Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

From 1925 to June 1929, Pugachev was deputy chief of staff of the Red Army, with responsibility for implementing the military reforms introduced by M. V. Frunze. In 1927, he was sent to Switzerland with the Soviet delegation to the Disarmament Conference at Geneva, and from 1928 to 1930 he served as chief of staff of the Ukrainian and then Central Asian Military Districts. He was arrested during Operation “Spring” on 28 February 1931, but was soon freed (apparently on the direct orders of J. V. Stalin). From 1932, he headed the Military Transportation Academy of the Red Army. He joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1934, skipping the candidate stage, but was arrested on 10 October 1938 and on 26 October 1939 was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment as a spy. Pugachev died in prison and was posthumously rehabilitated on 30 June 1956.

PUR. This acronym denotes the Political Administration of the Red Army, the organization that directed political work, political education, and propaganda in the armed forces of the early Soviet state at the height of the civil wars. It was established according to a decision (taken partly to appease the Military Opposition) of the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), in March 1919, to found a central military-political directorate to lead all party-political work within the Red Army. Subsequently, on 18 April 1919, the All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars was transformed into the Political Department of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. On 15 May 1919, this was renamed PUR (Politicheskoe upravlenie RVS Respubliki). The organization’s founding chair was I. T. Smilga (from 31 May 1919). He was succeeded by S. I. Gusev (19 January 1921–12 January 1922).

PURISHKEVICH, VLADIMIR MITROFANOVICH (12 August 1870–1 February 1920). The infamous right-wing politician and publicist V. M. Purishkevich, who once claimed that “to the Right of me, there is nothing but the wall,” was born into a noble, landowning family at Kishinev, in Bessarabia guberniia, and was a graduate of the Historical-Philosophical Faculty of the Novorossiisk University in Odessa. Having worked for some years in local government and as a journalist (and, in 1904, as a special advisor to the reactionary minister of the interior, V. K. Plehve), during the 1905 Revolution he was one of the founders and then vice president of the extremist Union of the Russian People (although, being of mixed Polish-Moldavian ethnicity, he had no Russian blood in his veins). However, he squabbled endlessly with other members of the union, and in 1908 left it to form his own monarchist and anti-Semitic party, the Union of the Archangel Michael. He also served as a deputy to the Second, Third, and Fourth State Dumas (representing Bessarabia), and in the years before the First World War, became a figure of national (even international) repute (or perhaps disrepute), due to his scandalous behavior and provocative speeches in the Russian parliament, as well as in his many published writings.

During the First World War, Purishkevich organized and ran a hospital train on the Eastern Front. His fame spread far beyond Russia when, on 17–18 December 1916, he participated in the murder of Rasputin, apparently hoping thereby to save the Romanov dynasty. During 1917, he was a vocal critic of the Russian Provisional Government; following the October Revolution, he attempted to organize armed resistance to the Bolsheviks in Petrograd, associating himself with the Junker revolt. He was subsequently arrested by the Soviet authorities (18 November 1917) and, on 3 January 1918, was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment by a revolutionary tribunal. It was found, in what was one of the first major political trials to be held in Soviet Russia, that he had been in correspondence with the head of the Don Cossack Host, Ataman A. M. Kaledin, regarding the means by which the Soviet government could be overthrown. He was released from prison on 1 May 1918, however, due to the ill health of his son.

Despite having given his word that he would refrain from political activity, Purishkevich then moved to Kiev and founded the Society for the Active Struggle against Bolshevism. He then moved to South Russia, in December 1918, to offer his support to the White regime of General A. I. Denikin, but was shunned. In 1919, he attempted to organize a new monarchist political party, the All-Russian Popular Statist Party, and published a newspaper, V Moskvu! (“To Moscow!”) at Rostov-on-Don. Denikin wisely ignored the former and closed down the latter on 4 November 1919 (on the grounds that it was preaching racial hatred). Purishkevich then began publishing under a different title, Blagovest (“The Peal of Church Bells”), but had only issued one edition of it before falling ill in January 1920. He died soon thereafter, of typhus, at Novorossiisk.