Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

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SABLIN, IURII (georgii) VLADIMIROVICH (12 November 1897–19 June 1937). Ensign (1917), komdiv (November 1935). The Soviet commander I. V. Sablin was born into the family of the progressive publisher V. M. Sablin at Iur′ev (Tartu), in Estland guberniia, and studied at the Moscow Commercial Institute. He joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries in 1915 and in 1916 volunteered for military service. Having been elected to VTsIK at the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets, during the October Revolution he participated in the fighting to secure Soviet power in Moscow. In December 1917, he led a unit of Red Guards (the 1st Moscow Revolutionary Detachment) to the Don territory to assist in the establishment of Soviet power at Novocherkassk; subsequently (March–April 1918), at the age of 20, he was placed in command of the 4th Red Army in Ukraine. As commissar of the Moscow sector of the Western Screens (from May 1918), he supported the Left-SR Uprising and was consequently condemned to a year’s imprisonment by a revolutionary tribunal, although he was soon amnestied. Having renounced the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries, he joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919 and served as commander of a group of forces of the 14th Red Army (October–November 1919), commander of the 41st Rifle Division (12 November 1919–3 January 1920), commander of the Estonian Rifle Division (20 February–14 March 1920), and commander of the 46th Rifle Division (2 April–14 June 1920). During the Soviet–Polish War, he was prominent as commander of the right-bank Ukraine group of forces of the 13th Red Army (July 1920) and of a composite cavalry division (August–September 1920). He then commanded an independent cavalry brigade of the 6th Red Army (October–November 1920) and the 16th Cavalry Division (10 December 1920–19 April 1921) and was also placed in command of the southern group of forces of the 7th Red Army in the operations that suppressed the Kronshtadt Revolt (February–March 1921).

Following the civil wars, Sablin graduated from the Red Military Academy in 1923, attended a flying school in 1925, and filled numerous command roles. He was arrested by the NKVD on 25 September 1936, sentenced to death, and executed as a counterrevolutionary and spy on 19 June 1937. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

Sablin, Mikhail Pavlovich (17 July 1869–17 October 1920). Rear admiral (1915), vice admiral (1919). The scion of a naval family (his father was Captain, First Rank P. F. Sablin (1839–?), the White naval commander M. P. Sablin was a graduate of the Naval Corps (1890). He participated in the Russian mission to China in 1900 and during the Russo–Japanese War was wounded in the Battle of Tsushima, in May 1905. He served subsequently in the Black Sea Fleet; during the First World War, he was commander of mining defenses in the Black Sea (1915–1918), chief of staff of the Black Sea Fleet (1917–1918), and finally, under the Soviet government, its commander (February–17 June 1918).

Having overseen the evacuation of most of the Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol′ to Novorossiisk (31 May–2 June 1918), Sablin refused to obey direct orders from V. I. Lenin to scuttle it (so it would not fall into the hands of the forces of the Austro-German intervention or the Volunteer Army), resigned his command, and traveled to Moscow to report to Lenin in person. Upon arrival, he was immediately arrested and imprisoned. In circumstances that remain unclear, he escaped and made his way, via Britain, to South Russia, where he served on the Naval Directorate of the Main Staff of the Armed Forces of South Russia (August 1918–April 1919); was then commander of Black Sea Ports (19 April 1919–1 February 1920); and from 28 February 1920, was General P. N. Wrangel’s trusted and reliable commander of the Black Sea Fleet and head of the Naval Directorate of the Russian Army. Shortly before the Whites’ evacuation of Crimea, Sablin died, of cancer of the liver, at Sevastopol′, where he is buried.

SAFONOV, IAKOV VASIL′EVICH (22 October 1877–29 January 1918). Colonel (6 December 1912), major general (1917). A lauded martyr to the cause of Ukrainian independence, I. V. Safonov was born at Korocha, near Belgorod, and was a graduate of the Odessa Infantry Officer School (1897) and the Academy of the General Staff (1904). He served in the Russo–Japanese War and subsequently held numerous staff posts, rising to the role of departmental head with the Main Directorate of the General Staff (from 24 February 1914). During the First World War, he served initially as commander of the 15th Shlisselberg Regiment, then was successively commander of the 15th Rifle Regiment (from 15 October 1915), chief of staff of the 37th Infantry Division (from 3 January 1917), and chief of staff of the 34th Army Corps (from 30 August 1917). Finally, following its “Ukrainization,” he became chief of staff of the 1st Ukrainian Army Corps. He was with the latter during its defense of Kiev against the onslaught of Red forces led by M. A. Murav′ev in the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War in early 1918. Together with the corps’ commander, General Ia. G. Gandziuk, Safonov was captured by pro-Soviet forces in the Ukrainian capital. When they refused to serve in the Red Army, both generals were executed.

SAFONOV, MIKHAIL VLADIMIROVICH (1878–1939). A Red commander active in Central Asia during the civil wars, M. V. Safonov, the son of a petty trader and a graduate of St. Petersburg University, joined the revolutionary movement at an early age and in 1905–1906 was a member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, siding with its Leftist Maximalists in the debate over the party program. In 1917–1918, he was a member of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries, but in 1919 he joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

From January 1918, Safonov was in command of a unit of Red Guards and from February 1918 was commissar for the Aral Region. From April 1918, he served as chairman of the Military Council and then commissar of the Turkestan Strike Group of forces at Aktiubinsk. In July 1918, he was made commander of the Forces of the Turkestan Republic, and from November 1918 he was military commander of the 4th Turkestan Rifle Division and a member of the Cheka of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. In that capacity, Safonov led the suppression of the anti-Soviet Belovodsk uprising. He was then made commander of Red Turkestan’s Ferghana Front (25 February–16 September 1919) and was thereafter deputy commander of forces on that front. In 1920–1921, he served as ambassador of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic and remained thereafter in party and economic-administrative posts. He died during the purges in the1930s.

Said-Abdulla (1903–?). The last Khan of Khiva (1 October 1918–2 February 1920), the former Russian protectorate in Central Asia, Said-Abdulla (sometimes rendered as Sayid Abdullah) was raised to the throne on 1 October 1918, by the Basmachi leader Junaïd-khan, following the murder of his predecessor, Isfandiyar Jurji Bahadur. However, the khan was largely ignored by the Basmachi leaders and lived in isolation in his official residence at Bedirikent. When Junaïd-khan was driven from Khiva by Red forces in early February 1920, Said-Abdulla fled his capital and went into emigration in Afghanistan, while his realm was transformed into the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic.

Said-Mir Mohammed Alim-khan (3 January 1880–28 April 1944). Major general (1911). A direct descendant of Genghis Khan, Said-Alim-khan was the last Emir of Bukhara, the Russian protectorate in Central Asia, and had a reputation as a debauched and corrupt tyrant. Educated in St. Petersburg, he ascended to the throne in December 1910, upon the death of his father. As emir, he toyed with the idea of reform, but eventually sided with the traditionalists, alienating modernizers, who formed the Young Bukharan Party. During the spring of 1918, he managed to hold off attacking Red (mostly Russian) forces from Tashkent (who were demanding that he abdicate and pass power to the Young Bukharans), and on 23 March 1918, signed a peace treaty with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic that recognized the independence of Bukhara. However, in the summer of 1920, strong Red forces under M. V. Frunze overran the region, clashing with the 27,000-strong army of the emir and defeating it.

On 8 September 1920, Said-Alim-khan fled from Bukhara, and following a brief period at Dushanbe, went into exile in Afghanistan (where he was later to die at Kabul). His realm was then transformed into the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic (8 October 1920), although for many years the Bolshevik authorities faced determined resistance in the region from forces of the Basmachi.

Sakharov, Konstantin Viacheslavovich (18 March 1881–23 February 1941). Colonel (6 December 1915), major general (15 November 1918), lieutenant general (5 October 1919). One of the most controversial figures in the history and historiography of the White movement in Siberia, K. V. Sakharov was the son of a military engineer and a graduate of the Orenburg Cadet Corps, the Nicholas Military Engineering School, and the Academy of the General Staff (1908). He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War, and in the First World War served as chief of staff of the 3rd Finland Rifle Division before being seconded, in early 1917, to the staff of the main commander in chief of the Russian Army. He was a participant in the Moscow State Conference in August 1917 (as a representative of the Union of the Holders of the St. George Cross) and the following month was arrested at Mogilev, accused of participating in the Kornilov affair. He was soon released, and immediately after the October Revolution, set off to join the Volunteer Army on the Don, but was arrested and imprisoned for six months by the Bolshevik authorities at Astrakhan. Upon his release, he traveled to the Urals and joined the forces of the Ufa Directory (August 1918).

On 23 November 1918, in the wake of the Omsk coup (of which he was very much in favor), Sakharov was named head of the garrison at Russian Island, off Vladivostok, where from 5 December 1918 he also served as head of the Officer Training School. Returning to Omsk, he worked on the staff of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, initially (January–May 1919) as a representative of General A. I. Denikin and subsequently as a roving inspector of military schools in the White zone. He was then named chief of staff of the Western Army (from 20 May 1919) and from 22 June 1919 was commander of that force (renamed the 3rd Army on 22 July 1919). In that capacity, he was, along with General D. A. Lebedev, one of the chief architects of the Cheliabinsk operation that proved so disastrous for Kolchak’s forces in late July 1919, but was nevertheless subsequently made commander of the Moscow Army Group of Kolchak’s Eastern Front (from 10 October 1919), before being made main commander of the Eastern Front (4 November 1919), having promised the supreme ruler that he would save his capital, Omsk. Soon afterward, however, Omsk fell without a fight to the 5th Red Army; Kolchak’s forces began to disintegrate; and (during the night of 9–10 December 1919) Sakharov was arrested and removed from his post at Taishet by General V. N. Pepeliaev and his brother, A. N. Pepeliaev, Kolchak’s prime minister.

Sakharov was released from prison by his successor as main commander, General V. O. Kappel′, on 23 January 1920, and placed in command of the remnants of the 3rd Army as it retreated into Transbaikalia at the climax of the Great Siberian (Ice) March. He arrived at Chita in March 1920 and served briefly as commander of the 3rd Army Corps of the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov, but left the service in protest against the naming of a division of the army after General Pepeliaev and at the prevalence of “revolutionary” discipline in that force and among the kappel′evtsy in general.

Sakharov then went into emigration, traveling first to Japan before settling in Germany from October 1920. There, he engaged in a career as a vituperative historian and memoirist of the civil wars. (At one point, he challenged General William S. Graves, the former commander of the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, to a duel, so incensed was he with the anti-White tone of Graves’s memoirs.) In the 1920s, Sakharov became an admirer of Mussolini and in 1933 helped found the Russian fascist organization, the Liberation Movement of the People’s of Russia (known by its Russian acronym, ROND), through which he attempted to influence émigré youth. He died in Berlin, following an operation on a stomach ulcer, and is buried in the Russian cemetery at Tegel.

SAKHAROV, NIKOLAI PAVLOVICH (18 August 1893–1951). Lieutenant colonel (1917), colonel (August 1918), major general (April 1919). One of the youngest senior commanders of White forces in Siberia, N. P. Sakharov was born at Murom and graduated from its Realschule in 1911, then volunteered for service in the Russian Army. He saw action in the First World War, with the 9th Ingermanland Infantry Regiment, and was wounded on several occasions.

Sakharov was demobilized in late 1917, returned to his hometown of Murom, and in July 1918 was one of the leaders of the anti-Bolshevik uprising that took place there, in coordination with the Iaroslavl′ Revolt. When the rising was crushed, he made his way to Kazan′ and joined the volunteer corps of the People’s Army then being organized by Colonel V. O. Kappel′. Sakharov commanded the Arsk Detachment (later the 3rd Kazan′, then the 50th Arsk Rifle Regiment). He subsequently (from 5 November 1919) commanded the 1st Samara Division of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, proceeding with it on the Great Siberian (Ice) March and arriving in Chita in March 1920. There, the forces commanded by Sakharov were regrouped into the Volga Brigade of the 3rd Siberian Corps of the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov. When that force was driven out of Transbaikal by the Red Army in September 1920, Sakharov led his men along the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Maritime Province, and from January to June 1921 he was commandant of Vladivostok. He was subsequently named commander of the Volga Brigade of the White Insurgent Army, led that force during the advance on Khabarovsk of the summer of 1922, and went with it into emigration when Red forces captured Vladivostok in October 1922. He subsequently lived in Shanghai and later San Francisco, where he died in 1951.

SAKS, SERGEI EVGEN′EVICH (29 September 1889–?). Ensign (28 December 1915). The Soviet naval commander S. E. Saks, who was born in Grodno guberniia, entered military service in 1910 and served in the Baltic Fleet during the First World War. He joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1918, from January that year was a member of the Supreme Military Council of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and from February 1918 was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Naval Affairs. In October 1918, he was named as the Revvoensoviet of the Republic’s special envoy to the Astrakhan–Caspian region. He then served as commander of the Astrakhan–Caspian Military Flotilla (13 October 1918–9 June 1919) and was at the same time (from November 1918) a member of the Revvoensoviets of the Caspian–Caucasian Front and (March–June 1919) the 11th Red Army. He subsequently (1919–1921) served as a special commissar with the naval commissariat, then was assigned to work with the Main Directorate of Water Transport. According to some sources, Saks was arrested and shot in 1938. Others (notably the Memorial organization) have it that he was arrested on 25 January 1949, sentenced to a term of imprisonment on 9 March 1949, interned at Krasnoiarsk, then released in 1954.

Sal′nikov, Dmitrii nikolaevich (9 October 1882–29 May 1945). Colonel (27 November 1918), major general (14 March 1920). One of the few White officers to be active both in South Russia and in Siberia, D. N. Sal′nikov was a graduate of the Odessa Military School (1904) and the Academy of the General Staff (1912). He saw action in both the Russo–Japanese War and the First World War, latterly as a staff officer with the 13th Army Corps (8 February 1916–3 January 1917).

Sal′nikov was a founding member of the Volunteer Army and participated in the First Kuban (Ice) March, as chief of the Operational Department of the army staff. Thereafter, he served briefly in the Don Army and as quartermaster general of the Volunteer Army, then became commander of the 1st Officer Regiment, the Markovtsy (27 November 1918–March 1919), serving at the same time (from January 1919) as commandant of the Nikitovsk region in the Donbass. After a conflict with his superiors, he was removed from these posts and sent on a mission to Siberia, where, in the forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, he became chief of staff of the Eastern Front (21 July–1 September 1919). He was subsequently named commander of Forces of the Barnaul and Biisk Regions (November 1919), but did not take up the post due to illness. Instead, he retreated into Transbaikalia with the remnants of some detachments of the Orenburg Cossack Host on the Great Siberian (Ice) March. In 1920, he became chief of the Information Department of the Staff of the Far Eastern (White) Army. From 1 June 1922, he served briefly with the forces of the regime of N. D. Merkulov at Vladivostok, before later that year going into emigration. He settled in Harbin, where he worked as a communications technician and a teacher, consorted with monarchist-legitimist organizations, and ran various émigré and veterans’ societies (e.g., founding and leading the Union of Servicemen from 1933 to 1935). Sal′nikov is buried in the New Uspenskii cemetery in Harbin.

SAL′SKII, VOLODYMYR PETROVICH (28 July 1883–4 October 1940). Lieutenant colonel (April 1917), brigadier general (Ukrainian Army, 5 October 1920). The Ukrainian military commander Volodymyr Sal′skii was born into a noble family at Ostrih (Ostrog), Volhyn guberniia, and was a graduate of the Vil′na Infantry Officers School (1906) and the Academy of the General Staff (1912). He occupied numerous staff positions during the First World War, most prominently as a senior adjutant on the staff of the 70th Infantry Division (from 16 November 1914) and as assistant senior adjutant to the quartermaster general of the staff of the 12th Army (from 12 June 1916).

In 1917, Sal′skii was involved in the Ukrainization of units of the Russian Army and, in January 1918, became chief of staff the Left-Bank Ukraine Forces of the nascent Ukrainian Army. In March 1918, he became a member of the Ukrainian Army’s general staff, chiefly occupied with organizing military schools. In May 1919, he was appointed to the command of the Zaporozhian Corps (leading that unit into Kiev, on 30 August 1919); in September 1919, he assumed supreme command of the Ukrainian Army, but resigned from that post on 5 November 1919 due to ill health. In emigration in Poland (from November 1920), he served as defense minister of the government-in-exile of the Ukrainian National Republic (1920–1921 and 1924–1940). He died in Warsaw and was buried in the Volia cemetery.

SAMEDBEY SADYKHBEY OGLU. See Mehmandarov, Samad bey (SAMEDBEY SADYKHBEY OGLU).

SAMOILO, ALEKSANDR ALEKSANDROVICH (23 October 1869–8 November 1963). Major general (6 December 1916), lieutenant general of aviation (1940). One of the most senior and effective military specialists in the Red Army, A. A. Samoilo was born in Moscow, the son of an army doctor of noble descent. He was a graduate of the Alexander Military School (1892) and the Academy of the General Staff (1898). After occupying numerous staff positions, during the First World War he served on the Operational Staff at stavka and was subsequently chief of staff of the 10th Army (from 30 September 1917).

Following the October Revolution, Samoilo chose to serve the Red Army and was a member of the Military Commission of the Soviet delegation at the peace negotiations with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. From February 1918, he was assistant commander of the Western Screen, and from April to June of that year was chief of staff of the White Sea Military District. He was then placed in command of ground and naval forces in the Arkhangel′sk region (June–July 1918), and from August to September 1918, was chief of staff of the North-East Screen. From 22 November 1918 to 2 May 1919 and from 29 May 1919 to 15 April 1920, he commanded the 6th Red Army; he was also briefly (5–29 May 1919) commander of the Eastern Front. From May 1920 to February 1921, he served as assistant chief of the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. He was also a participant in the peace negotiations with Finland that led to the Treaty of Tartu (14 October 1920) and those with Turkey that were sealed by the Treaty of Moscow (16 March 1921).

After the civil wars, Samoilo was chiefly engaged in educational work, as head of the Directorate of Military-Educational Establishments from 1922, and from 1926, lecturing at the Military Aviation Academy of the Red Army. He was made a professor in 1943, joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1944, and retired in 1948. He died and is buried in Moscow.

SAMOSUD. This Russian term, meaning literally “self-justice” (and by implication, the dispensation of justice by civilians and soldiers without reference to central governmental or legal authorities), might also be translated as “lynching.” It reached epidemic proportions across the former Russian Empire during the civil-war years—in, for example, the Novoselov affair and the Omsk massacre, to cite only instances in Siberia—and was an integral part of both the Red Terror (broadly defined) and the White Terror.

SAMURTSY. This was the name by which was familiarly known the Samurskii Regiment, the least celebrated of the colorful units of the Volunteer Army (and later the Armed Forces of South Russia). The regiment (consisting initially of three companies but later expanded to six) was created from mobilized members of the Red Army who had been captured by White forces (specifically, by the Drozdovtsy) around Pesnochanoperekopskaia stanitsa, in the Kuban, in June 1918. To them, on 14 August 1918, was added a 180-strong contingent of men who had previously served with the 83rd Infantry Samurskii Regiment of the Imperial Russian Army (hence the name). The regiment wore forage caps with a yellow crown, with black piping, and yellow epaulettes edged in black and featuring a black letter “S.”

The Samurtsy then saw action across Kuban and the North Caucasus, before moving into the Donbass and Voronezh guberniia with the 1st and later the 3rd Infantry Divisions of the Volunteer Army. During this period, the numbers attached to the regiment waxed and waned, from a maximum of some 1,300 to a minimum (in June 1919) of fewer than 600. As the Whites retreated in the autumn of 1919, the Samurtsy were incorporated (from 14 October 1919) into the Alekseev Division. Having reached Crimea to join the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, from 16 April 1920 the Samurtsy were incorporated into the Drozdovskii Division. In the camps at Gallipoli, they were again merged with the Alekseevtsy. Efforts were made in emigration to maintain a group organization and identity, but the few remaining Samurtsy were dispersed around the world.

Commanders of the Samurtsy were Colonel K. A. Kel′ner (to 19 July 1918); Colonel N. N. Doroshevich (19 July–early August 1918); Lieutenant Colonel (later Colonel) K. G. Shabert (early August–14 August and September–29 October 1918); Colonel Sipiagin (14 August–September 1918); Colonel M. A. Zviagin (29 October–December 1918 and 18 May–November 1919); Colonel Il′in (December 1918–18 May 1919); Colonel E. I. Zelenin (early December 1919–16 April 1920); and Colonel D. V. Zhitkevich (21 June–November 1920).

Sannikov, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1866–16 February 1931). Major general (1910), lieutenant general (2 April 1916). A key military administrator in the White movement in South Russia, A. S. Sannikov was a graduate of the Kiev Cadet Corps (1883), the Pavlovsk Military School (1885), and the Academy of the General Staff (1892). After a long period of service in various staff positions of the Kiev Military District, during the First World War he served mainly as chief of staff of the 9th Army and as chief of supply on the Romanian Front (1915–1917).

In 1918, Sannikov joined the army of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii (the Hetmanite Army), before being elected as mayor of Odessa. He then joined the Volunteer Army, as chief of supply (August–December 1918). He participated in the Jassy Conference, then was named commander of Forces of the Odessa Region and of the South-West Oblasti (January–March, 1919). Sannikov was removed from that post by General A. I. Denikin as a consequence of his poor relations with forces of the Allied intervention that had landed at Odessa in November–December 1918, and was made instead chief of supply of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), based at Ekaterinodar (March–December 1919). He was placed on the reserve list of the AFSR in January 1920, and two months later went into emigration. After a brief sojourn in Constantinople, Sannikov moved to Zemun, near Belgrade, and thereafter, in the mid-1920s, to France.

SAPOZHKOV UPRISING. This is the name by which is generally known the anti-Bolshevik uprising, led by A. V. Sapozhkov, that swept across the Urals region in July–September 1920. Sapozhkov (who, according to Soviet sources, was a former member of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries) had been dismissed from his post as head of the 9th Cavalry Division of the Red Army by K. A. Avksent′evskii, commander of the Trans-Volga Military District. Some 4,000 former Red Army soldiers (most of whom had been recruited from the Urals region) then rapidly joined Sapozhkov in defying the Red command. On 14 July 1920, his forces, dubbed the “1st Red Army of Justice,” captured Buzuluk, before moving on Ural′sk and Pugachev (Nikolaevsk), backed by a further 2,000 new recruits. Sapozhnikov, in common with rebels such as Nestor Makhno and the leaders of the Kronshtadt Revolt, promised “Soviets without Communists.”

Eventually, sufficient Red forces were concentrated to crush the rebels, but not before disorder had spread across extensive tracts of the Volga and Urals territory, from Tsaritsyn to Saratov and as far east as Ufa and Orenburg—that is, those same districts in which the Pitchfork Uprising had flourished earlier in 1920. The last remnants of the Army of Justice were destroyed on 6 September 1920, near Lake Bak-Baul, in Astrakhan guberniia. Sapozhkov was killed in that battle.

Sapozhnikov, Vasilii Vasil′evich (11 December–12 April 1924). Born at Perm′, the son of a civil servant, V. V. Sapozhnikov was a world-renowned botanist who worked in anti-Bolshevik governments at Omsk during the civil wars. He was a graduate of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University (1890, gaining his doctorate in 1896) and had taught at the University of Tübingen before taking up a post at Tomsk University, in 1893, and beginning research into the flora of the Altai region and Semirech′e that involved many extensive expeditions to southern Siberia.

Always active in public life (he was twice elected rector of Tomsk University), Sapozhnikov opposed the October Revolution, and in 1918, he joined the cabinets of the Western Siberian Commissariat and the Provisional Siberian Government as minister of education. In September 1918, he led the Siberian delegation to the Ufa State Conference and was elected to the Ufa Directory as deputy for the absent Siberian premier P. V. Vologodskii. However, although Sapozhnikov had some significant achievements as minister (notably overseeing the founding of a new university at Irkutsk, on 27 October 1918), like other proponents of Siberian regionalism, he became increasingly isolated within the Omsk government following the Omsk coup and the dominance thereafter within the White administration of Rightist elements associated with I. A. Mikhailov. On 2 May 1919, consequently, he resigned his post and returned to scientific work.

During the summer of 1919, Sapozhnikov undertook an expedition to the mouth of the Ob River, and he continued to teach, research, and publish under the restored Soviet regime in Siberia until his death in 1924. He was the author of almost 50 books.

SAPRONOV (SHIROKOV), TIMOFEI VLADIMIROVICH (1887–28 September 1937). The Soviet politician T. V. Sapronov was born into a peasant family at Mostaushki, in Tula guberniia, and worked as a housepainter. He became active in revolutionary politics during the 1905 Revolution and joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in 1912. In 1916, he was mobilized into the Russian Army, but he was soon dismissed on the grounds of ill health. In 1917, he chaired the Moscow uezd Soviet executive committee and was elected to the Constituent Assembly.

From 1918 to December 1919, Sapronov was chairman of the executive committee of the Moscow guberniia Soviet, and from December 1919 to 1920, he was chairman of the Khar′kov guberniia Soviet. From 23 March to 5 April 1920, he was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine and from May 1921 was deputy chairman of the VSNKh of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. From 2 April 1922 to 17 April 1923, he was also a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). He was also chairman of the “Small Sovnarkom” (a sort of inner cabinet) from 1923 to 1925.

Sapronov had been a supporter of the Left Bolsheviks in 1918 and a leading member of the Group of Democratic Centralists in 1919–1921, and in the 1920s he was an “ultra-leftist” sympathizer of the Left Opposition. It was at this time that he expounded the view that the USSR was not a workers’ state but an example of state capitalism, and that therefore, there was no obligation for party members to defend the country. Unsurprisingly, he was expelled from the party on 18 December 1927, and despite an apparent recantation of his views and his rejoining the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), in 1928 he was exiled (either to Arkhangel′sk province or to Crimea; sources differ). He was again expelled from the party in October 1932, and was arrested and imprisoned at Verkhneural′sk in 1935. Two years later, he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and was shot as a traitor. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1990.

Savel′ev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (6 February 1861–1924). Major general (11 October 1914), lieutenant general (1918). The White commander N. A. Savel′ev, who was the son of an officer of the Urals Cossack Host, was a graduate of the Moscow Infantry Officers School and the Academy of the General Staff (1906). During the First World War, he commanded the 15th Siberian Rifle Division (from 24 January 1916). During the civil wars, he was commander of the Urals Army (15 November 1918–8 April 1919) and then a corps commander of the Southern Army group of the forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (November 1919–March 1920).

Following the collapse of White forces in Siberia, Savel′ev endured the Great Siberian (Ice) March and joined the forces of Ataman G. M. Semenov in Transbaikalia, as commander of the 1st Transbaikal Corps (April–November 1920), and was subsequently made commander of the Far Eastern (White) Army (from 22 November 1920). In that position, he led its retreat from Chita through Manchuria to the Maritime Province and its remustering at Grodekovo. As Red forces pressed south from Khabarovsk toward Vladivostok, Savel′ev and the remnants of his units were incorporated into the forces of the Zemstvo Host, under General M. K. Diterikhs. Following the collapse of that army and the capture of Vladivostok by units of the People’s Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic in October 1922, Savel′ev went into emigration, settling in China. He died at Shanghai soon afterward.

SAVICH, NIKANOR VASIL′EVICH (22 December 1869–14 March 1942). The White politician N. V. Savich was born into a noble family on the Belovoda estate at Sumsk uezd, Khar′kov guberniia, and was a graduate of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Novorossiisk (Odessa) University. Following the death of his father, he took on responsibility for running the family estate and headed the local uezd and guberniia zemstvos. He was elected to both the Third and Fourth State Dumas, as a representative of Khar′kov guberniia, and aligned himself with the right-liberal Octobrists. In the Duma, he was considered an expert on naval affairs and worked with young officers (including the future Admiral A. V. Kolchak) to modernize the Russian Navy and rebuild the Baltic Fleet, in the aftermath of its destruction during the Russo–Japanese War.

Savich was considered as a candidate for the post of minister of naval affairs in the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, but as a monarchist, he ruled himself out. In May 1918, he left Petrograd to return to his estate in Ukraine, but he had not retired from politics: in November 1918, he participated in the Jassy Conference as a representative of the anti-Bolshevik State Council for a United Russia (of which, alongside A. V. Krivovshein, he was a leader); in 1919, he joined General A. I. Denikin’s Special Council, where he made a name for himself both as a critic of the predominance of Kadets in the political apparatus of the White regime in South Russia and as a proponent of a restored monarchy (his favored candidate being Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich). In March 1920, as the Armed Forces of South Russia collapsed, he was evacuated from Novorossiisk to Constantinople, but he returned to Crimea in June of that year to become state comptroller in the administration of General P. N. Wrangel.

In November 1920, when Wrangel’s Russian Army collapsed, Savich was again evacuated to Constantinople, where he served as acting head of the financial department of Wrangel’s government-in-exile. Still in Wrangel’s service as a financial advisor, he moved to Paris in 1921, where he became a prominent member of several émigré monarchist organizations. He abandoned politics in 1927 and thereafter devoted his time in emigration to writing his memoirs (Vospominaniia, Düsseldorf/St. Petersburg, 1993). He died at Asnières-sur-Seine, in northwest Paris, and is buried in that city’s cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.

Savinkov, Boris Viktorovich (19 January 1879–7 May 1925). The terrorist, novelist, enigmatist, revolutionary, and anti-Bolshevik B. V. Savinkov was born into a noble family at Khar′kov. His father was an assistant procurator of the Khar′kov Military District and later performed a similar role at Warsaw, but was retired from the service on account of his liberal views, and his elder brother was exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activity. Savinkov attended the Warsaw Gymnasium (where he first encountered Józef Piłsudski) and entered the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University in 1897, but was expelled following the student disturbances there in 1899. He later studied abroad, at both Berlin and Heidelberg Universities. He had been associated with various social-democratic organizations since at least 1898, and in 1901 was exiled to Vologda. There, he met A. V. Lunacharskii, but he had become disillusioned with Marxism, and in June 1903, having escaped abroad, joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) in Geneva.

Very soon Savinkov became deputy head of the PSR’s terrorist wing, the Fighting Organization, and as such was directly involved in most of the high-profile assassinations it perpetrated during the 1905 Revolution, including those of the minister of the interior, V. K. von Plehve (15 July 1904), and Grand Duke Sergei Romanov, the uncle of Nicholas II (17 February 1905). He was arrested and sentenced to death in 1906, but managed to escape from prison in Odessa and fled abroad to France, where he was made head of the Fighting Organization in 1908, following the exposure of his boss, Evno Azef, as a police agent. However, he had little success in rebuilding the organization and largely devoted himself to literary endeavors, publishing (under the pseudonym “V. Ropshin”) the accomplished novels The Pale Horse (1909) and What Never Happened (1912). In these works, he seemed to renounce terrorism and to adopt the religio-Populist ideas of D. S. Merezhkovskii and Zinaida Gippius.

During the First World War, Savinkov adopted a defensist line and volunteered for service in the French Army. He also worked as a correspondent on the Western Front for a number of Russian newspapers, among them the Kadets’ mouthpiece Rech′ (“Discourse”). He returned to Russia following the February Revolution, arriving in Petrograd on 9 April 1917, and was named as, successively, the Russian Provisional Government’s commissar with the 8th Army, commissar to the South-West Front (from 28 June 1917), and (from 19 July 1917) assistant minister of war. His rise was partly a consequence of his Masonic connections and partly a reward for his apparent success in restoring order at the front. However, Savinkov was to play a significant, if still murky, role in the Kornilov affair, apparently seeking for himself a place in any government that might have been formed by General L. G. Kornilov. He backed out of the plot at the last minute and was made military governor of Petrograd by A. F. Kerensky as Kornilov’s forces advanced on the city, but he refused to appear before the subsequent investigatory commission and was consequently expelled from both the Provisional Government (30 August 1917) and the PSR (9 October 1917).

A staunch opponent of the October Revolution, but disillusioned with the vacillation of the PSR, Savinkov journeyed to Gatchina to support the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising in late October 1917, then to the Don, where he joined the Don Civil Council, which had been established to advise the Volunteer Army by General M. V. Alekseev. Having narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of White officers at Novocherkassk, he returned secretly to Moscow in February 1918, and there formed his own underground anti-Bolshevik organization, the Union for Defense of the Fatherland and Freedom, which was partly financed by the British through the mission of Robert Bruce Lockhart. With Lockhart’s encouragement, Savinkov organized the Iaroslavl′ Revolt in July 1918. When that revolt was crushed by the Red Army, he moved to the Volga, where, after a period in the detachment of Colonel V. O. Kappel′, he attended the Ufa State Conference. Apparently, Savinkov was considered as a candidate for the post of foreign minister in the government of the Ufa Directory, but instead, on the instructions of N. D. Avksent′ev, he journeyed (via Japan and India) to France, where, as a member of the Russian Political Conference, he sought to represent the White cause to the Allies and to secure further Allied intervention in Russia.

During the Soviet–Polish War of 1919–1920, Savinkov traveled to Poland, where he led a Russian Political Committee and built an anti-Bolshevik cavalry force from refugees and prisoners of war under the aegis of the People’s Union for the Defense of Russia and Freedom. This force, together with the forces of Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz, formed the Russian People’s Volunteer Army that marched into Belorussia in November 1920, before being forced back into Poland by the Red Army (events Savinkov reflected upon in his later novel, The Black Horse, 1924). Following the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921), the Polish authorities expelled Savinkov from the country in October 1921, to appease the Soviet government. He then moved to Paris and, with the assistance of Russian businessmen and Western secret services, attempted to maintain the influence of his People’s Union, but with waning success.

Over the following years, sometimes in collaboration with the British agent Sydney Reilly, Savinkov was involved in a number of plots against the Soviet regime, contacting Ukrainian and Cossack émigrés, for example, and offering them autonomy or even independence for their lands in return for their support in a new anti-Soviet crusade (even through he was a Russian nationalist at heart). He even approached Mussolini. However, he fell victim to a Soviet diversionary plot (Operation “Trust”) and was lured into smuggling himself into the USSR, supposedly to meet with representatives of an underground anti-Soviet organization. On 16 August 1924, a few days after he had crossed the Polish–Soviet border, he was arrested at Minsk. On 29 August 1924, Savinkov was sentenced to death by the Supreme Court of the USSR, although this was commuted to 10 years’ imprisonment on the orders of the presidium of VTsIK. From his cell, he wrote a series of letters to émigré White leaders, urging them to cease the armed struggle against the USSR.

Savinkov died in prison at the Lubianka. According to the official Soviet account, he committed suicide by jumping from a window. There is strong evidence, however, to support the contention of Alexander Solzhenitsyn (in The Gulag Archipelago) that Savinkov was killed by OGPU officers. There are no public monuments to Savinkov, but he has been immortalized in other ways. He was the prototype for the terrorist Dudkina in the novel Petersburg (1916) by Andrei Belyi, and for the character Vyskova in the story The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov (1923) by Il′ia Ehrenberg, and was the hero of the novel General BO (1929) by Roman Gul′. His extraordinary life has also formed the basis of a number of feature films, including Krakh (“Failure,” dir. V. Ia. Samoilov, 1968) and Vsadnik po imeni Smert′ (“The Rider Named Death,” dir. K. G. Shakhnazarov, 2004), about his life in the prerevolutionary terrorist underground. Winston Churchill included an admiring chapter on Savinkov in his Great Contemporaries (1937), although it was removed from later editions. Finally, a hilariously bad novel about him is A. Agursky’s Eighty-seven Days (1964).

Savitskii, Ippolat Viktorovich (31 January 1863–9 October 1941). Major general (30 May 1910), lieutenant general (April 1917). The commander of White forces in Transcaspia, I. V. Savitskii was a graduate of the Voronezh Mikhail Military Gymnasium (1881), the Second Constantine Artillery School (1883), and the Academy of the General Staff (1891). After leaving the academy, he worked mostly in Turkestan, rising to the post of chief of staff of the 2nd Turkestan Army Corps (13 July 1910–26 October 1915), and in the First World War served in that capacity on the Caucasian Front and latterly, on that same front, as commander of the 66th Infantry Division (from 26 October 1915). From 12 October 1917, he was commander of the 2nd Turkestan Corps. Finally, in September 1917, Savitskii was named temporary commander of the Caucasian Army, succeeding General M. A. Przheval′skii.

When the army in the Caucasus collapsed in the winter of 1917–1918, Savitskii returned to Turkestan, where he participated in the successful Ashkhabad uprising against Soviet rule (July 1918) and subsequently joined the anti-Bolshevik Committee of Salvation in that city (November–December 1918). He was then dispatched to the staff of General A. I. Denikin to examine questions relating to the creation of an anti-Bolshevik army in Transcaspia. When such a force, the Turkestan Army, came into being, Denikin placed Savitskii in command of it (from 10 April 1919). However, he was removed from his post on 22 July 1919, following the failure of his attacks on Merv (21 May 1919) and Kakhka (19 June 1919). Savitskii was then placed in the reserve of the Armed Forces of South Russia and moved to Taganrog. He went into emigration in February 1920 and settled in Bulgaria, later moving on to France, where, until 1939, he lived at Meudon, Paris. He died in France.

SAVITSKII, IU. A. (1890?–?). Major-general (1921). Iu. A. Savitskii’s background remains obscure, but it is known that he was born into the family of a member of the Ussurii Cossack Host and that, following service in the First World War, in 1918 he became chief of staff of the Host’s forces, under Ataman I. P. Kalmykov. From late 1920, he headed the Host government; in May 1921, based at Grodekovo, he offered his support to the Provisional Government of the Maritime Region Zemstvo Board, having been declared an outlaw by the government of the Far Eastern Republic (FER). From 4 June 1921 to 2 January 1922, he was also Host ataman of the Ussurii Cossacks. In 1921, he also entered into negotiations with Iu. K. Hlushko-Mova, the leader of Green Ukraine, regarding the possibility of establishing a unitary Cossack–Ukrainian state in the Far East, under Ataman G. M. Semenov. In late 1922, Savitskii led the Ussurii Cossack forces in battles with the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the FER. He emigrated to China on 15 October of that year. His subsequent fate is unknown.

Sazonov, Sergei Dmitrievich (29 July 1860–25 December 1927). Born into an ancient noble family of Riazan′ oblast′ and educated at the esteemed Alexander Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo, S. D. Sazanov had a lengthy career in the Russian diplomatic service, which he joined in 1893, culminating in becoming ambassador to the Vatican (from 1906), before being recalled to St. Petersburg in June 1909 to become assistant foreign minister and then foreign minister (8 November 1910) in the cabinet of his brother-in-law, P. A. Stolypin. He initially sought to build bridges between St. Petersburg and Berlin, and pursued a moderate policy in the Balkans to placate Austria-Hungary, but nevertheless oversaw Russia’s entry into the First World War to fight against its traditional allies. During the war, he negotiated the Treaty of London (26 April 1915), which would have granted imperial Russia control of the Turkish Straits in the event of victory and brought Romania into the conflict on the side of the Allies, but he was distrusted by Germanophile elements at the court and by the Empress Alexandra, and was dismissed from his post in July 1916. He was subsequently named ambassador to Great Britain (12 January 1917), but had not been able to take up his post before the February Revolution occurred and his posting was canceled by the Russian Provisional Government.

Following the October Revolution, Sazonov joined the Whites, traveling initially to South Russia to participate in the Special Council of General A. I. Denikin. He subsequently traveled to France to join the Russian Political Conference and, as minister of foreign affairs for both Denikin and the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (from January 1919), to seek to represent Russian interests at the Paris Peace Conference and lobby the Allied governments on behalf of the Whites. After the civil wars, Sazonov remained in emigration in France. He died and is buried at Nice.

SCHNEIDERMAN, MOSEI ISRAELEVICH. See KRAINII, VIKTOR (SCHNEIDERMAN, MOSEI ISRAELEVICH).

SCREENS. Sometimes also called Curtain Forces, Screens (in Russian, Otriady zavesy or Voiska zavesy) were groups of military forces, organized on a volunteer basis and deployed by Soviet Russia during the early spring of 1918, as the old Imperial Russian Army collapsed and the new Red Army was in the process of formation. They were created, on 5 March 1918, by an order of the Supreme Military Council of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic for the “guarding of the interior regions of the state against possible invasion by the Germans” and to police the demarcation line agreed to in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). They had their origin in the hodgepodge of Red Guards, Baltic sailors, Bolshevized soldiers, and other volunteer detachments that had coalesced along the Narva and Dnepr Rivers in February 1918 to resist the renewed German attack (the Eleven-Days War), which had been inspired by the initial refusal of the Soviet government to accept the harsh terms offered to it by the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk.

The Western Screen (the Western Region of Curtain Forces) was established on 29 March 1918, by order of the Supreme Military Council, and was commanded by V. N. Egor′ev. It replaced the former Western Front from Nevel to Novyi Oskol and was intended to protect Moscow from a German offensive. This was soon followed by the Northern Screen (to protect Petrograd). Later were established the North-East Screen (from 6 August 1918), north of Petrograd, to oppose the Allied forces recently landed at Arkhangel′sk, and the Southern Screen (from 11 August 1918), facing the Hetmanite Army of the Ukrainian State. The following month, the Red Army was reorganized into regular fronts, and on 11 September 1918, by order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, the Screens were formally disbanded.

2ND ARMY. This White force was created around Kurgan, in western Siberia, on 22 July 1919, following the collapse of the spring offensive of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. It was constructed from elements of the southern group of forces of the former Siberian Army (the 4th Siberian Army Corps and other units forming its northern group, under General P. P. Grivin, and the 3rd Steppe Siberian Army Corps forming its southern group, under General G. A. Verzhbitskii, both supported by a cavalry group), and with an initial complement of around 40,000 men, would henceforth constitute one of the mainstays of Kolchak’s newly reorganized Eastern Front. Following a series of defeats at the hands of the Red Army, notably at Cheliabinsk and on the Tobol′ River in July–September 1919, the 2nd Army retreated eastward, eventually joining the Great Siberian (Ice) March. Its remnants arrived in Chita in March 1920 and joined the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov.

Commanders of the 2nd Army were Lieutenant General N. A. Lokhvitskii (22 July–1 September 1919) and Major General S. N. Voitsekhovskii (1 September 1919–25 January 1920). Its chief of staff was Colonel K. K. Akintievskii (22 July–12 November 1919).

2ND CAVALRY ARMY. This Red military formation was created, on the basis of the cavalry corps commanded by F. K. Mironov, by a directive of the Revvoensovet of the South-West Front on 16 July 1920. It was operational on the South-West Front and (from 21 September 1920) the Southern Front. Among its complement were the 2nd M. F. Blinov Cavalry Division (July–December 1920); the 16th Cavalry Division (July–December 1920); the 20th Cavalry Corps (July–September 1920); the 21st Cavalry Division (July–December 1920); the 3rd Rifle Division (October 1920); and the 46th Rifle Division (October 1920). Its forces numbered some 5,500 men.

In July 1920, working in collaboration with the 13th Red Army, the 2nd Cavalry Army engaged in battles with the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, driving the latter out of Aleksandrovsk. In August 1920, it operated in Northern Tauride and, at the end of that month, attacked the bridgehead established by the Whites on the right bank of the Dnepr, at Kakhovka. Operating alongside the 6th Red Army, the 2nd Cavalry Army then participated in the forcing of the Perekop isthmus, and on 13 November 1920, entered Simferopol′, in Crimea. On 6 December 1920, the 2nd Cavalry Army was reconfigured as the 2nd Cavalry Corps.

Commanders of the 2nd Cavalry Army were O. I. Gorodovikov (16 July–6 September 1920) and F. K. Mironov (6 September–6 December 1920). Its chiefs of staff were S. D. Kharlamov (17–28 July 1920); N. K. Shchelokov (28 July–10 October 1920); and G. A. Armaderov (10 October–6 December 1920).

SECOND KUBAN MARCH. This is the term applied to the operations of the Volunteer Army during the summer and autumn of 1918 that served to clear the North Caucasus of Soviet forces and to prepare a base for the following year’s advance on Moscow by the Armed Forces of South Russia. The Volunteers’ commanders, General M. V. Alekseev and (following Alekseev’s death in October 1918) General A. I. Denikin, planned to move south from the territory of the Don Cossack Host, along rail routes, to Ekaterinodar—which the Volunteers had failed to capture during the earlier First Kuban (Ice) March—and then to turn west toward Novorossiisk and the Black Sea coast. When the campaign was launched, on 23 June 1918, opposing Red forces in the North Caucasus numbered 80,000–100,000 men; the Volunteers numbered only perhaps 10,000, but they could call on the support of thousands of Cossacks from the Don and the Kuban Cossack Host, who had revolted against Soviet rule over the previous spring. Moreover, the Red forces were divided, faced widespread discontent from the population, and were isolated from Soviet Russia, since forces of the Austro-German intervention had captured Rostov-on-Don in May 1918, and the Don Cossacks had cut the alternative rail route via Tsaritsyn in June–July 1918. They also faced hostility in their rear, from the forces of the North Caucasus Mountain Republic, and had to deal with a variety of White partisan forces, such as that commanded by General A. G. Shkuro.

The first part of the Whites’ plan went smoothly, as Red forces were driven from the stations of Shablievka, Torgovaia, and Belaia Glina, although (in an echo of the loss of General L. G. Kornilov during the First Kuban March), on 25 June 1918, a shell from a Red armored train killed General S. L. Markov near Shabliavka. Then the White forces overcame 30,000 Red Guards at Tikhoretskaia (15 July 1918), and after a 10-day battle with the Reds’ Taman Army, on 18 August 1918 the Volunteers entered Ekaterinodar, capital of the Kuban territory. On 26 August 1918, the major port of Novorossiisk was also captured, enabling contact to be established by sea with Crimea, where many White officers (such as General P. N. Wrangel) were anxious to join the Volunteers. By September 1918, drawing manpower from the captured territories and from refugees, the Volunteers’ strength had grown to 35,000–40,000.

The second part of the campaign was also a success, but a hard-won one. Intense battles were fought with Red forces around Armavir, in mid-October 1918, and then around Stavropol′ (with General M. G. Drozdovskii, commander of the 3rd Officers’ Infantry Regiment, suffering what turned out to be a mortal wound), before that city was captured, by Wrangel’s 2nd Officers’ Regiment, on 18 November 1918.

The Second Kuban March cost the Volunteers at least 30,000 men—that is to say, almost 100 percent of their complement—but placed them in control of a rich and fertile base from which to launch further operations and gave them access to the sea, through which to establish contacts with the forces of the Allied intervention.

2nd RED ARMY. Two Red formations were called by this name in the course of the civil wars.

The first 2nd Red Army was created in Ukraine, in March 1918, from various partisan and Red Guards units determined to oppose the forces of the Austro-German intervention. As the interventionists advanced, this small force (perhaps 1,000 infantry with a few cavalry units) retreated from the Dnestr to Ekaterinoslav and then into the Donbass. Some of its units then moved toward Tsaritsyn, while others headed north to Khar′kov. Its commanders were E. N. Venediktov (April 1918) and one Bondarenko (from late April 1918).

The second (and much more substantial) 2nd Red Army was created in June 1918, on the orders of the commander of the Eastern Front, from various volunteer detachments around Ufa and Orenburg. Among the forces subsequently incorporated into this 2nd Red Army were the 1st Orlov Infantry Division (September 1918); the 5th Rifle Division (April–July 1919); the 7th Rifle Division (February–June 1919); the 28th Rifle Division (September 1918–August 1919); and the Viatka Special Division (October–December 1919). In June–July 1918, the army was involved in battles against the forces of Komuch (the People’s Army) and the Czechoslovak Legion across the basins of the Kama and Belaia Rivers, then moved toward the Izhevsk region to combat the Izhevsk-Votkinsk uprising against Soviet power and was also involved in offensive operations on the Eastern Front that captured Kazan′ and Sarapul (October–November 1918). It was subsequently beaten back from Perm′, Kungur, and Osa by the Whites’ Siberian Army (December 1918–January 1919), before moving on to a counteroffensive against the forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s Russian Army, recapturing Izhevsk (7 June 1919), Votkinsk (12 June 1919), Kungur (1 July 1919), and Ekaterinburg (15 July 1919). The second 2nd Red Army was disestablished on 16 July 1919, its units being dispersed among other Red formations, notably the Special Group commanded by V. I. Shorin on the eastern flank of the Southern Front.

Commanders of the second 2nd Red Army were V. V. Iakovlev (to 26 June 1918), F. E. Makhin (26 June–3 July 1918), and A. I. Kharchenko (3–4 July 1918), all of whom deserted to the Whites; K. I. Blokhin (18 July–3 September 1918); I. F. Maksimov (acting, 3–27 September 1918); and V. I. Shorin (28 September 1918–16 July 1919). Its chiefs of staff were E. A. Kel′chevskii (15 August–13 September 1918); N. G. Semenov (19 September–2 November 1918); F. M. Afanas′ev (acting, 3 November–12 December 1918, 23 February–3 May 1919, and 18 June–12 July 1919); A. O. Zundvlad (acting 13 December 1918–23 February 1919); and one Dmitriev (acting, 3 May–17 June 1919).

2nd Ukrainian Soviet Army. This Red military formation was created on 15 April 1919 (according to orders of the Revvoensovet of the Ukrainian Front of 24 March 1919), from forces operating around Khar′kov—including the Trans-Dnepr Division, the 2nd Independent Brigade, the 3rd Brigade, and the Crimean Brigade—that were molded into the 3rd and 7th Ukrainian Rifle Divisions and attached to the Ukrainian Front and (from 27 April 1919) the Southern Front. The Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine of Nestor Makhno was also attached to it. Its staff was based at Ekaterinoslav. In April 1919, the army helped forced a passage through the Perekop isthmus and overran much of Crimea, capturing Sevastopol′ on 29 April 1919. The following month, the army engaged with the forces of Nykyfor Hryhoriiv and then began defensive operations against the advancing forces of the Armed Forces of South Russia around Kupiansk. On 4 June 1919, the forces of the 2nd Ukrainian Soviet Army were incorporated into the 14th Red Army on the Southern Front.

The commander of the 2nd Ukrainian Soviet Army was A. E. Skachko (7 April–7 June 1919). Its chief of staff was N. A. Kartashov (7 April–7 June 1919).

SEDAR, MOHAMMED-KURBAN. See Junaïd-khan (SEDAR, MOHAMMED-KURBAN).

SEDIAKIN, ALEKSANDR IGNAT′EVICH (14 November 1893–29 July 1938). Staff captain (1916), komandarm, second rank (1935). The Soviet military commander A. I. Sediakin, the son of a soldier, was born in St. Petersburg and, before the First World War, worked as a surveyor in Siberia. During the First World War, he graduated from the Irkutsk Military School, then saw action on the Northern Front, latterly as commander of a machine gun regiment. Following the February Revolution, he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) and was elected chairman of his unit’s soldiers’ committee.

Following the October Revolution, Sediakin was elected chairman of the council of army commissars of the 5th Army, making him in practice its commander, and was elected also to the Constituent Assembly. In March 1918, he joined the Red Army, serving initially as chair of the Revolutionary-Military Committee of the Novozhevsk section of the Western Screens, then (from May 1918) as commander of the 2nd Pskov Rifle Division, and then (from 6 August 1918) as commander of armored trains on the Eastern Front. On 22 August 1918, he became commander of the 1st Kursk Infantry Regiment, in which post he participated in the subsequent campaigns against the People’s Army of Komuch. In September 1918, he was transferred to South Russia, becoming commander of the 2nd Kursk Infantry Brigade, and from January 1919, assistant commander of the Southern Front. Subsequently, as commander of the 15th (Inzensk) Infantry Brigade (from November 1919), he participated in the decisive battles against the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel.

After recovering from wounds sustained in June 1920, Sediakin served as commander of the 1st (from October 1920) and then 10th (from February 1921) Reserve Rifle Brigades. In March 1921, he was named commander of the southern group of the 7th Red Army during its suppression of the Kronshtadt Revolt. Sediakin’s men were the first to force their way into the fortress, and he was subsequently made commander of Kronshtadt. In that capacity, it was his job to round up the remaining rebels and to purge the garrison. For this, he was awarded his first Order of the Red Banner. He subsequently (from April 1921) became commander of the Petrograd Military District. From October 1921, as commander of the Karelia–Murmansk Region, he led Red forces against Finnish invaders of Karelia during the Kinship Wars (winning a second Order of the Red Banner for his achievements). When the civil wars ended, he graduated from the Red Military Academy in 1923 and went on to serve in a number of senior military posts, culminating with his appointment as deputy head of the General Staff of the Red Army (in 1934) and head of the Directorate of the Anti-Aircraft Defenses of the USSR (in 1936).

In July 1937, Sediakin was suddenly moved to the lesser post of commander of the Baku Military District, and in December of that year, he was arrested. On 29 July 1937, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR found him guilty of treason and terrorism, and he was shot that same day in Moscow. During the investigation, Sediakin named almost 100 others involved in his phantom “terrorist organization.” He was posthumously rehabilitated on 4 August 1956.

SEJNY UPRISING. This term refers to events that occurred in the ethnically mixed region of Sejny (Seinai) in August 1919, when Poles rose up against the Lithuanian authorities who claimed governance of the area. German forces that had occupied Sejny during the First World War withdrew in July–August 1919 and handed control to the Lithuanians (distrusting the Poles as an ally of France), but incoming Allied representatives had drawn a demarcation line (the Foch Line, 27 July 1919) that granted much of the disputed Suwałki (Suvalkai) region to Poland and demanded that the Lithuanian Army withdraw behind it. The Lithuanians, complaining that the Foch Line had been settled upon in talks between the Allies and the Poles in Paris, to which no Lithuanian representative had been accredited, only partially complied, refusing to abandon Sejny (where the population was split almost equally between Poles and Lithuanians and whose seminary had played a pivotal role in the Lithuanian national revival of the 19th century). Then, on 23 August 1919, around 1,000 Polish irregulars (led by Adam Rudnicki and Wacław Zawadzki) initiated the uprising.

Although the Polish leader Józef Piłsudski had advised against the uprising—he was hoping to persuade Lithuania to unite with Poland in an Intermarum Federation (Międzymorze)—soon afterward regular Polish forces of the 41st Infantry Regiment arrived and forced the Lithuanians to retreat beyond the Foch Line. Skirmishes continued, however, over the next months, culminating in the Polish–Lithuanian War, during which Sejny changed hands several times. Eventually, Polish sovereignty over the region was formalized in the Suwałki Agreement of 7 October 1920, which reinstated the Foch Line. This has remained the Polish–Lithuanian border in the Suwałki Region ever since (except during the Second World War).

SELIVACHEV, VLADIMIR IVANOVICH (14 June 1868–17 September 1919). Colonel (1906), major general (1914), lieutenant general (22 September 1916). The Red military commander V. I. Selivachev was a graduate of the Pskov Cadet Corps, the Pavlovsk Military School (1888), and the Academy of the General Staff (1894). He served in the Russo–Japanese War, as commander of a hospital ship, and subsequently commanded the 179th Infantry Regiment (9 January 1908–2 November 1911) and the 4th Finland Rifle Regiment (2 November 1911–2 April 1914). He served in the First World War as commander (from 2 April 1914) of the 4th Finland Rifle Brigade (from May 1915, the 4th Finland Rifle Division) and was awarded several honors for bravery in battles in East Prussia and Galicia.

After the February Revolution, Selivachev was commander of the 49th Army Corps (from 6 April 1917), then commander of the 7th Army. He was arrested on 9 September 1917, as a suspected instigator of the Kornilov affair, but was later pressed into service in the Red Army and was attached to the Vseroglavshtab in early 1918. From August to September 1919, he was assistant commander of the Southern Front and simultaneously commander of a strike force consisting of the 8th Red Army and parts of the 13th Red Army that initially stalled the advance of the Volunteer Army before retreating. Selivachev apparently died of typhus, although some sources assert that he was poisoned, being suspected of harboring sympathies for the Whites.

SELIVERSTOV, NIKOLAI FEDOROVICH (1887–8 May 1919). A prominent Red military commander who was active in Central Asia during the civil wars, N. F. Seliverstov was the son of a worker. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and subsequently helped organize Red Guards detachments at Port-Petrovsk (Makhachkala), in Daghestan. From March to April 1919, he was assistant commander of the Ferghana Front, and from 25 April 1919 he commanded the Aktiubinsk Front of the forces of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. On 8 May 1919, Siliveratov was killed in battle against forces of the Orenburg Cossack Host.

Semenov, Grigorii Mikhailovich (13 September 1890–30 August 1946). Esaul (1917), major general (February 1919), lieutenant general (24 December 1919). Perhaps the most reviled of the anti-Bolshevik leaders of the “Russian” Civil Wars and the architect of the atamanshchina that plagued the White cause, G. M. Semenov was born at Duruguevskaia stanitsa, to a Cossack father, who claimed (variously) Mongol or Buriat lineage, and a Russian mother. After graduation from the Orenburg Military School (1911), he served as a coronet with the Verkhneudinsk Regiment of the Transbaikal Cossack Host, spending a period on guard duty at the Russian embassy at Urga, Mongolia (October 1911–January 1912). In February 1914, he was transferred to the 1st Nerchinsk Regiment of the Transbaikal Cossacks and served with that unit in the First World War, under the command of P. N. Wrangel (1914–1916), before transferring to the 3rd Verkhneudinsk Regiment, which undertook an advance into northern Persia and Kurdistan with the Caucasus Army (1916–1917). He then returned to the Nerchinsk Cossacks on the Romanian Front (May–June 1917). As a result of his sending a personal appeal to A. F. Kerensky, he was dispatched on a mission to raise volunteer units from the Buriat and Cossack population of Transbaikalia.

When the October Revolution occurred, Semenov was still in Transbaikalia, at Berezovka Station, where he formed a Buriat-Mongol–Cossack partisan detachment to challenge Red Guards in the area (19 November 1917), thereby initiating the civil wars in the Russian Far East. After being defeated, on 2 December 1917 he retreated with his men into Manchuria. There, with the assistance of General D. L. Khorvat, he reformed and re-equipped his forces, now termed the Special Manchurian Detachment, for a new raid into Transbaikalia, which was launched on 29 January 1918. After initial success and the capture of Dauria, he was again repulsed, by the Red forces of S. G. Lazo, and forced back into Manchuria, setting up camp at Manzhouli (Manchuria) Station. Another advance on Chita by Semenov’s force was repelled by the city’s Red defenders in April–May 1918.

Following the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion and the collapse of Soviet power east of Lake Baikal, Semenov’s detachment (by now having received financial aid from Britain and France) reentered Russian territory, capturing Verkhneudinsk (20 August 1918) and Chita (26 August 1918). He made the latter his base and established a personal fiefdom in Transbaikalia, benefiting from his stranglehold on the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern Railways and the covert support of the Japanese interventionist forces in the region, who were keen to sow seeds of disunity among the Whites. His authority was enhanced by being named commander of the 5th Independent Amur Corps by the Provisional Siberian Government (September 1918). Following the Omsk coup, Semenov initially refused to recognize the authority of Supreme Ruler Admiral A. V. Kolchak, with whom he had clashed earlier in Manchuria (Semenov having refused at that time to follow orders from Khorvat, whom Kolchak was serving), and instead proclaimed an independent Mongol-Buriat Republic (19 January 1919). He also had himself elected (his opponents said illegally) campaign ataman (Pokhodnyi ataman) of the Transbaikal Cossack Host, the Amur Cossack Host, and the Ussurii Cossack Host (February–April 1919) and later as Host ataman of the Transbaikal Cossacks (June 1919). When Kolchak threatened military action against him, dispatching a force under General V. I. Vol′kov to Irkutsk, Semenov caved in and formally subordinated himself to the supreme ruler. He was subsequently named commander of the Chita Military District (from February 1919); commander of the 6th East Siberian Army Corps (from May 1919); assistant to the commander of the Forces of the Amur Region, General S. N. Rozanov (from July 1919); and main commander of Forces in the Rear Districts (from 24 December 1919).

However, Semenov remained a thorn in the side of the Omsk government throughout its existence, embarrassing Kolchak in front of the Allies by the extreme cruelty, banditry, and terror that characterized his dealings with both the local population and the interventionist forces in Transbaikalia. He also refused to send any forces to the front, although in December 1919 he did mount an abortive expedition to Irkutsk, under General L. N. Skipetrov, to attempt to clear the forces of the Political Center from Irkutsk and, potentially, to save Kolchak and the remains of the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve from capture by the Bolsheviks. On 4 January 1920, as he renounced his own authority and prepared to put himself in the hands of the Allies, Kolchak named Semenov governor-general of the Russian Far East, with “full military and civilian authority” over the region. Thus, when the remains of the Siberian White forces limped into Transbaikalia, they were united with Semenov’s units to create the Far Eastern (White) Army. This force was defeated in battles in October–November 1920 with the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the newly formed Far Eastern Republic, and Semenov was forced to abandon Chita and make his way through the Chinese Eastern Railway zone of Manchuria into the Maritime Province, where he continued to organize military offensives against Red forces to the north, on the Khabarovsk Front (as well as organizing political intrigues against the successive anti-Bolshevik governments at Vladivostok that refused to recognize his authority).

On 20 September 1921, with the remnants of his forces in disarray, Semenov went into emigration, crossing into Korea and then traveling to Japan and then briefly to the United States, where he was fortunate to escape imprisonment for crimes against American civilians and military servicemen during the civil-war period. He subsequently lived in Nagasaki (until 1928) and then Yokohama (until 1930), before returning to Manchuria. There, he lived at Kakagashi, near Darien, reportedly on a Japanese pension, and was close to Japanese intelligence services during the Manchukuo period. At this time he was engaged in various anti-Soviet activities and intrigues with the warring factions in China. He was arrested at his home by the invading Soviet forces in September 1945—apparently he made no effort to flee or to hide—and was flown to Moscow. Following a trial there on 26–29 August 1946 (which, in contrast to that of Generals P. N. Krasnov and A. G. Shkuro, received broad coverage in the Soviet press), in which he was found guilty of numerous crimes (including anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, espionage against the USSR, and terrorism), by order of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, he was hanged. On 4 April 1994, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation reviewed the case against Semenov. The charge of “anti-Soviet agitation” was dismissed, for lack of corpus delicti, but all other charges were upheld, and his posthumous rehabilitation was denied.

SEMENOV, NIKOLAI GRIGOR′EVICH (12 April 1874–26 August 1918). Lieutenant (29 March 1909), colonel (6 December 1912), major general (1917), komdiv (November 1935). The Red military commander N. G. Semenov was a graduate of the Moscow Aleksandrovsk Commercial School, the Moscow Military School (1897), and the Academy of the General Staff (1904). He entered Russian military service on 22 September 1895 and initially joined the Rostov Regiment. Prior to the First World War, he was a senior adjutant with the staff of the 9th Cavalry Division (23 August 1905–13 February 1912) and then worked on the staff of the Vil′na Military District (from 13 February 1912). During the war, Semenov occupied numerous posts: senior adjutant attached to the staff of the quartermaster general of the 1st Army; chief of staff of the 43rd Rifle Division; commander of the 102nd Viatka Infantry Division (from 20 November 1915); chief of staff of the 8th Siberian Rifle Division (from 3 January 1917); chief of staff of the 2nd Army Corps (17 April–27 August 1917); and commander of the 84th Infantry Division (from 27 August 1917).

Following the October Revolution, Semenov volunteered for service in the Red Army. During the civil wars, he was one of the Reds’ most effective military specialists. He served as chief of staff of the 2nd Red Army (19 September–2 November 1918) and commander of the 12th Red Army (16 June–8 September 1919), then was placed on the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, latterly as assistant inspector of infantry and then (from 1 March 1923) as inspector of infantry of the Red Army.

Semenov was arrested in 1931, during Operation “Spring,” and was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, but was soon released and returned to teaching work at the Red Military Academy. However, he was rearrested on 11 May 1938, and having been found guilty of membership in a fictitious “counterrevolutionary monarchist organization” by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, on 26 August that same year he was executed. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 27 September 1962.

SEMIRECH′E ARMY. The origins of this White formation in Central Asia lay in the fact that the overwhelming majority of members of the Semirech′e Cossack Host refused to recognize Soviet power in 1917 and drove the Bolsheviks from the urban centers of their region, including Vernyi (later Alma-Ata, now Almaty), in a series of risings in the spring of 1918. Soviet forces regrouped and, in March–April 1918, temporarily reasserted control, but the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion galvanized resistance across the region. By the autumn of 1918, much of the Semirech′e countryside was again in the hands of various Cossack formations, which in October of that year, united in the 2nd Independent Steppe Corps (and under the command of Ataman B. V. Annenkov), became subordinate to the Omsk government. Over the following months (November 1918–April 1919), this force battled against the Turkestan Red Army, achieving considerable success and assuring control of most of Semirech′e for the Whites, although from the summer of 1919 onward, this control began to crumble. In October 1919, as the forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s Russian Army began to disintegrate, the Semirech′e (Independent) Army was created, on the basis of the 2nd Steppe Corps, again under the command of Annenkov, which was then joined by the remnants of the Orenburg Army of Ataman A. I. Dutov. Its constituent parts (as of 1 February 1920) were the Northern (Front) Group (which included the Orenburg contingent), under Major General A. S. Bakich; the Central Group, under Annenkov; and the Southern Group, under Major General A. F. Shcherbakov.

The Northern and Southern Groups of the Semirech′e Army suffered decisive defeats against Red forces in March–April 1920 and retreated across the border into Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang/Sinkiang), where they were joined, on 25 May 1920, by Annenkov’s group. The Chinese authorities regarded these heavily armed refugees with grave suspicion, however, and most of the men spent many months in prisons and camps in Chinese Turkestan. In early 1920, some 5,000 members of the army returned to Soviet Russia, while others headed to Mongolia with General Bakich and united with the Asiatic Cavalry Division of General R. F. Ungern von Sternberg.

SEMIRECH′E COSSACK HOST. This Cossack host, with its capital at Vernyi (later Alma-Ata, now Almaty), was created in Semirech′e oblast′ in 1867, from elements of the neighboring Siberian Cossack Host. By the early 20th century, it occupied some 5,000 square miles of land and had a population of some 45,000, settled among 19 stanitsy and 15 smaller settlements. From the Host 3 cavalry regiments and 12 detached squadrons were raised during the First World War.

During the civil wars, the Host leadership supported the anti-Bolshevik cause and rose against Soviet rule from April 1918, capturing Sergiopol′ (8 August 1918) and Lepinsk (29 August 1918). The forces of the Host were then incorporated into the Semirech′e Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s Russian Army. When the latter collapsed, the majority of the Semirech′e Cossacks retreated into Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang/Sinkiang) in March–April 1920, some of them subsequently making their way to Vladivostok to join the Far Eastern (White) Army. At the same time the Host was formally disbanded by the Soviet government, as part of its policy of de-Cossackization.

The Host Atamans of the Semirech′e Cossack Host during the civil-war period were Major General A. M. Ionov (from 13 February 1918) and Major General A. F. Shcherbakov (from February 1920).

SEMIRECH′E FRONT. This Red front was created on 28 June 1918, according to the orders of the regional commissar of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, to combat White forces of the Semirech′e Cossack Host and the Semirech′e Army, commanded by Ataman B. V. Annenkov, that were advancing from Semipalatinsk toward Sergiopol′. By October 1919, some 7,500 men were operational on the Semirech′e Front, organized into the following units: the 1st Vernensk Worker-Peasant Infantry Regiment; the 1st and 4th Pishpeksk Infantry Regiments; the 4th Semirech′e Infantry Regiment; the 5th, 6th, and 7th Cavalry Regiments; the Tokmaksk unit; and an artillery division.

Initially, however, the front consisted of various irregular units of Red Guards that broke under the advance of the Whites and surrendered Sergiopol′ (21 July 1918) and Lepsinsk (29 August 1918). The latter town was soon recaptured, on 7 September 1918, and the front then stabilized along a southeast to northwest axis from the foothills of the Dzhungarskii Alatau to the Pribaltiiskii Steppe, while in the White rear, the Cherkassk Defense was conducted. Attempts to break through to relieve the defenders of Cherkassk in July–August 1919 were foiled by the Whites, who captured Cherkassk on 14 October 1919 and pushed the forces of the Semirech′e Front back to the Ak-Ichk canal. On 22 November 1919, by order of the Revvoensovet of the Turkestan ASSR, all forces on the Semirech′e Front were united into a single Semirech′e Independent Division (later the 3rd Turkestan Rifle Division).

Commanders of the Semirech′e Front were Petrenko (28 June–21 September 1918); N. N. Zatyl′nikov (21 September 1918–11 February 1919); G. Kochergin (acting; 11 February–5 March 1919); Ponomarev (5 March–6 June 1919); K. Koliada (6–24 June 1919); Zhuntov (24 June–8 July 1919); Zhurbenko (8 July–30 August 1919); F. E. Beker (30 August–10 November 1919); and A. F. Sdvizhenskii (10–22 November 1919). Its chiefs of staff were Ignatovich (28 June–28 September 1918); V. O. Zyrianov (28 September–5 November 1918); K. Bubnov (5 November 1918–May 1919); Paklin (May–16 June 1919); M. Liapin (June–6 September 1919); S. N. Dublitskii (acting; 26 September–12 October 1919); Brazhentsev (12 October–17 November 1919); and Zakrzhevskii (17–22 November 1919).

SEPTEMBER DAYS. This term (sometimes rendered as the “September Events”) denotes the events in Baku, during September 1918, when a significant proportion of the city’s Armenian population was massacred by forces of the Turkish Army of Islam and local Azeri militias. This was a replay of the interethnic conflicts that had plagued the region during the disturbances of 1905–1907. The attacks may also be explained as an act of revenge for the events that occurred in Baku in March 1918 (the March Days), when Armenian Dashnaks and Russians (among them some supporters of the Bolsheviks) massacred thousands of the Azeri inhabitants of the city.

The September violence was unleashed when the Turks finally defeated the forces of the Central Caspian Dictatorship and their British allies (Dunsterforce) on the outskirts of Baku, on 14 September 1918. Turkish troops and Azeri irregulars descended on the town; over the next three days, they killed at least 5,000 Armenian residents of the city and around 4,000 Armenian refugees who had sought shelter there. Unknown numbers were wounded, raped, or driven from their homes and businesses. Damage to property was also extensive. In the longer term, as many as 30,000 Armenian residents of the Baku region may have been slaughtered during the ensuing Armenian–Azerbaijan War.

serada, jan (ivan nikitovich) (1 May 1879–after 19 November 1943). Biographical details about Jan Serada, who was the first president of the Belarussian People’s Republic, are scarce, but it is known that he was born in the village of Zadźwiej, qualified as a vet from a school in Warsaw in 1903, and obtained the rank of colonel in the Russian Army, in which he served during the Russo–Japanese War and the First World War. In December 1917, he was elected head of the First All-Belarusian Congress at Minsk and subsequently chaired the executive committee that the congress elected. In that capacity, he oversaw the declaration of Belarussian independence on 25 March 1918, and subsequently became president of the new republic.

A self-proclaimed social democrat (although it is unknown whether he was ever a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party), he chose not to accompany the government into exile in December 1918, as Red Army forces overran the region, but remained in the subsequently established Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. During the 1920s, he taught at the Hory-Horki Agricultural Academy and a variety of other such institutions and published several works on animal husbandry, but on 4 July 1930 he was arrested on charges of propagating “bourgeois nationalism” (during NKVD investigations into the fictional Union for the Liberation of Belarus) and was imprisoned for five years at Iaroslavl′. In 1941, he was again arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Serada was apparently freed from the Kraslag camp, near Krasnoiarsk, on 19 November 1943, but his subsequent fate is unknown. He was posthumously rehabilitated, in a series of court decisions from 10 July 1988 to 16 January 1989.

SERDIUK (GUARDS) DIVISIONS. Named after the mercenary Serdiuk regiments formed under the Ukrainian Hetman State in the late 17th century, during the civil wars (and particularly the opening stages of the Soviet–Ukrainian War) this was the archaic title granted to elite volunteer units of the Ukrainian Army that emerged during its formation in the winter of 1917–1918. From November 1917, two such units (numbering 12,000 men in total) were created around Kiev, one commanded by Colonel Yurii Kapkan and the other by General Oleksandr Hrekiv. In January 1918, four of their regiments helped defend the Ukrainian capital from the Red advance, although several others, unwilling to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the socialist-dominated Ukrainian National Republic, remained neutral in the struggle.

In January–February 1918, the Serediuk Divisions were disbanded by the Ukrainian Central Rada, although many of their men then joined the Independent Zaporozhian Detachment (forerunner of the Zaporozhian Corps). In July 1918, a reconstituted Serdiuk Regiment, chiefly consisting of volunteers from the wealthier elements of the peasantry of Left-Bank Ukraine, was attached to the Hetmanite Army of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii, although most of its elements joined the forces of the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic as they overthrew the Ukrainian State in November–December 1918.

Serebrennikov, Ivan Innokent′evich (14 July 1882–1953?). One of those advocates of Siberian regionalism who initially supported the Whites but found themselves ostracized by the military, I. I. Serebrennikov was born into a well-to-do peasant family at Znamenskii-Verkhlensk, near Irkutsk. In 1901, he entered the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg, but dropped out after one year to join the revolutionary movement. In 1907, he was arrested, imprisoned, and exiled as a member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, but he really made more of an impression in this period as a frequently published statistician and geographer of Siberia (eventually becoming director of the Siberian Section of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society in 1915). From 1913 to 1917, by which time his political convictions had moved to the center-right, Serebrennikov was secretary of the Irkutsk City Duma and was also active in Zemgor during the First World War.

In 1917, Serebrennikov became increasingly involved in Siberian regionalist circles, and in January 1918 he was elected, in absentia, to the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia, as minister of food and supply. He then lived and worked at Tomsk, until the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime in June 1918, when he moved to Omsk to become minister of supply in the Provisional Siberian Government. He also chaired its Administrative Council. In September 1918, as acting chairman of its Council of Ministers (in the absence of P. V. Vologodskii), he headed the Siberian government’s delegation to the Ufa State Conference. He was briefly minister of supply in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, but as a Siberian oblastnik (even as one of quite conservative opinions), he was treated with suspicion by the Russian-nationalist White military, and in December 1918, he was forced out of his post (his ministry then being merged with the Ministry of Food).

Serebrennikov subsequently returned to Irkutsk, to run the Institute for the Study of Siberia, and was engaged in research into the economy of the Buriat people. In this period, he worked also as editor of the newspaper Velikaia Rus′ (“Great Russia”). In emigration from 1920, he taught for a year at the law school in Harbin and then ran the Russian Commercial School at Tientsin (1922–1924), where he also led an émigré organization, the Russian National Community. At the same time, he continued his scholarly research, publishing widely on Russian history, the economy of Manchuria, the place of religion in Chinese culture, and other subjects. After a period living in Japan, he moved to the United States at some point in the 1930s.

SEREBRIAKOV, LEONID PETROVICH (30 May 1888/1890–30 January 1937). A leading Red political and military organizer during the civil wars, L. P. Serebriakov was the son of a Samara worker and himself labored at a brewery at Ufa and a foundry at Lugansk, before joining the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1905. He adhered to the party’s Bolshevik faction, participating in the revolutionary events of 1905–1906 at Lugansk, and was subsequently engaged in party work in the Donbass, Baku, Nikolaev, Odessa, Moscow, Samara, Petrograd, and Tomsk. He was arrested and exiled on numerous occasions. In January 1917, he was called up into the Russian Army and assigned to the 88th Reserve Infantry regiment at Kostroma.

Following the February Revolution, Serebriakov became one of the leaders and organizers of the Kostroma Soviet, then moved to Moscow in 1917, where (from October 1917 to 1919) he served as a member of the presidium of the Moscow Soviet and was secretary of the Moscow Oblast′ Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks). He was also a member and secretary of the presidium of VTsIK (1919–1920); from 23 March 1919 to 8 March 1921, was a member of the Orgbiuro of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks); and from 5 April 1920 to 8 March 1921, was also a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee. During the civil wars, Serebriakov was also a member of the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front (16 July 1919–10 January 1920), in which capacity he played a leading part in planning the Red counteroffensive against the Armed Forces of South Russia, and served also on the Revvoensovet of the Republic (1920–1921). From 1921, he worked in the People’s Commissariat for Communications (as commissar from May 1922).

Serebriakov was a close associate of L. D. Trotsky during the civil wars and a leading member of the Left Opposition in the early 1920s. In 1927, consequently, he was expelled from the party as an adherent of the so-called United Opposition (of Trotsky, L B. Kamenev, and G. E. Zinov′ev). He was readmitted in 1930, after recanting his political “errors.” He then served, from 1931 to 3 August 1935, as head of the Central Directorate of Roads and Road Transport of the Sovnarkom of the USSR and as first deputy head of that office. He was arrested on 17 August 1936, and in January 1937 appeared (alongside K. B. Radek, Iu. L. Piatakov, and others) at the second of the major show trials (“The Trial of the 17”). (In the interim, the state prosecutor, A. Ia. Vyshinskii, had commandeered the Serebriakov family dacha for his own use.) Serebriakov was found guilty of various acts of terrorism and espionage as a member of the “Parallel Center,” and on 30 January 1937, was sentenced to death and shot. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 4 December 1986.

SERGEEV, EVGENII NIKOLAEVICH (1890–10 September 1937). Captain (14 June 1914), lieutenant (1917), komdiv (5 December 1935). The Soviet military commander E. N. Sergeev was the son of an artist. Having entered military service in 1909, he graduated from the Academy of the General Staff in 1914. During the First World War, he served in His Majesty’s Own Railway Regiment (from 24 March 1914), before moving to a post with the general staff in 1915. He then served as a senior officer on the staff of the 30th Army Corps (9 February–November 1915), as a senior adjutant on the staff of the 71st Infantry Division (from 14 July 1916), as an assistant senior adjutant on the staff of the 6th Army (from 6 July 1917), and as a senior adjutant with the intelligence section of the staff of the 6th Army.

After the October Revolution, Sergeev volunteered for service with the Red Army in July 1918. During the civil wars, as one of the Reds’ military specialists, he served as chief of staff of the 2nd Petrograd Infantry Division (15 July–September 1918) and assistant head of the operational department of the staff of the Northern Screen (9–26 September 1918), then was attached to the staff of the 3rd Red Army on the Eastern Front (from October 1918). He was subsequently chief of staff of the Special Brigade of the 3rd Red Army (8 November–December 1918), assistant chief of the operational section of the 3rd Red Army (23 December 1918–26 January 1919), and chief of staff (February–April and June–August 1919), then acting commander (19 August–December 1919), of the 30th Rifle Division. In the latter capacity, he played a leading role in the capture of the Whites’ capital at Omsk and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. He then served as chief of staff of the 3rd Red Army (19 December 1919–15 January 1920) and, from January to 8 March 1920, was commander of the 1st Labor Army. From April to May 1920, Sergeev was commander of reserve forces on the Western Front; from May to June 1920, he was commander of the northern group of forces on the Western Front, receiving a second Order of the Red Banner for his exploits there during the opening stages of the Soviet–Polish War.

Sergeev subsequently worked as a lecturer at a variety of military schools, then became chief of staff of the Leningrad Military District, assistant commander of the Leningrad Military District (1925–1926), chief of staff of the Belorussian Military District (1926–1928), and chief of staff of the North Caucasus Military District (1928–1936). In 1936, Sergeev was made a senior lecturer with the Operational Arts Department of the Red Military Academy. He was arrested in July 1937, and having been found guilty of membership in a phantom anti-Soviet terrorist organization by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on 10 September 1937, was immediately executed. Sergeev was buried in a mass grave in the Donskoi cemetery in Moscow. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 21 March 1957.

SERGE, VICTOR (KIBAL′CHICH, VIKTOR L′VOVICH) (30 December 1890–17 November 1947). Victor Serge, the celebrated francophone anarchist and internationalist (and prodigious author, historian, and literary critic), who joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) during the civil wars, was born in Brussels. He was the son of poverty-stricken Russian political exiles (his father was distantly related to N. I. Kibal′chich, who was executed in 1881 as a member of the People’s Will group that assassinated Alexander II). He joined the Belgian Socialist Party in 1905, but soon gravitated toward individualist anarchism and illegalism. He was expelled from Belgium in 1909 and settled in Paris, where he became a journalist of some note and then editor of the journal L’Anarchie. On 3 February 1913, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for his association with the violent Bonnot Gang (La Bande à Bonnot), which had staged numerous violent robberies in 1912–1913. Upon his release in 1917, Serge initially went to Spain, but then decided to travel to Russia to participate in the revolutionary events there. However, he was arrested en route, in France, having been ordered never to return to that country, and was again imprisoned (without trial), for more than a year.

In October 1918, Serge was released and sent to Soviet Russia as part of the group of revolutionaries exchanged for Robert Bruce Lockhart. He joined the RKP(b) in Petrograd in February 1919 and was apparently committed to the Soviet regime, but retained contacts with anarchist and nonparty groups and became increasingly critical of the state bureaucracy, particularly after going to work for the Komintern (as an editor, translator, and host to foreign visitors) in March 1919. He also spoke out against the Red Terror, the suppression of the Kronshtadt Revolt, and the introduction of the New Economic Policy.

In the aftermath of the events at Kronshtadt, being by then deeply disillusioned with general developments in Soviet Russia, Serge withdrew from active participation in national politics and became involved in an independent workers’ commune in a rural community near Petrograd. When that enterprise failed, he accepted a Komintern assignment to Germany, but was expelled from Berlin following the failure of the Communist uprising of November 1923. He then lived in Austria, but was a sympathizer of the Left Opposition during the power struggles of the 1920s in Soviet Russia and a stern critic of the creeping totalitarianism he associated with the rise to power of J. V. Stalin, particularly after his own return to the USSR in 1925. As an outspoken Oppositionist, he was expelled from the All-Union Communist Party in 1928 (and was briefly imprisoned), then turned to literary work (with which he had been engaged all his adult life), although his books and articles were banned in the USSR. He was arrested in 1933, but international protests led to his release and exile in 1936. He settled in France, but fled to Mexico following the German invasion of June 1940. His relations with the other famous Russian exile there, L. D. Trotsky, were strained (not least as a consequence of Serge’s continued criticism of the manner in which the Kronshtadt Revolt had been crushed). He died, penniless, of a heart attack, in Mexico City on 17 November 1947.

7TH RED ARMY. This appellation was applied to three formations of Soviet forces during the course of the civil wars.

The first 7th Red Army was created, by an order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, on 1 November 1918, from forces operating around Olonets, in Karelia. It was attached initially to the Northern Front (1 November 1918–19 February 1919), then (from 19 February 1919) the Western Front, and then (from 22 November 1918) had operational command over the Baltic Fleet and the naval fortress of Kronshtadt. From 29 December 1918, included in it was the Army Group Latvia (from 4 January 1919, the [Red] Army of Soviet Latvia). Its forces were also reconstituted, on 8 April 1919, into the Estonian Red Army (which, from 2 June 1919, became the southern group of the 7th Red Army) during the battles against the advancing White forces of General N. N. Iudenich. Following the defeat of the Whites, this 7th Red Army was transformed into the Petrograd Revolutionary Labor Army (10 February 1920). Among the forces attached to the first 7th Red Army were the 1st (November 1918–August 1919) and 2nd (July–December 1919) Rifle Divisions; the 2nd Petrograd Infantry Division (November 1918); the 2nd Novgorod Infantry Division (November 1918–January 1919); the 6th (November 1918–February 1920), 10th (February–July 1919 and September 1919–February 1920), 19th (November–December 1918 and January–August 1919), 55th (November 1919–February 1920), and 56th (November 1919–February 1920) Rifle Divisions; the Pskov Rifle Division (November 1918); and the Estonian Rifle Division (June–July 1919).

The first 7th Red Army was initially engaged in battles against German forces in Estonia, as it marched on and captured Narva (22 November 1918) and subsequently reached a point 20 miles from Tallinn in January 1919, during the opening stages of the Estonian War of Independence. It was forced to retreat and abandon Narva (19 January 1919) and subsequently was engaged in defensive operations in Karelia against Finnish forces and the Whites’ Northern Army. From May 1919, it was involved in the defense of Petrograd against the advance, from Estonia, of the White North-West Army and in the suppression of the Krasnaia Gorka uprising (August 1919). The 7th Red Army, with a strength of 40,000 men, 453 field guns, 708 machine guns, 6 armored trains, and 23 aircraft, went on the counteroffensive on 21 October 1919, driving the Whites back from the outskirts of Petrograd into Estonia. Following the Soviet–Estonian peace (the Treaty of Tartu, 2 February 1920), the 7th Red Army was disbanded.

Commanders of the first 7th Red Army were E. A. Iskritskii (1–28 November 1918); E. M. Golubintsev (29 December–5 December 1918); N. V. Khenrikson (5 December 1918–27 January 1919); A. K. Remezov (27 January–1 July 1919); M. S. Matiiasevich (1 July–26 September 1919); S. D. Kharlamov (26 September–17 October 1919); D. N. Nadezhnyi (17 October–17 November 1919); and S. I. Odintsov (17 November 1919–10 February 1920). Its chiefs of staff were V. E. Mediokritskii (1–8 November 1918); V. I. Shishkin (8 November–25 December 1918); M. V. Tsygal′skii (25 December 1918–8 May 1919); S. N. Golubev (8 May–5 July 1919); V. I. Liundekvist (5 July–30 September 1919); A. A. Liutov (30 September–17 October 1919); L. K. Aleksandrov (17 October–14 November 1919); S. D. Kharlamov (14 November–31 December 1919); M. M. von Enden (acting, 31 December 1919–27 January 1920); and V. N. Zarubaev (27 January–10 February 1920).

A second 7th Red Army was constituted on 15 April 1920 (according to an order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic of 10 April 1920). This force existed until 3 December 1920, and was concentrated in the Petrograd region, but did not see military action. It consisted of the 1st (April–July 1920), 6th (February–May 1920), 12th (September–October 1920), 13th (June–September 1920), 18th (April–May 1920), 19th (February–April 1920), 43rd (August–December 1920), 54th (April–June 1920), and 55th (February–August 1920) Rifle Divisions.

Commanders of the second 7th Red Army were S. I. Odintsov (15 April–30 July 1920); M. M. Lashevich (acting, 30 July–25 August 1920); and V. N. Zarubaev (25 August–3 December 1920). Its chiefs of staff were V. N. Zarubaev (15 April–25 September 1920); G. A. Pliushchevskii-Pliushchik (25 September–7 October 1920); and L. N. Rostov (7 October–3 December 1920).

The third 7th Red Army was created on 5 March 1921 to assist in the suppression of the Kronshtadt Revolt. It consisted of the 11th, 27th, 43rd, and Independent Rifle Divisions (March–May 1921). Its forces were repelled by the rebel sailors during its first offensive on 8 March 1921, but significantly reinforced (and with a strength of some 45,000 men), managed to conquer the naval base on 18 March 1921. The army was disbanded in May 1921, and its forces were assigned to the Petrograd Military District.

Commanders of the third 7th Red Army were M. N. Tukhachevskii (5–19 March 1921) and D. N. Avrov (19 March–10 May 1921). Its chief of staff was A. M. Peremytov.

SÈVRES, TREATY OF (10 August 1920). This agreement, which brought to a formal end the hostilities of the First World War between Turkey and the Allies in the Near East, had an important impact on the “Russian” Civil Wars, as it formalized the partition of the Ottoman Empire. Under the terms of the treaty, which was signed on behalf of the Democratic Republic of Armenia by Avetis Aharonyan, Armenia’s independence was recognized by Turkey (Article 88), while it was agreed that “Turkey and Armenia as well as the other High Contracting Parties agree to submit to the arbitration of the President of the United States of America the question of the frontier to be fixed between Turkey and Armenia in the vilayets of Erzurum, Trabzon, Van and Bitlis, and to accept his decision thereupon, as well as any stipulations he may prescribe as to access for Armenia to the sea, and as to the demilitarization of any portion of Turkish territory adjacent to the said frontier” (Article 89). Due to the outbreak of the Turkish War of Independence, however, the treaty was never ratified, and the provisions for a greater (“Wilsonian”) Armenia were dropped from the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923), which recognized a Turkish state within its current borders.

Seydamet (seydamet kirimer), dzhafer (Cafer) (1 September 1889–3 April 1960). A leader of the Crimean Tatar nationalist movement during the revolutionary period, Dzhafer Seydamet was born into a wealthy peasant family in the village of Kızıltaş (Kyzyl-Tash), near Yalta, in Tauride guberniia, and was educated from 1908 in the Law Faculty of Constantinople University. In 1910, he published The Oppression of the Tatar People in Turkey, which led the Russian government to demand his arrest, so he fled to France, where he graduated from the Law Faculty of the Sorbonne in 1913. He returned to Russia on the eve of the First World War and entered St. Petersburg University, but in 1914 was mobilized, put through an officers’ school, and sent to the front.

Seydamet returned to Crimea in 1917 and, along with Noman Çelebicihan, became one of the leaders of the Tatar national movement. On 25 March 1917, at the First Crimean Tatar Congress, he was elected as a member (and from April 1917, chairman) of the Muslim Executive Committee. In that capacity, he led the Crimean Tatar delegation to the All-Russian Muslim Congress in Moscow, in May 1917, and was the initiator of a number of reforms relating to land ownership and the status of women. During the summer of 1917, he was also one of the founders of Milliy Firqa (the Tatar People’s Party). On 26 November 1917, at the Tatar Assembly, he was named director of the ministry of foreign affairs and minister of military affairs of the newly founded Crimean-Tatar National Republic. He was subsequently active in directing Tatar forces in battles against Red Guard detachments across Crimea.

On 4 January 1918, Seydamet became prime minister of the Crimean-Tatar National Republic. However, when Bolshevik units approached Simferopol′ on 14 January 1918, he was forced to flee. He escaped arrest and made his way to Turkey, via Kiev. When forces of the Austro-German intervention entered Crimea in May 1918, he returned to lead the resurrected Crimean Tatar regime, but finding that it was shunned by the Central Powers, he resigned and instead served as minister of foreign affairs in the Crimean Regional Government of General M. A. Sul′kevich (25 June–15 November 1918). In that capacity, he journeyed to Berlin during the summer of 1918, with the aim of winning recognition for the independence of Crimea, but found that the Germans had no interest in this. From Germany, he went into emigration in Sweden, although he made a number of secret visits to Crimea until 1923. He lived subsequently in Turkey (and for a period in Switzerland), as the doyen of the émigré Crimean Tatar community and an active author and publicist for their cause. During the 1930s, he was active with the Prometheans, an anti-Soviet group that aimed to unite the national movements of small states and would-be states around the periphery of Russia and which, as such, enjoyed the patronage of Józef Piłsudski.

Sfatul Ţării. In 1917–1918, this body was the national assembly of Russia’s Bessarabian guberniia and then of the briefly independent Moldavian People’s Republic. Elections to it were first called by soldiers’ and peasants’ councils in the region on 23 October 1917, and it first met on 21 November 1917. The 70 original deputies (some two-thirds of them ethnic Romanians) chose Ion Inculet as president, and on 2 December 1917, they proclaimed the existence of the republic. This was opposed by the pro-Soviet Rumcherod at Odessa, which sent forces into the region. Sfatul Ţării appealed to both the Allies and the Romanian government for assistance. The latter responded, and by the end of January 1918, its 9th Army had driven the Bolsheviks beyond the Dnestr. Subsequently, on 9 April 1918, Sfatul Ţării voted (by 86 votes to 3, with 36 abstentions) for unification with Romania.

Shafalovich, Fedor Platonovich (18 September 1884–1954). Lieutenant colonel (15 August 1916), kombrig (5 December 1935), major general (4 June 1940), lieutenant general (4 October 1943). One of the most important military specialists to serve with the Red Army during the civil wars, F. P. Shafalovich entered military service with the imperial Russian Army on 31 August 1903 and was a graduate of the 3rd Moscow Cadet Corps, the Mikhail Artillery School (1906), and the Academy of the General Staff (1912). From the academy, he was posted to the 107th Infantry Regiment as a company commander, and subsequently served in the First World War as a senior adjutant on the staff of the 27th Infantry Division (from 16 November 1914), as a staff officer with the 3rd Siberian Army Corps (from 3 January 1916), as chief of staff of the 175th Infantry Division, and as chief of staff of the 15th Siberian Rifle Division. Finally, on 16 December 1917, he was named chief of staff with the quartermaster general of the Special Army.

Shafalovich volunteered for service with the Red Army in early 1918, worked initially with the Vseroglavshtab, and from September 1918, was assistant chief of staff and then chief of staff (28 November 1918–9 September 1920) of the 1st Red Army on the Eastern Front. From 24 September 1920 to 16 December 1922, Shafalovich was chief of staff of the Turkestan Front. He subsequently occupied various teaching posts in Red Army academies, rising to the rank of full professor in the K. E. Voroshilov Academy of the General Staff, and joined the All-Union Communist Party in 1946. He died in Moscow, where he was buried in the fourth section of the Vvedenskoe cemetery.

Shahumian, stepan gevorgi (Shaumian, Stepan Georgevich) (1 December 1878–20 September 1918). The “Lenin of the Caucasus,” Stepan Shahumian, a prominent revolutionary theorist, activist, editor, and literary critic, was born in Tiflis, the son of an Armenian cloth merchant. In 1899, he founded the first Marxist study circle in Armenia, and in 1901 he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, while studying at Riga Polytechnical Institute. Expelled from the latter and exiled to the Caucasus in 1902 for his political activities, he went abroad, first to Berlin (where he would graduate from the university in 1905) and then to Switzerland, where he first met V. I. Lenin. He returned to Baku, a convinced adherent of the Bolsheviks, during the 1905 Revolution, but was arrested several times before the First World War, finally being exiled to Saratov in 1914 for organizing a general strike of oil workers.

After the February Revolution, Shahumian returned to Armenia to become chairman of the Baku Soviet; in August 1917, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks). On 16 December 1917, he was named Sovnarkom’s extraordinary commissar for the Caucasus and, after arriving in Baku on 5 March 1918, was the driving force behind the formation of the Baku Commune, in which (from 25 April 1918) he served as chairman of the Sovnarkom and commissar for foreign affairs. When the Baku Commune yielded power to the Central Caspian Dictatorship on 31 July 1918, he was one of the Twenty-six Commissars who, after escaping from prison, fled across the Caspian to Krasnovodsk, where they were arrested by anti-Bolshevik forces. Alongside his comrades, Shahumian was executed by firing squad near the station of Pereval, in Transcaspia, on 20 September 1918. In the Soviet Union he became lauded as one of the foremost martyrs of the revolution, and his name adorned innumerable institutions, locations, and settlements, including the towns of Stepanakert (Khankendi) in Azerbaijan and Stepanavan (Dzhalal-Ogly) in Armenia. Statues were raised to him across the country, and his likeness or characters based on him appeared in many works of art and literature.

SHANDRUK, PAVLO (28 February 1889–15 February 1979). Staff captain (1916), cornet general (Ukrainian Army, 1920), major (Polish Army, 1938). A prominent commander of the Ukrainian Army of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), Pavlo Shandruk was born in Borsuk, Volyn guberniia, and was a graduate of the Nezhinskii Historical and Philological Institute (1911) and the Aleksei Military School, Moscow (1913). During the First World War, he commanded the 3rd Battalion of the 232nd Reserve Rifle Regiment of the Russian Army. In the Ukrainian Army, he was successively in command of the Zaporozhian Independent Rifle Battalion, the 9th Infantry Regiment, and the 1st Recruit Regiment.

Following the collapse of the UNR, Shandruk was interned in Poland before working in various posts at the exile organizations of S. V. Petliura and helping to found the military journal Tabor (“The Encampment”). In 1936, he joined the Polish Army, graduating from its General Staff Academy in 1938. As commander of the 29th Brigade of the Polish Army, Shandruk was captured by the invading German forces in September 1939, but was soon released, and on 12 March 1945, became head of the Weimar-based Ukrainian National Committee, which in the last days of the war attempted to raise a Ukrainian National Army, intended (under Shandruk’s command from 24 April 1945) to fight against the USSR alongside the Wehrmacht. He surrendered to U.S. forces in Austria in May 1945 and was imprisoned, but was subsequently released after the intervention of General Vladislav Anders of Poland. Shandruk subsequently lived in Germany and (from 1949) in Trenton, New Jersey, where he died in 1979.

SHAPOSHNIKOV, BORIS MIKHAILOVICH (20 September 1882–26 March 1945). Colonel (September 1917), army commander, first rank (20 November 1935), Marshal of the Soviet Union (7 May 1940). The leading Soviet military leader and theoretician B. M. Shaposhnikov was the son of a clerk from Zlatoust′, in the Urals, and was a graduate of the Aleksei Military School (1903) and the Academy of the General Staff (1910). Having served in Turkestan prior to the First World War, during the war he rose to the command of the Mingrelian Grenadier Regiment. Popular with the soldiery, in November 1917 he was elected to the command of the Caucasian Grenadier Division.

In May 1918, Shaposhnikov volunteered for service in the Red Army and was made assistant head of the Operational Directorate of the Supreme Military Council of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (22 May 1918). He subsequently served as head of the Reconnaissance Section of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (2 September–late October 1918), and from 30 September 1918 was a member of the Army Section of the Supreme Military Inspectorate of the Red Army. From 4 March 1919, he was first assistant chief of staff of the People’s Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and from 15 August 1919 was attached to the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, first as chief of the Reconnaissance Section and then (from 12 October 1919) as head of the Operational Directorate. In these capacities, he participated in the strategic planning of the Red Army’s successful operations against the Armed Forces of South Russia and the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel.

After the civil wars, Shaposhnikov held numerous senior military posts, including first assistant chief of staff of the Red Army (1921–1925), commander of the Forces of the Leningrad and then the Moscow Military Districts (1925–1927), chief of staff of the Red Army (1928–1931), commander of the Forces of the Volga Military District (1931–1932), chief military commissar and professor at the Red Military Academy (1932–1935), commander of the Forces of the Leningrad Military District (1935–1937), and chief of the General Staff of the Red Army (1937–1940). By this point, Shaposhnikov was one of J. V. Stalin’s closest military advisors and confidants (reportedly being the only general whom Stalin called by his name and patronymic and the only person allowed to smoke in Stalin’s office). In June 1937 (having opposed him in the 1920s), he sat on the special court that sentenced M. N. Tukhachevskii to death, and during the Second World War he was entrusted with numerous senior posts, culminating in the headship of the Military Academy of the General Staff (from June 1943). He died in Moscow, after a long illness, and was buried beneath the Kremlin wall. Innumerable places and institutions were renamed in his honor in the Soviet Union, while his three-volume work Mozg armii (“The Brain of the Army,” 1927–1929) became a key text of Soviet military theory and remains on the curriculum of the Russian General Staff Academy to this day.

Shapoval (SYbLIANSKII) Nikita IUKHIMOVICH (26 May 1822–25 February 1932). The Ukrainian politician and author Nikita Shapoval was born into the family of a retired NCO at Serebianka, in Ekaterinoslav guberniia. He attended a forestry college, then graduated from the Chuguev Officer School, and subsequently entered the Historical-Philosophical Faculty of Khar′kov University, but did not graduate. He was involved in the revolutionary movement from 1901 and was one of the founding members of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries. In 1917, he was elected to the Ukrainian Central Rada and was also a member of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly.

In early 1918, Shapoval served briefly in the Ukrainian cabinet of Volodymyr Vynnychenko, as minister of post and telegraph of the Ukrainian National Republic. He was also general secretary and then head of the Ukrainian National Union (14 November 1918–January 1919). In November–December 1918, he was one of the members of the Ukrainian National Republic Directory that overthrew the Ukrainian State of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii. He subsequently served as minister of agriculture in the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian National Republic (26 December 1918–5 February 1919). He then moved to Galicia, and in 1920 emigrated to Czechoslovakia, where he helped found the Ukrainian Economic Academy and engaged in research into the history of the revolution in Ukraine. Shapoval was publisher and editor of the journal Nova Ukraina (“New Ukraine”) and authored more than 60 published works, including collections of poetry. He died near Prague and is buried there. He is commemorated by a street in his hometown that bears his name.

Shapron diu Larre, Aleksei Genrikhovich (1883–10 June 1947). Colonel (July 1919), major general (9 March 1920). A close and trusted assistant of Generals M. V. Alekseev and A. I. Denikin in the White movement in South Russia, A. G. Shapron diu Larre, who was of French ancestry, was a graduate of the Simbirsk Cadet School and the Nicholas Cavalry School, following which he entered the Pavlovsk Life Guards Regiment and then His Majesty’s Kirasirsk Life Guards. Following numerous staff appointments, he ended the First World War as adjutant to General Alekseev (October 1917–September 1918).

Shapron diu Larre was an active agent of the Alekseev organization that opposed the October Revolution and traveled with Alekseev to the Don territory in November 1917 to help found the Volunteer Army. Alongside his mentor, he participated in both the First Kuban (Ice) March and the Second Kuban March. Following Alekseev’s death, he served as adjutant to General Denikin (September 1918–July 1919). Subsequently, as commander of the 2nd Volunteer Horse Regiment of the Drozdovtsy (July–December 1919), he was badly wounded at Chernigov. He then (again) served briefly on Denikin’s staff (January–March 1920), before emigrating, together with Denikin, from Feodosiia to Constantinople (4 April 1920). In emigration, he lived with his wife, Natal′ia Lavrovna (the daughter of General L. G. Kornilov) in Turkey, Britain, France, and finally, Belgium, where he is buried in the Ixelles (Elsene) cemetery.

Shatilov, Mikhail bonifat′evich (22/23 May 1882–8/12 December 1937). One of the leading figures of the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia, the prolific author and ethnographer M. B. Shatilov was born at Tiukalinska, Tomsk guberniia, into a Siberian merchant’s family (descended from a Decembrist exile) and graduated from the Law Faculty of Tomsk University (1909). He became well known in Siberia as a lawyer, journalist, and advocate of Siberian regionalism, and before the First World War was frequently in trouble with the tsarist authorities. In 1917, like many oblastniki, he joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, and was named assistant commissar for Tomsk guberniia by the Russian Provisional Government.

In January 1918, Shatilov was elected to the Siberian Regional Duma. During a secret meeting of its members on the night of 25–26 January 1918, he was named as a minister without portfolio in the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia. He was briefly arrested and imprisoned by the Soviet authorities in the region when the Siberian Regional Duma was dispersed, but on 27 June 1918 he joined the Provisional Siberian Government as minister for native affairs. As a consequence of his continued and outspoken support for the Siberian Regional Duma, he was arrested by renegade officers of the Siberian Army (a prime example of samosud) and resigned his portfolio on 21–22 September 1918, during the Novoselov affair.

Following the civil wars, Shatilov worked in several Soviet institutions, including the Tomsk guberniia Statistical Bureau, and from 1 October 1922, was director of the Tomsk Regional Museum (in which capacity, in the late 1920s, he undertook important ethnographic research among the Chulym people of Siberia, collecting materials for the museum). He was arrested and then released by the OGPU in both 1931 and April 1933, but in August 1933, having been found guilty of organizing a “counterrevolutionary group among the intelligentsia of Tomsk,” was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. En route to the Solovetskii camps in the White Sea, Shatilov was executed in Leningrad, in December 1937. His burial site remains unknown, but he was posthumously rehabilitated by a Siberian military tribunal in June 1959.

Shatilov, Pavel Nikolaevich (13 November 1881–5 May 1962). Colonel (6 December 1915), major general (July 1917), lieutenant general (May 1919), general of cavalry (November 1920). The son of General N. P. Shatilov, a member of the imperial Russian State Council, P. N. Shatilov became the most trusted advisor of General P. N. Wrangel, both during the civil wars and in emigration. He was a graduate of the Moscow Cadet Corps (1891), the Corps of Pages (1900), and the Academy of the General Staff (1908), and a member of His Imperial Highness’s Life Guards Cossack Regiment. He served (and was wounded) in the Russo–Japanese War, and in the First World War, saw action on the Eastern Front, as chief of staff of the 7th and 8th Cavalry Divisions (July 1914–January 1916), before transferring to the staff of the Caucasian Army, where he became chief of staff of the 2nd Caucasian Cavalry Division (August 1916–January 1917), commander of the 1st Black Sea Regiment of the Kuban Cossack Host (January–July 1917), and quartermaster general of the staff of the Caucasus Front (July–September 1917). He was arrested by the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, as a participant in the Kornilov affair, and imprisoned at Tiflis (September–December 1917).

For reasons that remain obscure, Shatilov joined the White movement in South Russia only in December 1918, serving on the staff of General A. I. Denikin at Ekaterinodar before becoming commander of the 1st Mounted Division (3 January–April 1919). In that capacity, he played an outstanding part in commanding the forces that surrounded and smashed 30,000 fighters of the 11th Red Army in the Kuban. He subsequently commanded the 4th Mounted Corps (April–June 1919), playing a key role in the capture of Tsaritsyn by Wrangel’s Caucasian Army. From 20 June to 13 December 1919, he served as chief of staff of the Caucasian Army and then transferred, with Wrangel, to the Volunteer Army, to perform the same function (13 December 1919–January 1920). However, on 8 February 1920, he was dismissed from the Armed Forces of South Russia and exiled to Constantinople, alongside Wrangel, accused of plotting against Denikin.

When Wrangel returned to Crimea to succeed Denikin in March 1920, Shatilov came with him and was made assistant commander in chief (23 March–16 June 1920) and then chief of staff of the Russian Army (16 June 1920–1922). In the latter capacity, he was largely responsible for the remarkably successful evacuation of Wrangel’s army from Crimea in November 1920.

In emigration, Shatilov lived in Turkey and then France, where he was head of the 1st Department of ROVS from 1930 to 1937. Following the abduction of the head of ROVS, General E. K. Miller, in 1937, Shatilov left public life, although this did not save him from being arrested and imprisoned for 10 months by the German occupiers of France during the Second World War. He died at his home near Paris in 1962 and is buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. Speculation abounds that Shatilov was an agent of the NKVD and its predecessors (including the Cheka)—perhaps from as early as 1918—but the charge remains unproven.

SHATOV, VLADIMIR (“BILL”) SERGEEVICH (24 December 1887–7 August 1943). The anarchist turned Soviet activist V. S. (“Bill”) Shatov was born into a Jewish family at Kiev and educated at the Kiev Technological Institute. Having been arrested several times for revolutionary activity, he migrated to the United States in 1907. There, working as a printer, he became involved in the anarcho-syndicalist organization the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”).

Shatov returned to Russia, via Vladivostok, in March 1917, and in October of that year was a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet (as a representative of the Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propagandists). Without initially renouncing his adherence to anarchism, he supported the Soviet government, and in early 1918 he was made extraordinary commissar for defense of the railways of the Petrograd Military District, serving subsequently as head of the Central Commandant’s Office of Petrograd (August 1918–May 1919) and then director of affairs of the commandant of the Petrograd Defensive Region (from June 1919). In these capacities, Shatov was one of the main instigators of Red Terror in Petrograd. He also commanded a division in battles against the White forces of General N. N. Iudenich, and in August 1919, was one of the organizers of the suppression of the Krasnaia Gorka uprising. From late 1920, he served as director of railways and waterways in the Far East, and from 1921 to October 1922, he was minister of war and then minister of communications of the Far Eastern Republic.

Following the civil wars, Shatov occupied numerous senior posts, chiefly in the transport administration of the USSR—including, from 1927, heading the construction of the Turksib railway network—and from 1932 to 1936, he was People’s Commissar of Communications of the USSR. In that capacity, he oversaw the construction of the Moscow–Donetsk railway, as well as the transportation of hundreds of thousands of victims of the Terror to prison camps. Shatov was himself arrested in 1937 and confined to the Gulag, where he died in 1943. (According to some sources, though, he was executed on 4 October 1937, at Novosibirsk.) He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.

Shchastnyi, Aleksei Mikhailovich (4 October 1881–21 June 1918). Captain, first rank (28 July 1917). The first victim of a judicial killing in Soviet Russia (and probably the victim of panic on the part of the authorities, as mutinies gripped the Baltic Fleet and rumors of a German move to capture it abounded), A. M. Shchastnyi was born at Zhitomir, Vol′ynsk guberniia. He was the son of a general and was a graduate of the Naval Cadet Corps (1901) and the Officer Mining Class (1905). He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War and lectured in naval institutions on radio-telegraphy and mine-laying. During the First World War, he became a senior officer on the battleship Poltava (1914–1916) and commander of the destroyer Pogranichnik (1916–1917), before transferring to the staff of the Baltic Fleet.

Shchastnyi remained in his post after the October Revolution, in the hope of continuing the war against Germany, and on 17 December 1917 was named chief of staff of the Baltic Fleet by the new Soviet authorities. On 17 April 1918, he was named by the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs as chief of the naval forces in the Baltic, but he had to all intents and purposes been in command of the fleet since the beginning of the year. In February–April he had led the Ice March of the Baltic Fleet, conducting some 160 vessels from Revel and Helsingfors to Kronshtadt, thereby saving the Baltic Fleet for the Soviet government. The following month, however, clashes occurred between Shchastnyi and People’s Commissar for War L. D. Trotsky over a number of issues: moving a flotilla of minelayers to Lake Ladoga, preparing the fleet for demolition, destroying a fort at Ino (near Petrograd), and the handling of orders regarding these actions. Shchastnyi attempted to resign from his post, but permission was refused, and on 27 May 1918, on Trotsky’s orders, he was arrested for “dereliction of duty and counterrevolutionary activity.” On 20 June 1918, he was placed before a revolutionary tribunal in the Moscow Kremlin. Found guilty, on the flimsiest of evidence, of numerous crimes against the state, he was sentenced to be shot. The sentence was confirmed at 2:00 a.m. the following morning by Ia. M. Sverdlov of VTsIK, and two hours later, Shchastnyi was executed in the courtyard of the Alexander Military School. He was buried where he fell. In 1992, a street was named in his honor in his hometown of Zhitomir. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1995.

SHCHELOKOV (SHCHOLOKOV), NIKOLAI KONONOVICH (23 May 1887–12 April 1941). Esaul (23 December 1916), colonel (1917), lieutenant general (1940). The Soviet commander N. K. Shchelokov was born at Ural′sk, into the family of a cornet of the Urals Cossack Host, and was a graduate of the Orenburg Nepliuevskii Cadet Corps and the Mikhail Artillery School (1907). After service with the 36th and 47th Artillery Brigades, Shchelokov served during the First World War with various artillery battalions of the Urals Host, and from 23 December 1916, commanded a battery.

Following the October Revolution and demobilization in late 1917, Shchelokov returned to the Urals Host territory and was actively involved in Cossack politics, but according to Soviet sources, he refused to lead Cossack forces in opposition to Soviet rule. In July 1918, having been sent on a mission to Saratov, he volunteered for service in the Red Army and was engaged over the following months in the creation of units of Red Cossacks. From January to September 1919, he commanded a cavalry regiment; from 17 September to 1 November 1919, he was acting commander of the 8th Cavalry Division of the cavalry corps of S. M. Budenny (from 19 November 1919, the 1st Cavalry Army). From 1 January to 19 June 1920 and from 19 February 1921 to 26 October 1923, Shchelokov was then chief of staff of the 1st Cavalry Army. He also, from 28 July to 10 October 1920, served as chief of staff of the 2nd Cavalry Army, operating against the forces of General P. N. Wrangel in the northern Tauride that were attempting to establish a bridgehead on the right bank of the Dnepr. From 1923, Shchelokov served as deputy to Budenny during the latter’s tenure as inspector of cavalry of the Red Army; from 1928, he was involved in educational work until his retirement in 1934. He returned to work in 1940, as head of the Cavalry School of the Red Military Academy, but died in Moscow in 1941 and was buried in the Vvedensk cemetery.

Shchepikhin, Sergei Aref′evich (1 October 1880–after 1940). Major general (24 December 1918). A senior staff officer in the anti-Bolshevik forces in eastern Russia and Siberia, S. A. Shchepikhin was born at Kirsanov stanitsa, into a family of the Urals Cossack Host, and was a graduate of the Orenburg Cadet Corps, the Orenburg Cossack Officer School (1899), and the Academy of the General Staff (1908). He served in a number of staff posts, including roles on the staff of the Omsk (11 May 1911–15 January 1914) and Kiev (from 15 January 1914) Military Districts, and during the First World War became a senior adjutant with the quartermaster general of the 3rd Army (6 December 1914–3 January 1917) and then commander of the 2nd Urals Cossack Regiment (from 3 January 1917).

From 17 February 1918 to early June 1918, Shchepikhin was chief of staff of the nascent Urals Army of the Urals Cossack Host. He then entered the service of the People’s Army of Komuch, as chief of its Field Staff on the Volga front (from 15 August 1918) and then chief of staff of the Volga Group of forces (12 October–25 December 1918). Subsequently, in the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, he served as chief of staff of the Western Army (1 January–21 May 1919), helping direct its capture of Ufa and further advance toward the Volga, and from 16 June 1919 was chief of supply of the Southern Army. On 7 October 1919, he was seconded to the staff of the quartermaster general of the main commander of the Eastern Front. As the White movement collapsed in Siberia, Shchepikhin joined the Great Siberian (Ice) March toward the Far East, becoming, en route, the chief of staff of the 2nd Army and then (from 27 January 1920) chief of staff of the main commander of the Eastern Front. Arriving in Transbaikalia in March 1920, he was named chief of staff of the Forces of Russia’s Eastern Region, under Ataman G. M. Semenov. He left the army in May 1920 and made his way from Chita into China, before journeying by sea to join the forces of General P. N. Wrangel in South Russia. He arrived in Crimea, however, only on the very eve of the evacuation of Wrangel’s Russian Army to Constantinople. He thus went into emigration, settling in Czechoslovakia, where he pursued literary work. He died in Prague and is buried in that city’s Olšanské cemetery.

SHCHEPKIN, NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH (7 May 1854–September 1919). One of the leading organizers of the anti-Bolshevik underground in revolutionary Russia, N. N. Shchepkin was born into an impoverished noble family in Moscow. He was the nephew of M. S. Shchepkin, one of the most famous Russian actors of the 19th century. After graduating from the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University, he served as a volunteer in the Russian Army during the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–1878. He then worked in local government in Moscow, eventually becoming deputy mayor of the city. He was a leading light in the Russian liberal movement around the turn of the century, and in 1905, was one of the founders of the Kadets, serving on the party’s Central Committee for the rest of his life (as one of the chief representatives of its left wing). He was also a member of the Third and Fourth State Dumas and, during the First World War, served on the Central Committee of the All-Russian Union of Towns (part of Zemgor).

After the February Revolution, Shchepkin became chairman of the Russian Provisional Government’s Turkestan Committee (from April 1917) and was one of the most active agitators for the continuation of the war. As such, he refused to recognize the Soviet government after the October Revolution and helped found, in Moscow, one of the first underground anti-Bolshevik organizations, The Nine. During the spring of 1918, together with N. I. Astrov and other Kadets, he entered the Right Center and the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, and in May of that year became one of the founders and leaders of the National Center. He was also a member of the anti-Bolshevik Tactical Center and was active in its military commission. When most of his colleagues in these organizations went south to join the Whites, Shchepkin remained behind in Moscow to help establish an underground staff of the Volunteer Army, with the aim of organizing an armed uprising in the capital, as White forces approached. He was arrested by the Cheka on 29 August 1919. On 23 September 1919, it was reported that Shchepkin and 67 other “counterrevolutionaries” had been executed in Moscow. They were buried in a mass grave in the Kalitnikov cemetery.

Shcherbachev, Dmitrii Grigor′evich (6 February 1857–18 January 1932). Major general (10 May 1903), lieutenant general (29 November 1908), general of infantry (6 December 1914). The White general D. G. Shcherbachev, the scion of a noble family from St. Petersburg guberniia, was one of the most senior generals attached to the anti-Bolshevik forces, but he played only a secondary role in the civil wars. He was a graduate of the Mikhail Artillery School (1876) and the Academy of the General Staff (1884), saw action in the Russo–Japanese War, and was later head of the Academy of the General Staff (24 January 1907–14 December 1912). During the First World War, he accepted postings as commander of the 9th Army Corps (December 1912–December 1914), the 9th Army (April–October 1915), and the 7th Independent Army (19 October 1915–October 1916). He then served briefly in the suite of Nicholas II as an adjutant, and after the February Revolution was made commander of the Romanian Front (April–December 1917).

In January 1918, Shcherbachev took command of the newly created Ukrainian Front (incorporating the former Romanian and South-West Fronts of the imperial Russian Army); in that capacity, in March 1918 he negotiated (to the satisfaction of the Romanian government) the terms of the occupation of the region by forces of the Austro-German intervention. He also agreed to (and obtained German sanction of) the occupation of Bessarabia by the Romanian Army (thereby confounding the plans of Rumcherod to Sovietize the region). He remained in Romania for the next year, and when Allied forces arrived in the region in late November 1918, he campaigned for greater assistance to be offered by them to the Volunteer Army. Finding that he could have only limited success in such a quest without visiting the Allied capitals, on 30 December 1918, he accepted from General A. I. Denikin’s Special Council the title of Military Representative of the Russian Army with the Allied Governments and the Allied Supreme Command (the nomination being confirmed by Admiral A. V. Kolchak in February 1919) and set off for Paris. He continued in that role until May 1920, when, having clashed with General P. N. Wrangel about the necessity for joint action with Poland, he was replaced by General E. K. Miller. Shcherbachev then retired to Nice, living on a pension supplied by the Romanian government, until his death in 1932. He is buried in the Russian cemetery at Caucade, Nice.

SHCHERBAKOV, ARKHIP FILOMONOVICH (1 September 1872–?). Esaul (15 October 1912), major general (191?). Ataman of the Semirech′e Cossack Host (from February 1920) A. F. Shcherbakov was a graduate of the Irkutsk Officer School and a veteran of the Russian expedition in China (1900–1901), the Russo–Japanese War, and the First World War (during which he served as an officer in the Argunsk Regiment of the Transbaikal Cossack Host from 10 January 1914). During the civil wars, he occupied a number of staff posts in the forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, chiefly in Turkestan and Semirech′e, and eventually became commander of the Southern Group of forces of the Semirech′e Army of Ataman B. V. Annenkov (September 1919–May 1920). Records about him disappear with the defeat of that force and its retreat into China in May 1920. His subsequent fate is unknown.

Shchetinkin, Petr Efimovich (21 December 1884–30 September 1927). Staff captain (1917). Born into a peasant family at Chufilovo, near Riazan′, P. E. Shchetinkin was one of the leaders of the anti-White partisans in Siberia during the civil wars. He was raised in Siberia and trained as a carpenter, but during military service in the First World War, he exhibited conspicuous bravery and military talent and was awarded four St. George’s Crosses and two French decorations for gallantry.

Following the October Revolution, Shchetinkin was an active participant in the establishment of Soviet power at Achinsk, serving as chief of the Criminal Investigation Department and chief of the Operational Section of the local soviet. Originally, it is reported, a member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in 1918. When Achinsk fell to units of the Czechoslovak Legion in late May 1918, Shchetinkin went underground and formed the sizable Northern Achinsk Partisan Army, which launched attacks on White strongholds and on the Trans-Siberian Railway in Eniseisk guberniia. In April 1919, this force united with that of A. D. Kravchenko, and Shchetinkin became chief of staff of the combined forces, the Taseevo Partisan Republic (based at initially Taseevo), although a White offensive against the partisans forced their retreat into the Uriankhai (Tuva) region during the summer of 1919. (Among the forces sent against Taseevo were those commanded by the future anti-Soviet partisan I. N. Solov′ev.)

Having united with the Red Army near Krasnoiarsk, in the wake of the collapse of the White regime of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in Siberia in early 1920, Shchetinkin filled a series of posts in the reestablished Soviet government in Siberia, then in August of that year organized and commanded a volunteer force (the 21st Siberian Rifle Regiment) that was sent to fight against the forces of General P. N. Wrangel in Crimea. In 1921, he led an expeditionary force into Mongolia to confront the forces of Baron R. F. Ungern von Sternberg. From 1922 to 1926, he was chief of staff of the OGPU’s Siberian Border District, before, in 1927, transferring to work as an instructor of the Mongolian army at Ulan Bator, where he died. He is buried at Novosibirsk. Shchetinkin’s exploits as a partisan leader were the subject of the Soviet feature film Kochuskii front (dir. Baras Khalzanov, 1972).

SHCHORS, MYKOLA (NIKOLAI ALEKSANDROVICH) (25 May 1895–30 August 1919). Sublieutenant (1917). The much-celebrated (and much-mythologized) Soviet hero of the civil wars—the Ukrainian equivalent of the Russians’ V. I. Chapaev—Mykola Shchors was born into the family of a railway worker at Snovsk (now Shchors), Chernigov guberniia, and graduated from the Military Medical School in Kiev (1914) and the Vil′na Military School (based at Poltava, 1916). He subsequently served, during the last months of the First World War, as a Feldscher and then as a junior officer on the South-West Front.

Following the October Revolution, Shchors joined the Bolsheviks (although probably not formally until mid-1918), and from February to April 1918, was active in forming and leading detachments of partisans in his home district (notably the Bohum Brigade) to fight against the forces of the Austro-German intervention and, subsequently, the Hetmanite Army of P. P. Skoropadskii’s Ukrainian State. In November 1918, he was placed in command of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Soviet Ukrainian Rifle Division; in a series of brilliantly executed campaigns, he assisted the Red Army in the capture of Chernigov and Kiev. On 5 February 1919, Shchors was named commandant of Kiev, but he went on to again lead the 1st Ukrainian Rifle Division in the offensive that led to the capture of Zhitomir, Vynnytsa, and other centers from the forces of the Ukrainian National Republic. In August 1919, as commander of the 44th (Tarashcha) Rifle Division of the 12th Red Army, he also played a pivotal role in the operations to defend Kiev that facilitated the successful evacuation of Red forces and institutions from the city prior to its recapture by Ukrainian and White units. However, far from being the idealized Bolshevik of Stalinist myth, he seems to have chafed against party discipline and to have been a critic of military specialists.

Shchors died, on 30 August 1919, in somewhat murky circumstances, while involved in frontline fighting against the Ukrainian Galician Army, near the village of Beloshitsa (now Shchorsovka): he was reported to have been killed by enemy machine gun fire, but in 1938, at the height of the purges, I. N. Dubovoi, who had been a military commissar in Shchors’s unit, admitted to having murdered him in order to take over as commander. (Dubovoi, however, who was a protégé of I. E. Iakir, was in the hands of the NKVD at the time of this “confession.”) The mystery was compounded by the fact that, in September 1919, Shchors’s remains were taken to Samara for burial, far from the battlefield and far from his home. The waters were further muddied by unconfirmed reports of a secret exhumation and autopsy in 1949 that concluded that the bullet hole in Shchors’s skull had been caused by a small-bore pistol fired from a distance of no more than 10–15 yards.

After his death, Shchors was largely forgotten until, in the 1930s, he began to be lauded as a hero by the Soviet propaganda machine. Subsequently, museums about him were opened; statues were raised in his honor (including a memorial at his grave in Samara); commemorative stamps and portraits bore his image; and he became the subject of innumerable stories, poems, plays, and patriotic songs, including the famous Pesnia o Shchorse (“Song About Shchors,” Mikhail Golodnyi and Matvei Blanter, 1935). The most famous (or infamous) of these fictional accounts is the feature film Shchors (1939), directed (following a suggestion put to him directly by J. V. Stalin) by the esteemed Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Dovchenko, who considered it to be his best film, although the making of it cost him his physical and psychological health and almost his life. During the filming, he was involved in a serious car accident that resulted from someone tampering with the steering of his vehicle. Such events, and the pressure put upon the director by Stalin, who met him frequently during the filming to criticize his efforts, made for a stilted, formulaic socialist-realist film (but apparently one that pleased the General Secretary). Bizarrely, Dovchenko (who had served in the Ukrainian Army of Symon Petliura, for which he had been arrested and charged by the Soviet authorities in 1919) was a friend of Dubovoi and was employing him as a military advisor on the film (in which he also acted a role) at the time of his arrest. Shchors’s death is not portrayed on screen in the film, and most of the historical characters Dovchenko originally scripted were excised, thereby adding further layers of obfuscation to the mystery.

Shchukin, nikolai nikolaevich (?–?). A mining engineer with extensive experience of the coal industry of Siberia, the White politician N. N. Shchukin served as temporary director of the Ministry of Trade and Industry of the Provisional Siberian Government (June–September 1918) and as minister of trade and industry in the cabinet of the Ufa Directory (4–18 November 1918) and (from 18 November 1918) in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. The limited sources available on his outlook and activity portray him as a liberal who was close to the cooperative movement of Siberia. In particular, he resisted demands from mine owners in the Urals that their enterprises, which had been nationalized by the Soviet regime in 1918, should be handed back to them and that the industry should be entirely deregulated. Instead, he attempted to coordinate the mining industry from his own office. However, he had not the means, the personnel, or the expertise to do this; in fact, both Kolchak’s minister of foreign affairs, I. I. Sukin, and the chief engineer of the Urals Mining Region, S. P. Postnikov, commented at various times that, as far as they could tell, Omsk’s Ministry of Trade and Industry “did not exist.”

Shchukin resigned from the Omsk government in May 1919, as rumors of corruption within his ministry emerged. It has been suggested that these may have originated with I. A. Mikhailov, the increasingly powerful minister of finance of the Omsk regime, whose regard for Shchukin was no higher than it was for the several other “Siberians” within the government whom he forced out of office in the spring of 1919—notably I. I. Serebrennikov and V. V. Sapozhnikov. Shchukin’s subsequent fate is unknown.

SHCHUS′, FEDIR (FEDOR) (1893–June 1921). Born into a peasant family at Bol′shaia Mikhailovka (not far from the home village of Nestor Makhno, Guliai-Pole), in Ekaterinoslav guberniia, Fedir Shchus′ was a prominent, daring, and ruthless commander in Makhno’s Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine. He was drafted into the Russian navy in 1915 and joined Makhno’s group on 26 September 1918, having originally led a rival anarchist force around Dibrovka in combat with forces of the Austro-German intervention.

Shchus′ subsequently served in Makhno’s forces as a member of the staff of the 3rd Trans-Dnepr Brigade (February–May 1919), chief of the Makhno Cavalry Detachment (July–August 1919), commander of the Cavalry Brigade of the 3rd Army Corps (September–December 1919), member of the staff of the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army (May 1920–April 1921), and chief of staff of the 2nd Army Group (May–June 1921). However, he remained defiantly independent and had many disagreements with his nominal commander, particularly over Shchus′’s propensity to use terror against German colonists in Ukraine. On one occasion, he was arrested and threatened with execution by Makhno, but escaped unharmed. He was killed in combat against Red Cossacks near Poltava.

A flamboyant character, practiced poseur, and notorious womanizer, with film-star good looks, Shchus′ was much photographed, often idiosyncratically dressed in a Russian hussar’s tunic and a sailor’s cap (with the words “St. John of the Golden Tongue” picked out in gold lettering), and usually festooned with bandoliers and hand grenades and brandishing a Mauser revolver and a Caucasian sword. He was the epitome of the romantic image of the Makhnovists.

Shikhlinskii, Ali-Agha Ismail-Agha oglu (23 April 1865–18 August 1943). Lieutenant colonel (1905), colonel (1908), major general (1912), lieutenant general (2 April 1917), general of artillery (Army of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, 28 June 1919). The Azeri general Ali-Agha Shikhlinskii, scion of an ancient noble family with extensive landholdings, was born at Qazax (Kazakh) in western Azerbaijan (Elizavetpol′ guberniia) and was a graduate of the Tiflis Military School (1883) and the Mikhail Artillery School in St. Petersburg (1885). After service with the 39th Artillery Brigade at Alexandropol (now Gyumri), he saw action in the China Relief Mission of the Russian Army in 1901–1902 and in the Russo–Japanese War, distinguishing himself for bravery during the siege of Port Arthur. In 1906, he completed a course at the Tsarskoe Selo Artillery Officers School and subsequently taught there. During the First World War, he served in various posts (mostly on the North-West and Western Fronts) concerned with artillery placements—indeed, he became known as the “God of Artillery”—and in September 1917, he was named commander of the 10th Army.

Following the October Revolution, Shikhlinskii resigned his posts and moved to Transcaucasia (initially to Tiflis, then to Baku), where he was involved in the formation of a Muslim (Azeri) Corps. His units supported the Army of Islam during the Battle of Baku (August–September 1918), helping to drive the forces of Central Caspian Dictatorship and their British allies (Dunsterforce) from the city. He subsequently helped build the army of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan and eventually, in January 1919, became deputy to the minister of war of the republic, Samadbey Sadykhbey oglu Mehmandarov. When the Red Army invaded Azerbaijan in April 1920, Shikhlinskii was arrested, but he was soon released to become assistant people’s commissar for military and naval affairs of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. Like almost all Azeri generals, he was then arrested again, but Shikhlinskii escaped execution due to the intervention of the Bolshevik leader Narman Narimanov. He was instead seconded to Moscow, where he was employed in the Higher Artillery School and various other military-educational institutions during 1920 and 1921, and was attached to the Directorate of the Inspector of Artillery of the Red Army. He then returned to Baku and, from 18 July 1921, taught at the Azeri staff college (and was its assistant head from 1924) until his retirement in 1929. He died at Baku, during the Second World War, and was buried in the Yasamal cemetery.

Shikhlinskii was the author of numerous works of military science. In his honor, streets were renamed in Qazax and in Baku and, in 1980, a tanker of the Azeri merchant fleet was given his name. Apart from many biographical studies, Shikhlinskii appears as a character in A. N. Stepanov’s novels Port Artur (1938) and Sem′ia zvonarevykh (“The Bellringers’ Family,” 1958–1963). He was also the subject of the documentary film Schitalsia bogom artillerii (“He Was Thought of as the God of Artillery,” dir. Z. Shikhlinskii, 1996).

Shilling, Nikolai Nikolaevich (16 December 1870–1946). Colonel (7 September 1909), major general (19 May 1915), lieutenant general (May 1919). The much-maligned White governor of Crimea, N. N. Shilling was a graduate of the Nicholas Cadet Corps (1888) and the 1st Pavlovsk Military School (1890) and served with the elite Ismailovskii Guards from 1888 to 1913. During the First World War, he commanded the 5th Finnish Rifle Regiment (1913–May 1915), a brigade of the 2nd Finnish Rifle Division (March–July 1916), the Ismailovskii Guards Regiment (July 1916–May 1917), and the 17th Army Corps (July–December 1917).

After working with the staff of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii in Kiev, when the Ukrainian State collapsed, Shilling joined the Volunteer Army in December 1918, and in the Armed Forces of South Russia became commander of the 5th Infantry Division in Crimea (February–June 1919) and commander of the 3rd Army Corps (the former Crimean-Azov Volunteer Army, June–August 1919). In those roles, he played a leading part in the Whites’ capture of Kherson, Nikolaev, and Odessa. He was then named governor-general and commander of the Military Forces of New Russia (September–December 1919) and then governor-general and commander of the Military Forces of New Russia and Crimea (December 1919–March 1920). In the latter of these capacities, he was held responsible for the botched and disastrous White evacuation of Odessa (6–7 February 1920) and was widely criticized. When General P. N. Wrangel succeeded A. I. Denikin as commander in chief in late March 1920, Shilling was removed from his post and placed on the reserve list of the new Russian Army.

Unable to secure an active posting under Wrangel, Shilling went into emigration in 1920 and settled in Czechoslovakia, where for a time he led the Foreign Union of Russian War Veterans. When Soviet forces entered the country in May 1945, he was immediately arrested by SMERSH, but was soon set free (apparently in view of his very poor health). He died shortly afterward and was buried in the crypt of the Uspenski Cathedral, in the Olšanské cemetery in Prague.

SHIROKOV, TIMOFEI VLADIMIROVICH. See SAPRONOV (SHIROKOV), TIMOFEI VLADIMIROVICH.

Shkuro (shkura), Andrei Grigor′evich (7 February 1887–17 January 1947). Colonel (December 1912), major general (30 November 1918), lieutenant general (4 April 1919). One of the most charismatic and, his critics would claim, ruthless and reckless Cossack commanders in the White forces in South Russia, A. G. Shkuro was born near Ekaterinodar, into the family of an officer of the Kuban Cossack Host, and was a graduate of the 3rd Moscow Cadet Corps and the Nicholas Cavalry School (1907). In the First World War, he was prominent as the commander of a cavalry detachment that adopted his name and conducted audacious raids in the rear of enemy forces on the Romanian Front (December 1915–March 1917). He then became a commander of mounted units in northern Persia (March–December 1917).

After briefly returning to the Romanian Front at the beginning of the year, in May 1918 he transferred to the North Caucasus and formed a partisan unit (the “White Wolves”) that challenged Soviet rule at Kislovodsk. He briefly captured the city, but was driven out by Red forces and moved to the Kuban, where he created another partisan unit that earned a reputation for merciless treatment of enemies (real and imagined). In June–July 1918, Shkuro’s Wolves united with the Volunteer Army near Stavropol′ and became the basis of the 1st Caucasus Cossack Division, under Shkuro’s command (August 1918–May 1919). From May 1919, he commanded the 3rd Kuban Corps of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) and undertook a series of independent raids in the rear of Red forces, as well as participating in the Mamontov raid (during which, on 17 September 1919, his forces captured Voronezh). His generalship in these actions was extremely effective, although Soviet historians always alleged that Shkuro’s Cossacks treated the Russian population with exceptional cruelty and lacked all military discipline (the latter point being conceded by some White memoirists). He was also a frequent speaker to the Kuban Rada, where he opposed Cossack separatism.

Shkuro was seriously injured by an exploding shell in October 1919, but recovered to (briefly) take command of the shattered Kuban Army (8–29 February 1920). As the AFSR collapsed, however, he was removed from his post, being one of those commanders blamed by Denikin for the failure of his great offensive. After a period in the reserve of the AFSR and the Russian Army, in April 1920 he received the permission of General P. N. Wrangel to retire from the service and move abroad. In emigration, he lived chiefly in France, working in the circus as a trick horseman. According to some witnesses, in the interwar period he came increasingly to regard himself as a Ukrainian and embraced the cause of Ukrainian nationalism. During the Second World War, he collaborated with the Nazis, working with Ataman P. N. Krasnov in organizing Cossack units in Yugoslavia to fight against the USSR and the local Communist partisans of Josip Tito. On 1 June 1946, together with Krasnov and other collaborators, he was handed over to the Soviet authorities by the British army at Linz, Austria. He was subsequently sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and was hanged, in Moscow, on 17 January 1947.

SHLIAPNIKOV, ALEKSANDR GAVRILOVICH (30 August 1885–2 September 1937). The Soviet politician and trade unionist A. G. Shliapnikov was born into a poor family of Old Believers at Murom, in Vladimir guberniia. He lost his father at the age of three and spent only three years in a local primary school, then began working in a factory at the age of 13, becoming a skilled metalworker. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1901 and was active among workers’ groups at Murom in the 1905 Revolution. He was arrested in July 1905, then amnestied (October 1905), then arrested again in December 1907 and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. He moved to Western Europe in 1908, working in factories in France, Germany, and England, but returned to Russia in 1914. There, he was co-opted onto the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) (September 1915–24 April 1917) and its Russian Bureau (September 1915–April 1917).

During the February Revolution, Shliapnikov was the most senior Bolshevik leader active in the Russian capital. He subsequently became a member of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet (from 27 February 1917) and chairman of the Union of Metalworkers (from April 1917). Following the October Revolution, he entered Sovnarkom as people’s commissar for labor (26 October–8 December 1917) and acting people’s commissar for trade and industry (4 November 1917–26 March 1918), in which capacities he oversaw the failed Soviet experiment with workers’ control prior to the introduction of War Communism. He also became a candidate member of the party Central Committee (8 March 1918–18 March 1919).

During the civil wars, Shliapnikov was given a variety of important military posts: member of the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front (20 October–8 December 1918); chairman of the Caucasus–Caspian Sector of the Southern Front (2 November–8 December 1918); member of the Revvoensovet of the Caspian–Caucasian Front (8 December 1918–14 February 1919); and member of the Revvoensovet of the 16th Red Army on the Western Front (10 November 1919–1 February 1920). As the war wound down, and in poor health—he was experiencing the early stages of Menière’s syndrom (a disorder of the inner ear that causes dizziness)—he returned to his post as chair of the metalworkers’ union and also joined the presidium of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions (1920–1922). In those capacities, he became one of the chief spokesmen of the Workers’ Opposition, protesting against the increasingly authoritarian nature of the Soviet state (the mass executions of workers following the Astrakhan rebellion of March–April 1919 particularly depressed him) and the influence in industry and management of “bourgeois specialists.” He advocated, instead, the devolution of political authority and economic management to the trade unions. Nevertheless, he was again elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee, on 16 March 1921.

Shliapnikov lost his Central Committee seat in 1922, however, and, following his adherence to a protest to the Komintern regarding Bolshevik authoritarianism (the “Letter of the Twenty-Two”), like his former lover (and fellow oppositionist) A. M. Kollontai, he was sidelined into diplomatic work (as assistant ambassador to France, 1923–1925). Upon his return to Russia, he was placed in several secondary roles, chiefly in economic administration, and occupied himself with the writing of his memoirs, but was subject to repeated investigations regarding alleged factional activities. After numerous arrests and investigations, he was finally expelled from the party in 1933 and was exiled to Karelia in 1934, then to Astrakhan in 1935. He was arrested again on 2 September 1936 and subsequently executed as a counterrevolutionary. Shliapnikov was posthumously rehabilitated in 1963.

Shmidt, Vasilii Vladimirovich (17 December 1866–29 July 1938). The Soviet politician V. V. Shmidt was born into a German workers’ family in St. Petersburg and completed only four years of schooling. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1905, gravitating toward the Bolsheviks, and was forced into exile in Germany in 1907. He returned to Russia in 1911 and was active in the metalworkers’ union, but he was arrested on several occasions. From March 1917, he became secretary of the Bolsheviks’ St. Petersburg Committee and was at the same time secretary of the Petrograd Trade Union Council.

During the October Revolution, Shmidt was an active member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. He was then, briefly, acting people’s commissar for trade and industry in Sovnarkom (4 November 1917–7 February 1918). From 3 March 1918 to 18 March 1919, he was also a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee (thereafter he was repeatedly reelected as a candidate member until 26 January 1934). From 8 December 1918 to 6 July 1923, he was people’s commissar for labor of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, combining the post with that of secretary of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions (1918–1920). Shmidt occupied numerous other important governmental posts in the 1920s, but in the 1930s fell foul of the regime of J. V. Stalin and was demoted to chairman of the executive committee of the Khabarovsk Soviet (1934–1936), in the Far East. He was arrested on 5 January 1937 and was subsequently executed as a spy. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 30 July 1957.

SHOLOKHOV, MIKHAIL ALEKSANDROVICH (24 May 1905–21 February 1984). The author of what is probably the most famous literary treatment of the “Russian” Civil Wars, Tikhii Don (“The Quiet Don,” often rendered in English as And Quiet Flows the Don) and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature, M. A. Sholokhov was born at Kruzhlinin in the Veshenskaia (Vioshki) stanitsa, in the northern reaches of the territory of the Don Cossack Host. His parents, who were not Cossacks, were of Russian and Ukrainian stock (although his mother’s first husband had been a Cossack). He moved to Moscow in 1922, where heworked as a journalist, but also took laboring jobs to make ends meet. He published his first work in Iunosheskaia pravda (“Young Truth”) in 1923.

After returning to his home village in 1924, Sholokhov began work on his epic tale of the Don territory during the civil wars in 1926. It would take him 14 years to complete. Various critics (including Alexander Solzhenitsyn) later argued that the work was plagiarized from the writings of F. D. Kriukov, who had fought on the side of the Whites in the civil wars and died of typhus in 1920. That this charge was false was made clear in 1987, when Sholokhov’s notes and drafts of many chapters were discovered. His authorship of the work was proven categorically in 1999, when drafts in his own hand (and that of his wife), written on paper known to have been manufactured in the 1920s, were located by the Russian Academy of Sciences. Skeptics, however, still maintain that Sholokhov’s work was based on another (unpublished) manuscript in his possession (perhaps by Kriukov); they also point to his youth at the time of the civil-war events he portrays in the novel and contrast its masterly narrative and sophisticated language with the rather prosaic nature of the other “Don Tales” the author had published earlier in the 1920s. Finally, Sholokhov’s doubters point out that it was rather strange that a pro-Soviet author should paint such a sympathetic portrait of the (largely anti-Bolshevik) Don Cossacks.

Sholokhov joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1932, and in 1937 he was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. In 1961, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was made an Academician of the USSR’s Academy of Sciences in 1939, and was twice awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor (among innumerable other honors). In the 1950s and 1960s, Sholokhov became a vocal critic of dissident writers. He died of cancer at his home village in 1984, having rejected treatment in the Kremlin hospital, and was buried on the banks of the Don, at Veshenskaia. Statues of him stand next to the Don in Rostov-on-Don and on Gogol′ Prospekt in Moscow. In his honor, Asteroid 2448 is called “Sholokhov,” as is Moscow’s State University of the Humanities. There have been many film and television adaptations of his works, including Tikhii Don (1931, dir. Ivan Pravov) and Tikhii Don (1957–1958, dir. Sergei Gerasimov). A seven-part English-language version of And Quiet Flows the Don, from the Sholokhov novel, was directed by the famous Soviet-era director S. F. Bondarchuk, chiefly in 1992; following his death in 1994, the stock was impounded by the film’s financiers until 2006, when, with legal wrangles having been settled, it was edited and completed by the director’s son, F. S. Bondarchuk. The result was less than impressive.

SHORIN, VASILII IVANOVICH (26 December 1870–28 June 1938). Lieutenant colonel (June 1915), colonel (1917). One of the most active of the military specialists employed by the Red forces, V. I. Shorin was born at Kaliazin, Tver′ guberniia, into the family of a tradesman and was a graduate of the Kazan′ Officers School (1892) and the Officers’ Riflemen School. He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War, as commander of a company, and rose to the command of the 333rd (Glazov) Infantry Regiment in the First World War (from June 1915). Following the October Revolution, he remained in the army and was elected as commander of the 26th Infantry Division by its soldiers’ committee.

Shorin joined the Red Army, as a volunteer, at Viatka, in September 1918, and thereafter played a significant role in reorganizing Red forces on the Eastern Front; as commander of the 2nd Red Army (28 September 1918–16 July 1919), he oversaw operations to clear White forces from the Volga–Kama region, in particular combating the Izhevsk-Votkinsk uprising. In May–June 1919, he also commanded the Northern Group of forces on the Eastern Front (combining the 2nd Red Army and the 3rd Red Army) in the attacks on Perm′ and Ekaterinburg. From July 1919, he commanded a Special (“Striking”) Group of forces (combining the 9th Red Army, the 10th Red Army, and later, the 11th Red Army) on the eastern (Volga) flank of the Southern Front (reorganized from 27 September 1919 to 16 January 1920 as the South-East Front), in the key operations against the Armed Forces of South Russia. Having thereby played a major role in the defeat of the forces of General A. I. Denikin, Shorin was then briefly made commander of the Caucasian Front (16–24 January 1920), before assuming senior positions as assistant commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the Republic (February–April 1920), commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the Republic for Siberia (April 1920–November 1921), and assistant commander of the Armed Forces of the Republic (November 1921–January 1922). In these roles, he was active in Siberia, commanding operations to suppress peasant risings (the Western Siberian Uprising) and against the forces of R. F. Ungern von Sternberg. From 11 February to 18 October 1922, he commanded the Turkestan Front in the fighting against the Basmachi (in particular, overseeing operations against Enver Pasha), before becoming assistant commander of Leningrad Military District (1923–1925). Shorin then went into retirement, but remained active as head of Osoaviakhim (the Society for Assistance of Defense, Aviation and Chemical Construction). His fate remains obscure: according to some sources, he was shot in 1938; according to others, he died in prison in Leningrad before his trial. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956, and in 1962 a street in Kaliazin was named after him.

shtegeman, Mikhail Aleksandrovich. See Vedeniapin (shtegeman), Mikhail Aleksandrovich.

Shteifon, Boris Aleksandrovich (6 December 1881–30 April 1945). Colonel (15 August 1917), major general (August 1920), lieutenant general (1923), major general (Wehrmacht, October 1941). A senior staff officer in the White movement in South Russia and a controversial figure in emigration, B. A. Shteifon was born at Khar′kov, into the family of a Jewish merchant who had converted to Orthodoxy. He was a graduate of the Chuguev Military School (1902) and the Academy of the General Staff (1911), saw action in the Russo–Japanese War with the 124th Voronezh Regiment, and during the First World War served on the staff of General N. N. Iudenich on the Caucasus Front; he was a planner of and a participant in the capture of Erzurum (January 1916). He was subsequently on the staff of the 1st Army Corps (from 21 July 1916) and served as chief of staff of the 3rd Finland Rifle Division (from 14 August 1917).

Following the October Revolution, Shteifon returned home to Khar′kov and, in association with General A. A. von Lampe, became involved with the underground officer organization there that was engaged in ferrying officers from the north toward the ranks of the Volunteer Army in the Kuban. In September 1918, under threat of arrest in Ukraine, he went south himself, where he was named chief of staff of the Volunteers’ 3rd Infantry Division and then commander of the Belozersk and Arkhangelogorod Regiments. In July 1919, he became chief of staff of the Poltava Detachment of General N. E. Bredov. With the latter, he participated in the Bredov March (December 1919–February 1920) and was subsequently interned in Poland (February–July 1920), before returning to join the Russian Army in Crimea (August 1920), serving on the staff of General P. N. Wrangel (September–November 1920). Following the Whites’ evacuation of Crimea in November 1920, he served as commandant of the refugee camps at Gallipoli.

In emigration, Shteifon lived first in Bulgaria, as chief of staff of the 1st Army Corps (from 1921), but in 1922 was expelled by the Stamboliiskii regime and moved to Yugoslavia. From 1921 to 1926, he was active in ROVS, but was eventually expelled from the organization by Wrangel for challenging the authority of the leadership. He was also active in publishing, teaching, and literary work in military science. During the Second World War, he collaborated with the Nazis and was made chief of staff of the Russian Defense Corps in Yugoslavia (October 1941), then commander of the corps (October 1941–30 April 1945). His nerves shattered by constant conflict with the German authorities, who refused to transfer the corps to the Russian front, Shteifon died suddenly of a heart attack, at Zagreb, in 1945. He was buried in the German military cemetery at Ljubljana.

Shul′gin, Vasilii Vital′evich (1 January 1878–13/15 February 1976). A prominent ideologue of the White movement in South Russia, V. V. Shul′gin had a long-established reputation as a publicist and spokesman for right-wing causes in the Russian Empire. He was born in Kiev, into the nobility of Volynsk guberniia. His father was a professor of history at Kiev University and editor of the leading monarchist newspaper, Kievlianin (“The Kievan”). As a student in the Law Faculty of Kiev University (graduating in 1900), Shul′gin became an inveterate opponent of the socialist parties. From 1907, he was elected to the Second, Third, and Fourth State Dumas and was a public figure of all-Russian repute, as leader of the Nationalist Party and (from 1911) as editor of Kievlianin. He was certainly an anti-Semite, but in 1913–1914 opposed the tsarist regime’s bungled handling of the infamous Beilis case and was imprisoned for three months for his published criticisms. During the First World War, dismayed by the imperial government’s handling of the war effort, he became a prominent member of the Progressive Bloc in the Fourth State Duma. During the February Revolution, Shul′gin was a member of the Temporary Committee of the Duma that met privately in an attempt to lead the popular disturbances into a peaceful resolution of the crisis, and on 2 March 1917, he traveled to Pskov to present Nicholas II with the Duma’s demand that he abdicate. However, he refused to join the Russian Provisional Government, which he regarded as a Kadet front.

Following the October Revolution, Shul′gin moved to Kiev and was active in the National Center and in assisting anti-Bolshevik officers to travel to the Don and the Kuban to join the Whites. In August 1918, he moved to Ekaterinodar and became one of the chief ideologues of the White movement as the éminence grise behind Osvag. He propagandized for the Volunteer Army through his newspaper Velikaia Rossiia (“Great Russia”), and in August 1918 was the main author of the statute of its political authority, the Special Council. He subsequently served on the latter as head of its Commission on Nationality Affairs and was also a founder of the Whites’ intelligence service, Azbuka.

In 1920, Shul′gin went into emigration, living mostly in Yugoslavia (serving there, from 1921 to 1922, as a member of the Russian Council of General P. N. Wrangel). In 1925–1926, he secretly visited the Soviet Union (without ever realizing that his trip had been organized by the OGPU, in order to observe those with whom he made contact). In the 1930s, he was an admirer of fascism, although chiefly in its Italian guise; he strongly opposed the German invasion of the USSR, for example. In 1944, Shul′gin was apprehended by Soviet security forces in Yugoslavia and was subsequently sent to Moscow for trial. Found guilty of “anti-Soviet activity,” he was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment, but was released under amnesty in 1956. Thereafter, he lived in Vladimir. There, he accommodated himself to the Soviet regime and, in the early 1960s, authored two appeals to the Russian emigration to cease its hostility to the USSR.

SHUMIATSKII, BORIS ZAKHAROVICH (4 November 1886–29 July 1938). The Soviet politician and Communist film mogul Boris Shumiatskii, who played a key role in Siberia during the civil wars, was born at Verkhneudinsk, Zabaikal oblast′, into the family of a bookbinder. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903 and thereafter aligned himself with the Bolsheviks. He was active during the 1905 Revolution, participating in armed uprisings in Krasnoiarsk and Vladivostok, for which actions he was imprisoned in 1906. He was subsequently under constant threat of rearrest and for a while, fled into exile to Argentina (1911–1913). He returned to Russia in 1913, but was immediately detained by the authorities and sent into the army. In 1917, he chaired the Siberian Bureau of the Central Committee of Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), acted as the party’s chief plenipotentiary in Siberia, and from November of that year until February 1918, was the chairman of Tsentrosibir′.

Following the collapse of Soviet power in Siberia in May–June 1918, Shumiatskii joined the Red Army as a military commissar and served subsequently as chairman of the Tiumen′ provincial revkom of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (October 1919–January 1920), then chairman of the Tomsk guberniia and city revkomy of the party (from March 1920). From June 1920, he was prominent as chairman of the party’s Dal′biuro and as minister of foreign affairs of the Far Eastern Republic (FER). He was subsequently chairman of the council of ministers of the FER (December 1920–April 1921), also serving as a member of the Revvoensovet of the 5th Red Army (5 January 1921–6 September 1922). In these capacities, he came into conflict with J. V. Stalin (then head of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities) over the issue of Buriat autonomy, which Shumiatskii strongly favored.

Shumiatskii’s career following the civil wars included spells as a Soviet plenipotentiary to the Mongolian People’s Republic (1921) and Persia (January 1922–14 April 1925) and rector of Moscow’s Communist University of the Workers of the East. Shumiatskii also developed an interest in cinema and became head of the All-Union Society for the Cinema Industry (“Soiuzkino,” 23 September 1930–5 April 1933), before becoming head of the Main Directorate of the Film Industry (known as the “People’s Commissariat for Film”), attached to Sovnarkom (5 April 1933–January 1938). During that same period, he served as deputy chairman of the Main Board of Artistic Affairs attached to Sovnarkom. In those capacities, he visited the United States to investigate the American film industry and returned to the USSR with a plan to construct a “Soviet Hollywood” in Crimea. This did not come about, but it was under Shumiatskii’s stewardship that the Soviet film industry produced many of its 1930s masterpieces, including films that focused on the civil wars, including Chapaev (dir. G. N and S. N. Sergeev, 1934), about V. I. Chapaev. Shumiatskii also wrote numerous books and articles on the subject of film, including Kinematografiia millionov (“Cinematography for the Millions,” 1935). He was arrested on 18 January 1938, and having been found guilty on 28 July of that year of espionage, was subsequently shot. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 22 February 1956. He is commemorated by streets bearing his name in Ulan-Ude (the Buriat capital) and Krasnoiarsk.

Shumilovskii, Leonid Ivanovich (30 January 1876–23/27 July 1920). A lapsed social democrat who during the civil wars joined the White government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, L. I. Shumilovskii was the son of a teacher and a graduate of both St. Petersburg University and Moscow University. In 1907, he was exiled to Tomsk guberniia for his political activities. He subsequently taught at Barnaul Realschule and edited the progressive newspaper Zhizn′ Altaia (“Life of the Altai”). He was elected to the 4th State Duma as a representative of Barnaul and was part of its Menshevik caucus. In 1917, he was elected as a member of the Constituent Assembly for the Romanian Front and for Altai guberniia.

During the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918, Shumilovskii was chosen as minister of labor in both the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia and the Provisional Siberian Government, and he served in the same capacity in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, from November 1918 to January 1920, by which time he had left the Menshevik party, declaring himself to be a “non-party socialist and a convinced supporter of Siberian regionalism.” He worked tirelessly to win over local trade unions to the White cause, but his efforts were repeatedly negated by the predations of the military, while his budget was too meager to allow for effective work. In March 1919, he briefly resigned from his post in protest at the illegal actions of the army, but returned to office upon concluding that resignation was not the most effective way of opposing what was an obvious scheme to drive “moderates” out of the government. In January 1920, Shumilovskii fell into the hands of the new Soviet authorities at Irkutsk and subsequently, by order of the Omsk extraordinary revolutionary tribunal, was executed. (Sources differ about the precise date of his execution.)

SHUSHA MASSACRE. Sometimes termed the “Shusha pogrom,” this term refers to one of the most brutal instances of interethnic conflict unleashed by the “Russian” Civil Wars: the violent events in the town of Shusha (Shushi), the largest settlement in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, on 22–26 March 1920, during the closing stages of the Armenian–Azerbaijan War. The town had a population of around 44,000 in 1916, with a slight preponderance of Armenians over Azeris. On 15 January 1919, the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan had appointed the ardently pan-Turkist Khosrov bek Sultanov as governor of Karabakh, a move that was rejected by the Armenian National Council of Karabakh, which had declared the region to be an integral part of the Democratic Republic of Armenia, but accepted by the local British garrison. Armed clashes occurred between the two communities on several occasions in 1919, with British forces unable to prevent the killing of hundreds of Armenian civilians by the Azeri army. In August 1919, to prevent further bloodshed, the Armenian Council agreed to a treaty that recognized the provisional incorporation of Karabakh into Azerbaijan, pending the final decision of the Paris Peace Conference. The treaty’s 26 conditions strictly limited the Azeri administrative and military presence in the region and emphasized the continued internal autonomy of Mountainous Karabakh. However, the Azeris’ violations of these conditions were blatant, and when Sultanov demanded, on 19 February 1920, that the Armenian Council accept the full and final incorporation of Karabakh into Azerbaijan, the Armenians determined upon a revolt.

On 22–23 March 1920, Armenian militias simultaneously attacked Azeri garrisons at Shusha, Askeran, and Terter. The attacks failed, however, and in revenge the Azeri army, supported by civilian militias, set about massacring the Armenian population and destroying their property in the center of Shusha, which was laid almost entirely to waste. At least 500 Armenians were killed in Shusha itself, while some Armenian sources cite figures as high as 30,000 for the number of deaths across the region over the following days. Shusha, from which all surviving Armenians fled, remained largely in ruins until a clearance and rebuilding program in the early 1960s. On 9 May 1992, the town was recaptured by Armenian forces, during the Armenian–Azeri conflict of that time, and today it is populated almost exclusively by Armenians. On 20 March 2000, a memorial stone was unveiled in Shusha to commemorate the victims of the massacre.

SHUVAEV, ALEKSANDR DMITRIEVICH (8 December 1886–December 1943). Lieutenant (15 August 1916). The Soviet commander A. D. Shuvaev was born into a military family at Novocherkassk, in the territory of the Don Cossack Host, but was not a Cossack. (His father was Lieutenant General D. S. Shuvaev, who also served the Reds.) He was a graduate of the Kiev Vladimir Cadet Corps, the Kiev Military School (1906), and the Academy of the General Staff (1912). Having entered military service on 31 August 1904, he joined the Finland Life Guards Regiment. During the First World War, he occupied numerous staff posts, including assistant senior adjutant to the quartermasters general of, successively, the 13th, 5th, and 9th Armies; from 18 June 1917, he was assigned to work in the Ministry of War in Petrograd.

Shuvaev was mobilized into the Red Army in early 1918, as a military specialist, and became chief of staff of the Petrograd Regional Division (to 26 January 1919), then head of the Codification Department of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (1 February 1919–2 June 1920). During the Soviet–Polish War, he was chief of staff of the northern group of forces on the Western Front (6–18 June 1920), then acting chief of staff (18 June–31 July 1920), then acting commander (31 July–17 October 1920) of the 4th Red Army. His subsequent postings included second assistant chief of staff of the armed forces of Ukraine and Crimea (7 February 1921–7 June 1922), chief of staff of the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic (4 July–21 August 1922), and chief of staff of the Turkestan Front (15 October 1923–25 April 1924).

Shuvaev was arrested on 8 August 1937, and having been found guilty of anti-Soviet activity by the NKVD troika of Voronezh oblast′ on 29 September 1937, was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. He was released on 21 October 1943, but died soon afterward in the Komi region. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 20 October 1956.

SHVARTZ (SCHWARZ), ALEKSEI VLADIMIROVICH VON (15 March 1874–23 September 1953). Colonel (6 December 1910), major general (27 October 1914), lieutenant general (24 August 1917). Like General N. F. Ern, the White officer A. V. von Shvartz was not particularly prominent during the civil wars, but he had a career that was emblematic of the scattered and unlikely fates of a generation of Russian officers in emigration. He was born into a noble family in Ekaterinoslav guberniia, attended the local Realschule, and after joining the Russian Army on 1 September 1892, graduated from the Nicholas Engineering School (1895) and the Academy of the General Staff (1902). He served in the Russo–Japanese War, as an engineer at Port Arthur, and subsequently (from 15 October 1910) worked on a historical commission of the Russian general staff, investigating the lessons of that conflict, before taking up a teaching post at the Nicholas Engineering School (from 26 March 1909). After the outbreak of the First World War, he was made commander of the Ivangorod Fortress (from 13 August 1914) and served as commander of the Karssk Fortress (from 13 November 1915) and, after its capture from the Turks, commander of Trabzon (from 23 July 1916). On 22 March 1917, von Shvartz became head of the Main Military-Technical Directorate of the General Staff.