Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

The chiefs of the Staff of the Supreme Ruler were D. A. Lebedev (21 November 1918–10 August 1919); M. K. Diterikhs (10 August–6 October 1919); and M. I. Zankevich (17 November–4 January 1920).

STALIN, JOSEPH (IOSIF) VISSARIONOVICH (Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili) (6 December 1878–5 March 1953). The Soviet military and political leader of the civil-war era and subsequent long-term dictator of the USSR, Joseph Stalin, was born into the family of an impoverished cobbler in the eastern Georgian town of Gori. He was raised by his pious mother after his alcoholic father deserted the family; was educated at the local (Russian-speaking) church school; and at the age of 16, as a star pupil, won a scholarship to the Georgian Orthodox Seminary in Tiflis. He was expelled from the seminary in 1899, by which time he had become attracted to Marxism, and thereafter spent his life working for the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (which he joined in 1898) as a “professional revolutionary.” In the case of Stalin (although at this time he was chiefly known as “Koba,” after a fictional Georgian hero, only adopting the soubriquet “Man of Steel” at a later date), as a follower of the Bolsheviks, this meant organizing armed militias, inciting strikes, spreading propaganda, and raising money through bank robberies (“expropriations”), holdups, ransom kidnappings, and extortion. Such activities were frowned upon by the Mensheviks, who were dominant in the Georgian Social-Democratic Labor Party, but were defended by V. I. Lenin, who valued Stalin’s work highly.

“Koba” was arrested and imprisoned and/or exiled on seven occasions before the First World War. (There is some evidence that he was in the employ of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, in this period, but this may have been a diversionary tactic on his part and does not necessarily signify treachery to the party.) During periods of liberty he was elected, at its Prague conference, to the first Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) (17 January 1912), helped found the party newspaper Pravda (“The Truth”), and became the Bolsheviks’ chief spokesman on the nationalities question (apparently as a consequence of his ethnicity, rather than any significant interest on his part in Marxist theories about nationalism). Following his final arrest by the tsar’s police (on 23 February 1913), Stalin remained in exile in Siberia (in the remote district of Turukhansk, northern Eniseisk guberniia).

Stalin was liberated on 2 March 1917, following the February Revolution, and returned to Petrograd, where he was elected to the Russian Bureau of the RSDLP(b) (12 March–31 April 1917) and worked on the editorial board of Pravda. He was also elected to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, on 18 March 1917. In those capacities, alongside L. B. Kamenev, Stalin professed a defensist attitude with regard to the war—something unsurprisingly passed over in histories written during his dictatorship in the USSR—and urged qualified support for the foreign and military policies of the Russian Provisional Government, although he rapidly accepted Lenin’s rejection of these policies upon the Bolshevik leader’s arrival back in Russia in early April 1917. Thereafter, Stalin (who from June 1917 was also a member of VTsIK) undertook numerous assignments on Lenin’s behalf, including arranging the latter’s flight from Petrograd in the aftermath of the July Days. However, he was only cautiously supportive of Lenin during the party debates on the seizure of power prior to the October Revolution, although he did follow Lenin’s line in the debates on peace of early 1918 that led to the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918).

Having been elected to the party Central Committee on 5 August 1917 (and subsequently, from 25 March 1919, its Politbiuro, Orgbiuro, and Secretariat), wherein he would remain until his death, during the civil wars Stalin occupied more important governmental and military posts than any other leading Bolshevik. He worked as People’s Commissar for Nationality Affairs (26 October 1917–7 July 1922), which made him automatically a member of Sovnarkom and gave him an important role in drafting the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1918; a member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (8 October 1918–8 July 1919 and 18 May 1920–1 April 1922); a member of the Central Committee and the foreign committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (22 October 1918–1 March 1919); chairman of the Central Bureau of Muslim Organizations of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (from November 1918); People’s Commissar for State Control of the RSFSR (9 April 1919–7 February 1920); People’s Commissar of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (Rabkrin) of the RSFSR (24 February 1920–27 December 1922); member of the Revvoensovets of the Southern Front (17 September–12 October 1918), the Western Front (6 July–30 September 1919), again the Southern Front (3 October 1919–10 January 1920), and the South-West Front (10 January–1 September 1919); a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Komintern (August 1920–June 1921); and a member of the Council of Labor and Defense of the RSFSR (from October 1920). He also performed innumerable ad hoc functions, such as overseeing the defense of Tsaritsyn against the attacks on it of the Don Cossack Host in summer–autumn 1918 and making a tour of inspection of the 1st Red Army, following its disastrous surrender of Perm′ to the Whites in December 1918.

In all these capacities, what is noticeable about Stalin’s civil-war career is the frequency with which he clashed with L. D. Trotsky (notably during the Tsaritsyn affair of 1918 and the Soviet–Polish War in August 1920), his distaste for the use of military specialists in the Red Army, and his currying of cliques of support in diverse institutions and regions of Soviet Russia. (Among his chief supporters, or clients, were K. E. Voroshilov, A. I. Egorov, and S. M. Budennyi.) He was also closely involved in framing the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and in forcing (by methods that aroused Lenin’s hostility) Soviet Georgia to join the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (the “Georgian affair”). Thus, when he was made General Secretary of the RKP(b) on 3 April 1922, and his support against Trotsky was sought by Kamenev and G. E. Zinov′ev in the political battles to succeed the ailing Lenin, Stalin was well placed to begin the campaign that would obliterate not just Trotsky and his supporters in 1926–1927, but also Kamenev, Zinov′ev, and almost the entire generation of Old Bolsheviks during the Great Purges of the 1930s. (This was despite Lenin’s calls, in January 1923, to have Stalin removed from his post as General Secretary.) Notable, however, among the first wave of Stalin’s victims once his power was firmly established, were the thousands of former military specialists who lost their posts (mostly in military-educational establishments) in 1930 as part of Operation “Spring.” Most were imprisoned and later killed; some were executed immediately. What remained of the Soviet military elite of the civil-war era was then slaughtered during the purge of the Red Army in 1937 (including M. N. Tukhachevskii, I. E. Iakir, I. P. Uborovich, A. I. Kork, and thousands of others).

Stalin was also the moving force behind the industrialization of the USSR and the collectivization of its agriculture, as well as the castration of the Komintern, as he pursued the goal of “Socialism in One Country.” Stalin’s subsequent posts and honors were many (he made himself Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1943 and then Generalissimo of the Soviet Union in 1945, despite his frequently disastrous handling of the war against Hitler), but he is chiefly remembered as the ruthless dictator who spread a reign of terror across the USSR (and after 1945, Eastern Europe), who was responsible for the deaths of untold millions of people and who discredited the Communist movement in the eyes of millions more.

The city of Tsaritsyn, which was renamed Stalingrad on 10 April 1945, was redubbed Volgograd in 1961, as part of the program of de-Stalinization instituted by Stalin’s successor, N. S. Khrushchev. At the same time, Stalin’s body, which following his death had been embalmed and placed alongside that of Lenin in the Red Square Mausoleum, was removed and buried, without ceremony, in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The thousands of other statues and portraits of Stalin across the former Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc have also been removed, particularly, after 1991, in the former non-Russian republics. The one place that a significant post-Soviet memorial remained was in his hometown of Gori, the Joseph Stalin Museum, built (from 1951) around the hovel in which he was raised. However, in the aftermath of the 2008 Soviet–Georgian War, on 24 September 2008 Georgia’s minister of culture, Nikoloz Vacheishvili, announced that the Stalin museum would be transformed into a “Museum of Russian Aggression.” The first signs of this scheme’s realization were manifested on 25 June 2010, when a towering statue of Stalin was removed from a nearby square, and the Georgian government announced that it would be replaced by a monument to the victims of war.

STARK, GEORG (GEORGII) KARLOVICH (20 October 1878–2 March 1950). Captain, second rank (1912), captain, first rank (6 December 1916), rear admiral (28 July 1917). A prominent figure in the White Fleet, G. K. Stark, who was of Swedish (and, ultimately, Scottish) ancestry, was born into a naval family in St. Petersburg and lived in the United States and in Dresden as a boy, before his family returned to Russia, where he graduated from the Naval Cadet Corps (1897). He served mostly thereafter on vessels in the Baltic Fleet, journeying around the world with it during the Russo–Japanese War and sustaining injuries during the Battle of Tsushima (27–28 May 1905). After teaching at the mine-laying school at Kronshtadt (1910–1912), he became a senior officer on the cruiser Avrora (1912–1913), then commander of the destroyers Strashnyi and Donskoi kazak (1914–1916), and finally, commander of a mining division (March–November 1917), all with the Baltic Fleet.

Stark left the service in April 1918 and made his way to Siberia, where he joined the Whites and briefly commanded the Kama Flotilla. On the orders of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, he then formed and commanded the Krasnoiarsk Division (originally Brigade) of naval riflemen (December 1918–January 1920). After a bout of typhus, he went into emigration at Harbin (from June 1920), but on 18 June 1921 he was named commander of the Siberian Flotilla by the Merkulov regime at Vladivostok (the Provisional Priamur Government). As forces of the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic approached Vladivostok on 24 October 1922, on the orders of General M. K. Diterikhs, Stark moved the flotilla to Pos′et Bay, where it took on board the remnants of the Whites’ Zemstvo Host and many civilian refugees and conveyed them to Korea. Stark then commanded a smaller group of vessels from the Siberian Flotilla that moved on to Shanghai and, ultimately, Manila, where the flotilla was disbanded. Stark then went into emigration, living in Paris, where he worked for many years as a taxi driver. He also later served as chairman of the Union of Russian Naval Officers in Emigration (1946–1949). He died in Paris and is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois cemetery.

Starynkevich, Sergei Sazontovich (Sazonovich also SOZONtOVICH) (6 July 1874–1933). One of the few members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) to be granted a ministerial portfolio in a White government, S. S. Starynkevich was born at Lutsk, in Volynsk guberniia. He graduated from the Law Faculty of Moscow University in 1900, after studies that were twice interrupted by periods of administrative exile as a consequence of his political activities. He pursued a career as a barrister in Moscow, but as a talented orator, he became increasingly involved in political work during the 1905 Revolution, as an organizer of the Peasants’ Union and as a prominent member of the Lawyers’ Union. In 1905, he also joined the PSR and worked with the party’s terrorist wing, the Combat Organization. He went abroad in early 1906, to evade arrest, and lived in Warsaw, Munich, and Switzerland, but returned the following year to help organize a revolutionary officers’ organization in Finland. He was arrested in the autumn of 1907 and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, then was exiled to eastern Siberia. He then worked in a legal firm and as a journalist at Irkutsk and became closer to elements on the right of the PSR.

On 9 April 1917, Starynkevich was named procurator of the Irkutsk Legal Chambers; in that capacity, in early 1918 he attempted several times to intervene to temper the “revolutionary justice” being administered in eastern Siberia by the Cheka. For this, he was arrested and imprisoned by the Soviet authorities and received a public reprimand at a revolutionary tribunal. A supporter of the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia, in July 1918 he was named director of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Provisional Siberian Government, and in August 1918 became its minister of justice (in which capacity he supervised the investigation into the execution of the Romanov family at Ekaterinburg). He was also a member of the government’s Administrative Council. In September 1918, he attended the Ufa State Conference and was subsequently named minister of justice of the Ufa Directory (4 November 1918). He remained in that post in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and served also as procurator general of the Government Senate (in fact, he was one of the author’s of the Kolchak regime’s constitution, “The Statute on the Provisional Structure of State Power in Russia,” of 18 November 1918), for which he was ostracized by his party comrades, particularly after the failure of his ministry to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Omsk massacre in December 1918. However, Starynkevich expressed himself as increasingly frustrated by the illegalities of the White military—its propensity for samosud—and like other moderates in the government (A. N. Gattenberger, I. I. Serebrennikov, V. V. Sapozhnikov, et al.), felt obliged to resign his post, in the spring of 1919.

Starynkevich left office on 2 May 1919 and arrived at Vladivostok in early September of that year. There is some evidence that he had been invited to involve himself in the organizations that planned the rising at Vladivostok against the Kolchak regime in November 1919 (the Gajda putsch), but he left Russia on 19 September 1919, before those plans reached fruition. In emigration he lived at Tsuruga (in Japan) and later in France, where he involved himself in relief work among Russian refugees.

STATE ECONOMIC CONFERENCE. First convened at Omsk on 22 November 1918 by Admiral A. V. Kolchak, this body was intended as a forum for the discussion of economic issues and a source of expert advice for the Omsk government and its supreme ruler. Its main task was to examine issues relating to the supply of the Russian Army, particularly in the wake of the withdrawal from the front of the Czechoslovak Legion and its well-developed commissary network. The SEC was chaired by the Petrograd financier S. G. Feodos′ev (who had been state comptroller in the imperial government from 1 December 1916 to 1 March 1917) and included representatives of the Siberian cooperative movement and local branches of the Congress of Trade and Industry, as well as the ministers of war, finance, food, supply, trade and industry, and ways and communications of the Omsk government. However, it gradually atrophied and went into recess on 21 May 1919, pending a review of its statutes.

The SEC was reconvened on 19 June 1919, with a slightly broader and more democratic membership and with a more clearly defined constitution and remit, including the right to review and comment upon (but not veto) all government legislation. From late August, however, when the SEC demanded still wider powers from the supreme ruler and was rebuffed, it again ceased to function. It was reconvened at Irkutsk, on 8 December 1919, following the Kolchak regime’s relocation to that city, but government ministers walked out when some delegates demanded that the regime make peace with the Bolsheviks, and thereafter the conference ceased to operate.

State Guard (of the ARMED FORCES OF SOUTH RUSSIA). This force was created on the orders of the White leader General A. I. Denikin, on 25 March 1919, to fulfill military-police functions on the territory occupied by the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR). It included provincial, city, and district subsections, as well as special railway, port, and river detachments, and was jointly controlled by the guard command and the local civilian authorities. The former were also answerable to the chief of the Directorate of Internal Affairs of the Special Council of the commander in chief of the AFSR. Among its most powerful units were the Black Sea (1,920 men), Stavropol′ (3,342 men), and Ekaterinoslav provincial brigades.

In command of the State Guard of the AFSR (from 19 September 1919) was General N. N. Martos. Its chief of staff was General D. N. Parkhomov (from 6 November 1919).

STATE UNITY COUNCIL OF RUSSIA. This anti-Bolshevik organization was ostensibly a multiparty coalition (like the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, the National Center, and others), but it was dominated by right-wing Kadets and other Rightist elements and never succeeded in attracting support from the Left. Nevertheless, the Council’s 45 members claimed to represent the State Duma and the State Council of the imperial regime, as well as city dumas, the zemstvos, trade and industry organizations, the Russian Orthodox Church, academic organizations, and so forth. Chairman of the organization, and head of its nine-man Central Bureau, was the landowner Baron V. V. Meller-Zakomel′skii, but among its leading members were such prominent liberal figures as P. N. Miliukov, A. V. Krivovshein, and N. S. Tret′iakov.

The State Unity Council was created at Kiev in late October 1918, chiefly by those (like Miliukov and Krivoshein) who (paradoxically, given the council’s title) held that, for the sake of Russia’s “unity,” even collaboration with Germany and Ukrainian nationalists could be condoned, if that would hasten the collapse of the Bolsheviks. However, the following month the group sent a delegation (led by Meller-Zakomel′skii, Miliukov, and Krivoshein) to the Jassy Conference, and from December 1918 (as the socialist Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic captured Kiev), it was centered at Odessa. There (in light of the collapse of the Central Powers), it sought, unsuccessfully, to influence the direction and purposes of Allied intervention. The organization collapsed in the wake of the withdrawal of French and Greek forces from Odessa in April 1919.

Stavropol′ Soviet Republic. Formed on 1 January 1918, as a constituent territory of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, this short-lived polity claimed governance over the former Stavropol′ guberniia of the Russian Empire and was centered on the city of Stavropol′. It was governed by a Central Executive Committee and a Sovnarkom (under A. A. Ponomarev) that instituted a program of Sovietization of the region, nationalizing large industries, confiscating large landholdings, and so forth, and created its own military formations (the 1st Red Army Battalion and the 1st Stavropol′ Regiment of the Peasants’ Revolutionary Army). However, it faced considerable opposition from other political forces at Stavropol′, notably the local organization of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, which managed briefly to arrest Ponomarev and other leaders of the republic on 28 April 1918. An Extraordinary Stavropol′ guberniia Congress of Soviets (of 9–14 May 1918) then voted to replace the Sovnarkom with a presidium (led by the Bolshevik I. Deineko), but anti-Soviet risings could not be quelled. Following a major rising of peasants at Sviato-Krestovsk in June 1918, the republic’s leadership decided to pool its resources with other Soviet formations in the region, and at the First Congress of Soviets of the North Caucasus (Ekaterinodar, 5–7 July 1918), the Stavropol′ Soviet Republic merged with the Kuban–Black Sea Soviet Republic and the Terek Soviet Republic to form the North Caucasus Soviet Republic.

Štefánik, Milan Rastislav (21 July 1880–4 May 1919). General (French Army, 1916). The Slovak statesman and scientist Milan Štefánik played a significant part in the early stages of the “Russian” Civil Wars, as a leading member of the Czechoslovak National Council. He was born at Kosaras, in Hungary (now Košariská in western Slovakia), into the family of a Lutheran priest, and studied at the Charles University in Prague, graduating in 1904 with a PhD in astronomy. At university, he had become acquainted with Tomáš Masaryk and was convinced of the need for a joint Czech and Slovak struggle against their Austro-Hungarian oppressors. He subsequently found employment at the prestigious Observatoire de Paris-Meudon in France, and over the following years participated in and led astronomical expeditions across the world (to North Africa, Russia, Central Asia, the Americas, and Oceania). His scientific findings in astrophysics and solar physics won him world renown before the First World War, but he was also cultivating political friendships and campaigning for the cause of “Czecho-Slovak” independence. He became a French citizen in 1912, and in 1914 was made a Grand Officier of the Legion of Honor. He volunteered for the French Army in 1914, and in May 1915 was sent to Serbia as a pilot. He returned to Paris at the end of the year and, with Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, founded the Czechoslovak National Council, becoming its vice chairman in 1917. In that capacity, he traveled to Russia in 1917, to help organize the Czechoslovak Legion and to bring it under Czechoslovak control.

After further travels in France and Italy to organize Czechoslovak forces and to the United States to propagandize for the cause, Štefánik traveled to Siberia in May 1918, with the aim of having the legion form the basis of a new Eastern Front, following Soviet Russia’s withdrawal from the war through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). He had some success in December 1918, persuading some units that had withdrawn from the Urals Front to fight on, but he had long since concluded that the legion would and could not fight much longer, and he returned to Europe in early 1919 to campaign among Allied leaders for its immediate repatriation. By this time (since 14 October 1918), he was minister of defense in the newly independent Czechoslovakia, struggling to maximize Slovak autonomy within the new state, but had clashed repeatedly with Beneš and other Czechs over that issue and over foreign policy.

Štefánik died in a plane crash near Pozsonyivánka (now Ivanka pri Dunaji), near Bratislava. The plane was shot down, possibly by accident, but the perpetrators were never identified, and some Slovak nationalists continue to insist that Štefánik was assassinated by Czech extremists. In 1927–1928, a gigantic memorial to a man now remembered as the father of his nation was constructed (to a design by Dušan Jurkovič) on the Bradlo hill, at Brezová pod Bradlom. There are many other memorials of Štefánik, including identical statues of him in an aviator’s outfit on Petřín hill in Prague and atop a war memorial in Paulhan (Hérault department, Languedoc-Roussillon), France; a bust (alongside one of Masaryk) at Košice, Slovakia; and another (raised in 1922, by M. Frico Motoska) in Wade Park, Cleveland, Ohio. There is also a Place Général Stéfanik in Paris’s 16th Arrondisement. In 1993, Bratislava’s international airport was renamed in Štefánik’s honor, and at Košariská, in his childhood home, the Slovak National Museum was established, which also bears his name. Since 2 February 2004, the Štefánik Cross has been awarded to Slovak citizens who have served in the defense of the Slovak Republic, by saving a human life or saving considerable material wealth by sacrificing their lives.

STEINBERG (SHTEINBERG), ISAAK NAHMAN (ZAKHAROVICH) (13 July 1888–2 January 1957). A leading socialist critic of the Soviet regime, which he briefly served during the civil wars, Isaak Steinberg was born at Dvinsk, the son of a Jewish merchant. He entered Moscow University in 1906 and in the same year joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, although his political inclinations bordered on anarchism. In 1907, he was arrested for his political and journalistic activities and sentenced to two years of exile at Tobol′sk, on completion of which he moved to Germany, where he graduated from the Law Faculty of the University of Heidelberg (1910). He returned to Russia and worked as a lawyer, appearing in a number of high profile cases as the representative of Jewish victims of persecution. He adopted an antiwar (defeatist) stance in 1914, and was frequently arrested thereafter. At the time of the February Revolution, he was working as a lawyer at Ufa, where he subsequently became a leading figure of the breakaway Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries (as head of their Ufa guberniia committee and a member of the party’s Central Committee).

In November 1917, Steinberg was elected to the Constituent Assembly, and from 12 December 1917 to 18 March 1918, he served as people’s commissar for justice in the Bolshevik–Left-SR Soviet government, but resigned in protest against the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). He subsequently became an arch-critic of the Soviet regime, in particular the Red Terror (once commenting to V. I. Lenin that it would be more honest to rename the People’s Commissariat for Justice “the People’s Commissariat for Social Extermination”). He journeyed to South Russia in 1918, to advocate a partisan war against the Austro-German intervention, and subsequently lived underground on Soviet territory.

Arrested by the Cheka in February 1919, and constantly hounded by the Soviet authorities, Steinberg went into emigration in Germany in 1923, where he was active in the so-called 2½ International. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Steinberg moved to London, where he became a cofounder of the Freeland League, which sought to find a safe haven for European Jews fleeing the Nazis. A lifelong critic of the Zionist movement, he sought to establish a self-governing Jewish settlement outside the Middle East and directed most of his efforts to obtaining permission to settle Jews in the northern reaches of Western Australia, basing himself in Perth from 1939 to 1943. This project (the “Kimberley Plan”) came to nothing, although Steinberg labored at it until his death, in New York, in 1957. His son, Leo Steinberg (born 1920), became an influential art historian.

Stepanov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (2 May 1869–19 January 1949). Major general (1915), lieutenant general (23 May 1919). The much-maligned minister of war of the Whites’ Omsk government, N. A. Stepanov was a graduate of the 1st Cadet Corps (1886), the Mikhail Artillery School (1889), the Academy of the General Staff (1900), and the Cavalry Officers School (1902). He then occupied numerous senior staff posts (including a term on the staff of the commander in chief of the Russian Army during the Russo–Japanese War), before becoming a professor at the academy in 1907. From 1912, he served as chief of staff to the 6th Cavalry Division, transferring to the staff of the main commander in chief of the Russian Army in 1915, where he served as an orderly, and on 27 December 1916, he was named chief of the Military-Marine Directorate of the staff of the commander of the Baltic Fleet.

Following the October Revolution (by which time he was chief of staff of the 4th Cavalry Corps), Stepanov moved to South Russia and joined the Volunteer Army, acting as chief of the Military-Marine Directorate on the staff of General A. S. Lukomskii, and from February 1918, as chief of staff of the Forces of the Rostov District. He then journeyed to Harbin, in Manchuria, to liaise with the Far Eastern Committee of General D. L. Khorvat, before transferring to Omsk to serve as assistant minister of war to the Ufa Directory and then (from 18 November 1918) the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. On 5 January 1919, he was named minister of war in the Omsk regime, in which capacity he oversaw the mobilization of Siberia’s population and resources in preparation for Kolchak’s spring offensive. However, he was in constant conflict (over balancing the needs of the front and the rear) with the ambitious chief of staff of Kolchak’s forces, General D. A. Lebedev, and also gained a reputation as a martinet, who was more interested in procedure than action. (According to the head of the British Military Mission in Siberia, General Alfred Knox, Stepanov suffered from “a congenital reluctance to decide anything.”) Kolchak, however, seems to have held him in high regard, and although Lebedev was able to engineer his removal from the war ministry on 23 May 1919, he was at the same time promoted by the supreme ruler to the rank of lieutenant general and placed in command of the Mid-Siberian Corps. Stepanov left that post in August 1919 and was sent on a mission to northwest Russia to liaise with General N. N. Iudenich. By the time Stepanov arrived in Europe, however, Iudenich’s efforts had been thwarted by the Red Army, and his North-West Army was about to be disarmed and interned in Estonia. Stepanov therefore went into emigration. He lived briefly in Serbia (from 1922), before settling in France during the Second World War, but seems to have played no significant part in émigré military life.

Stepanov, Vasilii Aleksandrovich (1871/1872/1873–1920). One of the prominent Kadets who supported the White regime in South Russia, V. A. Stepanov was born into an impoverished noble family and was a graduate of the 1st Tiflis Gymnasium, St. Petersburg University (1893), and the Mining Institute (1897). He subsequently worked as a mining engineer in the Donbass and the Urals, becoming director of the Bogoslovsk Mining District. He was also a member of the Kadet Party from its early days (situating himself on its left wing and serving on its Central Committee from 1916), and from 1907 to 1917 was a deputy in the Third and Fourth State Dumas, representing Perm′ guberniia. As secretary of the Kadet Duma caucus in the Fourth Duma, and as a Mason, he worked to unite elements of the opposition across party lines. In 1917, he served as deputy minister of trade and industry (and subsequently as director of that ministry) in the Russian Provisional Government and led the Military Commission of the Kadets.

Following the October Revolution, Stepanov took an active part in organizing and funding the dispatch of officers to the Don region to join the nascent Volunteer Army. On 28 November 1917, he was arrested by the Cheka, but was soon released. He then moved to Moscow and was active in all the major cross-party, anti-Bolshevik underground organizations that were founded during the spring of 1918: the Right Center, the Nationalist Center, and the Union for the Regeneration of Russia. In August 1918, he traveled to Ekaterinodar to join the Don Civil Council of General M. V. Alekseev. As state controller in the Special Council of General A. I. Denikin in 1918–1919, he spoke out in favor of military dictatorship and the restoration of a (constitutional) monarchy, was regarded as an expert on the nationalities question, and was one of the authors of the Denikin regime’s “constitution,” “The Provisional Statute on the Governance of the Regions Occupied by the Volunteer Army” (2 February 1919).

Stepanov was evacuated from Novorossiisk in February 1920 and subsequently traveled to Paris as an advocate of the White cause. In May 1920, he returned to Crimea to inform the government of General P. N. Wrangel of the mood in the Allied capitals; he was on his way back to France by sea when he died suddenly, of unknown causes.

STEPIN (STEPIN′SH), ALEKSANDR (ARTUR) KARLOVICH (1886–29 February 1920). Ensign (1912), lieutenant (1916). The Red commander A. K. Stepin was born into a Latvian peasant family at Ascheraden (now Aizkraukle), in central Livland guberniia, and participated in workers’ strikes and demonstrations during the 1905 Revolution. He was mobilized into the army in 1907 and served with distinction during the First World War (winning three St. George’s Crosses for valor). Following the February Revolution of 1917, he was elected as head of his regiment by its soldiers. He joined the Red Army in 1918 and the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919, and led Red units around Balash and Kamyshin on the Volga, then became commander of the 14th Rifle Division (January–June 1919). From 16 June 1919, he commanded the 9th Red Army, but contracted typhus and had to give up his post on 9 February 1920. Stepin died shortly afterward and was buried at Kamensk-Shatinsk, near Rostov-on-Don. The 14th Rifle Division was subsequently renamed in his honor.

Stevens, John Frank (25 April 1853–2 June 1943). One of the most successful and renowned American engineers of the 20th century, known as “Big Smoke” for his love of cigars, John F. Stevens played an interesting part in the “Russian” Civil Wars. He was born in Maine and had little formal education, but worked his way up the railway engineering profession, becoming chief engineer of the Great Northern Railway in 1895. In 1905, he was hired by President Theodore Roosevelt as chief engineer on the Panama Canal. Having completed the railway infrastructure of that project, however, he unexpectedly resigned in 1907. In May 1917, he was appointed by President Wilson to lead an advisory committee of railway experts that was dispatched to Russia to assist the Provisional Government and was subsequently placed at the head of the 300-strong Russian Railway Service Corps of American railwaymen that was to be sent into Russia via Siberia. However, the corps arrived at Vladivostok in November 1917, just as the Bolsheviks took power, and Stevens was obliged to evacuate to Nagasaki, returning to Russia only in the summer of 1918, as Allied intervention in Siberia started.

In January 1919, under the Inter-Allied Railway Agreement, Stevens was named chairman of the Technical Board of the Inter-Allied Railway Commission, based at Harbin. In that role, he was nominally subordinate to the Allied diplomats on the commission and to its chair, the minister of communications of the Omsk government, L. A. Ustrugov, but in effect the entire Trans-Siberian railway system was placed under Stevens’s control. He had some success in bringing order to the network and in increasing traffic (not least through the introduction of a centralized dispatching circuit from Vladivostok to Omsk, to replace the cumbersome station-to-station relay system previously used by the Russians), but his successes came too late to assist significantly in the White war effort and served only to rouse the jealousy and hostility of local administrators.

Stevens retired in 1923 (although he still engaged in consultancy work), was elected president of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1927, and died at Pinehurst, North Carolina, in 1943, at the age of 90.

STOGOV, NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH (10 September 1873–7 December 1959). Colonel (December 1908), major general (7 February 1915), lieutenant general (29 April 1917). A senior figure in both the Red Army and the White movement in South Russia, N. N. Stogov was the son of a merchant and a graduate of the Nicholas Cadet Corps (1891), the Constantine Artillery School (1893), and the Academy of the General Staff (1900). After graduating from the academy, he served in various staff posts (including senior adjutant on the staff of the Warsaw Military District, September 1904–March 1909), before joining the quartermaster general’s section of the General Staff of the Russian Army. During the First World War, he initially worked on the staff of the 1st Finnish Rifle Brigade and then commanded the 3rd Finnish Rifle Regiment, before becoming quartermaster general (from 15 April 1915) and then chief of staff (from 25 September 1916) of the 8th Army. In these latter capacities, Stogov was a close advisor to both General A. A. Brusilov and General A. M. Kaledin. His star rose further under the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, as he became commander of the 16th Army Corps and then, following the Kornilov affair, replaced General S. L. Markov as chief of staff of the South-West Front.

Following the October Revolution, Stogov briefly commanded the South-West Front. He was mobilized into the Red Army in early 1918 and served as chief of Vseroglavshtab (8 May–2 August 1918). He subsequently worked as an administrator in the Soviet military archives. Since early 1918, however, he had been involved in the anti-Soviet underground work of the National Center and had been named one of the leaders of the Volunteer Army’s Moscow Region. By some accounts, he was arrested by the Cheka in April 1919 and imprisoned in the Butyrki prison and the Andronikov monastery in Moscow. Then he was either released in the autumn of 1919 and fled, or merely fled (by some accounts via Poland), to South Russia, where he joined the Armed Forces of South Russia. After organizing the defenses of Rostov-on-Don, he served as chief of staff of the Kuban Army (29 December 1919–February 1920) and subsequently served in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel as commandant of Sevastopol′ and commander of the Forces of the Rear Region (May–November 1920).

Following the evacuation of Crimea by the Whites, Stogov lived at Zemun, Belgrade, and then, from 1924, in Paris, where he worked in a factory. He was also deputy chief (from 1928) and then chief (from 6 July 1930 to 1934) of the Military Chancellery of ROVS, as well as being involved with numerous other émigré organizations. He also contributed frequently to the ROVS journal Chasovoi (“The Sentinel”). He is buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Paris.

Strandman, Otto August (30 November 1875–5 February 1941). A prominent nationalist during the Estonian War of Independence, Otto Strandman was born at Wierland (Virumaa, eastern Estland guberniia) and was a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1901). He worked as a lawyer, before being forced into exile in Western Europe (1905–1909) to escape persecution for his part in autonomist circles (the predecessors to the Estonian Labor Party) during the 1905 Revolution. He returned to Russia in 1909 and resumed his career as a barrister, becoming prosecutor of the Revel District Court in 1917. Following the February Revolution of 1917, as Estonia attempted to secure its autonomy from Russia, Strandman was a member of the Estonian Provincial Assembly, the Maapäev, and following the October Revolution became its chairman (25 October–27 November 1917). He was arrested by the occupying German military authorities in early 1918, but later resumed his political activities as minister of justice, minister of agriculture, prime minister (8 May–18 November 1919), and minister of war (1920–1921) of the provisional government of Estonia, as it battled for independence from Soviet Russia.

Strandman remained active in Estonian politics during the interwar period (serving as president, 1929–1931) and undertook numerous missions abroad. He committed suicide in 1941, rather than submit to arrest by the invading Soviet forces. He is buried in the Siselinna Cemetery, Tallinn.

STREKOPYTOV UPRISING. This is the name given to the anti-Bolshevik uprising among units of the 8th Rifle Division of the Red Army around Gomel of 24–29 March 1919, led by Ensign M. A. Strekopytov (according to Soviet sources, a member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries). The rebels, who demanded an end to War Communism and the transfer of power to the Constituent Assembly, seized Gomel and several surrounding villages and arrested a number of local Soviet leaders. Within a few days, however, they had been driven from the region by Red forces withdrawn from the Western Front. Strekopytov and his closest supporters were said to have escaped into Poland.

STROD, IVAN IAKOVLEVICH (29 March 1894–19 August 1937). Ensign (1916). A much-lauded Red hero of the civil wars, I. Ia. Strod was born at Ludza in Latgale (eastern Latvia), the son of a Latvian Feldscher. He fought in the First World War and won the Cross of St. George on no fewer than four occasions.

Strod volunteered for the Red Army in early 1918, and was active on the Eastern Front and then in Siberia with the partisan detachment of N. A. Kalandarishvili, but was captured by the Whites and imprisoned at Olekminsk (November 1918–December 1919). He was released following the collapse of the anti-Bolshevik government of A. V. Kolchak and subsequently served with several Red Guard and partisan detachments in the Far East. In October 1920, he was placed in command of a cavalry detachment of the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic, and in February–March 1923, led the Red forces that crushed the Iakutsk Revolt and captured the White general V. N. Pepeliaev. Having won the Order of the Red Banner on three occasions, Strod retired in 1927, due to ill health. He also joined the All-Union Communist Party in 1927. Thereafter, he worked for Osoaviakhim (the Union of Societies of Assistance of Defense and Aviation-Chemical Construction of the USSR) at Tomsk.

Strod’s fame did not prevent him being arrested, on 4 February 1937, and subsequently executed during the purges. He was posthumously rehabilitated, on 23 July 1957, and a general cargo ship built in 1975 (and still in service out of Vladivostok) was named in his honor.

Struve, Petr Berngardovich (26 January 1870–22 February 1944). The son of the Baltic German vice governor of Perm guberniia and a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1895), P. B. Struve was a prominent philosopher, economist, historian, and political activist who offered advice and support to the White leaders in the “Russian” Civil Wars. He was elected to the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences in 1916, but was expelled (in absentia) by the Soviet authorities in 1928.

From the early 1890s, Struve had been active and influential in social-democratic circles in the Russian capital (the young V. I. Lenin was one of his admirers), and by the middle of that decade was acknowledged as the leading theorist of “legal Marxism.” In 1898, he wrote the founding charter of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, but his sympathies were evolving toward liberalism, and he went abroad in 1901 to found and edit (from 1902) the influential liberal journal Osvobozhdenie (“Liberation”). Struve returned to Russia in October 1905 and was one of the cofounders of the Kadets. Appalled by what he perceived as the irrational destructiveness of the Russian people and the unreasoning intransigence of the intelligentsia during the 1905 Revolution, he served from 1905 to 1915 as the leader and spokesman of the right wing of the party’s Central Committee, and in 1907, he was elected as a Kadet deputy to the Second State Duma. Following that Duma’s dissolution, he abandoned active politics and devoted himself to scholarship, becoming a professor at St. Petersburg University in 1913. He was also involved in numerous publishing projects before the revolutions of 1917, including editing the leading liberal newspaper Russkaia mysl′ (“Russian Thought”) and inspiring the hugely influential collection of essays Vekhi (“Signposts,” 1909), a critique of the Russian intelligentsia’s radical and rationalist traditions. He was a staunch defensist during the First World War, eventually (on 8 June 1915) resigning from the Kadets in protest against the party’s criticisms of the government.

Struve played only a secondary role in politics during 1917, as director of the Economic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Provisional Government, but following the October Revolution, he became a vocal opponent of the Soviet regime and an advocate of armed struggle against it and moved immediately to South Russia to join the political administration of the Volunteer Army. When Red forces drove the Volunteers out of the Don territory and onto the First Kuban (Ice) March, however, he returned to Moscow to live underground. In 1918, he contributed to the sequel to Vekhi, Iz glubiny (“From the Depths”) and joined one of the most influential anti-Bolshevik underground organizations, the Right Center, before (having tried and failed to find a safe route to Arkhangel′sk) fleeing to Finland in December 1918, both to escape arrest and to offer political advice to General N. N. Iudenich. There, from January 1919, he was a member of the Kadet-monarchist Political Conference, based at Helsinki. In 1919, he moved to Paris and was connected to the Russian Political Conference, before returning to South Russia to edit the mouthpiece of the White regime of General A. I. Denikin, the newspaper Velikaia Rossiia (“Great Russia”), and to work with the White intelligence service, Osvag. Together with A. V. Krivovshein, Struve was one of the closest political advisors of General P. N. Wrangel, and from April to November 1920, was director of foreign affairs of the South Russian Government. He was evacuated, with the rest of the Wrangel regime, to Turkey in November 1920, and moved from there to Bulgaria (1921), Czechoslovakia (1922–1923), and Berlin (1923–1926), before finally settling in Paris, as an influential and busy teacher, publicist, and writer. In emigration, Struve edited the newspapers Ruuskaia mysl′ (“Russian Thought”) and Vozrozhdenie (“Regeneration”) and remained a staunch opponent of the Soviet government, but during the Second World War, he excoriated collaborators with the Nazis. Struve was the author of some 660 published works.

Stučka, Pēteris (Stuchka, Petr Ivanovich) (26 July 1865–25 January 1932). The prolific writer and prominent Soviet jurist Pēteris Stučka was also head of the Bolshevik regime in Latvia during the Latvian War of Independence. Of Latvian peasant stock, he was born at Kokenhausen (Koknese), in Livland guberniia. After graduating from the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1888), he worked as an assistant advocate in Riga and was editor of the progressive newspaper Dienas Lapa (“The Daily News”). He was exiled for five years in the 1890s for his political activities, before returning to Riga to found what was to become the Latvian branch of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1904, aligning himself with the Bolsheviks. In 1917, he became a member of the Petersburg Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) and worked on the editorial board of the party newspaper, Pravda (“The Truth”).

Following the October Revolution, Stučka worked in the People’s Commissariat for Justice (and served as commissar for justice from 18 March to 22 August 1918), drafting numerous Soviet laws, including that of 10 November 1917 abolishing the civil ranks of the imperial era, and in July 1918 prepared the draft instruction on revolutionary tribunals. He returned to Latvia at the end of that year, as chairman of the Sovnarkom of the newly proclaimed Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic (4 December 1918–22 May 1919) and chairman of its central executive committee (6 March 1919–13 January 1920), operating latterly from Latgale in opposition to the nationalist government in Riga and the Baltic Landeswehr. With the establishment of the independent, nationalist Latvian Republic, he moved to Moscow to become deputy people’s commissar for justice. He also worked in various other Soviet institutions, including the Communist Academy, and from 1923 until his death was chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Stučka was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. After his death, numerous places and institutions (including, from 1958 to 1990, the Latvian State University) were renamed in his honor.

SUBBOTNIKI. This was the term used in Soviet society to describe performers of voluntary, unpaid work for the state (literally, “Saturdayers,” after the day on which such labor was usually performed), as well as the days themselves. The movement (sometimes termed “Bolshevik Saturdays” or “Communist Saturdays”) was said to have begun spontaneously, on 12 April 1919, among 13 Bolsheviks and 2 other workers at Moscow’s Sortirovochnaia railway depot (part of the Moscow–Kazan′ Railway), who donated 10 hours’ labor to the repair of three locomotives. Their efforts were subsequently praised by V. I. Lenin in his pamphlet Velikii pochin (“A Great Initiative,” 28 June 1919), and the practice became widespread during the autumn of 1919, at the height of the advances toward Moscow and Petrograd of the White forces of A. I. Denikin and N. N. Iudenich, respectively. A “Week of the Front,” in January 1920, saw a further growth in the practice, and on 1 May 1920, the first All-Russian Communist Saturday was held. On that day, even the highest Bolshevik leaders joined the shock workers, including Lenin, who helped to clear building rubble from the Moscow Kremlin, a scene depicted in a famous (and much copied) painting by V. G. Krikhatskii, Lenin at the First Subbotnik, which features Lenin “helping” to carry a very large log. Subbotniki were also the focus of V. V. Maiakovskii’s poem Khorosho (“Good”). Undoubtedly the Subbotniki reflected to some degree the revolutionary enthusiasm of the Russian working classes, but they were also exploited by the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Soviet state to mobilize the country, and the “voluntary” nature of Saturday labor became tainted with obligation and even compulsion.

Sükhbaatar (SUHEBATOR) Damdin (2 February 1893–20 February 1923). One of the key figures in Mongolia’s struggle for independence and a military leader of the Mongolian revolution of 1921, Sükhbaatar (“Axe Hero”) was born in the chiefly Chinese trading settlement of Maimaicheng, near Urga (Ulaanbaatar). His father was a laborer. After some years of work as a drover and brief religious schooling, during the revolution of 1911 he was drafted into the Mongolian Army, and from 1912 was trained in the Russian military school at Khujirbulan, before serving on Mongolia’s eastern border. In 1918, for reasons that remain unclear, he was transferred to a government printing office.

In 1919, when China seized the opportunity of the civil wars in Russia to reincorporate Mongolia into its territory, Sükhbaatar joined one of the groups that would form the Mongolian People’s (i.e., Communist) Party on 25 June 1920. The following month, he (along with Khorloogiin Choibalsan) was part of a Mongol delegation that conveyed a letter from the Bogdo Khan to the Soviet authorities in Irkutsk, requesting assistance against the Chinese. When the renegade White forces of Roman Ungern von Sternberg entered Mongolia in late 1920, Sükhbaatar returned to Mongolia and was placed in command of the Mongolian People’s Partisans (9 February 1921). He was also elected to the new Provisional Government of Mongolia (13 March 1921). On 18 March 1921, he succeeded in driving the Chinese out of Khiatka, a day still celebrated as Army Day in Mongolia. Over the following months, he commanded Mongolian forces, in alliance with the Red Army and the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic, in battles against the Chinese and Ungern, capturing Urga on 6 June 1921, and on 11 July 1921 was named minister of war in a new Mongolian government. On 5 November 1921, he was one of the signatories of the Soviet–Mongolian Treaty of Friendship in Moscow, where he met V. I. Lenin.

Sükhbaatar died suddenly, in early 1923, amid rumors of antigovernment plots, and theories persist that he was poisoned. In 1924, the Mongolian capital was renamed Ulaanbaatar (“Red Hero”) in his honor, and many statues of him were commissioned and raised (including an impressive equestrian one in Sükhbaatar Square, in the capital, that was coated in bronze in 2008). His portrait also adorned numerous Mongolian postage stamps, coins, and banknotes, and his name was given to a province, a district, and a city in Mongolia. In 1954, his remains were exhumed from his grave at Altan Ölgii and reinterred in a grandiose mausoleum (modeled on that of Lenin) on Sükhbaatar Square in the capital. When the mausoleum was dismantled in 2005, Sükhbaatar’s remains were cremated, and his ashes were reburied at Altan Ölgii.

SUKIN, IVAN IVANOVICH (1890–?). One of the most powerful and controversial figures of White Siberia, little is known of I. I. Sukin’s background before his appearance as an assistant secretary at the Russian embassy in Constantinople in 1914, apart from the fact that he graduated from the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée in 1911. In 1917, he was secretary at the Russian embassy in Washington, in which capacity he met Admiral A. V. Kolchak during the latter’s mission to the United States in the summer of 1917.

Arriving in Siberia in October 1918, Sukin became one of the key conspirators in the Omsk coup. He probably enjoyed a closer personal relationship with Kolchak than any other minister and was soon made head of the Diplomatic Section of the Staff of the Supreme Ruler. From January 1919, he was in practical control of Kolchak’s foreign policy, as assistant minister of foreign affairs in the Omsk government (S. D. Sazonov, in Paris, was the nominal minister) and director of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A close associate of the powerful minister of finance, I. A. Mikhailov, Sukin was one of the most influential political figures in Siberia (although opponents regarded him variously as an inexperienced fool, a poseur, and a snob). He set as his main task the cleansing of the last vestiges of Siberian regionalism from the Omsk government and the promotion of its institutions as truly all-Russian in ambition and capacity. However, when his diplomacy failed to achieve the official recognition of the Kolchak regime by the Allies, a meeting of the Council of Ministers on 12 August 1919 passed a vote of no confidence in him. Kolchak, however, turned down the request of Prime Minister P. V. Vologodskii that Sukin be dismissed. Thus, he held onto his job until the final days of the White movement in Siberia. In December 1919, Kolchak’s last prime minister, V. N. Pepeliaev, was planning to prosecute Sukin for corruption, but as the government fell apart at Irkutsk, Sukin slipped away, according to some accounts, disguised as an American Red Cross nurse. In 1920, he served as director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Maritime Zemstvo Government in Vladivostok and subsequently emigrated via China to the United States, where he is rumored to have found employment in a bank. His subsequent fate remains unknown.

Sukin, Nikolai Timofeevich (23 November 1878–1937). Colonel (15 August 1916), major general (18 August 1918), lieutenant general (1920). A Cossack general who played a leading role in the White forces in Siberia, N. T. Sukin was born into a high-ranking family of the Orenburg Cossack Host and was a graduate of the Orenburg Nepliuevskii Cadet Corps, the Mikhail Artillery School (1899), and the Academy of the General Staff (1908). After serving in a Cossack mounted artillery unit, in the First World War he rose to the post of senior adjutant on the staff of the quartermaster general of the 1st Army (from 2 September 1916).

Sukin returned to his home territory following the October Revolution. In the forces of the Provisional Siberian Government, the Ufa Directory, and the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, he served as chief of staff of the Urals Independent (from 26 August 1918, 3rd Urals Army) Corps (14 July 1917–3 January 1919), before becoming commander of the 6th Urals Corps of the Western Army (3 January–26 May 1919). In February 1919, at the Third Extraordinary Krug of the Orenburg Cossack Host, he submitted a memorandum that was sharply critical of the Host ataman, General A. I. Dutov. For this, he was expelled from the Host, but he still played an active part in the spring offensive of Kolchak’s forces, being praised and decorated by the supreme ruler.

During the counteroffensive of the Red Army, many units of Sukin’s 6th Urals Corps were smashed. Consequently, the corps was disbanded, and on 1 June 1919, Sukin was attached to the Staff of the Supreme Ruler. On 30 August 1919, he was placed on the reserve list, but became an active commander again during the Great Siberian (Ice) March, leading the northern column of the 2nd Army during the retreat into Transbaikalia. During the summer of 1920, he served briefly under Ataman G. M. Semenov as chief of staff of the Main Commander of Forces in the Russian Eastern Region, then emigrated. He lived in China until 1933, when, together with his brother, Major General A. T. Sukin, he returned to the USSR and found work in military schools, latterly at Alma-Ata (formerly Vernyi, now Almaty). He was arrested on 23 April 1937, on 26 November that year was found guilty of espionage, and was subsequently executed. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 30 December 1989, by order of the Military Procurator of the Turkestan Military District.

SUL′KEVICH, mohammed SULEIMANOVICH (Sulkiewicz, Süleyman; Sul′kevich, matvei/masei aleksandrovich) (20 December 1864/20 July 1865–15 July 1920). Major general (1910), lieutenant general (26 April 1915). The head of a pro-German regime in Crimea in 1918, M. S. Sul′kevich was of Polish-Lithuanian Tatar stock. He was born at Kemeshi, near Minsk, and was a graduate of the Voronezh Cadet Corps, the Mikhail Artillery School, and the Academy of the General Staff (1894). He participated in the Russian Expeditionary Force in China in 1900–1901 and saw action in the Russo–Japanese War. During the First World War, he served as quartermaster general of the Irkutsk Military District (1914–1915), then took up a variety of command posts. In 1917, he was put in charge of the formation of a Muslim Mounted Corps that was the initiative of General L. G. Kornilov. In the wake of the Kornilov affair, on 20 September 1917 he was placed on the reserve list, but returned to his work with the Muslim Corps on 7 October 1917.

Following the October Revolution, Sul′kevich left his command and is thought to have then worked for the German authorities on the Romanian Front. In late May 1918, possibly on the invitation of General Hermann von Eichhorn, he made his way to Crimea, where, following the overthrow by Crimean Tatar nationalists of the Bolsheviks’ Tauride Soviet Socialist Republic, with the assistance of the invading German forces he established the Crimean Regional Government. In that regime, he served jointly as chairman of the Council of Ministers, minister of internal affairs, and minister of war (from 25 June 1918). In those roles, he displayed distinct Germanophile tendencies (e.g., seeking to have the kaiser declare a protectorate over an independent Crimea), which angered many Russians within and around his regime, while his determination to meet the grain requisitions demanded by the occupying Germans alienated Tatar peasants. As a separatist and a collaborator with the Germans, he had also earned the enmity of the leader of the Volunteer Army, General M. V. Alekseev.

Thus, Sul′kevich was forced out of office following the armistice of 11 November 1918; as Allied vessels arrived in the Crimean ports, he handed over authority to the regime of S. S. Krym on 18 November 1918. Sul′kevich then moved to the Armenian Democratic Republic, where he joined Musavat, and in March 1919, became chief of staff of the country’s army. In May 1920, as the 11th Red Army invaded Armenia, he was arrested. Sul′kevich was executed at Baku some two months later.

Sultan-Galiev, Mirsaid. See Soltanğäliev, Mirsäyet Xäydärğäli ulı (Sultan-Galiev, Mirsaid).

Sultan-Kilich (KELECH-Shakhanovich)-Girei (1880–17 January 1947). Colonel (12 May 1916), major general (1918). One of the leaders of the national movement of the mountain peoples of the North Caucasus, both during the revolutionary era and in emigration, Prince Sultan-Kilich-Gerei was educated at the Cavalry Officers School at Ekaterinoslav before entering the 12th Belgorod Uhlan Regiment. During the First World War, he served as an officer in the Cherkess Mounted Regiment of the “Native Division” of the Russian Army, and in 1917 was briefly arrested as a suspected participant in the Kornilov affair. After his release, he made his way to the Kuban.

In the White movement, Sultan-Kilich-Gerei first commanded a brigade of the 2nd Kuban Division under General V. P. Liakhov (March–August 1918) and was then commander of the Cherkess-Terek (Wild) Cossack Division (September 1918–May 1920). After the collapse of the Armed Forces of South Russia in the North Caucasus, in early 1920 he retreated with his unit into the Democratic Republic of Georgia (May 1920) and then made his way by sea to Crimea (June 1920). Having joined the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, he was dispatched to the North Caucasus to raise anti-Bolshevik Cossack and native partisan units, which engaged in periodic uprisings and battles against the Red Army in Karachaevsk oblast′ from June to November 1920. Following the collapse of Wrangel’s forces, Sultan-Kilich-Girei again retreated into Georgia, from where he made his way to France, via Yugoslavia, in February–March 1921.

During the interwar years, Sultan-Kilich-Gerei was active in anti-Soviet émigré organizations, chairing the Committee for the Independence of the Caucasus and joining the Central Committee of the Popular Party of the Mountain Peoples (1922–1945), while earning his living as trick horseman in the circus and as a horse trainer. Following the German invasion of France in June 1940, he entered into collaboration with the Wehrmacht and was sent back to the North Caucasus to raise Cossack units for the struggle against the USSR (1942–1943). He was then sent to Yugoslavia, to organize émigré Cossack forces in the struggle against the partisans of Josip Tito. Sultan-Kilich was among those Cossacks forcibly repatriated in May 1945 from British-administered camps in Austria to the USSR. There, he was immediately arrested and sentenced to death by hanging, alongside Generals P. N. Krasnov, A. G. Shkuro, and others.

sultanov, khosrov bey (10 May 1879–1947). A prominent and controversial statesman in Azerbaijan during the civil-war years, Khosrov bey Sultanov Pasha bey oglu was born near Zangezur, Elizavetopol guberniia, and was a graduate of the Elizavetopol Gymnasium and the Odessa Military School, where he trained as a doctor. During the First World War, he worked with several relief organizations in Transcaucasia before becoming active in politics in 1917.

On 28 May 1918, Sultanov was one of the signatories of the declaration of independence of the Armenian Democratic Republic, subsequently serving briefly as its war minister (28 May–11 June 1918) and helping to found the Azeri army. On 15 January 1919, he was named governor-general of the disputed Karabakh (Qarabağ) and Zangezur (Siunik) regions, as British forces disarmed the Armenian irregulars under General Andranik Toros Ozanian and imposed a settlement favorable to the Azeris, so as to end (temporarily) the Armenian–Azerbaijan War. Although Sultanov was never able to extend his authority over Zangezur, in May 1919, he was able to drive the Armenian General Dro from Askeran and secure Shusha and Khankendi for Azerbaijan. In those regions, he was responsible for such cruelties against the Armenian population that he earned the displeasure of the generally pro-Azeri British and was consequently briefly recalled to Baku by the Azeri government. Any reprimand he may have received, however, made little difference, and Sultanov continued to antagonize local Armenians throughout the remainder of 1919, effectively goading them into a doomed uprising in late March 1920 that was answered by the Shusha massacre. The following month, troops of the 11th Red Army entered Azerbaijan, and Sultanov’s reign was ended (on 16 April 1920).

After three years of surviving underground in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1923 Sultanov fled to Turkey and thence to a life in emigration in Iran, France, and Germany, where he collaborated with the Nazi regime during the Second World War. Following the war he moved to Trabzon, in Turkey, where he died.

SUPREME ADMINISTRATION OF THE NORTHERN REGION. See NORTHERN REGION, SUPREME ADMINISTRATION OF THE.

Supreme Council of the National Economy. See VSNKh.

SUPREME MILITARY COUNCIL OF THE Russian soviet federative socialist republic. See Russian soviet federative socialist republic, SUPREME MILITARY COUNCIL OF THE.

Supreme Military Inspectorate of the Red Army. See Red Army, Supreme Military Inspectorate of the.

SUPREME RULER. This was the title (in Russian Verkhovnyi pravitel′) bestowed upon Admiral A. V. Kolchak by a decree of the Omsk government dated 18 November 1918, in the aftermath of the Omsk coup. Kolchak was recognized as supreme ruler by leaders of the Whites in South Russia, the Baltic, and North Russia (Generals A. I. Denikin, N. N. Iudenich, and E. K. Miller, respectively) and retained that title until his resignation, on 4 January 1920. The adoption of the title by Kolchak had been anticipated earlier (on 4 August 1918), when the former head of the Chinese Eastern Railway administration, General D. L. Khorvat, had had himself declared “Provisional Supreme Ruler of Russia” by the anti-Bolshevik administration he led in Manchuria and the Maritime Province.

Surin, Viktor Il′ich (11 April 1875–18 February 1967). Colonel (15 June 1915), major general (24 August 1917), lieutenant general (15 June 1919). A senior staff officer with the White forces in Siberia, V. I. Surin was born in Bessarabia guberniia and was a graduate of the Vladimir Cadet School in Kiev, the Mikhail Artillery School, and the Academy of the General Staff (1906). He subsequently occupied numerous staff positions and spent much of 1909 on a mission to France, before becoming assistant senior adjutant on the staff of the St. Petersburg Military District (from 20 December 1909). He was then transferred to the chancellery of the Ministry of War (7 September 1910). During the First World War, he served on the staff of the 2nd Army (from August 1915) and was commander of the 123rd Infantry (Kozlovskii) Regiment (from 15 September 1916), before becoming quartermaster general of the 3rd Army (from 18 April 1917). He was then made chief of the chancellery of the Ministry of War of the Russian Provisional Government (13 June 1917).

Following the October Revolution, Surin was seconded to the Academy of the General Staff as a teacher (from 3 April 1918), but deserted to the Whites following that establishment’s transfer to the Urals. Subsequently, on 16 August 1918, he was named chief of supply of the Siberian Army (at the same time accepting the portfolio of assistant minister of war in the Provisional Siberian Government). Following the Omsk coup, he became acting minister of war in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak (21 November 1918–5 January 1919), then returned to the post of assistant minister of war, with responsibility for supplies and technical units.

Following the collapse of the White effort in Siberia and the retreat of Kolchak’s forces into Transbaikalia and the Far East, Surin served briefly on the general staff of the forces of the Provisional Government of the Maritime Province (from 17 June 1920), before retiring from the service (1 September 1920). In emigration, Surin settled first at Harbin, working as a senior agent of the Economic Bureau of the Chinese Eastern Railway and (from 29 December 1931) as a lecturer in geography at the Harbin Law Faculty. He subsequently moved to San Francisco.

Suwałki Agreement (7 October 1920). This treaty, which established a provisional demarcation line for the border between Poland and Lithuania, was signed by representatives of the governments of those countires as Polish forces overran the Suwalki region while they were pursuing the Red Army eastward across the Nieman River in the closing stages of the Soviet–Polish War. The Lithuanians hoped that the line agreed upon, which partitioned Suwałki, would provide a guarantee of their possession of Vilnius (which, without being specifically mentioned in the terms of the treaty, was allotted to the Lithuanian zone). However, the Poles had only agreed to treat under heavy pressure from the League of Nations and remained determined upon securing the city that they called Wilno. On 9 October 1920, therefore, 24 hours before the Suwałki Agreement was scheduled to take effect, Polish forces under General Lucjan Żeligowski seized the city (the Żeligowski mutiny), effectively preempting the Suwałki Agreement and setting in train a process that would eventually result in Wilno (Vilnius) being incorporated into the Polish state in 1923.

SVANETIAN UPRISING. This was the name given to the unsuccessful uprising against Soviet power that broke out in the mountainous northwest Georgian province of Svaneti soon after the invasion of Georgia by the Red Army and the establishment of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (February–March 1921). In September 1921, Georgian guerrilla forces, led by Mosostr Dadeshkeliani, Nestor Gardapkhadze, Bidzina Pirveli, and others, overwhelmed Red strongholds across Svaneti and prepared to attack Kutaisi, but by the end of the year Red punitive detachments had regained control. Captured rebel leaders were immediately executed, and Red Terror was employed to quell the local populace, but the Kakhet–Khevsureti rebellion soon began, and many of those involved in the Svanetian uprising would also later participate in the general Georgian anti-Soviet August Uprising of 1924.

SVECHIN, ALEKSANDR ANDREEVICH (17 August 1878–29 July 1938). Major general (11 June 1916), lieutenant general (October 1917), komdiv (23 May 1936). One of the leading military specialists serving with the Red Army during the civil wars, and later an influential writer on military science in the USSR, A. A. Svechin was born at Ekaterinoslav, into a military family. (His elder brother Mikhail [1876–1969] also rose to the rank of major general in the tsarist army and fought with the Whites in the civil wars, before going into emigration.) He was a graduate of the St. Petersburg Cadet Corps, the Mikhail Artillery School (1897), and the Academy of the General Staff (1903). Thereafter, he was attached to the general staff and served in the Russo–Japanese War as commander of the 22nd East Siberian Regiment and as chief supply officer on the staff of the 16th Army Corps, then on the directorate of the quartermaster general of the 3rd Manchurian Army. During the First World War, he served initially with the staff of the main commander in chief and was then commander of the 6th Finnish Rifle Regiment (23 July 1915–January 1917), chief of staff of the 7th Infantry Division, head of the Office of the Black Sea Marine Division (26 January–14 May 1917), and chief of staff of the 5th Army (24 May–22 September 1917). Suspected of involvement in the Kornilov affair, he was removed from his command and transferred to the staff of the Northern Front.

Svechin joined the Red Army voluntarily in March 1918, and became assistant chief of the Petrograd Fortified Region, before being named commander of the Smolensk Region of the Western Screen and then chief of staff of the Western Screen (March–August 1918). He was then made chief of the Vseroglavshtab, the All-Russian Main Staff (August 1918–11 October 1918). In that capacity, he repeatedly clashed with the main commander in chief of the Red Army, Jukums Vācietis, and was consequently removed from the active army and utilized as a lecturer at the Red Military Academy from 28 November 1918. He served there until the mid-1920s, as head of the Department of the History of Military Science and Strategy, and chaired the Commission for Research into the Lessons of the War of 1914–1918. He was arrested in 1930, and subsequently released, but was arrested again on 21 February 1931, during Operation “Spring,” and on 18 July 1931, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for counterrevolutionary activities. He was freed in March 1932 and returned to work in the Reconnaissance Directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army; from 1936 he worked again at the restructured Red Military Academy. He was rearrested on 30 December 1937, charged with terrorism and membership in a counterrevolutionary “officer-monarchist organization and a military-fascist plot.” On 29 July 1938, he was found guilty by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and sentenced to death. Svechin was shot that same day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 8 September 1956.

SVECHNIKOV, MIKHAIL STEPANOVICH (18 September 1881/2–26 August 1938). Colonel (1917), kombrig (5 December 1935). One of the few senior tsarist officers to join the Bolsheviks prior to October 1917, M. S. Svechnikov was born at the stanitsa of Ust′-Medveditskaia (now Serafimovich), in the Don territory, the son of an officer of the Don Cossack Host. He was a graduate of the Mikhail Artillery School (1901) and the Academy of the General Staff (1911), saw action in the Russian Expedition to China in 1900–1901 and in the Russo–Japanese War, and in the First World War rose to chief of staff of the 106th Rifle Division (from 3 January 1917).

Having joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in May 1917, Svechnikov remained in the army following the October Revolution, and on 7 December 1917, was elected to the command of the 106th Infantry Division (which was then stationed in Finland) by its soldiers’ committee. In January 1918, he was assigned by the Bolshevik leadership to the post of assistant commander of the Red Guards in Finland and played a prominent role in the Finnish Civil War, as commander of Red forces in the west of the country. From May 1918, he was involved with the formation of Red Army units in Petrograd and from August that year was commander of the 1st Petrograd Rifle Division. From 8 December 1918 to 19 March 1919, he was commander of the Caspian–Caucasian Front, before serving as chief of staff of the Kazan′ Fortified Region (from March 1919) and commandant of the Kursk Fortified Region (from July 1919). In October–November 1919, he played an important part in turning the advance of the Armed Forces of South Russia, as commander of the Independent Rifle Division of the 13th Red Army during the Orel–Kursk Operation. He was then made assistant commandant of the Tula Fortified Region (December 1919) and was subsequently chief of staff of the Petrograd Fortified Region. As the civil wars wound down, he was attached for special assignments to the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic and then to the chief of staff of Vseroglavshtab, the All-Russian Main Staff. From March 1920, he served as military chief (voenkom) of the Don (and from 6 July 1920, the Kuban–Black Sea) Regional Commissariat. From September 1920, he was chief of staff of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic and then served as a military attaché to Persia before, on 1 March 1923, being placed on the reserve list and being assigned to military-educational work.

Svechnikov was the author of numerous historical works on the First World War and the “Russian” Civil Wars, and from 1934, he was head of the Department of the History of the Art of War at the Red Military Academy. He was arrested on 31 December 1937, and on 26 August 1938 was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. The sentence was carried out that same day. Svechnikov was posthumously rehabilitated on 8 December 1956.

SVERDLOV, IAKOV MIKHAILOVICH (22 May 1885–16 March 1919). The Soviet politician Ia. M. Sverdlov (real name Jeshua-Solomon Movshevich) was born at Nizhnii Novgorod, the son of a Jewish engraver. After five years at the local Gymnasium, he began studying to be a chemist, but he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1901 and transformed himself into the archetypal “professional revolutionary.” Following the party schism of 1903, he immediately sided with the Bolsheviks and became an effective traveling activist. However, he was arrested on six occasions between December 1901 and November 1910, and spent almost his entire adult life prior to the revolution of 1917 in prison, in exile, or on the run. That did not prevent him from being co-opted onto the first Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) on 17 January 1912 (and he remained a member of that body until his death). From January 1912 to February 1913, he was also a member of the party’s Russian Committee and was an editor of the party newspaper, Pravda (“The Truth”). From 1914 to 1916, he was in Siberian exile at Turukhansk with J. V. Stalin, for whom he developed a strong dislike.

Sverdlov returned to Petrograd following the February Revolution and became secretary of the Bolshevik Central Committee. This was a role for which he was very well suited: he was possessed of a phenomenal memory, seemed to know personally almost every member of the party, and was a meticulous administrator. Following the October Revolution (from 8 November 1917), he became chairman of the VTsIK of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, making him the de facto head of state of Soviet Russia. In November 1917, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, as a representative of the Simbirsk region, but he was one of the main instigators of the assembly’s dispersal on 6 January 1918. He became a close and trusted ally of V. I. Lenin (in effect, his “right-hand man”), playing a key role in persuading party members to accept such unpopular measures as the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), and it was he who, on 16 July 1918, signed the order for the execution of the Romanov family at Ekaterinburg. He was also, in 1918, the chairman of the editing commission for the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and chairman of the Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of the Occupied Territories.

The enormous workload that Sverdlov accepted, however, undermined his health. He died of influenza at Orel, in March 1919, and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. In Soviet times, there was scarcely a town or city anywhere in the USSR that did not have a street or square named in his honor. In Moscow, the central square outside the Bolshoi Theater was renamed Sverdlov Square, and the nearby Metro station was given the same appellation when it opened in 1938. In 1990, the square was renamed Theater Square (and the following year the statue of Sverdlov that adorned it was removed). From 1924 to 1991, the city of Ekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk in his honor (and an imposing statue of him still stands there); a new city in the Lugansk oblast′ of Ukraine was named Sverdlovsk in 1938; and the town of Aydarbek in the Lori province of Armenia was renamed Sverdlov. The destroyer Novik (commissioned for the Imperial Russian Navy in 1913) was also renamed The Iakov Sverdlov in 1923, and the first ship of the Sverdlov class of cruisers (launched on 5 July 1950) was also named after him. He was also the subject of the fawning Stalinist biopic Iakov Sverdlov (dir. S. I. Iutkevich, 1940), from which scenes depicting Stalin were excised upon the film’s reissue in 1965.

SVINHUFVUD, PEHR EVIND (15 December 1861–29 February 1944). The Finnish lawyer, judge, and rightist politician Pehr Svinhufvud (popularly known as Ukko-Pekka, “Old Man Pete”) was born in the village of Sääksmäki, in southwest Finland, into an ancient Swedish noble family. He was the son of a merchant seaman. After attending the Swedish-language Gymnasium in Helsingfors (Helsinki), he graduated in 1881 from the Imperial Alexander University in the Finnish capital (obtaining his MA the following year). He then began a legal career, becoming famous for using his position as a judge in the Finnish court of appeal to resist the creeping Russification of the Grand Duchy during from the 1890s, a stance that earned him dismissal from his post in 1902. He subsequently served as speaker in the Finnish parliament (1907–1912), and from 1908 worked as a judge at Lappee. In November 1914, he was dismissed from that latter post for refusing to obey the Russian authorities and was exiled to Tomsk. Following the February Revolution, he returned to Helsingfors and was hailed as a national hero.

On 27 November 1917, Svinhufvud was elected as chairman of the Finnish senate, and in that capacity, steered his country to independence the following month, having gained the recognition of V. I. Lenin on a mission to Petrograd. At the outbreak of the Finnish Civil War, he went into hiding in Helsinki, before escaping (via Berlin and Stockholm) to the political base of the Finnish Whites at Vaasa. There, he resumed his role as head of the government, encouraging German intervention in Finland and being named regent on 27 May 1918. On 12 December 1918, he was succeeded by Carl Gustav Mannerheim and retired from political life. However, in the late 1920s he became a totem of the anti-Communist Lapua movement; on its insistence, he was named prime minister by President L. K. Relander on 4 July 1930 (serving in that role until 18 February 1931). He subsequently became the third president of Finland (1 March 1931–1 March 1937). During his time in office, Svinhufvud attempted to smash Communism in Finland, while generally resisting right-wing and fascist calls for the establishment of a more authoritarian regime.

Svinhufvud died at Luumäki in 1944. He was commemorated in many ways across Finland, from the grand monument outside the parliament building in Helsinki to the name “Ukko-Pekka” for a 4–6–2-type locomotive and the M39 rifle of the Finnish army.

SYbLIANSKII, Nikita IUKHIMOVICH. See Shapoval (SYbLIANSKII), Nikita IUKHIMOVICH.

Syrový, Jan (24 January 1888–17 October 1970). Major general (Czechoslovak Legion, August 1918), general (Czechoslovak Army, 1927). Born in Třebíč (Trebitsch), Moravia, the son of a small craftsman, Jan Syrový played a significant role in civil-war Siberia and in the interwar history of Czechoslovakia. After finishing at a technical school at Brno (1908) and one year’s voluntary military service in the Austro-Hungarian Army, he worked as a commercial traveler. The outbreak of war in 1914 found him employed in an engineering firm in Warsaw, in Russian Poland, where he volunteered for service in the Czechoslovak druzhina of the Russian Army (the embryo of the Czechoslovak Legion). He subsequently saw combat on the South-West Front (including action at the Battle of Zbrov in July 1917, during which he lost his right eye).

Syrový rose to command the 2nd Regiment of the Czechoslovak Corps (March–May 1918) and was a participant in the conference of Legionnaires and members of the Czechoslovak National Council at Cheliabinsk, on 25 May 1918, that decided to ignore Soviet orders to disarm. During the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, he commanded forces around Kurgan, Cheliabinsk, Omsk, and Ekaterinburg (May–August, 1918), and subsequently also commanded forces of the Ufa Directory on the Urals Front (12 August–24 December 1918). From August 1918, he served also as the commander in chief of the Czechoslovak Legion.

Following his force’s evacuation from Vladivostok in the autumn of 1920, Syrový returned to Czechoslovakia and occupied numerous posts in the national army (including chief of staff from 1927 to 1933 and inspector general of the army from 1933 to 1938), as well as serving, briefly but significantly, as acting president of the republic (5 October–30 November 1938) and as prime minister (23 September–1 December 1938), during the Munich crisis. Subsequently, as minister of war, he gave the order to the Czechoslovak Army not to resist the German invasion of March 1939, a moment he described at the time as “worse than death.” In 1947, he was found guilty in a Czechoslovak court of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers; was stripped of his military rank, his many medals, and his pension; and was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment, but he was amnestied in 1960. In 1995, he was fully rehabilitated by the Czech government.

SYTIN, PAVEL PAVLOVICH (18 July 1870–22 August 1938). Colonel (6 December 1911), major general (January 1917). The Red military specialist who was at the center of the Tsaritsyn affair, P. P. Sytin was born into a military family at Skobin, Riazan′ guberniia, and was a graduate of the Kiev Officer School (1892) and the Academy of the General Staff (1899). He saw action in the Russo–Japanese War and was subsequently chief of staff of the Brest-Litovsk Fortress and a lecturer in its military school. During the First World War, he rose to the command of the 37th Infantry Division on the Romanian Front (1917).

In December 1917, Sytin was elected as commander of the 18th Army Corps by its soldiers’ committee and subsequently volunteered for service in the Red Army. Thereafter, in April 1918, he was placed in command of the forces of the Western Screen, around Briansk. In May 1918, he headed the Soviet delegation that met with the German authorities at Khar′kov, and from September 1918, he commanded the forces of the Southern Screen. He was subsequently appointed by L. D. Trotsky to be the first commander of the Southern Front (11 September–9 November 1918), an appointment that led to a major clash between Trotsky and J. V. Stalin over the prominence in the Red forces of such military specialists (the “Tsaritsyn affair”). When the planned Soviet offensive toward Balashovsk in that sector proved unsuccessful, Sytin was removed from the command and placed instead at the head of the Directorate of Business of the Revvoensovet of the Republic.

He subsequently served as Soviet military attaché in the Democratic Republic of Georgia (1920–1921), and from 1922 lectured at the Red Military Academy, from 1924 to 1927 working also on the Military-Historical Directorate on research into the lessons of the world war and the civil wars. From 1927, he was assigned to the Revvoensovet of the USSR. He retired in 1934, becoming a research fellow of the Central State Archive of the Red Army. Sytin was arrested on 27 February 1938, and on 22 August 1938 was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR for participation in a “counterrevolutionary organization.” He was executed that same day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 16 February 1957.