Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Following the October Revolution, von Shvartz was pressed into service with the Red Army as commander of the Northern Screen, but he fled to Kiev in March 1918, moving on to Odessa in December of that year, as forces of the Austro-German intervention withdrew from the region and the Ukrainian State collapsed. Perhaps as a consequence of his service with the Reds, he was not enlisted into the ranks of the Volunteer Army, yet in mid-March 1919 he was named by the local French commander of forces of the Allied intervention (in the face of fierce protests from General A. I. Denikin) as governor-general of Odessa and commander of Russian forces in the Odessa region.

When the Allies evacuated Odessa in April 1919, von Shvartz went with them, spending time in Constantinople and then Italy before settling near Genoa and later in Paris. In April 1923, he moved to Buenos Aires to take up a post (as a civilian) as professor of fortifications with the staff academies of the Argentine Army (the Escuela Superior le Guerra and the Curso Superior del Collego Militar), remaining there for the rest of his working life. One of his students was Juan Domingo Peron. He is buried in the Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires. Von Shvartz was the author of numerous technical works and memoirs on the subject of military engineering.

SIBBIURO. The Siberian Bureau (Sibirskoe biuro) of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) was created, on 17 December 1918, to coordinate the restoration of Soviet power in Siberia, following its collapse during the Democratic Counter-Revolution and the rise to power in the east of the Whites. Its members included S. E. Chutskaev, J. K. Daniševskis, F. I. Goloshchekin, V. N. Iakovleva, E. M. Iaroslavskii, V. M. Kosarev, A. A. Maslennikov, A. Ia. Neibut, B. Z. Shumiatskii, V. N. Sokolov, A. P. Sunde, F. I. Sukhoverkhov, and other Bolsheviks who were active with Red forces on the Eastern Front, or who had experience of underground and partisan work in the White rear. The Sibbiuro sought to establish links with partisan forces in Siberia (notably those of the Taseevo Partisan Republic), channeling weapons and money to them. In January 1919, Northern (Viatka) and Southern (Ufa) departments of the Sibbiuro came into being, while in March 1919, its work was temporarily transferred to an underground Bolshevik regional committee at Omsk.

The Sibbiuro was reactivated in August 1919, as the Red Army drove A. V. Kolchak’s Russian Army back across Siberia. On 3 March 1920, a Far Eastern Bureau (Dal′biuro) was established within it, to coordinate party activities in the Far Eastern Republic, while on 8 April 1920, the Sibbiuro (which by then was based at Novonikolaevsk) was named the highest party organ in Siberia, responsible for guiding all political and economic work across eight gubernii: Altai, Eniseisk, Irkutsk, Novonikolaevsk, Omsk, Semipalatinsk, Tomsk, and Iakutsk. In May 1924, at the First Siberian regional conference of the RKP(b), the Sibbiuro was replaced by the Siberian Regional Committee of the RKP(b).

SIBERIA, PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF. This anti-Bolshevik polity was formed, after a meeting at Tomsk of the Siberian Regional Duma, on 23 June 1918, as Soviet power collapsed in the region in the wake of the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion. With a membership of proponents of Siberian regionalism, members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, Kadets, and others, the Provisional Siberian Government was at one and the same time both a central actor in the Democratic Counter-Revolution and one of the key battlefields on which more right-wing forces sought to win control of the anti-Bolshevik movement during the summer and autumn of 1918.

The Provisional Siberian Government, led by its premier, P. V. Vologodskii, succeeded the Western Siberian Commissariat and took nominal control of the nascent Siberian Army. Although many of the latter’s officers were distrustful of the partly socialist and regionalist complexion of this new authority, the government allayed such fears by introducing a political program that denationalized industry and reaffirmed the right of private land ownership, reestablished the old legal system, and proscribed the activities of trade unions and other social organizations. It also sought to assert its authority over the Siberian Regional Duma and refused to recognize the legitimacy of the leftist Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia (even though the Provisional Siberian Government’s members had originally been part of that government, when it had been secretly elected at Tomsk in January 1918).

On 24 August 1918, the Provisional Siberian Government established an Administrative Council, which in turn assumed more and more authority and often ignored or undermined the socialist members of the government. Meanwhile, challenges to the government’s authority from the Siberian Army’s commander, Colonel A. M. Grishin-Almazov, also became increasingly frequent and pointed, and a series of political crises and murders shook the regime (notably the Novoselov affair, which resulted in the death of A. E. Novoselov and the resignation from the government of its leading socialist members, M. B. Shatilov and V. M. Krutovskii). The remaining ministers of the government subordinated themselves to the Ufa Directory on 4 November 1918 and effectively became its governmental apparatus, although members of the government (notably I. M. Mikhailov) were implicated in the Omsk coup, which toppled the directory on 18 November 1918 and brought Admiral A. V. Kolchak to power as supreme ruler. Subsequently, members of the former Provisional Siberian Government became the leadership corps of the provisional All-Russian Omsk government, while often presenting their legitimacy as resting on the very democratic institutions in Siberia that they had worked to destroy.

SIBERIA, PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF AUTONOMOUS. This anti-Bolshevik regime (also known as the Derber government, after its prime minister, P. Ia. Derber) was established at a secret meeting of the Siberian Regional Duma at Tomsk, on 26–27 January 1918. It united some 24 members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries with prominent proponents of Siberian regionalism (not all of whom were actually present as the ministers were named) around a platform of struggle against the current Soviet authorities and the establishment of Siberian autonomy (although it expressed a wish also to maintain soviets, as class organizations). However, the regime never formally began to function, as Red Guards succeeded in dispersing the meeting. Some of its members were arrested by the Bolsheviks, notably G. B. Patushinskii, V. M. Krutovskii, and M. B. Shatilov. Others (initially V. I. Moravskii, V. T. Tiber-Petrov, I. S. Iudin, E. E. Kolosov, and N. Zhernakov) accompanied Derber to the Far East, where in May 1918, the government failed to get its authority recognized by the local authorities at Harbin (notably the Far Eastern Committee of General D. L. Khorvat) and then by the leaders of White formations, the Allies, and the Czechoslovak Legion at Vladivostok, after Derber transferred operations to the port in July 1918.

As the Soviet regime collapsed in Siberia in May–June 1918, members of the Derber government who had remained underground at Novonikolaevsk and Omsk emerged as the Western Siberian Commissariat and its successor, the Siberian Provisional Government, but came to act increasingly independently of their progenitor, while the Siberian Army completely refused to recognize Derber’s authority. The replacement of the radical Derber with the more moderate I. A. Lavrov as prime minister, on 30 July 1918, had little impact on the government’s power and influence, and by October 1918, it had entirely ceased to function (although it only formally disbanded on 3 November 1918, when it recognized the authority of the Ufa Directory).

SIBERIAN ARMY. This anti-Bolshevik military force was created at Novonikolaevsk, chiefly around what remained of the structures of the Russian Army’s West Siberian Military District, on 26 May 1918, as Soviet authority collapsed across Siberia in the wake of the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion. It was initially a volunteer force, consisting mostly of officers, but by July 1918 had begun a series of mobilizations among the Siberian peasantry.

The Siberian Army was originally called the West Siberian Independent Army (from 13 June 1918), but was redubbed the Siberian Army on 27 June 1918. It thereafter shifted its base of operations to Omsk, where the Provisional Siberian Government came to power on 30 June 1918 and sought to coordinate and control White forces across all Siberia and the Far East. From 12 June 1918, it consisted of the Mid-Siberian and Steppe Corps and the West Siberian Detachment, to which was added a 3rd (Urals) Corps on 26 August 1918. Finally, from 25 September 1918, by which time the Siberian Army had become one of the forces of the Ufa Directory, it was reorganized into five territorial corps: 1st Mid-Siberian (Tomsk and Altai gubernii); 2nd Steppe (Tobol′sk guberniia and Akmolinsk and Semipalatinsk oblasti); 3rd Urals (Perm′ guberniia and the eastern districts of Ufa and Orenburg gubernii); 4th East Siberian (Irkutsk and Eniseisk gubernii and Transbaikal and Iakutsk oblasti); and 5th Amur (Amur, Maritime Province, Kamchatka). Estimates indicate that by September 1918, the Siberian Army had a strength of 37,600 men, with 70 field guns and 184 machine guns. However, in this period officers of the Siberian Army, who had set about restoring the uniforms and ranks and insignia of the old Russian Army, found themselves in conflict with the socialist political authorities of the Democratic Counter-Revolution, and many became involved in the plots (such as the Novoselov affair) that would culminate in the Omsk coup, which involved the arrest of the directory and the elevation to power of Admiral A. V. Kolchak as supreme ruler.

During the autumn of 1918, the Siberian Army conducted operations against Red forces in the Urals and in Semirech′e, as well as battling Red partisans across Siberia, with its greatest success being the capture of the northern Urals city of Perm′ from the 1st Red Army on 24 December 1918. Following that victory, the force was reformed into a new Siberian Independent Army, which performed creditably in the spring offensive of Admiral Kolchak’s Russian Army in March–June 1919, eventually advancing so far west as to facilitate the capture of Glazov, in late June. When, however, White forces were forced to retreat (the Siberian Army having had its left flank suddenly exposed by the collapse of the Western Army to its south), and Kolchak dismissed the Siberian Army’s rebellious commander, General Radola Gajda, the Siberian Army was divided into the 1st Army and the 2nd Army of Kolchak’s reconstitued Eastern Front, on 22 July 1919.

Commanders in chief of the Siberian Army were Colonel (later Major General) A. N. Grishin-Almazov (13 June–5 September 1918); Major General P. P. Ivanov-Rinov (5 September–13 December 1918); Major General A. F. Matkovskii (acting, 15–24 December 1918); General R. Gajda (24 December 1918–7 July 1919); and General M. K. Diterikhs (10–22 July 1919). Its chiefs of staff were Colonel P. A. Belov (12 June–15 November 1918); Major General I. I. Kozlov (acting, 16 November–30 December 1918); and Major General B. P. Bogoslovskii (4 January–17 March 1919).

SIBERIAN COSSACK HOST. Occupying lands spread across Akmolinsk oblast′, Semipalatinsk oblast′, and parts of Tomsk guberniia, and comprising 53 stanitsy, 437 farmsteads (khutora), and 132 smaller settlements, the territories of the Siberian Cossack Host were divided into three districts (Omsk, Kokchetavsk, and Ust-Kamenogorsk), with their center at Omsk. In 1917, the Host population was 172,000, many of them the descendants of Cossacks who had been settled in Siberia from the late 16th century onward (although only formally constituted as an independent host in 1808), and of whom some 11,500 were under arms.

In January 1918, the Soviet authorities formally disbanded the Host and arrested its leaders. Thereafter, opponents of the Bolsheviks were driven underground, forming a number of secret organizations, the most powerful of which were the “Group of 13,” led by B. V. Annenkov, and the independent detachments of V. I. Volkov and I. N. Krasil′nikov. These units played a significant part in driving the Bolsheviks from Siberia during the spring and summer of 1918, and Siberian Cossack units subsequently entered the Siberian Army of the Provisional Siberian Government. In July 1918, the Host’s 4th Krug met at Omsk and elected Major General P. P. Ivanov-Rinov as Host ataman. Under his general command, Siberian Cossack units then fought as an important part of the Eastern Front of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. In September 1919, the Independent Cossack Corps of Kolchak’s forces was created, numbering some 4,000 men. As the White movement in Siberia collapsed in the autumn of 1919, most of these men retreated into Transbaikalia and formed units of the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov, before retreating into the Maritime Province, where at various times from late 1920 to October 1922, their units were attached to anti-Bolshevik forces such as the White Insurgent Army and the Zemstvo Host. Many of the Siberian Cossacks subsequently emigrated to either China or Australia.

SIBERIAN FLOTILLA. This term denoted the mutable concentration of naval vessels controlled by anti-Bolshevik forces in the Far East, chiefly at Vladivostok and along the Ussurii and Amur Rivers, that formed part of the White Fleet. The flotilla was first assembled in July 1918, from various forces in the region, to support the actions of the Czechoslovak Legion, and at that time it was composed of an auxiliary cruiser, a gunboat, 15 destroyers, 13 transport vessels, and other smaller ships. During 1918 and 1919, it saw limited action against Red partisans in the region. Three of the vessels of the flotilla (the cruisers Orel and Iakut and the ice-breaker Baikal) were moved to Japan in January 1920: the Baikal later returned to Vladivostok, but the others made their way to Europe, the crippled Orel was abandoned at Dubrovnik, and the Iakut reached Crimea in November 1920, in time to assist in the evacuation of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel. After the formation of the Far Eastern Republic in April 1920 (and its subsequent claim to sovereignty over the Maritime Province and the flotilla’s base at Vladivostok), control over the flotilla was disputed. After the coup of May 1921 that established the Provisional Priamur Government, however, it again fell firmly into the hands of local Whites, notably the Zemstvo Host of General M. K. Diterikhs. When, in October 1922, the FER’s People’s-Revolutionary Army drove the Whites from Vladivostok, some vessels of the Siberian Flotilla were used to evacuate approximately 10,000 military and civilian refugees from Pos′et Bay to Korea. Eighteen vessels of the flotilla remained in Korea, under the care of the Red Cross; ten others (carrying 3,000 refugees) moved on to Shanghai, where they received a frosty welcome from the Chinese authorities, prompting some to journey on to the Philippines, where they arrived in January 1923. The vessels were then apparently sold, with the funds raised being partly used to provide financial aid to this largely forgotten sector of the White emigration, and the remainder being put at the disposal of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. In December 1923, the Soviet foreign minister, M. M. Litvinov, demanded that the United States (which at that time administered the Philippines) return the ships as Soviet property, but only the ice-breaker Baikal could be found. It was returned to the USSR and joined the Red Fleet.

The Siberian Flotilla was initially commanded, independently, by Admiral S. N. Timirev (former commander of tsarist naval forces in the Far East and husband to M. V. Timireva, the mistress of Admiral A. V. Kolchak). With the establishment of the Omsk government, it came under the control of the naval ministry at Omsk and was successively commanded by Admiral M. I. Fedorovich (from 15 February 1919), Admiral M. A. Berens (December 1919–1 February 1920), and Admiral G. K. Stark (18 June 1921–January 1923).

SIBERIAN REGIONAL DUMA. A long-cherished dream of the advocates of Siberian regionalism, this local parliament was proclaimed, in opposition to Soviet power, by Siberian socialists, regionalists, and representatives of non-Russian minorities in Siberia (both natives and immigrant Poles and Ukrainians) at an Extraordinary All-Siberian Regional Congress at Tomsk, on 6–19 December 1917, and can be regarded as the embryo of the Democratic Counter-Revolution east of the Urals. Its first meeting was closed down by Tomsk Red Guards during the night of 26–27 January 1918, on the orders of Tsentrosibir′, which proclaimed the convocation of the Duma to be illegal, and 20 of its 93 members (almost all of whom were members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries) were arrested. Prior to the arrests, however, some of its members had founded the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia, which claimed its mandate and authority from the Duma. Others formed the Western Siberian Commissariat to work underground toward the overthrow of the Soviet government.

However, with the emergence at Omsk of the increasingly right-wing Provisional Siberian Government in June–July 1918, the Duma (under the leadership of its chairman, I. A. Iakushev), struggled to assert its sovereignty and the principle that the Siberian government was responsible to it. The Duma was allowed to reconvene briefly, on 15–16 August 1918, but the leader of the Omsk regime, P. V. Vologodskii, supported by the military, insisted that the Provisional Siberian Government was independent of it. When the Duma attempted to force the issue by inserting its own candidate, A. E. Novoselov, into the government, Novoselov was immediately abducted and murdered (during the Novoselov affair) by Cossacks of the Siberian Army, who were acting under the orders of Colonel V. I. Volkov. On 6 November 1918, the Duma was formally dissolved by the Ufa Directory.

Siberian Regionalism. Siberian regionalism, or oblastnichestvo, was a political and social movement founded in the late 19th century by a circle of Siberian students in St. Petersburg, led by N. M. Iadrintsev and G. N. Potanin. These young radicals viewed Siberia, from which landlordism and serfdom were absent, as the best hope for destroying the tsarist autocracy; at the same time, they resented their region’s exploitation by the center as a source of raw materials and as a dumping ground for criminals and malcontents (although the presence of political exiles in Siberia actually fueled radical regionalism). The key text of the movement was Iadrintsev’s Sibir′ kak koloniia (“Siberia as a Colony,” 1882), which argued that the Siberians’ love of personal freedom and their proclivity for private enterprise had already differentiated them culturally and spiritually from the Russians, and that they should form a separate state, just as the United States had broken away from Britain. Members of the movement tended, however, to be as much (if not more) interested in history, linguistics, ethnography, and geography as they were in politics, and the regionalists never created a formal party.

The movement stultified after the 1905 Revolution and became divided into a left faction (including P. Ia. Derber) and a right faction (which included A. N. Gattenberger and I. I. Serebrennikov), but it was given a new lease of life in 1917 and during the Democratic Counter-Revolution. On 5 August 1917, a Conference of Public Organizations, convened at Tomsk by the oblastniki, approved the “Regulations for the Autonomy of Siberia” and the design of a regional flag: a rectangular banner, differentiated diagonally into a green triangle (for Siberia’s woods) and a white triangle (for the snow). Subsequently, an Extraordinary All-Siberian Regional Congress at Tomsk, on 6–19 December 1917, proclaimed the Siberian Regional Duma to be the highest legislative authority east of the Urals. That body would have considerable influence over subsequent events in Siberia, although many oblastniki, notably Potanin, came to argue that the movement had been hijacked by all-Russian parties, especially the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries.

When the Whites, under Admiral A. V. Kolchak, came to power following the Omsk Coup of 18 November 1918 and began the struggle to resurrect a “Russia, One and Indivisible,” Siberian regionalism suffered a heavy blow, although some trappings of its symbolism were retained in the white and green cockades of the Siberian Army and the white and green adornments of the “Free Siberia” military awards that were introduced by Kolchak on 27 June 1919. After the fall of Kolchak, the threat of Siberian separatism was one factor leading the Soviet government to maintain for several years rule through an imposed (from Moscow) Siberian Revolutionary Committee and Sibbiuro, rather than locally elected soviets.

SIBERIAN REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE. The Sibrevkom, one of a number of such revolutionary committees, was the extraordinary and provisional body charged by Moscow with governing Siberia until circumstances were such that formal Soviet institutions could be created. It was established by a decree of VTsIK of 27 August 1919 and was initially a troika, consisting of I. M. Smirnov (chairman), V. M. Kosarev, and M. I. Frunkin. The Sibrevkom served as the plenipotentiary organ of VTsIK in Siberia, and in theory, enjoyed full authority over all political and administrative structures across the Omsk, Tomsk, Altai, Semipalatinsk, Irkutsk, and Iakutsk gubernii. In fact, of course, most of these regions remained in the hands of White forces until early 1920. Thus, the Sibrevkom’s authority advanced eastward only gradually, in the wake of the Red Army, with the institution basing itself initially at Cheliabinsk and then (from November 1919) at Omsk. In June 1921, it moved once more, to Novonikolaevsk. Moreover, real authority resided in the regional bureau of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the Sibbiuro. Nevertheless, the Sibrevkom functioned from 18 September 1919 until 1 December 1925, making it the longest lasting of such institutions.

SICH RIFLEMEN. See UKRAINIAN SICH RIFLEMEN.

SIdorin, Vladmir Il′ich (3 February 1882–20 May 1943). Colonel (1917), major general (5 May 1918), lieutenant general (2 February 1919). The man destined to lead the army of the Don Cossack Host during the “Russian” Civil Wars (and to leave that post under a cloud), V. I. Sidorin, the son of an impoverished noble Cossack officer, was born at Esaulovsk stanitsa, in the Second District of the Don territory. A graduate of the Don Cadet Corps (1900), the Nicholas Engineering School (1902), the Russian Aviation School (1907), and the Academy of the General Staff (1910), Sidorin served with the 4th Amur Railway Battalion in the Russo–Japanese War, and in the First World War occupied a number of staff positions, rising to the posts of deputy chief of staff of the 2nd Army (March 1916–March 1917), chief of staff of the Caucasian Corps (April–June 1917), and chief of staff of the Western Front (June–October 1917).

In August 1917, Sidorin was sent to Petrograd by General L. G. Kornilov to organize a secret officers’ organization (in preparation for a potential coup that was at the heart of the Kornilov affair). He returned to the Don territory in November 1917 and participated in the battle for Rostov (November–December 1917), then became chief of staff to General A. M. Nazarov (December 1917–January 1918) and participated in the Don Cossack uprising against Soviet rule in the partisan detachment of General P. Kh. Popov (as his chief of staff from 12 February 1918). He was then (as one of the opponents of the new Host ataman, General P. N. Krasnov) placed in the reserve of the Don Army (May 1918–February 1919). Then on the recommendation of Krasnov’s successor as ataman, General A. F. Bogaevskii, he became that army’s commander in the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR). He occupied that post from 2 February 1919 to 14 March 1920, in the key period of the Don Cossacks’ struggles against the Red Army. Sidorin led the Don Cossack forces as they reconquered all the Host territory during the summer of 1919, then advanced on Moscow, and was also in charge of the Don Army as, in January–March 1920, it retreated into and through the Don territory and the Kuban. When, following the collapse of the AFSR, the remnants of the Don Army were evacuated from Novorossiisk and then gathered in Crimea (March–April 1920), he was placed in command of the new Don Corps of the Russian Army. However, Sidorin was never able to fully control the forces under his command (notably failing to prevent the rapine that accompanied the Mamontov raid and repeatedly failing to fulfill the orders of General A. I. Denikin, during the autumn of 1919, to send forces to the aid of the beleaguered Volunteer Army). Consequently, on 18 April 1920, together with his chief of staff, General A. K. Kel′chevskii, he was removed from his post by the new commander in chief of White forces in the South, General P. N. Wrangel.

Charged with the encouragement of Cossack separatism—he had allowed the publication of articles with such sentiments in his force’s newspaper, Vestnik Donskoi armii (“The Bulletin of the Don Army”)—and failure to prevent the undisciplined and unordered retreat of his forces to Novorossiisk during the winter of 1919 to 1920, Sidorin was then arraigned before a court martial overseen by General A. M. Dragomirov. He was found guilty of neglect of duty and sentenced to a dishonorable discharge from the army (and the canceling of all his honors and ranks) and was ordered to serve four years in exile, but Wrangel commuted this to voluntary retirement from the army. Sidorin left Crimea in May 1920; in emigration, he lived in Bulgaria and Serbia before, in 1924, moving to Prague, where he worked as a draftsman in the Cartographical Section of the Czechoslovak Army. During the interwar years, he wrote numerous historical works on the Don Army and the civil wars, as well as editing the journal Vol′noe kazachestvo (“Free Cossackdom”). During the Second World War, he adopted a pro-fascist, collaborationist position (having moved to Germany in 1939). He is buried in the Russian cemetery at Tegel in Berlin.

SILIKYAN (SILIKOV), MOVSES (14 September 1862–10 December 1937). Colonel (6 December 1910), major general (22 August 1917), lieutenant general (Army of the Armenian Democratic Republic, 1 June 1919). The Armenian military commander Movses Silikyan was a graduate of the 1st Moscow Military Gymnasium, the 3rd Alexandropol Military School, and the Officers’ Riflemen School. He joined the Russian Army on 28 August 1882, serving in the 155th Infantry Regiment. During the First World War, he saw action on the Caucasus Front with the 8th Caucasian Rifle Regiment (from March 1914) and as commander of the 6th Caucasian Rifle Regiment (from 29 November 1915). With the latter, he participated in the Armenian’s “Van Resistance” against Turkish massacres, and in 1916, led his men into Erzurum.

As the Caucasian Front disintegrated in the aftermath of the October Revolution, Silikyan led the organization of Armenian national units around Yerevan, as the commander of the 1st Armenian Rifle Division from January 1918. In May 1918, in the wake of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), he led the Democratic Republic of Armenia’s military resistance to the Ottoman 3rd Army, as it advanced into the territories around Batumi, Kars, and Ardahan that had been ceded to Turkey by the Bolsheviks, repulsing them at the Battle of Bash Abaran (21–24 May 1918) and the Battle of Sardarapat (24–26 May 1918). He also commanded Armenian forces on the Karssk–Alexandropol Front during the Turkish–Armenian War (24 September–2 December 1920).

Following the Sovietization of Armenia and the establishment of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Silikyan was removed from the army but found work in numerous Soviet establishments. He was arrested on 8 August 1937, at the height of the purges, and was subsequently executed alongside a number of other former leaders of the Armenian army (including Kristopor Araratov) at the Nork Gorge, near Yerevan. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1958.

SINKLER, VLADIMIR ALEKSANDROVICH (12 January 1879–16 March 1946). Colonel (6 December 1914), major general (1917), lieutenant general (Ukrainian Army, 3 July 1920). The Ukrainian military leader Vladimir Sinkler was born at Novyi Margelan (Ferghana) into the noble family of a military engineer of Scottish ancestry. He was a graduate of the Orenburg Nepliuevsk Cadet Corps (1896), the Mikhail Artillery School (1899), and the Academy of the General Staff (1905). Following service on the staff of the main commander in chief in the Far East during the Russo–Japanese War, he commanded a regiment of the Pavlovsk Life Guards and was then assigned work on the staff of the St. Petersburg Military District. During the First World War, he served as chief of staff of the 2nd Guards Infantry Division (from 24 March 1915) and commander of the 176th Pervipolchnensk Regiment (from 11 May 1916), as well as chief of staff of the 2nd Guards Corps (from 28 April 1917), but illness forced him into retirement in late 1917.

In the spring of 1918, Sinkler joined the staff of the Ukrainian Army and remained in that post following the coup that brought Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii to power, rising to quartermaster general of the Hetmanite Army (from 12 October 1918). Following the collapse of the Ukrainian State in late 1918, he transferred his loyalty back to the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), serving as assistant chief of the general staff of the Ukrainian Army from January 1919. From summer 1919, he was chief of staff of the Trans-Dnepr group of forces of the UNR, and from March to July 1920, was chief of the general staff of the Ukrainian Army, which was by then based on Polish territory. In that last capacity, he helped negotiate the Polish–Ukrainian Treaty of Warsaw (21–24 April 1920). Later, in 1921, he joined Symon Petliura’s Supreme Military Council, but when hopes for Ukrainian independence were crushed at the end of the Soviet–Polish War, he left military service, refusing a commission in the Polish Army, and found work as a check-weighman at Bořislav.

On 13 March 1945, Sinkler was netted by Soviet military intelligence services (SMERSH) in a raid at Katowice and was sent to the Lukianivska prison in Kiev for interrogation. The local procurator suggested a 10-year sentence for his crimes against Soviet power, but before that could be imposed Sinkler, who had suffered severe heart problems in the past, was transferred to the prison hospital with acute angina and died soon thereafter of a heart attack. He was posthumously rehabilitated by the procurator general of Ukraine in May 2005.

SISSON DOCUMENTS. This term denotes the collection of 68 documents obtained in Petrograd in early 1918 by Edgar Sisson, a representative of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (the Creel Committee). The documents purported to show that V. I. Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks were in the pay of the German General Staff, which hoped that its revolutionary agents would cause the collapse of Russia and thereby force that country’s withdrawal from the First World War. The content of the documents was released to the press on 16 September 1918, and a collection of them was published (in an edition of 137,000, with testimonies as to their veracity by American historians and experts on Russia ) by the Creel Committee as The German–Bolshevik Conspiracy (Washington, DC, 1918). It has since been convincingly demonstrated (notably by George F. Kennan, in the Journal of Modern History in 1956) that the documents were forgeries, but at the time they served as a justification for the Allied intervention in Russia.

SIVERS, RUDOL′F FERDINANDOVICH (11 November 1892–8 December 1918). The Soviet military commander R. F. Sivers, one of the most active and effective leaders of the nascent Red Army during the early stages of the civil wars, was born at St. Petersburg, into the family of an office worker of German heritage. He served in the First World War as an ensign and joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, working with the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b) and helping to edit the soldiers’ newspaper Okopnaia pravda (“Trench Truth”). He was arrested by the Provisional Government following the July Days, but released in October 1917, and during the October Revolution he commanded a unit of Red Guards in the suppression of the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising.

In November 1917, Sivers was sent, with his men, to Ukraine, where he helped establish Soviet power in the Donbass. On 23 February 1918, the “Socialist Army” commanded by Sivers, in one of the early railway wars, captured Rostov-on-Don and then went on to seize Taganrog from anti-Soviet forces of the Don Cossack Host and the Volunteer Army. In all these operations, it is alleged, Sivers condoned widescale atrocities against the enemy and against civilians (especially priests). From March to 10 April 1918, he commanded the 5th Red Army in battles against forces of the Austro-German intervention in Ukraine; and in the summer of 1918, he led the Special Brigade (from September 1918, the 1st Special Ukrainian Brigade) of the 9th Red Army on the Southern Front in battles against the Don Cossack forces of General P. N. Krasnov.

Sivers was fatally injured during a battle near the village of Zhelnovka (near Kazan′) and later died at Moscow. He was buried in Petrograd on the Field of Mars. A street in Taganrog (now P. E. Osipenko Street) was renamed in his honor, and in Rostov-on-Don another major boulevard still retains his name.

16TH RED ARMY. This Red military formation was created according to an order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic of 15 November 1918, from forces that had been part of the Western Screens (and were sometimes thereafter referred to as the Western Army). From 19 March 1919, it was attached to the Western Front, and from 13 March to 9 June 1919, it was renamed the Lithuanian–Belorussian Army. In October 1920, all forces of the former 4th Red Army were included in the 16th Red Army; in December 1920, all former forces of the 3rd Red Army were incorporated into it. Its complement included the 2nd Rifle Division (June–August and October 1920 and December 1920–May 1921); the 2nd Border Division (June–July 1919); the 4th (October 1920–May 1921); 5th (December 1920–May 1921), 6th (December 1920–March 1921), 8th (January 1919–May 1921), 10th (March–September 1920 and October 1920–January 1921), 16th (October 1920 and November 1920–May 1921), 17th (June–September 1919, October 1919–October 1920, and October 1920–May 1921), 21st (May–June 1920), 27th (July–August 1920, October 1920, and December 1920–March 1921), 29th (March–May 1920), 48th (August–December 1920), 52nd (November 1918–November 1919), 56th (September 1920), and 57th (March–May and October–November 1920) Rifle Divisions; the Latvian Riflemen (September 1920); the Lithuanian Rifle Division (November 1918–April 1919); the Independent VOKhR Rifle Division (April–October 1920); and the 10th Kuban Cavalry Division (November–December 1920).

The 16th Red Army originally occupied an area around Gdov, Luga, Novgorod, and Cherikov, before (from November 1918 to January 1919) moving into areas of Belorussia and Lithuania that, in the wake of the armistice, had been evacuated by German forces. This advance brought it into contact with Polish units around Minsk. During the opening stages of the Soviet–Polish War, in July 1920, the 16th Red Army captured Minsk and Brest-Litovsk before being forced to retreat, in late August, by the resurgent Poles. In November–December 1920, it was involved in battles against the forces of S. Bułak-Bałachowicz. The army was disestablished on 7 May 1921, and its forces were distributed to other armies on the Western Front.

Commanders of the 16th Red Army were A. E. Snesarev (15 November 1918–13 March 1919); F. K. Mironov (acting, 9–14 June 1919); A. V. Novikov (14 June–22 July 1919); V. P. Glagolev (22 July–14 August 1919); N. V. Sollogub (14 August 1919–21 September 1920); A. I. Kuk (26 September 1920–24 April 1921); and E. A. Shilovskii (acting, 24 April–7 May 1921). Its chiefs of staff were A. V. Novikov (15 November 1918–13 March 1919 and 9–14 June 1919); V. V. Sergeev (14 June–10 September 1919); V. L. Baranovich (10–28 September 1919); P. A. Mei (acting, 28 September–9 October 1919); M. A. Batorskii (9 October 1919–10 October 1920); E. A. Shilovskii (10 October 1920–24 April 1921); and N. E. Varfolomeev (acting, 24 April–7 May 1921).

6TH RED ARMY. This appellation was applied to two groups of Red forces during the course of the civil wars.

The first 6th Red Army was created from forces attached to the northeastern section of the Soviet Republic’s Screens on 11 September 1918, and from 1 October 1918 to 19 February 1919 was attached to the Northern Front, operating in the regions of Arkhangel′sk, Kotlas, and Viatka in opposition to the Whites’ Northern Army. Among its constituent parts were the 1st Rifle Division (August 1919–April 1920); the 1st Kamyshinsk Rifle Division (March–April 1919); the 18th Rifle Division (November 1918–April 1920); the 19th Rifle Division (December 1918–January 1929); and the 54th Rifle Division (August 1919–April 1920). Based at Vologda (September 1918–February 1920) and latterly Arkhangel′sk (March–April 1920), it also had operational command of the Northern Dvina Military Flotilla (September 1918–May 1920) and the Onega Military Flotilla (August 1919–April 1920). Its operations were focused along the few railways and the main rivers of the northern region and brought it into contact with British and American forces of the Allied intervention that were advancing south from Arkhangel′sk. When the latter withdrew from North Russia, the 6th Red Army entered Arkhangel′sk (21 February 1920) and Murmansk (13 March 1920). By an order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic on 10 April 1920, the first 6th Red Army was disestablished, its forces being distributed between the White Sea Military District and the 7th Red Army. The commanders of the first 6th Red Army were V. M. Gittis (11 September–22 November 1918); A. A. Samoilo (22 November 1918–2 May 1919 and 29 May 1919–15 April 1920); and V. P. Glagolev (2–29 May 1919). Its chiefs of staff were A. A. Samoilo (11 September–22 November 1918); N. N. Petin (29 November 1918–22 May 1919); I. V. Iatso (23 May–27 October 1919 and 22 November 1919–2 January 1920); and N. V. Lisovskii (27 October–22 November 1919 and 2 January 1920–10 April 1920).

The second 6th Red Army was created by an order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic on 19 August 1920, on the basis of troops of the Trans-Volga Military District, chiefly the 2nd Revolutionary Labor Army. On 21 September 1920, it was attached to the Southern Front. It operated chiefly in the Kherson and Kakhovka regions, in battles against General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army (often in collaboration with the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine and the 2nd Cavalry Army), securing the right bank of the Dnepr against the Whites’ attempt to secure a bridgehead and subsequently playing a key role in forcing an entry into Crimea across the Perekop isthmus and the Sivash marshes in November 1920. The constituent forces of the 6th Red Army included the 1st (September–November 1920), 13th (September–October 1920), 15th (September 1920–May 1921), 51st (September–November 1920 and November 1920–May 1921), and 52nd (September–November 1920 and November 1920–May 1921) Rifle Divisions; the Latvian Rifle Division (November 1920); and the 3rd Cavalry Corps (November–December 1920). The second 6th Red Army was disbanded on 13 May 1921, and its forces were transferred to the Khar′kov Military District. Commanders of the second 6th Red Army were K. A. Avksent′evskii (20 August–26 October 1920) and A. I. Kork (26 October 1920–13 May 1921). Its chiefs of staff were V. K. Tokarevskii (19 August–3 December 1920) and A. V. Kirpichnikov (3 December 1920–13 May 1921).

SKACHKO, ANATOLII EVGENEV′ICH (1879–28 December 1941). Captain (191?). The Soviet military commander A. E. Skachko was born at Poltava into the family of a land surveyor and was also trained in that profession, graduating from the Moscow Institute of Surveying (1900). He served in the First World War as a journalist with the Russian Army. Having joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in 1917 and been elected commander of his regiment in November of that year, from April 1918 he worked as editor of the Izvestiia (“News”) of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and head of the military section of VTsIK.

From August 1918, Skachko was attached to the staff of the Eastern Front, then moved to fight with Red forces in Ukraine, becoming chief of staff of an army group around Khar′kov (from 6 February 1919). He was subsequently commander of the 2nd Ukrainian Soviet Army (7 April–7 June 1919), then was sent on undercover work in Daghestan, which was then occupied by White forces attached to the Armed Forces of South Russia. From June 1921 to January 1922, he worked as head of the Arts Department of Glavpolitprosvet (the Main Committee for Political Education, part of the People’s Commissariat for Education). Skachko then performed a number of jobs in military and political education. He was arrested by the NKVD on 8 August 1937, and later died in the Kargopol′sk labor camp, near Arkhangel′sk.

Skalon, Mikhail Nikolaevich (19 January 1874–28 February 1943). Colonel (August 1912), major general (20 December 1914), lieutenant general (August 1920). A senior figure in the White forces in South Russia, M. N. Skalon was born into a noble family in Khar′kov guberniia and was a graduate of the Corps of Pages (1894). He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War, and in the First World War was commander, successively, of the 36th Orlov Regiment (July 1914–April 1915), the Life Guards 4th Rifle Regiment (22 April 1915–5 April 1917), and the 33rd Rifle Division (5 April 1917–January 1918).

In the White movement, Skalon commanded forces in the Novorossiisk region under General N. N. Shilling (November 1919–January 1920) and was subsequently commander of the Composite Guards Rifle Division under General F. E. Bredov, alongside whom he endured the Bredov March into Poland (January–March 1920). He returned to Crimea via Romania, in July 1920, to join the Russian Army, and was named by General P. N. Wrangel as commander of its 3rd Army Corps (August–October 1920). He then served as governor-general of Tauride (25 October–1 November 1920), before the successful evacuation of the bulk of Wrangel’s forces from Crimea, over which he ultimately presided. In emigration, Skalon settled in Bulgaria and then (from 1925) in Czechoslovakia.

Skipetrov, Leonid Nikolaevich (23 March 1883–22 August 1956). Major general (6 September 1918). A close collaborator of Ataman G. M. Semenov, the White commander L. N. Skipetrov was of noble background (he was the son of a court counselor) and was a graduate of the Vil′na Military School (1904). He served in the Russo–Japanese War and during the First World War rose to the command of the Irkutsk Military District. In December 1917, he led the rising against Soviet power at Irkutsk that was staged by officer cadets, and subsequently (from 1 September 1918) served as chief of staff of Semenov’s Special Manchurian Detachment. From December 1918, he was jointly inspector of infantry in the Independent East Siberian Army (as Semenov’s force was redubbed following its formal incorporation into the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak) and commander of the 1st Military District of Transbaikal oblast′; on 16 June 1919, he was named as Semenov’s deputy as ataman of the Transbaikal Cossack Host.

Skipetrov is most remembered for leading an expeditionary force of Semenov’s troops against the revolutionary forces of the Political Center at Irkutsk in December 1919. In the aftermath of the failure of that expedition, his force was attacked by units of the Czechoslovak Legion at Baikal Station (9 January 1920), and Skipetrov was taken prisoner (the Czechoslovaks feared that Semenov’s forces were about to destroy the 40 tunnels carrying the Trans-Siberian Railway around the southern shore of Lake Baikal, thereby blocking their escape route from Siberia). He subsequently traveled to Europe with the legion and, in emigration, lived in Poland and later the United States, where he convened the Southern California Union of Russian War Veterans. He died and is buried in Los Angeles.

SKLIANSKII, EFRAIM MARKOVICH (31 July 1892–27 August 1925). A central figure in the Red Army command structure during the civil-war period, the most trusted deputy and supporter of L. D. Trotsky (who lauded him as “the Carnot of the Russian Revolution”), E. M. Sklianskii was born into a middle-class family at Fastov, Kiev guberniia; was raised at Zhitomir; and was a graduate of the Medical Faculty of Kiev University (1916). He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in 1913 and worked as a propagandist for the organization’s Kiev city committee. Immediately after graduation in 1916, he was called up by the army. He served initially as a soldier in a reserve regiment and subsequently as a doctor in the 149th Black Sea Infantry Regiment. Following the February Revolution, he was elected to the soldiers’ committee of the 19th Army Corps (March 1917) and then became chairman of the soldiers’ committee of the 5th Army (May 1917). As a member of the Dvinsk Committee of the RSDLP(b), he was a delegate to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets (October 1917), serving on its presidium. He also participated actively in the October Revolution, as a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet.

Sklianskii subsequently served as a commissar at the stavka of the supreme commander at Mogilev and (from 23 November 1917) was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs. At the same time (from 22 December 1917), he was deputy people’s commissar for military affairs. In this period, he had special responsibility for overseeing the orderly demobilization of the old army. From 19 March 1918, he was a member (and then deputy chairman) of the Supreme Military Council of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and from 22 October 1918 to 11 March 1924, was deputy chairman of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. He was also a member of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defense, and from 1920 to 1921, was a member of the Council of Labor and Defense.

As part of the campaign to undermine Trotsky, to whom Sklianskii had remained very close, in March–April 1924 he was removed from all his military responsibilities, on the initiative of J. V. Stalin (of whose competence during the civil-war period Sklianskii had been sharply critical), and was assigned to VSNKh as chairman of the Mossukno textile trust. During a visit to the United States in 1925, he drowned while canoeing at Long Lake, New York. Suspicions remain that Sklianskii was killed on Stalin’s orders, but no definite proof has emerged and it is most likely that he died accidentally, as a result of bad weather. He was buried on 25 September 1925, at Moscow’s Novodevich′e cemetery.

SKOBEL′TSYN, VLADIMIR STEPANOVICH (12 March 1872–4 January 1944). Major general (19 October 1914), lieutenant general (191?) One of the most prominent and effective leaders of the anti-Bolshevik forces in North Russia, V. S. Skobel′tsyn was born into a noble family in Kursk guberniia. He was a graduate of the Orlov Cadet Corps (1890), the 1st Pavlovsk Military School (1892), and the Academy of the General Staff (1899), and was a member of the Moscow Life Guards Regiment. After numerous staff appointments and a period as head of the Pavlovsk Military School (6 January 1907–12 February 1910), in the course of the First World War he rose to the post of chief of staff of the 17th Army Corps (4 December 1915–6 March 1917) and participated in the Brusilov Offensive. After the February Revolution, he served as commander of the 2nd Turkestan Rifle Division (6 March–12 April 1917), commander of the 1st Finnish Rifle Division (12 April–18 July 1917), and then assistant commander of the Northern Front.

Following the October Revolution, Skobel′tsyn served briefly in the Hetmanite Army in Ukraine and then fled to Finland, where he remained until returning to join the White movement in 1919. As commander of the Olonets Volunteer Army from June 1919, he directed its operations against Red Army positions in the region of Petropavlovsk. In February 1920, with the evacuation of much of the rest of the White Northern Army from Arkhangel′sk and Murmansk, Skobel′tsyn led his men across the border into Finland. From 1921, he lived in emigration in France; he died at Pau, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques.

Skoblin, Nikolai Vladimirovich (1885–October 1937?). Staff captain (1917), colonel (November 1918), major general (26 March 1920). For a while a lauded White hero of the civil wars, by virtue of his command of the fabled Kornilovtsy, N. V. Skoblin later came to be remembered more widely as an agent of the Soviet secret services who committed the basest betrayal of his émigré comrades. Born into the nobility of Chernigov guberniia, he was a graduate of Chugunsk Military School (1914) and served during the First World War with the 126th Ryl′sk Infantry regiment. Following the February Revolution, he was selected to command the 2nd Battalion of the Kornilov Shock Regiment (May–November 1917).

An early recruit to the Volunteer Army, during the civil wars in South Russia Skoblin commanded a battalion (December 1917–November 1918), then the Kornilov Regiment (November 1918–September 1919), then the 2nd Brigade (September–October 1919), and finally, the Kornilov Division (16 October 1919–25 October 1920). He was then placed on the reserve list. In November 1920, he was evacuated from Crimea to the camps of Gallipoli and he subsequently lived, in emigration, in the Balkans and France.

Skoblin was removed from the command of the Kornilovtsy in 1923, by General P. N. Wrangel, but was restored to that position in 1929 by General A. P. Kutepov, when the latter became head of ROVS. It has been suggested that it was under the influence of his allegedly avaricious wife, the famous singer Nadezhda Plevitskaia (who also worked for the Soviets), that in September 1930 he entered the service of the NKVD. In that capacity, as a member of the “Inner Line,” he was involved in the planting of false documents with the Gestapo that led eventually to the downfall of Marshall M. N. Tukhachevskii. He also played a leading role, in September 1937, in the kidnapping by the NKVD of the successor to Kutepov as head of ROVS, General E. K. Miller. When his treachery was uncovered (Miller had left documents with General P. A. Kusonskii, to be opened in the case of his death or disappearance, that revealed his own suspicions about Skoblin’s trustworthiness), Skoblin fled, probably to Spain. There are no reliable accounts of his subsequent fate; some have suggested that Skoblin was poisoned on a Soviet ship en route to Odessa, others, that he was killed in Spain by the NKVD agent Alexander Orlov. In his memoirs (The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes, 1954), Orlov suggests that Skoblin was taken to Leningrad. It may be telling, however, that in an otherwise sensational memoir (Special Tasks, 1994), the Soviet intelligence officer Pavel Sudoplatov wrote that Skoblin died in a bombing raid in Barcelona. The fate of his wife is slightly better established: she was arrested, tried by a French court, and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for her part in the abduction of General Miller, and she died in prison at Rennes on 5 October 1940, possibly of a heart attack (although the precise cause of her death remains unconfirmed). The story of Plevitskaia and Skoblin was fictionalized by Vladimir Nabokov (who had known Plevitskaia in Berlin) in his English-language story “The Assistant Producer” (1943). It also formed the basis of Eric Rohmer’s feature film Triple Agent (2004).

Skoropadskii, Pavel (pavlo) Petrovich (3 May 1873–26 April 1945). Colonel (6 December 1906), major general (6 December 1912), lieutenant general (12 September 1915). The Hetman of the Ukrainian State of 1918, P. P. Skoropadskii was born at Wiesbaden (in what was then the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau) into a wealthy Cossack family, but grew up on his father’s estates in Poltava and Chernigov gubernii. He was a graduate of the Corps of Pages (1893), and having entered military service with His Majesty’s Cavalry Guards on 15 August 1891, fought in the Russo–Japanese War as commander of the 2nd Chita Regiment of the Transbaikal Cossack Host. Having won a gold sword of honor for his exploits, he subsequently became an aide-de-camp to Nicholas II (from 1905), and from April 1911 led a cavalry regiment of the tsar’s House Guards. In the First World War, he rose to the command of the 1st Guards Cavalry Division (from 2 April 1916), and from 22 January 1917 was commander of the 34th Army Corps, stationed in Ukraine.

Following the February Revolution and the formation of the Ukrainian Central Rada, Skoropadskii was named by the Russian Provisional Government as commander of the new 1st Ukrainian Corps (2 July 1917), in which capacity he resisted Bolshevik intrigues among local forces and worked to Ukrainize the military formations stationed in Ukraine. On 6 October 1917, at Chigrin, at the First Congress of Free Cossacks, he was elected their honorary commander (otaman), but resigned on 29 December 1917, when the Rada placed a man he did not trust (Iurii Kapkan) in charge of its forces. When forces of the Austro-German intervention occupied Ukraine in the aftermath of the first Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (27 January 1918) and encountered problems in persuading the Rada to deliver foodstuffs in the quantities agreed to in the treaty, Skoropadskii was approached by the German military with the request that he take control of the government. A coup was duly launched, on 29 April 1918, and Skoropadskii was pronounced “Hetman of Ukraine” by a Congress of Ukrainian Landowners. That same day, he issued a “Charter to the Ukrainian People,” announcing the dissolution of the Rada and its land committees and annulling all laws and decrees of both the Ukrainian Rada and the Russian Provisional Government of 1917 relating to the land question. He followed this with the “Laws on the Provisional State Order of Ukraine,” under which the Ukrainian National Republic was replaced by the Ukrainian State and all executive power was passed to the Hetman, pending the summoning of a Ukrainian Soim (Diet).

Subsequently, Skoropadskii’s government, headed by the wealthy landowner Fedir Lyzohub, sought to restore the prerevolutionary economic order and to defend private property, while at the same time meeting the demands of the Central Powers for the delivery of food supplies. This latter policy proved to be immensely unpopular across Ukraine. Moreover, despite his deliberate attempts to bedeck his government with the trappings of Ukrainian and Cossack history (he was a descendant of the 18th-century Hetman I. I. Skoropadskii), Skoropadskii’s cabinet was dominated by Russians. The regime was consequently resisted by organizations of workers and peasants and by the former nationalist and socialist adherents of the Central Rada, and widespread fighting was the outcome. On 4–17 September 1918, Skoropadskii visited Berlin and met with the kaiser, but as his German and Austrian allies collapsed in October–November 1918, he was forced into negotiations with representatives of the UNR, and he could not forestall the uprising against his rule that was being prepared by the Ukrainian National Republic Directory.

On 14 December 1918, Skoropadskii slipped out of Kiev (disguised as a wounded German officer), on a German train bound for Berlin. In emigration, he settled at Wannsee and was in receipt of financial support from the German government. He never relinquished his claim to governance over Ukraine, and during the interwar years, from his home he headed the Hetmanite Movement, made up of monarchist émigré organizations such as the Ukrainian Union of Agrarians-Statists in Europe, the United Hetman Organization in Canada and the United States, and the Ukrainian Hetman Organization of America. He was also honorary president of the Ukrainian hromada in Berlin and the chief founder of the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Berlin. During the Second World War, he lobbied the Nazi government for the release of Ukrainian nationalists who had been imprisoned in German concentration camps. Skoropadskii was mortally wounded during an Allied air raid on the railway station at Plattling, near Munich, on 26 April 1945, and died that same day. He is buried at Obersdorf.

SKRYPNYK, MYKOLA (NIKOLAI ALEKSEEVICH) (25 January 1872–7 July 1933). A founder and leader of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, Mykola Skrypnyk was born into the family of a railwayman at Iasnuvata, in Ekaterinoslav guberniia. He was expelled from his secondary school at Izum for revolutionary activities and in 1901 suffered the same fate at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute, having joined the social-democratic movement in 1897. Thereafter, he was engaged full time in revolutionary work (chiefly in journalism), as a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, and was arrested 15 times and exiled 7 times by the tsarist authorities.

A longtime associate of V. I. Lenin (he had been active as part of the latter’s network around the newspaper Iskra from as early as 1901), during the October Revolution Skrypnyk was a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and in 1918, he was appointed chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (3 March–17 November 1918), as well as its people’s commissar for foreign affairs (8 March–18 April 1918), having served earlier as secretary for labor and industry in the People’s Secretariat of the Ukrainian People’s Republic of Soviets (March–April 1918). However, following his association at a party conference at Taganrog in April 1918 with the “Kiev group” of Ukrainian Bolsheviks (who favored a separate Ukrainian Communist Party), rather than the “Ekaterinoslav group” (who wanted to merge fully with the Russian party), his prominence waned somewhat, and in 1919–1920, in the Ukrainian governments of Cristian Rakovski, he headed commissariats of only secondary importance, although he was also serving in the All-Russian Cheka, as a member of its collegium and head of its Secret Political Department (1918–1919).

In the 1920s, Skrypnyk’s star rose again, as he became people’s commissar for internal affairs (19 July 1921–February 1922) and procurator general (1922–April 1927) of the Ukrainian SSR. In the debates surrounding the Treaty on the Formation of the USSR, as a defender of the autonomy of the Soviet republics, he clashed with J. V. Stalin and subsequently became the foremost advocate of the policy of the Ukrainization of the political and cultural life of his own republic. As Ukrainian people’s commissar for education and both a member of the presidium of the All-Union VTsIK and chairman of its Council of Nationalities (1927–1933), he had huge influence and even worked to spread Ukrainization beyond the republic’s borders to areas of compact Ukrainian settlement in the Kuban, Kazakhstan, Siberia, and the Far East. His ubiquity in the cultural life of Ukraine was sealed when, in 1928, he ratified a new orthography of the Ukrainian language that subsequently became known as the skrypnykivka.

Skrypnyk was removed from power in 1933, when the policy of Ukrainization was abruptly reversed by Stalin, but refused to recant his “nationalist wrecking” in sufficiently abject terms and was accused of “counterrevolutionary activity.” Rather than face trial, he committed suicide in his office at Khar′kov on 7 July 1933. He was posthumously rehabilitated in January 1962.

Skujenieks, Marģers (10 June 1886–1941). The Latvian nationalist politician Marg¸ers Skujenieks was born in Riga. He was the son of the author Eduard Skujenieks (more commonly known under the pseudonym Edward Vensku). He studied at a local Realschule and at Jelgava (Mitau), and in 1911 graduated from Moscow University, becoming a statistician. He was active in left-wing politics from 1905 and in the nationalist movement from 1911, and he was consequently expelled from Latvia by the authorities. In January 1918, he was a member of the Democratic Bloc that drew up Latvia’s first declaration of independence, and he participated also in the meeting of Tautas Padome that restated the declaration of independence on 18 November 1918. In 1919, he was one of the leaders of the Latvian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.

Skujenieks subsequently served as a member of the Latvian parliament and was twice prime minister of Latvia (19 December 1926–23 January 1928 and 6 December 1931–23 March 1933). He was arrested in June 1940, following the Soviet invasion of Latvia, and deported to the USSR, where he was subsequently shot.

SlashchOv (SlashchEv) (-KRYMSKII), Iakov Aleksandrovich (29 December 1885–11 January 1929). Colonel (November 1916), major general (14 May 1919), lieutenant general (25 March 1920). The eccentric and controversial White commander, known as the “Savior of the Crimea,” Ia. A. Slashchov, was born in St. Petersburg into a military family and was a graduate of the Pavlovsk Military School (1905) and the Academy of the General Staff (1911). He taught military tactics at the Corps of Pages (from March 1912), and during the First World War (during which he was wounded on five occasions), he commanded a company and later a battalion of the Finnish Life Guards Regiment (January 1915–July 1917), then became commander of the Moscow Life Guards Regiment (14 July–1 December 1917).

In the White movement, Slashchov was initially involved, as an emissary of General M. V. Alekseev, in the creation of units of the Volunteer Army around the spa towns of the North Caucasus (January–May 1918), then joined the partisan detachment of General A. G. Shkuro (May–July 1918, as chief of staff from June 1918). He was subsequently commander of the 1st Kuban Cossack Infantry Brigade (from 6 September 1918) and chief of staff of the 2nd Kuban Cossack Division of the Volunteer Army (15 November 1918–February 1919). In the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), he was made a brigade commander of its 5th Infantry Division (18 February 1919), commander of the 4th Infantry Division (8 June 1919), and commander of the 3rd Army Corps (6 December 1919–February 1920). It was in the last of these posts that he achieved his greatest feat, orchestrating a heroic defense of the Perekop isthmus to deny the Reds access to Crimea as the AFSR fell apart and saving the peninsula as a refuge and sanctuary for the Whites. He then served General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army in Crimea, as commander of the Crimean (formerly 2nd) Army Corps (February–August 1920). On 18 August 1920, following his defeat in the Battle of Kakhovka (and a series of scandals involving Slashchov’s brutal attempts to end corruption and gambling in the areas under his control), he was relieved of his command on “health grounds” and placed on the reserve list. (In fact, Slashchov was a prodigious drinker and was also addicted to morphine as a means of alleviating the pain from his many wounds, and he seems to have suffered some sort of nervous collapse.) On the same day, in recognition of earlier triumph, Wrangel accorded Slashchov the title “Krymskii” (“of the Crimea”) as a suffix to his surname, although he was equally well known (by his enemies) as “the hangman.”

Slashchov was evacuated to Constantinople with the remnants of Wrangel’s forces in November 1920. There, he wrote a number of works that were bitingly critical of Wrangel, as a consequence of which he was dismissed from the service and deprived of the right to wear uniform by a court of honor. He subsequently returned to Sevastopol′, on 21 November 1921, after negotiations with the Soviet authorities, and was conveyed to Moscow in the personal carriage of F. E. Dzierżyński. In 1922, he issued a series of appeals for other White officers and soldiers to return home, and from June 1922, he was employed by the Red Army as a lecturer on tactics at the Vystrel Military School in Moscow. On 11 January 1929, he was shot dead in his apartment at the school by one Lazar Kolenberg, who was apparently seeking vengeance for the death of his brother, who had been executed in Crimea in 1920 on Slashchov’s orders. This, however, could not be proven at Kolenberg’s trial, and he was set free (giving rise to speculation that the killer was an agent of the NKVD). The character of General Roman Khludov in the play Beg (“Flight”), by Mikhail Bulgakov, was based on Slashchov.

Slaven (SLAVIN), petr anotonovich (?–1920?). Colonel (191?). The Red military commander Petr Slaven was born in Latvia. Having served in the Russian Army in the First World War, he initially served the Reds in the civil wars, as a commander of the Latvian Riflemen. From 16 August to 20 October 1918, he was commander of the 5th Red Army on the Eastern Front, overseeing the recapture of Kazan′ (10 September 1918) and other Volga cities. He then became commander of the Southern Front (9 November 1918–24 January 1919), and from 10 March to 25 June 1919, was commander of the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia (from 7 to 25 June 1919, the 15th Red Army). He apparently then deserted and went into emigration in Latvia, where according to some reports, he subsequently died of typhus.

SLAVO-BRITISH LEGION. This anti-Bolshevik formation (sometimes refered to as the Slavo-Brittanic Legion), which at its peak mustered 4,000 men, was recruited (from the summer of 1918 onward) from mainly Russian volunteers around Arkhangel′sk in North Russia, but operated under the command of British officers and mainly British NCOs and boasted British-style uniforms and ranks and insignia. Initially attracting officers and men who were distrustful of the socialist-dominated Supreme Administration of the Northern Region (or who were distrusted by it), the legion was regarded as a disciplined and trustworthy unit, and the Allied commander in the region, General W. E. Ironside, came to view it as the potential backbone of a fully functioning new Russian army to lead the struggle against the Soviet regime. However, in the early hours of 7 July 1919, soon after the legion had been deployed at Kucherika, close to the front line on the Dvina River, it mutinied, and five British and four Russian officers were killed. The mutineers came from the 1st and 4th North Russian Regiments of the legion. Their action was suppressed by nearby units of the Royal Fusiliers, but at least 150 of the men fled the scene and deserted to the Reds. Eleven mutineers were captured, tried, and publicly executed. The legion was subsequently disarmed and redeployed as a labor force. A smaller force of a similar nature (the Anglo-Russian Brigade) was recruited by the British Military Mission in Siberia in early 1919.

Sleževičius, Mykolas (21 February 1882–11 November 1939). Born at Dremliai, near Raseiniai, and of Lithuanian noble extraction, Mykolas Sleževičius was a noted lawyer and journalist who twice served as his emergent country’s prime minister during the Lithuanian Wars of Independence. A graduate of the Law Faculty of Novorossiisk (Odessa) University (1907), he was an activist with the Lithuanian Democratic Party and editor of its newspapers Lietuvos ūkininkas (“Lithuanian Farmer,” 1907–1912) and Lietuvos Žinios (“Lithuanian News,” 1910–1912), which advocated Lithuanian autonomy. With Lithuania under German occupation from 1915, Sleževičius spent the First World War in Russia. Following the collapse of tsarism in 1917, he agitated strongly for immediate Lithuanian independence from Russia, which earned him expulsion from the Lithuanian Democratic Party, but remained as vice chairman and later chairman of the Supreme Council of Lithuania in Russia.

In 1918, Sleževičius was briefly imprisoned at Voronezh by the Bolsheviks. Upon his release, he returned to Lithuania, where he served as prime minister from 26 December 1918 to 12 March 1919, and again from 12 April to 7 October 1919. In this capacity (and in opposition to those, such as Augustinas Voldemaras, who favored irregular national militias), he helped organize the Lithuanian Army for resistance against both Polish and Soviet incursions, as well as drafting the country’s first land reform. In 1920, as the Polish–Lithuanian War erupted, he was appointed head of the Lithuanian Defense Committee.

As a representative of the Lithuanian Peasant Popular Union, Sleževičius was again elected prime minister on 15 July 1926, but was deposed in the coup d’état that brought to power Antanas Smetona and Augustinas Voldemaras. Thereafter, Sleževičius’s political activities were constrained, but he remained active as chairman of the Lithuanian Society of Lawyers. He died and is buried in Kaunas.

SLUTSK DEFENSE. This term, sometimes rendered as the “Slutsk defensive action,” denotes the failed attempt, in November 1920, to establish an independent and democratic Belorussian state around the town of Slutsk, 65 miles south of Minsk. Demarcation lines agreed to in the armistice signed by Soviet and Polish delegations at Riga on 12 October 1920, which brought an end to the fighting in the Soviet–Polish War, left Slutsk temporarily in a neutral zone, but it was tacitly understood by all parties that the region was destined to be assigned as Soviet territory. In response, local supporters of the Belarussian National Republic (BNR), led by Pavel Zhauryd, summoned a regional congress at Slutsk, on 14 November 1920. Its 107 delegates passed votes in favor of the BNR and determined to resist, by force of arms, any attempt by the Red Army to occupy Sluchyna (the Slutsk district). The latter task was placed in the hands of a 17-member Rada of Sluchyna, chaired by Uladzimyr Prakulevich, who selected Zhauryd as head of the militia.

Over the following weeks, 10,000 men were mobilized, in two regiments, as the Slutsk Brigade. Battles against the approaching Red forces began on 27 November 1920, but by 31 December 1920, the last remnants of the isolated and poorly armed Slutsk Brigade had been driven across the border into Poland by Soviet forces. Both Zhauryd and Prakulevich, after brief periods in emigration, returned to the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and found employment there in the 1920s, but both were arrested as “bourgeois nationalists” in the early 1930s. Prakulevich was executed by the NKVD in 1938; Zhauryd died in a labor camp in the Mari region the following year. Their fates were shared by many who had participated in the Slutsk defense. Efforts in contemporary Belarus to have 27 November declared a public holiday have been scorned by the regime of Aliaksandr Lukashenka.

SMENOVEKHOVSTVO. Named after the 1921 Prague publication Smena vekh (“Change of Signposts,” sometimes also translated as “Change of Landmarks”)—which had in turn taken its title from an earlier collection of essays, Vekhi (published in Russia in 1909 by M. O. Gershenzon), that considered the intelligentsia’s role in history—this was the name given to a strain of thought that emerged among a disparate group of Russian émigrés in the early 1920s. Apart from Prague, notable centers of the Smenovekhovtsy were Berlin and Sofia. They argued that the civil wars had been irretrievably lost, that the Soviet regime (whatever its faults) was legitimized by its victory and endurance, and that members of the emigration should “either recognize this Russia, hated by you all, or stay without Russia, because a ‘third Russia’ by your recipes does not and will not exist.”

Encouraged by the introduction of the New Economic Policy, the Smenovekhovtsy, grouped around the newspaper Nakanune (“On the Eve,” published in Berlin from 26 March 1922), called upon the émigré community to return to Russia to help rebuild the shattered state, but predicted that Communism would not endure and that Lenin’s regime would be tempered by a revival of Russian nationalism and the reestablishment of Russia as a great power. This “Russification of October,” they argued, would lead to the creation of the “Russia, One and Indivisible” that the Whites had always desired, not an international proletarian revolution. Throughout its existence (it endured until the Second World War), the movement, sometimes later termed “National Bolshevism,” was encouraged—and to some extent (albeit mostly unknown to its adherents) financed—by the Soviet secret services. Its leaders included the former White luminaries N. V. Ustrialov and Iu. V. Kliuchnikov, and it won the support of the novelists Aleksei Tolstoi and Andrei Belyi, both of whom returned to the Soviet Union.

Smetona, Antanas (10 August 1874–9 January 1944). Antanas Smetona, the leader of the Lithuanian national movement during the Lithuanian Wars of Independence and the first president of his country, was born in the village of Užulėnis, 50 miles northwest of Vil′na. He began his education at the Jelgava (Mitau) Gymnasium, but was expelled in 1896 for involvement in a nationalist organization. He then attended Gymnasium No. 9 in St. Petersburg and, in 1902, graduated from the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University, all the while expanding his activities on behalf of the Lithuanian national movement. Before the First World War, he wrote for and edited a number of Lithuanian-language newspapers, including Vilniaus Žinios (“Vilnius News”), Lietuvos Ūkininkas (“Lithuanian Farmer”), and Viltis Aušra (“The Dawn”), and was involved in the semilegal publication and distribution of Lithuanian-language books. During the war, he was vice chairman and later chairman of the Lithuanian Relief Society.

From 18–22 September 1917, at German-occupied Vil′na, Smetona participated in a Lithuanian Conference and was elected chairman of the Taryba (the Council of Lithuania, later the Council of State), in that capacity signing the declaration of independence of Lithuania (16 February 1918). When German forces retreated from the Baltic in the winter of 1918–1919 and the Red Army moved in, he went abroad, promoting the Lithuanian cause in Germany and Scandinavia. On 4 April 1919, he was elected president of Lithuania by the Council of State and served in that capacity until 19 June 1920.

Smetona became a controversial figure in Lithuanian politics in the early 1920s, on one occasion (in 1923) being imprisoned. In December 1926 (together with Augustinas Voldemaras and others), he staged a coup and promulgated a new constitution granting broad and authoritarian powers to the president of the republic. He then served as president until 15 June 1940, when Lithuania was invaded by the USSR. Smetona urged armed resistance to the USSR, but was opposed by his government and the majority of army leaders. Consequently, he resigned and fled with his family to Switzerland, via Germany. In 1941, Smetona emigrated to the United States, settling as a private citizen in Cleveland, Ohio, in his son’s house. He died in a fire there on 9 January 1944, and was buried at the city’s Knollwood Cemetery. In 1968, his remains were transferred to the All Souls Cemetery in Chardon, Ohio. In 1996, a statue of him was raised at Kaunas (near Vilniaus gatve, 33).

SMILGA, IVAR TENISOVICH (2 December 1892–10 January 1938). The head of PUR, the Political Administration of the Revvoensovet of the Republic during the civil wars, I. T. Smilga was born into a prosperous Lithuanian family in Livland guberniia. After his father, a forester, was executed for participating in political disturbances during the 1905 Revolution, in 1907 Smilga joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party and gravitated toward the Bolsheviks. He studied at Moscow University from 1909 to 1910, but in 1911 was exiled to Vologda for three years. He was liberated in 1914 and joined the Bolsheviks’ Petersburg Committee, but was again arrested and exiled, this time to Eniseisk, in May 1915.

Freed by the February Revolution, in April 1917 Smilga was elected to the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks). During the October Revolution, he was chairman of the regional executive committee of the Soviets of the army, fleet, and workers’ organizations in Finland and chairman of Tsentrobalt. As such, he was the Soviet government’s chief representative in Finland. In that capacity, he failed in the attempt to establish Soviet power in Finland during the Finnish Civil War. Back in Soviet Russia, he became one of the most prominent and active of the Red Army’s military commissars, serving successively as commissar of the Northern Screen (15 April–11 September 1928), member of the Revvoensovet of the Northern–Urals–Siberian Front (16–20 July 1918), member of the Revvoensovet of the 3rd Red Army (20 July–12 October 1918), member of the Revvoensovet of the Eastern Front (12 October 1918–15 April 1919), and chief of PUR (31 May 1919–19 January 1921). In these positions, he became a prominent member of the Military Opposition to L. D. Trotsky’s administration of the Red Army. Nevertheless, on 31 May 1919 he was made chairman of PUR and was conjointly a member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (8 May 1919–24 March 1923). He served also as a member of the Revvoensovet of the South-East Front (1 October 1919–16 January 1920) and the Revvoensovet of the Caucasian Front (16 January–18 May 1920), and was acting commander of the Caucasian Front (24 April–15 May 1920) during the destruction of the Armed Forces of South Russia. In 1920, he was removed from the Bolshevik Central Committee, being blamed by J. V. Stalin for the Red failure in the Soviet–Polish War, during which he had served as military commissar to the 7th Red Army (30 May–24 October 1920), under M. N. Tukhachevskii. On 19 January 1921, he was also removed as head of PUR.

Smilga then embarked on a career in economic planning, as deputy chairman of VSNKh (1921–1928) and Gosplan (1925–1926). He was restored to the Central Committee in 1925, but in 1927 he joined the United Opposition of Trotsky, G. E. Zinov′ev, and L. B. Kamenev, authoring the economic program of the group. He was consequently expelled from the party and exiled to Khabarovsk for 15 years. He was briefly allowed to return to the fold (as a member of the presidium of VSNKh) in 1930, when Stalin’s regime adopted a Leftist program of rapid industrialization, and he publicly recanted his criticisms of the leadership, but soon fell from favor again, and, on 1 January 1935, in the aftermath of the assassination of S. M. Kirov, he was yet again arrested and then sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. On 10 January 1938, Smilga was charged with “membership of a terrorist organization” by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out the same day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 3 April 1987.

SMIRNOV, IVAN NIKITOVICH (NIKITICH) (1881–25 August 1936). A prominent Red activist member of the Left Bolsheviks, I. N. Smirnov was born into a peasant family in Riazan′ guberniia, but was raised in Moscow by his widowed mother. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party as a young worker in 1899, and was almost immediately arrested and imprisoned. Upon his release, he became a party activist in Tver′ guberniia, but was arrested and again imprisoned, from 1903 to 1905. During the 1905 Revolution, he was active in Moscow and participated in the December uprising there. He then undertook party work in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Khar′kov, and elsewhere, between further periods of imprisonment at Narym in Siberia (1910–1912 and 1914–1916). In 1916, he was enlisted into the army at Tomsk. Following the February Revolution, he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Soldiers’ Soviet at Tomsk, before returning to Moscow in August. During the October Revolution, he commanded a detachment of Red Guards in the city.

In the summer of 1918, Smirnov was sent to Kazan′ and became a member of the Revvoensovet of the Eastern Front (28 August 1918–1 April 1919) and of the party’s Sibbiuro, as well as one of the leading military commissars of the 5th Red Army (April 1919–May 1920). In that last capacity, he played a leading role in the defeat and destruction of the White regime of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in Siberia and in the negotiation of a truce with the forces of the Political Center at Irkutsk in January 1920. He was also a founding member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (6 September 1918–8 July 1919), where he became a spokesman for the Military Opposition to L. D. Trotsky’s administration of the Red Army. (It was Smirnov who made the Opposition’s keynote address to the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 that won some concessions.) He was also made chairman of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)’s Siberian Revolutionary Committee (27 August 1919–29 August 1921), in which capacity he was responsible for extinguishing peasant resistance to Soviet rule in Siberia and oversaw the operation that captured Baron R. F. Ungern von Sternberg. Subsequently (1921–1923), he managed the armaments industry for VSNKh. He became a full member of the Central Committee of the RKP(b) in April 1920, but lost his seat in March 1921, having sided with Trotsky on the trade union question.

As an outspoken member of the Left Opposition, Smirnov was later demoted to the post of people’s commissar for post and telegraph of the USSR (1923–1927). On 14 November 1927, he was expelled from the party, and on 31 December 1927, he was sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia for participating in the United Opposition. He recanted and was allowed to return to the fold in 1929, becoming head of an industrial conglomerate at Saratov, but was arrested again on 14 January 1933, for having contributed an article to the exiled Trotsky’s Biulleten′ oppozitsii (“The Bulletin of the Opposition”), and was again expelled from the party. On 14 April 1933, he was sentenced to five years’ hard labor, but in 1936 was arraigned in the first Moscow show trial (“The Trial of the United Anti-Soviet Trotskyite–Zinov′evite Center”), along with G. E. Zinov′ev, L. B. Kamenev, and others. On 24 August 1936, Smirnov was found guilty of membership in an anti-Soviet “terrorist organization” and sentenced to death. He was shot the next day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 13 June 1988.

Smirnov, Mikhail Ivanovich (18 June 1880–1937/1940/1943). Captain, first rank (1916), rear admiral (20 November 1918). A close associate of Admiral A. V. Kolchak at many stages of the latter’s career, the White naval commander M. I. Smirnov was born into a noble family in St. Petersburg and was a graduate of the Naval Corps (1899) and the Nicholas Naval Academy (1914). He first worked closely with Kolchak in the Naval General Staff, from 1906 to 1909; then, during the First World War, he served in the Black Sea Fleet, becoming Kolchak’s chief of staff in 1916 and accompanying him on his mission to the United States in 1917.

Smirnov arrived in Omsk on 17 November 1918, hours before the Omsk coup brought Kolchak to power as supreme ruler, and was soon promoted to the rank of rear admiral and made director of the Ministry of Marine of the Omsk government. In that capacity, his main occupation was the formation of the Kama Flotilla (initially attached to the Siberian Army), which he also commanded from 31 March 1919, offering support to forces of the Northern Army and the Western Army during Kolchak’s spring offensive. In November 1919, he spoke out against those White leaders who favored abandoning Omsk without a battle and apparently begged Kolchak not to send him (with the evacuated government) to Irkutsk, but rather to allow him to remain at his side at Omsk. Kolchak refused.

En route to Irkutsk on 24 November 1919, Smirnov was captured by rebel militiamen at Glazov, but was soon freed. In February 1920, he made his way across the border into Manchuria (arriving at Harbin, according to some accounts, disguised as a British Tommy) and subsequently lived in emigration in Germany, the United States, France (where he helped fund the education of Kolchak’s son, Rostislav, by writing a brief biography of the supreme ruler, and according to some sources, worked as a milliner at Cannes), and finally, Great Britain. He died in London either shortly before or during the Second World War (reports vary).

SMIRNOV(-SVETLOVSKII), PETR IVANOVICH (1897–17 March 1940). Flag officer, second rank (1938). The Red naval commander P. I. Smirnov, who was the son of a doctor, was born at Sulin, in the territory of the Don Cossack Host. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in 1914. During the October Revolution, he commanded units of sailors from the Baltic Fleet in and around Petrograd, joined the Red Army in February 1918 (to assist in the defense of Pskov against invading German forces during the Eleven-Days War, when negotiations for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk stalled), and from July 1918 was one of the organizers and chief of staff of the Volga Military Flotilla. He also commanded partisan units of the 5th Red Army on the Eastern Front, conducting raids into the rear of enemy forces during the autumn of 1918. From January to March 1919, he was commandant of the Kronshtadt fortress, and subsequently (17 April–25 July 1919) served as commander and chief commissar of the Volga Military Flotilla. He was then twice commander of the Dnepr Military Flotilla (13 December 1919–7 August 1920 and 6 October–14 December 1920).

After the civil wars, Smirnov held numerous senior naval posts, including commander of the Black Sea Fleet (15 August–30 December 1937), and from January 1938 to March 1939, he was first deputy and then acting people’s commissar for naval affairs of the USSR. He was arrested on 26 March 1939, and having been found guilty (on 16 March 1940) of belonging to a “military-fascist” anti-Soviet organization, was executed the following day. Smirnov was buried in a mass grave in the Donskoi cemetery in southeast Moscow. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 23 June 1956.

SMOLIN, INNOKENTII SEMENOVICH (1 January 1884–23 March 1973). Colonel (20 November 1917), major general (February 1919), lieutenant general (April 1921). A prominent military commander in the White movement in Siberia, I. S. Smolin was born at Irkutsk and studied at the Irkutsk Military School, graduating in 1905, after which he served in the 11th Siberian Rifle Regiment. During the First World War, he rose to the post of commander of the 3rd Finnish Rifle Regiment (1917). In early 1918, he formed an underground officers’ organization at Turinsk that worked toward the overthrow of the Soviet regime in Siberia, and during the summer of that year, he commanded a partisan detachment that engaged Red forces around Kurgan and then Omsk.

Smolin subsequently served in the Siberian Army and the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak as commander, successively, of the 15th Kurgan Rifle Regiment (from July 1918), the 4th Siberian Rifle Division (1 January 1919–22 February 1920), and the 3rd Army Corps of the Southern Group of General G. A. Verzhbitskii. From 27 January to 22 February 1920, he was commander of the Southern Group during its participation in the Great Siberian (Ice) March, following which he entered the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov, as commander of the Omsk Rifle Brigade (later Division), and from 23 August 1920 was commander of its 2nd Rifle Corps. When Semenov’s hold on the Transbaikal was broken in November 1920, Smolin made his way via Manchuria to the Maritime Province, where from 1 June 1921 he served as garrison commander of Nikol′sk-Ussuriisk, under the regimes of S. D. Merkulov and the White Insurgent Army. He went into emigration in October 1922, living at first at Shanghai, where he worked for an international savings bank (and also, reportedly, as a professional jockey), before moving to the United States in 1939 and then on to Tahiti, where he was again employed in a bank.

SNESAREV, ANDREI EVGEN′EVICH (1 December 1865–4 December 1937). Colonel (6 December 1908), major general (23 December 1915), lieutenant general (1917). One of the most senior tsarist officers to serve in the Red Army, A. E. Snesarev was born at Staraia Kalitva (Ostrogozhsk uezd, Voronezh guberniia) into the family of a priest. He was a graduate of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University (1888), the Moscow Infantry Officers School (1890), and the Academy of the General Staff (1899). From 1899, he was on military service in Turkestan, becoming a specialist on the military geography of Central and Southern Asia. He participated in missions to India, Afghanistan, Tibet, and Kashgar; in 1900 went to London for several months to conduct research at the British Museum; and ultimately became proficient in no fewer than 14 Asian languages. From 1904, he was seconded to the Academy of the General Staff and at the same time worked as a lecturer on military geography at various military schools and academies. From 1910, he served as chief of staff of the 2nd Cossack Free Division, and during the First World War he rose to the command of the 9th Army Corps (from 9 September 1917).

In May 1918, Snesarev volunteered for service in the Red Army and became military leader (voenruk) of the North Caucasus Military District (May–June 1918), at a time of fierce battles there between pro-Soviet forces and forces of the Volunteer Army, the Kuban Cossack Host, and the Terek Cossack Host. He was then a participant in the defense of Tsaritsyn (June–July 1918), becoming involved in the Tsaritsyn affair as an opponent of J. V. Stalin. From September 1918, he was commander of the Western Defensive Region and then (15 November 1918–31 May 1919) became commander of the Lithuanian–Belorussian (Red) Army (the Western Army until 13 March 1919, and later the 16th Red Army).

From July 1919 to August 1921, Snesarev served as head of the Red Military Academy and subsequently lectured there. He helped found the Moscow Institute of Eastern Studies and, from 1921 to 1930, was its rector. He served at the same time as a professor in the Military-Aviation Academy (from 1924) and the Military-Political Academy (from 1926). On 27 January 1930, as a target of Operation “Spring,” Snesarev was arrested and was sentenced to death, although this was eventually commuted to 10 years’ imprisonment. From 1930, he was an inmate of the Solovetskii Special Camp, in the White Sea, but was released on the grounds of ill health in 1932. He died in a Moscow hospital in 1937, and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1958.

SOCHI CONFLICT. This three-way border conflict erupted among the White forces of General A. I. Denikin, the Soviet forces of the Taman (Red) Army and the Kuban–Black Sea Soviet Republic, and the forces of the Democratic Republic of Georgia over lands forming the southern stretches of what in 1917 was the Black Sea guberniia (but which until 1904 had been part of the Sukhumi district of the chiefly Georgian-populated Kutaisi guberniia).

With the blessings and assistance of their protector, the German Caucasus Mission, Georgian forces under General Giorgi Mazniashvili occupied Adler (2 July 1918), Sochi (6 July 1918), and Tuapse (27 July 1918), but Georgian claims to sovereignty over the region were not recognized by either Red authorities in the North Caucasus or the increasingly dominant White Volunteer Army. Eventually, on 6 February 1919, the Georgians were forced back across the Bzyb River by units of the Armed Forces of South Russia that were pushing southward along the Black Sea littoral. Following further clashes, a demarcation line along the Psou River was established and patrolled by British forces in the region. This came to be internationally accepted as the new border between Russia and Georgia (and remained so until the Russian Federation’s recognition of Abkhazian independence following the 2008 Russian–Georgian War again posed questions about borders in the region).

SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF NARGEN. See NARGEN, SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF.

Socialist Soviet Republic of Abkhazia. See Abkhazia, Socialist Soviet Republic of.

SOCIALIST SOVIET REPUBLIC OF BELORUSSIA. See BELORUSSIA, SOCIALIST SOVIET REPUBLIC OF.

Socialists-Revolutionaries, PARTY OF. The Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (the PSR, often erroneously termed the “Social Revolutionary Party”) was founded during the winter of 1901–1902, as diverse adherents of the earlier Populist (narodnik) movement, who had sought to inspire revolution among the Russian peasantry through a mixture of propaganda and terrorism, sought to respond to new conditions in Russia: notably, the growth of industry and concomitant urbanization, the growth of the social-democratic movement (in the shape of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party), peasant unrest, and student demonstrations. Its first organizations emerged along the Volga (notably at Saratov), but the party’s center of operations was later transferred to Moscow. Its members were referred to as SRs (in Russian, esery). Among its early leaders were G. A. Gershuni, E. K. Breshko-Breshkovskaia, A. A. Argunov, N. D. Avksent′ev, M. R. Gots, Mark Natanson, N. I. Rakitnikov, V. V. Rudnev, N. S. Rusanov, and I. A. Rubanovich. Its foremost ideologist was V. M. Chernov, editor of the PSR’s leading journal, the Switzerland-based Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia (“Revolutionary Russia”), whose “neo-Populist” theories advocated a revolutionary alliance of the proletariat, the peasantry, and the intelligentsia. A minimum program and a maximum program drafted by Chernov were adopted at the party’s First Congress at Imatra, in Finland (December 1905–January 1906): the former, advocating the socialization of land and a federal state, was to be implemented on the morrow of a revolution; the latter, calling for the socialization of industry, would be implemented only at some uncertain date in the future. (The reluctance of the party to agitate for the immediate introduction of the maximum program led to the immediate defection of the SR-Maximalists, while its reluctance to commit itself only to the minimum program and to renounce terrorism led to the defection of members on the party’s right, who went on to form the Party of Popular Socialists.)

From its birth, the party advocated terrorism as a means of destabilizing tsarism, and its “Combat Organization” (Boevaia organizatsiia), led by Evno Azef and B. V. Savinkov, was behind the assassination of a number of public figures (including Minister of Education N. P. Bogolepov in 1901; Ministers of the Interior D. S. Sipiagin in 1902 and V. K. von Plehve in 1904; and Grand Duke Sergei, uncle of Nicholas II, in 1905). As a consequence of this—and also as a consequence of the fissiparous nature of social-democratic politics at the time—the PSR became by far the most popular socialist party in Russia before the First World War. Despite its hold over the revolutionary movement and its control of key unions, however, the party proved incapable of uniting the opposition during the 1905 Revolution, and from 1907, it went into a period of rapid decline, hastened by the demoralizing revelation in 1908 that Azef was a paid agent of the tsarist secret police (the Okhrana). Consequently, the right of the party—which had been the center until the defection of the Popular Socialists—began to argue for an abandonment of terror and the reorientation of the PSR toward a role as the (legal) representative of the interests of small property owners, as the land reforms of Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin appeared to be undermining the cohesion of the traditional peasant commune that the SRs had always envisaged to be the basic building block of a future socialist society. (The party’s right wing also advocated participation in the State Duma elections, from which the party, as an illegal terrorist organization, was banned, although some individual members were elected under the Trudovik banner.)

The rise of labor unrest from April 1912, in the wake of the “Lena goldfields massacre” of striking miners in eastern Siberia, helped the party revive, but the onset of war in 1914 brought new divisions, as center-leftist SR-Internationalists (including Rakitnikov and Chernov) opposed the war and attended the antiwar socialist conferences at Zimmerwald and Kienthal, while the right wing of the party (notably Savinkov and Avksent′ev, through the journal Prizyv, “The Call”) advocated “defensism,” supported the imperial government’s war efforts, and demanded a civil truce during the hostilities.

That division endured into 1917, beyond the collapse of tsarism during the February Revolution, and by the summer of that year the left of the party was operating as a quite separate organization, soon to formally split from the PSR as the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries (led by M. A. Spiridonova and B. D. Kamkov). Meanwhile, the right wing of the party (led by Avksent′ev and V. M. Zenzinov) offered succor to the Russian Provisional Government of A. F. Kerensky, even though the latter was not even reelected to the SR Central Committee in June 1917, as a consequence of members’ distaste for his policies. This rendered the center of the party, led by Chernov, isolated; even as minister of agriculture in the Provisional Government, Chernov was unable to push through measures on land reform that might have appealed to what remained of the party’s key constituency, the peasantry, while the PSR’s campaign to end the war through a peace “without annexations or indemnities” was shunned by the Allies (and in part by the Provisional Government). Nevertheless, the SRs formed the largest faction within VTsIK in 1917, dominated the All-Russian Peasants’ Soviet, could boast at least 1,000,000 members in almost 500 regional branches, sold an average of 300,000 copies of each edition of their main newspaper, Delo naroda (“The People’s Cause”), and with their allies in Ukraine (the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries) and elsewhere, won 58 percent of the votes for the Constituent Assembly in the elections of November 1917.

That such apparent popularity could not be transformed into effective leadership or governance, however, was revealed when the Constituent Assembly, which was chaired by Chernov and included a majority of SR delegates (380 out of 720 delegates), was closed by the Bolsheviks with hardly a murmur of popular protest, while subsequent efforts by the party to organize in the assembly’s name (notably as Komuch) during the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918 were swamped by the Right. The election results, being based on unified party lists, also obscured how many votes were actually cast by voters who would have preferred to elect Left-SRs. (From December 1917, Left-SRs had entered Sovnarkom and supported the closure of the assembly.) At this point, the party’s Central Committee (elected at its 4th Congress in December 1917) consisted of Rakitnikov, D. F. Rakov, Chernov, Zenzinov, N. S. Rusanov, V. V. Lunkevich, М. А. Likhach, М. А. Vedeniapin, I. A. Prilezhaev, М. I. Sumgin, A. R. Gots, M. Ia. Gendel′man, F. F. Fedorovich, V. N. Rikhter, K. S. Burevoi, Е. М. Timofeev, L. Ia. Gershtein, D. D. Donskoi, V. A. Chaikin, and E. M. Ratner.

On 14 June 1918, the PSR was listed as a proscribed organization by Sovnarkom of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. From late 1918, the PSR divided again, among those who were willing to cooperate with the Soviet government in its fight against the Whites (chiefly the Narod group, led by V. K. Vol′skii, which was then precariously legalized), those (such as Chernov) who assumed an attitude of (at times hostile) neutrality to the Soviet government, those who sought to battle both the Bolsheviks and the Whites, and those (chiefly lapsed SRs) who collaborated with the White regimes in Siberia and South Russia. As the civil wars wound down, the Bolsheviks chose to dispose of the SRs, putting their leaders on trial for “counterrevolutionary activities” from 8 June 1922. Twelve of the SR leaders, including eight Central Committee members, were sentenced to death, although (for fear of inciting international outrage at a time when the Soviet government was seeking a tactical rapprochement with Western governments) this was later commuted to life imprisonment (and in fact they were subsequently deported). Doubts were cast at the time upon the legality of these sentences, as they were based on the Soviet legal code of 1922, which postdated the alleged “crimes.” Nevertheless, countless other, lesser SRs were also arrested and imprisoned or exiled during the 1920s, and few party members who were even remotely prominent would survive the Terror of the 1930s.

In emigration—chiefly in Prague, Paris, and Berlin—feuding within the PSR continued, notably between Chernov and Kerensky, and the party gradually dissolved. Émigré SRs were responsible, however, for the publication of a number of important journals and newspapers, among them Volia Rossii (“The Will of Russia,” Prague, 1922–1932) and Sovremennye zapiski (“Contemporary Notes,” Paris, 1920–1940), which dissected the party’s fate during the civil wars.

SOCIETY OF GALLIPOLIITSI. See GALLIPOLIITSI, SOCIETY OF.

SOKOL′NIKOV, GRIGORII IAKOVLEVICH (BRILIANT/BRILLIANTOV, GRISH IANKELEVICH (3 August 1888–21 May 1939). The Soviet politician and military commander G. Ia. Sokol′nikov was born into the family of a Jewish doctor at Romny (Romni), in Poltava guberniia. He studied in the Law Faculty of Moscow University but did not graduate, although he later received a doctorate in economics from the Sorbonne (1914). He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1905, siding with the Bolsheviks, and was an active participant in the revolutionary upheavals of 1905–1907 (including the Moscow uprising of 1905). He was arrested by the tsarist authorities in 1907, and in February 1909 was exiled to Siberia. He escaped and fled abroad in 1909, living in Switzerland and then France and working on party newspapers. He returned to Russia with V. I. Lenin, on the famous “sealed train,” in April 1917. Back in Russia, he assumed senior party posts, being elected to the Central Committee on 3 August 1917, and remained a member until 18 March 1919. (He would be repeatedly elected to the Central Committee from 2 April 1922 to 26 June 1930.)

Following the October Revolution, Sokol′nikov oversaw the nationalization of Russia’s banks. During the civil-war period, he also occupied numerous important governmental and military posts, including chairing the Soviet delegation to the negotiations that resulted in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). He was also a member of the presidium of VSNKh (May–June 1918); was a member of the Revvoensovets of the 2nd Red Army (19 September 1918–16 July 1919), the Southern Front (1 December 1918–25 August 1919), and the 9th Red Army (4 December 1918–6 January 1919); and commanded the 8th Red Army (12 October 1919–20 March 1920), in that last role overseeing the key battles around Rostov-on-Don and Novocherkassk that shattered the Armed Forces of South Russia. He was then moved to Central Asia, to combat the Basmachi, as commander of the Turkestan Front (10 September 1920–8 March 1921) and chairman of both the Soviet government’s Turkestan Commission (1920–16 August 1922) and the Turkbiuro of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (1920–March 1921).

In the course of the civil wars, Sokol′nikov proved himself to be a brilliant organizer, was an outspoken supporter of L. D. Trotsky’s efforts to make the Red Army into a regular army, was an active supporter of the Cossacks and critic of the policy of de-Cossackization (e.g., attempting but failing to save the life of F. K. Mironov), and demonstrated that he had a nose for potential and actual deserters to the Whites. As the civil wars wound down, Sokol′nikov was mostly involved in financial work, serving as first deputy people’s commissar for finance of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (January–22 November 1922) and then as full commissar (22 November 1922–16 January 1926, from 6 July 1923 of the USSR). Being associated with the group of oppositionists around Trotsky, his star then waned. Despite denouncing Trotsky in 1927, thereafter Sokol′nikov was placed in posts of only secondary importance (including ambassador to Great Britain, 16 November 1929–15 October 1932). He was expelled from the party and arrested on 26 July 1936; on 30 January 1937, having been found guilty of membership in a counterrevolutionary organization (the fictional “Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center”) by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, he was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. He died in captivity, according to some reports at Verkhneural′sk; according to the official version, at the hands of other prisoners. Since investigations undertaken in the 1950s, however, suspicions have been strong that (like Karl Radek, two days earlier) Sokol′nikov was murdered by the NKVD on the direct orders of J. V. Stalin. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 16 December 1988. Sokol′nikov was the author of numerous scholarly works, some of which have been republished, including his three-volume Finansovaia politka revoliutsii (“The Financial Policy of the Revolution,” 1925–1928), reissued in Moscow in 2006.

SOKOLOV, ALEKSANDR PETROVICH (1895–17 December 1931). Lieutenant (1917). A Red commander who was chiefly active in Central Asia during the civil wars, A. P. Sokolov graduated from a military school in 1916 and rose to the rank of lieutenant in the First World War. He joined the Red Army in April 1918, and from August of that year commanded the Moscow Partisan Detachment. From September 1918, he commanded the 1st Battle Group on the Ashkhabad Front. He was then named commander of the Transcaspian Front of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (17 May–6 August 1919) and subsequently became commander of its Ferghana Front (16 September–16 November 1919). He then commanded the Kazan′ Independent Regiment and, in 1920, was made chief of staff of the Matchinsk Army Group in Ferghana. He was subsequently involved in military educational work. Sokolov joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919 and was a member of the Central Asian Bureau of the party Central Committee. He was killed in battle with the Basmachi in 1931.

SOKOLOV, KONSTANTIN NIKOLAEVICH (1882/1883–1927). The journalist, lawyer, and White politician K. N. Sokolov was a graduate of (and subsequently taught at) the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University and was a member of the Central Committee of the Kadets (having joined the party in 1905), representing the party’s right wing. Pior to the First World War, he edited several Kadet publications, incluing the party’s chief newspaper, Rech′ (“Discourse”).

Following the October Revolution, Sokolov was one of the founding members of the anti-Bolshevik National Center; in 1918, he made his way to Rostov-on-Don, where he edited the newspaper Svobodnaia rech′ (“Free Speech”). In January 1919, he joined General A. I. Denikin’s Special Council, as director of its legal department, and from March 1919 was head of Osvag. In June 1919, he was seconded to a Special Council delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, where he concentrated on efforts to smooth relations between the Volunteer Army and the various Cossack delegations in the French capital. In March 1920, he spoke out in favor of General P. N. Wrangel as the proposed successor to Denikin.

Sokolov subsequently remained in emigration, dwelling chiefly in Bulgaria, where he became a professor of law at Sofia University and published an influential memoir, Pravlenie generala Denikina (“The Rule of General Denikin,” 1921). He died in Sofia in 1927.

SOLLOGUB, NIKOLAI VLADIMIROVICH (4 May 1883–7 August 1937). Lieutenant (6 December 1915), colonel (1917), komdiv (26 November 1935). The Soviet military specialist N. V. Sollogub was born into a noble family in Minsk guberniia and was a graduate of the Pavlovsk Military School (1902) and the Academy of the General Staff (1910). He entered military service on 31 August 1900, and before the First World War served in several Guards regiments. During the war, he occupied several staff posts with the 1st Army; from 4 January 1917, he was on the staff of the quartermaster general of the Special Army, then moved to a similar post with the 11th Army (August–September 1917), and then was placed on the staff of the Western Front (from September 1917).

Sollogub volunteered for service in the Red Army in early 1918, and during the civil wars he was the first chief of staff of the Eastern Front (26 June–10 July 1918). He was then, jointly, a member of the Special Military Records Section of the Supreme Military Inspectorate of the Red Army and a lecturer at the Red Military Academy (August 1918–May 1919). After that, he was attached to the chief of staff of the Western Front; from 14 August 1919 to 21 September 1920 (during the Soviet–Polish War), he commanded the 16th Red Army, and from 1 October to 6 December 1920, was chief of staff of the Western Front. He was then made chief of staff of the forces of Ukraine and Crimea (6 December 1920–1922). From 1922 to 1923, he was assistant head of the Red Military Academy. Sollogub remained in teaching work for the rest of his career. He was imprisoned and executed in 1937, during the purges.

Solov′ev, ivan nikolaevich (1890–24 May 1924). Uriadnik (1919), esaul (1922). I. N. Solov′ev, the leader of one of the most enduring anti-Soviet peasant uprisings of the civil-war period, was born into a poor Cossack family in Minusinsk uezd, Eniseisk guberniia, and attended the village school. He entered military service in 1911 and saw action in the First World War, before returning to Siberia in 1918, where he was subsequently mobilized into the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. As a junior commander, he led a regiment of the Eniseisk Cossacks in campaigns against the Red partisan bands of A. D. Kravchenko and P. E. Shchetinkin in eastern Siberia in 1919, then spent several months recovering from wounds in hospital at Krasnoiarsk.

Following the collapse of the White movement in Siberia in late 1919, Solov′ev returned home, but in early 1920 he was arrested by the Cheka. In July 1920, he escaped and joined a group of other fugitives in the taiga of southern Eniseisk guberniia, near the borders of the Uriankhai (Tuva) region. By mid-1922 the group, now under Solov′ev’s command, had grown to a strength of 500 and was engaged in battles against the Red special forces (ChON) sent against it. During one of these encounters, Solov′ev was killed, but various members of his group continued their resistance for at least the next two years. The film Konets imporator taigi (“The End of the Emperor of the Taiga,” dir. V. G. Sarukhanov, 1978), which focused on the part played in the pursuit of Solov′ev by ChON commander A. P. Golikov (the future novelist A. P. Gaidar), was intended to counter the popular songs and tales of Solov′ev’s exploits as a Robin Hood-like figure, which had for years suffused Siberian society.

Soltanğäliev, Mirsäyet Xäydärğäli ulı (Sultan-Galiev, Mirsaid) (13 July 1892–28 January 1940). A prominent proponent of Jadidism in the prewar era and the foremost Volga Tatar Communist of the revolutionary era, Mirsäyet Soltanğäliev was born into a family of impecunious teachers in the village of Kyrmyskaly (Karmaskaly), Ufa guberniia. Following the 1905 Revolution, he moved to Baku, but returned to Kazan′ to attend the Tatar Teachers’ College from 1907 (graduating in 1911). While working as a teacher, from 1912 he began publishing newspaper articles on Tatar affairs under various pseudonyms—“Sukhoi” (“The Dry One”), “Syn naroda” (“Son of the People”), “Uchitel′-tatarin” (“Teacher-Tatar”), and so forth—and was involved in the distribution of literature protesting the Russification of Muslim schools. He also translated many classics of Russian literature into Tatar. During the First World War, he moved to Baku, again working as a journalist and teacher, and was increasingly drawn away from Jadidism toward revolutionary socialism. Following the February Revolution, he was chosen as secretary of the All-Russian Muslim Congress at Moscow and was elected to the All-Russia Muslim Council created by it. In July 1917, he returned to the Volga region and, in collaboration with Mullanur Wakhitov, established the Muslim Socialist Committee at Kazan′, with a program close to that of the Bolsheviks.

Following the October Revolution, Soltanğäliev joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) and in February 1918 participated in the overthrow of the All-Russian Provisional National Council of Muslims at Kazan′ (the governing body of the Idel–Urals Republic). In December 1918, he became one of the three members of the governing Small Collegium within Sovnarkom’s People’s Commissariat for Nationalities and editor of its journal, Zhizn′ natsional′nostei (“Life of the Nationalities”). In January–February 1919, he was a key player in the negotiations with Ahmed Zeki Validov that led to the Bashkir forces’ deserting from the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak to the Reds. From 1919 to 1921, he was also chairman of the Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East, attached to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), making him the most senior Muslim figure in early Soviet Russia.

At this time, as the Soviet state sought to attract national movements to its cause, Soltanğäliev’s brand of national Communism was tolerated, even when he began to argue that the key to the development of the world revolution was not the proletarians of the West but the colonial peoples of the East. By 1922, he was going even further, however, arguing that in order to avoid a return to Russian imperialism within the Soviet state, the oppressed peoples of the East should be given power over the Russians, and that Muslim nations should have Muslim leaders. This was too much for the increasingly Stalin-dominated regime in Moscow, and in April 1923, Soltanğäliev was arrested. He was accused of treason, pan-Turkism, and conspiracy with the Basmachi and was expelled from the party and imprisoned, but later released. In 1928, he was arrested again, and along with 76 others, was charged with membership in a “Soltanğälievist counterrevolutionary organization” and of being a proponent of pan-Turkism. He was found guilty and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted in 1931, and he was imprisoned on the Solovetskii Islands in the White Sea. Although he was released in 1934 and permitted to move to Saratov, he was rearrested in early 1937. On 8 December 1939, he was sentenced to death again and was subsequently shot at Lefortovo prison in Moscow. Soltanğäliev was posthumously rehabilitated on 30 April 1990.

SOOTS, JAAN (29 February 1880–6 February 1942). Major general (Estonian Army, 1919). Famous as one of his country’s foremost military commanders during the Estonian War of Independence, Jaan Soots was born at Helme, in Estland guberniia (now Valga county in southern Estonia). Following a failed attempt to train as a teacher at Riga, he committed himself to a military career and graduated from the Vil′na Military Academy (1904) and the Academy of the General Staff (1913). He saw action with the Russian Army during the Russo–Japanese War and the First World War and was one of the organizers of the Estonian Division of the Russian Army in 1917. After Estonia’s declaration of independence, he became chief of the Operational Staff of the Estonian Army (from 23 February 1918), and from February 1919 was chief of staff. After appending his signature to the Soviet–Estonian Treaty of Tartu (2 February 1920), he retired from the army, but he subsequently served two terms as minister of war of the Estonian Republic (25 January 1921–2 August 1923 and 16 December 1924–4 March 1927) and was also mayor of Tallinn (1934–1939). Soots was arrested following the Soviet invasion of Estonia in June 1940, and was subsequently executed in a prison camp at Usol′e, near Perm′.

Sorokin, Ivan Lukich (4 December 1884–1 November 1918). Esaul (1917). A Red commander who is alleged to have deliberately betrayed the Soviet regime, I. L. Sorokin was born into a family of the Kuban Cossack Host at the village of Petropavlovsk, in the Labinsk district of the Kuban oblast′, and was a graduate of the Tiflis Military Medical School (1916). He participated in the First World War in the 1st Labinsk Regiment (1914–1915) and the 3rd Line Regiment (1916–1917) on the Caucasus Front, working as a Feldscher.

Having been active in the left wing of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries from April 1917, in early 1918 Sorokin helped organize a partisan detachment of Red Cossacks in the Kuban and participated in battles with the Volunteer Army in his home district. In February 1918, he was named assistant commander of the South-East Revolutionary Army. During the First Kuban (Ice) March (22 February–30 April 1918) he was, in effect, in command of all Red forces opposing the Whites in the Kuban, and it was his forces that drove those of General V. L. Pokrovskii out of Ekaterinodar and thereafter defended the city against repeated White assaults (9–13 April 1918). Later in April 1918, he was made assistant to the main commander of the Red Army of the North Caucasus. He subsequently became temporary commander of that force (from 3 August 1918), and on 3 October 1918, was made acting commander of the 11th Red Army. In that last capacity, he unleashed a regime of terror in the area under his control, according to Soviet historians, as a deliberate ploy to disorganize the Soviet regime in the North Caucasus, to aid the Whites.

On 21 October 1918, Sorokin ordered the execution of a group of members of the regional committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and members of the Central Executive Committee of the North Caucasus Republic (including A. A. Rubin and V. I. Krainyi), as well as I. I. Matveev (the commander of the Taman Red Army). He was also responsible for the execution, on 19 October 1918, of a number of captured tsarist officers (including Generals R. D. Radko-Dmitriev and N. V. Ruzskii), but on 28 October 1918 a Second Extraordinary Congress of Soviets of the North Caucasus declared Sorokin to be an outlaw and removed him from his military posts. On 30 October 1918, he was arrested near Stavropol′, and he was subsequently killed in prison there by a Red commander (I. T. Vysenko of the 3rd Taman Regiment of the 1st Taman Infantry Division) before he could be brought to trial.

SOUTH-EAST FRONT. This Red front, with its staff headquarters at Saratov, was created by a directive of the main commander of the Red Army, on 30 September 1919, from the forces previously operating as the Special Group (under the command of V. I. Shorin) on the left flank of the Southern Front. It sought to unify Red forces across Saratov guberniia, the Don oblast′, and the Novokhopersk, Pavlovsk, and Bogucharsk districts of Voronezh guberniia, and to drive General A. I. Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia back toward Tsaritsyn. Included in the South-Eastern Front were the 9th Red Army and the 10th Red Army (both from 20 September 1919), the 11th Red Army, the 1st Cavalry Army (from 10 January 1920) and the 8th Red Army (all from 10 January 1920), the forces of the Penza Fortified Region, and the Volga–Caspian Military Flotilla (from 14 October 1919).

After defensive actions along the River Khoper in October 1919, the forces of the South-Eastern Front played a key role in the general offensive of the Red Army that commenced the following month. On 3 January 1920, its forces captured Tsaritsyn, and on 7 January 1920, they entered Novocherkassk, the capital of the Don Cossack Host. On 16 January 1920, by order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, its forces were transformed into the Caucasian Front.

The commander of the South-Eastern Front was V. I. Shorin. Its chiefs of staff were F. M. Afanas′ev (1 October 1919–4 January 1920) and S. A. Pugachev (4–16 January 1920).

South-East Revolutionary Army. See Red Army of the North Caucasus.

SOUTHERN ARMY. This White force, consisting chiefly of Cossacks of the Orenburg Cossack Host, was created on 23 May 1919, as a consequence of the reformation of the Orenburg Army. Commanded by Major General G. A. Belov, from September to October 1919 it formed part of the Eastern Front of the forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, then was placed in the Moscow Army Group created by Kolchak’s new commander in chief, General K. V. Sakharov. As of 1 June 1919, it consisted of the 1st Orenburg Cossack Corps, the 4th Orenburg Rifle Corps, the 5th Sterlitamak Rifle Corps, and the 11th Iaits Rifle Corps, numbering some 27,000 men in all and commanding 247 machine guns and 27 cannon.

From May through the middle of June 1919, the force was chiefly occupied with efforts to capture Orenburg, but despite this lengthy siege, the city remained in Red hands. Moreover, with the collapse of Kolchak’s Western Army to the north and the Red counterattack across the Urals, as well as the approach from the southeast of the advancing Turkestan Red Army, the Southern Army was forced to retreat in late June; its northern group (the 4th Orenburg and 5th Sterlitamak Corps), under General Belov, moved east toward Omsk, while its Southern group (the 1st Orenburg and 11th Iaits Corps) moved southeast towards Orsk and Aktiubinsk. In August 1919, the Belov group took part in the failed counteroffensive of Kolchak’s forces from the River Tobol′. In the aftermath of that failure, Belov’s forces became separated from the other elements of the Moscow Group and retreated independently, southeast, toward Semipalatinsk.

On 18 September 1919, the remnants of the Southern Army (with the exception of the 4th Orenburg Corps of General A. S. Bakich) were again reformed and were renamed the Orenburg Army. This army was placed under the command of Ataman A. I. Dutov, under whom it retreated farther into Central Asia, where on 6 January 1920, it was incorporated (as the Orenburg Detachment) into the Semirech′e Army of Ataman B. V. Annenkov.

SOUTHERN FRONT. This term was used to designate two Red fronts during the civil-war era.

The first Southern Front (sometimes termed the “Southern Front against Denikin”) was created by an order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic on 11 September 1918, from forces previously attached to the Western and Southern Screens, the Red Army of the North Caucasus, and the Astrakhan group of forces. Its staff, formed from elements of the command of the Southern Screen and the Military Council of the North Caucasus, was based at Kozlov, then Orel, Tula, Sergievsk, Serpukhov, and once more Orel. The original aims of the first Southern Front were to maintain the demarcation line between Soviet forces and the forces of the Austro-German intervention in Ukraine and to combat forces of the Don Cossack Host and the Volunteer Army in southeastern Russia. Attached to this front were the 8th (3 October 1918–9 January 1920), 9th (3 October 1918–30 September 1919), 10th (3 October 1918–30 September 1919), and 11th (3 October–7 December 1918) Red Armies; the 11th Independent Army (23 May–12 June 1919); the 12th (3 October–7 December 1918, and in its second formation, 27 June–27 July 1919), 13th (5 March 1919–10 January 1920), and 14th (until 4 June 1919, the 2nd Ukrainian Soviet Army, 27 April 1919–10 January 1920) Red Armies; the 1st Cavalry Army (19 November 1919–9 January 1920); the Special Corps (10 June–7 July 1919); and other smaller formations. In September–November 1918, the Southern Front conducted defensive operations against Don Cossack attacks on Tsaritsyn and Voronezh. An unsuccessful attempt to go on the offensive in November 1918 was followed by a successful offensive from January 1919 against the Don Army. By April 1919, forces of the Southern Front had captured Rostov-on-Don, had forced the River Manych, and were advancing on Bataisk and Tikhoretsk. The May 1919 offensive of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) then pushed the forces of the Southern Front into retreat, obliging them to abandon the Don oblast′, the Donbass, Khar′kov, Belgorod, and Tsaritsyn. Further pressure from the Whites drove forces of the Southern Front from Kiev, Odessa, Kursk, Voronezh, and Orel in August–October 1919. On 11 October 1919, the successful counterattack of the Southern Front began, driving the Whites back to the Black Sea and the North Caucasus by early 1920. Having virtually destroyed the AFSR, on 10 January 1919, the Southern Front’s forces were reorganized as the South-West Front. Commanders of the first Southern Front were P. P. Sytin (11 September–9 November 1918); P. A. Slaven (9 November 1918–24 January 1919); V. M. Gittis (24 January–13 July 1919); V. N. Egor′ev (13 July–11 October 1919); and A. I. Egorov (11 October 1919–10 January 1920). Its chiefs of staff were I. I. Zashchuk (acting, 11 September–12 November 1918); V. F. Tarasov (13 November 1918–7 June 1919); N. V. Pnevskii (9 June–17 October 1919); and N. N. Petin (14 November 1919–10 January/26 September 1920).

The second Southern Front (sometimes termed the “Southern Front against Wrangel”), with its staff based at Khar′kov, was created by an order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic on 21 September 1920, with the purpose of combating the forces of General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army, which had burst out of Crimea into the northern Tauride. Its complement included the 4th (18 October–10 December 1920), 6th (21 September–10 December 1920), and 13th (21 September–12 November 1920) Red Armies; the 1st (21 October–10 December 1920) and 2nd (21 September–6 December 1920) Cavalry Armies; and other smaller units. The Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine of Nestor Makhno also played a major role in the operations of the second Southern Front. Forces of the Southern Front engaged in a bloody struggle against the Whites in northern Tauride; rebuffed Wrangel’s attempts to create a bridgehead on the right bank of the Dnepr; breached the Whites’ defense of the Perekop isthmus; and in November 1920, captured Crimea and drove Wrangel’s army into emigration. On 10 December 1920, the Southern Front was disbanded and its forces placed under the command of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The commander of the second Southern Front was M. V. Frunze. Its chiefs of staff were P. P. Karatygin (acting, 21–27 September 1920) and Jānis Pauka (27 September–10 December 1920).

SOUTHERN RUSSIAN (SPECIAL SOUTHERN) ARMY. This anti-Bolshevik formation was created on 3 October 1918, on the order of Ataman P. N. Krasnov (and with the assistance of the monarchist society “Our Homeland”), as part of the All-Great Don Cossack Host. Commanded by General N. I. Ivanov (2 October 1918–27 January 1919) until he died of typhus at Novocherkassk, and subsequently commanded by D. G. Shcherbachev, it consisted of the Voronezh Corps (2,000 men under Major General Shil′dbakh-Litovets), the Astrakhan Corps (3,000 men under Ataman Prince Tundutov), and the Saratov Corps and His Majesty’s Life Guard Squadron (commanded by S. Mikh). Only the Saratov Corps of the Southern Russian Army saw action against Bolshevik forces on the lower Volga before, in March 1919, its units were redistributed between the Volunteer Army and the Don Army of the Armed Forces of South Russia, thereby ending the army’s existence.

SOUTH RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT. See GOVERNMENT OF SOUTH RUSSIA.

SOUTH-WEST CAUCASIAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC. This short-lived polity was centered at Kars (and is known to Turks as the Kars Republic) and claimed sovereignty over the predominantly Muslim-inhabited regions of Kars, Batumi, and Yerevan and the Akhaltsikhe and Akhalkalaki districts of Tiflis guberniia. These regions had been assigned to the Ottoman Empire under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), but when Russian forces withdrew, fighting broke out between the invading Turkish forces and the forces of the newly created Armenian Democratic Republic. That conflict was ended by the Treaty of Batumi (4 June 1918), which again assigned the disputed regions to Turkey. However, when it was announced that, under the terms of the Armistice of Mudros (30 October 1918), which took Turkey out of the First World War, Ottoman forces should withdraw to the 1914 frontier and disarm, on 1 December 1918, a Muslim National Committee at Kars declared unilateral independence from Turkey (and Russia) of the border regions in a new republic under President Cihangirzade İbrahim Bey, a general of the Ottoman army. This act was facilitated by the fact that although Turkish forces had implemented the terms of Mudros to the extent that they withdrew beyond the 1877 frontier with Russia, they had not retreated from Kars (which had been awarded to Russia by the Treaty of San Stefano of 1878, following the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–1878).

Local British forces, which had occupied Batumi and Baku, supported an Armenian delegation that was sent to Kars in January 1919, but negotiations stalled and violence erupted between Armenia and the forces of the putative Kars Republic, which the Armenians (and the British) regarded as a Turkish puppet state intended to circumvent the Mudros armistice and maintain a Turkish hold on the territories won (or won back) from Russia during the previous year. British forces sent from Batumi, on the orders of General William M. Thomson, eventually occupied Kars on 19 April 1919 and arrested members of the government (12 of whom, along with some 125 other Turkish wartime commanders and politicians, were subsequently exiled to Malta by the Allies). They then disbanded the republic and placed Kars province under Armenian rule (although under the Soviet–Turkish Treaty of Kars of 13 October 1921, Kars would eventually revert to Turkey).

SOUTH-WEST FRONT. This Red front was created on 10 January 1920, according to a directive of the main commander in chief of the Red Army, following a reorganization of the Southern Front. Its task was to clear right-bank Ukraine and Crimea of the remnants of the forces of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) and to defend Kiev against the possibility of an attack from Poland. Its staff was located initially at Kursk and later at Khar′kov. Included in the South-West Front were the 12th (10 January–13 August 1920 and 27 September–25 December 1920), 13th (10 January–21 September 1920), and 14th (10 January–31 December 1920) Red Armies; the 1st Cavalry Army (17 April–14 August 1920); the 6th Red Army (8–21 September 1920); the Ukrainian Labor Army (30 January–25 September 1920); and the forces of the Gomel Fortified District. From 19 May to 13 June 1920, the Fastovsk group of forces (the 44th and 45th Rifle Divisions and the 3rd Detachment of the Dnepr Military Flotilla), commanded by I. E. Iakir, was also attached to the South-West Front.

In January–February 1920, the forces of the South-West Front pushed back the AFSR and, on 7 February 1920, entered Odessa, but attempts to force an entry into Crimea were rebuffed by White forces under the command of Ia. A. Slashchov. In April–May 1920, as the Soviet–Polish War moved into its active phase, forces of the South-West Front were driven out of Mozyr, Ovruch, and Kiev and into left-bank Ukraine. An offensive in May 1920 recaptured Kiev, and by July, the front’s forces were threatening L′vov and Lublin, but the Polish counteroffensive of August–September 1920 pushed them back into Ukraine. (Some historians claim that the front commander’s failure to capture L′vov and to support the forces of the Western Front was caused by the baleful influence of the chairman of the front revvoensovet, J. V. Stalin.) The South-West Front was also confronted with the breakout from Crimea, in early June 1920, of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, forcing a withdrawal to the right bank of the Dnepr. A counteroffensive in August 1920 proved effective, and the forces of the South-West Front deployed against Crimea were then reorganized into an independent, reconstituted Southern Front, against Wrangel. In late December 1920, the remaining forces of the South-West Front were transferred to the control of the Kiev Military District.

The commander of the South-West Front throughout its existence (10 January–31 December 1920) was A. I. Egorov. Its chief of staff was N. N. Petin.

SOVIET–AFGHAN TREATY OF FRIENDSHIP (28 February 1921). This agreement between the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and Afghanistan (signed for the Soviet government by G. V. Chicherin and L. M. Karakhan, and for Afghanistan by Muhamed Wali Khan, Mirza Muhamed Khan, and Guliama Sidlyk Khan) was one of a series of bilateral treaties signed at this time by the Soviet government to win international recognition and thereby (it was hoped) to increase its security as the civil wars wound down. (Others included the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement and the Soviet–Turkish Treaty of Moscow, both of 16 March 1921, and the Soviet–Persian Treaty of Friendship of 26 February 1921.) Under its terms, the contracting parties offered mutual recognition and arranged for the establishment of consulates on each others’ territory and agreed upon “the freedom of Eastern nations,” including the khanates of Bokhara and Khiva (which were by then, in fact, under Soviet control), “on the basis of independence” (Articles VII and VIII), while Soviet Russia agreed to return to Afghanistan undefined “border areas” that had been occupied by imperial Russian forces in the 19th century, to allow “free and untaxed” transit of Afghan goods on Soviet territory (Article VI), and to “provide Afghanistan with financial and other material assistance” (Article X). (A separate protocol spelled out that this assistance would amount to a subsidy of one million rubles per annum, the construction of a telegraph from Kushkh to Kabul, and the provision of “technical and other specialists.”)

The Soviet government hoped that, by establishing a treaty relationship with Afghanistan, it could present itself as a friend of the colonial world; prevent attacks on Soviet territory from Basmachi fighters based across the border; and dissuade the emir, Amanullah khan, from offering aid to the Basmachi, as well as checking British influence in Kabul and profiting from Kabul’s resentment of the settlement imposed on it by the British, the Treaty of Rawalpindi of 8 August 1919 (at the end of the Third Afghan War). This was not, however, a Soviet–Afghan alliance against Britain. Rather, it was designed to protect each of the signatories from the danger of the other concluding an agreement with Britain against it; Article II of the treaty therefore bound both signatories “not to enter into any military or political agreement with a third state which might prejudice either of the contracting parties.” After the treaty had been ratified, F. F. Raskol′nikov was sent to Kabul as the first Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan.

soviet anarchists. See anarchism.

Soviet–Finnish conflict. This conflict, which can be regarded as perhaps the most serious of the so-called Kinship Wars, broke out on 6 November 1921, following a rebellion in Eastern Karelia that Soviet historians always claimed was provoked by forces that originated in Finland and were covertly supported by the Finnish government, in breach of the Treaty of Tartu (14 October 1920). Battles involved between 2,000 and 5,000 Karelian rebels, who are sometimes referred to as Forest Guerrillas (Metsäsissi in Finnish)—including perhaps 500 volunteers from Finland, who had been permitted (and even encouraged) to cross the border into Soviet Russia by the Finnish government—and 20,000 troops of the Red Army. Red forces crushed the rebels in a series of battles in January to February 1922, at which point aid to them was also cut off by Finland. The conflict ended with the signing of agreements between Finland and Soviet Russia regarding measures to maintain the viability of their common border (21 March and 1 June 1922, signed at Moscow and Helsinki, respectively). Nevertheless, some 10,000 Karelian refugees had fled into Finland by the end of 1922.

SOVIET–GEORGIAN WAR. This conflict, between the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Democratic Republic of Georgia, lasted from 15 February to 17 March 1921. It resulted in the overthrow of the independent Georgian republic, which had been dominated by Mensheviks of the Georgian Social Democratic Labor Party, and the establishment of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was loyal to Moscow. The RSFSR had recognized the independence of Georgia in the Treaty of Moscow of 7 May 1920, but on 14 February 1921, influential Georgian Bolsheviks (notably J. V. Stalin and G. K. Ordzhonikidze) in the party’s Caucasian Bureau (Kavbiuro) obtained the agreement of V. I. Lenin and the party leadership to invade Georgia, ostensibly to assist a workers’ and peasants’ rebellion in the country (although Georgian Mensheviks claimed that discontent in the country had been artificially stimulated by Moscow).

Having established Soviet rule in Azerbaijan in April 1920, Ordzhonikidze had moved immediately to invade Georgia, but Soviet forces were repulsed, and a Communist rising in Tiflis was suppressed by the People’s Guard. Subsequently, preoccupied with the defeat of the Russian Army of P. N. Wrangel and with the escalation of the Soviet–Polish War, Soviet attention temporarily shifted from Transcaucasia. Also, some leading Bolsheviks, notably L. D. Trotsky and K. B. Radek, argued that the invasion of Georgia would be premature. With Wrangel defeated and a treaty arranged with Poland, however, by early 1921 Moscow was ready to act. Another factor was that by this time all Allied forces had withdrawn from Transcaucasia, making their intervention to save Georgia less likely. Having engineered Communist uprisings in the Armenian-populated region of Lori, among the Ossetians of northeast Georgia, and elsewhere, on 16 February 1921 Red Army forces, mustering 50,000 men, entered Georgia from Azerbaijan and Armenia, through the Daryal and Mamisoni passes in the north and along the Black Sea coast. After heavy fighting, the 11th Red Army entered Tiflis on 25 February 1921, and the Georgian SSR was proclaimed (the 35,000-strong Georgian army, under Generals Giorgi Mazniashvili and Giorgi Kvinitadze, having withdrawn to Kutaisi, in the west). Soviet forces, joined by Abkhazian peasant militias, then moved against the remnants of the Georgian army, capturing Gagra (1 March 1921), Sukhumi (4 March 1921), Kutaisi (10 March 1921), Poti (14 March 1921), and other centers, as the Georgian army fell apart.

During this conflict, Turkey took the opportunity to demand the evacuation by Georgia of the formerly Ottoman provinces of Ardahan and Artvin; in late February, it moved troops toward the still Georgian-held city of Batumi. Hoping to benefit from a Turkish–Soviet conflict, on 7 March 1921, members of the Georgian government reached an agreement with the local Turkish commander, Musa Kâzım Karabekir, that allowed Turkish forces into Batumi, while the civil administration of the city remained in Georgian hands. On 16 March 1921, however, the Turks proclaimed the annexation of Batumi, forcing the Georgians to make a choice. Realizing that earlier hopes of assistance from the Allies were forlorn (on 16 March 1921 the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was signed) and that Moscow had no intention of going to war with Turkey (on the same day, a treaty of friendship, the Treaty of Moscow, was signed between Turkey and the RSFSR), and wishing to preserve Batumi for Georgia, on 17 March 1921, the Georgian defense minister, Grigol Lordkipanidze, agreed to an armistice at Kutaisi with the Soviet delegate, Avel Enukidze.

In the course of the conflict of February–March 1921, some 5,500 Red Army soldiers were killed and approximately the same number of Georgian fighters also lost their lives. Meanwhile, over the course of 17–19 March 1921, Georgian forces at Batumi forced the Turks out of the city, as they allowed Soviet forces in and as the Georgian government fled into exile aboard an Italian ship. Subsequently, under Article V of the Treaty of Kars (13 October 1921), Turkey abandoned its claim to Batumi (whose Muslim population was to be granted autonomy within the Georgian SSR) in exchange for territorial concessions in Artvin, Ardahan, and Kars. Resistance to the Sovietization of Georgia continued, however, notably in the Svanetian uprising, the Kakhet–Khevsureti rebellion, and the national uprising of summer 1924 (the August Uprising), organized by the Committee for the Independence of Georgia, while in Moscow disputes over events in Georgia within the Bolshevik Party (particularly between Stalin and Trotsky, supported by the ailing Lenin) became acute in 1922 (the “Georgian affair”).

On 20 June 1989, at the height of the era of glasnost′, a special commission to investigate the events of 1921 was established by the presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Georgian SSR. It concluded: “The [Soviet Russian] deployment of troops in Georgia and seizure of its territory was, from a legal point of view, a military interference (intervention) and occupation aimed at changing the existing political regime.” It is now also established that, following the suppression of the 1924 uprising, almost 13,000 Georgians were executed, and a further 20,000 were exiled to Siberia.

SOVIET–MONGOLIAN TREATY OF FRIENDSHIP (5 November 1921). Signed at Moscow, following the establishment of the pro-Soviet Mongolian People’s Republic, this treaty formalized relations between the two contracting parties. Both agreed to suppress organizations hostile to their partner operating on their territories, to facilitate trade and the exchange of ambassadors and consuls, and so forth. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, in addition, “responding to the wise measures of the People’s Government of Mongolia in the matter of organizing telegraphic communications not dependent on the rapacious tendencies of world imperialism,” was contracted to transfer to Mongolian ownership all Russian telegraphic installations on Mongolian territory. It was also agreed that a special commission would be appointed to determine the frontier between Soviet Russia and Mongolia. By the Mongolian reckoning, the treaty was signed “on the 6th day of the 10th moon of the 11th year of the ‘Exalted by the Many’ [i.e., the 11th year of the reign of the Bogdo Khan].”

SOVIET–PERSIAN TREATY OF FRIENDSHIP (26 February 1921). This agreement between the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and Persia (signed for the Soviet government by G. V. Chicherin and L. M. Karakhan, and for Persia by Ali Gholi Khan Mochaverol Memalek) was one of a series of international agreements signed at this time by the Soviet government to win international recognition and thereby (it was hoped) increase its security as the civil wars wound down. (Others included the Anglo–Soviet Trade Agreement and the Soviet–Turkish Treaty of Moscow, both dated 16 March 1921, and the Soviet–Afghan Treaty of 28 February 1921.)

Specifically, the Soviet government wished to guard against attacks from Persian territory by White forces that had been driven across the border by the Red Army as it moved into Transcaucasia in 1920. Thus (under Article V of the treaty), both contracting parties agreed “to prohibit the formation or presence within their respective territories, of any organization or groups of persons . . . whose object is to engage in acts of hostility against Persia or Russia.” Furthermore, (under Article VI of the treaty), the Soviet government was granted “the right to advance its troops into the Persian interior for the purpose of carrying out the military operations necessary for its defense,” should the Persian government be unable to suppress foreign or domestic forces on its territory that were regarded as menacing by Moscow. (The USSR would use this clause as justification for its occupation of northern Iran during and after the Second World War.) The price to be paid, on the Soviet side, was the renunciation of all political and economic concessions that its tsarist predecessor had been granted in Persia (notably those detailed in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 31 August 1907); the withdrawal of Red forces from Persian territory; and the sacrifice of its ally, the separatist Soviet Republic of Gīlān. Also (under the terms of Article XI of the treaty), the Soviet and Persian navies were given “equal rights to free shipping under their own flags on the Caspian Sea,” thereby supplanting the Treaty of Tukmenchai (21 February 1828), which had forbidden Persia to base a navy on the Caspian. For Tehran, the treaty also offered some leverage in efforts to assert its economic, military, and political independence from Britain, specifically to throw off the shackles imposed on it by the Anglo–Persian Agreement of 9 August 1919 (which was formally denounced by the Persian parliament on 22 June 1921). To Moscow’s chagrin, the Persians repeatedly breached the terms of the treaty over the following years.

SOVIET–POLISH WAR. The Soviet–Polish War was just one—albeit the most prolonged, geographically extensive, studied, and perhaps internationally significant—of a series of conflicts that erupted in Eastern Europe as German forces withdrew from the region in the aftermath of the First World War. The retreat of Ober Ost and the collapse of the territorial settlement brokered through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) left a power vacuum that was contested by local nationalist forces and Soviet Russia, although the nationalists also often fought among themselves, such as in the Ukrainian–Polish War and the Polish–Lithuanian War. (Other related conflicts were the Soviet–Ukrainian War, the Estonian War of Independence, the Latvian War of Independence, the Lithuanian Wars of Independence, and the Kinship Wars.) Polish aims, broadly speaking, as articulated by the preeminent Polish leader of the era, Józef Piłsudski, were to recapture territories lost during the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century and to create a Polish-led federation, the Międzymorze (or Intermarum, “the land between the seas”) of several East-Central European states, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, as a bulwark against the reemergence of both German and Russian imperialisms. (The two aims, it is worth noting, were to some extent conflicting, because if Poland recovered the lands lost in all three partitions, it would be in possession of territories claimed by its desired allies in Ukraine, Belarussia, and Lithuania.) Soviet aims were to repulse any Polish advance (which they regarded as a branch of the Allied intervention in Russia) and, potentially, to carry the revolution west through Poland to Central Europe.

Skirmishes began soon after the armistice of 11 November 1918 (although a case could be made for citing the Dowbor-Muśnicki uprising of January–February 1918 as the beginning of the conflict), but escalated rapidly following the Red Army’s capture of Minsk on 5 January 1919, as Belarussian, Lithuanian, and Polish self-defense forces began to organize for the defense of “their” homelands in what was an ethnically mixed region of intractable complexity. Hostilities remained at a relatively low level for most of 1919, however, as the Soviet government prioritized its campaigns against the Whites and Warsaw calculated that it was to its advantage to grant the Red Army a free hand to crush forces that were unabashedly committed to the reestablishment of a “Russia, One and Indivisible.” Moreover, this breathing spce merely granted the newly created Second Polish Republic the opportunity to begin concentrating forces along its still undemarcated eastern border; by September 1919, the Polish Army numbered 540,000 men, of whom 230,000 were deployed in the east. As the Whites fell back in the autumn of 1919, these forces began to engage with Red forces with increasing frequency, contesting the claims to sovereignty over the disputed border regions voiced by the newly created Litbel (the Lithuanian–Belorussian Soviet Republic, proclaimed on 27 February 1919), for example.

For its part, the Soviet government was seeking to preempt the imposition of a border such as that suggested by the Allies at Paris (the Curzon line), which it regarded as too generous to Poland. However, with the Red Army forced to concentrate its resources on the Eastern Front and the advance of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, the Poles gradually gained the initiative during the spring of 1919. Forces under General Stanisław Szeptycki captured Słonim (2 March 1919) and crossed the River Neman; forces under General Antonu Listowski took Pinsk (5 March 1919) and crossed the Jasiolda (Iasel′da) River and the Oginski Canal; and other units entered the outskirts of Lida. (Although Poland also, it should be recalled, was distracted by its border disputes with Czechoslovakia over Cieszyn Silesia, Orava Territory, and Spiš and by the risings of Poles in Silesia against German rule.) The situation was then further complicated, during the summer of 1919, by the northward advance of the White Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), whose leadership appeared disinclined to recognize Polish independence, never mind negotiate about borders (despite the fact that the AFSR’s main commander, General A. I. Denikin, was half Polish). In the light of this, Piłsudski determined in April 1919 that, although his army should counter any Red incursions into territory held by Poland, it should avoid challenging the Red Army to a degree that might grant respite or succor to the Russian Whites. Nevertheless, the Poles not only pushed Soviet forces out of the recently captured centers of Grodno and Vil′na (19 April 1919), but launched a counteroffensive that led to the capture of Mołodeczno (4 July 1919), the Polesie region (10 July 1919), Minsk (8 August 1919), and Dubno (9 August 1919). Further advances were made in the northwest, with territory from the Dvina to near Daugavpils secured by early October 1919. Thus, by early January 1920, Polish forces had reached the line of Uszyca–Płoskirów–Starokonstantynów–Szepietówka–Zwiahel–Olewsk–Uborć–Bobrujsk–Berezyna–Dyneburg (Daugavpils).

In this period, Polish relations with the Lithuanian government were reaching crisis point over border issues (particularly their rival claims to Vilnius/Wilno), but Warsaw’s negotiations with the Latvian government at this time had some success, and by early 1920, Polish and Latvian forces were conducting joint operations against the Red Army (notably in the capture of Dyneburg/Daugavpils, 3–21 January 1920). In spring 1920, the Polish–Ukrainian War also drew to a close with the Treaty of Warsaw (21–24 April 1920), and thereafter Poland enjoyed a military alliance with the Ukrainian Army of the Ukrainian National Republic. This emboldened the Poles, as did the defeat of Denikin and Kolchak’s forces over the winter of 1919–1920, which had neutralized any threat of the establishment of a White government in Russia. Likewise, with the last significant White force (General P. N. Wrangel’s Russian Army) confined to Crimea, a peace settlement having been negotiated with Estonia (the Treaty of Tartu, 2 February 1920), and a cease-fire in operation on the front with Latvia, the Bolsheviks felt that their hands were now free to deal with Poland and potentially, to export the revolution to Europe.

What had essentially been, throughout 1919, a low-level border conflict, was thus primed to erupt into full-scale war. By April 1920, the Red Army had over 700,000 troops concentrated on its Western Front and South-West Front facing Poland; the Poles could draw on an army of approximately the same number. Anticipating a Soviet offensive, Piłsudski launched his own (“Operation Kiev”) on 24 April 1920. This was a joint operation, with the Polish 3rd Army (under General Edward Rydz-Śmigły), 6th Army (under General Wacław Iwaszkiewicz), and 2nd Army (under General Listowski) advancing into Ukraine alongside the two remaining divisions (around 15,000–30,000 men) of S. V. Petliura’s Ukrainian Army. It was initially a remarkable success; Kiev was captured on 7 May 1920. Preparations were then made for an offensive against Żłobin, to secure the most direct rail route between Kiev and Minsk (then in Polish hands). However, the Polish and Ukrainian attackers had failed in their objective to entrap defending Soviet forces, and the 12th Red Army and 14th Red Army had both retreated beyond the Dnepr in good order. On 15 May 1920, a Red counteroffensive was duly launched on the South-West Front (commanded by A. I. Egorov), with S. M. Budennyi’s 1st Cavalry Army joining the fray. Bolstered by over 100,000 new volunteers (responding to a flood of Soviet agitprop directed toward rousing anti-Polish feeling) and some 14,000 new officer volunteers (answering a call by the former tsarist commander General A. N. Brusilov urging fellow officers to join the Red Army), by 10 June 1920 the Red Army had Polish forces in retreat along the entire front and on 13 June 1920 recaptured Kiev. Over the following weeks, the Poles attempted a series of counterattacks (at Usza on 19 June, at Horyń on 1 July, and at Równe on 8 July), but Egorov and Budennyi’s men pressed on.

Meanwhile, an offensive was launched, on 4 July 1920, by Soviet forces to the north, commanded by M. N. Tukhachevskii and comprising an army group made up of the 3rd Cavalry Corps, the 4th Red Army, the 15th Red Army, the 3rd Red Army, and the 16th Red Army (a total of some 108,000 infantry and 11,000 cavalry, backed by 722 artillery pieces and almost 3,000 machine guns). Facing them were around 120,000 troops of the 1st and 4th Polish Armies and Group Polesie, backed by some 460 artillery pieces. Again the Reds were successful, capturing Wilno/Vil′na on 14 July and Grodno on 19 July 1920 (and thereby sealing the secret military alliance with Lithuania that was an annex to the Soviet–Lithuanian Treaty of Moscow of 12 July 1920). On 1 August 1920, Brest-Litovsk fell, and that same day Red forces crossed the Narew and Western Bug Rivers, while in the south Polish forces had been pushed entirely out of Ukraine, and Budennyi was closing on Zamość and Lwów (now defended by the Polish 6th Army under General Władysław Jędrzejewski). At this point, however, the situation in the south improved for Poland, as the Polish 2nd Army recaptured Brody (2 August). Polish spirits were also lifted by the supportive activities of a strong French military mission in Warsaw (which included Marshal Foch’s chief of staff, Maxime Weygand, and a young Charles de Gaulle); by the activities of the Kościuszko Squadron of the Polish air force, which was manned by Polish American volunteers; and by the arrival of shipments of military supplies from Hungary, although the labor movements in France, Britain, and elsewhere (united in the “Hands Off Russia” campaign) were mostly critical of the Polish invasion of Ukraine. This sentiment struck something of a chord with Lloyd George, whose government had just entered negotiations with the Soviet government that would eventually lead to the Anglo–Soviet Trade Agreement. Poles have consequently always insisted (probably justly) that they alone were responsible for what then ensued.

Another key to the outcome of the war, however, was that rather than follow the orders of the Soviet commander in chief, S. S. Kamenev (and the pleas of Tukhachevskii) that his forces should push northward against Warsaw, Egorov (encouraged by his military commissar on the South-West Front, J. V. Stalin) continued to push westward, hoping (but failing) to capture Lwów and Lublin. (Stalin’s motives in this affair are obscure, but may have involved his known distaste for military specialists of the type of Kamenev and Tukhachevskii.) The consequence was that, although Red Cossacks of the 3rd Cavalry Corps under G. D. Gai crossed the Vistula as early as 10 August 1920 and threatened to attack Warsaw from the west, the Polish 1st Army (under General Franciszek Latinik) was able to resist Tukhachevskii’s assault on the capital from the east, stopping Soviet forces at Radzymin on 13 August, while a countereattack by the heavily armored Polish 5th Army (under General Władysław Sikorski) halted the 3rd and 15th Red Armies around Nasielsk on 14–15 August 1920. Further Polish forces, among them the Reserve Army, then joined the battle, pushing northward through the gap between the two Soviet fronts and encircling Tukhachevskii’s armies. The Poles’ thereafter legendary “Miracle on the Vistula” was complete, while the puppet governments that the Bolsheviks had prepared to install in a Soviet Western Ukraine and a Soviet Poland (the Galrevkom and Polrevkom, respectively) proved to be redundant.

On 18 August 1920, Tukhachevskii ordered a general withdrawal toward the Bug River, but by then he had lost contact with most of his forces, which fled in disarray—some of the 4th and 15th Red Armies into East Prussia, where they were disarmed by the Germans. Most of the 3rd Red Army extracted itself from Poland intact, but the 16th Red Army disintegrated at Białystok, and most of its men were taken prisoner. Freed from commitments before Warsaw, Polish forces then headed south to confront Budennyi. The 1st Cavalry Army was forced to abandon its siege of Lwów on 31 August 1920 and was that same day defeated by Polish cavalry at the Battle of Komarów—the greatest cavalry battle since the Napoleonic era and the last significant cavalry battle of the 20th century. Another defeat followed at the Battle of Hrubieszów (6 September 1920), as what remained of the 1st Cavalry Army limped eastward.

With Red Army forces in retreat from Lithuania to Ukraine throughout September 1920, the Soviet government was eventually forced to sue for peace (with offers made on 21 and 28 September 1920); a cease-fire was signed on 12 October and went into effect on 18 October 1920. Following protracted negotiations, a full peace treaty, the Treaty of Riga, was signed on 18 March 1921. Under its terms, Poland made substantial territorial and other gains from Soviet Russia. At the same time, Warsaw was left free to force a successful outcome to the Polish–Lithuanian War (1 September to 7 October 1920), thereby capturing Wilno/Vilnius.

In the course of the Soviet–Polish War, the Red Army suffered casualties of over 100,000 and the Polish Army almost 50,000 men. The number of civilians killed remains unknown, but among the many controversial aspects of the conflict are charges that all contending armies engaged in terror against the civilian population—particularly the many Jews in the region, who were subjected to a wave of pogroms that resulted in the deaths of up to 100,000 people, according to some estimates. (Attacks on Jewish communities during the conflict form a central motif of Isaak Babel’s collection of short stories, Red Cavalry, which was based on his own experiences in Poland in 1920.) Moreover, after the Treaty of Riga, more than 80,000 Red soldiers remained in Polish prisoner of war camps, of whom around 20,000 would perish; a similar number of Polish prisoners (out of around 51,000 in captivity) died in Soviet and Lithuanian camps. Prisoner exchanges began only in 1922. Apart from Babel’s aforementioned work, the Soviet–Polish War has been portrayed in myriad literary and filmic accounts, notably the feature film Bitwa warzawska (“Battle of Warsaw, 1920,” dir. Jerzy Hoffman, 2011), which was shot in 3D and was one of the most expensive films ever made in Poland.

Soviet Republic of Gīlān. See Gīlān, Soviet Republic of.

Soviet Republic of Soldiers and Fortress-Builders. See nargen, socialist republic of.

SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF TAURIDE. See TAURIDE, SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF.

SOVIET–UKRAINIAN WAR. This multifaceted military conflict, from December 1917 to November 1921, between the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR)—and in 1918, the Ukrainian State—on the one side, and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and pro-Soviet Ukrainian forces on the other, was one of the longest, most intense, and bloodiest of all the “Russian” Civil Wars. At issue was not only many Ukrainians’ desire for independence and their hostility to “Russian” Bolshevism and Soviet internationalism, but also the Soviet government’s recognition that their own new state would be unlikely to survive without the industrial and agricultural wealth of Ukraine, which had supplied the majority of the iron, coal, wheat, sugar, and other essential products in the former Russian Empire. The situation was complicated by the fact that Ukrainian cities were largely populated by Russians—even in Kiev, during the revolutionary period, less than 20 percent of the population was Ukrainian (and many of them were Russified)—the notable exception being L′viv (L′vov/Lemberg), but that city had never been part of the Russian Empire, and during the civil wars, it was contested by Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians.

The war first erupted in November–December 1917, when a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was established at Khar′kov, in opposition to the Ukrainian Central Rada at Kiev, which the Bolsheviks accused of bourgeois nationalism and of providing covert aid to the Volunteer Army that was forming on the Don, effectively using Ukraine as a shield between itself and Moscow. In this period, some 30,000 Red forces, led by V. A. Ovseenko and M. A. Murav′ev and composed of radicalized elements of the old army, sailors of the Baltic Fleet, and the Black Sea Fleet and Red Guards, advanced on Kiev from the north and east, capturing Khar′kov (25 December 1917), Ekaterinoslav (9 January 1918), and Poltava (20 January 1918). They were opposed by some 15,000 irregular Ukrainian forces, Free Cossacks, and the Sich Riflemen. After Murav′ev’s group had crushed resistance from Ukrainian student detachments (notably the Kruty Heroes), Kiev fell to the Reds on 26–27 January 1918, but following the first Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (27 January 1918), forces of the UNR commanded by Symon Petliura, with the aid of forces of the Austro-German intervention, retook the city on 2 March 1918. Under the terms of the second Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), the Soviet government agreed to a peace treaty with Ukraine, which was eventually signed on 12 June 1918.

Following the overthrow of the Ukrainian State of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii and the reestablishment of the UNR in November–December 1918, a new Soviet invasion began, in the name of the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine (founded on 20 November 1918), and on 16 January 1919, the Ukrainian National Republic Directory declared war on the RSFSR. However, Red Army forces captured Kiev on 4–6 February 1919, forcing the Ukrainian National Republic Directory to flee to Vinnytsia (Vinnitsa). Hostilities continued throughout the following year, as the Ukrainian Army united with the Ukrainian Galician Army of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (WUPR), although elements of the latter went over to the Bolsheviks (to form the Red Ukrainian Galician Army). The Ukrainian side was also weakened by attacks in its rear during 1919, from both the White Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) and Poland, by internal turmoil caused by the activities of otomans such as Nykyfor Hryhoriiv and Danylo Zeleny, and by the various campaigns of the Insurrectionary Revolutionary Army of Nestor Makhno. However, in the summer of 1919, the UNR was strengthened by the arrival of Iurii Tiutiunnyk with troops formerly commanded by the now dead (executed by Makhno) Hryhoriiv, who had pushed his way through the Reds’ southern flank. The Ukrainian Army then launched an offensive that pushed the Soviet forces back to the Horodok–Iarmolyntsi–Sharhorod–Dunaivtsi–Nova Ushytsia–Vapniarka line, before being joined by the Ukrainian Galician Army, which in retreat from the Poles in its own Ukrainian–Polish War, had crossed the Zbruch River on 16–17 July 1919. Their arrival brought the number of Ukrainian troops in the field to nearly 85,000 regulars and 15,000 partisans.

The subsequent Ukrainian campaign to retake Kiev proceeded with victories in Vinnitsa (12 August 1919); Khmilnik, Ianiv, Kalynivka, and Starokostiantinov (all 14 August 1919); Berdychev (19 August 1919); and Zhitomir (21 August). On 31 August 1919, Ukrainian troops triumphantly entered Kiev, only to discover that White forces of the AFSR had arrived at the same time. Hostilities between the two forces were narrowly averted when the combined Ukrainian army withdrew from the city. The Red command then took advantage of the Ukrainians’ embroilment with the Whites to move forces from the Ekaterinoslav region to Zhitomir. The leadership of the UNR and the WUPR split over how to deal with the Whites, and their army suffered a typhus epidemic. The Ukrainian Galician Army (led by General Myron Tarnavsky) finally made a separate peace with the Whites on 6 November 1919, leaving the UNR isolated. Meanwhile, the military situation had worsened, as Red forces made substantial gains in areas of right-bank Ukraine (as the Whites were driven out), while the Poles moved into the western reaches of Ukraine. By the end of November 1919, the government and army of the UNR found themselves hemmed in by Soviet, Polish, and White troops. Consequently, at a conference on 4 December 1919, the command of the Ukrainian Army decided to suspend regular military operations and go over to partisan warfare. This took the form of the first of the UNR’s heroic but debilitating Winter Campaigns, waged by forces under the command of Mykhailo Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko in the Elizavetgrad (now Kirovohrad) region, against the 14th Red Army from 6 December 1919 to 6 May 1920.

Ukrainian fortunes rose again, however, following the signing of the Treaty of Warsaw (20–24 April 1920) and the beginning of the Soviet–Polish War, which allied the UNR with Poland (albeit at the cost of abandoning the WUPR). A Ukrainian division under General M. D. Bezruchko was therefore among the forces that drove the Red Army from Kiev on 6–8 May 1920, but it had to retreat from the city on 10–12 June 1920, in the face of a counteroffensive by S. M. Budennyi’s 1st Cavalry Army that drove Ukrainian forces westward to L′viv. When Poland came to terms with Soviet Russia—in an armistice on 18 October 1920 that would eventually lead to the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921), under which Warsaw recognized the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic—what was left of the Ukrainian Army kept fighting. Hopelessly outnumbered, however, on 21 November 1920, Petliura’s 23,000 men were forced to retreat across the Zbruch River into Poland, where they were promptly disarmed and interned.

The final chapter of the Soviet–Ukrainian War occurred a year later, in November 1921, in the second of the UNR’s Winter Campaigns, when some 1,200 Ukrainian forces marched into Soviet Ukraine from Podolia and Volynia, hoping (but failing) to inspire a general peasant rising. The collapse of this campaign brought the Soviet–Ukrainian War to an end in terms of conventional military action, although the partisan movement in Ukraine remained active until at least mid-1922, and émigré, anti-Soviet, nationalist organizations (notably the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) flourished between the wars and got a second wind during Nazi Germany’s occupation of Ukraine during the Second World War. Remnants of these organizations survive to the present day, both in Ukraine and among the Ukrainian diaspora.

Of the many literary and artistic portraits of this brutal war, the best known (and most accomplished) is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard (1926), which opens with the observation, “Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second.”

SOVNARKOM. The acronym (sometimes abbreviated to SNK) by which was generally known the body that, from 1917 to 1946, constituted the government (or cabinet) of the Rusian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and later the USSR: the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovet narodnykh kommissarov). The term was also widely applied to the governing bodies of that state’s various constituent Soviet socialist republics and autonomous Soviet republics.

The Sovnarkom of the RSFSR—or, rather, of what was to become the RSFSR—was created, on the initiative of V. I. Lenin, at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 26 October 1917, in the midst of the October Revolution, to act as the government of the new Soviet regime. It would meet on an almost daily basis through 1918, although thereafter meetings gradually became less frequent (e.g., three or four a week in 1919). Between 20 and 30 persons were usually in attendance (although sometimes more than 40 attended), with less than half of them being members of the Central Cmmittee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) and later the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The term “commissars” was deliberately chosen to differentiate them from the ministers of “bourgeois” governments, both to signal Sovnarkom’s revolutionary intent and to indicate that the administration was in the hands of collective commissions (commissariats), not individuals. However, the range of portfolios was almost identical with that which had prevailed under the Russian Provisional Government of February–October 1917.

Sovnarkom initially consisted of a chairman (Lenin) and 11 individual people’s commissars—Foreign Affairs (L. D. Trotsky), Internal Affairs (A. I. Rykov), Justice (G. I. Lomov), Labor (A. G. Shliapnikov), Education (A. V. Lunacharskii), Post and Telegraph (N. P. Glebov), Nationality Affairs (J. V. Stalin), Finance (I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov), Agriculture (V. P. Miliutin), Trade and Industry (V. P. Nogin), and Food and Supplies (I. A. Teodorovich)—plus a three-man collegium representing the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs (V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, N. V. Krylenko, and P. E. Dybenko). These were soon supplemented by the heads of newly created commissariats: State Charity (A. M. Kollontai, from 30 October 1917, renamed Social Security, 26 April 1918); Health (N. A. Semashko, from 7 November 1917); Ways and Communications (M. T. Elizarov, from 8 November 1917); State Properties (V. A. Karelin, from 12 December 1917, abolished 11 July 1918); Local Government (V. E. Trutovskii, from 12 December 1917, abolished June 1918); and State Control (K. I. Lander, from 9 May 1919, reorganized as Rabkrin from 7 February 1920).

Members of the institution formed on 26 October were all Bolsheviks (although a high portion of their staff within the commissariats were former tsarist and Provisional Government civil servants, who came to be termed “bourgeois specialists”), but within a few weeks Sovnarkom became a coalition, as a number of members of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries joined the government, some of them in newly created commissariats: A. L. Kolegaev (Commissar of Agriculture, from 24 November 1917); Isaak Steinberg (Commissar of Justice, from 12 December 1917); Karelin (State Properties, from 12 December 1917); Trutovskii (Local Government, from 12 December 1917, abolished June 1918); and P. P. Prosh′ian (Post and Telegraph, from 22 December 1917). The Left-SRs V. A. Algasov (“People’s Commissar without Portfolio but with a Casting Vote,” attached to the Commissariat for Internal Affairs, from 12 December 1917) and M. A. Brilliantov (“Member of the Collegiate of the Commissariat for Finance with Casting Vote,” from 19 January 1918) also joined Sovnarkom. However, all the Left-SRs resigned their portfolios on 26 March 1918, in protest against the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918).

During the civil wars, under Lenin’s chairmanship, Sovnarkom generally acted as the bona fide government of the RSFSR, although its decisions never contradicted policies determined in the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b)/RKP(b), and on occasion (e.g., the debates of January–February 1918 over the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), it was clearly the Central Committee, rather than Sovnarkom, that was prime. Moreover, it seems never to have attempted to influence decisions regarding military affairs and the most closely related matters of supply, which were all decided by the Revvoensovet of the Republic or the Council of Labor and Defense (although there was a considerable overlap of membership between the latter and Sovnarkom).

After nine months of uncertainty, Sovnarkom’s powers were finally defined in the July 1918 Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, although the fact that this document made Sovnarkom responsible before VTsIK and the Congress of Soviets for “the general administration of the affairs of the state” was hardly a definitive clarification. What the constitution did establish, though, was that Sovnarkom was empowered to issue decrees carrying the full force of law when the Congress of Soviets was not in session. The congress would then routinely approve Sovnarkom’s decrees at its next session. (Before the constitution was promulgated, Sovnarkom was, effectively, a provisional government.) From 1921, following Lenin’s illness, however, decision making and political power passed rapidly into the hands of party bodies, notably the Politbiuro of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Indeed, that body, from the day of its foundation (25 March 1919), had begun to impinge upon matters previously decided by Sovnarkom, and the latter degenerated completely into a rubber stamp.

SPECIAL COUNCIL. Founded by General M. V. Alekseev at Ekaterinodar, on 31 August 1918, in accordance with a scheme (“The Statute on the Special Council attached to the Supreme Ruler of the Volunteer Army”) drafted by V. V. Shul′gin and General A. M. Dragomirov, the Special Council attached to the commander in chief of the Volunteer Army—and later the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR)—was “the supreme organ of civil authority” in the White camp in South Russia. The Special Council could trace its roots to the Political Council, established at Novocherkassk in December 1917 by General L. G. Kornilov. It served as an advisory council, first to General Alekseev and then to General A. I. Denikin, in the fields of law making and governance and was a point of contact for and with other anti-Bolshevik polities around Russia and with their representatives abroad. Its structure, powers, and authority were further elaborated by a “Statute on the Special Council Attached to the Main Commander in chief of the AFSR” (ratified by General Denikin on 2 February 1919).

The council’s initial military members were Denikin (first deputy chairman), Dragomirov (second deputy chairman and assistant to the main commander of the army), A. S. Lukomskii (third deputy chairman and assistant to the main commander of the army), and I. P. Romanovskii (chief of staff). At the first meeting of the Special Council, only eight men were in attendance: Dragomirov, Lukomskii, V. A. Lebedev, A. A. Lodyzhenskii, V. A. Stepanov, E. P. Shuberskii, I. O. Geiman, A. A. Neratov, and A. S. Makarenko. The council was gradually supplemented by 11 departmental directors and later, following the second “Statute on the Special Conference,” by 14 of them. By July 1919, this had expanded to a membership of 24 persons (see appendix 2). The Special Council met in two forms, “large” and “small.” The Large Council discussed important questions of state and decided upon the wording of complex draft laws; the Small Council, chaired by Denikin while Alekseev was still active, dealt with routine business. Following the illness and death of Alekseev, the Special Council was chaired (from October 1918 to September 1919) by Dragomirov and then by Lukomskii. Commissions attached to the Special Council were also established: the first was founded in November 1918 to examine the question of the participation of a representative of the Special Council in the Paris Peace Conference; a second (chaired by Shul′gin) was founded in January 1919, to examine nationality affairs; and a third elaborated laws on trade unions, labor, and the land question.

In August 1919, as the AFSR advanced northward, the Special Council transferred its headquarters from Ekaterinodar to Rostov-on-Don; later, as the AFSR retreated in November–December 1919, it too retreated, to Novorossiisk, where it was disbanded by Denikin on 17 December 1919 and replaced by a Government of the Main Commander of the Armed Forces of South Russia. That, in turn, was superseded by General P. N. Wrangel’s Crimean Government of South Russia at Sevastopol′ in April 1920, following the resignation of General Denikin.

SPECIAL MANCHURIAN DETACHMENT. Created in December 1917, around Verkhneudinsk (now Ulan-Ude), by the then Esaul (future Ataman) G. M. Semenov, this was the first organized military force to oppose Soviet rule in eastern Siberia. Its initial complement was some 90 officers, 35 Cossacks, and 40 Buriats, but it grew rapidly as demobilized officers and men of the Transbaikal Cossack Host returned to the region and joined up. By April 1918, Semenov’s force had transferred to the Chinese Eastern Railway zone in Manchuria, establishing its headquarters at Manzhouli (Manchuria) Station, on the Russian border, and consisted of the Mongol-Buriat Cavalry Regiment, two Mongol-Karachen Regiments, the 1st Semenov and the 2nd Manchurian Infantry Regiments, two officer companies, two Serbian companies, and a battalion of Japanese volunteers (in all, some 700 men). It also commanded 2 armored trains and 14 artillery pieces.

In the autumn of 1918, after several less successful incursions into Soviet territory, Japanese forces assisted the division in capturing Verkhneudinsk (20 August 1918) and Chita (26 August 1918). The latter town then became its headquarters. Following Semenov’s (reluctant) subordination to Admiral A. V. Kolchak as supreme ruler, in June 1919, the detachment (by then renamed the Special Manchurian Division) became part of the 6th East Siberian Army Corps of the Russian Army and was stationed along the railway line between Lake Baikal and the Manchurian border. Following the collapse of the Russian Army, on 21 March 1920, it was renamed the Manchurian Riflemen of Ataman Semenov Brigade and became part of the Far Eastern (White) Army. In September 1920, pursued by the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic, which had captured Chita earlier that month, most of its complement followed Semenov across the border into China.

Ataman Semenov commanded the Special Manchurian Detachment throughout its existence, assisted chiefly by the heads of divisions Colonel A. I. Tirbakh, Lieutenant General V. A. Kislitsyn, Major General K. P. Nechaev, and Colonel N. G. Natsvalov, as well as Major General L. N. Skipetrov (who was also chief of staff of the division from 1 September 1918).

SPECIAL TRANSCAUCASIAN COMMITTEE. Also known by its Russian acronym Ozakom (from Osobyi zakavkazskii komitet), the Special Transcaucasian Committee was established by the Russian Provisional Government on 9 March 1917, to replace the authority of the deposed imperial viceroy of the Caucasus, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. Chaired (from 11 March 1917) by the Russian V. A. Kharlamov, and including representatives of the Armenian (Michael Papadjanian), Azeri (Mammad Yusif Jafarov Hajibaba oglu), and Georgian (Kita Abashidze, later Akaki Chkhenkeli) communities, it was described as the highest civil authority in Transcaucasia and claimed juristiction over those parts of the Ottoman Empire occupied by Russian forces (notably, the Administration for Western Armenia). Following the October Revolution, on 15 November 1917, it was succeeded by the Transcaucasian Commissariat and thus can in some senses be regarded as the progenitor of the various independent governments of Transcaucasia during the civil-war years.

SPIRIDONOVA, MARIIA ALEKSANDROVNA (16 October 1884–11 September 1941). One of the most vocal and most persecuted socialist critics of the Soviet government during the civil-war era, M. A. Spiridonova was born at Tambov into the family of a minor (nonhereditary) noble (a collegiate secretary) and graduated from Tambov Gymnasium for Girls in 1902. She began to train as a nurse, but joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) in 1904 and volunteered for terrorist work with its Fighting Organization. In January 1906, she gained national attention when she mortally wounded G. N. Luzhnovskii, a police inspector whom the SRs had condemned to death for the violent suppression of peasant unrest in Tambov guberniia in 1905. Despite the brutality of her act (she shot Luzhnovskii five times, point blank, in the face), she became a national hero and an international cause célèbre, as a consequence of her gender and youth, as well as the stories of her having been beaten, tortured, and even raped, which were spread by her party comrades (perhaps in the knowledge that they were not all true). After a trial in Moscow, she was exiled for life to eastern Siberia, public pressure having persuaded the authorities to commute her original death sentence.

Released from a women’s prison at Nerchinsk following the February Revolution, Spiridonova served briefly as mayor of Chita, where she symbolically dynamited the city prison. She arrived back in Petrograd in May 1917 and quickly became the leader of the left wing of the PSR (although she failed to gain a seat on the party’s Central Committee) and was subsequently the leader of the breakaway Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries. Following the October Revolution, she initially campaigned for an all-socialist coalition during the Vikzhel′ negotiations, but soon became a strong supporter of the Bolshevik–Left-SR coalition government. She was elected to the chair of the Second Congress of Peasants’ Soviets, was chair of the Peasant Section of VTsIK (at the Second, Third, and Fourth Congresses of Soviets) and was also the Bolshevik–Left-SR candidate for the chair of the Constituent Assembly, although she was defeated in that contest by the mainstream PSR candidate, V. M. Chernov. However, during the spring of 1918 she became a tenacious critic of the Soviet government, attacking the Food Army, the first stirrings of the Red Terror, and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (although she had initially supported V. I. Lenin on that issue). At the Sixth Congress of Soviets in July 1918 she (and her party) broke with the Bolsheviks.

Spiridonova was intimately involved in planning the assassination of the German ambassador, Count Wilhelm Mirbach, that sparked the Left-SR Uprising in Moscow. On the evening of 6 July 1918, she went to the congress venue, the Bolshoi Theater, to take responsibility for Mirbach’s killing and hoped to be allowed to speak to the delegates. Instead, she was arrested by the Cheka. She was tried in secret, on 27 November 1918, and sentenced to a year in prison, but the following day was amnestied on the recommendation of the Presidium of VTsIK. She then briefly resumed political activity (and agitation against the Soviet government, while fiercely opposing the Whites), but was rearrested in January 1919, after delivering a speech that was scathingly critical of the Soviet government. She was tried on 24 February 1919, before the Moscow revolutionary tribunal, and was sentenced to confinement in a sanatorium for a year (it being claimed at her trial, by N. I. Bukharin, that she was mentally ill), but in fact, she was placed in a tiny cell in the barracks of the Kremlin guards. She became very ill, but escaped on 2 April 1919, then lived underground until she was rearrested, on 26 October 1920. On 18 November 1921, she was released on condition that she refrain from all political activity, and there is no evidence that she broke this condition, or that she attempted to flee Russia, but she was suddenly rearrested on 16 May 1923 and sentenced to three years of exile. Her exile actually lasted, in effect, for 14 years. Spiridonova subsequently resided, under strict surveillance by the Soviet authorities, at Kaluga (1923–1925), Samarkand (1925–1928), and Tashkent (1928–1930), then was rearrested in 1930 and sentenced to three more years of exile (the term being twice extended) for maintaining illegal contacts abroad; in a sense, the celebrity of her cause had come back to haunt her. Sent to Ufa, she worked as a planner in an agricultural bank and in other economic posts.

On 8 February 1937, Spiridonova was again arrested, falsely accused of terrorist acts and of leading a “counterrevolutionary” organization. She was found guilty at a trial on 7 January 1938 and was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment. She was executed by the NKVD, along with 156 other inmates of Orel prison (among them Cristian Rakovski and veterans of both sides in the civil wars) in the nearby Medved Woods on 11 September 1941, as German forces approached the city. All had been accused of “conducting defeatist activity among the prisoners and plotting to flee the prison in order to renew subversive activities.” A petition for Spiridonova’s posthumous rehabilitation in November 1958 was turned down by the Supreme Prosecutor of the USSR, but in 1990 the 1941 charges against her were rescinded, and in 1992 she was exonerated of all charges dating back to 1918 and was fully rehabilitated.

Staff of the Supreme Ruler. This was the name given to the body created by order of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, which sought to coordinate all White military forces in Siberia (usually dubbed the Russian Army and, from 21 July 1919, the Eastern Front). The institution existed from 24 December 1918 until Kolchak’s “abdication” as supreme ruler on 4 January 1920. It was based at Omsk, but from 17 November 1919, following the Whites’ evacuation of that city, was housed in a carriage of the special train carrying Kolchak and his entourage toward Irkutsk. When Kolchak divested himself of all authority at Nizhneudinsk, on 4 January 1920, and placed himself under the protection of the Czechoslovak Legion, many members of the Staff of the Supreme Ruler took the opportunity to abandon their posts and flee.