Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

R

RABKRIN. Established by a decree of VTsIK on 7 February 1920 (in line with a Sovnarkom decree of 12 April 1919), the People’s Commissariat for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (Raboche-krest′ianskaia inspektsiia), invariably referred to as Rabkrin, worked to audit and improve the effectiveness of the state apparatus of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and monitored the implementation of government decrees. Its first head was J. V. Stalin (24 February 1920–25 April 1922). He was succeeded by A. D. Tsiurupa (25 April 1922–6 July 1923). Although the Soviet government intended Rabkrin to act as a check against bureaucratism, it soon concluded that the commissariat had spawned yet more bureaucracy and was failing to halt corruption and careerism. Consequently, in April 1923 it was merged with the Party’s Central Control Commission, which was already under the control of Stalin’s ally, V. V. Kuibyshev. His successor (from 1926 to 1930) was another close associate of Stalin, G. K. Ordzhonikidze. As such, with access to the files of all government departments, Rabkrin served as effective means of building and consolidating Stalin’s control of the country and the party in the later years of the civil wars. It was dissolved by the 17th Party Congress in January 1934.

Radek (Sobelson), Karl Berngardovich (19 October 1885–19 May 1939). A leading member of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in the civil-war period, the Soviet journalist, polemicist, and internationalist Karl Radek was born at Lemberg (now L′viv), in Austrian Galicia, into the family of an Austrophile Jewish teacher. He studied at Kraków University, but was expelled for revolutionary activity. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1903 and was arrested and imprisoned by the tsarist authorities in 1905, by which time he was active with the left wing of the social-democratic movement in Warsaw and subsequently went abroad, being engaged in party work in Poland, Switzerland, and Germany. It was at this time that Radek’s volatility and acerbic nature came to the fore, in articles he published in various newspapers attacking other socialists, and he found himself expelled from both the Polish and German social-democratic parties. During the First World War, he was active in the antiwar (Zimmerwaldist) movement in Switzerland, as a close associate of V. I. Lenin.

Radek attempted to return to Russia in April 1917, traveling with Lenin from Switzerland on board the famous “sealed train” provided by the German government, but was not allowed into Russia and spent the following months in Stockholm, as a member of the Foreign Bureau of the Russian Social-Democratic Party (Bolsheviks), which he had rejoined. Following the October Revolution, he entered Soviet Russia and became a member of the Soviet delegation that negotiated peace with the Germans, although he was actually a supporter of the Left Communists and opposed the eventual Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). He also (from November 1917) directed the Central European Department of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and was head of the press department of that commissariat.

In November 1918, Radek went to Germany to aid in the establishment of the German Communist Party (KPD), but was imprisoned for almost a year from January 1919, following the suppressed Spartacist putsch (even though he had counseled against an armed uprising). He returned to Russia in December 1919 and became one of the leading members of the Komintern, serving as a member and secretary of its executive committee from August 1920 to June 1924. He was also a member of the Central Committee of the RKP(b) (23 March 1919–23 May 1924), having been elected, in absentia, while in prison in Berlin.

During the power struggles of the 1920s, Radek sided with L. D. Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Consequently, with the rise of J. V. Stalin, he rapidly lost his senior posts and, in 1925, became rector of Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University. He was expelled from the Party on 18 December 1927 and exiled to Tomsk for three years, but subsequently, in May 1929, recanted his Trotskyist “errors” and was freed. He then served as a commentator on foreign affairs for Izvestiia, was readmitted to the party in January 1930, and in 1936, helped draft the new (“Stalin”) Constitution of the USSR. Nevertheless, Radek was arrested on 16 September 1936 and, at the second major Moscow show trial (the case of the “Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center”), was found guilty of spying for Japan and other crimes and was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment (30 January 1937). He died two years later, in a fight with a criminal (nonpolitical) inmate at Vekhneural′sk prison. Soviet investigations in the 1950s raised the possibility that his assailant was in the employ of the NKVD. He was posthumously rehabilitated in May 1988.

RAGOZA, ALEKSANDR FRANTSEVICH. See ROGOZA (RAGOZA), ALEKSANDR (OLEKSANDR) FRANTSEVICH.

Railway War. This is the term sometimes applied to the military skirmishes that, in the wake of the October Revolution, took place over the winter of 1917–1918, as Red Guards, Baltic sailors, and other pro-Bolshevik forces were dispatched by train from the capitals, Petrograd and Moscow, to stifle nascent opposition to Soviet power around the periphery of the former empire. In late November 1917, for example, Red detachments under the command of V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko began to leave central Russia by rail, bound for the territory of the rebellious Don Cossack Host, where the Volunteer Army was also gathering. They captured Rostov-on-Don on 23 February and Novocherkassk on 25 February 1918, temporarily subduing the Cossacks and forcing the Volunteers onto their First Kuban (Ice) March. Meanwhile, in late December 1917, Red forces led by M. A. Murav′ev were sent from Moscow and Khar′kov against the Ukrainian Central Rada, capturing Kiev (temporarily) on 26–27 January 1918, in the opening salvos of the Soviet–Ukrainian War.

Rakhmankul (?–12 December 1922). Rakhmanul was one of the most prominent leaders of the Basmachi movement among the Uzbeks. Although the details of his life remain obscure, he led the largest of a number of groups of fighters around Matchinsk, high in the Zervshan Mountains, which had declared itself to be independent in February 1918. It was not until 1923 that any Red forces dared to enter this lawless region. In late 1922, Rakhmankul led his men out of his mountain fastness and attacked Red encampments. He was captured in November 1922 and executed after a trial at Kokand the following month.

RAKITNIKOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH (22 July 1864–15 April 1938). A prominent figure in the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918, N. I. Rakitnikov was the son of a gardener and a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1885). He joined the revolutionary (Populist) movement in 1885, becoming a member of the People’s Will and working as an organizer and a publicist. He was arrested in 1887 and exiled to Vologda (and later to Arkhangel′sk) by the tsarist authorities, subsequently returning to Saratov. He became a founding member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) in 1901, serving on its Central Committee from 1902 as an expert of peasant affairs, and was leader of the Peasants’ Union in 1905.

Rakitnikov was forced to live in emigration following the revolution of 1905–1907 (during which he had been elected to the Fist State Duma). He adopted an internationalist stance in 1914 and opposed Russia’s participation in the First World War, but having returned to Russia in 1916, in 1917 nevertheless joined the Russian Provisional Government, as deputy minister of agriculture (from June 1917). He was reelected to the PSR Central Committee on 3 June 1917 (having withdrawn from it in 1909, following the exposure of Evno Azef as a police spy) and was one of the editors of the party’s newspaper, Delo naroda (“The People’s Cause”). He opposed the October Revolution and, having been elected to the Constituent Assembly, helped organize armed resistance to Soviet power on the Volga in the summer of 1918, as a member of Komuch. However, following the Omsk coup, he left his party’s central committee and joined the Narod group of the PSR, which preached military support for the Red Army in its struggle against the Whites and an end to political opposition to the Bolsheviks.

Rakitnikov abandoned politics in 1919 and subsequently worked as a statistician and economist in Soviet institutions in Moscow. He was arrested on 3 April 1922, but after a spell in prison, was amnestied rather than put on trial alongside other PSR leaders. He was arrested again in early 1937, and on 1 June that year was sentenced to five years’ hard labor, but was shot the following year on the orders of an NKVD troika at Krasnoiarsk. Rakitnikov was posthumously rehabilitated in 1989.

RAKOV (OSETSKII), DMITRII FEDOROVICH (16 October 1881–11 September 1941). A key figure in the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918, D. F. Rakov was born into a peasant family at Bolshoi Kemar, in Nizhnii Novgorod guberniia, and was a graduate of the Kazan′ Teacher Training College and a commercial institute (1913). He found work as a teacher in Kosmodem′iansk (in the Mari region) and was active in the revolutionary movement from 1902. During the 1905 Revolution, he was one of the leaders of the Union of School Teachers and was exiled, in 1907, to Vologda, where he worked as a statistician.

In 1917, Rakov was elected to the Central Committee of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR), occupying a left-center position. He was also elected to the Constituent Assembly and participated in its only meeting, on 5–6 January 1918. Following the assembly’s dispersal by the Bolsheviks, Rakov was sent by the anti-Bolshevik Union of Regeneration to the Volga, to prepare for an armed uprising against the Soviet government. When Soviet power was overthrown in the Volga region, he joined Komuch and was a participant in the Ufa State Conference. During the Omsk coup he was arrested, along with members of the Ufa Directory, by White Cossacks, but was soon released and expelled from Siberia, making his way to Prague. From there, he was sent by the PSR to Moscow, to undertake underground political work, but he was arrested by the Cheka in 1920.

At the trial of the PSR leaders in 1922, Rakov was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for anti-Soviet activities. In 1925, he was exiled to Kokand, then to Ufa, then Tashkent. In 1937, he was again arrested and sentenced to a further 10 years’ imprisonment. Rakov was executed at Orel, in September 1941, as German forces approached the city. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1989.

RAKOVSKI (“insarov”), cRISTIAN (Kr′sto) (1 August 1873–11 September 1941). Lieutenant (Romanian Army, 1900). One of the most influential Bolshevik leaders in Ukraine during the civil wars, and sometimes regarded as one of the more “civilized” leaders of the Soviet regime, Cristian Rakovski was born (as Krastyo Georgiev Stanchev) into the family of a rich and progressively minded merchant at Gradets, in Bulgaria, and later lived in Switzerland, Germany, Russia, and France. Frequently expelled for revolutionary activities from these and other countries, as well as from various schools and universities (including Berlin University, Zurich University, and Montpellier University), he finally graduated in medicine from the University of Geneva in 1897. Before 1914, he was one of the founders of the social-democratic organizations in Bulgaria and Romania and a much-published journalist (in several languages), as well as a prominent member of the Second International. He also completed military service in the Romanian Army (1899–1900), but during the First World War became one of the most active and vocal socialist opponents of the conflict, propagandizing against it across Europe and helping to organize the antiwar Zimmerwald Conference in 1915. Carrying his campaign into Romania, in September 1916 he was arrested by the authorities at Iaşi (Jassy) and charged with being a German spy.

Rakovski was released from prison on 1 May 1917, by revolutionary Russian soldiers, but left Russia for Sweden in August 1917, to escape arrest by the Provisional Government in the aftermath of the July Days. He returned to Petrograd soon after the October Revolution and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in either December 1918 or January 1919 (accounts differ). He was immediately put in charge of Rumcherod, at Odessa, with the aim of spreading the revolution into Bessarabia and Romania, but failed to prevent the Romanian occupation of Bessarabia. From May to September 1918, Rakovski led the Soviet government’s delegation to the Ukrainian State and was briefly Soviet representative to revolutionary Germany (September–5 November 1918). He then served as chairman of the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine (24–29 January 1919), chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (29 January–17 December 1919), people’s commissar for foreign affairs of the Ukrainian SSR (29 January–July 1919), chief of the Political Directorate (PUR) of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (September 1919–January 1920), people’s commissar for internal affairs of the Ukraine SSR (3 February–9 May 1920), member of the Revvoensovet of the South-West Front (6 February–9 October 1920), chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Ukrainian SSR (19 February 1920–15 July 1923), chairman of the Ukrainian Economic Council (19 February 1920–15 July 1923), and people’s commissar for foreign affairs of the Ukrainian SSR (19 February 1920–15 July 1923). From 1920, he was also chairman of the Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) for Combating Banditry in the Ukrainian SSR, of the Extraordinary Sanitary Commission, and of the Special Commission on Fuel and Supplies, and (from 9 October–12 December 1920) was a member of the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front. He was also a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (6–17 March 1920), of the Politbiuro of that committee (6 March 1919–July 1923), and of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and later the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (23 March 1919–14 November 1927). One of his major achievements in office was to persuade the Ukrainian Borotbists to join the Soviet regime, although he had subsequently to deal with some opposition from them from within his government.

Rakovski was at first entirely unsympathetic to all Ukrainian aspirations toward statehood and independence, even questioning the existence of a distinct Ukrainian nationality, and was merciless in repressions and reprisals against “bourgeois nationalists” (for which he was criticized by the Ukrainian Communist Party, which refused to reelect him as leader in March 1920 and was subsequently purged by Moscow). However, by 1921 he was making demands for the further devolution of political and economic power from Moscow to his region and had become an early advocate of the Ukrainization of political and cultural life in the country. He clashed openly with People’s Commissar for Nationalities of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic J. V. Stalin over this and related issues at the 12th Congress of the RKP(b) in April 1923 and was subsequently removed from his posts in Ukraine and sent into “diplomatic exile,” as Soviet chargé d’affaires and then ambassador to Great Britain (July 1923–30 October 1925) and France (30 October 1925–21 October 1927).

As a member of the Left Opposition and a supporter of L. D. Trotsky in the power struggles of the 1920s, Rakovski was recalled from France and, along with other members of the opposition, was expelled from the party on 18 December 1927. Early in the following year, he was exiled to Astrakhan. There, his health deteriorated badly, and he was eventually allowed to move to Saratov on medical grounds, but was then sent to Barnaul (in the Altai) as punishment for his still vocal opposition to Stalin. Indeed, Rakovski was one of the last of Trotsky’s supporters to recant; when he did so, in April 1934, it was in the form of a letter to Pravda in which he advocated that “There Should Be No Mercy” in dealing with his former associate. He was subsequently allowed to return to Moscow, where he worked in a senior post at the People’s Commissariat for Health and was also, in 1935, briefly Soviet ambassador to Japan. He was arrested on 27 January 1937, and at the third Moscow show trial, in March 1938 (“The Trial of the 21”), he was accused, along with N. I. Bukharin and others, of espionage and plotting to overthrow the Soviet government. Unlike most of his codefendants, who were immediately executed, Rakovski was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment, but he was subsequently shot (alongside M. A. Spiridonova and others) at Orel, on 11 September 1941, as German forces approached the city. He was posthumously rehabilitated in February 1988.

Ramishvili, Noe (“Petr”) (1881–7 December 1930). The first prime minister of the Georgian Democratic Republic, Noe Ramishvili was a mainstay of the Georgian Socil-Democratic Labor Party and had been one of the leaders of the Mensheviks within the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, which he had joined as early as 1902. Despite that affiliation, Ramishvili was an enthusiastic advocate of terrorism and ran a combat squad in Tiflis before the First World War. He also met and became an enduring personal enemy of J. V. Stalin at that time.

Following the October Revolution, Ramishvili acted as one of the leaders of the Georgian National Council, and on 28 April 1918, he was named minister of the interior of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic. After the latter collapsed, on 26 May 1918 he was named prime minister of the independent Georgian republic. He was in turn replaced in that post by his party colleague Noe Zhordania, on 28 July 1918, and subsequently served in the Zhordania cabinet as minister of the interior, combining that post with that of minister of education from March 1919. Holding responsibility for internal security issues, he came under intense criticism from Abkhazian, Ossetian, and pro-Bolshevik opponents of the Menshevik regime for the allegedly brutal suppression of resistance to the rule of Tiflis in 1918 and 1919, although his supporters would argue that he had no choice in these matters, if he was ever to achieve a definitive resolution to, for example, the Georgian–Ossetian conflict.

Following the invasion of Georgia by the Red Army in February–March 1921, Ramishvili fled to Paris with the rest of the Government-in-Exile of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, but continued to oppose Soviet rule through covert operations and contacts with the resistance movement within Georgia (notably, the Committee for the Independence of Georgia); in 1924, he was one of the proponents of the failed August Uprising against the Soviet government in Georgia. Between the wars, Ramishvili was also an advocate of Józef Piłsudski’s Promethean movement, which sought the union of all the non-Russian peoples of the former Russian Empire in an alliance against Moscow. He was assassinated in Paris, in 1930, by Parmen Chanukvadze, an agent of the NKVD, and was buried in the Georgian compound of the cemetery at Leuville-sur-Orge, Paris.

RANKS and insignia (RED ARMIES). On 10 November 1917, Sovnarkom issued a decree abolishing all civil ranks and titles. Thereafter, all persons were supposed to address each other as grazhdanin (citizen), which had become common parlance in 1917 (when even Nicholas II had been addressed as “citizen Romanov” by his captors). However, the term tovarishch (comrade) soon became more widely used. The armed forces were supposed to be equally egalitarian, and on 30 November 1917, the military-revolutionary committee at the stavka issued a telegram canceling “all officer and class ranks, titles and decorations.” Thereafter, only two “ranks” were recognized: Krasnoarmeets (Red Army man), for ordinary soldiers, and Krasnyi komandir, usually shortened to Kraskom (Red commander) for the graduates of the 50 or so Red Commander Training Schools that had been established by the end of 1918. The term “officer” was never used, because of its aura of privilege and militarism. Former officers of the imperial army, serving as experts in the Red Army, were known only as voenspetsy (military specialists). Officially, indeed, there were no ranks. However, various posts in the Red Army were given positional titles (usually shortened to an acronym), as indicated in the list below, a somewhat artificial state of affairs that was to endure until 1935. Also, on 16 January 1919 (and again indicated in the list below) the first official and regular Red Army insignia were introduced, by which post-holders could be distinguished. To emphasize that this was an army of a new type, which bore no resemblance to the old army, the ostentatious epaulettes of the imperial forces (which had become a hated symbol of privilege in 1917) were deliberately not used. Instead, functional positional insignia (in branch-of-service colors), together with a hammer and sickle, were displayed on the uniform’s bastion-shaped jacket-sleeve patch, which was about seven inches long and two inches wide at its lower part (where aligned with the top of the cuff) and two and one-half inches wide at its widest part. At first, Red Army commanders tended to arrange their insignia in all manner of patterns, but the approved layouts were as follows:

Komandir otdeleniia (section commander): Large red star (three- and one-half inches), with black piping, bearing a black hammer and sickle; one small red triangle below, with black piping.

Pomoshchnik komandir vzvoda (Pomkomvzvoda, assistant platoon commander): Large red star, with black piping, bearing a black hammer and sickle; two small red triangles below, with black piping.

Zamestnik komandir vzvoda (Zamkomvzvoda, deputy platoon commander): Large red star, with black piping, bearing a black hammer and sickle; two small red triangles below, with black piping.

Starshina (sergeant major): Large red star, with black piping, bearing a black hammer and sickle; three small red triangles below, with black piping.

Komandir vzvoda (Komvzvoda, platoon commander): Large red star, with black piping, bearing a black hammer and sickle; one small red square below, with black piping.

Komandir roty (Komroty, company commander): Large red star, with black piping, bearing a black hammer and sickle; two small red squares below, with black piping.

Komandir batal′ona (Kombat, battalion commander): Large red star, with black piping, bearing a black hammer and sickle; three small red squares below, with black piping.

Komandir polka (Kompolka, regimental commander): Large red star, with black piping, bearing a black hammer and sickle; four small red squares below, with black piping.

Komandir brigady (Kombrig, brigade commander): Larger (six-inch) red star, with double black piping, bearing a black hammer and sickle; one small red diamond below, with black piping.

Komandir divizii (Komdiv, divisional commander): Larger red star, with double black piping, bearing a black hammer and sickle; two small red diamonds below, with black piping.

Komandir armiei (Komandarm, army commander): Larger red star, with double black piping, bearing a black hammer and sickle; three small red diamonds below, with black piping.

Komanduiushchii frontom (front commander): Larger red star, with double black piping, bearing a black hammer and sickle; four small red diamonds below, with black piping.

Glavnyi komandir (Glavkom, main commander): None.

RANKS AND INSIGNIA (WHITE AND COSSACK ARMIES). The ranks of forces belonging to the Whites and Cossack armies were derived entirely from those of the imperial Russian Army, whose ranks were as shown in table 2. For details of Whites’ badges of rank, see UNIFORMS (WHITE ARMIES).

Table 2.

White Army

Cossack Army

English Equivalent

Junker

—

Officer cadet

Riadovoi

Cossack

Private

Efreitor

Prikaznyi

Lance corporal

Mladshii unterofitser

Mladshii uriadnik

Junior NCO

Starshii unterofitser

Starshii uriadnik

Senior NCO

Feldfebel (Vakhmistr)

Vakhmistr

Sergeant major

Podpraporshchik

Podkhorunzhii

Junior ensign/coronet

Praporshchik

Praporshchik

Ensign/coronet

Podporuchik

Khorunzhii

Sublieutenant

Poruchik

Sotnik

Lieutenant

Shtabs-rotmistr

—

—

(Shtab-kapitan)

Starshii esaul

Staff captain

Rotmistr (Kapitan)

Esaul

Captain

Podpolkovnik

Voiskovoi starshina

Lieutenant colonel

Polkovnik

Polkovnik

Colonel

General-maior

General-maior

Major general

General-leitenant

General-lietenant

Lieutenant general

General-ot-infanterii/

—

—

Kavalerii/artillerii

Voiskovoi ataman

General

Ransome, Arthur michell (18 January 1884–3 June 1967). The English author Arthur Ransome, who was born in Leeds into the family of a professor of history, played an important but little-known part in the “Russian” Civil Wars. Having abandoned his schooling toward a chemistry degree at Yorkshire College (a forerunner of the University of Leeds), he moved to London to become a writer, but fled abroad in 1913, following a notorious libel case brought against him by Lord Alfred Douglas (even though he won it) and the collapse of his marriage. He settled in Russia to study its folktales (publishing the successful Old Peter’s Russian Tales in 1916), but during the First World War was drawn into journalism, working as the Russian correspondent of the radical newspaper Daily News.

In 1917, Ransome exhibited some sympathy for the Bolsheviks and developed cordial relations with the party’s leaders, including L. D. Trotsky, V. I. Lenin, and especially Karl Radek. Paradoxically, he was at the same time providing information to the British Secret Intelligence Service, although his views were so pro-Soviet and so opposed to the Allied intervention that the British suspected him of being a Soviet agent and kept him under surveillance. He returned to Britain in September 1918, perhaps fearing arrest in the wake of the exposure of the Lockhart plot, but went back to Soviet Russia in October 1919, as the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (succeeding M. Phillips Price). En route to Moscow, via Tallinn, he was contacted by the Estonian assistant foreign minister Ants Piip and was asked to convey a proposal for an armistice in the Estonian War of Independence to the Soviet government. Having crossed the front, Ransome passed the message to M. M. Litvinov, thereby initiating the process that brought to an end the Estonians’ support for the White forces of N. N. Iudenich and that culminated in the Soviet–Estonian Treaty of Tartu (2 February 1920).

Ransome left Russia for the last time in November 1919, later returning to Britain with the woman who was to become his second wife, E. P Shelepina, who had worked as Trotsky’s secretary. (Evgenia, it is now known, was carrying with her diamonds and pearls, valued at 1,039,000 rubles, to fund Komintern activity in Western Europe.) Ransome subsequently settled in his beloved Lake District, where he would find fame and fortune as the author of a series of children’s books, beginning with Swallows and Amazons in 1929. Ransome’s time in Russia forms the central thread of Roland Chambers’s children’s novel Blood Red, Snow White (2007).

RAPALLO, TREATY OF (16 April 1922). This Soviet–German treaty, signed by People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs G. V. Chicherin and his German counterpart, Walter Rathenau, during the Genoa Conference (which was supposed to normalize Soviet–Allied relations) ended the diplomatic isolation of both signatory powers and shook the world. According to its terms, the signatories agreed to drop all prewar debts and all financial claims against each other stemming from the First World War, to cooperate economically, and to establish full diplomatic relations. Through a secret annex (signed on 29 July 1922), the treaty also opened an era of Soviet–German military collaboration that was of mutual benefit, enabling the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to covertly circumvent aspects of the Treaty of Versailles and enabling the Red Army to benefit from German military expertise and training. A supplementary agreement, signed at Berlin on 5 November 1922, extended the treaty to cover Germany’s relations with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Transcaucasian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Far Eastern Republic.

Raskol′nikov (Il′in), Fedor Fedorovich (28 January 1892–12 September 1939). Midshipman (25 March 1917), lieutenant (November 1917). The “Red Admiral” of the Soviet fleet of the civil-war era and later a noted critic of J. V. Stalin, F. F. Raskol′nikov (who probably took that pseudonym from the protagonist of F. M. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment), who was illegitimate, was born in St. Petersburg. His father, F. A. Petrov, was an Orthodox priest, and his mother, A. V. Ilina, was the daughter of a general in the Russian army. He was a graduate of the Prince Oldenburg Orphanage (1908) and studied at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute. While there, in 1910 he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party as a supporter of the Bolsheviks, becoming a secretary to the editors of Pravda in 1912. He was arrested and exiled abroad in 1913, but soon was allowed to return under amnesty and joined the Russian navy. He did not see action in the First World War, being engaged in studies at the St. Petersburg Midshipman School (1914–25 March 1917) and on tours of duty in the Far East, during which he visited Korea, Japan, and Kamchatka.

Following the February Revolution, Raskol′nikov was engaged in party work at Kronshtadt, as editor of Golos pravdy (“The Voice of Truth”), as a member of the Bolshevik Kronshtadt Committee and the local Military Organization of the RSDLP(b), and as deputy chairman of the Kronshtadt Soviet, but he was arrested and imprisoned (as an alleged German agent) by the Russian Provisional Government following the July Days. He was released without charge on 11 October 1917, and during the October Revolution, he organized Baltic Fleet sailors and Red Guards in Petrograd for the suppression of the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising, before moving to Moscow to help establish Soviet power there. From 13 November 1917, he was a commissar with the Naval General Staff. Raskol′nikov was elected in the Petrograd district as a member of the Constituent Assembly (in which capacity he led the Bolshevik faction’s walkout on 5 January 1918), and on 28 January 1918 he was named deputy people’s commissar for naval affairs. In the summer of 1918, he was sent to the Eastern Front, where he joined its Revvoensovet, commanded the Red Volga Military Flotilla (from 23 August 1918), and assisted in the capture of Kazan′. He served also as one of the founding members of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (6 September–27 December 1918).

In December 1918, he was made deputy commander of the 7th Red Army and chief commissar of the Baltic Fleet, in preparation for the planned invasion of Estonia, but was captured by the Royal Navy when his flagship, the destroyer Spartak, ran aground off Revel (Tallinn) on 26 December 1918. He was taken to London as a prisoner of war and confined in Brixton prison. On 27 May 1919 he was released, and he returned to Russia as the central figure in a prisoner exchange between Britain and Soviet Russia. He subsequently served as a member of the Revvoensovet of the Reds’ Astrakhan Army Group (June–14 August 1918) and commander of the Volga–Caspian Military Flotilla (31 July 1919–June 1920). In the latter capacity, he oversaw the audacious Enzeli operation that secured the capture of the White Caspian Flotilla from its British custodians in Persia.

Having been a supporter of L. D. Trotsky during the debate on trade unions in 1920, and having been blamed for creating, during his service as its commander (2 June 1920–March 1921), the discontent among sailors of the Baltic Fleet that led to the Kronshtadt Revolt, on 16 July 1921 Raskol′nikov was made Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan, apparently in an attempt to remove him from the limelight. However, his subversive activities at Kabul caused a diplomatic row with Great Britain; following an ultimatum from the British foreign secretary (the “Curzon note”), on 6 February 1924 he was withdrawn and returned to Moscow. He subsequently worked (under the pseudonym “Petrov”) in the Eastern Department of the Komintern and served in a number of literary and editorial roles: editor of Molodaia gvardiia (“Young Guard”) and Krasnaia nov′ (“Red Soil”); main editor of Moskovskii rabochii (“Moscow Worker”); and chairman of the Repertoire Committee (1928–1929), which was responsible for the censorship of theater and cinema in the USSR. He was also a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Education of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1929–March 1930).

In 1930, Raskol′nikov returned to diplomatic work, as Soviet ambassador to, successively, Estonia (6 March 1930–18 August 1933), Denmark (1 July 1933–31 August 1934), and Bulgaria (31 August 1934–5 April 1938). On 1 April 1938, in the midst of the purges, he was summoned back to Moscow. He refused to obey and moved to Paris. Consequently, he was expelled from the party, and on 17 July 1939, was declared to be “outside the law” by the Supreme Court of the USSR. On 17 August 1939, he published an “Open Letter to Stalin” in the émigré press in France, denouncing the Soviet leader for destroying the party and for “annihilating the most important conquests of October.” A few days later, he apparently tried to throw himself out of a window at his hotel at Grasse, in southern France. Raskol′nikov died soon afterward, in a delirium whose cause was unspecified, in a hospital at Nice. Rumors persist that he was poisoned by an agent of the NKVD (possibly Sergei Efron, husband of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva), but no proof has been found. On 26 August 1963, by order of the Supreme Court of the USSR, he was formally rehabilitated.

RASULZADE, MAMMED AMIM (31 January 1884–6 March 1955). The leader of Musavat and one of the founding fathers of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic of 1918–1920, Mammed Rasulzade was born into a devout Muslim family at Novkhana (Novxani), near Baku, and educated locally at the city’s Technical College. He began his political life as an associate of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in Baku and as a founder of Hummet. A prolific journalist and editor of radical nationalist newspapers, in 1909 he was forced to flee into exile in Persia to escape persecution by the Russian authorities. There, he became a leading figure in the revolutionary movement, and in 1911, as Russian forces entered Persia to help the shah’s supporters crush the constitutional revolution, he was forced to flee again, this time to Constantinople. He returned to Baku in 1913, to join Musavat, rapidly becoming its undisputed leader and also editing its newspaper, Achik Soz (“Open World”), which took a pro-Russian line during the First World War.

In 1917–1918, Rasulzade was head of the Muslim faction in the Sejm of the Transcaucasian Federation and in May 1918 was elected head of the Azerbaijani National Council (Milli Shura), which on 28 May 1918, proclaimed the independence of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. (One of Rasulzade’s achievements was the revival of the name “Azerbaijan,” which had been lost in those parts of the country annexed by Russia in the early 19th century.) Thereafter, he held no government posts, but was widely regarded as the moral and spiritual leader of the country.

When the Azeri republic collapsed under Soviet military and political pressure in April 1920, Rasulzade went into hiding, but he was arrested that August by the local Soviet authorities and taken to Moscow. There, he reluctantly accepted a post as a press secretary within the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities. He had known its leader, J. V. Stalin, in Baku at the beginning of the century and, it is said, once hid him from the police. (According to some versions, it was only Stalin’s personal intervention that saved Rasulzade from execution following his arrest.) In 1922, he abandoned his post and escaped to Finland. Thereafter, he lived in Turkey until 1931, then in Poland (where he married the niece of Józef Piłsudski), and then Romania. During the Second World War, he met Hitler in Berlin and was recruited by the Nazis to encourage Azeri POWs to fight against Soviet Russia, but was expelled from Germany when he told his audience to fight against all enemies of an independent Azerbaijan. He returned to Turkey in 1947, where he died in 1955 and was buried in the Cebeci Asri Cemetery in Ankara. From 1993 to 2006, Rasulzade’s portrait adorned the obverse of the Azerbaijani 1,000 manat banknote.

RATAISKII (ROTAISKII), ANDREI IOSIFOVICH (28 November 1870–?). Colonel (18 December 1915), major general (1917). The Soviet military commander A. I. Rataiskii was born into a Catholic family in St. Petersburg, where he attended a local Gymnasium. He entered military service on 29 May 1890 and passed through the Odessa Officers School before joining the 1st Grenadiers. He participated in the intervention in China in 1900–1901, the Russo–Japanese War (during which he was wounded in the siege of Port Arthur), and the First World War.

Rataiskii joined the Red Army in early 1918; he was commander of the 13th Rifle Division (29 July–9 October 1918) and the 12th Rifle Division (25–27 November 1918 and 7 March–3 July 1919), then acting commander of the 8th Red Army on the Southern Front (3 July–12 October 1919), after which he deserted to the Whites. His subsequent fate is unknown.

RATTEL′, NIKOLAI IOSIFOVICH (3 December 1875–3 March 1939). Lieutenant (12 August 1900), lieutenant colonel (2 April 1906), major general (6 September 1915). One of the unsung heroes of the Red Army, a leading military administrator and planner, N. I. Rattel′ was born at Staryi Oskol, Kursk guberniia, and was a graduate of the Arakcheev Cadet Corps (1893), the Pavlovsk Military School (1896), and the Academy of the General Staff (1902). He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War, rising to positions on the staff of the main commander in chief. In the First World War, he again served as a staff officer with the main commander in chief (from 25 July 1914), before becoming commander of the 12th (Velikolutsk) Infantry Regiment (from 1 May 1915), quartermaster general of the South-West Front (from 2 June 1916), quartermaster general of the Western Front (from 7 August 1917), and chief of military communications of the active army (from 10 September 1917).

Following the October Revolution, Rattel′ joined the Red Army and (from March 1918) was a member of the Supreme Military Council of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, as chief of military communications, then (from June 1918) as chief of staff. During the illness of M. D. Bonch-Bruevich during the summer of 1918, he was also acting chairman of the Supreme Military Council. Following the formation of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, he became chief of the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (6 September–21 October 1918) and then head of Vseroglavshtab (22 October 1918–10 February 1921). In these capacities, he participated in the planning of all major strategic operations of the Red Army on all the major fronts of the civil wars and played a key part in the development of Soviet military schooling and training establishments. From 17 June 1920, he was also a member of the Special Conference attached to the staff of the main commander in chief and was chairman of the Military-Legal Council of the Revvoensovet of the Republic; from 1922 he was attached to the Main Command of the Revvoensovet of the Republic and then the Central Directorate of Military Communications.

Rattel′ retired from the army in 1925 and subsequently chaired a number of industrial trusts (including Glavzoloto and Glavtsetmetzoloto). On 13 March 1930, he was arrested and investigated for treason during Operation “Spring,” but was subsequently released and became head of the technical library of Giprotsvetmetrabotki Institute. He was again arrested on 28 July 1938, and on 2 March 1939 was found guilty of participation in a terrorist organization. He was shot the following day and buried in a mass grave at Kommunarka, Moscow. He was rehabilitated on 10 November 1956.

RAZVOZOV, ALEKSANDR VLADIMIROVICH (27 July 1879–14 June 1920). Midshipman (1898), lieutenant (1903), captain, second rank (6 December 1912), captain, first rank (6 December 1915), rear admiral (18 July 1917), vice admiral (20 November 1917). A. V. Razvozov, the last commander of the Baltic Fleet of the imperial period and the first under Soviet rule, was born into the family of a naval officer and was a graduate of the Naval Cadet Corps (1898) and the Mining Officer Class (1901). During the Russo–Japanese War, he served as a mining officer on the battleship Retvizan and participated in the defense of Port Arthur, before being taken prisoner by the Japanese. Following his release in 1905, he then taught at the mining school at Kronshtadt; by 1914, he had been made captain of the destroyers Burnyi (1911–1913) and Ussuriets (1913–1914). During the First World War, he commanded the 5th (1914–1915), 9th (May 1915–1916), and 2nd (1916–1917) Mining Divisions of the Baltic Fleet, then was named commander of Mining Divisions of the Baltic Fleet (6 March 1917). He then became commander of the Baltic Fleet (from 7 July 1917), overseeing its actions against German forces during the Battle of Moon Sound (September–October 1917). On 20 November 1917, in the aftermath of the October Revolution, he expressed his willingness to remain in his post under the new Soviet government, but he was removed from it on 5 December 1917, when Sovnarkom introduced a collective command of the putative Red Fleet. Razvozov returned to his command on 12 March 1918, but on 20 March 1918 was again removed, as a consequence of his refusal to accept orders from the People’s Commissariat for Naval Affairs. He was then arrested, but was soon released and put to work in the Admiralty archives, researching the history of Russia’s naval operations during the First World War. Razvozov was again arrested by the Cheka in September 1919, accused of involvement in counterrevolutionary circles. (It may not have helped his case that General N. N. Iudenich planned to restore him to the command of the Baltic Fleet if his North-West Army captured Petrograd.) He later died in the hospital of the Kresty prison, from complications associated with an operation on a ruptured appendix. He was buried in the Smolensk cemetery in Petrograd.

RED ARMY. The “Worker–Peasant Red Army,” first mentioned in a Sovnarkom decree of 3 January 1918, had its origins in loosely organized units of Red Guards and remnants of the Imperial Russian Army (which had been formally demobilized by Sovnarkom in December 1917) that fought against (1) the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising in October–November 1917; (2) the nascent Ukrainian Army over the winter of 1917–1918 (in the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War); (3) forces of the Austro-German intervention in northwest Russia in January–February 1918, during the hiatus in the discussions that would eventually lead to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918); (4) the Dowbor-Muśnicki uprising; and (5) Cossack resistance to the October Revolution manifested in the Kaledin uprising, the Dutov Uprising, and other similar events. In these early formations, in line with the Bolsheviks’ long-standing ideological antipathy to standing armies, commanders were elected, there was no clearly defined organization, and there were no field staffs or rear organizations. Along these lines, in the period January to March 1918, loosely defined 1st, 2nd, and Special Western Fronts were created, to which were added the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 1st Don, Donetsk, and the 2nd Special Fronts by May 1918. At the same time, Screens were organized around the borders of the new Soviet republic.

Following the banning of the election of officers in the new army (21 March 1918) and the introduction of Vsevobuch (“universal military service”) on 22 April 1918, in line with measures that were taken by L. D. Trotsky, within days of his being named People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, Red forces began to be reorganized into regular field armies: the 1st Red Army, the 2nd Red Army, the 3rd Red Army, the 4th Red Army, the 5th Red Army, the 6th Red Army, the 7th Red Army, the 8th Red Army, the 9th Red Army, the 10th Red Army, the 11th Red Army, the 12th Red Army, the 13th Red Army, the 14th Red Army, the 15th Red Army, the 16th Red Army, the 10th Terek–Daghestan Red Army, the Donetsk Red Army, the Crimean Red Army, the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia, the Estonian Red Army, the Taman (Red) Army, the Turkestan Red Army, the Ukrainian Red Army, the 1st Ukrainian Red Army, the 2nd Ukrainian Red Army, the 3rd Ukrainian Red Army, the Red Army of Armenia, the Red Army of the Azerbaijan SSR, the Red Army of Georgia, the Red Army of Bukhara, the Red Army of Khorezm, the Red Army of the North Caucasus, and the Red Banner Caucasian Army. Those armies termed “independent” (otdel′nyi) were subordinated directly to the main commander in chief of the Red Army (who worked in collaboration with the Revvoensovet of the Republic and the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs); others were included in the complement of the various Red fronts: the Northern–Urals–Siberian Front, the Eastern Front, the Northern Front, the Southern Front, the Western Front, the South-East Front, the South-West Front, the Ukrainian Front, the Caucasian Front, the Caspian–Caucasian Front, and the Turkestan Front were the main ones, although smaller local fronts also existed at various times (the Semirech′e Front, the Transcaspian Front, the Ferghana Front, the Aktiubinsk Front, the Eastern Transbaikal Front, the Amur Front, etc.). From late 1919, cavalry armies were also organized (chiefly the 1st Cavalry Army and the 2nd Cavalry Army), and there were also the Labor Armies and the Food Army.

In 1918, up to 11 Red armies were operational; in 1919, there were 20; and in 1920, there were 15. Each army consisted of from two to nine divisions (the basic infantry divisions being termed rifle divisions from October 1918), including sometimes aircraft and armored train divisions, and numbered between 30,000 and 100,000 men. Sometimes elements of the Red Fleet were made operationally subordinate to a Red Army (e.g., military flotillas); equally, armies could be made operationally subordinate to elements of the Red Fleet (e.g., the 7th Red Army was subordinated to the Baltic Fleet in 1919 and again in 1921).

Armies were controlled by individual field staffs and various other organizations, including a revvoensovet, the staff (with an operational department, an administrative department, a department of supply and inspectorates of artillery, armored forces, infantry, cavalry, and engineering), a political department (coordinated by the central PUR), a revolutionary tribunal, a department of military control (counterintelligence), and other offices. Most armies (and fronts) of the Red Army were initially commanded by military specialists, but by 1920 increasing numbers of Red commanders had been trained in the Red Military Academy, and other institutions and the specialists were moved out of command posts (usually into teaching). Nevertheless, even by the end of 1921, of the 217,000 command staff members of the Red Army, 34 percent were military specialists. Their loyalty was guaranteed by the practice of attaching to them military commissars, although there were many instances of treachery and desertion. Although proponents of a militia army had been defeated in 1918, the use of tsarist officers in the army continued to raise hackles, and the practice was widely criticized by the Left Bolsheviks, the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries, the Military Opposition, the Workers’ Opposition, and other factions. (Following the rise to power of J. V. Stalin, the former officers again fell under suspicion, and many were arrested in Operation “Spring”; most of the remainder would die in the purges of the 1930s.)

As for the rank and file, recruited from workers and peasants from across Russia (as well as some internationalists), the Bolsheviks succeeded in building an army of 3,000,000 men by the end of 1919 and 5,498,000 by 1 October 1920 (of whom 778,000 were active combatants), but by 1924 that number had been reduced to around 500,000. The army’s morale was reinforced by the injection into its ranks of large numbers of party members; more than 200,000 Bolsheviks joined the Red Army during the civil wars.

Over the course of the civil wars, a revolutionary system of ranks and insignia was developed in the Red Army, as well as distinctive uniforms and military decorations. From 8 May 1918, the Red Army was controlled by a main staff, Vseroglavshtab (which incorporated the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army); following a decree of VTsIK on 2 September 1918, the Red Army was led by the Main Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Republic, thereby ending a situation wherein Soviet troop formations were answerable to two centers, the Supreme Military Council of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Operational Department of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs. The main commanders of the Red Army in the civil-war period were Jukums Vācietis (6 September 1918–8 July 1919) and S. S. Kamenev (18 July 1919–1 April 1924).

red army, intelligence directorate of. In comparison to other military institutions, there appears to have been little continuity between the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army and its imperial predecessors (since 1905, the 1st Section of the Quartermaster’s Directorate of the Main Staff). However, precise details of its formation remain hazy. It is unlikely, however, that the grand claims of the British agent George Hill to have founded the Red Army intelligence service at the behest of L. D. Trotsky will ever be substantiated. More likely is that such operations developed on an ad hoc basis, at various levels of command, over the summer of 1918, with a model being established by the organization of a Registration Department attached to the staff of the Eastern Front in June 1918. By the autumn of that year, Razvedyvatel′nye otdeli (Reconnaisance Sections) had been established at all levels, on all Red fronts, with each including a Department of Military Inspection, an Agents Department, and a Military Censorship Department. (The key intelligence office here was the Agents Department, which was divided from 21 June 1919 into a 1st Department, dealing with “ground agents,” and a 2nd Department, dealing with “naval agents,” operating in four geographical subdivisions: North, West, Near East, and Far East.) This process was crowned by a Sovnarkom decree of 21 October 1918, creating a Registration Section as the 3rd Department of the Operations Directorate of the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. In late 1920, this institution was upgraded to become the 2nd (Intelligence) Directorate (Razvedupr) of Vseroglavshtab.

The heads of Soviet military intelligence during the civil-war years were S. I. Aralov (November 1918–July 1919); S. I. Gusev (July 1919–January 1920); G. L. Piatakov (January–February 920); V. Kh Aussem (February–August 1920); Ia. D. Lentsman (August 1920–April 1921); A. Ia. Zeibot (April 1921–March 1924); and Jānis Bērziņš (April 1924–April 1935).

RED ARMY OF ARMENIA. This Soviet force was created, according to a decision of the Sovnarkom of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, on 6 December 1920, on the basis of the Armenian Independent Rifle Regiment that had been formed at Baku in October 1920 (under the aegis of the Revvoensovet of the 11th Red Army). By February 1921, when it participated in the invasion of the Democratic Republic of Georgia and the suppression of a series of uprisings by the Dashnaks, the Red Army of Armenia consisted of three rifle brigades and a cavalry brigade, various other units, and three armored trains, and numbered some 7,500 men. Its commander (from 1 January 1921) was M. V. Molkochanov.

RED ARMY OF BUKHARA. The Red Army of the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic was formed in September 1920, according to a decision of the Bolsheviks’ Bukharan Revolutionary Committee. It was based on the 1st Eastern Muslim Riflemen and the 1st Uzbek Cavalry Regiment; was governed by Nazir of Military Affairs B. Shagabitdinov (from November 1920, Iu. O. Ibgarimov); and was thrown immediately into action against the forces of the Emir of Bukhara, Mohammed Alim Khan. By the following year, the force numbered some 6,000 men. In subsequent years, the Red Army of Bukhara was deployed in a series of operations against the Basmachi.

Red Army of Georgia. This Soviet force was created according to a decree of the revkom of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, on 11 March 1921, following the Soviet invasion of the Democratic Republic of Georgia and the dispersal of its army and the People’s Guard. By early April 1921 the 1st Georgian Rifle Division had been formed, and by June the army numbered some 17,000 men.

RED ARMY OF KHOREZM. The Red Army of the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic was created according to a decree of the All-Khorezm Soviet of People’s Deputies in late April 1920 and was organized by the People’s Nazir of Military Affairs. Initially, the army was raised from volunteers. Following the removal of nationalist Young Khivans from the government of the Khorezm republic and their replacement by Bolsheviks in the spring of 1921, the Red Army of Khorezm was purged of allegedly disloyal elements. By mid-1921, the force numbered some 5,000 men. This number increased following the introduction of conscription in September 1921, and the army also developed cavalry units and other specialist detachments, as it was deployed in the struggle against the Basmachi in the Khiva region.

(RED) ARMY OF SOVIET LATVIA. This Red military formation was created, according to an order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic of 4 January 1919, from elements of the 7th Red Army (including the Latvian Riflemen) that had previously operated under the title “Army Group Latvia.” It was attached to the Northern Front (from 7 February 1919) and later the Western Front (from 19 February 1919). Its complement included the 1st Rifle Division of the Army of Soviet Latvia (January–June 1919), the Special Internationalist Division (from 12 February 1919, the 2nd Rifle Division of the Army of Soviet Latvia, January–June 1919), the 2nd Novgorod Rifle Division (January 1919), the Lithuanian Rifle Division (May 1919), the Aluksnensk Group (May–June 1919), and the Marienburg Group (May–June 1919).

Formed in the aftermath of the Red Army’s capture of Riga (3–5 January 1919), during the Latvian War of Independence, the Army of Soviet Latvia was engaged in battles across Latvia with nationalist and German forces and by late January 1919 had occupied all of Latvia with the exception of Libau. From February 1919, however, it was forced onto the defensive, in part due to the pressure exerted on its right flank by Estonian forces. Having been forced out of Latvia, on 7 June 1919, the Army of Soviet Latvia was renamed the 15th Red Army.

Commanders of the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia were Jukums Vācietis (6 January–10 March 1919) and P. A. Slaven (10 March–7 June 1919). Its chief of staff was P. M. Maigur (6 January–7 June 1919).

RED ARMY OF THE AZERBEIJAN Soviet Socialist Republic. This Soviet force was created, according to a decree of the revkom of the Azerbaijan SSR of 7 May 1920, initially on the basis of preexisting Azeri forces. By mid-July 1920, it numbered some 5,500 men. The force participated in clashes between British and Iranian forces along the Azeri–Persian border from August 1920 to June 1921. It commander was M. Kadirli.

RED ARMY OF THE NORTH CAUCASUS. This Soviet military formation was created by orders of the defense staff of Tsaritsyn on 25 January 1918, from various Red forces (including the 39th Infantry Division) that were operating (under the name of the South-East Revolutionary Army) in the Kuban and lower Don regions against forces of the Volunteer Army. Having captured Ekaterinodar in March 1918, the Red Army of the North Caucasus became, in effect, the army of the Kuban Soviet Republic. When forced out of Ekaterinodar by the Whites in August 1918, part of the army moved east to unite with the Taman Army and then retreated north toward Tsaritsyn. The size of the army is uncertain, but Soviet sources cite figures in the region of 100,000 men at its height. On 3 October 1918, by order of the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front, the Red Army of the North Caucasus was transformed into the 11th Red Army.

Commanders of the Red Army of the North Caucasus were A. I. Avtonomov (25 January–18 April 1918); K. I. Kalniņš (28 May–2 August 1918); and I. L. Sorokin (3 August–3 October 1918).

Red Army, Supreme Military Inspectorate of the. This establishment was founded, on the orders of People’s Commissar for Military Affairs L. D. Trotsky, on 24 April 1918. Headed by N. I. Podvoiskii, its functions were to organize new formations of the Red Army and manage supply, as well to oversee political work in the army. From November 1918, its political sections were merged with the new All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars (Vsebiurvoenkom). Following the creation of the People’s Commissariat for State Control, on 8 September 1919, by order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, the Supreme Military Inspectorate was disestablished and its apparatus and personnel distributed among the new commissariat and the Military and Naval Inspectorate of the Revvoensovet of the Republic.

RED BANNER CAUCASIAN ARMY. The Red Banner Caucasian Army (until August 1923, formally the Independent Caucasian Army) was a Soviet force that which existed from late May 1921 to 17 May 1935. It was nominally subordinate to the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, but was in practice controlled by the central military institutions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and subsequently, those of the USSR. Consisting of six territorial divisions (the 1st Georgian, 2nd Georgian, 1st Caucasus, 3rd Caucasus, Azeri, and Armenian Rifle Divisions), it was founded on the basis of the reformed 11th Red Army, following the disestablishment of the Caucasian Front on 29 May 1921. Its chief activity consisted of combating nationalist partisans (termed “bandits” by the Soviet government) across the North Caucasus, notably during the August Uprising in 1924 in Georgia.

Commanders of the Red Banner Caucasian Army in the civil-war era were A. I. Gekker (May–June 1921); S. A. Pugachev (10 June 1921–12 July 1923 and April 1924–February 1925); and A. I. Egorov (12 July 1923–April 1924).

RED COSSACKS. This was the name given to the cavalry units created by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine to counter the anti-Soviet Free Cossacks. The first regiment of Red Cossacks was formed at Khar′kov, on 28 December 1917, during the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War, and can be considered the first Soviet military formation in Ukraine.

RED FLEET. The naval force of the Soviet republic, formally the Worker-Peasant Red Fleet, was founded by a Sovnarkom decree of 29 January 1918. It consisted chiefly of the Baltic Fleet and (intermittently) parts of the Black Sea Fleet and the numerous Red military flotillas that operated in support of the Red Army on various fronts. It operated, initially, on a volunteer basis, drawing its complement from the radical sailors who had done so much to secure the victory of the October Revolution, but due to the technical nature of the work, it also had to rely on military specialists for its officers, even more than the Red Army did.

By an order of VTsIK of 22 April 1918, the practice of electing officers in the navy was banished; following this and the introduction of universal military service (Vsevobuch) in July 1918, the fleet began to operate in a more regular fashion. Its first task, in the spring of 1918, was to save vessels moored at Revel and Helsingfors from falling into the hands of the advancing forces of the Austro-German intervention by organizing their transfer to Kronshtadt and Petrograd, in the successful Ice March of the Baltic Fleet. Less successful was the movement of ships of the Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol′ to Novorossiisk; many vessels of this fleet were lost and the rest were scuppered in June 1918 by F. F. Raskol′nikov (on the orders of V. I. Lenin) before they could be captured by hostile forces.

From 6 September 1918, the Red Fleet was subordinated to the Revvoensovet of the Republic, its commander, the Commander of Naval Forces of the Republic (Komorsi), answering to it through the Main Commander of All Armed Forces of the Republic. The Red Fleet was initially administered by the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Naval Affairs, but from December 1918 those functions were transferred to a Naval Department of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. In June 1919, the Naval Department was closed, and all its functions were transferred to the Komorsi and his staff. Elements of the Red Fleet participated in actions in the Gulf of Finland, supporting Red Army forces in battles against the North-West Army of N. N. Iudenich, and in the Estonian War of Independence, along the internal waterways of Russia against the Whites and other forces, on the Sea of Azov, on the Black Sea, and on the Caspian. On the Caspian, the Red Fleet merged with the Red Fleet of Soviet Azerbaijan on 20 May 1920, absorbing the White Caspian Flotilla of the Armed Forces of South Russia following the successful Enzeli operation (17–18 May 1920).

Commanders of the Red Fleet in the civil-war period were V. M. Al′tfater (15 October 1918–20 April 1919), E. A. Berens (24 April 1919–5 February 1920), A. V. Nemitts (6 February 1920–22 November 1921, from 27 August 1921 as the Main Commander in Chief’s Assistant for Naval Affairs), and E. S. Pantserzhanskii (22 December 1921–9 December 1924, from 1 January 1924 as Commander in Chief of the Naval Forces of the USSR).

Red Guards. This term was first used in Finland during the 1905 Revolution (and was current there again during the Finnish Civil War), then reemerged in Russia in 1917 to denote the volunteer militias of industrial workers that were formed across the country in that year. Originally, the formation of Red Guard units was spontaneous—an effort by workers to organize themselves, free of party interference, to protect their interests and those of their factory—but as the political and economic crises of 1917 developed, Red Guards and the Bolsheviks became united in their hostility to the Russian Provisional Government and in their demand for “All Power to the Soviets” (particularly following the Kornilov affair of late August 1917). Gradually, through the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b), the Bolshevik Central Committee came to exert some control over the militias.

By October 1917, there were some 150,000–175,000 Red Guards across Russia, with at least 30,000 in Petrograd. The latter played a significant part in the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in the capital during the October Revolution, by seizing strategic sites around the capital, suppressing the Junker revolt and the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising, and then spreading the revolution to Moscow and other cities during the Railway War. In early 1918, with Soviet power seemingly securely established, the Red Guards either dispersed or were incorporated into the new Red Army, or (if they opposed the Soviet regime, as some came to do) were forcibly dispersed. The institution was formally abolished by Sovnarkom in April 1918.

Red International of Labor Unions. See PROFINTERN.

RED MILITARY ACADEMY. The Red Military Academy (formally, the Academy of the General Staff of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army) was founded in Moscow on 3 May 1918, on the basis of the co-option and reorganization of the former Academy of the General Staff. Thus, its teachers were predominantly military specialists from the old officer corps. Because of the defection to the Whites of many of the members of the imperial academy in the summer of 1918, however, it was only formally opened, by Ia. M. Sverdlov, on 8 December 1918. Like its predecessor, its aim was to offer higher education courses on military science, tactics, strategy, history, supply, communications, and other specialties to officers. These were termed Higher Military Academic Courses (from 1925, Advanced Courses for the Supreme Command). Students were also given courses on the history of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). These latter were run by A. S. Bubnov, N. I. Podvoiskii, and other party luminaries.

The academy’s graduates were intended to fill most of the higher staff and command positions in the Red Army and to staff other colleges and military schools. Its first cohort, of 183 students (selected from 435 applicants), was enrolled in November 1918. The curriculum originally involved an attenuated seven-month course, with 280 of the allotted 940 teaching hours devoted to practical instruction. Short (one-month) staff courses were also organized on the various fronts in 1919. Later, courses were from one to three years long. In 1921, the academy was reorganized into the Military Academy of the Red Army, and on 9 January 1922, on the instruction of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, this institution was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for its achievements in the civil wars. What precisely these achievements were, however, is difficult to determine; the number of graduating Red commanders during the civil-war years was quite small, and many of them (e.g., V. I. Chapaev) found that the experience of studying at the academy merely reinforced their hatred of former officers and their suspicion of traditional military science. From 31 October 1925 to September 1998 (when it was amalgamated with the Malinovskii Academy to form the Combined Arms Academy of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation), the academy was named in honor of M. V. Frunze.

The first heads of the Red Military Academy were A. K. Klimovich (8 December 1918–July 1919); A. E. Snesarev (July 1919–August 1921); M. N. Tukhachevskii (August 1921–February 1922); A. I. Gekker (February–June 1922); P. P. Lebedev (August 1922–April 1924); and M. V. Frunze (19 April 1924–26 January 1925).

RED STAR. Alongside the hammer and sickle, the red star became one of the most widely deployed symbols of the Soviet state, the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and the Communist movement in general. How this came to be remains unclear. One version has it that Red Army troops in Moscow were given tin stars during the spring of 1918 to distinguish them from troops of the old Russian Army—who were returning to the country from German and Austro-Hungarian prisoner of war camps in the wake of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918)—and began to paint them red, an act that was subsequently approved by the party. Another has it that L. D. Trotsky once noticed that N. V. Krylenko was wearing a green star on his lapel—the symbol of his support for and fluency in Esperanto (its five points representing the five continents)—and ordered that a red star should be worn by Red Army soldiers. A final, probably scurrilous story is that the star was introduced due to the influence of Jews within the Bolshevik party.

Whatever its origins, what became known as the Revolutionary Military Symbol of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army was officially introduced by the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs on 19 April 1918 (a decision confirmed by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in July 1918): a large red enamel star, set in a silver wreath of laurel leaves (on the right), and an oak branch (on the left). Superimposed on the star was a brass hammer and plough (later hammer and sickle) device. On military uniforms, this was to be worn on either the headgear or the left side of the greatcoat or tunic, or as an element of the ranks and insignia of Red commanders. Until late 1918, the star was worn “upside down,” with the wreath above the hammer and plough/sickle device. Cloth versions, to be sewn onto uniforms, were also common during the civil-war period.

Like the hammer and sickle, the red star has been banned as a public symbol in some post-Soviet states (notably Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania), which regard it as a symbol of occupation and oppression, although this has been deemed illegal by the European Court of Human Rights.

RED TERROR. This was the name given to the policy of Sovnarkom, officially decreed on 5 September 1918 (in response to an appeal in VTsIK by Ia. M. Sverdlov on 2 September 1918), that was designed to eliminate, terrorize, or unmask both actual and potential enemies of the Soviet regime. This “Decree on Red Terror” authorized the isolation of class enemies in concentration camps and the shooting of “all persons involved in White Guard organizations, plots and insurrections.” Its name echoes that used to describe the last weeks of the “Reign of Terror” in June–July 1794, during the French Revolution. Although often used more generally to describe Bolshevik and specifically Cheka tactics of violence and intimidation against their enemies throughout the civil-war period (and even beyond), strictly speaking the Red Terror came to an end on 6 November 1918, with the amnesty proclaimed by the Sixth All-Russian Extraordinary Congress of Soviets.

Officially, the Red Terror was pronounced in retaliation against the White Terror and alleged foreign espionage that aimed to overthrow the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (the Lockhart plot, the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, the Left-SR Uprising, the Iaroslavl′ Revolt, etc.), the escalation of Allied intervention in Russia in August 1918 (with landings at Arkhangel′sk and Baku), and recent attempts on the lives of Soviet leaders (V. I. Lenin and Moisei Uritskii, in particular). Many would argue, however, that the use of terror in a revolutionary situation underpinned the political thought of the Bolsheviks’ leadership; that it had been accepted as a necessary—even beneficial—policy by broad sections of the party; and that it had been put into practice by the Bolsheviks on many occasions prior to the autumn of 1918—for example, the execution of Admiral A. M. Shchastnyi, the lynching of former tsarist officers who played no active part in the burgeoning counterrevolution (General N. N. Ianushkevich was shot in the street in Petrograd in February 1918, and General N. K. Rennenkampf suffered a similar fate at Taganrog in April 1918), and the execution of the Romanov family. It was only from around September 1918, however, that “mass terror” spread and developed as a determined, theorized, uninhibited, and asserted policy and was lauded as a means for the regeneration of the entire social body. Mass terror then became the instrument of a policy of social cleansing, aimed at eliminating entire groups defined as “enemies” of the new Soviet society that was under construction. Certainly the principle was soon established by the main enforcers of the terror, the Cheka (and, specifically, Martin Latsis), that guilt or proof did not come into play with regard to “revolutionary justice.” Rather, the central concern was the class background of any suspect.

Among the first victims of the proclaimed Red Terror were a mixture of the privileged representatives of the old regime (tsarist officers and bureaucrats, the aristocracy, etc.) and members of other political parties whom the Reds held responsible for the Left-SR Uprising, the Iaroslavl′ Revolt, the Murav′ev uprising, the Democratic Counter-Revolution, the assassination of Uritskii, and especially, the attempt on the life of Lenin on 30 August 1918. Estimates vary, but in September–November 1918 there were probably between 8,000 and 15,000 executions under the Red Terror (512 of them in Petrograd alone, within days of the 5 September decree), while many other people were imprisoned, tortured, or held as hostages, or had their possessions and livelihoods taken away from them. Few of these events were preceded by even the most cursory of trials, although occasionally they followed decisions of a revolutionary tribunal or a Cheka troika.

Formally, as noted, a halt was called to the terror on 6 November 1918 (at the Sixth All-Russian Congress of Soviets), but its use was not curtailed, and the number of victims of political violence swelled considerably in succeeding years, as other and broader social groups were targeted: landowners and Cossacks (through de-Cossackization) in 1919, former Whites and their families in 1920 (especially in the Crimea, where at least 5,000 people were executed around Sevastopol′ within days of the evacuation of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel), striking workers and peasants suspected of involvement in the Tambov Rebellion and other anti-Soviet revolts in 1920–1921, sailors involved in the Kronshtadt Revolt and followers of Nestor Makhno in 1921, and supporters of the Georgian Social Democratic Labor Party and the Basmachi from 1921 onward. In addition, priests of the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious leaders seem to have been targeted at all times.

A precise total of the victims of terror over the course of the civil wars can never convincingly be arrived at, due to the absence and/or ambiguity of documentation and to the impossibility of always clearly defining what counts as terror and what counts as, for example, legitimate counterinsurgency. However, it seems likely that there were considerably fewer than the 140,000 executions suggested by the historian Robert Conquest, perhaps less than half that many. Among the most prominent victims of the Red Terror were Nicholas II, his wife and children, and members of his staff; other members of the Romanov family, including the Grand Dukes Mikhail Aleksandrovich, Nikolai Mikhailovich, Pavel Aleksandrovich, Nikolai Konstantinovich, Dmitrii Konstantinovich, Nikolai Mikhailovich, and Georgii Mikhailovich (and many members of their families and retinues); the former tsarist ministers A. N. Khvostov, N. A. Maklakov, A. A. Markov, A. G. Bulygin, B. V. Stürmer, and A. D. Protopopov; and Generals N. N. Dukhonin, Ia. G. Zhilenskii, N. V. Ruzskii, Radko Dmitriev, P. K. von Rennenkampf, and A. E. Evert.

RED UKRAINIAN GALICIAN ARMY. This was the name given to those units of the former Ukrainian Galician Army (UGA) that were absorbed into the Red Army in February 1920, at the close of the Soviet–Ukrainian War. By the end of 1919, the UGA, hemmed into a corner of eastern Podilia and ravaged by typhus, had been reduced to a complement of around 5,000 men. On 12 February 1920, elements of the force (led by the Revolutionary Committee of the UGA) entered into negotiations with the Soviet government, and it was agreed that the remnants of the UGA would become an autonomous part of the Red Army, in order to continue the struggle against Poland over the future of Western Ukraine (Eastern Galicia). The force’s commander, General Osyp Mykytka (together with his chief of staff, General Gustav Ziritz), refused to accept this deal; both were taken to Moscow and subsequently executed.

Thereafter, V. P. Zatonskii organized the Red Ukrainian Galician Army into three brigades (under Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Bizanz, Captain Iuliian Holovinsky, and Captain Osyp Stanimir) and assigned each to a separate Red Army division. This move, which separated the constituent parts of the Red UGA, together with continued Soviet interference in the purportedly autonomous force, swiftly led to a breakdown in the agreement, and in mid-April 1920, the 2nd and 3rd Brigades of the Red Ukrainian Galician Army deserted and subsequently surrendered to the advancing Polish Army (and its Ukrainian allies, under Symon Petliura) in the opening stages of the Soviet–Polish War. The 1st Brigade continued to fight, but was defeated and interned by the Poles at Makhniva.

REILLY, SIDNEY GEORGE (24 March 1873/1874–5 November 1924). Although he remains one of the most enigmatic figures of the early 20th century, the origins and background of the man sometimes dubbed the “Ace of Spies”—and the man said to have been the model for Ian Fleming’s fictional James Bond—remain shrouded in mystery and contradiction. Reilly himself gave several versions of his background, befuddling his employers as often as his enemies. Some now accept that he was born Georgi Rosenblum at Odessa, in 1874; others that he was born Salomon (Shlomo) Rosenblum at Kherson, in 1873. Similarly, some accept that in his teens he stowed away on a British ship at Odessa and wound up in Brazil, where, while holding down a number of menial jobs, he found employment with British intelligence, was rewarded with a British passport, and made his way to London. According to others, Reilly made his way to London from France, where in 1895 he had murdered two Italian anarchists and robbed them of their war chest.

In London, he set himself up as a peddler of miracle cures, worked for Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, and married a wealthy widow (Margaret Callaghan), whose husband he might have murdered. From 1899, now with the name Sidney Reilly, he undertook a series of foreign excursions, reportedly on behalf of British intelligence, and in 1903–1904 appears to have been in the employ of the Japanese in the countdown to the Russo–Japanese War. Thereafter, he seems to have worked for the British on espionage missions in France and Germany before the First World War. Reilly later claimed to have spent most of the war as a spy in Germany, but it is now known that he lived mostly in New York and was involved in selling weapons to both Russia and Germany.

In 1918, he returned to London, was sworn in as an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and was dispatched to Russia, arriving in Moscow in April 1918. There, he played a role in preparing the way for both the Left-SR Uprising (arranging meetings between disillusioned members of the Latvian Riflemen and the British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart) and the Iaroslavl′ Revolt (by helping Lockhart channel funds to B. V. Savinkov’s Union for the Defense of the Fatherland and Freedom), but according to some sources, he was working all along for the Cheka and betrayed Lockhart to them, thus triggering the suppression of the Lockhart plot.

When Lockhart was arrested, Reilly disappeared and returned to London. From there, he was sent to South Russia, where he gathered intelligence on both the Whites and the Reds during 1919. His career with the SIS thereafter remains obscure, although some have claimed that he was involved in the forging of the Zinov′ev letter in 1924. In September 1925, he returned to Soviet Russia to meet members of a fictitious anti-Bolshevik organization that the OGPU had constructed during its diversionary Operation “Trust.” (Whether Reilly actually knew that this was a trick, but believed he could outfox the OGPU, is open to debate.) He was arrested on the Finnish border and taken for interrogation to the Lubianka prison in Moscow. There, he was reminded that he had been sentenced to death by a revolutionary tribunal in 1918 for his part in a series of anti-Soviet plots. He was subsequently executed in a forest at Bogorodsk, Moscow, apparently on the direct orders of J. V. Stalin (who feared an international scandal if it became known that Soviet intelligence had abducted a British agent), although for a while rumors persisted that he was alive and working for Soviet intelligence (sightings of him were reported in Leningrad, New York, and London).

Apart from the Bond novels, Reilly has appeared in other fictional guises, including the British television mini-series Reilly, Ace of Spies (dir. Martin Campbell and Jim Goddard, 1983).

REISNER, LARISSA (1/2 May 1895–9 February 1926). The Soviet author, poet, and journalist Larissa Reisner (sometimes rendered Rejsner) was born into a bourgeois German family at Lublin, where her father worked as a professor of law. She was educated at universities in France and Germany. During the First World War, she wrote for several left-wing journals in Russia, notably Maxim Gorky’s political-literary monthly Letopis′ (“Chronicle”), from 1915, and following the February Revolution, his daily Novaia zhizn′ (“New Life”), in 1917.

Following the October Revolution, Reisner joined the Russian Social-Democratic-Labor Party (Bolsheviks) and worked as an agitator at the Kronshtadt naval base. There, she met F. F. Raskol′nikov, whom she married in 1918; as an agitator and reporter, she accompanied him with the Volga Military Flotilla to the Volga Front in August of that year (having resigned from a post with the People’s Commissariat for Education). She also accompanied Raskol′nikov to Afghanistan, when he became ambassador there in July 1921. After returning to Russia and separating from Raskol′nikov, she made numerous contributions to Soviet journalism, including a collection of pieces on the Communist uprising in Hamburg in 1923, Hamburg auf den Barrikaden (“Hamburg at the Barricades,” 1923). She was encouraged in this by her new partner, Karl Radek. She died of typhus in Moscow, in early 1926, and was buried in the Vagan′kovsk cemetery.

The figure of a statuesque woman revolutionary, wearing a leather jacket and toting a revolver, became a staple of Soviet film and art and was largely based on Reisner (who was dubbed the “Paris Athena of the Russian Revolution”). She was the subject of a play by V. V. Vishnevskii, Optimisticheskaia tragediia (“An Optimistic Tragedy,” 1933), and Boris Pasternak wrote a poem called “In Memory of Larissa Reisner” (1926). It is also thought that the character Lara in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was partially inspired by Larissa Reisner.

REMEZOV, ALEKSANDR KONDRAT′EVICH (10 December 1869–?). Colonel (6 December 1908), major general (1 May 1915). The Soviet commander A. K. Remezov was the son of a priest and graduated from the Riazan′ seminary. He entered military service on 14 January 1887, initially joined the 2nd Fanogoriisk Grenadier Regiment, and subsequently graduated from the Kazan′ Infantry Officers School (1889) and the Academy of the General Staff (1899). He served in the Russo–Japanese War, as a senior adjutant on the staff of the Manchurian Army (4 September 1904–11 March 1905) and as a duty officer with that force’s quartermaster general (from 14 September 1905). He subsequently commanded the 27th Eastern Siberian Rifle Regiment (9 November 1906–6 November 1907), was on the staff of the Amur Military District (19 November 1906–27 April 1908), was a staff officer with the 2nd Siberian Reserve Infantry Brigade (27 April 1908–26 September 1910), and (from 26 September 1910) was chief of staff of the 49th Infantry Division. During the First World War, Remezov was commander of the 194th Troitsk-Sergievsk Regiment (5 December 1914–5 July 1915), a brigade commander with the 81st Infantry Division (5 July 1915–5 May 1916), chief of staff of the 75th Infantry Division (5 May–5 June 1916), chief of staff of the 31st Army Corps (5 June 1916–18 April 1917), and commander of the 16th Siberian Rifle Division (from 18 April 1917).

He volunteered for service with the Red Army and during the civil wars was commander of the 10th Rifle Division (30 July 1918–10 December 1918) and of the 7th Red Army (27 January–1 July 1919), later becoming acting commander of the 11th Red Army (12–26 July and 12–19 September 1919) and then that force’s chief of staff (10 December 1919–7 May 1921). Remezov was then attached to the Red Army main staff, but his subsequent fate is unknown (his name last appeared on staff lists on 1 March 1923).

REPUBLIC OF CENTRAL LITHUANIA. See CENTRAL LITHUANIA, REPUBLIC OF.

REPUBLIC OF MOUNTAINOUS ARMENIA. See MOUNTAINOUS ARMENIA, REPUBLIC OF.

REPUBLIC OF NORTHERN INGRIA. See NORTHERN INGRIA, REPUBLIC OF.

REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEES. During the civil wars, revolutionary committees (revkomy) were established by the Bolsheviks either as, in effect, provisional governments of areas that had recently been conquered by the Red Army, or as provisional administrations of areas that it was anticipated would soon be conquered by the Red Army. The latter (examples of which include the Polrevkom, the Galrevkom, and the Sibrevkom) were created on Soviet territory and then moved into (or toward) their “home” territory, as the Red Army advanced. The former operated as underground organizations on territory held by the Whites or nationalist forces (an example is the Azerbaijan revkom). Their operations were guided by a decree of VTsIK (“On Revolutionary Committees”) of 24 October 1919 and were based on the experience of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet during the October Revolution. Most revkomy were supplanted by the regular Soviet administrative apparatus by the beginning of 1920, although the Sibrevkom, which had to deal with the prolonged Iakutsk Revolt, remained in existence until 1 December 1925.

Revolutionary Communists. See Party of Revolutionary Communism.

REVOLUTIONARY FIELD STAFF. This command section of the early Soviet forces was in existence at Mogilev during the period of transition from the Imperial Russian Army, through volunteer detachments, to the formal establishment of the Red Army. It was founded on 27 November 1917, on the orders of N. V. Krylenko, the new commander in chief of the army. On 10 December 1917, M. K. Ter-Arutiuniants was named head of the Revolutionary Field Staff, with B. B. Kamenshchikov and I. P. Pavlunovskii as his deputies and Jukums Vācietis as quartermaster general. The body was placed in direct subordination to V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, commander of all Soviet forces in Ukraine.

The Revolutionary Field Staff played an important role, in early 1918, in securing Soviet power in western and northwest Russia, particularly in organizing the suppression of the Dowbor-Muśnicki uprising. It was also responsible for organizing the force commanded by R. I. Berzin that was sent to Kiev to challenge the Ukrainian Central Rada. When, on 18 February 1918, following the Soviet government’s initial refusal to sign a peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk, German forces recommenced their invasion of northwest Russia in the Eleven-Days War, the Revolutionary Field Staff was withdrawn from Mogilev to Orel. There, on 12 March 1918, it was disbanded.

Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine. The Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine (RIAU) coalesced, in September 1918, under the command of Nestor Makhno, from numerous armed bands, dedicated to various brands of anarchism, that were operating around the village of Guliai-Pole, Ekaterinoslav guberniia, in southeast Ukraine, initially to fight the Austro-German intervention and the forces of the Ukrainian State. It subsequently fought against the Ukrainian Army and the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), sometimes in alliance with the Red Army (e.g., as the 7th, 8th, and 9th Trans-Dnepr Regiments from February to April 1919). Indeed, its operations in the rear of the AFSR, during the Whites’ advance on Moscow in late 1919 (notably during the Battle of Peregonovka, 25–27 September 1919), played a major part in the defeat of the forces of General A. I. Denikin. The Insurgent Army also, in November 1920, played a significant role in storming the Perekop peninsula and in driving the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel from Crimea. From late 1920, however, it fought the Red Army, following Moscow’s declaration that Makhno was an outlaw and a bandit for refusing to obey orders to send his units to the front against Poland.

Claims that at its peak, in December 1919, the RIAU had a strength of some 80,000 infantry and 20,000 cavalry, are probably exaggerated, but it was a significant force, organized into the 1st (Donets) Corps, the 2nd (Azov) Corps, the 3rd (Ekaterinoslav) Corps, the 4th (Crimean) Corps, and a strategic reserve (incorporating the 1st Machine-gun Regiment). Each corps had one infantry and one cavalry brigade, and each brigade consisted of three or four regiments. The RIAU was an extremely mobile force and made extensive use of both its cavalry and the tachanka. It also commanded at least 118 field guns and (at various times) 7 armored trains. By the summer of 1921, however, under constant pressure from the Reds, the force had shrunk to a few thousand men, scattered across Ukraine and southern Russia. A handful of them escaped into Romania with Makhno in August 1921; others continued to resist the Soviet authorities until at least 1924.

The command structure of the RIAU was not of a traditional military type. There were no officers in the formal sense, and all commanders were, in theory, elected and recallable on the vote of soldiers’ committees or general assemblies (although Makhno’s decision seems to have been final in most cases of promotion, demotion, and whatever was the anarchist version of cashiering). Other than Makhno, among the force’s most prominent commanders were Semen Karetnik, V. F. Belash, Fedir Shchus′, and Lev Zadov. Exiled Makhnovists reportedly fought in the Lieutenant Shevchenko Company of the Mickiewicz-Palafox Battalion of the XIII International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.

REVOLUTIONARY TRIBUNALS. The revolutionary tribunals (revtribunaly) were organs of popular justice (named after the infamous Revolutionary Tribunal of the French Revolution), established in Soviet Russia by the Sovnarkom “Decree on Justice, No. 1,” of 22 November 1917, “for the purpose of the struggle against counter-revolutionary forces and to defend the revolution, as well as to fight against marauders and profiteers, sabotage and other abuses by merchants, industrialists, civil servants and others.” As such, they became a central feature of the Red Terror.

When the Cheka came into being (7 December 1917), one of its tasks was to hand suspects over to the tribunals. Subsequent Sovnarkom decrees (including those of 1 January, 4 May, and 3 June 1918 and 12 April 1919) formalized their precedence over other judicial organs (so-called people’s courts) and gave them unrestricted rights of prosecution and sentencing. The latter, including from 13 June 1918 the option of a death sentence (first imposed on Admiral A. M. Shchastnyi on 22 June 1918), was to be decided by a majority vote “according to the dictates of the revolutionary conscience.” It is clear, though, that local revolutionary tribunals also dealt with mundane, day-to-day crimes, such as burglary, when the regular courts became overloaded with such cases. It is also clear that trials did not always run as smoothly as the authorities desired, or that they inevitably delivered the desired verdicts: for example, the first major trial handled by the revtribunal of the Petrograd Soviet, in which (in December 1917) the Kadet luminary and philanthropist Countess S. V. Panina was accused of embezzling the funds of the People’s Commissariat for Education (as, in effect, she had), resulted in a guilty verdict but a sentence merely of “public censure.”

Trials were supposed to last no more than one week and featured state prosecutors and state defense counsels. The personnel of the revolutionary tribunals were elected by local soviets at provincial level, although they existed also in garrisons and other institutions, and included permanent chairmen and secretaries and 40 jurors, who were to serve for one month. On 16 May 1918, a Special Revolutionary Tribunal was attached to VTsIK, and on 21 October 1919, another was established within the Cheka, to consider the most serious cases of profiteering and bribery. With the creation of provincial courts in 1923 (and the general regularization of the Soviet legal system), the revtribunaly ceased to operate.

REVVOENSOVET OF THE REPUBLIC. Also known in English as the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic, or the Revolutionary War Council (and frequently referred to by its Russian abbreviation, RVSR), this body was the highest military authority in Soviet Russia from 6 September 1918 until 20 June 1934 (although, from 28 August 1923, it was called the Revvoensovet of the USSR). It was established, according to the decree of VTsIK of 2 September 1918, “On Declaring the Soviet Republic to be an Armed Camp,” in the aftermath of a series of reverses for the Red Army in the previous month—notably the landing of Allied forces at Arkhangel′sk (2 August 1918), the capture of Kazan′ by People’s Army of Komuch in alliance with the Czechoslovak Legion (6–7 August 1918), the Izhevsk–Votkinsk uprising (7 August 1918), the entry into Baku of Dunsterforce (14 August 1918), and the capture of Ekaterinodar and Novorossiisk by the Whites’ Volunteer Army (15–26 August 1918)—as well as an eruption of internal crises, notably the attempt on the life of V. I. Lenin and the assassination of Moisei Uritskii (both on 30 August 1918) and the unmasking of the so-called Lockhart plot (31 August 1918).

Previously, in the hierarchy of the Red Army, two overlapping high military authorities had coexisted: the Supreme Military Council and the Operational Section of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs. Henceforth, however, with the establishment of the RVSR, all Red fronts, armies, and military organizations and institutions, at the front and in the rear, operational and administrative, were subordinated to the Revvoensovet of the Republic (although the scope of its authority over the rear and questions of supply was considerably diminished by the creation of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defense on 30 November 1918). The Revvoensovet of the Republic was headed by its chairman, the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs (from July 1923, the People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs), who was formally nominated by VTsIK. Membership in the RVSR wavered between 2 and 13 over the course of its existence (not including the chairman, his secretary, and the main commander in chief, or glavkom, of Red forces); in sum, during its institutional lifetime, a total of 52 individuals participated in it. Members were formally nominated by the Sovnarkom of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. However, members’ other duties often necessitated their presence at the front, so full meetings were initially very rare, which led to some friction. This was one reason why, on 8 July 1919, a Sovnarkom decree was issued that cut the membership of the RVSR to six (including the chairman, deputy chairman, and glavkom). Thereafter, participation was more uniform, and meetings were more regular (usually Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10:00 a.m. to noon).

The Revvoensovet of the Republic exercised control and direction of the Red Army (both military and political) through a set of subordinate staffs and directorates: chiefly, the Directorate of Affairs (i.e., Secretariat) of the RVSR, the Field Staff of the RVSR, the All-Russian Main Staff (Vseroglavshtab), the All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars (from May 1919, the Political Directorate of the RVSR, PUR), the Supreme Military Inspectorate, the Central Directorate of Supply, the Naval Section, the Military-Revolutionary Tribunal, and the Military-Legal Council. By early 1919, a hierarchical structure of revvoensovets was more or less in place, with army-level revvoensovets answerable to front-level revvoensovets, which answered, in turn, to the Revvoensovet of the Republic. On 28 August 1923, the RVSR was transformed into the Revolutionary-Military Council of the USSR.

The chairman of the RVSR throughout most of the civil-war period was L. D. Trotsky (6 September 1918–26 January 1925). His deputy was E. M. Sklianskii (22 October 1918–11 March 1924), succeeded by M. V. Frunze (14 March 1924–31 October 1925). Main Commanders of the Armed Forces of the Republic were Jukums Vācietis (6 September 1918–8 July 1919) and S. S. Kamenev (8 July 1919–28 April 1924). The initial members of the RVSR were Trotsky, Vācietis, Jūlijs Daniševskis, P. A. Kobozev, K. A. Mekhonishin, F. F. Raskol′nikov, and I. I. Smirnov. For a full list of RVSR members during the revolutionary period (most of whom were killed during the Terror of the 1930s because of the institution’s association with Trotsky), see appendix 1.

REVVOENSOVET OF THE REPUBLIC, FIELD STAFF OF THE. The highest operational organ of the main command of the Red Army, this body was formed on 6 September 1918, to replace the staff of the former Supreme Military Council of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and had responsibility for all operational decisions effecting Red forces. It was originally called the Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (RVSR) and received its more enduring title on 8 November 1918. It consisted of the Operational Directorate; Administrative-Educational Board; Registration Directorate; Central Directorate of Military Supplies; Field Directorate for Aviation; Directorate of Inspectors of Infantry, Cavalry (from 1919), Artillery, Engineers, and Armored Units (from 1920); Military-Economic Directorate; Military-Sanitary Directorate; and Reconnaissance Section. The independent and critical spirit of the Field Staff, which was dominated by military specialists, rankled with some Leftist Bolsheviks, and its operational freedom was reined in, from July 1919 onward, by the RVSR. On 10 February 1921, the institution was merged with Vseroglavshtab to form a unified Staff of the Worker-Peasant Red Army.

Chiefs of the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic were N. I. Rattel′ (6 September–21 October 1918); F. V. Kostiaev (21 October 1918–16 June 1919); M. D. Bonch-Bruevich (16 June–13 July 1919); and P. P. Lebedev (13 July 1919–14 February 1921).

Riabikov, Pavel Fedorovich (24 March 1875–27 August 1932). Major general (31 March 1917). Born into a military family, the White general P. F. Riabikov was a graduate of the Polotsk Cadet Corps (1893), the Constantine Cadet Corps (1896), and the Academy of the General Staff (1901). He had a background in military intelligence and served in the Russo–Japanese War and the First World War (as commander of the 199th Kronshtadt Infantry Regiment, 16 February 1916–January 1917). In December 1917, he was named second quartermaster general of the General Staff, and in March 1918, was assigned to the staff academy as a lecturer. He was then evacuated to Ekaterinburg with the academy and took the first opportunity to desert to the Whites.

Riabikov spent much of the civil wars with the general staff academy at Tomsk, being named a professor of military history on 7 May 1919. He was then named second quartermaster general of the main staff of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (28 May 1919) and subsequently served as chief of staff of the Eastern Front (2 October–8 November 1919). In March 1920, having moved to Chita, as a participant in the Great Siberian (Ice) March, he was sent first to China, then to Japan, as the official representative of Ataman G. M. Semenov.

With the collapse of the White movement in the Far East, Riabikov turned to journalism as, in 1922–1923, one of the editors of the Harbin-based journal Ekonomicheskoe obozrenie (“The Economic Review”). In 1927, he moved to Czechoslovakia, where he taught a course on the history of the First World War at the Russian People’s University in Prague. Riabikov is buried in Prague’s Olšanské cemetery.

RIABOVOL, NIKOLAI STEPANOVICH (17 December 1883–13 June 1919). Lieutenant (1916). The Cossack politician N. S. Riabovol was born at Dinskaia stanitsa, into the family of a member of the Kuban Cossack Host. (His father was the village scribe.) He attended the Ekaterinodar Realschule and the Kiev Polytechnical Institute, but did not graduate from the latter, as he could not fund the final year of his engineering course. From 1909, he helped organize the cooperative administration of the Kuban–Black Sea Railway, eventually becoming a director of that company. He was mobilized in 1915, and after completing training as a military engineer, joined a sapper’s detachment in Finland.

In May 1917, Riabovol returned to the Kuban and was elected head of the Regional Food Supply Committee; in September of that year, he was elected head of the Kuban Host Rada. As such, he effectively became president of the Kuban People’s Republic, following the establishment of that entity in January 1918. In that capacity, he journeyed to Kiev in the spring of 1918 to establish relations with the Ukrainian State of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii. On returning to the Kuban, he attempted to establish the Kuban’s autonomy, in the face of firm opposition to such an idea from the Whites’ Volunteer Army. In the summer of 1919, he was shot and killed as he returned to his quarters while attending a Cossack conference at Rostov-on-Don. The assassins were never identified, but many in the Kuban believed that they were acting on the orders of the White leadership.

RIGA, TREATY OF (11 August 1920). This agreement, signed (following an armistice in their hostilities of 30 January 1920) by representatives of the Republic of Latvia (including Jānis Vestmanis) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (including A. A. Ioffe), brought to an end the Latvian War of Independence and established the Soviet–Latvian border. Under its Article II, Soviet Russia recognized “without objection the independence and sovereignty of the Latvian State” and forever renounced “all sovereign rights held by Russia in relation to the Latvian nation and land.” Other articles dealt with the repatriation of people and property (chiefly to Latvia) and the establishment of diplomatic and commercial links between the two countries. The treaty was abrogated by the USSR when the Red Army invaded and occupied Latvia in June 1940.

RIGA, TREATY OF (18 March 1921). This agreement brought to an end the Soviet–Polish War. Negotiations began at Minsk as early as 17 August 1920 (while the Red Army was in the ascendant in the conflict and was approaching the gates of Warsaw) and were then transferred to neutral Riga, in Latvia, where they resumed on 21 September 1920, by which time the Polish counteroffensive was approaching Soviet territory. The Polish delegation was led by the deputy minister for foreign affairs, Jan Dąbski, and the Soviet delegation by A. A. Ioffe. Initially, the Soviet side stalled (still entranced by the possibility of turning the Poles and generating a revolution in central Europe), but following the Polish victory in the battle of the Neman River, an armistice agreement was signed on 12 October 1920 (coming into effect on 18 October).

The final treaty, signed five months later, consisted of 26 articles and 5 annexes. These, inter alia, defined the Soviet–Polish frontier and dealt with issues pertaining to the sovereignty of the signatory powers, as well as matters of citizenship, the rights of national minorities, and repatriation, and established regulations for diplomatic and commercial relations between Soviet Russia and Poland. The treaty also stipulated that Polish art treasures and other cultural goods held on Russian territory be returned to Poland (e.g., the contents of the Załuski Library, which had been taken to St. Petersburg in 1794), although in reality, only a minute portion of such valuables was ever repatriated. Most notable in all this was that the agreement granted Poland territories well to the east of the Curzon line and contravened Poland’s military agreements with the Ukrainian National Republic (the Treaty of Warsaw, 21–24 April 1920). The new frontier ran east of the L′vov–Vil′na railway and, in the north, a strip of territory awarded to Poland (linking Vil′na with Latvia) separated Soviet Belorussia from Lithuania. In the south, the Zbruch River became the border. Consequently, territories populated by large numbers of Ukrainians and Belorussians—10 million of them by some estimates—were incorporated into the Second Poland Republic (notably the areas formerly controlled, or at least claimed, by the West Ukrainian People’s Republic). On the other hand, by signing the treaty, Poland had to evacuate its forces from areas even farther east (notably Minsk) and granted official recognition to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, thereby shattering Józef Piłsudski’s dream of a grand, anti-Russian, eastern European federation stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea (Międzymorze), and also renouncing all Poland’s claims to its borders of 1772, prior to the First Partition of Poland. In effect, at Riga the Poles recovered only those eastern borderlands (the Kresy Wschodnie) lost to Russia in the third partition of Poland of 1795. The Poles also accepted a share of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve amounting to 73 million gold rubles, having initially staked a claim to 296 million. (Warsaw’s willingness to accept such terms was determined in part by its anxiety regarding the impending League of Nations plebiscite in Upper Silesia, which was more likely to go Poland’s way if a secure peace had been achieved in the east.) The treaty lapsed with the USSR’s invasion of Poland in late 1939 and was replaced by a new Soviet–Polish border agreement in 1945.

RIGHT CENTER. Sometimes referred to as the Moscow Center, this clandestine anti-Bolshevik organization was created in March 1918 and united elements of the right wing of the Kadets with representatives of right-wing and monarchist groups, such as the Union of Public Men, the All-Russian Union of Landowners, and the All-Russian Congress of Trade and Industry. Among its founding figures were the Kadets N. I. Astrov, V. A. Stepanov, and P. B. Struve, and it was led by another right-wing Kadet, Professor P. I. Novgorodtsev. Other members included the former tsarist minister A. V. Krivovshein, the former state councilor V. I. Gurko, and the former assistant minister of foreign affairs of the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, S. M. Leont′ev.

Its members (many of whom entered also into the anti-Bolshevik National Center) rallied around a platform that refuted the right to rule of the Constituent Assembly elected in 1917, posited a constitutional monarchy as the natural form of government for a reunited Russian Empire, and set as their task the unification of all nonsocialist organizations—both for the struggle against the Bolsheviks and to ensure that other socialist parties (notably the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries) did not usurp power. However, tensions arose within the organization between those who saw Russia’s immediate salvation as arriving in the form of an Austro-German intervention to overthrow the Soviet government and those (chiefly the Kadets) who remained loyal to the Allies and wished to continue the war against the Central Powers and to encourage Allied intervention in Russia. In the autumn of 1918, with the collapse of Germany and the ascendancy of the White military dictatorships of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and General A. I. Denikin, the Right Center was disbanded.

RKP(b). The abbreviation usually employed to denote the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), or Russkaia Kommunisticheskaia Partiia (bolsheviki), the name by which the Russian Social-Democratic Party (Bolsheviks) (that is, the Bolsheviks) was formally known from 8 March 1918 to 1925, when the party formally became the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), or VKP(b).

Robins, Raymond (17 September 1873–26 September 1954). The American lawyer and politician Raymond Robins was born on Staten Island, New York; raised in Ohio, Kentucky, and Florida; and graduated in law from the Columbian College in the District of Columbia (now George Washington University) in 1895. He joined the Florida Bar and then the Californian Bar, but in 1897 abandoned his practice to try his luck at prospecting during the Alaskan gold rush. He settled in Illinois in 1900 and became increasingly interested in Christianity and social work. He also offered legal advice to radical socialists and anarchists in Chicago.

In 1917, Robins traveled to Russia, as a member of the American Red Cross mission, and remained in the country throughout much of the civil-war period. Upon his return to the United States, he became a vocal advocate of American recognition of the Soviet government and was influential in persuading Franklin Roosevelt to make such a move in 1933. Robins was paralyzed from the waist down after falling from a tree in 1935, but remained an active proponent of progressive political and social causes for the rest of his life.

Rodzianko, Aleksandr Pavlovich (13 August 1879–6 May 1970). Colonel (6 December 1912), major general (1918), lieutenant general (2 October 1919). One of the most prominent military leaders of the Whites in northwest Russia, A. P. Rodzianko was born into a powerful aristocratic family in Ekaterinoslav guberniia (his uncle was M. V. Rodzianko, the chairman of the Third and Fourth State Dumas). A graduate of the Corps of Pages (1899), the Cavalry Officers School (1907), and a French cavalry school (1908), he began his adult life as a page of chamber at the imperial court. In the First World War, he commanded a number of prestigious guards and cavalry units, rising to the command of the 17th Cavalry Division (October 1917–March 1918). He left his post after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and participated in the formation of the anti-Bolshevik forces that were rallying at Pskov (the Pskov Volunteer Corps).

When German forces withdrew from Pskov, Rodzianko went to Riga to seek the assistance of the Allies, without success. He then traveled to Revel (Tallinn), where in February 1919, General A. F. Dzerozhinskii placed him in command of the Southern Group of the Pskov Volunteer Corps near Iur′ev (Tartu). He succeeded Dzerozhinskii as commander of the corps on 1 June 1919 (having, in practice, commanded it for some time), and subsequently was commander of the North-West Army (19 June–2 October 1919). He clashed, however, with General N. N. Iudenich over the strategy of the planned White offensive in the Baltic: Rodzianko favored a concentration on Pskov and Novgorod, whereas Iudenich insisted on a drive against Petrograd. Nevertheless, he was retained as assistant commander of the North-West Army (2 October–23 November 1919) when Iudenich took over as main commander of the North-West Front. During the White offensive, he participated personally in the capture of Tsarskoe Selo and Gatchina, leading his men from the front.

When the White offensive in the Baltic floundered, Rodzianko was sent to London by Iudenich, to again seek British aid, but with the collapse of the North-West Army and its internment in Estonia, his mission had to be aborted; in January 1920, he went instead to Germany. He subsequently lived in emigration in the United States and is buried in the cemetery of the Novo-Diveyevo Monastery in Spring Valley, New York.

ROGOVSKII, EVGENII FRANTSEVICH (1888–23? March 1950). The radical politician E. F. Rogovskii was born into a noble family at Saratov. His father was a judge. He was a graduate of the Saratov Gymnasium and the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1908), but devoted much of his youthful energies to underground political activities as a member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) from 1905. During the 1905 Revolution, he was a member of that party’s terrorist wing, the Fighting Organization. He was arrested and exiled to Irkutsk, where, following the February Revolution of 1917, he helped organize a people’s militia. In March 1917, he returned to Petrograd and worked with the city duma, eventually becoming mayor. In November 1917, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly as a representative of the Altai region.

When, on 6 January 1918, the Constituent Assembly was closed down by the Bolsheviks, Rogovskii made his way to the Volga, where, during the Democratic Counter-Revolution, he was elected chairman of the Council of Heads of Departments of Komuch, making him, effectively, its prime minister. In that capacity, in September 1918, he attended the Ufa State Conference, serving as that gathering’s deputy chairman. On 4 November 1918, he was elected deputy minister of internal affairs in the cabinet of the Ufa Directory, with special responsibilities for organizing the militia. (The PSR leadership in the east had wanted Rogovskii to be named minister of the interior of the directory, but the Kadets and the military blackballed him, and that post was given to I. A. Mikhailov.) As such, he was a target of criticism by those on the right, who accused Rogovskii of attempting to create a partisan, PSR police force. Consequently, during the Omsk coup of 18 November 1918, he was arrested along with the Directors N. D. Avksent′ev and V. M. Zenzinov and other members of the PSR and was forcibly exiled from Siberia to China.

Rogovskii subsequently settled in France, where during the Second World War he participated in the French Resistance. On 12 February 1945, he was among the group of prominent émigrés, led by V. A. Maklakov, who visited the Soviet embassy in Paris to offer J. V. Stalin their congratulations on the USSR’s victory over Nazi Germany. After the war, he became director of a Russian rest home at Juan les Pins, on the Côte d’Azur. He died there, no later than 23 March 1950.

ROGOZA (RAGOZA), ALEKSANDR (OLEKSANDR) FRANTSEVICH (8 June 1858–29 June 1919). Lieutenant colonel (30 August 1888), colonel (30 August 1892), major general (2 March 1904), lieutenant general (13 April 1908), general of infantry (6 December 1914), staff general (General bunchuzhnyi, Hetmanite Army, April 1918). Aleksandr Ragoza, the minister of war in the Ukrainian State of 1918, was born into a noble family in Vitebsk guberniia, attended the Polotsk Gymnasium, and was a graduate of the Mikhail Artillery School (1887) and the Academy of the General Staff (1883). He saw action in the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–1878 and subsequently occupied numerous military administrative and command posts, rising to the command of the 19th Infantry Division (from 17 March 1909). During the First World War, he was commander of the 25th Army Corps (from 27 September 1914) and was then commander of the 4th (from August 1917, 4th Ukrainian) Army (30 August 1915–26 February 1918).

In April 1918, Rogoza joined the Hetmanite Army and subsequently served in P. P. Skoropadskii’s Council of Ministers as minister of war (1 May–23 November 1918). In that position, he recruited numerous other Russian generals to the Ukrainian forces and began to construct independent Ukrainian staffs, military schools, and other institutions. With the collapse of the Hetmanate and the rise of the Ukrainian National Republic Directory, Rogoza found himself under arrest (from 15 December 1918), but he was soon released and made his way to Odessa, with the intention of journeying to the Kuban to join the Volunteer Army. He was still in Odessa, however, when it was captured by the forces of Otoman Nykyfor Hryhoriiv (5 April 1919). He was once again placed under arrest, was then passed over to the local Bolsheviks, and, having refused to serve in the Red Army, subsequently was publicly executed on Catherine Square in the city.

ROMANOV FAMILY, EXECUTION OF. The shooting of Tsar Nicholas II, his family, and some of their retainers at Ekaterinburg, during the night of 16–17 July 1918, was one of the most widely publicized atrocities of the “Russian” Civil Wars and remains a controversial subject to this day. It is sometimes held to be emblematic of the horrors of the Red Terror, but strictly speaking, it predated that phenomenon by six weeks.

Following his abdication during the February Revolution, Nicholas II (now disparagingly referred to by the new, revolutionary authorities as “Citizen Romanov”) was placed under house arrest with his wife and children at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, near Petrograd. There was some discussion of the possibility that the family might be offered asylum in England, but this was finally refused, apparently upon the insistence of King George V (who had no wish, at a difficult point in the world war, to have his own reign associated with the disgraced and collapsed rule of his cousin). In August 1917, the Russian Provisional Government—which regarded the royal family’s continued presence so close to the capital as both an embarrassment and a potential rallying point for a monarchist counterrevolution (although for public consumption, the government claimed to be protecting Nicholas and his family from the rising tide of disorder)—moved them to Tobol′sk, in western Siberia. In April–May 1918, the royal family was moved again, to Ekaterinburg, and incarcerated in the Ipat′ev house, the former home of a local merchant, now ominously redubbed the “House of Special Purpose.”

On 17 July 1918, as forces of the Czechoslovak Legion approached Ekaterinburg, the family’s guard, commanded by Ia. M. Iurovskii, received orders from the Executive Committee of the Urals Soviet that the Romanovs were to be executed, before they could be liberated by anti-Bolshevik forces. Although it was long denied by the Soviet authorities, it is now known that the Urals Soviet was acting on the direct orders of the secretary of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), Ia. M. Sverdlov, who in turn was following the instructions of V. I. Lenin. Shortly after midnight on 17 July 1918, Nicholas; his wife (the former Empress Alexandra); their daughters Anastasia, Tatiana, O′ga, and Mariia; and their son, Aleksei (the former heir to the throne), were led to the cellar of the house, together with the family physician (E. S. Botkin), cook (I. M. Kharitonov), footman (A. E. Trupp), and a lady in waiting (A. S. Demidova). There, they were all shot and bayoneted to death. The bodies were then variously hacked to pieces, burned, and dissolved in acid before being buried in an abandoned mine outside the city.

The Romanovs’ remains were rediscovered by an amateur archaeologist, Aleksandr Avdonin, and the filmmaker Geli Riabov, in 1979. However, fearful of the reaction of the Soviet authorities to such a revelation (even 60 years after the event), the pair kept this discovery secret until 1989, when Riabov broke the story to the press. The burial site was then excavated in 1991, and all but two of the bodies were discovered and identified through DNA testing. This put an end to the claims of several pretenders, who from the 1920s onward had claimed to be surviving members of the family (notably one Anna Anderson, who had claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia). The bodies were reburied in a state funeral in the St. Catherine Chapel of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, in 1998. They were joined, in 2008, by the final two skeletons, which had recently been recovered (from the same site, near Ekaterinburg) and identified.

The émigré Russian Orthodox Church Abroad had controversially canonized the royal family in 1981s as “new martyrs.” On 15 August 2000, after much debate, the Russian Orthodox Church within Russia canonized them as “passion bearers,” a title denoting those who had met their deaths with Christian humility, rather than those who had died for their religious beliefs. On 1 October 2008, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation ruled that the Romanov family were victims of political repression and that they should be rehabilitated. On the site of the Ipat′ev house (which had been demolished by the Soviet authorities on 22 September 1977) there now stands the huge All Saints Church (formally, the Church on Blood in Honor of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land), which was consecrated by Orthodox patriarchs on 16 June 2003.

Nicholas and his immediate family were not the only members of the royal dynasty to be killed during the revolution. Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich (the youngest son of Tsar Alexander II and brother to Nicholas II) was abducted by a group of Bolsheviks (allegedly including G. I. Miasnikov) at Perm′, on 12 June 1918, and subsequently killed. On the night of 17–18 July 1918, the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich (the fifth son of Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich, and a first cousin of Tsar Alexander III) was executed at Alapaevsk in the northern Urals, alongside three sons of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich (the princes Ivan, Konstantin, and Igor Konstantinovich), Prince Vladimir Paley (the son of the morganatic marriage of Grand Duke Paul Aleksandrovich), and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna (wife of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, the fifth son of Tsar Alexander II). Their bodies were later disinterred by White forces and placed in coffins that were eventually reburied, in April 1920, in the crypt of the chapel of the Russian mission in Peking. (That chapel was later demolished and a parking lot now covers the site, although it is believed that the bodies are still in situ.) On 30 January 1919, the Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich (the eldest son of Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich and a first cousin of Tsar Alexander III) was executed at an unknown site in Petrograd, alongside the Grand Duke Pavel Aleksandrovich (the eighth son of Tsar Alexander II), Grand Duke Dmitrii Konstantinovich (son of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich and a first cousin of Alexander III), and Grand Duke Georgii Mikhailovich (son of Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich and another first cousin of Alexander III).

Romanovskii, Ivan Pavlovich (16 April 1877–5 April 1920). Colonel (25 March 1912), major general (December 1916), lieutenant general (12 November 1918). I. P. Romanovskii, the man who, as chief of staff of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), was widely blamed for the collapse of the White movement in South Russia, was the son of an artillery officer of noble birth and a graduate of the 2nd Moscow Cadet Corps (1897), the Constantine Artillery School (1899), and the Academy of the General Staff (1903). He served in the Finland Life Guards Regiment (27 October 1903–19 September 1904), and in the Russo–Japanese War was on the staff of the 18th Army Corps (24 September 1904–3 January 1906). He then became senior adjutant on the staff of the 9th Eastern Siberian Rifle Division (3–6 January 1906), senior officer for commissions with the staff of the Turkestan Military District (6 January 1906–4 January 1909), and senior adjutant on the staff of the Turkestan Military District (4 January–9 October 1909), before transferring to the Main Directorate of the General Staff, where he worked in the mobilization department (9 October 1909–16 September 1910) and eventually became its assistant head (from 22 October 1910), then its head (from 25 March 1912). He then became commander of a battalion with the 2nd Finnish Rifle regiment (11 May–14 September 1913).

In the First World War, Romanovskii served as chief of staff of the 25th Rifle Division, then commander of the 206th Infantry Regiment (from 6 August 1915), chief of staff of the 52nd Infantry Division, and (from 14 October 1916) quartermaster general of the 10th Army. From 9 April 1917, he was chief of staff of the 8th Army, commanded by General L. G. Kornilov, and on 10 June 1917, he was named quartermaster general on the staff of the supreme commander, General A. A. Brusilov. He remained in that post when Kornilov became supreme commander in July. Along with Kornilov, he was arrested in the aftermath of the Kornilov affair and imprisoned at Bykhov, with some of the other future White leaders: Kornilov himself and Generals A. I. Denikin, A. S. Lukomskii, S. L. Markov, and others. Together with them, he escaped, on 19 November 1917, and disguised as an ensign, made his way to the Don, where he became a pivotal figure in the creation of the Volunteer Army and in the First Kuban (Ice) March.

Romanovskii first joined the staff of General Denikin and was then made chief of staff of the Volunteer Army (February 1918–8 January 1919) and subsequently chief of staff of the AFSR (8 January 1919–29 March 1920). He was also a permanent member of the Special Council and in general was one of Denikin’s most trusted confidants; indeed, Denikin determined that Romanovskii should succeed him as commander in chief, in the case of his own death. As such, he was the target of much criticism in the army, particularly among those who felt that (prior to his death on 1 January 1919) General M. G. Drozdovskii was better qualified to be Denikin’s second-in command. Nevertheless, it was not until the very eve of the disastrous White evacuation of Novorossiisk, in March 1920, that Denikin bowed to the pressure and relieved the man that he would later recall as a “warrior knight” of his post.

Together with the deposed Denikin, Romanovskii soon afterward went into emigration, leaving Feodosiia on 4 April 1920. On 17 April 1920, he was shot dead in the billiard room of the Russian Embassy at Constantinople. The assassin was never caught, but is believed to have been Lieutenant M. A. Khoruzin, a member of a secret monarchist organization (and a former agent of Azbuka), who, like many others on the right, considered Romanovskii a “liberal,” a freemason, and the chief architect of all the failures of the White cause.

ROSHAL′, SEMEN GRIGOR′EVICH (13 January 1896–8 December 1917). One of the first and most celebrated Soviet martyrs of the civil wars, S. G. Roshal′ was born into a middle-class Jewish family in St. Petersburg, where his father was in business. He joined revolutionary study groups as a gymnasium student and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1914. He was called up in September 1915 and sent to the Northern Front, but was soon arrested for agitating among the soldiers and was imprisoned at the Kresty prison in Petrograd. He was freed during the February Revolution and, in 1917, was active as a member of the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b) at Kronshtadt. He was arrested (as an alleged Gewrman agent) by the Russian Provisional Government in the aftermath of the July Days, released only on 8 October 1917. During the October Revolution, he helped organize the defense of Petrograd against the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising, before accompanying N. V. Krylenko to the stavka, where he was present at the lynching of the army commander N. N. Dukhonin. In December 1917, he was dispatched to the Romanian Front, as a Sovnarkom extraordinary commissar for that region, but was arrested by the military authorities at Iaşi (Jassy) and executed. A street and a square in Kronshtadt were subsequently renamed in Roshal′’s honor, as were other public spaces and buildings across the USSR, including (from 1918 to 1944) the Admiraly Embankment in central Petrograd (Leningrad).

ROSTA. This was the acronym by which the state news agency of Soviet Russia, the Russian Telegraph Agency (Rossiiskoe telegrafnoe agentstvo), was generally known after it was founded (and then subordinated directly to VTsIK) on 7 September 1918. The institution united VTsIK’s own press bureau with the Petrograd Telegraph Agency. During the civil-war period, it was particularly associated with agitprop, especially the “Rosta Windows,” stenciled and painted propaganda posters that were displayed in its Moscow office’s windows and (subsequently) elsewhere. These were created by many famous Soviet artists, including M. Cheremnykh (who created the first Rosta window in October 1919), V. V. Maiakovskii, K. S. Malevich, I. A. Maliutin, D. S. Moor, and A. M. Rodchenko. Once the required number of a design of poster had been painted in Moscow, the stencils were dispatched to another town or city for the work to be reproduced there. Generally, the designs were very simple and made suitable for viewing from a distance, often telling a story (or making a propaganda point) in a series of boxed pictures, in a style reminiscent of the traditional Russian lubok (popular printed card). Rosta, which in the course of the civil wars developed subagencies in Siberia, Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and Turkestan—and established overseas offices in Berlin (1918), Tehran (1919), Budapest (1920), Vienna (1921), Stockholm (1921), and Oslo (1921)—survived until 1935. From July 1925 it was under the auspices of the Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union (Telyegrafnoe agentstvo Sovetskogo Soiuza), TASS.

ROVS. This is the acronym, derived from the Russian (Russkii Obshche Voinskii Soiuz), by which the Russian All-Military Union is generally known. ROVS was founded on 1 September 1924, by the last White commander in chief, General P. N. Wrangel, at his base at Sremski Karlovci, in Serbia (although the base of its operations was Paris). It sought to unite all military veterans of the White movement in exile into a single organization, so as to preserve the battle-readiness of Wrangel’s Russian Army and the remnants of other White forces, as they dispersed across the globe during the emigration. According to Article II of its statute, “The basic aims of the All-Russian Military Union are selfless service of the Motherland, irreconcilable struggle against communism and all those who work for the dismemberment of Russia.” To achieve these aims, ROVS offered to support veterans of the Imperial Russian Army and the White armies of the civil wars, to assist such military exiles in finding homes and work in emigration, and to prepare for the future liberation of Russia. Some elements within ROVS favored a very active program of sabotage and propaganda to be undertaken by agents sent into Soviet Russia, but Wrangel resisted this. He resisted too, as long as he could, those many members of the organization who wished it to adopt a monarchist line, preferring to espouse a policy of nonpredetermination. However, Wrangel and ROVS eventually accepted the claim to the Russian throne of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich Romanov.

The organization was divided into regional sections, of which there were initially four: the 1st Section (France and Belgium), the 2nd Section (Germany, Austria, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), the 3rd Section (Bulgaria and Turkey), and the 4th Section (Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey). Later, branches were opened in the Far East (China) and in North and South America. By the early 1930s, ROVs had a membership of some 40,000. Many would have read its official journal, Chasovoi (“The Sentinel”).

Beset by conflicts with other émigré organizations (notably Zemgor) and internal rivalries, ROVs became an obvious and major target for the operations of the Soviet intelligence services (specifically, the OGPU and the NKVD, successors to the Cheka). The latter established a fake anti-Soviet organization, Trest (“the Trust”), during Operation “Trust,” to lure White émigrés back to the USSR, where they were promptly arrested. The Soviet intelligence services also instituted a secret provocative and diversionary group within ROVS, known as the Inner Line. The activities of the latter, led by General N. V. Skoblin, raised suspicions among some émigrés in the late 1920s, but all warnings were ultimately ignored, leading to the abduction from France of Wrangel’s immediate successor as head of ROVS, General A. T. Kutepov, in 1930, and his successor, General E. K. Miller, in 1938. The latter event led to a great crisis of self-belief and purpose in the organization, which had lost most of its significance in the émigré community by the outbreak of the Second World War.

Nevertheless, ROVS remained in existence, although by the 1990s it had evolved into an organization dedicated to the preservation of the traditions and historical artifacts of the imperial Russian and White armies, although it did (and does) attempt to act as a pressure group, lobbying European parliaments to seek justice for the victims of communism and criticizing recent Russian regimes. In the late 1990s, a schism emerged within the organization over the issue of whether or not, given the collapse of the Soviet Union, ROVS should be disbanded. In 2000, the vast majority of members voted for dissolution, but a faction within Russia (led by Igor Ivanov) refused to accept the legitimacy of this decision and named the aged civil-war veteran Nikolai Feodorov chairman of a breakaway organization that retained the name ROVS. Feodorov, who lived in the United States, died in 2003.

The chairmen of ROVS were General Wrangel (1924–1928); General Kutepov (1928–1930); General Miller (1930–1937); F. F. Abramov (1937–1938); A. P. Arkhangel′skii (1938–1957); A. A. von Lampe (1957–1967); V. G. Kharzhevskii (1967–1979); V. P. Osipov (1979–1983); V. I. D′iakov (1983–1984); P. A. Kaplinichenko (1984–1986); B. M. Ivanov (1986–1988); N. I. Iovich (1988); V. V. Granitov (1988–1999); V. N. Butkov (1999–2000); and V. A. Vishnevskii (2000).

ROZANOV, SERGEI NIKOLAEVICH (24 September 1869–28 August 1937). Major general (24 August 1914), lieutenant general (1918). Although S. N. Rozanov became one of the most prominent (and feared) White generals in Siberia, his background remains obscure, although it is known that he was a graduate of the 3rd Moscow Cadet Corps, the Mikhail Artillery School, and the Academy of the General Staff (1897). During the Russo–Japanese War, he served on the staff of the quartermaster general of the 2nd Manchurian Army, and during the First World War rose to chief of staff of the 3rd Caucasian Army Corps, in 1916, and of the 13th Army Corps, from 1916 to 1917.

Following the October Revolution, Rozanov was mobilized into the Red Army and worked on the Directorate of the All-Russian Main Staff, before deserting to anti-Bolshevik forces on the Volga in September 1918. He then served as chief of staff with the People’s Army of Komuch and subsequently fulfilled the same role in the forces of the Ufa Directory (25 September–21 November 1918). During the Omsk coup, he seems initially to have supported the candidature of General V. G. Boldyrev as dictator and was temporarily retired, “due to illness,” when Admiral A. V. Kolchak became supreme ruler, but returned to service early in 1919, and on 13 March of that year was made commander of the Irkutsk Military District, with his authority extended (as governor-general) over Eniseisk guberniia and large parts of Krasnoiarsk guberniia. There, as commandant of a significant swath of the rear of Kolchak’s forces, he was chiefly engaged in combating attacks upon the Trans-Siberian Railway by Red partisans on the Kansk–Taishet Front. Infamously, by an order of 27 March 1919, he ordered the execution of every 10th villager in areas where there had been attacks upon the line. From 30 July 1919 to 31 January 1920, he was commander of forces (in practice, again, governor-general) of the Maritime Province and commander of the Amur Military District, where again he was occupied with counterinsurgency operations (notably the suppression of the Gajda putsch at Vladivostok in November 1920). In late 1919, however, he fell under suspicion of corruption, having been accused of selling state-owned supplies of tea, cotton, and other goods in Japan for personal gain. In emigration from 1922, he lived briefly in Peking (where he worked as a bookkeeper) and then in France.

ROZENGOL′TS, ARKADII PAVLOVICH (4 November 1889–15 March 1938). A leading Red military organizer of the civil-war period, A. P. Rozengol′ts was the son of a Vitebsk merchant. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1905, adhering to the Bolshevik faction, and thereafter devoted himself to party work at Vitebsk and Kiev, before finding employment in an insurance business in Moscow in 1915. Following the February Revolution, he was active on the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet, and during the October Revolution was a member of the Moscow Military-Revolutionary Committee.

As a close ally of L. D. Trotsky in the civil-war period, Rozengol′ts was an early member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (30 September 1918–8 July 1919), as well as a member of the Revvoensovets of a number of individual fronts and armies: the 5th Red Army (16 August 1918–1 April 1919); the Eastern Front (28 August 1918–1 April 1919); the 8th Red Army (7 December 1918–18 March 1919); the 7th Red Army (30 June–30 September 1919); the 13th Red Army (7 October–19 December 1919); the Western Front (8 May–2 June 1920); the 15th Red Army (9 June–26 September 1920); the Caucasian Front (23 August 1920–29 May 1921); and again, the Western Front (31 December 1921–8 April 1924). He made a particularly notable contribution to the organization of Red forces during the fighting around Kazan′, over the summer of 1918, and during the retreat from Ufa in March–April 1919. In 1920, he joined the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Finance of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and was also heavily involved in the reconstruction of the railway system as chairman of Tsektran (the Central Transportation Committee of the RSFSR).

From 28 August 1923 to 10 December 1924, Rozengol′ts was again on the Revvoensovet of the Republic (and later of the Revvoensovet of the USSR), as chief of the Air Fleet. Thereafter, he held numerous senior party and government posts, including candidate member (from 1927–1930) and then (1930–1932) member of the presidium of the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), member of the collegium (1928) and then (1928–1930) deputy people’s commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin) of the USSR, and (from 1930) People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade of the USSR. From February 1934, he was also a candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Rozengol′ts also served as an advisor (June 1925–1926) and then deputy (1926–26 May 1927) to the head of the Soviet trade mission in London, and his espionage activities at this time were one cause of the breaking off of diplomatic relations between Britain and the USSR in May 1927. In October 1923, he had also been a signatory of the “Declaration of the 46,” which was critical of the party leadership (i.e., the triumvirate of L. B. Kamenev, G. E. Zinov′ev, and J. V. Stalin). He was removed from his posts on 14 June 1937 (and made, briefly, chief of the Directorate of the State Reserve of Sovnarkom), and on 10 October 1937 was arrested. Rozengol′ts was one of those tried alongside N. I. Bukharin, as part of the “Anti-Soviet Right-Trotskyist Bloc” (“The Trial of the 21”), in March 1938, accused of a range of terrorist and espionage crimes. He was sentenced to death on 13 March 1938 and was shot two days later. He was rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of the USSR on 4 February 1988.

RSDLP. See RUSSIAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC LABOR PARTY.

RSDLP(b). The abbreviation for Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), by which, in English, the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party was generally known after it had constituted itself as a separate party at its Prague conference in January 1912. It remained under this title until it changed its name to the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), or RKP(b), on 8 March 1918.

rsdlp(b), military organization of the. The military wing of the Bolshevik organization was founded (before the split of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party) during the 1905 Revolution, with the aim of fostering revolutionary activity in the imperial army. In March 1906, the first congress of Bolshevik military organizations was convened in Moscow, but many of its delegates were arrested. Following the February Revolution, the Military Organization experienced a renaissance, with a decision of the party Central Committee to formally reestablish it on 9 March of that year. Subsequently, it was particularly active among soldiers’ and sailors’ committees in the Petrograd garrison, the Baltic Fleet, and the Northern Front. Its newspaper, Soldatskaia pravda (“The Soldier’s Truth”), was among the most widely distributed in 1917, and according to Soviet sources, delegates representing 60 military organizations and 26,000 party members were present at the organization’s conference in Moscow in July of that year. The Bolshevik Central Committee seems, at times, to have had difficulty controlling the more impulsive members of the Military Organization, where sentiments akin to anarchism were common, and members of the organization were implicated in the disorders of the July Days. On the other hand, its members were also responsible for preparing for the October Revolution, by marshalling Red Guards and staffing the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and individual members subsequently played important roles in the Red Army, the People’s Commissariat of Military and Naval Affairs, and other Soviet organs during the civil wars: for example, V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, G. I. Blagonarov, Semen Dimanstein, M. V. Frunze, S. M. Kirov, N. V. Krylenko, K. A. Mekhonoshin, V. R. Menzhinskii, A. F. Miasnikov, V. I. Nevskii, N. I. Podvoiskii, F. F. Raskol′nikov, S. G. Roshal′, and R. F. Sivers. Following the demobilization of the imperial army, the Military Organization was disestablished in March 1918.

Rsfsr. See rUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATIVE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC.

RUBIN, ABRAM ISRAILEVICH (AVRAAM AZARIEVICH) (1883–21 October 1918). The Soviet politician and military commander A. I. Rubin studied in the Law Faculty of Moscow University, but did not graduate. In 1917, he was a participant in the 1st and 2nd All-Russian Congresses of Soviets and was active in Petrograd during the October Revolution, subsequently being assigned to the financial department of VTsIK. Having been dispatched to South Russia with Red Guards units, in December 1917 he helped establish Soviet power at Novorossiisk. From March 1918, he was chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Black Sea Soviet Republic and subsequently occupied the same post in the merged Kuban–Black Sea Soviet Republic (May–July 1918) and the North Caucasus Soviet Republic (July–October 1918). He was also a member of the North Caucasus Regional Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and in sum, was one of the most powerful Bolsheviks in the region in 1918. In October 1918, Rubin was among those Soviet leaders arrested and then executed at Piatigorsk by the renegade commander of the 11th Red Army, I. L. Sorokin.

RUDNEV, VADIM VIKTOROVICH (5 January 1879–19 November 1940). The anti-Bolshevik politician V. V. Rudnev was born into a petty noble family at Ostrogozhsk, Voronezh guberniia, where his father worked as a civil servant. He was a graduate of the Voronezh Gymnasium (1897) and subsequently studied in the medical faculty of Moscow University, but was expelled for political activities in 1901 and was briefly exiled to Siberia. He joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) and was arrested in 1905, but was released in time to lead the PSRs’ activities in Moscow during the uprising there of December 1905. From 1907, Rudnev was a member of the party Central Committee. He was arrested in 1907 and sentenced to four years of exile in Siberia. In 1911, he returned from exile and went abroad, settling in Basel, where he completed his medical studies. He returned to Russia in 1914, having adopted a defensist position, and found work as a doctor. In 1917, he was again head of the PSR city organization in Moscow and, from 11 July 1917, was mayor of Moscow, using that post to offer vocal support to the efforts of A. F. Kerensky as head of the Russian Provisional Government.

During the October Revolution, Rudnev formed and led Moscow’s Committee of Public Salvation. He was subsequently elected to the Constituent Assembly and was convener of its PSR caucus. When the assembly was closed down by the Bolsheviks on 6 January 1918, Rudnev became one of the leading lights in the Union for the Regeneration of Russia. On behalf of the union, in May 1918 he moved to South Russia, where he was chiefly active among local government organizations around Odessa and also attended the Jassy Conference, before moving into emigration on 5 April 1919, as forces of the Allied intervention withdrew from the region. He went via Constantinople to Paris, where he played a leading role in the charitable activities of Zemgor and other émigré organizations and was associated with Rightist-PSR political and publishing circles. Upon the German invasion of France in June 1940, Rudnev moved with his wife to Pau, on the Atlantic coast, where he died of cancer on the eve of a planned move to the United States.

Rumcherod. This short-lived organ of Soviet power in southeast Ukraine and Bessarabia functioned from May 1917 to May 1918, its name being an acronym of the Russian words for “Romania, Black Sea and Odessa” and its full name being the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of the Romanian Front, the Black Sea and Odessa Military District. In its initial form, Rumcherod was dominated by Mensheviks and members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) who opposed the October Revolution. Consequently, on the orders of war commissar N. V. Krylenko, it was dismissed and a new committee elected at the 2nd Congress of Front and District Soviets at Odessa, on 10 December 1917. This body was made up of 70 Bolsheviks, 55 members of the PSR, 22 representatives of peasant organizations, and 32 others; a Moscow Bolshevik, V. G. Iudovskii, was placed at its head. On 18 January 1918, Rumcherod proclaimed (and was thus succeeded by) the Odessa Soviet Republic, which survived until May 1918.

Russian All-Military Union. See ROVS.

Russian Army (of Admiral A. V. Kolchak). This was the name by which was collectively known those White forces in Siberia whose operations, during the civil wars, were coordinated from Omsk by the Staff of the Supreme Ruler, Admiral A. V. Kolchak, from 24 December 1918 to 4 January 1920. At their height, on 1 June 1919, these forces mustered 680,000 men, according to official data, although less than a quarter of that number were stationed at the front. The Russian Army initially included the Siberian Army, the Western Army, the Orenburg Army, the Semirech′e Army, the Urals Army, and the Southern Army, as well as other smaller combinations. Following the failure of the Russian Army’s spring offensive, during which its forces advanced across the Urals toward the Volga before being driven back into Siberia by a Red Army counteroffensive, its complement was reorganized into the White Eastern Front (from 22 July 1919), containing the 1st Army, the 2nd Army, the 3rd Army, and the Southern Army (the last of these deployed across Semirech′e). When an attempt to turn back the Reds on the River Tobol′ failed in September 1919, the 1st Army was withdrawn to the rear, and the remaining forces were reformed once more (on 10 October 1919), into the Moscow Army Group. When Omsk, Kolchak’s capital, fell, uncontested, to the Reds on 14 November 1919, the remnants of the Russian Army set off east toward Transbaikalia on the Great Siberian (Ice) March. Most of those who survived were incorporated into the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov in Transbaikalia.

RUSSIAN ARMY (of General P. N. Wrangel). This White force, the last of any great significance to take the field during the “Russian” Civil Wars, was formed on 28 April 1920, on the basis of those elements of the Armed Forces of South Russia that had been evacuated to Crimea from Novorossiisk, the Kuban, Georgia, and Odessa, as well as the 3rd (Crimean) Corps, which under General Ia. A. Slashchev, in late 1919 to early 1920 had defended the Perekop peninsula against Red attacks, thereby securing a safe haven in Crimea.

As of 1 June 1920, Wrangel’s Russian Army was composed of the 1st (Volunteer) Army Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General A. P. Kutepov (to 3 September 1920) and Lieutenant General P. K. Pisarev (from 4 September 1920), including the Kornilov Infantry Division, the Markov Infantry Division, the Drozdovskii Infantry Division (i.e., the colorful units), the 1st Cavalry Division, and the 2nd Cavalry Division; the 2nd (formerly Crimean) Army Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General Ia. A. Slashchev (to 18 August 1920), including the 13th Infantry Division, the 34th Infantry Division, and the Terek–Astrakhan Cossack Brigade; the Don (Cossack) Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General F. F. Abramov, including the 2nd Don Division, the 3rd Don Division, and the Guards Don Brigade; and the Composite (Mounted) Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General P. K. Pisarev, including the Composite Kuban Division and the 3rd Chechen–Astrakhan Mounted Division. By 20 September 1920, as the Russian Army grew and took the offensive, it was composed of the 1st Army, formed on 17 September 1920, commanded by Lieutenant General A. P. Kutepov, including the 1st Army Corps, the Kornilov Infantry Division, the Markov Infantry Division, and the Drozdovskii Infantry Division; the Don (Cossack) Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General F. F. Abramov and (from 1 October 1920) Major General A. V. Govorov, including the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Don Cossack Divisions and the 1st Mounted Division; the 2nd Army, formed on 17 August 1920 and commanded by Lieutenant General D. P. Dratsenko and (from 1 October 1920) Lieutenant General F. F. Abramov, including the 2nd Army Corps and the 13th and 34 Infantry Divisions; the Independent Mounted Group, formed in September 1920, commanded by Lieutenant-General N. G. Babiev and (from 1 October 1920) Lieutenant General V. G. Naumenko, including the 1st Mounted Division and the 6th and 7th Infantry Divisions; and the Expeditionary-Landing Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General S. G. Ulagai, including the 1st and 2nd Kuban Divisions and the Composite Kuban Division. The reserve of the Russian Army consisted of the Independent Mountain (Terek) Cossack Division, commanded by Major General V. K. Agoev and (from 26 August 1920) and Major General N. V. Shinkarenko. In total, by October 1920 the Russian Army could muster around 50,000 men, with about 35,000 of them at the front. The army also boasted numerous aircraft (in six squadrons) and tanks and seven armored trains.

With such numbers, it could not realistically hope to challenge the Bolsheviks’ hold on central Russia, but the Russian Army was easier to manage in such a compact territory than the larger armies built by General A. I. Denikin and Admiral A. V. Kolchak in 1919. Wrangel also hoped to take advantage of the Reds’ preoccupation with Soviet–Polish War. (Negotiations were entered into with both Poland and the Ukrainian National Republic Directory regarding joint operations against the Red Army.) However, his forces were desperately short of supplies. Consequently, an advance was launched out of Crimea into the agriculturally rich lands of Northern Tauride on 8 June 1920, reaching the lower Dnepr within a week, while forces under General Slashchev landed on the northern shore of the Sea of Azov and drove north. The following month, on 8 August 1920, General Ulagai’s expeditionary force landed on the Taman peninsula, hoping to inspire an uprising among the Kuban Cossack Host. After some initial success, however (with White forces pushing as far north as Aleksandrovsk and as far east as Mariupol′), the tide turned, as in September–October 1920 the Soviet government agreed to armistice terms with Poland and turned its attention south. Ulagai’s force was evacuated back to Crimea in the first week of September, while Wrangel’s last push was the so-called Trans-Dnepr Operation, launched by General Kutepov’s 1st Army on 6 October 1920, to try to attract the support of Poland (and the Poles’ ally, France). However, Kutepov could only hold on to a small bridgehead on the right bank of the Dnepr for a week before being forced back. By late October, some 133,000 Red forces had been concentrated against the 37,000 men that remained of the Russian Army. Many of the latter manned the Turkish Wall that formed a barrier across the Perekop, but on 7 November 1920, Red forces were able to outflank them, thanks to unexpectedly cold weather and favorable winds that made the shallow Sivash Salt Sea traversable. The remains of the Russian Army then fell back to the Crimean ports, from where almost 150,000 people were evacuated in mid-November.

After the evacuation of the Crimea, Wrangel did not consider the struggle to be at an end, and even while the troops were en route to refugee camps in Turkey, he reformed the Russian Army into the 1st Army Corps, the Don Corps, and the Kuban Corps, which on 12 February 1921 were said to muster 48,319 men (almost half of them officers). As, over succeeding years, the men were distributed across the Balkans to as far afield as France and Belgium, final (but ultimately fruitless) efforts were made by Wrangel to maintain a formal command structure, a sense of unity, and battle-readiness through the creation of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS).

The Russian Army’s main commander in chief was General P. N. Wrangel. Its chiefs of staff were Lieutenant General S. L. Markov (11 May–16 June 1920) and Lieutenant-General P. N. Shatilov (16 June–14 November 1920).

RUSSIAN COMMUNIST PARTY (BOLSHEVIKS). See RKP(b).

RUSSIAN FOREIGN HISTORICAL ARCHIVE. Founded in Prague in 1923–1924, in affiliation with Zemgor, chiefly as a center for the preservation of documents relating to the Russian Revolution, the anti-Bolshevik movements of the “Russian” Civil Wars, and the Russian emigration, this famed collection (the Russkii zagranichnyi istoricheskii arkhiv) was later supplemented by the archives of the Don Cossack Host. It was subsequently (from 1928) attached to the foreign ministry of Czechoslovakia and was funded by the government in Prague. In December 1945, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the archive’s holdings were transferred on 15 freight cars to the USSR. Officially, the transferred holdings were said to be “a gift” to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, on the occasion of its 220th anniversary, from the working classes of Czechoslovakia. The collections are currently distributed between the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and other archives, notably the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA), in the case of holdings on White military formations, and the Russian State Archive of the Military-Naval Fleet (TsGAVMF).

RUSSIAN LIBERATION COMMITTEE. This organization, which had close links with the long-standing Anglo–American anti-tsarist league, the Society of the Friends of Russian Freedom (founded in November 1889), was created in London in 1918 by Britons who supported the White cause (among them the journalist Harold Williams) and White émigrés (including the Kadets Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams and P. N. Miliukov and the historian Michael Rostovtzeff). Its aim was to propagandize for the White cause and to campaign, through the press and through public meetings, for the expansion of Allied intervention in Russia. The committee published a regular Bulletin from 1919 to February 1920, succeeded by a weekly journal, The New Russia: A Weekly Review of Russian Politics (Nos. 1–46, 5 February–16 December 1920), as well as a series of pamphlets on diverse aspects of contemporary Russian affairs. It acted also as a telegraph agency for the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, distributing to the Western press copies of news telegrams that arrived from Siberia as a counter to the propaganda of the Bolsheviks.

RUSSIAN NATIONAL COUNCIL. This bloc of anti-Bolshevik organizations was created at Baku in November 1918. It united 70 representatives of all-Russian political parties (such as the Kadets and the Mensheviks) and social organizations (such as the Union of Russian Officers); established a 12-man governing council under the Kadet M. F. Podshibiakin; and published a newspaper, Edinaia Rossiia (“United Russia”). It campaigned for the reestablishment of a “Russia, One and Indivisible,” within the pre-1914 borders (with the exception of Poland) of the Russian Empire, which hardly endeared the Russian National Council to its hosts in the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan. It therefore looked instead to establish ties to the National Center and General A. I. Denikin’s Special Council and assisted the Whites in extending their administration over Daghestan from late 1918. When the 11th Red Army invaded Azerbaijan in April 1920, most of the Russian National Council’s members fled into emigration.

Russian orthodox church. See church, russian orthodox.

RUSSIAN POLITICAL CONFERENCE. This White organization was formed in Paris in late 1918. It aimed at unifying the various regional anti-Bolshevik movements and coordinating their activities, particularly with regard to their dealings with the Allies, especially the presentation of a united front on the issue of the territorial integrity of Russia before the impending Paris Peace Conference. Its members included G. E. L′vov (chairman), S. D. Sazonov, B. A. Maklakov, N. V. Chaikovskii, and B. V. Savinkov (who also constituted the Russian Foreign Delegation to coordinate the approaches to the Peace Conference of the governments of A. V. Kolchak and A. I. Denikin). P. B. Struve and foreign representatives of both the National Center and the Union for the Regeneration of Russia were also attached to it, while in early 1919, A. M. Dragomirov arrived from South Russia as the plenipotentiary of Denikin’s Special Council. (Although it was of note that representatives in Paris of the Kuban Cossack Host and the Don Cossack Host refused invitations to join, preferring to make independent representations to the Allies.) At various times in 1919, the Russian Political Conference voiced objections to the Prinkipo proposal and to the Allies’ proposals for the settlement of territorial questions in the Baltic, the Bessarabian question, and the establishing of the eastern border of Poland, but it was never officially recognized as representing Russia at the Peace Conference.

russian Provisional Government. See Provisional Government, russian.

RUSSIAN RAILWAY SERVICE CORPS. Active in attempts to improve communications systems in Siberia and the Far East from 1918 to 1919, this organization had its origins in the dispatch to Russia of the U.S. Russian Railway Advisory Mission in May 1917. Headed by John F. Stevens, the mission arrived at Vladivostok on 31 May 1917, undertook a tour of inspection of Russia’s railways, and made recommendations to Washington regarding what could be done to assist the Russian Provisional Government. Among its recommendations was that, apart from locomotives and other equipment, what Russia required was technical expertise to overcome the bad management and organization of its railways. In response, the Russian Railway Service Corps was created, headed by Colonel George H. Emerson and under the general direction of Stevens. It consisted of some 350 railwaymen, engineers, and managers, who were given army commissions.

The corps left San Francisco in late November 1917, after the October Revolution, and arrived off Vladivostok on 14 December, just as the Bolsheviks were consolidating their hold on the port. Concluding that, in the circumstances, nothing could now be achieved in Russia, Stevens had the men re-routed to Japan, where he later joined them. The corps remained at Nagasaki until late February 1918, when a contingent of 110 of its number was sent to Harbin to work with General D. L. Khorvat’s administration on the Chinese Eastern Railway (the Far Eastern Committee). Further contingents followed in the summer of 1918, as Allied intervention in Siberia developed, and eventually, following the signing of the Inter-Allied Railway Agreement in January 1919, the corps’ work came under the auspices of Stevens’s Technical Board at Harbin. By the end of 1919, the corps had established 14 station units, distributed along the length of the Chinese Eastern and Trans-Siberian Railway, from Vladivostok to Omsk, but many of its efforts to improve the network were stymied by Russian stubbornness and Japanese interference and opposition. The corps was also chronically short of funds, suffered from low morale, and experienced a high turnover in manpower. Following their evacuation from Vladivostok in April 1920, members of the corps and their descendants entered into a 55-year legal battle with the U.S. government to ensure their entitlement to pensions and other benefits enjoyed by servicemen.

Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. The RSDLP (sometimes rendered as the RSDWP, the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party) was a Russian Marxist party founded by the union of various social-democratic groups at the organization’s first congress at Minsk, in March 1898. All nine delegates to that congress were quickly arrested by the tsarist police, however, and the focus turned to those social democrats living abroad, who were responsible from 1 December 1900 for the publication of the movement’s leading newspaper, Iskra (“The Spark”). They organized a second congress, in Brussels and London, in 1903. It was at this second congress that the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in the RSDLP emerged. Within the Russian Empire, various regional party organizations affiliated themselves with the RSDLP (e.g., the Bund and, from 1906, the Latvian Social-Democratic Labor Party). The RSDLP itself was a prominent member of the Second International.

RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATIVE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. Formed on 26 October 1917, in the aftermath of the October Revolution, and governed by VTsIK and Sovnarkom in accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of 10 July 1918, this was the formal name of the polity often referred to historically as Soviet (or Bolshevik) Russia, which was frequently called the Russian or Soviet Republic in contemporary documents (including its own). On 30 December 1922, following the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR, along with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the RSFSR became one of the four original constituent states of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was by far the largest and most populous of the republics, but V. I. Lenin’s commitment to federalism meant that regional autonomy was granted from early on. Following the breakup of the USSR in December 1991, the RSFSR became the Russian Federation.

Russian soviet federative socialist republic, CONSTITUTION OF THE. Adopted by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 10 July 1918 (and becoming active on 19 July 1918), this revolutionary document (consisting of 90 articles, divided into six chapters), the fundamental law (osnovnoi zakon) of the Soviet state, little resembled any other country’s constitution and included the candid statement that absolute power in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic resided in the “dictatorship of the proletariat”; that is, according to Bolshevik ideology, a concept of socialist dictatorship (largely derived from the Critique of the Gotha Program by Karl Marx) defined as “power not limited by laws.” In detail, it included restatements of the most important decrees adopted by Sovnarkom since the October Revolution (e.g., the “Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Peoples”), defined the official flags and arms of the state, and offered hints about decrees that would be adopted in the future.

Among other unusual aspects of the 1918 constitution were its expression of the basic goals of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)—the building of a socialist society and the guaranteeing of its longevity through the promotion of world revolution—without specifically mentioning the role of the RKP(b) (or other political parties) in the state, and the fact that the document omits any reference to the necessity for the government (or individual citizens) to obey the constitution. Notable too were the overlapping responsibilities and powers accorded to Sovnarkom, VTsIK, and the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (described as “the supreme organ of power”). The constitution remained in force until the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR (31 January 1922), but was only substantially replaced by the “Stalin Constitution” of 1936.

Russian soviet federative socialist republic, SUPREME MILITARY COUNCIL OF THE. This body was established by an order of Sovnarkom on 4 March 1918, given the tasks of providing strategic leadership to the armed forces of the Soviet Republic and overseeing the building of the Red Army. It initially consisted of several senior military specialists with two military commissars, but its composition was expanded from 19 March 1918 to include all senior military commanders and their deputies, the quartermaster general, and representatives of the operational staffs, military intelligence sections, etc., of the Red fronts and armies. From 19 March 1918, the institution was chaired by the People’s Commissar for Military Affairs (i.e., from 28 March 1918, L. D. Trotsky), and the role of commissars within it was annulled, but the most important figure in the establishment was probably the former tsarist officer M. D. Bonch-Bruevich, who was military director of the council. The institution was initially based at Petrograd, then Moscow (from 11 March 1918), then Murom (from 5 June 1918), and then again Moscow (from 14 July 1918). By an order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic of 6 September 1918 (based on a decree of VTsIK of 2 September 1918), the Supreme Military Council was abolished and its staff transferred to the Revvoensovet of the Republic.

Russian Telegraph Agency. See ROSTA.

Russian Western Army. See WESTERN VOLUNTEER ARMY.

RUSSIAN WESTERN GOVERNING COUNCIL. This chiefly phantom White government, with a pro-German orientation, was formed at Mitau (Jelgava) in September 1919. From early October 1919, it operated under the title the Central Council of Western Russia. The council was led by Count K. K. Palen (and later by prince V. Volkonskii), and its military commander was P. R. Bermondt-Avalov. It controlled territory in southern Latvia but sought to expand its influence, with the ultimate aim of establishing a “United States of Russia,” including autonomous Poland, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia. To that end, on 21 September 1919, Bermondt-Avalov concluded an agreement with General R. von der Goltz whereby some 40,000 men of the Baltic Landeswehr would switch their allegiance to his own Western Volunteer Army (thereby circumventing Allied demands that German forces leave the Baltic theater). Bermondt-Avalov refused to obey the orders of General N. N. Iudenich that he should send the forces under his control toward Narva to support the White advance on Petrograd, instead attacking Riga, where he encountered resistance from the Royal Navy. The council ceased to exist in December 1919, following the withdrawal of German forces from the region.

RUSSKAIA KRAINA. “The Russian Periphery” was the name used during 1918 and 1919 to describe their autonomous region in Transcarpathia by those of its inhabitants—Rusyns, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Romanians, Jews, and others—who, with the support of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, resisted attempts to incorporate it into either Poland or the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On 22–24 March 1919, a governing council (Rada) of the Russkaia Kraina was established under Ágoston Stéfán. However, on 10 September 1919, under the Treaty of St. Germain, with the agreement of the Allies and guarantees about its future autonomy, the region was incorporated into the new state of Czechoslovakia as Podkarpatská Rus (Subcarpathian Rus′). In June 1945, the region was incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

RYKOV, ALEKSEI IVANOVICH (25 February 1881–15 March 1938). One of the unsung Red heroes of the civil-war era, the “supply dictator” of the Red Army, the Soviet politician A. I. Rykov was born into a peasant family (according to other sources, the family of a petty trader) at Kukarki settlement, Iaransk uezd, Saratov guberniia; completed his secondary schooling at the Saratov Gymnasium; and studied at the Law Faculty of Kazan′ University from 1900, although he did not graduate after being arrested and exiled in 1901 for his political activities. He had joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) at its foundation in 1898, and from 1903 gravitated toward the Bolsheviks. After participating in the 1905 Revolution, he served as a member (27 April 1905–19 May 1907) and then candidate member (19 May 1907–17 January 1912) of the RSDLP Central Committee. Although he had previously been close to V. I. Lenin (especially during periods of exile in western Europe in 1903 and 1910–1911), he broke with him over the election of a separate Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912 and was not elected to that body. In fact, he was arrested and exiled to Arkhangel′sk province in 1912, amnestied in February 1913, and then exiled again to Narymsk, Tomsk guberniia, in 1913, returning to Petrograd only after the February Revolution. During 1917, he served on the executive committees of both the Petrograd and the Moscow Soviets, and on 3 August of that year was elected to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party.

During the October Revolution, Rykov was a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Moscow Soviet, but was actually located in Petrograd, where he participated in the uprising and subsequently served as Sovnarkom’s first People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs (from 27 October 1917). However, siding with the cautious L. B. Kamenev and G. E. Zinov′ev in the October–November 1917 talks with the railwaymen’s union, Vikzhel, regarding the formation of an all-socialist government, Rykov resigned from his party and governmental posts on 4 November 1917. He returned to the party fold when the Vikzhel talks collapsed and, on 3 April 1918, having demonstrated his organizational abilities as head of the Moscow supply committee (from 9 November 1917), was appointed to the vital post of chairman of VSNKh, effectively placing him in charge of the entire Soviet economy. He remained in that post until 28 May 1921. From 8 July to September 1919, he was also a member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. In this period, he served also as a special representative on the Council of Labor and Defense, with the remit of overseeing food supplies to the Red Army. Insofar as War Communism worked, it was chiefly Rykov who made it work.

He was elected once again to the party Central Committee, on 5 April 1920, and served on its Orgbiuro from to 23 May 1924. On 26 May 1921, he was made deputy chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense, and on 29 December that same year was appointed to a similar role in Sovnarkom. With Lenin thereafter frequently sidelined by illness, Rykov seemed to be one of the most powerful men in the country and a potential successor to Lenin as Soviet leader, a fact confirmed by his appointment to the Politbiuro on 3 April 1922. With the formation of the USSR, he retained his central position, becoming chairman of the VSNKh of the USSR and deputy chairman of the Sovnarkom of the USSR on 6 July 1923. Following Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, Rykov gave up his post with VSNKh to become (from 2 February 1924) chairman of the Sovnarkom of the USSR (i.e., prime minister) and simultaneously, chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).

During the power struggles of the 1920s, as a convinced supporter of the New Economic Policy, Rykov associated with N. I. Bukharin and M. P. Tomskii and supported J. V. Stalin against first the Left Opposition in 1923–1925 and then the United Opposition of L. D. Trotsky, Zinov′ev, and Kamenev in 1926–1927. On 19 January 1926, he replaced Kamenev as chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense of the USSR. However, when Stalin made his turn to the left in 1928, Rykov, now branded a “Right Deviationist,” gradually fell from power; despite admitting his “mistakes,” he lost his post as chairman of the Sovnarkom of the RSFSR on 18 May 1929, his Politbiuro post on 21 December 1930, and his posts as chairman of the Sovnarkom of the USSR and chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense of the USSR on 19 December 1930. He was then demoted to People’s Commissar of Post and Telegraph (from 30 May 1931, People’s Commissar of Communications from January 1932) and was demoted also to candidate member of the party Central Committee, on 10 February 1934. As the purges spread, he was removed as commissar on 26 September 1936, expelled from the party, and arrested on 27 February 1937. The following year, he appeared alongside Bukharin and others at the third of the great Moscow show trials (“The Trial of the 21”), was found guilty of espionage and plotting to overthrow the Soviet government on 13 March 1938, and two days later was shot at Kommunarka. He was rehabilitated on 4 February 1988.

RYSKULOV, TURAR RYSKULOVICH (14 December 1894–10 February 1938). The Soviet politician Turar Ryskulov, one of the most prominent Kazakh figures of the civil-war era, was born in East Talgarsk volost′, Semirech′e oblast′, and from 1907 to 1910 attended the Russo–Kirghiz Boarding School at Merke. He also graduated in 1914 from the Pishpek (later Frunze, now Bishkek) Agricultural School, and from August 1916 was a student at the Tashkent Teacher-Training College. Having participated in the Central Asian uprising of 1916 (during which he was arrested), in 1917 he founded the Revolutionary Union of Kirghiz Youth at Merke.

In September 1917, Ryskulov joined the Bolsheviks and during the civil wars was chairman of the Muslim Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Turkestan (March 1919–18 July 1920) and chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (January–18 July 1920). He then moved to Moscow, to become deputy People’s Commissar for Nationalities (1921–1922); served again as chairman of the Turkestan ASSR (1922–1926); and was later deputy chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (28 May 1926–May 1937). In that capacity, he performed numerous roles in economic administration, notably overseeing the construction of the Turksib Railway. He was arrested on 21 May 1937, while on holiday at Kislovodsk, and was subsequently executed as a “counterrevolutionary” and “national Communist” (in the mold of Mirsäyet Soltanğäliev) after a 15-minute trial in Moscow.

Ryskulov was rehabilitated on 8 December 1956 and has come to be regarded as a national hero (not least because of his efforts in the 1930s to avert the worst consequences of the collectivization of agriculture in Central Asia). The Economic University of Kazakhstan currently bears his name (and has a large statue of him at its entrance, raised in 2009), as does one of the main thoroughfares of Alma-Aty.