chairman of the Ukrainian VTsIK, combining that post from 30 December 1922 with that of chairman of the VTsIK of the USSR. On 16 March 1921, he was reelected to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). He remained in such senior positions until his dismissal during the purges (10 March 1939), when he was also expelled from the party. However, Petrovskii was not executed and in 1940 became deputy director of the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow. He is buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. In 1926, Ekaterinoslav was renamed Dnepropetrovsk in his honor.

PETRUSHEVYCH, YEVHEN (3 June 1863–29 August 1940). Yevhen Petrushevych, the leader of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, was born into the family of a priest of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Vhurch at Buzke (Busk), in Austrian Galicia, and educated at Lemberg University, where he was awarded a doctorate in law and was active in student politics. After establishing his own legal practice at Sokal, Petrushevych joined the National Democratic Party, immersed himself in Ukrainian cultural life, and was elected to the Austrian parliament, where he acted as vice chairman of the Ukrainian caucus (1907–1917). He was also a member of the Galician Diet (Sejm), a vocal opponent of political compromises with the Austrians, and a noted campaigner for electoral reform to increase Ukrainian representation (in which he had some success). During the First World War, he was a member of the Supreme Ukrainian Council at Lemberg, helping to organize the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. As the Austrian Empire collapsed at the end of the war, in October 1918, in his capacity as president of the Ukrainian National Rada in Galicia, Petrushevych proclaimed the creation of a Ukrainian state on Austrian territory and subsequently (4 January 1919) became president of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic. His lengthy political experience meant that his role in public affairs was far more extensive than the ceremonial function intended for the presidency.

Following the union (the Act of Zluka) between the Republic and the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), Petrushevych joined the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic (22 January 1919). His relationship with the directory soured, however, when (on 9 June 1919) he assumed dictatorial powers in Western Ukraine, in an attempt to coordinate its efforts in the Ukrainian–Polish War. Petrushevych was then expelled from the directory, which established its own ministry to govern Western Ukraine. The new UNR government of Isaak Mazepa managed to reconcile with Petrushevych temporarily, but his sharp differences of opinion with the Ukrainian military commander, S. V. Petliura, remained unresolved. (Essentially, Petrushevych was willing to contemplate doing a deal with the Russian White army of General A. I. Denikin, the Armed Forces of South Russia, for joint resistance against Poland, while Petliura would have been more likely to have contemplated doing a deal with the Poles, or even the Bolsheviks, for joint resistance against Denikin.)

On 15 November 1919, Petrushevych left the headquarters of the UNR at Kamianets-Podilskyi and made his way to Vienna. There, he excoriated Petliura for having signed away the territory of Western Ukraine to Poland in the Treaty of Warsaw (21–24 April 1920), which he declared to be illegal. Subsequently, he established a government-in-exile of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (25 July 1920), which remained in existence until 15 March 1923, the day after the Allies’ Conference of Ambassadors at Paris had confirmed recognition of Polish sovereignty over Galicia. In desperation, Petrushevych then came to espouse pro-Soviet views in Berlin, where he moved in 1923 (and may even have received Soviet funding), but abandoned that stance when Moscow’s policy of Ukrainization was canceled under J. V. Stalin. In the 1930s, he established contacts with the right-wing Ukrainian National Association and even with the former Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii. He died and was buried in Berlin, in the cemetery of St. Hedwig (Jadwiga) Cathedral. In November 2003, his remains were moved to a special chapel at the Lychakiv Cemetery, L′viv. A main square in that city has also been renamed in his honor.

Philips Price, Morgan walter (29 January 1885–23 September 1973). The journalist, memoirist, and long-serving British Labour MP Morgan Philips Price was born at Grove Taynton, near Gloucester, the son of the serving MP for Tewkesbury. After graduating from Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered politics as the prospective Liberal MP for Gloucester (from 1911), but took a firm antiwar stance in 1914 and became a founding member of the Union of Democratic Control. Having toured Russia extensively before the war, in 1914 he offered his services to the Manchester Guardian and became its correspondent on the Eastern Front. His dispatches from Petrograd and Moscow in 1917–1918 (which were savagely censored) displayed a marked sympathy for the Bolsheviks, and in 1918, following the onset of the Allied intervention, he was employed by the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to write propaganda to be directed at British forces in North Russia. Following the revolution in Germany, he moved in late 1918 to Berlin, where he was employed as the correspondent of the Daily Mail until 1923.

Price contested the British general elections of 1922, 1923, and 1924, as the unsuccessful Labour candidate for Gloucester, before being elected MP for Whitehaven in 1929 and joining the government of Ramsay MacDonald. He lost his seat in 1931, but was returned to parliament as MP for the Forest of Dean in 1935. He remained in that seat from 1950 to 1959, serving as MP for Gloucester West. He was the author of numerous works on the Russian Revolution.

PHILOSOPHERS’ SHIPS. This was the name given to several vessels that carried scholars, philosophers, leaders of the Russian cooperative movement, and other intellectuals who were expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922–1923, as the Soviet government sought to establish that although the introduction of the New Economic Policy might represent a tactical retreat on the economic front, there was to be no free market in intellectual capital, no retreat on the ideological front, and no place in Soviet Russia for members of the intelligentsia unwilling to support the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Following waves of arrests across Moscow, Petrograd, Kazan′, and several Ukrainian cities, beginning on 16–17 August 1922, which sought to net 217 individuals listed by an agreement of the Politbiuro and the GPU, the first contingents of deportees, numbering at least 160 individuals, were transported from Petrograd to Stettin in Germany aboard the German ships the Oberbürgermeister Hacken (which set sail on 28 September 1922) and the Preussen (which embarked on 16 November 1922). Others followed, sometimes by train to Riga or by boat to Constantinople. Although wrenching these individuals from their roots, their families, and their homeland was undoubtedly cruel in many respects, there was something to L. D. Trotsky’s explanation that it was also an act of “far-sighted humaneness”; after all, if civil war was reignited, he explained, the Cheka would be forced to shoot such opponents of the regime. Among those expelled (although some of them moved abroad independently) were Iu. I. Aikhenwal′d, N. A. Berdiaev, S. N. Bulgakov, S. L. Frank, I. A. Il′in, L. P. Karsavin, A. A. Kizevetter, N. O. Losskii, S. P. Mel′gunov, V. A. Miakotin, M. A. Osorgin, A. V. Peshekhonov, F. A. Stepun, P. A. Sorokin, and S. E. Trubetskoi. Many of the exiles believed that they would be allowed eventually to return to Russia—perhaps within a year—but there is evidence to suggest that, even as they were leaving the country, the Soviet government had determined that their banishment would be without time limit.

PIATAKOV, IURII (GEORGII) LEONIDOVICH (25 July 1890–30 January 1937). One of the leading representatives of the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, Iu. L. Piatakov, the son of an engineer in a sugar factory, was born at Horodyshche, in Kiev guberniia. He was expelled from St. Petersburg University in 1910, the year he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, and was arrested and exiled on a number of occasions over the following years before fleeing to Western Europe, via Sweden, in October 1914. Having worked alongside V. I. Lenin on the journal Kommunist, he returned to Russia in March 1917, where he led the Bolsheviks’ Kiev City Committee and was a member of both the Executive Committee of the Kiev Soviet and the Ukrainian Central Rada (although his sympathies were with the Soviet rather than the Rada, which he repeatedly criticized for “bourgeois chauvinism”).

In the aftermath of the October Revolution, Piatakov was named by Sovnarkom as deputy commissar of the State Bank (November 1917, and the commissar of the State Bank, December 1917–March 1918). In December 1917, he was also a member of the Kiev Revolutionary Committee that attempted to overthrow the Rada and subsequently (July 1918) was elected secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In 1918, he was a sympathizer of the cause of the Left Communists and opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). In November 1918, he was co-opted as a member of the Ukrainian Military Revolutionary Committee that planned the Soviet invasion of Ukraine in that month. Thereafter, he was chairman of the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine (28 November 1918–29 January 1919). until he was replaced by Cristian Rakovski (who was felt to be more sympathetic to the national question than the sternly internationalist Piatakov). From June 1919, he chaired the Extraordinary Military Tribunal of Ukraine and was a member of the Revvoensovets of the 13th Red Army (21 June–3 November 1919), the 16th Red Army (29 May–16 October 1920), and the 6th Red Army (26 October 1920–3 December 1920). He also commanded the 42nd Rifle Division in 1919.

As the civil wars wound down, Piatakov became chairman of the Central Directorate of the Coal Industry of the Donets Basin (November 1920–December 1921) and vice chairman of VSNKh (1923–November 1927). In the latter capacity, and as an enthusiastic advocate of the rapid industrialization of the USSR, he was one of the main authors of the First Five-Year Plan. He was also deputy (from 10 June 1934, first deputy) people’s commissar for heavy industry of the USSR (January 1932–September 1936). From 25 April 1923 to 2 December 1927 and from 13 July 1930 to 11 September 1936, he was also a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the gap in his membership being explained by his expulsion from the party as a consequence of his adherence to the Trotskyite Left Opposition from 1924 to 1927.

Piatakov was the first oppositionist to publicly repent his opposition (February 1928); subsequently authored numerous works praising the “genius” of J. V. Stalin; and during their trial in 1936, was among those who publicly and most vociferously demanded the death sentence for L. B. Kamenev and G. E. Zinov′ev, but all of that did not save him. He was arrested on 12 September 1936, and, at the second Moscow show trial (the “Trial of the 17”), was found guilty of membership in a “Ukrainian Trotskyist Center” (30 January 1937). He was immediately executed. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1988.

PILAR VON PILCHAU, ADOLF KONSTANTIN JAKOB (23 May 1851–17 June 1925). A Baltic German noble from Pärnumaa (Kreis Pernau), Estland guberniia, Baron Adolf Pilar von Pilchau trained and worked (from 1876) as a judge and was active in local politics. In 1899, he was elected land councilor of Livonia, and from 1906 to 1918 he served as land marshal of Livonia and leader of the Ritterschaft (the local assembly of the Baltic Germans). From 1912 to 1917, he was also a member of the Imperial Russian State Council. When German forces arrived in Latvia and Estonia in 1917–1918, he was one of the inspirers of the United Baltic Duchy and served as the first and only chairman of its Regency Council (Regentschaftsrat), from 5 to 28 November 1918, having been chairman of the Joint Council of Livonia, Estonia, Riga, and Ösel from April to November 1918. He went into exile in Germany in January 1919, but in 1923 returned to Estonia to live at Pärnu (Pernau), where he died.

PILKIN, VLADIMIR KONSTANTINOVICH (11 July 1869–6 January 1950). Lieutenant (14 May 1896), captain, second rank (6 December 1906), rear admiral (December 1916). The White naval commander and politician V. K. Pilkin, the son of Admiral K. P. Pilkin (1824–1913), was born in St. Petersburg and was a graduate of the Naval College (1890) and the Nicholas Naval Academy (1908). From 1892, he served as a junior navigator on the cruiser Rasboinik. After service in France, helping oversee the ship’s construction, on 16 October 1900, he was attached to the crew of the battleship Tsesarevich, which in 1903 was assigned to the Pacific Squadron at Port Arthur. He saw action and was wounded at Port Arthur, during the Russo–Japanese War, and subsequently worked in the naval general staff. He was then captain of the destroyer Vsadnik (1909–1911) and the battleship Petropavlovsk (1911–1916) and, from late 1916 to 1917, commanded the 1st Brigade of the Baltic Fleet. In late 1917, he fell ill with tuberculosis and remained in hospital in Finland until late 1918.

Upon his recovery, Pilkin joined the Whites’ North-West Government, as naval minister, and became a trusted advisor to General N. N. Iudenich. In emigration, he chaired the Wardroom (kaiut-kompaniia) of Russian Naval Officers at Nice, where he died and was buried in the Caucade Russian cemetery.

Piłsudski, Józef Klemens (5 December 1867–12 May 1935). Marshal (Polish Army, March 1920). One of the founders of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS) and the architect of his country’s independence in 1917–1918, Józef Piłsudski was born into an impoverished Polish noble family at Zalavas (Zułów) in Lithuania. He attended the Russian Gymnasium at Vil′na, where he formed a lasting hatred for the tsarist government and an equally abiding desire to regain Poland’s lost Lithuanian lands. From 1885, he attended the Medical Faculty at the University of Khar′kov. However, he was soon consorting with revolutionary circles, leading to his suspension in 1886, arrest in 1887, and subsequent exile to Siberia. After his release in 1892, he helped create the PPS at Vil′na and became editor of its newspaper, Rabotnik (“The Worker”). From 1895 to 1905, living mostly in exile in London, he was also a member of the party’s ruling Central Workers’ Committee. In this period emerged his cherished hopes that a war between imperial Russia and its neighbors might favor a national uprising in Poland; with that in mind, he traveled to Japan in 1904 to seek a subsidy. When the Japanese offered only minimal financial assistance, he returned to Warsaw, where he lost faith in the PPS when it voted in 1906 to accept autonomy within a federal, democratized Russian state, rather than demanding full independence for Poland. He did not leave the party, however, as it helped him cultivate a military organization, which conducted bank robberies and many assassinations of tsarist officials in the upheavals that gripped Poland from 1905 to 1908. When a raid on a mail train at Bezdany on 26 September 1908 netted 200,000 rubles, however, he devoted himself to his own PPS-Revolutionary Faction and the secret Union of Active Struggle (Związek Walki Czynnej), which further explored armed resistance to the Russians.

During the First World War, Piłsudski obtained Austrian permission to form a Polish Brigade (eventually numbering some 10,000 men) to fight against Russia, but his relations with Vienna were strained, and he resigned his command in July 1916, although he then became head of military affairs in the (provisional) Regency Council of State established by the occupying Central Powers in Warsaw. The February Revolution expanded his hopes that Polish independence was possible, and he urged his legionnaires to refuse to sign an oath of allegiance to Austria. For this, on 22 July 1917, he was arrested and imprisoned at Magdeburg Castle.

With the collapse of the Central Powers in November 1918, Piłsudski returned to Warsaw to become commander in chief of all Polish forces (from 11 November 1918) and provisional head of state (from 14 November 1918) of the new Polish Republic. In the latter role (made full on 22 February 1919, following a vote in the new Polish parliament), he attempted to remain above politics, although in 1918 and 1919 he did support a tranche of progressive legislation covering workers’ rights and land reform. Apart from unifying the new state and building an army, his policy thereafter centered on maximizing the territorial extent of the new state (especially in the east) and creating a federation of the Polish and Lithuanian peoples, in alliance with Belarussia and Ukraine, so as to resist Russian and German encroachment. This was to be known as Międzymorze (“Between the [Black and Baltic] Seas”), but it came to naught due to his neighbors’ fears that it was the first step toward a re-creation of the ancient Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Having defeated the Western Ukrainian National Republic in the Ukrainian–Polish War and secured a military alliance with the Ukrainian National Republic of Symon Petliura through the Treaty of Warsaw (21–24 April 1920), Piłsudski sent his forces toward Kiev in April–May 1920, triggering the active stage of the Soviet–Polish War, the conclusion of which in the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921) left Poland in control of large swaths of territory claimed by Lithuania, Belarussia, and Ukraine. Victory in the Polish–Lithuanian War (together with Piłsudski’s covert sponsorship of the Żeligowski mutiny) also secured Wilno (Vilnius) for Poland. (It is of note that, partly through disquiet at the Russian Whites’ inflexibility on the issue of the Russo–Polish border and their policy of “Russia, One and Indivisible,” Piłsudski had refrained from attacking the Red Army until after its defeat of the Armed Forces of South Russia. Later, in a pamphlet entitled Who Saved Soviet Power from Destruction? [1937], General A. I. Denikin concluded that primarily culpable were Piłsudski and the Poles.)

Disillusioned by the fractious nature of Polish politics and by the new constitution of March 1921, which had greatly diminished the powers of the head of state, Piłsudski resigned as president on 14 December 1922 and also resigned as chief of the general staff, on 30 May 1923. Three years later, he was tempted back into active political life by his former socialist allies, in protest at the increasingly right-wing policies adopted by successive governments, and on 12–14 May 1926, he launched a coup d’état in collaboration with PPS, the Peasant Party, and even the Polish Communist Party and temporarily dispersed the Polish parliament (Sejm). He refused the powerless post of head of state and served variously thereafter as minister of defense, inspector general of the armed forces (27 August 1926–12 May 1935), minister of military affairs (16 May 1926–12 May 1935), and chairman of the War Council, as well as serving two terms as prime minister (2 October 1926–27 June 1928, and 15 August–4 December 1930). Under his influence, the powers of the Sejm were reduced, and a program of Sanacja (“Sanitation” or “National Healing”) was pursued, which involved the ruthless suppression of opponents on the left and on the right, particularly in the aftermath of the 1926 coup, during the so-called Brest trials in 1930 and at the Bereza Kartuska concentration camp that he established in 1934. He died of cancer of the liver at the Belweder palace, his official residence, in 1935.

Piłsudski’s heart was buried in his mother’s grave in the Rasu cemetery, in Wilno; the rest of his body was interred in Kraków’s Wawel Cathedral, in the company of the ancient kings of Poland. Unsurprisingly, Piłsudski’s reputation was officially sullied in post–Second World War Communist Poland, but following the collapse of communism he became widely revered once more (although far from uncontroversial). His name has been attached to innumerable places and institutions; almost every Polish town has its Piłsudski Street; and most have a statue or two also (there are three in the space of a mile along the avenue that joins the Belweder Palace to Piłsudski Square in Warsaw). He has also been the subject of many paintings and commemorative stamps and coins, and he is featured as a character in many works of fiction, including, the 2007 novel Lód (“Ice”) by Jacek Dukaj. On 12 May 1995, the Polish Sejm resolved that “Józef Piłsudski will remain, in our nation’s memory, the founder of its independence and the victorious leader who fended off a foreign assault that threatened the whole of Europe and its civilization. Józef Piłsudski served his country well and has entered our history forever.”

Pisarev, Petr Konstantinovich (17 December 1875–22 December 1967). Esaul (1914), colonel (1917), major general (12 November 1918), lieutenant general (August 1919). The son of an elder in the stanitsa of Ilovinskii, in the territory of the Don Cossack Host, the White commander P. K. Pisarev was a graduate of the Novocherkassk Cossack Officer School (1898). By 1917, he had won the Cross of St. George for bravery in action and had risen to the command of the 42nd Don Cossack Regiment.

Pisarev joined the Volunteer Army in January 1918, was a participant the First (Kuban) Ice March, and on 29 March 1918 was wounded in the battle for Ekaterinodar. In the Volunteer Army, he commanded a partisan unit (the Alekseev Regiment, April–November 1918) and a brigade of the 2nd Division (November 1918–February 1919). Following the creation of the Armed Forces of South Russia, he commanded a brigade of the 4th Division of the Caucasian Army (February–July 1919) and then its 6th Infantry Division (July–August 1919). He subsequently was put in command of the 1st Kuban Cossack Cavalry Corps (September 1919–March 1920) and was simultaneously commander of the Tsaritsyn garrison. Following the collapse of A. I. Denikin’s efforts, he was put in command of an army group (the 1st Composite Kuban Corps) of the Kuban Army (March–April 1920), and finally, the Terek-Astrakhan Brigade (April 1920). Having been evacuated from Novorossiisk to Crimea, in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel he served as commandant of Sevastopol′ (April–May and July–September 1920), commander of the 4th Army Corps (May–July 1920), and commander of the 1st Army (Volunteer) Corps (September–November 1920).

In November 1920, along with the rest of Wrangel’s army, Pisarev was evacuated to Turkey. He then was sent to Greece, as the representative there of the ataman of the Don Cossack Host, eventually moving to Yugoslavia in 1921. In 1923, he settled in France, near Paris, and from 1937 was chairman of the Union of Pervopokhodniki. Pisarev is buried in the plot of the Alekseev Regiment in the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Paris.

Pitchfork Uprising. Sometimes referred to as the Black Eagle Uprising, this peasant protest against the Soviet food requisitioning detachments (prodotriady) that were associated with the constraints of War Communism erupted across the Menselinsk uezd of Ufa guberniia on 4 February 1920, when local military leaders refused to release peasants from the Tartar village of Yanga Yelan who had been arrested for failing to hand over the requested supplies. Their fellow villagers attacked and killed members of the prodotriad and circulated appeals for an uprising. On 9–10 February 1920, Soviet leaders at Menselinsk and Zaisk were also attacked and killed, and the rising spread to the neighboring Belebei and Birsk uezdy of Ufa guberniia and the Chistopol′ uezd of Kazan′ guberniia. Some sources have it that as many as 50,000 rebels may have been involved, but they were poorly armed (largely with pitchforks and staves) and were easily crushed by Red Army and Cheka detachments sent to the area in March 1920. As many as 3,000 rebels may have been killed or executed during and in the immediate aftermath of the uprising.

PITKA, JOHAN (19 February 1872–September 1944). Captain (190?), rear admiral (September 1919). The Estonian naval commander Johan Pitka was born at Jalgsema in the Võhmuta region of northern Estland guberniia and educated at the Käsmu, Kuressaare, and Paldiski naval schools. He served as a junior officer in the Imperial Russian Navy from 1889 to 1907, and from 1904 to 1911 lived in Britain. Back in Estonia in 1917, he became active in organizing the nationalist militia units that formed the basis of the Estonian Army (Defense League) during the Estonian War of Independence. He also organized and commanded several armored trains and is regarded as the founder of the Estonian Navy, which he commanded in all its major operations of the civil-war period.

Pitka retired from the service in November 1919, and from 1924 to 1930 lived near Stuart Lake, British Columbia, Canada. He then returned to Estonia and became active in politics, initially as a member of the right-wing League of Liberators, although he left that movement in 1932. He was also the director of the Estonian Consumer Cooperative Central Federation and a member of parliament from 1937. In 1940, he fled to Finland when the USSR invaded Estonia, returning only in 1944 to help resist the Soviet reinvasion as the Nazis retreated. The circumstances of his death remain obscure: according to some sources, he drowned while attempting to flee to Sweden on a small boat; according to others, he was killed by a tank shell in a battle with Soviet forces at Läänemaa.

The frigate Admiral Pitka is currently the flagship of the Estonian navy. Among the many monuments to him in Estonia are one in the Hirvepark, in central Tallinn, and another at the Ansomardi farm at Jalgsema; another, by Emil Urbel and Aivar Simson, was unveiled in Spirit Square, Fort St James, British Columbia, on 5 August 2009.

PLATONOV, PETR. See PETRENKO (PLATONOV), PETR.

PNEVSKII, NIKOLAI VIACHOSLAVOVICH (14 August 1874–1928). Lieutenant colonel (6 December 1904), colonel (6 December 1910), major general (6 May 1916). The Red military specialist N. V. Pnevskii was born into a noble family in Warsaw guberniia. He was the son of General V. I. Pnevskii. Having entered military service on 31 August 1892, he graduated from the Mikhail Artillery School (1895) and the Academy of the General Staff (1901). After numerous staff postings, he served in the Russo–Japanese War, during which he was injured and was much decorated for bravery (including the award of a gold sword “For Valor”). He subsequently occupied several more staff posts, finally becoming chief of staff of the 38th Infantry Division (from 14 May 1913). On the outbreak of the First World War, he became chief of staff of the 1st Kuban Cossack Division, and in the course of the conflict rose to chief of staff of the 1st Army (from 17 August 1918) and then (15–27 December 1917) temporary commander of that force.

Pnevskii volunteered for service with the Red Army in April 1918 and was named chief of staff of the Volga Military District. From 1 July 1917, he was chief of the operations section of Vseroglavshtab and then became chief of the Technical Commission of the Central Directorate for Supply of the Red Army, as well as working as an advisor to the Revvoensovet of the Republic. From 9 June to 17 October 1919, he was chief of staff of the Southern Front, as its forces retreated in the face of the onslaught of the Armed Forces of South Russia. He was then assigned to the main staff of the Red Army, before becoming assistant (from 1923) and then acting (from March 1924) director of affairs of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. He died in Moscow in 1928.

Poale Zion. The Jewish Zionist political party Poale Zion (“Workers of Zion”) was founded in Russia when the social-democratic Bund rejected Zionism in 1901. Having formally organized itself at a congress in Poltava in 1906 and approved a party program the following year, it gained a following among working-class Jews across western Russia and Ukraine and had affiliate branches among the Jewish diaspora in Europe, North America, and Palestine. Its ideology, as articulated by its leader, Dov Ber Borochov, was essentially Marxist, but also stressed nationalism as a positive force in the class struggle. Its last congress in Russia took place in August 1917.

The party split into left and right factions in the aftermath of the October Revolution, with Poale Zion Right advocating a reformist socialist platform, and Poale Zion Left supporting the Bolsheviks. Non-Zionist Jewish Bolsheviks regarded the party with suspicion, however, and it failed to gain entry to the Komintern. Radicals from the movement then formed the Jewish Communist Party (Poale Zion) in 1919, which continued to exist in the USSR until it was banned in 1928. Elements of the Poale Zion organization continued to survive (albeit precariously) across Europe in the interwar years, but were obliterated by the Holocaust.

PODTELKOV, FEDOR GRIGOR′EVICH (25 August 1886–11 May 1918). One of the leaders of the pro-Bolshevik elements of the Don Cossack Host, F. G. Podtelkov was born into a poor Cossack family at the Krutovskii khutor, Ust′-Koperskaia stanitsa, in the northern Don region. He was raised by his uncle and educated in a local church school. Having been mobilized in 1912, he served as a cavalry sergeant major with the 6th Don Cossack Guards Battery during the First World War, twice receiving the St. George’s Cross and a medal “For Bravery.” During 1917, according to his own account, he came to identify with the Bolsheviks, although he never joined the party.

In January 1918, at a congress of Cossack frontoviki at Kamenskaia stanitsa, Podtelkov was elected chairman of a Don Cossack Provisional Revolutionary Committee that opposed the Host leadership and challenged its governance of the Don territory by proclaiming the Don Soviet Republic. On 13 April 1918, at the First Congress of Soviets of the Don Oblast′ at Rostov-on-Don, Podtelkov became chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Don Soviet Republic and a member of both the presidium of its Central Executive Committee and the Extraordinary Staff for the Defense of the Don Republic. In early May 1918, he led a 127-strong contingent of Red Cossacks that attempted to mobilize the population of the upper Don in support of the Red Army. On 10 May 1918, however, he was captured by anti-Bolshevik Cossacks and the following day was executed (along with 79 of his men) at Ponomarevskii khutor, Krasnokutskaia stanitsa. Among the charges against him was that he had personally executed the White Cossack leader Colonel V. M. Chernetsov.

In Soviet times, Podtelkov was lauded as a hero, and a number of places were renamed in his memory, including a street in Rostov-on-Don. His fate was described by the novelist M. A. Sholokhov in Tikhii Don (often Quiet Flows the Don in English translations).

Podvoiskii, Nikolai Il′ich (16 February 1880–28 July 1948). A prominent Red military organizer of the civil-war era, N. I. Podvoiskii was the son of a village teacher from Kunashevka, Chernigov oblast′. He was educated at the Chernigov Seminary (from which he was expelled for political activity in 1901) and the Demidov Law School at Iaroslavl′, but did not graduate. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1901; during the 1905 Revolution, he organized strikes and workers’ militias at Ivanovo-Voznesensk and at Iaroslavl′. Thereafter, he briefly moved abroad (to Germany and Switzerland), before returning to Russia in 1908 to work in the social-democratic organizations in St. Petersburg, Kostroma and Baku. He was arrested in 1916, but released during the February Revolution. In 1917, he was a member of the Bolsheviks’ Petersburg Committee, was active in the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b), and edited the newspapers Soldatskaia pravda (“Soldier’s Truth”) and Rabochii i soldat (“Worker and Soldier”). During the October Revolution, he was chairman of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and commanded the storming of the Winter Palace.

After the revolution, Podvoiskii was first made head of the Petrograd Military District and, from November 1917 to 14 March 1918, was joint head of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs. From January 1918, he also served as chairman of the All-Russian Collegium for the Organization and Direction of the Red Army, and from April 1918 was chairman of the Supreme Military Inspectorate of the Red Army. From 30 September 1918 to 8 July 1919, he was a member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic and was at the same time people’s commissar for military and naval affairs of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (January–September 1919). From November 1919 until 1923, he was head of Vsevobuch and was also involved in commanding the operations of special detachments deployed to root out “counterrevolutionary” elements that had survived the civil wars.

Podvoiskii subsequently served in numerous party and state institutions, including a period as head of the International Association of Red Sports and Gymnastics Associations (Sportintern, 1921–1927) and another as chairman of the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (1924–1930), and from 1930 worked with Istpart (the Commission for the Study of the October Revolution and of the Russian Communist Party), until his retirement in 1935. After the German invasion of Russia in 1941, Piatakov volunteered for military service, but was turned down due to his age. However, he was allowed to volunteer to dig trenches outside Moscow. He died in a party retirement home in Moscow.

POGROMS. During the “Russian” Civil Wars, attacks on Jewish communities (“pogroms” in English, although the Russian verb from which this is derived, gromit′, means simply “to destroy”) reached a scale unprecedented prior to the Shoah (Holocaust). They were perpetrated by the Whites, by Ukrainian nationalists of various stamps, by elements of the Red Army (notably Cossacks of the 1st Cavalry Army, as famously portrayed in the Red Cavalry stories of Isaak Babel), by the volatile forces loyal to various atamans (e.g., Nykyfor Hryhoriiv and S. N. Bułak-Bałachowicz), and even by rogue detachments of the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine. Realistic estimates of the number of victims range from 30,000 to 70,000, with most victims concentrated in Ukraine, although Polish Jews also suffered (with attacks on them being launched by both sides during the Soviet–Polish War).

The pogromists drew upon a deeply embedded vein of anti-Semitism in imperial Russian society, which had witnessed mass outbreaks of violence against Jews in 1881–1884 and 1903–1906 and the notorious Beilis case in 1913. White leaders, in particular, found it useful (in an anticipation of Nazism) to portray the Soviet government as a “Jewish conspiracy” to destroy Russia; thus, although pogroms per se were condemned by, for example, Admiral A. V. Kolchak (for fear of offending the Allies), his one-time commander in chief, General M. K. Diterikhs, wrote a pamphlet in 1919 entitled Bei zhidov! (“Beat the Jews!”). Historiographically, however, greater attention has been paid to the still very contentious subject of the alleged complicity of the Ukrainian authorities in pogroms and to the alleged guilt of S. V. Petliura, who was assassinated by an “avenging” Jew in Paris in 1926.

Pokrovskii, viktor Leonidovich (1889–9 November 1922). Staff captain (1917), colonel (24 January 1918), major general (1 March 1918), lieutenant general (1919). One of Russia’s flying aces of the First World War, and later a resourceful and daring White cavalry general (albeit one who earned the soubriquet “the Hangman” for his treatment of Red prisoners and White deserters alike), V. L. Pokrovskii was a graduate of the Odessa Cadet Corps (1906), the Pavlovsk Military School (1909), and the Sevastopol′ Aviation School (1914). During the First World War, he commanded the 12th Flying Unit (aviaotriad) at Riga from 1914 to 1917.

In the White movement, Pokrovskii served in the forces of the Kuban Cossack Host, forming the 2nd Volunteer Detachment to oppose Soviet rule in the North Caucasus (January–March 1918), and was subsequently named commander in chief of the Kuban Army (1–30 March 1918), prior to its merger with the Volunteer Army near Ekaterinodar and its participation in the siege of that city in April 1918. Pokrovskii was then named by the Kuban Rada as commander of the Forces of the Kuban Region (April–June 1918) and subsequently served as commander of the 1st Kuban Brigade (June–August 1918), of the 1st Kuban Mounted Division (August 1918–January 1919), and of the 1st Kuban Corps of the Armed Forces of South Russia (3 January–July 1919). After having participated in the destruction of the 11th Red Army in the North Caucasus in early 1919, as commander of a group of forces of the Caucasian Army near Tsaritsyn (July–September 1919), he masterminded the capture of the strategically important center of Kamyshin on the Volga. He fell ill in September 1919, but upon recovery was made chief of the rear of the Caucasian Army by General P. N. Wrangel and was charged with combating Kuban Cossack separatism (October–November 1919). Subsequently, he was placed in command of the Caucasian Army, as the successor to Wrangel (26 November 1919–21 January 1920), but was removed as his forces collapsed before the advance of the Red Army.

Failing to secure a command post in Wrangel’s Russian Army, Pokrovskii went into emigration in April 1920, settling in the port of Varna, in Bulgaria. There, he sought to create an underground organization to undertake diversionary and terrorist missions in Kuban. He came to the attention of the local police when, on 3 November 1922, members of his organization assassinated the Cossack Aleksandr Ageev, who was agitating for the men of the Kuban to return home. Pokrovskii fled to Kiustendil, in the far west of Bulgaria, but was killed there on 9 November 1922, by a policeman, or by a local terrorist, or by an agent of the NKVD (sources differ).

POLIAKOV, IVAN ALEKSEEVICH (10 August 1866–16 April 1969). Voiskovoi starshina (1917), colonel (27 April 1918), major general (14 August 1919). The son of an officer of the Don Cossack Host and a graduate of the Novocherkassk Cossack School (1910) and the Academy of the General Staff (1914), in the First World War the White commander I. A. Poliakov worked on the General Staff and then as assistant senior adjutant of the Operations Department of the quartermaster general of the 9th Army. In late 1917, he made his way to the Don territory and spent some time in hiding before participating in the Don rebellion and joining the Don Cossack forces of Ataman P. Kh. Popov.

In the White movement, Poliakov commanded a regiment in the Don Army (February 1918–August 1919), the 6th Don Brigade of the 2nd Don Corps (August–October 1919), the Cavalry Group of the 2nd Don Corps (October–November 1919), and the 4th Don Division (November 1919–March 1920). As a participant in the staff conference of the Don Army and the Volunteer Army in January 1919, he spoke against the unification of command under General A. I. Denikin and the formation of the Armed Forces of South Russia, but in P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army served as a member of the staff of the Don Corps of General F. F. Abramov.

Poliakov was evacuated from Crimea in November 1920. Having failed in an attempt to make his way to join the remaining White forces in Siberia, he lived in emigration in Yugoslavia (at Zagreb), then moved to Germany during the Second World War. There, he participated in the formation of collaborationist Cossack units intended to fight against the USSR. In 1945, he was briefly interned by the British occupying forces, but escaped the repatriation to Soviet Russia that was the fate of thousands of other “victims of Yalta.” In the 1940s and 1950s, Poliakov became embroiled in rival claims to the title of Ataman of the Don Cossacks, but on 14 February 1961, in New York, was named as such by General Abramov, the highest surviving Cossack elder. He died in New York.

POLISH–GEORGIAN ALLIANCE. Negotiations for this putative military alliance were in process at Tiflis, between the Polish Second Republic (represented by its deputy foreign minister, Tytus Filipowicz) and the Democratic Republic of Georgia, when the 11th Red Army invaded Georgia in February–March 1921 and proclaimed the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic SR (at which point Filipowicz was arrested). It was therefore never ratified, but found some concrete form in the sanctuary offered to émigré Georgian officers in Poland during the interwar years, many of them reaching senior ranks in the Polish Army (only to be captured and killed by Soviet forces in 1939–1940).

POLISH LEGION. Chiefly active in Siberia during the “Russian” Civil Wars, but also a participant in the Soviet–Polish War, this force had its origins in the formation at Samara, from 1 July 1918, of a Polish volunteer unit (formally, the 5th Polish Rifle Division) under Walerian Czuma (1890–1962), a veteran of the Polish Legions (formed by Józef Piłsudski in Austrian Galicia from 1914 to fight against Imperial Russia). The majority of the volunteers were, like Czuma, prisoners of war, but as the legion retreated into Siberia, its ranks were swelled by local Poles, many of them descendants of men exiled following the Polish uprisings against Russia of 1831 and 1863, thereby glossing the legion’s activities with a sense of historic destiny. At its peak, the legion numbered some 16,000 men.

Following the Omsk coup, the Polish Legion, like the Czechoslovak Legion, withdrew from the front and, under the Inter-Allied Railway Agreement, was later assigned to guard the Trans-Siberian Railway (in the Poles’ case, in the Novonikolaevsk region). When the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak collapsed and Omsk fell to the Red Army in November 1919, the Polish Legion joined the scramble eastward along the railway as part of the Great Siberian (Ice) March, but found itself in the rear of the retreating Czechs. On 22 December 1919, Red forces caught up with the Polish Legion and inflicted a heavy defeat on it in a battle at Taiga. The Poles lost many of their trains to the Reds, and many more broke down, lacking spares and engineers, in the Siberian winter.

Consequently, the legion disintegrated: some 1,000 men forced their way eastward, eventually reaching Vladivostok and being shipped back to Poland by the Allies, arriving there in June 1920; some mutinied and joined the Reds; and others (some 5,000) formally surrendered to the Soviet authorities at Krasnoiarsk on 8 January 1920. Those who surrendered were subsequently interned, for the most part, in the primitive Voina Gorodok prisoner of war camp, near Krasnoiarsk, where many soon succumbed to typhus and other diseases. The survivors were eventually repatriated to Poland under Article IX of the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921).

Many of those Russian- or Siberian-born Poles shipped home by the Allies and those repatriated by the Soviet authorities had never before set foot on Polish soil. Those shipped home, under Colonel Kazimierz Rumsza, became the core of the Siberian Brigade of the 5th Polish Army (formed on 12 July 1920) and joined the defense of the Modlin Fortress from 13 August 1920, at the height of the Soviet–Polish War. Following the Battle of Warsaw, the brigade engaged the Soviet 3rd Cavalry Corps of G. D. Gai, then helped pursue Red forces back across the Neman and participated also in the Polish–Lithuanian War, combating Lithuanian forces around Suwałki.

POLISH–LITHUANIAN WAR. This conflict, from 1 September to 7 October 1920, was focused on control of the city of Vil′na (Wilno to the Poles and Vilnius to the Lithuanians), which the new Lithuanian Republic claimed as its capital, but which was mostly populated by Poles and Jews. When Polish forces invaded Soviet territory at the beginning of the Soviet–Polish War, the Soviet government, seeking an ally, hurried to recognize Lithuanian independence and the new state’s claim to Vil′na and other territories to the southeast of the city (including Grodno, Oshmiany, and Lida). This was formalized in the Soviet–Lithuanian Treaty of Moscow (12 July 1920). Forces of the 3rd Cavalry Corps of the Red Army, under G. D. Gai, then occupied Vil′na (14 July 1920) and Grodno (19 July 1920) on Lithuania’s behalf, but they were driven from the region by the Poles on 26 August 1920, two days before the arrival in Vil′na of Lithuanian forces. On 22 September 1920, Polish forces staged a new offensive, capturing Grodno three days later. Polish–Lithuanian fighting was formally brought to an end by a cease-fire, the Suwałki Agreement (7 October 1920), negotiated by the Military Control Commission of the League of Nations. The agreement delineated a demarcation line that would have left most of the disputed region in Lithuanian hands.

However, on 9 October 1920, 24 hours before the agreement was scheduled to come into force, the 1st Lithuanian-Belorussian Division of the Polish Army seized Vil′na, and its commander, Lucjan Żeligowski, declared himself “supreme ruler” of what he termed the Republic of Central Lithuania. Following a number of delays and a disputed election, this new “state,” created by the Żeligowski mutiny, was formally united with Poland (as the Wilno Voivodship) on 22 March 1922. The Allies’ Conference of Ambassadors at Paris accepted the status quo in 1923, but in 1931 the International Court at The Hague determined that Polish actions had been in violation of international law. However, no effective action was taken, and the region was only returned to Lithuania following the division of Poland between Nazi Germany and the USSR in 1939. A common assertion in Western historiography is that had both Soviet Russia and Lithuania not been defeated in the summer and autumn of 1920, then Red Army troops would have remained in the region, and Lithuania would not have had independence between the wars.

polish revolutionary committee. See polrevkom.

Political Administration of the Red Army. See PUR.

POLITICAL CENTER. Formed at an underground meeting of the All-Siberian Congress of Zemstvos and City Dumas at Irkutsk, on 12 November 1919, as the White regime in the region collapsed, this organization united the All-Siberian Regional Committee of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, the Bureau of Siberian Mensheviks, left-leaning proponents of Siberian regionalism, and members of the so-called Zemstvo Politbiuro. Its chairman was F. F. Fedorovich; deputy chairmen were I. I. Akhmatov and B. A. Kosminskii.

The Political Center (Polittsentr) aimed to organize the overthrow of the White authorities in eastern Siberia, to form a provisional revolutionary authority, and to create a buffer state in the region, independent of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and free of White influence and interventionist forces. It was the Political Center that organized and led the Irkutsk uprising against the forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak from 21 to 22 December 1919, winning control of the city and its environs by 4–5 January 1920. It was the Political Center also that initially took custody of Kolchak and those who had accompanied him to Irkutsk, on 15 January 1920. However, as retreating White forces, chased by the 5th Red Army, approached Irkutsk, the Political Center was forced to hand authority (and custody of Kolchak and the remains of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve) over to the Bolsheviks’ Irkutsk Revolutionary Committee on 21 January 1920. Two days later, the Polittstentr was dissolved.

Political commissars. See military commissars.

POLITICAL CONFERENCE. See North-west Government.

POLREVKOM. The acronym by which was known the Polish Revolutionary Committee, the organization established in Soviet Russia that was supposed to help found a Polish Soviet Socialist Republic once the Red Army had won the Soviet–Polish War. It was created in Moscow, on 23 July 1920, under the aegis of the Polish Bureau of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Central Committee, and quickly moved to Smolensk (24 July 1920). Housed on one of the armored trains attached to the Reds’ North-West Front, the committee then followed the Red Army’s advance, moving to Minsk (25 July) and Białystok (30 July 1920), where it established a permanent base at the Pałac Branickich (the so-called Versailles of Poland). When the Red advance was turned before Warsaw and the Poles pushed eastward, on 22 August 1920 the Polrevkom retired to Minsk and was soon afterward dissolved. Its nominal chairman was Julian Marchlewski, but real authority rested with Feliks Dzierżyński.

POLUBOTKIVTSI UPRISING. This rebellion of the men of the 2nd Ukrainian Pavlo Polubotok Cossack Regiment (informally, the Polubotkivtsi) and members of the Ukrainian Pavlo Polubotok Military Club occurred on 4–5 July 1917, in Kiev. The rebels, who numbered 5,000 or more, aimed to force the Ukrainian Central Rada to proclaim the immediate independence of Ukraine. They seized a local arsenal, occupied the fortress and the district headquarters of the army, and arrested the commander and the head of the militia, but were soon suppressed by and disarmed by Russian forces and troops loyal to the Rada that opposed Ukrainian independence. Nevertheless, it can be viewed as one of the opening salvos in the Soviet–Ukrainian War and the “Russian” Civil Wars in general. The rebel leaders were interned and, on 14 July, the remainder of the regiment was sent to the front. (Pavlo Polubotok was a Cossack political and military leader and acting Hetman of left-bank Ukraine between 1722 and 1724. He died in the Peter and Paul Fortress prison after having been imprisoned by Peter the Great. Ukrainian nationalists considered him a martyr and a hero of the Ukrainian struggle for independence.)

POLUPANOV, ANDREI VASIL′EVICH (14 September 1888–5 December 1956). The Soviet commander A. V. Polupanov was of working-class background and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party (Bolsheviks) in 1912. He was mobilized in 1914 and sent into the navy, serving with the Baltic Fleet. Following the October Revolution, he led a contingent of Baltic sailors in the Red advance on Kiev and, when the Ukrainian capital was captured by Soviet forces (26–27 January 1918), served briefly as commandant of the city. He subsequently served as commander of various units of armored trains around Odessa and Melitopol′ and on the Eastern Front. From November 1918, he commanded the 1st Naval Armored Squadron on the Dnepr and was subsequently commander of the Dnepr Military Flotilla (12 March–13 September 1919). From November 1919, Polupanov then served as special commissar with the Volga–Caspian Military Flotilla, before (from February 1920) being placed in command of armored train units around Moscow and on the South-West Front. From July 1920, he commanded naval artillery units around Kakhovka (during efforts to repulse the attempts of General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army to establish a bridgehead on the right bank of the Dnepr) and was subsequently placed in command of all armored units of the 6th Red Army. Following the civil wars, Polupanov had a long career in chiefly economic administration and management before retiring on a pension in 1953. After his death in 1956, streets in both Kiev and Evpatoria were renamed in his honor.

POOLE, FREDERICK CUTHBERT (3 August 1869–20 December 1936). Captain (1899), lieutenant colonel (June 1915), brevet colonel (June 1917), colonel (June 1919). The British commander of Allied forces in North Russia from 24 May to 14 October 1918, Frederick Poole KBE, the son of a Durham clergyman, graduated from the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and joined the Royal Artillery in 1889. After serving with distinction in India, South Africa, and Somaliland, he retired in 1914, but was recalled to the army during the First World War and in 1917 was made chief of the British Military Mission to the Russian Army. Having long advocated Allied intervention in Russia, and having been placed in command of British forces at Murmansk, he was an obvious choice to head Allied forces in the North. In that role, Poole hatched an ambitious plan to invade European Russia and overthrow the Soviet government. On 2 August 1918, as the first stage in that plan, he landed troops at Arkhangel′sk before pressing south along the railway toward Vologda and southeast along the Northern Dvina.

Poole clearly sympathized more with the White officers gathering at Arkhangel′sk than he did with the socialist politicians of the Supreme Administration of the Northern Region, and he did little to discourage the plots against the regime of N. V. Chaikovskii that culminated in the Chaplin coup of 5 September 1918. He was subsequently recalled to London and replaced by his more tactful chief of staff, General W. E. Ironside. Poole then served briefly as British liaison officer to the Volunteer Army of General A. I. Denikin, at Ekaterinodar, but was recalled from that assignment also, in early 1919. He retired in 1920 and went on to make several unsuccessful attempts to win a seat as an MP.

POPOV, DMITRII IVANOVICH (1892–May 1921). The revolutionary sailor, one-time member of the Cheka, mainstay of the Left-SR Uprising, and supporter of Nestor Makhno, Dmitrii Popov enjoyed one of the most colorful of civil-war careers. He was born into a peasant family in Klinsk uezd, Moscow guberniia, left school at the age of 14, and worked in various Moscow factories before being mobilized into the Baltic Fleet in 1914. After flirting with anarchism, he joined the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries in 1917 and participated in the October Revolution in Petrograd, as a member of VTsIK. He then served with the Red Soviet Finland Detachment of the Finnish Red Guards during the Finnish Civil War, before that unit was transferred to Moscow in March 1918, and then (on 8 April 1918) was put at the disposal of the Cheka. Popov was immediately made chief of staff of the military forces of the Cheka (the embryo of VOKhR) and, from April to July 1918, was a member of the Cheka collegium. Having become disillusioned with Bolshevik authoritarianism and as an opponent of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), he used his authority to prepare forces and supplies for the forthcoming uprising being planned by the Left-SR Central Committee. During the uprising, Popov’s headquarters at Kazarmennyi Lane in Moscow provided shelter for the wounded I. G. Bliumkin after he assassinated the German ambassador, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, and was the scene of the arrest of Feliks Dzierżyński by the rebels. Popov’s men were also dispatched around the city in an attempt to seize strategic points. When the uprising was crushed, Popov went into hiding. On 27 November 1918, he was declared to be an outlaw on Soviet territory by the revolutionary tribunal of VTsIK and was sentenced to death in absentia.

To escape arrest, Popov moved to Khar′kov in December 1918, engaging in underground work with other Left-SRs who aimed at the overthrow of the Ukrainian National Republic. At one point, under the false name of Kormilitsyn, he joined the 11th Ukrainian Soviet Regiment and worked with its assistant commander, Iu. V. Sablin, who had also been involved in the July 1918 uprising in Moscow (but was subsequently pardoned). Popov then moved to Kiev and then, in August 1919 (when Kiev was captured by the Whites), to Novomoskovskii uezd (in Ekaterinoslav guberniia), where he formed a detachment of partisans that in November 1919 united with the Makhnovists. With the latter, he commanded, in succession, the 2nd Sulinsk, 24th Ternovsk, and 3rd Ekaterinoslav regiments of the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine in early 1920, before succumbing to typhus. After recovering, he was assigned to propaganda work.

Now calling himself an “anarchist-communist,” in late May 1920 Popov was elected to the Insurgent Revolutionary Council of Ukraine (Makhno’s staff), and from June 1920 was its secretary. In that capacity, he negotiated and (on 10 October 1920) signed (at Khar′kov) the agreement between the Makhnovists and Soviet forces for joint action against the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel. Popov was still at Khar′kov when the Soviet government decided to liquidate the Makhnovists, and he and his retinue were arrested by the Cheka on 26 November 1920. He was subsequently sent to Moscow, where he was executed.

Popov, Petr Kharitonovich (10 January 1867–6 October 1960). Major general (6 April 1914), lieutenant general (5 May 1918), general of cavalry (12 February 1919). One of the leaders of the Don Cossacks during the civil wars and in emigration, P. Kh. Popov was born at Migulinsk stanitsa, in the Don territory, and was a graduate of the Novocherkassk Cossack Cavalry Officer School (1891) and the Academy of the General Staff (1899). After a number of staff postings, chiefly with the Moscow Military District, his major activity was as head of the Novocherkassk Cavalry School (January 1910–January 1918).

On 30 January 1918, Popov was elected campaign ataman (Pokhodnyi ataman) of the Don Cossack Host on the recommendation of the new Host ataman, General A. M. Nazarov, and soon thereafter led his Cossacks out of Novocherkassk, as the Bolsheviks approached, and into the Sal′sk Steppe (the “Steppe March,” 12 February–April 1918). He refused to unite with the Volunteer Army in its First Kuban (Ice) March, preferring to remain in the Don territory around Velikokniazhesk stanitsa, from where he took an active part in preparing and then leading the rising of the Don Cossacks against Soviet rule in March–April 1918. On 23 April 1918, his forces, in union with a contingent of Volunteers that had recently arrived on the Don from Jassy (under the command of General M. G. Drozdovskii), recaptured Novocherkassk, the Cossack capital. Popov was then placed in command of the Don Army (15 April–6 June 1918). However, after the election of General P. N. Krasnov as ataman of the Don Cossack Host (3 May 1918), Popov was replaced as army commander by General S. V. Denisov and was ordered to proceed to Constantinople as Krasnov’s “ambassador” to Turkey. He refused this commission, which was clearly designed to remove him from any hope of influencing the Cossacks, and went into retirement.

When Krasnov was replaced as Host ataman by General A. P. Bogaevskii, Popov was recalled to become chairman of the government of the Don Republic and minister of foreign Affairs (7 February–19 October 1919). (He was also elected campaign ataman for life by the Don Krug on 12 February 1919.) He then joined the suite of Bogaevskii (November 1919–March 1920) and was evacuated with him to Crimea, as the Don and the Kuban fell to the Bolsheviks in early 1920, but received no active posting in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, being placed instead on the reserve list (April–November 1920).

In emigration, Popov settled first in Bulgaria (from 1920), where he helped found the first émigré Cossack stanitsa near Gabrovo, before moving on to work as a car mechanic in France (from 1924) and as a cook in the United States (from 1928). In 1938, he moved again, to Czechoslovakia, after having been elected Host ataman of the Don Cossacks in exile, but the result was disputed by the incumbent, General Count M. N. Grabbe. Popov was arrested by the German authorities during the Second World War for refusing to assist them in creating Cossack units to fight against the USSR, but was soon released on condition that he refrain from all public activities. In 1946, Popov moved back to the United States, where he was twice more elected ataman of the Don Cossack Host, although his efforts to form a viable Don government-in-exile came to naught. He died in New York and is buried in the St. Vladimir Russian cemetery at Jackson, New Jersey.

POPULAR SOCIALISTS, PARTY OF. This political party, formally the Laborite People’s-Socialist Party (and sometimes known by its Russian acronym, Enesy), was formed in September 1906 by those members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries who rejected terrorism as a legitimate means of political struggle but who otherwise chiefly adhered to its program. Its membership, which was never large (estimated at 2,000 in 56 local branches in 1907), consisted overwhelmingly of members of the urban intelligentsia and zemstvo activists, and its leaders tended to be academics and publicists. The party, which had been represented by 16 deputies in the Second State Duma, virtually ceased to operate from 1907 onward, but revived following the February Revolution, and some of its members—notably N. V. Chaikovskii, S. P. Mel′gunov, V. A. Miakotin, and A. V. Peshekhonov—played a central role in the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918, as founders and members of the Union of Regeneration and other organizations. When the Democratic Counter-Revolution floundered in the autumn of 1918, the party ceased to exist. Many of its leading members who had remained in Soviet Russia were forcibly exiled in 1922 aboard the philosophers’ ships.

POSKA, JAAN (24 January 1866–7 March 1920). One of the most prominent nationalist leaders during the Estonian War of Independence, Jaan Poska was born at Laiusevälja, Laiuse volost′, and was a graduate of the Riga Seminary and the Law Faculty of Dorpat (now Tartu) University (1890). Prior to the First World War, he worked as a lawyer, and from 1904 he served on the Revel City Duma (as its chairman from 1905). From 1913 to 1917, he was mayor of Revel. Following the February Revolution, he was named commissar of Estland guberniia by the Russian Provisional Government, and in November 1917, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly.

On 24 February 1918, Poska was made minister of foreign affairs of the newly proclaimed independent government of Estonia, and he subsequently served as deputy prime minister and minister of justice in that regime. From 3 January 1919, during the Estonian War of Independence, he represented Estonia at the Paris Peace Conference, and following his return from France was placed at the head of the Estonian delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Tartu (2 February 1920) with Soviet Russia. He died shortly after the peace was signed. A street in Tallinn now bears his name.

POTANIN, GRIGORII NIKOLAEVICH (21 September 1835–6/30 June 1920). Born near Pavlodar, in northern Kazakhstan, G. N. Potanin, who was educated at the Corps of Pages at Omsk, was to become a highly respected researcher and writer on the history, geography, and ethnography of Siberia and Central Asia, as well as, during the civil-war period, the doyen of Siberian regionalism. He was expelled from St. Petersburg University in 1861, in the aftermath of student demonstrations against the terms of the emancipation of the serfs, and was subsequently banished to Siberia, where he was imprisoned from 1865 to 1874 for participation in the Society for an Independent Siberia, then later sentenced to hard labor and penal exile. In 1876–1877 and from 1884 to 1886, he led scientific expeditions through Mongolia, China, and Tibet; having published his findings, he was subsequently one of the founders of the University of Tomsk. Nevertheless, he was again arrested in 1905 for political crimes.

Despite this radical past, by the time of the civil wars Potanin’s politics had moved to the right, not least as a consequence of the domination of newly formed Siberian institutions, such as the Siberian Regional Duma, by all-Russian parties, especially the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries. Consequently, in 1918 he distanced himself from the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia (e.g., refusing to participate in the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia) and became, paradoxically, a supporter of the Whites, although he was by this time too old and ill for Admiral A. V. Kolchak and his followers to make much use of this propaganda coup.

When, in the winter of 1919–1920, the White regime in Siberia collapsed and Kolchak’s forces retreated to the Far East, Potanin remained at Tomsk, where he soon thereafter died and was buried. In 1956, his remains were reinterred in a wooded grove in the grounds of Tomsk State University. Potanin is commemorated by a mountain peak named in his honor in the Altai range, the names of numerous streets in Siberian cities (notably the Potaninskaia in central Novosibirsk), and a statue at Tomsk. The 9915 Potanin asteroid also bears his name, as does a species of rose.

POTAPOV, NIKOLAI MIKHAILOVICH (2 March 1871–1946). Colonel (6 December 1906), major general (2 February 1912), lieutenant general (1917), kombrig (21 July 1936). One of the most senior of the military specialists employed by the Red Army, N. M. Potapov, who was the son of a tsarist bureaucrat, was a graduate of the Moscow Cadet Corps (1888), the Mikhail Artillery School (1891), and the Academy of the General Staff (1897). His career in the Russian Army was chiefly devoted to military intelligence, working with Russian missions in Austria (from 18 March 1901) and Montenegro (from 10 June 1903). He returned to Russia in 1916 and was named as head of the evacuation directorate of the General Staff (from 10 August 1916). A convinced supporter of the February Revolution, he was made quartermaster general of the General Staff on 13 April 1917.

Following the October Revolution, Potapov volunteered his services to Sovnarkom; in fact, he had been collaborating with the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b) in Petrograd since July 1917. On 23 November 1917, he was named chief of the General Staff and director of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs. From June to September 1918, he was also a member of the Supreme Military Council, and from September 1918 served on the Military-Legislative Council of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (from 4 June 1919, as its chairman). He then served as assistant chief inspector of Vsevobuch (from 19 November 1921) and then assistant head of Vsevobuch (from 1 July 1922). In the early 1920s, he worked with the Cheka on Operation “Trust” and also taught at the Red Military Academy. Potapov retired in 1938 and died in Moscow. He is buried in the city’s Novodevich′e cemetery.

Poti, TREATY OF (28 May 1918). This provisional agreement was signed by representatives of the German Empire (General Otto von Lossow of the German Caucasus Mission) and the Democratic Republic of Georgia (Noe Ramishvili and Akaki Chkhenkeli) two days after the declaration of Georgian independence. Under the terms of the treaty, Georgia received the diplomatic recognition of Germany and the promise of German protection, while Germany was to have free use of Georgian railways and ports and was to occupy strategic points in the country, the German Mark was to circulate freely within Georgia as a unit of currency, and a joint German–Georgian mining company was to be established. In a secret supplementary protocol, von Lossow agreed to help secure further international recognition of Georgia.

The Georgians saw the agreement as a means of staving off invasion by the Ottoman Empire (which had been waging war against the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic); the Germans hoped to secure control of oil production on the Caspian and the pipeline to Batumi on the Black Sea. On 8 June 1918, 3,000 German troops under General Friederich von Kressenshtein landed at Poti, while a Georgian delegation under Chkhenkeli proceeded to Berlin to negotiate the final treaty. However, complications arose over Georgia’s refusal to actively ally itself with the Central Powers in the First World War, and no final agreement was signed before the collapse of Germany in November 1918. Nevertheless, the Georgian republic was viewed with suspicion by the Allies for its pro-German orientation in 1917 (as well as for its socialist character).

PRAVDA, SEMEN (“BATKO”) (1877–13 November 1921). The Makhnovist commander Semen Pravda (known to his followers, as was Nestor Makhno, as “Batko,” meaning “Little Father”) was born into a family of farm laborers at Liubimovka, Aleksandrovsk uezd. He began associating with anarchist groups around 1904 and took part in terrorist attacks on the tsarist police, but in 1905 lost both his legs in an accident while working as a coupler at Gaichur station. Thereafter, in the absence of artificial limbs, he walked on his stumps, earning a living as an accordion player.

In 1918, Pravda was active as an organizer of peasant partisan forces in opposition to the requisitioning policies of P. P. Skoropadskii’s Ukrainian State and the forces of the Austro-German intervention. He personally participated in the fighting as a machine gunner on a tachanka. His group formally allied with the Makhnovists following a congress of the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine at Pologi on 3 January 1919. By late 1919, having helped organize a number of new units for the insurgents, he was commanding at regimental level in the rebel forces. From December 1920 to March 1921, he was in charge of hospital and sanitation units of the Makhnovists, before being made commandant of their main staff headquarters. When Nestor Makhno fled across the border into Romania in August 1921, Pravda continued the guerrilla struggle against the Red Army, but three months later was killed (alongside his brother Grishka) while fighting at Turkenovka, near Aleksandrovsk. (According to some sources, true to an earlier vow, he shot himself before he could be captured by the enemy.)

Although he was much loved by his men, Pravda was detested by the relatively well-to-do Mennonite community of southern Ukraine (who were much persecuted by the Makhnovists), a fact confirmed by his appearance as an unsavory “good for nothing louse” in the novel The Rüsslander (2001) by the Canadian author Sandra Birdsell, who is of Mennonite heritage.

PREOBRAZHENSKII, PAVEL IVANOVICH (1 January 1874–10 September 1944). Born into the family of a priest in Novgorod guberniia, the White politician P. I. Preobrazhenskii entered the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University in 1894, but the following year transferred to the St. Petersburg Mining Institute to study engineering (graduating in 1900). He worked in the Lena goldfields and in Transbaikalia before the revolution, as well as being elected to the State Duma as a Trudovik (“Laborite”) representative. During the First World War, he worked on the Eastern Front with a sanitary unit funded by Zemgor.

In 1917, Preobrazhenskii served as deputy minister of education in the Russian Provisional Government. Having made his way east, during the period of the Democratic Counter-Revolution he occupied that same post in the Provisional Siberian Government (from 31 June 1918), in the cabinet of the Ufa Directory (from 4 November 1918), and in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (from 18 November 1918). He subsequently resigned, in protest at the White military’s interference with his work, before being elevated, on 6 May 1919, to the post of minister of education in Kolchak’s government, following the resignation of V. V. Sapozhnikov. In December 1919, he was arrested by the forces of the Political Center at Irkutsk, during the anti-Kolchak uprising in that city, and consequently, in January 1920, fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks.

Preobrazhenskii was among those ministers of the Kolchak regime tried by a revolutionary tribunal at Omsk in May 1920, but received only a short prison sentence. (The novelist Maxim Gorky was among those who pleaded for clemency to be shown to him, writing to V. I. Lenin in person for that purpose.) He was released in December 1920 and was subsequently employed as a researcher in a variety of mining enterprises in the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East, as well as lecturing at Perm′ University (receiving his doctorate there in 1935) and authoring more than 50 scientific works. His reputation as one of the most senior geologists in the USSR was cemented in 1943, when he was made deputy director of the State Institute of Mining and Chemical Materials in Moscow. The mineral preobrazhenskite was named in his honor, as was a street in the town of Berezniki, Perm′ guberniia.

Primakov, Vitalii Markovich (18 December 1897–12 June 1937). Komkor (1935). The noted Red Army commander, who was the son of a teacher, was born in the small town of Semenovka, Chernigov guberniia. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1914 and soon gravitated toward the Bolsheviks, but in that same year was exiled to eastern Siberia for the dissemination of antiwar propaganda among troops at Chernigov. Freed by the February Revolution, he returned to Ukraine and was elected to the party’s Kiev committee. He participated in the “storming” of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution and subsequently led units of Red Guards at Pulkovo and Gatchina during the crushing of the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising.

In January 1918, Primakov organized the 1st Regiment of Red Cossacks and during the civil wars rose to the command of the 1st Mounted Corps of Red Cossacks in the Red Army (from October 1920) and won the Order of the Red Banner on two (according to some sources, three) occasions. Following the civil wars, he graduated from the Higher Military Academy (1923) and the Higher Cavalry School (1925), before serving as a military attaché with Soviet missions in China, Afghanistan, and Japan (1925–1930). Returning to regular Red Army service, he rose to the post of deputy commander of the North Caucasus (1933–1935) and then Leningrad (1935–1936) Military Districts. He was arrested on 14 August 1936 (as part of the investigation into “The Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization”). Along with M. N. Tukhachevskii, I. E. Iakir, I. P. Uborovich, and other senior Soviet commanders of the civil-war era, Primakov was found guilty of espionage and other crimes by a special sitting of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on 11 June 1937 and was sentenced to death. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 31 January 1957.

Prinkipo proposal. This term denotes the proposal issued by Allied leaders at the Paris Peace Conference, following a vote on 21 January 1919, in favor of sponsoring negotiations on “conditions for a general settlement” in Russia. A radio broadcast from the Eiffel Tower invited representatives of every “organized group that is now exercising political authority or military control anywhere in Siberia, or within the boundaries of European Russia as they stood before the war just concluded” to attend a peace conference, to be held from 15 February 1919 on the Prinkipo (“Princes”) Islands, off Constantinople. The chief advocates of the proposal were Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George, although it had originally been inspired by the Canadian prime minister, Robert Borden. The venue in Turkey was chosen partly for its convenience, but also because the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, was opposed to the proposal: he had agreed to it being made only for the sake of avoiding disunity, but refused to have a Soviet delegation visit Paris.

The Soviet government accepted the invitation on 4 February 1919, and most leaders of territories claiming independence from Russia did likewise, but the White leaders, General A. I. Denikin and Admiral A. V. Kolchak, refused to countenance the idea, arguing that to do so would lend legitimacy to the rule of the Bolsheviks. In this they were encouraged by the French government; the British secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill, also advised the Whites to refuse. Consequently, the date set for the conference passed, and the proposal lapsed.

PRISOVSKII, KONSTANTIN ADAMOVICH (1878–15 March 1966). Colonel (16 August 1915), major general (16 September 1917), ensign general (Ukrainian Army, 1918). The Ukrainian commander Konstantin Prisovskii was born at Kiev and was a graduate of the Chugunsk Military School (1901). He served in the 130th Kherson Infantry Regiment and, during the First World War, with the 278th Infantry regiment, rising to its command before being transferred to the command of the 10th Turkestan Rifle Division (from 28 June 1916). In late 1917, as the Russian Army collapsed, he moved to Kiev and became head of its military school.

In the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War, Prisovskii commanded an officers’ detachment, and from 9 February 1918, was commander of the Independent Zaporozhian Detachment (later Brigade), consisting of all forces that had retreated from Kiev as Red forces captured the city. He was thus effectively the first commander of the Ukrainian Army. In the wake of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), after Kiev had been taken back from the Bolsheviks, he was named military governor of Kiev by the government of the Ukrainian National Republic. In November 1918, he organized the Zaporozhian Detachment to oppose the forces of the Ukrainian National Republic Directory, but upon deployment at the front it immediately deserted. Prisovskii then moved to South Russia in January 1919 to join the Armed Forces of South Russia, serving as head of the Constantine Military School, which had relocated from Kiev to Crimea (April 1919–October 1920). He was evacuated from Crimea in November 1920, and in emigration lived in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and later France. He died at Mougins in the French Alps.

PRODARMIIA. See FOOD ARMY.

PRODNALOG. Literally, the “Food Tax” but often translated as the “Tax in Kind,” this practice was one of the central planks of the New Economic Policy, introduced in Soviet Russia from 21 March 1921. It replaced the prodrazverstka (“food requisitioning”) that had been a feature of War Communism since the establishment of the “Food Dictatorship” in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in May 1918. Under the system of prodnalog, food and other agricultural products were no longer taken indiscriminately from the peasantry; rather, target quotas were calculated on a local basis (adjusted to take account of the wealth of individual families) for the amount of grain and so forth that had to be delivered to the state. After the quota had been met, peasants were free to use what remained in their own hands as they desired: they could consume it; trade it on the open market; or engage in barter with state agencies delivering manufactured goods to the countryside. Moreover, the quotas demanded under prodnalog were also significantly lower than the amounts requisitioned under the previous system. (According to some estimates, for example, 3,900,000 tons of cereals were demanded from the peasantry in 1921–1922, compared to the 5,900,000 tons that had been taken in 1920–1921.)

Inequities continued to exist, and errors were made, but on the whole this was a progressive tax system, and this major change in policy certainly contributed to a decrease in the number of peasants willing to join armed revolts against the Soviet regime, as battles against the Whites wound down, and to the Red Army’s ability to control those, like the Tambov Rebellion, that were already under way. It also revived trade and encouraged peasants to grow more food; by the mid-1920s, agriculture—a sector in which production had declined dramatically during the First World War and the civil-war years—was moving back toward pre-1914 levels of production. On 10 May 1923, following a resolution at the 12th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), VTsIK decreed that prodnalog was to be replaced by a universal, direct agricultural tax to be collected in monetary form from 1924.

Prodrazverstka. “Food apportionment” (but usually translated as “food requisitioning”). This was the term generally applied to the policy for extracting food, especially grain, from the countryside from May 1918 until the introduction of the New Economic Policy (and prodnalog, the “food tax”) in March 1921. The system, which was the central plank of War Communism, was at first introduced in a piecemeal fashion, but was declared universal in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic by a Sovnarkom decree of 11 January 1919, and was subsequently decreed also in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Socialist Soviet Republic of Belarussia. Initially, prodrazverstka applied only to the collection of grain, but by late 1919 it had come to include potatoes and meat; by the end of 1920, it included almost every kind of agricultural product.

The compulsory requisitioning of food by agents of the “Food Dictatorship” (the Food Army and other organs of the Soviet state) was officially only to be applied to surplus stocks, and village and even family norms were supposed to have been calculated regarding all foodstuffs. “Apportionment” was felt to be necessary, as Soviet Russia lost the vast majority of its food-producing regions (notably Ukraine, the Kuban, the Volga, and Western Siberia) in the spring and summer of 1918, as a consequence of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, and the outbreak of the Democratic Counter-Revolution. In reality, during the emergency of the civil wars, food was taken from stocks peasants needed to feed their families and their livestock and as seed grain for the following year. If payment was offered, it rarely came close to legal norms (let alone market prices); in fact, the policy of prodrazverstka was used by the Soviet regime as an instrument of class warfare, setting supposedly “poor peasants” (organized in kombedy) and agricultural workers against supposedly “rich peasants” (kulaks).

According to official Soviet statistics, the authorities collected 1,770,000 metric tons of grain by prodrazverstka in 1918–1919, 3,480,000 metric tons in 1919–1920, and 6,010,000 metric tons in 1920–1921. However, the policy was bitterly resisted by most villages, which turned against the regime that had granted them land (through the Decree on Land) and against urban Russia in general. The sown acreage was greatly reduced (as it was also on White territory, where similar tactics of terror were employed to procure food); peasants grew only as much as they needed to survive and could safely conceal; and resentment of the Soviet authorities gradually blossomed into major armed revolts (such as the Chapan War, the Tambov Rebellion, the Pitchfork Uprising, and the West Siberian Uprising). The policy also led to terrible shortages of food in Soviet cities and contributed to the famine that haunted much of the country from 1920 to 1922.

PROFINTERN. The Russian acronym by which the Red International of Labor Unions (Krasnyi internatsional profsoiuzov) is generally known. The formation of this organization was proposed by G. E. Zinov′ev in March 1920, as a counterweight to the social-democrat–dominated International Federation of Trade Unions, but its first congress met only on 3 July 1921, in Moscow, when Solomon Lozovskii (who also authored the Profintern’s “Program of Action”) was elected as general secretary by 342 delegates claiming to represent 42 countries. Like the Komintern, however, the national credentials of these representatives were open to doubt, and the organization was dominated from the beginning by the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), notwithstanding its establishment of overseas offices in Berlin (the Central European Bureau), Paris (the Latin Bureau), London (the British Bureau), and Sofia (the Balkan Bureau), as well as, later, affiliate organs in North and South America.

PROKOPOVICH, V′IACHESLAV PROKOPOVICH (1881–1942). The Ukrainian politician and historian V′iacheslav Prokopovich joined the Ukrainian Democratic-Radical Party before the First World War, but was later a member of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Federalists and, in 1917, was elected to the Ukrainian Central Rada. From January to April 1918, he served as minister of education in the Council of People’s Ministers of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), in the cabinet of Vselvolod Holubovych, and from 26 May to 14 October 1920 was premier of the UNR. When the government of the UNR went into exile in 1921, Prokopovych served further periods as premier (March–August 1921, and May 1926–October 1939), living in emigration in Warsaw, Prague, and Paris. He was also editor of the Ukrainian émigré journal Tryzub (“Trident”). He died at Bessancourt, north of Paris, where he was buried.

PROLETKUL′T. This acronym denotes the “Proletarian Cultural-Educational Association” that was initiated in Petrograd just prior to the October Revolution of 1917. Originally a loose, local coalition of workers’ clubs and societies, factory theaters, and so forth, that attended to the cultural needs of the industrial working class, in 1918 Proletkul′t became a national movement that aimed to define and form a distinct proletarian culture to inspire and guide the revolution. It held its First All-Russian Conference in Moscow, from 15 to 20 September 1918. Its foremost theorist was A. A. Bogdanov, who contended that a proletarian revolution could not succeed without the development of proletarian culture and a proletarian intelligentsia to lead it.

Although it won the support of A. V. Lunacharskii and the influential trade unionist and poet A. K. Gastev, this insistence on proletarian autonomy and on the independence of Proletkul′t from the cultural agencies of the Soviet government and the Rusian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) placed Bogdanov and Proletkul′t in conflict with V. I. Lenin, L. D. Trotsky, and other leading Bolsheviks, who argued that the proletariat should aspire to inherit the highest technical, artistic, and scientific achievements of the bourgeoisie, as these were universal to all humanity. Nevertheless, at the peak of its influence, in 1920, the organization claimed to unite some 500,000 members in more than 300 regional groups, and in July–August of that year, it inaugurated an International Bureau (the Kul′tintern), attached to the Komintern, to coordinate activities in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Great Britain.

During the civil-war years, Proletkul′t’s major initiatives included the establishment of adult education centers, libraries, and “people’s universities”; the staging of plays and concerts; and the offering of courses in music, painting, mathematics, the natural sciences, and history. In this, the movement attracted the support of many established artists and writers (notably Andrei Belyi and Sergei Eisenstein). However, on 1 December 1920, Lenin published a pamphlet called On Proletarian Culture, which sternly condemned the organization and its independence, arguing that there could be no such thing as a unique proletarian culture. Thereafter, the organization was subsumed by the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment. Under its auspices, Proletkul′t rapidly withered, and it had become virtually extinct long before it was officially closed down in April 1932.

Propaganda. See Agitprop.

Provisional All-Russian Government. See OMSK GOVERNMENT.

PROVISIONAL FERGHANA GOVERNMENT. See FERGHANA, PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF.

Provisional government. See provisional government, russian.

Provisional Government of Arkhangelian Karelia. See White Sea Karelia, Provisional Government of.

PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF AUTONOMOUS SIBERIA. See SIBERIA, PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF AUTONOMOUS.

Provisional Government of Autonomous Turkestan. See KOKAND (QUQON) AUTONOMY.

PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE AMUR REGION. See AMUR REGION, PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE.

PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE MARITIME REGION ZEMSTVO BOARD (THE ZEMSTVO BOARD OF VLADIVOSTOK). See MARITIME REGION ZEMSTVO BOARD (THE ZEMSTVO BOARD OF VLADIVOSTOK), PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE.

Provisional Government of the Northern Region. See Northern Region, Provisional Government of the.

PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF WHITE SEA KARELIA. See WHITE SEA KARELIA, PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF.

Provisional Government, russian. The Russian Provisional Government was the body that ruled the former Russian Empire—or at least aspired to rule it—from the collapse of tsarism during the February Revolution until 25 October 1917, when it was toppled by the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution. The government’s first public pronouncement indicated that it was committed to the rule of law, democracy, freedom of conscience and religion, and the lifting of restrictions upon the freedoms of the non-Russian peoples of the old empire, and that it would rule only until the summoning of a Constituent Assembly that would decide upon the future form of government in Russia, although it did grant itself legislative powers. From the outset, however, the legitimacy of the Provisional Government was open to question: Did it draw its authority from the State Duma (of which its first ministers had been elected members) or from the revolution? Moreover, its authority was constantly challenged by the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet (and later VTsIK), and its provisionality was compromised when, on 14 September 1917, on the initiative of Prime Minister A. F. Kerensky, the government declared Russia to be a republic. Nevertheless, it rapidly achieved recognition by the United States (22 March 1917) and the Allied powers, France, Great Britain, and Italy (24 March 1917), who were relieved that their own struggle for the victory of “democracy” in the First World War was no longer tainted by their association with the tsarist autocracy, and its creation was almost universally welcomed within Russia. However, it disappointed all hopes placed in it.

In its initial manifestation, the government was dominated by Kadets (particularly, the minister of foreign affairs, P. N. Miliukov) and those close to them (such as the prime minister, Prince G. E. L′vov, and the Octobrist A. I. Guchkov, who was minister of war), although Kerensky (minister of justice), the lone socialist minister, soon emerged as the most recognizable and popular figure. That cabinet collapsed, though, when, on 18 May 1917, Miliukov issued a statement to the Allies (the “Miliukov Note”) that seemed to indicate the government’s commitment to the aggressive war aims of the imperial government, which contradicted the Petrograd Soviet’s commitment to achieving “a peace without annexations or indemnities.” In the wake of the resulting mass street demonstrations (the “April Days”), Miliukov and Guchkov were forced to resign from the cabinet. On 5 May 1917, a new cabinet was formed (the First Coalition), which promoted Kerensky to the key post of minister of war and drew other prominent socialists into the government, such as Irakli Tsereteli (minister of post and telegraph) and V. M. Chernov (minister of agriculture). The socialists’ attempts to push through radical social reforms, however, alarmed the remaining Kadets, who walked out of the coalition on 2 July 1917, in protest at the government’s promise to grant broad autonomy to Ukraine. At the same time, left-wing socialists were alarmed by the government’s failure to promote a peace policy. Indeed, rather than pursue peace, the government committed itself to a renewed military offensive against the Central Powers. This was launched on 18 June 1917 and, after initial successes, turned into a disaster.

Against this background, mass street demonstrations led by the Bolsheviks (who remained outside the coalition) mutated into a direct challenge to the authority of the Provisional Government during the July Days and the spread of demands for “All Power to the Soviets!” By (as we now know, falsely) blackening the name of the Bolsheviks as “German agents,” the government survived, with L′vov resigning as prime minister to be replaced on 8 July 1917 by Kerensky (who also retained his war portfolio). However, not until 24 July 1917 could a new coalition (the Second Coalition) be constructed, and then only at a price: the Kadets joined only once Kerensky had agreed to promote the authoritarian General L. G. Kornilov to the post of commander in chief of the Russian Army. This success emboldened both Kornilov and the political Right, who sought to force government to stamp down on the Left and then launched a clumsy and abortive coup d’état, the Kornilov affair, with the aim of establishing a military dictatorship. Kerensky’s government survived, but only just (and only by relying for its defense on the Bolshevik-dominated Red Guards), and was still under grave pressure at the front (the Germans took Riga on 18 August 1917 and the following month were threatening Estonia from the sea).

After a brief period, in the wake of the Kornilov affair, when Kerensky was ruling alone and then (from 1 September) as head of a five-man Directorate, on 27 September 1917, a new cabinet (the Third Coalition) was patched together, consisting mostly of socialists drawn from the right wing of their parties, such as S. N. Maslov (minister of agriculture). Kerensky tried to legitimize this gravely unpopular cabinet by summoning a series of ad hoc national assembles (the pre-parliament, the Democratic Conference), but these only served to reveal how deep was the gulf between the Center and the Left in Russian politics, while in the aftermath of the arrest of Kornilov, the Right and the military openly scorned the government. Thus, when the Bolsheviks launched their armed attack on the government on 24–25 October 1917, the Provisional Government was unable to resist. One of its ministers, P. N. Maliantovich, trapped in the Winter Palace as Red Guards approached, was heard to exclaim, “What sort of government is it that cannot summon 400 armed men to defend itself?”

The reasons for the failure of the Provisional Government have been extensively debated. Some blame the government’s naivety and idealism in first dismantling all the institutions of the tsarist regime (especially the police and the system of local governor-generals), which led to uncontrollable disorder. But amid the swell of popular radicalism in 1917, did it have a choice with regard to these hated pillars of the old regime? Others cite the government’s refusal to deal more harshly with its enemies on the Left: If the Bolshevik leaders were traitors, why were they not shot? But could such an act have been defended in an atmosphere in which, it was popularly held, there were “no enemies on the Left”? Others blame the failure to summon the Constituent Assembly and usually indict the Kadets, who dominated its electoral commission, for deliberately filibustering for partisan reasons (they feared that in a popularly elected assembly, their party would never enjoy the degree of influence it had in the Provisional Government). The question is then asked: Why did the moderate socialists kowtow to a party that was so lacking in mass support? But again, the alternative looks equally unattractive: If the socialists had opted to rule alone, would they have long enjoyed the support of the Allied powers (not to mention the leadership of the Russian Army)? And would they not have pushed the liberals back into the ranks of the counterrevolution, as had happened in the 1905 Revolution? Yet others point to the government’s failure to introduce the social reforms for which the mass of the population were clamoring (especially land reform). But how could any government contemplate such an upheaval while the country was at war (and millions of peasants were in the army)? Finally, critics have noted the Provisional Government’s failure to pursue its commitment to a general, negotiated end to the war with any vigor, adding that an end to the war would have facilitated the solution of all the other problems that it faced. However, the success of the government’s peace policy depended far less on the vigor with which the Provisional Government espoused it than on the willingness of the Allies, especially Britain and France, to listen—and in 1917, the Western Allies remained totally committed to their 1914 vow to fight the war to a victorious conclusion. From this perspective, the Provisional Government seems to have been doomed from its inception.

The impact of the failure of the Provisional Government on the subsequent events of the “Russian” Civil Wars has been less discussed, but it was profound. In particular, both the leaders of the White movement and most Kadets (not to mention political movements to the right of the Kadets) blamed the coalition politics of 1917 for all Russia’s ills: the anarchic and “criminal” rule of the Bolsheviks, the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), the disintegration of the Russian Empire, and so forth. Throughout 1918, they excoriated the shameful kerenshchina (“rule of Kerensky”) of 1917 and vowed never to repeat that experience. They sought instead the firm authority (tverdoi vlast′) of military dictatorship. This explains the demise of the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918 and the failure of those organizations that promoted it (Komuch, the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, etc.). It explains also not only the rise of military dictators to the head of the White movement (A. V. Kolchak, A. I. Denikin, N. N. Iudenich, G. K. Miller, etc.), but also the succor offered to these figures, through the Allied intervention, by the Western liberal democracies, whose faith in Russian democrats like Kerensky had been stretched beyond endurance in 1917.

PROVISIONAL MILITARY DICTATORSHIP OF MUGHAN. See MUGHAN, PROVISIONAL MILITARY DICTATORSHIP OF.

Provisional Oblast′ Government of the urals. See urals, Provisional Oblast′ Government of the.

Provisional Priamur (people’s) Government. See maritime zemstvo government.

PROVISIONAL SIBERIAN GOVERNMENT. See siberia, provisional government of.

PROVISIONAL TEREK–DAGHESTAN GOVERNMENT. See TEREK–DAGHESTAN, PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT of.

PROVISIONAL WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ GOVERNMENT OF UKRAINE. See UKRAINE, PROVISIONAL WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ GOVERNMENT OF.

Przheval′skii, Mikhail Alekseevich (5 November 1859–13 December 1934). Colonel (24 March 1896), major general (2 April 1906), general of infantry (19 November 1916). By rank one of the most senior officers in the White movement in South Russia (although he played only a subsidiary role), M. A. Przheval′skii was born into the nobility of Tver′ guberniia and was a graduate of Mikhail Artillery School (1879) and the Academy of the General Staff (1884). He was one of the Russian Army’s experts on Turkey, having begun his military career in the 1880s as a secret agent in Erzurum (and then having worked as secretary at the Russian consulate in that city throughout the 1890s). He also held several senior staff posts with units of the Kuban Cossack Host and the Terek Cossack Host before the First World War. During that war, he commanded the 2nd Turkestan Army Corps (3 February 1915–3 April 1917)—making a major contribution to Russia’s victories over the Ottoman Empire—and the Caucasian Army (3 April 1917–11 September 1917), then became commander in chief of the Caucasian Front (11 September 1917–January 1918). In that last capacity, he participated in the negotiations with Turkey that led to the truce signed at the Armistice of Erzincan on 5 (18) December 1917.

In late 1918, Przheval′skii joined the Volunteer Army, before being placed on the reserve list of the staff of General A. I. Denikin (30 May 1919–March 1920). In emigration, from late 1919, he worked as a watchman in a warehouse in Salonika in 1921, then moved to Yugoslavia, where he was engaged as a supernumerary clerk in the library of the country’s General Staff. In 1926, he was admitted to an old people’s home in Belgrade, where he died eight years later. He is buried in the city’s New Cemetery.

Pskov Volunteer Corps. This anti-Bolshevik formation was created in Pskov, from September 1918 onward, by Captains V. G. von Rozenberg and A. K. Gershel′man (local representatives of the officer organization founded in Petrograd by General N. N. Iudenich). By late November 1918, with the encouragement and assistance of local German forces, it had registered some 4,500 volunteers—about half of them officers of the imperial army (some of them repatriated from German POW camps, the rest consisting of students and other elements)—but was nevertheless forced out of the city by the Red Army, as the Germans withdrew after the armistice of 11 November 1918. Most of the corps then moved onto Estonian territory.

Although the Pskov Corps was now formally subordinated to the Estonian Army, as it was drawn into the Estonian War of Independence, the Estonian authorities regarded it with suspicion bordering on hostility (and rightly so, as most of its members were firmly opposed to Estonian independence). Consequently, the Estonians insisted, on 4 December 1918, that the corps should not exceed a complement of 3,500 men, although by the time of its offensive in May 1919 it probably numbered some 4,500 once again. Its chief components were the 1st Pskov Volunteer Rifle Regiment, the 2nd Ostrovskii Volunteer Rifle Regiment, the 3rd Rezhitsk Volunteer Rifle Corps, and the Independent Detachment of S. N. Bułak-Bałachowicz (which had deserted from the Red Army, near Luga, in November 1918), each of which mustered some 800 men. On 1 June 1919, the Pskov Rifle Corps was named an independent corps of the Whites’ Northern Army. On 19 June 1919, the corps left the Estonian Army and, from 1 July 1919, formed the basis of the North-West Army, as it launched the first of its two failed offensives against Petrograd.

Commanders of the Pskov Volunteer Corps were General A. E. Vandam (21 October–22 November 1918); Colonel G. G. von Nef (22 November–December 1918); Colonel A. I. Bibikov (acting, December 1918); Colonel V. V. von Val′ (17 December 1918–January 1919); Colonel A. F. Dzerozhinskii (January–May 1919); and Major General A. P. Rodzianko (from 1 June 1919).

PUGACHEV, SEMEN ANDREEVICH (13 February 1889–23 March 1943). Sublieutenant (15 June 1908), staff captain (14 June 1916), captain (15 August 1916), komkor (1935). The Soviet commander S. A. Pugachev was born at Riazan′, the son of a teacher, and was a graduate of the Alexander Military School in Moscow (1908) and the Academy of the General Staff (1914). During the First World War, he served as a captain with the 6th Siberian Corps (from 22 March 1915) and latterly with the operational directorate of the Northern Front (from 22 July 1917).

In April 1918, Pugachev volunteered for service in the Red Army and thereafter became one of its most effective military specialists. During the civil wars, he served in numerous responsible positions: as a member of the administrative department of the staff of the Urals Military District (May 1918–January 1919); as head of the operational section of the staff of the 2nd Red Army on the Eastern Front (from January 1919); as chief of the operational directorate of the Special Group of Forces on the Southern Front (from September 1919); as chief of the operational directorate of the South-East Front (from October 1919); and as chief of the operational directorate of (from January 1920) and then (from March–May 1921) chief of staff of the Caucasian Front. In the last of these capacities, he played a key role in the defeat of the Armed Forces of South Russia of General A. I. Denikin. Subsequently (from 10 June 1921 to 12 July 1923, and from April 1924 to February 1925), he was commander of the Independent Caucasus Army (Red Banner Caucasian Army), during the latter of those appointments being responsible for the suppression of the August Uprising in Georgia, and at the same time (from July 1922) was plenipotentiary of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs to the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. From 12 August 1923 to 30 April 1924, he was commander of the Turkestan Front, masterminding Red offensives against the Basmachi.