Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

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TACHANKA. A sprung carriage, with a lightweight body, designed to be pulled by two horses (and sometimes four) and usually manned by three men, this vehicle became widely adopted during the civil wars by cavalry forces, as a high-speed, mobile platform for a Maxim gun or other weaponry. A variety of hypotheses exist with regard to the etymology of the word “tachanka”: that it derives from the Ukrainian netychanka, a carriage named after the town of Neutitschein (now Nový Jičín, in eastern Moravia, the Czech Republic); that it is an endearing diminutive of the Russian word tachka (“wheelbarrow”); and that it is a diminutive of tavrichanka, a carriage used in Taurida (“Tavrida” in Russian). Although they had been employed by Russian forces during the First World War, tachankas were used with formidable effectiveness by Nestor Makhno’s Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine and other formations operating on the open steppe of southern Russia during the “Russian” Civil Wars, enabling columns to travel up to 75 miles a day.

A popular Russian song celebrates the vehicle (“The Tachanka,” 1936; lyrics by M. Ruderman, music by K. Listov), which is also featured in the classic Soviet films Chapaev (dir. G. N. and S. D. Vasil′ev, 1934) and Ognennye versty (“The Burning Miles,” dir. S. I. Samsonov, 1956); an imposing monument to it (The Legendary Tachanka, by E. M. Poltoratskii, 1967) stands near Kakhovka, in southern Ukraine (which, ironically, was the site of a largely static, entrenched battle between the Red Army and the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel in October 1920); and a preserved Makhnovist tachanka has pride of place in the Historical Museum at Guliai-Pole, the birthplace of Nestor Makhno. Perhaps most impressive of all, however, is Isaak Babel’s “Discourse on the Tachanka,” one of his famous Konarmiia (Red Cavalry) tales, which ponders on how “what had been the common or garden brichka, in which priests and officials drive about, came into prominence and grew to be a mobile and formidable instrument of warfare. It created a new strategy and new tactics, altered the usual aspect of war, [and] gave birth to the heroes and geniuses of the tachanka.”

TACTICAL CENTER. This clandestine anti-Bolshevik organization was formed in Moscow in April 1919, with the aim of coordinating the activities of a number of anti-Bolshevik groups. While retaining their organizational independence, representatives of the National Center, the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, the Union of Public Men, and other groups entered the Tactical Center, on the basis of the slogan “Russia, One and Indivisible” and support for a one-man dictatorship to lead the anti-Bolshevik struggle. The center recognized Admiral A. V. Kolchak as supreme ruler and maintained close contacts with the Whites in Siberia, South Russia, and elsewhere, but its plans to organize an uprising to coincide with the Armed Forces of South Russia’s advance on Moscow in the autumn of 1919 came to nothing, and the organization was liquidated by the Cheka over the course of the following year. Among the organization’s leading members were N. N. Shchepkin, O. P. Gerasimov, and Prince S. E. Trubetskoi (from the National Center), as well as S. P. Mel′gunov (of the Union of Regeneration).

TAMAN (RED) ARMY. This celebrated group of Red forces was active in the North Caucasus from 27 August 1918 to February 1919. It took its name from the Taman peninsula, in western Kuban, which stretches across the mouth of the Sea of Azov toward the Kerch peninsula in the Crimea. The Taman Army, which at its birth was composed of 30,000 men in three columns, was created at Gelendzhik (in the aftermath of the capture of Ekaterinodar by the Volunteer Army on 16 August 1918) from the remains of various Red forces that had been fighting the Whites and the forces of the Austro-German intervention. Workers from Novorossiisk and sailors from the recently scuttled Black Sea Fleet were prominent among its members. The sailor I. I. Matveev was chosen as commander, with E. I. Kovtiukh as his deputy, G. N. Baturin as chief of staff, and N. K. Kich as military commissar.

The Taman Army’s first operation was an attempt to unite, by a march through Tuapse, with the Red Army of the North Caucasus, although progress was hampered by the 25,000 refugees who accompanied the army. The first column, which made up the vanguard, battled with the forces of the Democratic Republic of Georgia; the second column was harried by forces of the Kuban Cossack Host; and the third column, in the rear, was beset by the Volunteers. The first column took Tuapse on 28 August 1918 and proceeded across the main ridge of the Caucasus Mountains to Khadyzhensk and Belorechensk (which was captured on 12 September 1918). It was joined there by the other columns two days later, and on 18 September 1918, the Taman Army united with the main Red force in the region at Armavir. Having completed this odyssey, Matveev was removed from his post on the orders of the insubordinate commander of the Red Army of the North Caucasus, I. I. Sorokin, and executed as a traitor at Piatigorsk on 8 October 1918.

Subsequently, under Kovtiukh’s command (and later that of I. F. Fed′ko), the Taman Army was reorganized into two infantry divisions, three cavalry regiments, and an artillery brigade and was involved in heavy fighting against White and Cossack forces around Stavropol′ in November and December 1918, following which the army was awarded the Order of the Red Banner (even though Stavropol′ was abandoned to the enemy). Having suffered a great loss of men in battle and to typhus, it was then reorganized again into the 3rd Taman Rifle Division, which in January 1919 withdrew to Astrakhan under pressure from the Whites.

“The Heroic March of the Taman Army” was much mythologized in Soviet times, one of the prime examples being the major novel of the Soviet author Aleksandr Serafimovich (A. S. Popov), Zheleznii potok (“The Iron Flood,” 1924), which was made into a feature film, under the same title, by Efim Dzifan in 1967.

TAMBOV REBELLION. Sometimes referred to (particularly in Soviet sources) as “the Antonov uprising” or the Antonovshchina, after its leader A. S. Antonov, this large and uniquely well-organized peasant rebellion engulfed Tambov guberniia and parts of neighboring provinces in southeast European Russia from the summer of 1920 to the summer of 1921.

Situated at the juncture of the Red Army’s fronts against the White forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in the east and those of A. I. Denikin in the south, Tambov guberniia suffered particularly badly from the ravages of the civil wars—a situation exacerbated by a drought in 1919 that ruined agricultural production—but the Soviet government refused to alter the province’s official status as a region of food surplus, from which grain should be extracted (through the process of prodrazverstka) to feed both the Red Army and the cities of northern Russia. Indeed, Tambov’s contribution was raised from 18 million tons of grain in 1919 to 27 million tons to be delivered to the authorities in 1920. In the summer of 1919, the region was also ravaged by the Mamontov raid (while the weapons left behind by the marauding Whites would serve in part to arm the rebellion). All this led to an apparently spontaneous revolt against the Soviet authorities, which began at Khitrovo on 19 August 1920 and soon spread to Kamenka and Tugolukova and then across the province and into the Voronezh region.

Antonov, who had been leading a small anti-Bolshevik partisan group around Tambov since the previous year, emerged to place himself at the head of the rebellion, organizing a territorially based army (the Blue Army or Antonovtsy), which at its peak numbered between 50,000 to 70,000 men. He also cooperated with local members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries in the formation of a network of administrative committees termed Unions of the Working Peasantry (Soiuzy trudogo krest′ianstva, or STKs) to replace the Soviet institutions. The chairman of the STKs was P. M. Tokmakov. (Other prominent rebel leaders included D. S. Antonov, A. V. Boguslavskii, and I. S. Kolesnikov.) The political program of the STKs was never fully hammered out, but they tended to emphasize political equality; an end to the civil war; freedom of speech, the press, conscience, trade unions, and assembly; support for the convention of a new, freely elected constituent assembly; the transfer of land to the peasantry, and workers’ control of industry.

By the spring of 1921, Soviet rule had collapsed all across Tambov guberniia, and every effort to crush the rebels militarily had failed, while further (albeit smaller) peasant rebellions had occurred along the Volga around Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn, and Astrakhan, and tens of thousands of rebels were active beyond the Urals in the Western Siberian Uprising. In Tambov, on 21 May 1921, the insurgent command proclaimed the existence of the Provisional Democratic Republic of the Tambov Partisan Region. However, the Red Army was soon making inroads into the province, as (in May 1921) 50,000 seasoned troops, including large cavalry formations, were deployed (to reinforce the 50,000 Red Army men already fighting the rebels), together with tanks, artillery, armored trains, aircraft, and even poison-gas-laying detachments. From 27 April 1921, the Soviet forces deployed against the rebels were commanded by the gifted but ruthless M. N. Tukhachevskii. The end of War Communism, the introduction of the New Economic Policy (and the prodnalog method of grain procurement), and an easing off of military recruitment as the civil wars wound down also helped to appease the peasantry and undercut the rebels.

By July 1921, the Tambov rebel army had disintegrated, and many of its leaders had been killed (including Tokmakov, Boguslavskii, and Kolesnikov), although Antonov survived, on the run, for another year. The Cheka and a special Bolshevik Central Committee commission (“for the liquidation of banditism in the Tambov guberniia”) under V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko smashed the STK network and executed, imprisoned, or exiled many thousands of insurgents; at least 50,000 people were interned in specially constructed concentration camps (some of them as hostages), where the mortality rate approached 25 percent per month. It has been estimated that total mortality in Tambov guberniia from 1920 to 1922, as a consequence of civil wars, executions, and prison deaths, was around 240,000.

The Tambov Rebellion is the focus of the Russian feature film Zhila-byla odna baba (“Once Upon a Time There Lived a Simple Woman,” dir. A. S. Smirnov, 2011).

TANKS (RED ARMY). The October Revolution of 1917 put an end to the plans of the Russian Army, developed from 1916, to put almost 400 tanks into the field by 1918. Nevertheless, the Red Army began producing tanks at the Sormovo Factory at Nizhnii Novgorod in August 1919, and the first model (the Freedom Fighter Comrade Lenin) was completed in August 1920 and was presented by the factory to L. D. Trotsky. Another 14 tanks were completed by August 1921. However, with the exception of their Fiat engines and the addition to seven of the tanks of a 37mm cannon and one or more Hotchkiss machine guns in the turret, these vehicles appear to have been identical copies of the French Renault FT-17 tank that had been deployed by interventionist forces at Odessa in December 1918. Red forces had captured a number of these in February–March 1919. One was sent to Moscow as a prize (and a model); the others were attached to the Armored Division of Special Purpose at Khar′kov and were deployed against the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) from June 1919. From 1919 to 1921, the Red Army also captured 59 Mark V (heavy), 17 Mark A (medium), and 1 Mark B (light) British tanks, mostly in South Russia during the collapse of the AFSR in early 1920. Extensive rebuilding and repair was necessary to most of them before they could be (for the most part) assigned to the 9th Red Army, while a training course for tank crews was established at Ekaterinodar, utilizing the expertise of officers captured from the Russian Tank Corps of the AFSR. Many of these tanks were subsequently transferred to the west (to participate in the Soviet–Polish War) and then, in September–October 1920, were again redeployed to the south, used in the battles against the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel and, in February 1921, in the conquest of the Democratic Republic of Georgia by the 11th Red Army. During these operations, a further 22 tanks that had been ineffectively sabotaged and abandoned by White forces were recovered in Crimea, and two British Mark Vs were captured in Georgia.

By this time, “Directives on the Use of Tanks in Battle” for the Red Army had been published (Moscow, September 1920), according to which the role of tanks was mainly to support infantry in breaking fixed enemy positions and to work with artillery units in coordinated firing patterns. Ten Renault tanks from the United States that had been dispatched to Vladivostok to assist anti-Bolshevik forces were captured by Red partisans near Blagoveshchensk in March 1920 and were assigned to the 1st Amur Heavy Tank Division of the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic. They were deployed against White forces during the summer and autumn of 1920, but by 1922, due to a lack of munitions and spare parts, only one tank, the Vigilant, remained operational. On 10 February 1922, near Volochaevka, it was immobilized after being hit by fire from the White armored train, The Kappel′evtsy, and the crew blew it up with grenades, lest it fall into enemy hands.

TANKS (WHITE AND INTERVENTIONIST FORCES). None of the White forces had the industrial capacity to manufacture their own tanks, so all had to be imported from the Allies. The first tanks arrived with French forces at Odessa, on 18 December 1918: 20 Renault FT-17s were assigned to the 501st Special Artillery Regiment, 6 of which were captured by Red forces and 6 more abandoned during the French evacuation of Odessa in April 1919.

Subsequently, in South Russia, a mission of 10 officers and 55 other ranks of the British Royal Tank Corps trained more than 200 volunteer officers of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) at the Russian Tank School (Tankadrom) established at Ekaterinodar on 22 March 1919 (relocated to Taganrog in June 1919). These men operated the British tanks that were shipped into Russia via Novorossiisk from mid-April 1919 (a total of 73 of them, according to White records, 74 according to British records). These were a combination of Mark Vs (heavy), Mark As (medium), and Mark Bs (medium). How many of these vehicles saw action in the 1st and 2nd Tank Divisions of the White forces in South Russia, however, is unclear, as almost half of them (35) arrived only in October 1919, just as the AFSR was about to collapse, and White orders of battle indicate that, as of 18 November 1919, 11 tanks were still at Novorossiisk, 11 were being used for training at the tank school at Taganrog, and 16 were undergoing repair or assembly there. White tanks were certainly present at Orel in October 1919, however (the most northerly point reached by the AFSR), and they had been used to some effect in earlier engagements, notably with the Caucasian Army during the capture of Tsaritsyn in late June 1919, when the army used them to smash through the city’s barbed-wire defenses (even though two of the six vehicles deployed broke down during transit and could not be used), captured six armored trains, and took Siavarsk unopposed by the terrified enemy. The 1st Tank Division (with some 25 vehicles) reformed in Crimea as part of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel in May 1920 and was utilized expertly in the breakout through the Perekop peninsula in June 1920. Thereafter, the division was based at Melitopol′. Most its tanks were captured by the Reds or sabotaged (often ineffectively) by their crews during the Whites’ defeat at Khakovka of 14–16 October 1920.

Opportunities for the deployment of tanks by anti-Bolshevik forces in North Russia were limited by the forested and swampy terrain, but a North Russian Tank Detachment (of four Mark Vs and two Mark Bs), under Major J. N. L. Ryan, was formed at Arkhangel′sk on 11 August 1919, to fight alongside the Whites’ Northern Army. Three of the tanks were deployed alongside an armored train on the Vologda railway on 29 August 1919, and 34 officers and men of the North Russian Tank Corps were trained by Bryan at his headquarters at Solombala, before the final British evacuation of Arkhangel′sk on 27 September 1919. Two British tanks were left behind for the Russians and saw action in October against Red forces around Plestetskaia station. On 19 February 1920, as Red forces entered Arkhangel′sk, their crews loaded the tanks onto barges and sank them in the Dvina River. They were subsequently salvaged by the Reds and sent to Moscow for analysis.

The British North-West Russian Tank Detachment, comprising 22 officers, 26 men, and 6 Mark V (composite) tanks, under Lieutenant Colonel E. Hope-Carson, arrived at Revel (Tallinn) starting on 6 August 1919. They saw action in the Narva region during the advance toward Petrograd of the Whites’ North-West Army in September–October 1919 and were used to train 22 officers and 9 enlisted men of the Russian Tank Battalion. On 18–25 October 1919, the tanks were deployed at Gatchina and Tsarskoe Selo, alongside three Russian-crewed Renault FT-17s that had been loaned by Finland. When the White forces retreated, the tanks were entrained and sent back to Revel. The Finnish tanks were returned to Helsinki, and the British tanks were given to the Estonian Army.

TARANOVSKII, EFIM (1888–18 August 1921). Ensign (1917). A prominent follower of Nestor Makhno, Efim Taranovskii was born into a well-to-do Jewish peasant family in Mariupol′ uezd. Having served in the Russian Army during the First World War, he became a proponent of anarchism in 1917, styling himself an “anarchist-communist” when he returned to Ukraine. In 1918, he moved to the Guliai-Pole region to combat the forces of the Austro-German intervention at the head of a Jewish regiment of Black Guards. His group united with Makhno in the autumn of 1918, and Taranovskii then served in the Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine as a member of its main staff (from autumn to winter 1918). In 1920, he also commanded a cavalry regiment, while maintaining his staff post, and in October of that year was named commander of the 1st Army Group of the Insurgent Army. He assisted the Red Army in clearing the forces of General P. N. Wrangel from Crimea. Having successfully evaded the Reds’ subsequent attempts to smash the Makhnovists, during the summer of the following year Taranovskii was captured by a group of anti-Semitic peasants and burned alive at the stake.

TARASOV, VLADIMIR FEDOROVICH (?–?). Captain (191?). One of the most prominent of those Red military specialists who deserted to the Whites in the course of the civil wars, V. F. Tarasov had served, in the imperial army, as an officer with the 13th Mounted Artillery Brigade during the First World War, and in 1918 completed an accelerated course at the Academy of the General Staff. Later that year, he volunteered for service with the Red Army and assisted in preparing the defenses of Petrograd. From 23 March 1918, he was assigned to the general staff, transferring to Vseroglavshtab on 27 June 1918. He then worked as an advisor to the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs, before being assigned to the post of acting chief of staff of the Eastern Front (10–23 July 1918), and from 5 November 1918 was head of the 2nd (Secret) Department of Registration Directorate of the Revolutionary Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic. However, he was almost immediately sent back to the front, as chief of staff of the Southern Front (from 13 November 1918). On 7 June 1919, he was arrested by the Cheka as a suspected traitor, but was soon released to become acting chief of staff of the 8th Red Army (10 August–2 October 1919). When the Armed Forces of South Russia captured Voronezh on 6 October 1919, he remained in that city and went over to the Whites. His subsequent fate is unknown.

TARNAVSKY, MYRON (29 August 1869–29 June 1938). Major (Austro-Hungarian Army, 1916), lieutenant colonel (Austro-Hungarian Army, 1918), colonel (Ukrainian Galician Army, 1919), brigadier general (Ukrainian Galician Army, July 1919). The Ukrainian commander Myron Tarnavsky was born at Baryłow (Łopatyn), in Austrian Galicia. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War, becoming commander of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (from 1916) and then commander of the 16th Infantry Regiment (from 1918). He joined the Ukrainian Galician Army (UGA) in February 1919 and was made commander of its Second Corps, then was named the UGA’s commander in chief (from 5 July 1919) within the Ukrainian Army. In that capacity, he oversaw the UGA’s Kiev offensive and remained in command as his army collapsed under attack by the Poles, the Whites, and the Red Army. He was stripped of his command on 7 November 1919, for having, in desperation, unilaterally arranged an armistice with the Armed Forces of South Russia of General A. I. Denikin. Tarnavsky was subsequently interned at Tukhul in Poland with other Ukrainian forces, having failed in an attempt to flee to Czechoslovakia. He died and is buried at L′viv.

Tarnobrzeg, Republic of. This short-lived, pro-Soviet polity was proclaimed by radical Poles in the town of Tarnobrzeg, in Austrian Galicia, on 6 November 1918, following a demonstration attended by some 30,000 people. Its leaders were the socialist activist Tomasz Dabal and a radical Catholic priest called Eugeniusz Okoń. The Tarnobrzeg Republic (to which the towns and regions of Kolbuszowa, Mielec, and Sandomierz also adhered) had a strong following among local peasants and proclaimed a sweeping program of land reform. It was suppressed by Polish forces in early 1919, as they occupied the region during the Ukrainian–Polish War, and was subsequently incorporated into the Lwów Voivodship of the Second Polish Republic.

Tartu, TREATY OF (2 february 1920). This agreement brought to an end the various conflicts between Soviet Russia and Estonia arising from the Estonian War of Independence. Under its terms, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic recognized the independence of Estonia and renounced territorial claims against it “in perpetuity,” agreed to pay Estonia 15 million gold rubles from the Imperial Russian Gold Reserve, and undertook to return property and valuables to Estonia that had been evacuated from the region during the First World War. Both signatory states also agreed not to harbor on their territories organizations hostile to the other: Estonia had, in fact, already disarmed and interned members of the North-West Army of General N. N. Iudenich, and Soviet Russia proceeded to disperse its own Red Estonian Riflemen. (In fact, however, the men were simply redistributed to other units, and the Soviet government continued to foster subversion within Estonia, for example, sponsoring the failed coup d’état launched by Jaan Anvelt’s Estonian Communists on 1 December 1924.)

The border established by the Treaty of Tartu, which incorporated some small parts of the former St. Petersburg and Pskov provinces into Estonia, was moved westward by the USSR during the Second World War and is currently the subject of a low-level dispute between the Russian Federation and Estonia.

Tartu, TREATY OF (14 October 1920). This agreement, signed after four months of negotiations, confirmed the border between Soviet Russia and Finland and regularized relations between the two countries in the aftermath of Finland’s independence from Russia, the Finnish Civil War, and the Soviet–Finnish Kinship Wars. Under the terms of the treaty (Article II), the border between Finland and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was established along the line of that between the former Grand Duchy of Finland and the Russian Empire, except that (under Article IV) Finland received Pechenga (Petsamo), in the far north, giving it an (ice-free) outlet on the Barents Sea. Finland also agreed (under Article X) to return to Russia the areas of Karelia it had occupied around Repola and Porajärvi. In addition, Soviet Russia granted Finnish vessels free navigation through Lake Ladoga and along the River Neva to the Gulf of Finland, and Finland agreed to disarm the coastal fortresses of Ino (Nikolaevsk) Pumaala and to demilitarize the outer islands it controlled in the Gulf of Finland (Articles XIII–XV).

Taryba. The Council of Lithuania (Lietuvos Taryba) was convened at a conference in German-occupied Vilnius on 18–23 September 1917, charged with the establishment of an independent Lithuanian state. On 11 July 1918, it was redubbed the State Council of Lithuania (Lietuvos Valstybės Taryba), and it continued its activities until the meeting of the Constituent Assembly of Lithuania, on 15 May 1920. During its first meeting, Antanas Smetona was elected chairman of the Taryba. He retained that post until he was elected president of Lithuania on 4 April 1919, when he was succeeded by Stasys Šilingas. The membership was initially 20 (including 8 Christian Democrats and 4 priests), but the Taryba had almost doubled in size by 1919. On 16 February 1918, it issued a declaration of independence, but Germany remained dominant in the region, a situation recognized by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). Indeed, Berlin tolerated rather than supported the Taryba and obstructed efforts at the establishment of a meaningfully independent Lithuanian administration.

In an attempt to establish the basis of a future relationship with Germany, on 4 June 1918 the Taryba controversially voted to invite Duke Wilhelm of Urach, Count of Württemberg, to become the monarch of a Kingdom of Lithuania. He agreed, and was elected King of Lithuania (as Mindaugas II) on 13 July 1918, prompting the resignation of four members of the council. After the German revolution in early November 1918, that decision was annulled (2 November 1918), and the unity of the Taryba was reestablished. At this point, a first (republican) constitution was issued, and Augustinas Voldemaras was invited to form a government (11 November 1918). However, with the approach of Soviet forces, on 2 January 1919 the new Lithuanian authorities were obliged to move to Kaunas (Kovno), as the Lithuanian Wars of Independence began.

TASEEVO PARTISAN REPUBLIC. This is the name traditionally accorded to the area around the village of Taseevo, in southern Eniseisk guberniia, deep in the rear of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, which in 1919 was under the firm control of Red partisans and became a no-go area for the Whites. Partisans under V. G. Iakovenko, who had been active in the region since the summer of 1918, drove White forces out of Taseevo in an uprising on 28 December 1918, declared Soviet power, and subsequently (in early January 1919) formed the Taseevo Partisan Front. Following a White counterinsurgency operation, in June 1919 the partisans were forced to leave Taseevo and retreat into the taiga, but after a series of victories over their pursuers recaptured it on 23 September 1919. In November 1919, by which time their army was some 10,000 strong, the partisans went on the offensive against the Russian Army, which was by then reeling under the blows of the rapidly advancing Red Army, and on 2 January 1920, having negotiated a truce with elements of the Czechoslovak Legion that were moving through the area, the partisans entered Kansk. On 15 January 1920, advance units of the 5th Red Army reached Kansk, where the Taseevo forces were merged with them.

TASHKENT REBELLION. See OSIPOV (TASHKENT) REBELLION.

Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. This polity, which according to its constitution was an autonomous element of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, was created on 27 May 1920, with Kazan′ as its capital. Its territory incorporated land that had, in tsarist Russia, been part of the neighboring Kazan′, Simbirsk, and Ufa gubernii and more recently had been part of the abortive Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic.

Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic. An early example of the flexibility of Soviet nationalities policy (although critics would cite it as an example of the Bolsheviks’ lack of principles), this theoretically autonomous polity was established on the orders of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic on 22 March 1918, on territories that had previously formed parts of Ufa, Perm′, Viatka, Orenburg, Simbirsk, and Samara gubernii. Its chief inspirers were Mirsäyet Soltanğäliev and the Tatar Bolshevik Mullanur Wakhitov. However, a planned Constituent Congress, due to convene on 15 September 1918, did not meet because of the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion and the capture of the region by forces of the Democratic Counter-Revolution. Many Bolsheviks decried the experiment as a dangerous concession to “bourgeois nationalism,” and the republic was disestablished, following a decision of the Politbiuro of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), on 13 December 1919.

TAURIDE, SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF. This short-lived Soviet polity existed in Crimea from 19 March to 30 April 1918, as a constituent part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. It was declared by a revolutionary committee elected at the First Constituent Congress of Soviets that gathered at Simferopol′ on 7–10 March 1918, and was governed by a Sovnarkom that included eight Bolsheviks and four members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries and was led by Anton Sutskii. This regime set about Sovietizing Crimea, instituting land redistribution, nationalizing industry, and sending supplies north to Moscow, but from 18 April 1918 it came under attack by forces loyal to the Ukrainian Central Rada, and in the aftermath of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), the area was soon also occupied by forces of the Austro-German intervention, with whom were allied rebel Tatar forces under the political guidance of Milliy Firqa. In late April 1918, Sutskii; the head of the Crimean regional committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Ia. Iu. Tarvatskii; and most other senior members of the administration were arrested by the Germans. All were subsequently executed, and the Tauride SSR collapsed.

TAUTAS PADOME. The Tautas Padome, or Latvian People’s Council, was formed on 17 November 1918 and served as a provisional parliament in Latvia between the country’s declaration of independence (18 November 1918) and the summoning of the Satermes Sapulce, the Latvian Constituent Assembly (1 May 1920). It originally consisted of 40 members, drawn from the Provisional Latvian National Council (Latvijas Pagaidu Nacionala Padome) and the Democratic Bloc, but was later expanded to 245 members. The chairman of the Tautas Padome, Jānis Čakste, acted as head of state (president), while Kārlis Ulmanis served as prime minister of the government throughout the body’s existence.

Teague-Jones, Reginald (1890–16 November 1988). Major (191?). A British intelligence officer active in Transcaucasia and Transcaspia during the “Russian” Civil Wars, Reginald Teague-Jones was educated at a German school in St. Petersburg (where his father was a language teacher) and at King’s College, University of London, although he never took his degree. He moved from England to India in 1910 and joined the police force. Having gained experience in intelligence work on the North-West Frontier, he was transferred to the Foreign and Political Department of the Indian government. He was sent into Transcaspia as an intelligence officer in 1918, and in September of that year was working with the anti-Bolshevik Transcaspian Provisional Government, at Ashkhabad, at the time of the execution of the Twenty-Six Commissars, Bolsheviks from Baku who had fallen into the Transcaspian government’s hands.

Thereafter, the Soviet authorities came to blame the British for the shootings and to claim that Teague-Jones had personally ordered them (charges later confirmed by the testimony of the head of the Transcaspian Provisional Government, F. A. Funtikov). Consequently, Teague-Jones changed his name (to Ronald Sinclair), although he continued in intelligence work until after the Second World War, when he retired to Florida and later to Spain. In the 1980s, failing health impelled “Sinclair” and his second wife to return to Britain. He died in a retirement home at Plymouth, in Devon, shortly before the publication of his memoir of the events in Transcaspia, The Spy Who Disappeared (1990).

Tel′berg, Georgii Gustavovich (27 September 1881–20 February 1954). One of the most influential ministers in the Siberian anti-Bolshevik regimes of the civil-war period, G. G. Tel′berg was born into a family of Swedish extraction at Tsaritsyn, Saratov guberniia, and was a graduate of the Law Faculty of Kazan′ University (1903, receiving his PhD in 1912). He worked as a lawyer, mostly at Ufa and Orenburg, before becoming a lecturer in law, first at Kazan′ University (from 1908), then Moscow University (from 1910), and finally Tomsk University (from 1914). A member of the Kadets from the party’s foundation in 1905, in 1918 he joined the Eastern Section of the Kadet Central Committee, which was based at Omsk.

During the Democratic Counter-Revolution, Tel′berg served as a senior legal consultant to the Provisional Siberian Government (from 10 September 1918) and then as cabinet secretary to the Ufa Directory (from 4 November 1918). Following the Omsk coup, he was one of the authors of the “constitution” of the regime of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, “The Statute on the Provisional Structure of State Power in Russia” (18 November 1918). Thereafter, he served as cabinet secretary (from 18 November 1918) and (until June 1919) deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers in the Omsk government. He was also head of the Government Senate at Omsk and one of the editors of the official Pravitel′stvennyi vestnik (“Government Herald”). A close associate of the powerful minister of finance, I. A. Mikhailov, on 2 May 1919 Tel′berg received a full governmental portfolio as minister of justice. Thereafter, he formed with Mikhailov and the minister of war (and chief of staff of Kolchak’s Russian Army), D. A. Lebedev, a sort of inner cabinet, “The Committee on Law and Order,” which came to wield virtually unlimited power over governmental affairs in July 1919, when Tel′berg became acting chairman of the Council of Ministers (during the absence, due to illness, of Prime Minister P. V. Vologodskii). Unlike Mikhailov and Lebedev, Tel′berg survived the crises within the Omsk government over the summer of 1919, although he was removed from his post of acting chairman of the Council of Ministers (15 August 1919). Nevertheless, probably more than any other of Kolchak’s ministers, he came to be personally associated in the public mind with the lawlessness that characterized White Siberia, and he was dismissed as minister of justice on 20 November 1919, in a government reshuffle at Irkutsk.

On 14 December 1919, Tel′berg emigrated. He settled in Manchuria, where he ran a bookshop at Harbin and lectured on the history of Russian law at the Harbin Law School. He also held teaching posts at the Japanese Commercial College and the American Academy at Tsindao. In 1940, he emigrated to the United States, settling in 1942 in New York, where he founded and ran a successful publishing business, the Telberg Book Corporation, which still survives. He is buried in the cemetery of the Novo-Diveyevo Monastery at Nanuet, in Rockland County, New York.

10TH RED ARMY. This Soviet military formation was created by an order of the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front of 3 October 1918, following a directive of the Revvoensovet of the Republic of 11 September 1918. It united numerous Red forces that had been active around Tsaritsyn and Kamyshin over the summer of 1918. It was attached to the Southern Front (from 3 October 1918), the South-East Front (from 1 October 1919), and the Caucasian Front (from 16 January 1919). Included in the 10th Red Army at various times were the 1st Communist Rifle Division (October 1918–January 1919); the 1st Kotel′nikov Rifle Division (October–November 1918); the 1st Northern Kuban Rifle Division (October–November 1918); the 1st Kamyshinsk Rifle Division (October 1918–March 1919); the 1st Steel Rifle Division (October 1918–January 1919); the 14th (June–July 1920), 16th (April–May 1920), 20th (December 1919–February 1920 and March–April 1920), 28th (August 1919–April 1920), 32nd (March 1919–April 1920), 33rd (April–May 1920), 34th (June–July 1919, February 1920, and March–April 1920), 37th (October 1918–February 1920), 38th (October 1918–February 1920), 39th (November 1918–March 1920), 40th (April–June 1920), and 50th (February 1920) Rifle Divisions; the Kotlubano-Buzinov Rifle Division (October–December 1928); the Budennyi Cavalry Corps (September–November 1919); the Independent Cavalry Corps (September–November 1919); the 1st Cavalry Corps (April–June 1920); the 1st (December 1919–February 1920) and 2nd (May–June 1920) Caucasian Cavalry Divisions; the 4th (November 1918–July 1919), 6th (March–June 1919), 7th (June 1919), 9th (February and April 1920), and 12th (January–February and April–July 1920) Cavalry Divisions; and the Independent (later 18th) Cavalry Division.

From October 1918 to January 1919, the 10th Red Army was chiefly engaged in defensive operations before Tsaritsyn, which was under siege by the Tsaritsyn Group of the Don Army, commanded by General K. K. Mamontov. It subsequently (in mid-February 1919) joined the 9th Red Army in a counteroffensive that pushed the front south to the Manych River. However, it was later forced back to Tsaritsyn, under pressure from the Caucasian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, and had to abandon the city to the Whites in late June 1919. The 10th Red Army was then attached to the Special Group of forces of V. I. Shorin, which undertook a counteroffensive in July–August 1919 toward the Don. Further offensives followed the collapse of the Armed Forces of South Russia’s efforts in late 1919, although Tsaritsyn was only recaptured by the 10th Red Army on 3 January 1920. Subsequently, over the spring and summer of 1920, acting in coordination with the 9th Red Army and the 11th Red Army, the 10th Red Army (from 4 May 1920 redubbed the 10th Terek Army) helped to clear the Whites from the North Caucasus. The army was disestablished in July 1920.

Commanders of the 10th Red Army were K. E. Voroshilov (3 October–18 December 1918); N. A. Khudiakov (18–26 December 1918); A. I. Egorov (26 December 1918–25 May 1919); L. L. Kliuev (26 May–28 December 1919); A. V. Pavlov (28 December 1919–20 June 1920); and V. P. Glagolev (20 June–8 July 1920). Its chiefs of staff were Sokolov (16 October –15 November 1918); S. K. Matsiletskii (15 November–17 December 1918); N. Ia. Kazanov (17–26 December 1918); L. L. Kliuev (26 December 1918–26 May 1919); B. N. Kondrat′ev (26 May–28 August 1919); V. N. Chernyshev (28 August 1919–15 June 1920); and E. F. Appoga (15 June–8 July 1920).

10th Terek-Daghestan Red Army. This Red military force was created on 7 March 1921, by the order of the Revvoensovet of the Caucasian Front, from units of the Terek-Daghestan Group of Forces. It included the 14th, 32nd, and 33rd Rifle Divisions and the 16th Cavalry Division (all 7 March–29 May 1921). The 10th Terek-Daghestan Red Army was disbanded on 29 May 1921, and its forces were subsequently distributed among those of the North Caucasus Military District.

Commanders of the 10th Terek-Daghestan Red Army were M. K. Levandovskii (7 March–18 April 1921); I. F. Sharkov (acting, 18–26 April 1921); V. N. Chernyshev (26 April–11 May 1921); and G. A. Armaderov (11–29 May 1921). Its chiefs of staff were V. M. Voronkov (13–21 March 1921); G. A. Armederov (21 March–11 May 1921); and D. I. Taiskii (acting, 11–29 May 1921).

TER-ARUTIUNIANTS, MKRTICH KARAPETOVICH (MIKHAIL KARPOVICH) (3 February 1894–25 August 1961). Ensign (1917). The Soviet military commander M. K. Ter-Arutiuniants was born into the family of an Armenian tailor at Elizavetpol′ (Ganja). He graduated from a military school in Petrograd in 1917 and joined the Bolsheviks in March of that year, working with the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b) in the capital. During the October Revolution, he acted as commissar of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet with the Kronversk Arsenal of the Peter and Paul Fortress and then led forces around Pulkovo during the suppression of the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising.

Ter-Arutiuniants was subsequently (from 10 December 1917) head of the Revolutionary Field Staff at the stavka of N. V. Krylenko and played a leading role in the suppression of the Dowbor-Muśnicki uprising. In May–June 1918, he acted as the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs’ special commissar for the defense of the Don region, and in July–August of that year, headed the supply office for forces of the North Caucasus Military District. From September 1918 to September 1922, he attended the Red Military Academy, with breaks to assume command posts (e.g., as chief of staff of the Tula Fortified Region in October 1919, during the onslaught of the Armed Forces of South Russia). From 1924 to 1931, Ter-Arutiuniants worked in the apparatus of Rabkrin, before moving into teaching posts. He retired in 1951.

TEREK COSSACK HOST. Created as an independent Host in 1577 (and part of the Caucasus Line Host from 1792 to 1860), by 1917 the Terek Cossack Host had a population of 250,000. Its territory, centered on the city of Vladikavkaz, was divided into four regions (Piatigorsk, Mozdovsk, Sunzhensk, and Kizliarsk), incorporating 70 stanitsy. During the First World War, it mobilized 18,000 men into the Russian Army.

Soviet power was established in the region in early 1918—the Terek Soviet Republic being proclaimed at Piatigorsk on 3–5 March of that year—and the Host was officially disbanded during the period of de-Cossackization, but in June 1918 the Terek Cossacks rose against the new authorities, and civil war ensued. By November 1918, through the application of Red Terror, the Bolsheviks had precariously reestablished their control of the Terek, but over the winter of 1918–1919, forces of the White Volunteer Army entered the region and assisted the Cossacks in clearing the Red authorities from the Host territory. Thereafter, the Terek Cossacks allied with the Volunteers and subordinated themselves to the Armed Forces of South Russia, contributing the 1st–4th Terek Cossack Divisions, the 1st–4th Terek Plastunskii (“dismounted Cossack”) Independent Brigades, and various other formations to its forces in 1919. In 1920, in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, Terek Cossacks formed part of the Terek-Astrakhan Brigade. As punishment for their support for the Whites, in the aftermath of the civil wars many Terek Cossack families were deported to Ukraine and other regions, and their empty villages were handed over to the indigenous peoples of the North Caucasus, while the territory itself was divided among the new autonomous soviet socialist republics of Daghestan, Northern Ossetia, and Checheno-Ingushetia.

The Terek Cossack Host’s atamans of the civil-war period were M. A. Karaulov (killed on 13 December 1917); L. E. Medianik (killed later in December 1917); and Lieutenant General G. A. Vdovenko (28 February 1918–1945).

TEREK–DAGHESTAN, PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT of. This anti-Bolshevik authority was formed on 1 December 1917, at Vladikavkaz, at a joint congress of the Union of United Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus, the government of the Terek Cossack Host, and the Union of Towns of the Terek–Daghestan Region. It consisted of 12 ministers and was initially led by the Terek ataman M. A. Karaulov. However, he was shot dead by revolutionary soldiers on 13 December 1917, and subsequently Prince P. Kh. Kaplanov chaired the Terek–Daghestan cabinet.

The regime issued a declaration that the solution of all social and economic problems should be postponed until the summoning of a regional constituent assembly and that, in the meantime, all efforts should be directed toward the military struggle against Soviet rule, but it was in reality powerless. In March 1918, with the proclamation of the Terek Soviet Republic, the members of the regime fled to Georgia, where some of them joined the exiled government of the equally nebulous Mountain Republic.

Terek Soviet Republic. This polity was created on 3–5 March 1918, at the 2nd Congress of the Peoples of the Terek, as a constituent part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Claiming control of the Terek oblast′, in opposition to the aspirations for autonomy of the Terek Cossack Host and the mountain peoples of the North Caucasus (through the Mountain Republic), and attempting to introduce a Soviet system into the region, it had its capital first at Piatigorsk and later at Vladikavkaz. Its territory was entirely occupied by forces of the Volunteer Army by February 1919, and from July 1919 it formed part of the North Caucasian Soviet Republic.

The chairmen of the Sovnarkom of the Terek Soviet Republic (which contained representatives of a variety of political parties) were, successively, the Bolshevik S. G. Buachidze (died 20 June 1918); the Left-SR Iu. G. Pashkovskii (died August 1918); and the Bolshevik F. Kh. Bulle.

TER-HARUTIUNIAN, GAREGIN. See NJDEH (TER-HARUTIUNIAN), GAREGIN.

TER-MINASSIAN, RUBEN (1882–29 November 1950/1951). The Armenian revolutionary Ruben Ter-Minassian was born at Akhalkalaki and was educated at a local Georgian seminary at Ejmiatsin (the spiritual capital of Armenia) and at the Lazarian Institute in Moscow. He was a close friend of Hamo Ohandjanian and, with him, joined the Dashnaks around the turn of the century. After training around Batumi in 1902, he spent several years organizing fedayeen (guerrilla fighters) around Lake Van, in Turkey. After a period in retirement from the struggle after the proclamation of the Turkish constitution in 1908 (largely spent studying science in Geneva), he was also active in that region during the First World War, leading Armenian fighters around Taron during the “Van Resistance” of 1915 and 1916 and helping to found the Administration for Western Armenia. Having escaped encirclement by the Turks, Ter-Minassian returned to Transcaucasia and, in 1917, was elected to the Armenian National Council.

In March 1918, Ter-Minassian accompanied the Transcaucasian Sejm delegation to negotiate with the Turks at the Trabzon Peace Conference and, from June 1918, served in the parliament of the Democratic Republic of Armenia, where his was a cautious voice, warning against overambitious territorial claims. From May to October 1920, he was minister of defense of the Armenian republic. In that capacity, he oversaw the suppression of uprisings by local Bolsheviks, was notably severe in his treatment of the Azeri population, and was also involved in financing undercover operations to assassinate Turkish leaders implicated in the 1915 genocide of the Armenians.

Following the invasion of Armenia by the Red Army in December 1920, Ter-Minassian fled, via Zangezur (Syunik), to Persia and thence to France. After many years of touring Europe and the Middle East as a spokesman for the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, he settled in France in 1948. He died in Paris and is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery.

TERPILO, DANILO (DMITRII) (1886–November 1919). A prominent Ukrainian otaman of the civil-war era, Danilo Terpilo was born at Tripol′e, Kiev guberniia, and had begun training to become a village teacher when, in 1905, he entered revolutionary politics as an organizer for the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries in his home district. He was arrested and exiled to the far north in 1908, but was amnestied in 1913. During the First World War, he served as a clerk with the 35th Army Corps, before returning home in late 1917 to become again involved in politics, this time working with the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor Party and supporting the Ukrainian Central Rada.

In the autumn of 1918, during the uprising against the Ukrainian State of General P. P. Skoropadskii, Terpilo offered his services to the Ukrainian National Republic Directory and, under the command of S. V. Petliura, raised the 3,000-strong Dnepr Division, at the head of which he entered Kiev on 14 December 1918. He soon broke with Petliura, however, believing that the directory was pursuing a too rightist line, and from January 1919 began raising forces to battle against the Ukrainian Army. On 8 February 1919, he offered to subordinate his units to the Red Army, but rebuffed all efforts to have his forces subjected to the regular Red command and broke with the latter in March 1919. On 25 March 1919, he was declared to be an outlaw by the Sovnarkom of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. His forces subsequently retreated into left-bank Ukraine, pursued by the Reds, although Terpilo was killed in battle at Kanev with White forces in November 1919.

Theater. See FICTION.

3RD ARMY. This White force was created on 22 July 1919, following the collapse of the spring offensive of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. It was constructed from elements of the former Western Army (chiefly the Volga, Ufa, and Urals Groups) and, with an initial complement of around 50,000 men, would henceforth constitute one of the mainstays of Kolchak’s newly reorganized Eastern Front. The 3rd Army was spectacularly defeated by the Red Army at Cheliabinsk in July–August 1919 and was routed again on the Tobol′ River the following month. It thereafter retreated in some disarray, and its remnants subsequently joined the Great Siberian (Ice) March. The surviving units of the 3rd Army reached Chita, in Transbaikalia, in February–March 1920, where they were reconstituted as the 3rd Corps of the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov.

Commanders of the 3rd Army were General K. V. Sakharov (22 July–4 November 1919 and 23 January–20 March 1920); General K. O. Kappel′ (4 November–10 December 1919); and General P. P. Petrov (14 December 1919–23 January 1920). Its chief of staff was General V. I. Oberiukhtin (22 July–10 October 1919).

3RD RED ARMY. This was the name given to three formations of forces of the Red Army in the course of the civil wars.

The first 3rd Red Army was created in early March 1918, as Red Guards and other units coalesced in southern Ukraine, along the left bank of the Dnestr, to resist Romanian forces (that were threatening to invade Bessarabia) and the forces of the Austro-German intervention. This force, which was loosely affiliated to Rumcherod, was also sometimes variously referred to as the “Special Revolutionary Army of the Odessa Region,” the “Odessa Army,” and the “3rd Revolutionary Army.” By April 1918, concentrated around the town of Lozovaia, it had reached a strength of some 5,000 men. The 3rd Red Army was then driven back into the Donbass by advancing German forces. Many of its members then moved to Tsaritsyn, where they were absorbed into the 5th Red Army. Commanders of the first 3rd Red Army were P. S. Lazarev (from March 1918) and (from 18 April 1918) E. I. Chikvanaia.

The second (and more substantial) 3rd Red Army was formed on 20 July 1918, according to the directives of the commander of the Eastern Front, from Soviet units in the region of Perm′, Ekaterinburg, and Ishim, to resist the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion. Included in this 3rd Red Army at various times were the Eastern (from 25 August 1918, the 1st Urals) Infantry Division (July–October 1918); the 2nd Urals Infantry Division (July–October 1918); the 3rd Urals Division (August–November 1918); the 4th Urals Rifle Division (December 1918); the 5th Urals Infantry Division (September–December 1918); the 21st Infantry Division (July–September 1919); the Urals Independent Infantry (from 11 November 1918, 29th Rifle) Division (October 1918–January 1920); the 4th Urals (from 11 November 1918, the 30th Rifle) Division (July 1918–November 1919); the 51st Rifle Division (July–November 1919); the 62nd Rifle Division (November–December 1918); the Special Division (November–December 1918); the Urals Rifle Division (November 1919–January 1920); and the 10th Cavalry Division (November 1919–January 1920). In 1918, this 3rd Red Army operated against the Czechs and the Whites’ Siberian Army around Zlatoust, Ekaterinburg, and Perm′, all of which were lost (Perm′ on 24 December 1918). In early 1919, it resisted the spring advance of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s Northern Army, finally halting it before Viatka. The force then participated in the advance of Red forces into Siberia, recapturing Perm′ (30 June 1919) and participating in the capture of Petropavlovsk and Omsk in September–November 1919. On 15 January 1920, this 3rd Red Army was transformed into one of the first Labor Armies, as the 1st Revolutionary Army of Labor. Commanders of the 3rd Red Army were R. I. Berzin (20 July–29 November 1918); M. M. Lashevich (30 November 1918–5 March 1919); S. A. Mezheninov (5 March–26 August 1919); M. I. Alafuzo (temporary, 26 August–6 October 1919); and M. S. Matiiasevich (7 October 1919–15 January 1920). Its chiefs of staff were V. F. Orel (28 July–4 August 1918); M. M. Lashevich (5–7 August 1918); Iu. Iu. Aplok (7–31 August 1918); M. I. Alafuzo (31 August 1918–26 August 1919 and 7 October–9 November 1919); I. I. Gerasimov (temporary, 26 August–6 October and 10–26 November 1919); V. V. Liubimov (temporary, 27 November–19 December 1919); and E. N. Sergeev (19 December 1919–15 January 1920).

The third 3rd Red Army was created on 11 June 1920, during the Soviet–Polish War, from the southern group of forces of the 15th Red Army on the Western Front. It included the 2nd (August, September–October, and November 1920), 5th (June–December 1920), 6th (July–December 1920), 11th (October and December 1920), 16th (November 1920), 18th (October 1920), 21st (July–November and December 1920), 27th (November–December 1920), and 56th (June–September, October, and December 1920) Rifle Divisions; the Independent Rifle Division of VOKhR (October–December 1920); and the Kuban Cavalry Division (September–November 1920). Having been formed to hold the gap between Lake Sho and Lake Pelik, this 3rd Red Army advanced in the direction of Dokshitsy (Dokszyce) and Parafinovo in June–July 1920, before participating in the Reds’ failed attack on Warsaw. In November–December 1920, the 3rd Red Army engaged in operations against the forces of S. Bułak-Bałachowicz, before being merged into the 16th Red Army (on 31 December 1920). Commanders of the third 3rd Red Army were V. S. Lazarevich (12 June–18 October 1920); A. S. Beloi (temporary, 18–24 October 1920); and N. E. Kakurin (24 October–21 December 1920). Its chiefs of staff were A. I. Roshkovskii (temporary, 12 June–4 July 1920); N. V. Lisovskii (4 July–20 October 1920); A. D. Taranovskii (20 October–2 November 1920); and K. P. Nevezhin (2 November–31 December 1920).

3rd Ukrainian Soviet Army. This Red military formation was created on 15 April 1919 (following an order of the Revvoensovet of the Ukrainian Front of 24 March 1919) from forces operating around Odessa, chiefly the 5th and 6th Ukrainian Rifle Divisions. These were joined, in May 1919, by the 1st Bessarabian and 2nd Internationalist Divisions. The army operated in the Odessa–Kherson–Nikolaev region and, by late April 1919, controlled much of left-bank Ukraine. On 11 May 1919, the army forced a passage across the Dnestr and began an advance on Kishinev, but its progress was interrupted by the mutiny of forces commanded by Nykyfor Hryhoriiv. In June 1919, the 3rd Ukrainian Soviet Army was disestablished, and its units were incorporated into the 12th Red Army on the Western Front.

The commander of the 3rd Ukrainian Soviet Army was N. A. Khudiakov (15 April–23 June 1919). Its chief of staff was I. A. Plotnikov (15 April–23 June 1919).

13TH RED ARMY. This military formation of the Red Army was created, according to an order of the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front, on 5 March 1919, on the basis of forces operating around Donetsk. The 13th Red Army was initially attached to the Southern Front, then (from 10 January 1920) the South-West Front, then once more (from 21 September 1920) the Southern Front. Its complement included, at various times the 1st (August–September 1920), 2nd Don (October–November 1920), 3rd (July 1919–October 1920), 7th (August–September 1919), 9th (March–December 1919 and September–October 1920), 15th (May–September 1920), 23rd (September–October 1920), 40th (June–October 1920), 41st (March–April 1919), 42nd (March 1919–January 1920, January–March 1920, and June–November 1920), 46th (January–October 1920), 51st (August–September 1920), and 52nd (April–September 1920) Rifle Divisions; the Don Independent Rifle Division (March 1919); the Latvian Riflemen (October 1919 and March–September 1920); the Naval Expeditionary Division (October–November 1920); the Independent Rifle Division (September 1919); the Estonian Rifle Division (October 1919–January 1920 and February–March 1920); the 1st Cavalry Corps (June–July 1920); the 2nd (May–July 1920), 7th (September–November 1920), 8th (November 1919–May 1920), 9th (August–October 1920), and 16th (July 1920) Cavalry Divisions; and the Taganrog Group of Forces (October–November 1920).

In March–April 1919, the 13th Red Army was engaged in battles across the Donbass, capturing Iuzovka and other centers and moving toward Rostov-on-Don. It was forced onto the retreat by the Armed Forces of South Russia over the summer of 1919, but retook the offensive from Orel in October–November of that year and, by January 1920, had recaptured the Donbass and Mariupol′. In August 1920, the advance from Crimea of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel forced the 13th Red Army to retreat once more, but it was subsequently to participate (as a reserve force) in the Red Army counteroffensive that eventually broke into Crimea in November of that year. The 13th Red Army was disbanded on 12 November 1920, and its forces were merged into the 4th Red Army.

Commanders of the 13th Red Army were I. S. Kozhevnikov (6 March–16 April 1919); A. I. Gekker (16 April 1919–18 February 1920); I. Kh. Pauka (18 February–5 June 1920); R. P. Eideman (5 June–10 July 1920); and I. P. Uborevich (10 July–11 November 1920). Its chiefs of staff were A. A. Dushkevich (6 March–3 July 1919); A. M. Zaionchkovskii (acting, 3 July 1919–26 February 1920); M. A. Orlov (acting, 22 February–20 June 1920); M. I. Alafuzo (20 June–13 October 1920); and F. P. Tokarev (13 October–12 November 1920).

Tikhmenev, Nikolai Mikhailovich (27 March 1872–12 June 1954). Colonel (1907), major general (30 August 1914), lieutenant general (8 February 1917). One of the chief military administrators of the White forces in South Russia, N. M. Tikhmenev was born at Rybinsk and was a graduate of the Moscow Infantry Officer School (1891) and the Academy of the General Staff (1897). After his graduation from the academy, he occupied a number of staff positions and saw action during the Russian expedition into China (1900–1901) and in the Russo–Japanese War. During the First World War, he served as assistant to the head of military communications at the stavka of the main commander in chief (from 5 October 1915) and, from 8 February 1917, was chief of military communications for the entire theater of military operations. Suspected by the Provisional Government of involvement in the Kornilov affair, he was placed on reserve from 10 September 1917.

Tikhmenev joined the Volunteer Army early in 1918 and was a close advisor of General A. I. Denikin following the formation of the Armed Forces of South Russia, working as chief of military communications on Denikin’s staff and overseeing the restoration of the railways in the rear of the army. He was also a member of Denikin’s Special Council. In emigration, he settled in France and was for many years chairman of the Union of Remembrance of Emperor Nicholas II, as well as serving in the Russian Orthodox Church administration in Paris. He is buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Paris.

Tikhon, Patriarch (BelLavin, Vasilii Ivanovich) (19 January 1865–7 April 1925). The head of the Russian Orthodox Church during the civil wars, Tikhon was born into the family of a provincial clergyman and educated at the Pskov Seminary. He was awarded a degree in theology from the St. Petersburg Academy in 1888, took monastic vows in 1891, and was made a bishop in 1898, then was assigned to the Orthodox diocese in Alaska. During his nine years in North America, he drafted a model parish statute, which was to be adopted by the All-Russian Sobor′ of the Orthodox Church of 1917 to 1918. Following the February Revolution, he was one of the first bishops to be elected to a diocese (Moscow) by a diocesan assembly, and on 5 November 1917, he was elected to the newly restored Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church (which had been abolished by Peter the Great in 1701).

During the civil wars, Tikhon refused to offer public support for the Whites, hoping to keep the church out of the struggle, but on 1 February 1918, he anathematized the Bolsheviks for their use of violence and terror and later openly condemned the execution of the Romanov family. In turn, he was gravely persecuted under the Soviet regime and spent more than a year in captivity, without trial, at the Donskoi Monastery (May 1922–June 1923). In 1923, despite issuing a surprise statement declaring the cessation of his hostility to the Soviet state, he was proclaimed deposed by a council of the state-controlled “Living Church”; two years later, he suddenly died. It is widely believed that Tikhon was poisoned at the hands of the Soviet security services (having already survived two attempts on his life). In 1981, he was canonized by the émigré Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and in 1989 this was confirmed by a Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church. Tikhon’s remains rest in a reliquary in the main cathedral (Katholikon) of the Donskoi Monastery, in Moscow.

TIMOSHKOV, SERGEI PROKOF′EVICH (18 October 1895–4 May 1972). Staff captain (1916), kombrig (5 December 1935), major general (4 June 1940). A Red commander active in Central Asia during the civil wars, who joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919, S. P. Timoshkov was born at Zimnitsa, Smolensk guberniia; graduated from the Vil′na Officer School (relocated to Poltava, 1916); and rose to the rank of staff captain in the First World War, as commander of a machine gun detachment with the 4th Turkestan Rifle regiment. He joined the Red Army in 1918, as chief of a machine gun detachment with the 2nd Tashkent Battalion, and from July 1918 he was assistant commander of a detachment battling the anti-Soviet Ashkhabad uprising. From August 1918, he was active on the Transcaspian Front as commander of an independent detachment. He subsequently commanded the 1st Turkestan Rifle Regiment and, at the same time (from April 1919), was assistant commander of the Transcaspian Front. He was then made, successively, commander of the Transcaspian Front (8 August–22 November 1919), commander of the Transcaspian Army Group of the Turkestan Front (22 November–December 1919), and commander of the 1st Turkestan Rifle Division (December 1919–March 1920). From 1921 to 1922, he was commander of the Forces of Turkestan Oblast′, engaged in battles against the Basmachi.

Timoshkov remained in military service after the civil wars, eventually becoming (from May 1930) a senior professor at the Red Military Academy, and in the Second World War (from November 1943) was deputy commander of the 51st Rifle Corps. He was imprisoned in 1948, but was released (in July 1953) soon after the death of J. V. Stalin and was subsequently rehabilitated. He died in Moscow in 1972 and was buried in the Novodevich′e cemetery.

Tito (broz), Josip (7 May 1892–4 May 1980). Sergeant (Austro-Hungarian Army, 1914), sergeant major (Austro-Hungarian Army, 1915). The Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman—who like many other East European communist leaders (e.g., Béla Kun), participated in the “Russian” Civil Wars—was born Josip Broz, into the family of a blacksmith, in the Croatian village of Kumrovec, then in Austro-Hungary. After finishing school in 1905, he trained as a machinist in Sisak and became involved in the workers’ movement. He held down several jobs (including a spell as a test driver for Daimler at Wiener Neustadt, in Austria), before being mobilized into the Austro-Hungarian Army. During the First World War, he became the youngest sergeant major in the Austrian army and was recommended for a medal for bravery, but on 25 March 1915, before it could be awarded, he was wounded and captured by Russian forces in Bukovina. He spent 13 months in hospital at Sviansk, before being moved to POW camps at Ardatov (near Nizhnii Novgorod) and then at Kungur in the Urals in the summer of 1916. He was freed by rebelling workers during the February Revolution and arrested two months later for organizing demonstrations among prisoner groups, but escaped and made his way to Petrograd (where he participated in the July Days), then was captured when trying to flee to Finland and sent back to Kungur. He escaped again before arriving at the camps and made his way to Omsk.

Following the October Revolution, Broz joined a Red Guards unit there and became a member of the Yugoslav branch of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Despite some claims by Yugoslav communists that Broz then served on a number of fronts in the “Russian” Civil Wars with internationalist detachments, he seems to have played no significant part in the Red Army’s struggle against the Whites, living quietly (as he himself once admitted) with his new Russian wife in Siberia until September 1920, when they went to Yugoslavia. There, he joined the Yugoslav Communist Party (YCP) and was active in underground work for that illegal party between the wars (including a stint in Moscow in 1935 with the Komintern). He returned to Yugoslavia in 1937, to become chairman of the YCP (his predecessor, Milan Gorkić, having been killed in Moscow during the purges). From 27 June 1941, he was commander in chief of all Communist partisans in the struggle against the German invasion of Yugoslavia and (by now renamed Tito) came to be viewed by 1945 as the savior of his country. This popularity enabled him to defy Moscow in the postwar era, breaking free of the Soviet bloc from 1948. He then ruled Yugoslavia as the country’s president from 1953.

After a long illness, in 1980 Tito died of gangrene, following the amputation of his right leg. His funeral—during which he was buried in a mausoleum complex (Kuća Cveća, “the House of Flowers”) attached to the Museum of Yugoslav History—remains the largest state funeral in history, in terms of the number of foreign dignitaries in attendance (among them no fewer than 4 kings, 31 presidents, and 22 prime ministers).

TIUTIUNNYK, IURII (IURKO) IOSYPOVICH (20 April 1891–20 October 1930). NCO (1914). The Ukrainian military commander Iurko Tiutiunnyk was born into a peasant family at Budyshcha, in the Pendivskii district of Kiev guberniia. He was the grandson of the sister of Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko. After being educated at local schools, he was drafted into the Russian Army in 1913, then made an NCO the following year. He distinguished himself by his bravery in battle during the First World War (notably at the Battle of Łódź, 11 November–6 December 1914) and was sent to the military college in Tiflis in 1915. In 1917, he was offered the command of the Odessa Military District by A. F. Kerensky, but having no faith in the Russian Provisional Government’s professions of goodwill toward Ukrainian autonomy, he declined and instead set about organizing a Ukrainian nationalist detachment, the 1st Simferopol′ (Hetman Doroshchenko) Regiment. He was subsequently elected as a member of the Ukrainian Central Rada.

During the autumn of 1917, Tiutiunnyk organized and led a unit of Free Cossacks around Zvenigorodka, in central Ukraine. In 1918, his group engaged in battles against the Red Army, forces of the Austro-German intervention, and the Hetmanite Army. In February 1919, he merged his force with that of Nykyfor Hryhoriiv and later with the Ukrainian Army, alongside which he fought both the Red Army and the Whites. He also played a leading role (as commander of the Kiev Rifle Division) in the Ukrainian Army’s desperate Winter Campaigns of 1919–1921.

After briefly fleeing abroad in 1921, Tiutiunnyk returned to Soviet Russia in 1923 and agreed to cooperate with the Soviet authorities. As “Ukrainization” policies blossomed in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic during the 1920s, he was allowed to lecture on strategy at a military college in Khar′kov, contributed (under the name “Iurtik”) to the script of the feature film Zvenigora (dir. A. P. Dovzhenko, 1928), and appeared as himself in a propaganda film attacking the role played by S. V. Petliura in the civil wars. With the rise to power of J. V. Stalin and the reversal of “Ukrainization” policies in the USSR, however, Tiutiunnyk fell from favor. On 12 February 1929, he was arrested at Khar′kov, and on 3 December 1929, following a brief trial in Moscow, he was found guilty of anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to death. He was executed by firing squad the following year at the Lubianka, in Moscow.

TIUTNNYK, VASIL′ (VASILII NIKIFOROVICH) (17 July 1890–19 December 1919). Captain (1917), coronet general (Ukrainian Army, 1919). The Ukrainian commander Vasil′ Tiutnnyk was born into a peasant family at the Kuturzh khutor, in Poltava guberniia, and was a graduate of the Tiflis Military School (1912), where he was recognized as an expert marksman. He subsequently served with the 25th Siberian Rifle Regiment in Irkutsk, and in the First World War, saw action with them as commander of a reconnaissance unit in Poland and Belorussia. In the autumn of 1917, he entered the service of the Ukrainian Central Rada and was made commander of its 2nd Army.

From March 1918, Tiutnnyk was a member of the Ukrainian Army, remaining in that post following the coup of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii to serve in the Hetmanite Army, as assistant chief of a section of the General Staff in Kiev. In fact, though, Tiutnnyk was an opponent of the Ukrainian State; he was a member of the Ukrainian National Union and a supporter of Simon Petliura and participated in preparations for the overthrow of Skoropadskii in November–December 1918. From November 1918, he was deputy chief of the General Staff of the army of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), as well as head of its Operational Section. In May–June 1919, it was on the basis of plans drawn up by Tiutnnyk that the Ukrainian Army extricated itself from a calamitous situation between the Red Army and the Polish Army and captured Proskurov, Kamenets-Podol′skii, and other towns. Subsequently, he was named commander in chief of the Ukrainian Army and (from August 1919), simultaneously, commander of its Eastern Group. In that capacity, he laid the plans for the first of the UNR army’s Winter Campaigns (1919–1920).

Before that operation got under way, however, Tiutnnyk died, at Rovno, of heart complications associated with a bout of typhus. The monument at his grave in Rovno (raised by subscription in 1930, when that city was in Poland) was restored in 1992, and in 2001 a plaque in his memory was unveiled in the room of the local hospital where he died.

TOGAN, AHMET ZEKI VELIDI (VALIDOV). See Validov (Validi), Ahmed Zeki (togan).

TOKMAKOV, PETR MIKHAILOVICH (?–23 March 1921). Sublieutenant (1915). One of the leaders of the Tambov Rebellion, P. M. Tokmakov was born into a peasant family at Inokovka, Tambov guberniia. He was mobilized during the Russo–Japanese War and chose to remain in military service thereafter, being frequently cited for bravery and receiving numerous awards and medals during the First World War.

Tokmakov returned to Tambov in 1918 and began organizing self-defense militias and units of partisans there, in partnership with A. S. Antonov. During the uprising against Soviet power of 1920–1921, he rose to command the United Partisan Army of the Tambov Region (from 14 November 1920) and then the 2nd Partisan Army (from early 1921). According to some sources, he was also one of the leading members of the political arm of the rebellion, the Union of the Toiling Peasantry. Early in 1921, he was mortally wounded in battle against Red Army forces at the village of Belomestnaia Dvoinia. A rebel soldier called S. V. Ionov, who was captured by the Cheka, later told his interrogators that he had killed Tokmakov, against whom he bore a grudge stemming from a reprimand for looting. Tokmakov’s common-law wife, Anastaia Drigo-Drigina, however, testified that he had died of battle wounds. His gravesite remains unknown.

Tolstov, Vladimir Sergeevich (7 July 1884–29 April 1956). Colonel (1917), major general (1918), lieutenant general (October 1919). Son of an exiled ataman of the Terek Cossack Host (General of Cavalry S. E. Tolstov), V. S. Tolstov, the last ataman of the Urals Cossack Host (elected 11 March 1919), was born at Lokhvitsa, Poltava guberniia, and was a graduate of the Nicholas Cavalry School (1905). During the First World War, he commanded the 4th Urals Cossack Regiment.

In January 1918, Tolstov led the Urals Cossacks’ rising against Soviet power at Astrakhan and Gur′ev; later in 1918, he commanded the Gur′ev group of the Urals Army; and from 8 April 1919 to 5 January 1920, he commanded the Urals Army. Following the collapse of that force, he led its 15,000 survivors on a horrendous “ice march” along the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, eventually passing into Persia with just 162 Cossacks. He and his men were then confined to a prison camp at Basra, until 16 May 1921, when some of their number (including Tolstov) were transferred to the Far East. In 1922, Tolstov commanded Cossack forces based on Russian Island, off Vladivostok. When the city fell to the Far Eastern Republic’s People’s-Revolutionary Army in October of that year, he emigrated to China.

In 1921, Tolstov was elected as a member of the émigré Russian Council of General P. N. Wrangel, and from August 1922, he also served as chairman of the Directorate of Cossack Forces in emigration. In 1942, Tolstov moved permanently to Australia, where many Cossacks of the Urals Army had settled, and worked as a docker in Sydney before establishing his own business. He died and is buried in Brisbane.

TOMSKII (Efremov), MIKHAIL PAVLOVICH (31 October 1880–22 August 1936). The long-serving leader of Soviet trade unions M. P. Tomskii was born into a working-class family at Kolpino, St. Petersburg guberniia, and trained as a printer. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1904 and supported the Bolsheviks in the intra-party struggle. A union organizer and activist at Revel during the 1905 Revolution, he was arrested, imprisoned, and exiled on a number of occasions, until, in 1911, he was sentenced to five years’ hard labor and exiled to Siberia. He returned to Petrograd in 1917, following the February Revolution, to become a member of the Bolsheviks’ Petersburg Committee and editor of the newspaper Metallist (“The Metalworker”).

Following the October Revolution, Tomskii became chairman of the Moscow Council of Trade Unions (from December 1917) and a member of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defense (1918–1920). On 23 March 1919, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and was subsequently general secretary of the Central Council of Trade Unions and chairman of Profintern, the Red International of Labor Unions (July 1920–May 1921). From 1922, he was a member of the Politbiuro, working with J. V. Stalin and others to undermine L. D. Trotsky in the power struggles that occurred during the illness and subsequent death of V. I. Lenin. A supporter of the New Economic Policy, from April 1929 he was castigated, alongside N. I. Bukharin and A. I. Rykov, as a member of the “Right Opposition” and lost most of his senior party and state posts (although he remained a full member of the party Central Committee until January 1934). In May 1932, he became head of the State Publishing House (Gosizdat).

After being named as a spy during the first of the Moscow show trials, Tomskii committed suicide at Bolshevo (Moscow oblast′) in August 1936. In 1938, during the third of the great show trials, fabricated evidence was presented that named Tomskii as the link between members of the Right Opposition and an oppositional group in the Red Army. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 21 June 1988.

TÕNISSON, ALEKSANDER (17 April 1875–30 June 1941). Major general (Estonian Army, 25 March 1918). A senior nationalist military commander during the Estonian War of Independence, Aleksander Tõnisson was born at Härjanurme, in Estland guberniia, and was a graduate of the Vil′na Military School (1899). He was a veteran of the Russo–Japanese War and the First World War, concluding his service in the latter (from 23 May 1917) as one of the organizers and the commander of the 1st Estonian Regiment, with which he saw action around Riga in the summer of 1917.

When German forces occupied Estonia in early 1918, Tõnisson fled to Finland, returning in the autumn of that year to command the 1st Estonian Division (effectively, the Estonian Army) in the initials stages of the war against Soviet Russia. After the war, he served twice as minister of defense (1920 and 1932–1933), before retiring from the army in 1934 to become mayor of Tartu (1934–1939) and then lord mayor of Tallinn (1939–1940). He was arrested by the occupying Soviet authorities on 19 December 1940 and was executed at Tallinn the following year. In May 2007, the statue of Tõnisson at Johvi was set on fire, allegedly by Russian youths protesting the removal of a Soviet war memorial (the “Bronze Soldier”) in Tallinn.

Tõnisson, Jaan (22 December 1868–1941?). As leader of the right-liberal National Party of Estonia, and twice his country’s prime minister in 1919–1920 (during the Estonian War of Independence), Jaan Tõnisson is chiefly remembered for his part in negotiating the Treaty of Tartu (2 February 1920), through which Estonia was recognized by the Soviet government. A lawyer by training, he was born in the village of Tänassilma, near Viljandi, Estland guberniia, and during the tsarist period was an active opponent of the Russification of his country. From 1893 onward, he edited the most popular Estonian-language newspaper, Postimees (“The Courier”). He was also active in the cooperative movement. During the revolution of 1905, he founded the first legal Estonian political party (the National Progress Party) and was subsequently elected to the 1st State Duma in 1906. Following its dissolution, he was arrested and imprisoned for three months. In 1917, he demanded complete independence for Estonia and was briefly imprisoned by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution.

Thereafter, Tõnisson went abroad to campaign for the recognition of Estonian independence, returning to Tallinn (Revel) in November 1918. He joined the Estonian government as minister without portfolio and then served two terms as prime minister (18 November 1919–28 July 1920 and 30 July–26 October 1920). He remained a member of the Estonian parliament (Riigikogu) from 1920 to 1937 (serving as its chairman, 1923–1925 and 1932–1933) and was twice state president (9 December 1927–4 December 1928 and 18 May–21 October 1933). In the late 1930s, he was one of the leaders of the democratic opposition to the authoritarian government of Konstantin Päts, but following the Soviet invasion of Estonia in June 1940, he was nevertheless arrested. His subsequent fate is uncertain, but one credible version has it that he was executed at Tallinn in July 1941. A statue of him was unveiled in Tartu in 1999.

TOPCHUBASHOV, ALIMARDAN ALAKBAR OGLU (4 May 1862–8 November 1934). The head of state of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan was born at Tiflis, into a branch of the ancient, noble Topchubashi family. He was educated at the Tiflis Gymnasium and graduated from the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1888). Topchubashov was then offered a teaching post at the university, but would have been required to convert to Christianity to accept it, so he returned instead to the Caucasus, where he worked as a lawyer; edited the newspaper Kaspi (“The Caspian”); and became a prominent leader of the Turko-Tatar and Muslim peoples of the Russian Empire in their struggles against legal, political, and religious discrimination. In 1905, he helped found and lead the Ittifaq al-Muslim (Union of Muslims), and in 1906 he was elected to the First State Duma, as a Muslim representative. When that parliament was dissolved by Nicholas II, Topchubashov was among those deputies who signed the Vyborg Manifesto, calling for civil disobedience to protest the tsar’s act. Consequently, he was arrested and imprisoned for three months and was subsequently deprived of his political rights.

With the founding of the Azerbaijan Republic (28 May 1918), Topchubasov became the government’s ambassador to Armenia, Georgia, and the Ottoman Empire, based in Constantinople. He was still in that city when, on 7 December 1918, he was elected chairman (speaker) of the Azeri parliament in Baku, thereby becoming head of state (in absentia) of the republic. He traveled to France in January 1919, to press for Azerbaijan’s recognition at the Paris Peace Conference. This he eventually received in January 1920, but the Soviet invasion of his country in April 1920 meant he was unable to return home. He died in Paris on 8 November 1934.

TOPORKOV, SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH (25 September 1880–1931). Colonel (May 1917), major general (8 December 1918). The White general S. M. Toporkov was born into the family of a member of the Transbaikal Cossack Host at Akshinsk stanitsa. He served with the 1st Chita Cossack Regiment in the Russo–Japanese War and was much decorated for bravery. During the First World War, he commanded Chechen and Tatar regiments of the Caucasian Native Mounted Division (the ‘Wild Division”).

Following the October Revolution, Toporkov joined the Volunteer Army upon its foundation (December 1917) and served as commander, successively, of an independent Kuban Cossack detachment (March–June 1918), the 1st Zaporozhian Regiment of the 1st Kuban Mounted Division (June–October 1918), and the 2nd Mounted Brigade of the 1st Mounted Division (2 November 1918–January 1919). Following the creation of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), he commanded the 1st Mounted Division of the 1st Kuban Mounted Corps (January–April 1919). From 19 January 1919, Toporkov was also commander of the 1st Terek Cossack Division, which was in the process of formation. With the latter, during May and June 1919, he undertook a remarkable raid in the rear of the Red Army, penetrating into Soviet territory as far as Khar′kov (which was then some 400 miles from the front). He captured and briefly held that city (as would the later Mamontov raid). From 22 July to September 1919, he commanded the 4th Mounted Corps of the Caucasian Army, and was then placed in command of the 2nd Kuban Corps of the same army (October–November 1919). From December 1919 to March 1920, during the collapse of the AFSR, he commanded the Composite Kuban–Terek Mounted Corps, the main reserve force of the retreating Whites. Following the evacuation of White forces from Novorossiisk to Crimea, he participated in the military council of March 1920 at Sevastopol′ that selected General P. N. Wrangel as supreme commander and was then placed in command of the Composite Cossack Corps in Wrangel’s Russian Army (April–November 1920). He was evacuated to Turkey in November 1920, and in emigration settled in Serbia. Toporkov died in Belgrade and was buried in that city’s New Cemetery.

Trabzon Peace Conference. This conference, which brought together delegations from the Ottoman Empire and the Transcaucasian Sejm, led by Rear Admiral Rauf Bey and Akaki Chkhenkeli, respectively, opened on 14 March 1918. Its aim was to reconcile the different views that were taken by Turkey and the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic with regard to the border that had been established between Turkey and the former Transcaucasian provinces of the Russian Empire by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). Essentially, the Turks were willing to accept the Brest settlement (although they harbored ambitions for much greater territorial expansion into Transcaucasia), as were, with some reluctance, the Georgians, but the Armenians, who had the most to lose (as claimants to much of eastern Anatolia), were not. Hostilities were then resumed between Turkey and Armenia in April 1918, and on 4 June 1918, the Democratic Republic of Armenia was forced to accept the Treaty of Batumi.

TRADE UNIONS. Trade union membership skyrocketed in Russia during the revolutionary year of 1917. On the eve of the collapse of tsarism (12 years after union activity had been legalized in the Russian Empire), just three unions were operating legally, with 1,500 members; by July 1917, there were almost 1,000 unions, with membership approaching 2,000,000. When the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions (the first since the February Revolution) met in Petrograd on 21–28 June 1917, a majority (55.5 percent) of delegates were Mensheviks; 36.4 percent were Bolsheviks. However, the Bolsheviks predominated in the newly legalized factory committees, which competed for influence with the trade unions. This facilitated the October Revolution and was useful in the implementation of workers’ control by the new Soviet government, but as that policy became discredited over the winter of 1917–1918, factory committees were ordered to subject themselves to the now Bolshevik-dominated unions at the All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions on 20–27 January 1918. (Between congresses, the unions were subordinated to the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions.)

Under pressure from Sovnarkom, it thereafter became the task of the trade unions to persuade workers to forfeit the control of industrial enterprises that they had seized and to follow the guidance of the trade unions, so that local interests would not prevail over the demands of the national economy (now governed by VSNKh, which was at the same time being purged of members loyal to the Left Bolsheviks). The unions could also act as mediators between workers and management, but as time went on, their independence in this regard was eroded, and the right to strike was removed. Indeed, it became clear that elements within the Soviet government regarded the trade unions as little more than a branch of the state machinery (specifically, the People’s Commissariat for Labor), a development that the Bolshevik head of the union organization, M. P. Tomskii, seemed disinclined to resist. In this regard, the unions, from the point of view of the Soviet government, could be called upon to oversee tasks quite divorced from those traditionally associated with trade unions, such as mobilization for the Red Army and the formation of food supply detachments for the Food Army.

Matters came to a head in December 1920, when L. D. Trotsky, drawing on his experience as joint head of both Glavpolitput′ (the Main Political Section of the People’s Commissariat for Rail Transport) and Tsektran (the Central Committee of the Union of Workers in Rail and Water Transport), advocated the complete “statification” of the unions, through their fusion with the chief organs of industrial administration, and argued that in a workers’ state the only concern of trade unions should be increasing productivity. There was a link here also with Trotsky’s advocacy of Labor Armies. Although the militarization of labor had been a creeping feature of Soviet life since April 1918, when key workers in the mining industry had first been forbidden to leave their jobs, putting the case so bluntly aroused opposition from V. I. Lenin (supported by G. E. Zinov′ev and others in the so-called Platform of 10), who proposed that the unions should maintain some independence as “schools for Communism,” drawing nonparty workers into socially responsible labor. Trotsky’s position was also criticized by members of the Workers’ Opposition, who proposed that control of the economy should be completely removed from the state and transferred to congresses of producers from the local to the national level. At the 10th Party Congress in March 1921, the program of the Platform of 10 was adopted, with 336 votes cast in its favor (as opposed to 50 for Trotsky’s platform and 18 for the Workers’ Opposition).

During the Democratic Counter-Revolution of the summer of 1918, many trade unions dominated by Mensheviks in peripheral industrial regions of the country (notably the Urals) tended to collaborate with the Bolsheviks’ enemies—Komuch, the Provisional Siberian Government, and so forth—but when the Whites took control of the anti-Bolshevik movement, the unions found themselves persecuted and generally became pro-Soviet in outlook, despite their opposition to the aforementioned developments on Soviet territory.

trade unions, all-russian central council of. The leading organ of the trade union movement in Russia was first elected by the Third All-Russian Conference of Trade Unions at Petrograd on 20–28 June 1917. It initially contained more Mensheviks than Bolsheviks and had a Menshevik chairman (V. P. Grinevich), but following the October Revolution, at the First All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions at Petrograd on 7–14 January 1918, seven of the nine men elected to it were Bolsheviks, and G. E. Zinov′ev was made chairman. He was soon succeeded, in March 1918, by M. P. Tomskii. During the civil wars, the council participated in the administration and management of nationalized industries, as well as in the creation of the Red Army. In 1924, its name was changed to the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions.

TRANSBAIKAL COSSACK HOST. Occupying lands along the Chinese border, centered on Chita, in the southern reaches of Transbaikal oblast′, and living in 63 stanitsy and 514 smaller settlements, the Transbaikal Cossack Host had a population of some 250,000 by 1917. During the First World War, it managed to place 13,000 men under arms. (One of the Transbaikal units, the 1st Nerchinsk Regiment, was commanded by then colonel P. N. Wrangel.)

The Transbaikal Host came out against Soviet rule in late 1917, under the influence of G. M. Semenov, and in the course of the civil wars raised 14 mounted regiments and 4 batteries for service in the armies of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. With the collapse of the Whites in Siberia and the establishment on their territory of the pro-Soviet Far Eastern Republic, many Transbaikal Cossacks chose to continue the struggle against Bolshevism in the Maritime Province, in the ranks of the Far Eastern (White) Army and other such White formations, before emigrating to China, Australia, and elsewhere.

Atamans of the Transbaikal Cossack Host of the civil-war period were Colonel E. G. Sychev (August 1918; acting January–August 1918) and G. M. Semenov (from 13 June 1919).

TRANSCASPIAN FRONT. This Red front was created on 24 July 1918, by the government of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, to combat the forces of the Transcaspian Provisional Government at Ashkhabad (Aşgabat). It was initially controlled by joint military-political and military-operational staffs, but from 17 April 1919 was governed by a single revvoensovet. Its complement included a variety of Red Guards and other formations and a number of internationalist detachments formed from the many former prisoners of war that had been held in Central Asia, together totaling around 4,500 men. The front operated on the territory of the Transcaspian oblast′ and the Khanate of Khiva, and along the lower reaches of the Amu Daria River.

In August 1918, the forces of the Transcaspian Front managed to break through enemy lines and captured Bairam-Ali and Merv, but were soon forced to withdraw to Ravnina station, 100 miles southwest of Chardzhuia. New offensives against the Whites in the following year were more effective, capturing Kaakha on 3 July and Ashkhabad on 9 July 1919, although the Red forces were then faced with the threat of attacks from the Basmachi force of Junaïd-khan. On 22 November 1919, all forces of the Transcaspian Front were united into a Transcaspian Army Group, with the exception of those operating around Krasnovodsk, who became the 1st Turkestan Rifle Division.

Commanders of the Transcaspian Front were B. N. Ivanov (24 July 1918–9 May 1919), A. P. Sokolov (17 May–6 August 1919), and S. P. Timoshkov (8 August–22 November 1919).

TRANSCASPIAN PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT. This anti-Bolshevik government was formed at Ashkhabad (Aşgabat), as a consequence of the anti-Soviet rising there (the Ashkhabad Uprising) on 11–12 July 1918, which had been (partially) organized by the Provisional Executive Committee of the Transcaspian (Ashkhabad) oblast′. The government included representatives of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR), the Mensheviks, and Turkmen nationalist organizations and was chaired by F. A. Funtikov of the PSR. By late July 1918, it had established its authority over most of the Transcaspian oblast′, partly as a result of the support offered to it by the British military mission at Meshed, in Northern Persia (Norperforce), which sent a detachment of sepoys to Ashkhabad to guard the new government. On 19 August 1918, the regime signed an agreement with the head of that mission, General W. Malleson, that placed the conduct of its military affairs in the region in the latter’s hands. (This is one reason that Soviet historians always blamed the British military for the execution of the Twenty-six Commissars in Transcaspia on 20 September 1918.) In January 1919, the government collapsed and power passed to a more conservative Committee of Social Salvation. This too collapsed when British forces began to leave Transcaspia (April–July 1919); subsequently, control of anti-Bolshevik forces east of the Caspian Sea passed to the Whites, in the shape of representatives of General A. I. Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia. Forces of the Red Army’s Transcaspian Front entered Ashkhabad on 9 July 1919, and by February 1920, having seen off the last resistance at Krasnovodsk, had control of the entire oblast′.

TRANSCAUCASIAN COMMISSARIAT. Also known by its Russian acronym, Zavkom, this short-lived anti-Bolshevik Transcaucasian government (heir to the Russian Provisional Government’s Special Transcaucasian Committee), consisting of three Georgian, three Armenian, three Azeri Muslim, and two Russian representatives, was created on 15 November 1917, in Tiflis, by leaders of the main local political parties (the Mensheviks, Dashnaks, Musvatists, and Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries) and was led by the Georgian Menshevik E. P. Gegechkori. Its initial purpose was to act, in the wake of the uncertainty caused by the October Revolution, as a provisional government for Transcaucasia, pending the meeting of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly in January 1918. However, being in opposition to the October Revolution, and in light of the Bolsheviks’ dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, it contested the authority of the Soviet government and came to aim (somewhat reluctantly) to formally seal the separation of Transcaucasia from Soviet Russia. To that end, it reached an agreement with Ataman A. M. Kaledin of the Kuban Cossack Host for joint struggle against the Soviet government and its local supporters.

In December 1917, armed units loyal to the Transcaucasian Commissariat drove pro-Bolshevik soldiers from the Tiflis arsenal and closed pro-Bolshevik newspapers in the city. On 9–12 January 1918, its forces also attacked Russian soldiers near the stanitsy of Shamkhor (near Giandzhi) and Khachmasa (near Baku), killing many. Among other measures adopted by the Commissariat were a decree on land (16 December 1917) that transferred much state, church, and private land to a national land fund and eliminated the private market in land; the abolition of class distinctions; improvements in labor conditions; and the circulation of a new currency (in the form of bonds). Delegates from the commissariat also met with the Turkish military authorities at Erzincan, on 2 December 1917, and three days later a truce was signed (by the Russian commander of the Caucasian Front, General M. A. Przheval′skii), which permitted Transcaucasia to keep virtually all the Russian conquests of 1916. This, however, was overturned by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), which ceded Transcaucasian territory to Turkey (although in any case, the Erzindjan truce was not likely to have been honored in the long run by the Turks, who were merely buying time while the grip of the disintegrating Russian Army on the conquered territories in eastern Anatolia weakened). Consequently, on 26 March 1918, the Transcaucasian Commissariat transferred power to the Transcaucasian Sejm, which on 9 April 1918 would proclaim the independent, but short-lived, Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic.

TRANSCAUCASIAN DEMOCRATIC FEDERATIVE REPUBLIC. This short-lived polity (also known as the Transcaucasian Federation), which had its capital in Tiflis, was formally established on 9 April 1918, in line with a proclamation of 24 February 1918 of the Transcaucasian Sejm. It united the former imperial Russian and Russian-occupied territories of what were to become Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia under a federal government, led by chairman of the council of ministers and minister of foreign affairs A. I. Chkhenkeli (of the Georgian Social-Democratic Labor Party), as agreed by local representatives of the Mensheviks, Musavat, and Dashnaks. It replaced the Transcaucasian Republic and the Transcaucasian Commissariat that had developed in the aftermath of the October Revolution (which in turn had replaced the Special Transcaucasian Committee, established by the Russian Provisional Government to administer the area in 1917).

The republic refused to recognize the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), was engaged in a struggle for control of Transcaucasia with the pro-Bolshevik Baku Commune (declared on 25 April 1918), and sought to resist Turkish occupation of the Transcaucasian regions promised to “Russia” by that treaty. Not having the forces available to mount a meaningful resistance, however, it was forced to enter into negotiations with the Central Powers at Batumi (24 May–8 June 1918), earlier negotiations at the Trabzon Peace Conference having been aborted. During these negotiations, differences arose between the Georgians, who looked to Germany for protection—indeed, Georgia would sign a separate agreement with the German mission in the Treaty of Poti (28 May 1918); the Armenians, who hoped for assistance from the western Allies; and the Azerbaijani Musavatists, who were more than willing to deal with Muslim Turkey. Consequently, the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic collapsed after six weeks, with declarations of independence by Georgia (as the Democratic Republic of Georgia) on 26 May 1918, Azerbaijan (as the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic) on 27 May 1918, and Armenia (as the Armenian Democratic Republic) on 28 May 1918.

TRANSCAUCASIAN FEDERATION. See TRANSCAUCASIAN DEMOCRATIC FEDERATIVE REPUBLIC.

TRANSCAUCASIAN SEJM. This organ of state power in Transcaucasia was created at Tiflis, by the Transcaucasian Commissariat, on 23 February 1918. It had the aim of formalizing the separation of Transcaucasia from the collapsing Russian Empire. When the Transcaucasia Commissariat ceased to operate, from 26 March 1918 the Sejm became the main state organ in the region. Its membership consisted of those delegates elected to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly from Transcaucasia, as well as representatives of the chief regional political parties. Initially, there were 95 delegates, including 24 Mensheviks from the Georgian Social-Democratic Labor Party, 24 Armenian Dashnaks, and 30 Azeri members of Musavat. Its chairman, with the rights of president of an ephemeral Provisional Transcaucasian Republic, was the prominent Georgian Menshevik N. S. Chkheidze (former chairman of VTsIK, in 1917).

In March 1918, the Sejm duly signaled the separation of Transcaucasia from Russia and, on 22 April 1918, proclaimed the establishment of a Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic. When, under a combination of internal and external pressures, the latter collapsed at the end of the following month, the Sejm declared its own dissolution on 26 May 1918. From it sprang the independent, separate–and often conflicting–Armenian Democratic Republic, Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, and Georgian Democratic Republic.

Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Initially established on 12 March 1922 as the Transcaucasian Federation (formally the Federative Union of Socialist Soviet Republics of Transcaucasia), this Soviet state entity, which united the Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian Soviet Socialist Republics, was formally created at the First Transcaucasian Congress of Soviets at Baku, on 13 December 1922. Its capital was Tiflis (Tblisi). The first joint chairs of its governing Union Council were Nariman Narimanov (of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan), Polikarp Mdivani (of the Communist Party of Georgia), and Aleksandr Miasnikian (of the Communist Party of Armenia). The insistence of the Bolsheviks (led by J. V. Stalin, head of the People’s Commissiat for Nationalities of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) on this union flew in the face of local resistance and has been widely interpreted as a deliberate attempt by Moscow to play off the peoples of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan against each other, in order to reinforce central (i.e., Russian) control. It caused particular friction in Georgia, being in part responsible for the genesis of the Georgian affair of 1921–1922. The Transcaucasian SFSR joined the USSR on 31 December 1922 (under the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR), but was dissolved into its constituent parts on 5 December 1936.

Tret′iakov, Sergei Nikolaevich (26 August 1882–16 April 1944). A leading industrialist and a prominent member of the White regimes in both Siberia and Crimea, S. N. Tret′iakov was the scion of an eminent textile business family (his grandfather was S. M. Tret′iakov, the Moscow mayor and founder of the eponymous art gallery) and a graduate of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University (1905). He made his own fortune in the textile business and was a stalwart of the right-liberal Progressist Party, as a founding member of its Central Committee from 1912. Also in 1912, he was made chairman of the Main Committee of the Moscow Stock Exchange. During the First World War, Tret′iakov was deputy chairman of the Moscow Military-Industrial Committee and, in September 1917, was appointed chairman of the Supreme Economic Council of the Russian Provisional Government. On 26 October 1917, he was arrested by the new Soviet authorities and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, but was released the following February.

Tret′iakov then moved to Moscow, where he became one of the founders of one of the major anti-Bolshevik underground organizations of the time, the National Center. He then moved on to Khar′kov and, in late 1918, emigrated to Paris. On the invitation of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, in September 1919 Tret′iakov arrived in Siberia and was named minister of trade and industry in the Omsk government (which was attempting to gild itself with new members of an all-Russian, rather than a parochial-Siberian, standing). Following Kolchak’s abandonment of his capital, Omsk, and the subsequent reshuffling of his government at Irkutsk, Tret′iakov became director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers (22 November 1919) of Kolchak’s still putatively all-Russian government. In December 1919, as anti-Kolchak forces became active at Irkutsk, he undertook a mission to Chita to encourage Ataman G. M. Semenov to send troops to the admiral’s aid, but was unable to forestall the collapse of the White regime during the uprising at Irkutsk organized by the Political Center that month.

In February 1920, Tret′iakov left Siberia and made his way to Crimea, where he acted as a member of the Financial Council of General P. N. Wrangel’s South Russian Government. Following the collapse of the White regime in Crimea, he returned to Paris, where he remained in emigration, acting as deputy chairman of the Russian Union of Trade and Industry, but living in circumstances far more modest than those to which his family was accustomed. In 1929, he became an agent of the NKVD, supplying Soviet Russia with information about ROVS; he was in a privileged position to do so as landlord in residence of the building in which the union’s Central Directorate was housed, and he had installed microphones in every room. In August 1942, Tret′iakov was arrested by the Gestapo as a Soviet agent. He was subsequently executed at Oranienburg, near Berlin.

TRIAPITSYN, IAKOV IVANOVICH (1898–July 1920). Ensign (191?). Ia. I. Triapitsyn, the man at the center of the controversial Nikolaevsk incident, was the son of an artisan-tanner from Velikii Ustiug, near Vologda. He was mobilized into the Russian Army in 1914 and won two Crosses of St. George for bravery in battles on the Eastern Front.

Following demobilization in late 1917, Triapitsyn was active in the establishment of Soviet power at Samara and later in Siberia, but was imprisoned by the Whites at Irkutsk following the Omsk coup. He escaped, however, and made his way to the northern reaches of the Maritime Province, where in the course of 1919 he built an independent force of Red partisans that may have numbered more than a thousand men. In late 1919, he directed this force toward Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, which his units surrounded in January 1920. Having finally captured the town in March 1920, Triapitsyn initiated a massacre of its Japanese defenders. On 22 April 1920, he was nevertheless made commander of the Okhotsk Front on the orders of G. Kh. Eikhe (commander in chief of the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic). However, he clashed with the Red command on a number of operational issues and was prone to extreme incidences of indiscipline and insubordination. For these offences, Triapitsyn was arrested; at a trial held at Blagoveshchensk on 7 July 1920, he was declared to be a bandit by the Soviet authorities. He was subsequently shot.

TROTSKY (BRONSTEIN), LEV (LEON) DAVIDOVICH (26 October 1897–21 August 1940). The founder of the Red Army and the man often credited with being the architect of its victory in the “Russian” Civil Wars, L. D. Trotsky was born into the family of a relatively prosperous (but largely illiterate), Jewish (but secularized, and almost entirely Russified) farmer at Ianovka, near Elizavetgrad, in Kherson guberniia. As a pupil at the St. Paul Realschule in Odessa, he was initially attracted to revolutionary Populism but subsequently, during his final year of schooling at Nikolaev, he joined a social-democratic group and became involved with the South Russian Workers’ Union. He was arrested and imprisoned on 16 January 1898 and then, in 1900, exiled to eastern Siberia for four years, but escaped on 21 August 1902 and fled abroad (using a false passport bearing the name of a former jailer in Odessa, which then became his own). He settled in London and began writing for the social democrats’ main newspaper, Iskra (“The Spark”), earning a lofty reputation (and the nickname, “The Pen”) for the quality of his work.

Following the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1903, Trotsky adopted a position midway between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, supporting the views of Iu. O. Martov on party membership but accepting (to some degree) V. I. Lenin’s call for greater party discipline. At this time, he was also developing (with Alexander Helphand, known as Parvus) the notion of “permanent revolution”: according to Trotsky, because the Russian bourgeoisie was so weak, the workers’ party should hold on to power after a revolution in that country, in alliance with the peasantry, and should not, having made the revolution, hand power over to the bourgeoisie. He predicted that the peasants’ attraction to private property would naturally, sooner or later, alienate them from a socialist government, but argued that the Russian revolution would be saved by inspiring workers’ revolutions elsewhere in Europe, thereby providing it with allies across an integrated continent.

The outbreak of the revolution of 1905 found Trotsky in Geneva. He returned to St. Petersburg, via Kiev, in February of that year, and after several weeks as deputy chairman, on 26 November 1905 was elected chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet. Trotsky and most members of the Soviet were arrested and imprisoned by the tsarist authorities on 3 December 1905. The following year, on 3 November 1906, he was again exiled to Siberia (this time for life), but again managed to escape (on 7 February 1907) and made his way to Europe. He settled in Vienna and worked for the reuniting of the RSDLP through his prodigious journalism and other writings, being elected to the party Central Committee in January 1910. From September 1912, he worked as a war correspondent for the Ukrainian newspaper Kievskaia mysl′ (“Ukrainian Thought”), covering the two Balkan Wars. After the outbreak of the First World War, as an enemy national, he fled Vienna for Switzerland and then (from 19 November 1914) settled in Paris, where from January 1915 he edited the internationalist Nashe slovo (“Our Word”) and supported Lenin’s (defeatist) stance on the war. Consequently, in September 1916 he was obliged to leave France and went, via Spain, to the United States, settling in New York from 13 January 1917. There, alongside N. I. Bukharin and A. M. Kollontai, he edited the newspaper Novyi mir (“New Life”) and contributed articles to the Yiddish Der Forverts (“Forwards”). He returned to Russia following the February Revolution (being briefly detained, en route, at Halifax and Amherst, Nova Scotia, by the British authorities), arriving in Petrograd on 24 April 1917.

Trotsky was immediately co-opted onto the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and, disgusted by the Mensheviks’ participation in the Provisional Government, soon joined the Bolsheviks (along with many of his followers in the so-called Inter-district Group of the RSDLP, such as A. V. Lunacharskii and V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko). On 3 August 1917, he was elected to the party Central Committee (even though he was currently in prison, as a consequence of his part in the alleged coup of the July Days); having been released from the Kresty prison on 2 September 1917, in the aftermath of the Kornilov affair, he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (12 September 1917). In that capacity, he founded (and from 8 October 1917 chaired) the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which would prepare, organize, and lead the October Revolution. (On 6 November 1918, none other than J. V. Stalin wrote in Pravda: “All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky.”) In particular, Trotsky has been credited with resisting Lenin’s call to seize power before the meeting of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 25 October 1917, although others would argue that his key act came in the two or three days before that date, when he secured the support, or neutrality, of a majority of the units of the Petrograd Garrison, and during the following week, when he masterminded the Red Guards’ defeat of the Kerensky–Krasnov Uprising around Petrograd.

In the days following the October Revolution, Trotsky also sided firmly with Lenin against other members of the Bolshevik leadership who wanted to give in to the demands of the powerful railway workers’ union, Vikzhel′, for the creation of an all-socialist, coalition government. With the creation of the (initially all-Bolshevik) Sovnarkom, he was appointed People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs (26 October 1917), in which capacity he was responsible for conducting most of the negotiations with the Central Powers following the armistice of 13–14 November 1917. Now recognized as second in command within the party, Trotsky resisted V. I. Lenin’s demands that a treaty (no matter how injurious to Russia) should be signed immediately. He instead dragged out the negotiations, in order to reveal the rapacious nature of the imperialist enemies of the Soviet state and thus provoke (he hoped) revolution in Western Europe. When this tactic of “neither war nor peace” failed, and the Germans renewed their advance during the Eleven-Days War (18 February 1918), Trotsky reluctantly abstained in a vote in the party Central Committee, allowing Lenin’s faction to win and to move toward signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). On 13 March 1918, soon after the treaty was signed, Trotsky resigned his post and became People’s Commissar for Military Affairs (14 March 1918–6 July 1923) and chairman of the Supreme Military Council (14 March–2 September 1918), adding the post of People’s Commissar for Naval Affairs to that portfolio in April 1918. (The People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs and the People’s Commissariat for Naval Affairs were formally merged on 6 July 1923, with Trotsky serving as People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs to 26 January 1925). The post of commander in chief was then abolished, and Trotsky gained full control over military policy.

Having seen the army collapse before the German advance in February 1918, and having witnessed even the most trusted Red Guards and units of Baltic sailors (led by P. E. Dybenko) fleeing from the enemy at Narva, Trotsky immediately began issuing decrees that would transform what was left of the old army and the irregular units of Red Guards into a regular army, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. Ably supported by his deputy, E. M. Sklianskii, he was responsible also for establishing its early command structure; encouraging the use of military specialists; establishing the role of military commissars; the transformation from the volunteer principle to the principle of universal military training (Vsevobuch) and forced conscription; and building a network of military-educational institutions, culminating in the Red Military Academy, that would train a new generation of Red commanders. During the summer and early autumn of 1918, Trotsky’s presence on the Eastern Front, the orders that he gave, and his insistence on the strictest of discipline (including the execution of deserters) has been credited with saving the revolution from defeat at the hands of the People’s Army of Komuch and the Czechoslovak Legion. Such policies, however, were not universally popular, and Trotsky’s trust in military specialists, in particular, would earn him the distrust of Stalin and K. E. Voroshilov during the Tsaritsyn affair.

On 6 September 1918, Trotsky was made chairman of the new Revvoensovet of the Republic, while Jukums Vācietis took over the command of the army. Trotsky spent much of the next two years touring the various Red fronts in his personal armored train (Trotsky’s train), becoming the very symbol of Bolshevik militarism. In March 1919, he made concessions on the role of military commissars and military specialists that appeased the Military Opposition, and in July of that year he overcame a crisis when his opponents removed Vācietis, purged the membership of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, and reversed Trotsky and Vācietis’s decision not to pursue the defeated forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak across the Urals but to concentrate forces on the Southern Front. On 5 July 1919, Trotsky tendered his resignation as War Commissar, but the Politbiuro, the Orgbiuro, and the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) unanimously rejected it and forced him to reconsider.

A further crisis followed in the autumn of 1919, at the height of the advances of the White forces of Generals A. I. Denikin (which had almost reached Tula and looked set to attack Moscow) and N. N. Iudenich (which had reached the outskirts of Petrograd), when Trotsky persuaded Lenin that Petrograd could not be abandoned (as that would encourage the intervention of Finland and Estonia) and went personally to the city to rally Red forces (for which he won the Order of the Red Banner on 31 December 1919). Equally controversially, in July 1920 he was opposed to pursuing the Red advance during the Soviet–Polish War onto Polish territory, arguing that the Red Army was exhausted and that an invasion would merely stiffen Polish resistance—and he was proved right.

During the civil-war period, Trotsky also became a member of the Politbiuro (from March 1919) a candidate (August 1920–June 1921) and then a full member (July 1921–November 1922) of the Executive Committee of the Komintern, and was briefly People’s Commissar for Food Supply (July 1921).

As the civil wars wound down and the health of his closest ally, Lenin, declined, Trotsky and his supporters in the Left Opposition (who opposed the moderation of the New Economic Policy era and demanded a greater emphasis on rapid industrialization and international revolution) found themselves increasingly outmaneuvered by their enemies within the party leadership, notably the Old Bolsheviks Stalin, L. B. Kamenev, and G. E. Zinov′ev. Trotsky, in particular, made himself unpopular (in the party and at large) through his post–civil-war advocacy of Labor Armies and his denigration of the role of trade unions in the Soviet state, as well as his haughty and dismissive attitude to those he considered to be his intellectual inferiors—–that is, almost everyone. Moreover, although he had been encouraged by the ailing Lenin to put himself forward as leader and to quash Stalin, Trotsky declined (apparently fearing disunity of the party and in the belief that a Jewish leader would ignite an anti-Semitic, reactionary wave in Russia). Consequently, on 26 January 1925, he was replaced as People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and head of the Revvoensovet of the USSR by M. V. Frunze and was subsequently expelled from the Politbiuro (23 October 1926) and the Central Committee (23 October 1927). Meanwhile, he served (largely nominally) as chairman of the Main Concessions Committee of the USSR (May 1925–17 November 1927), member of the Presidium of VSNKh (May 1925–August 1926), and member of the Electro-Technical Directorate of VSNKH (from 1925).

Trotsky’s reconciliation with Kamenev and Zinov′ev to oppose Stalin (the so-called United Opposition) in 1926 was easily contained by Stalin at the 15th Party Congress in 1927. Charged with factionalism, all leading members of the opposition were expelled from the party, including Trotsky (14 November 1927). The last of these events took place a week after Stalin had organized a display of “popular anger” at the opposition during a demonstration to mark the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, during which stones were thrown at Trotsky by the crowd. To stifle any lingering influence he may have had, he was then banished to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan on 17 January 1928, and forcibly exiled from the USSR on 16 January 1929.

After periods in Turkey (to 24 July 1933), France (to 18 July 1935), and Norway (to December 1936), Trotsky settled in Mexico from 9 January 1937, at the behest of the radical artist Diego Rivera. There, he rallied opposition to Stalin through the Fourth International, at the same time explicitly challenging the legitimacy of the Moscow-dominated Komintern, and wrote a series of major works, including The Revolution Betrayed (1937), in which he argued that the Soviet union had become a bureaucratized, degenerated workers’ state. (He had already published a monumental and enduringly influential History of the Russian Revolution in 1931–1933 and an autobiography, My Life, in 1930.) Reacting to his appeals, in many countries during the 1930s Trotskyist parties split from the Communists, notably the Socialist Workers’ Party in the United States and, in Spain, POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), which was suppressed by Stalin’s supporters during the Spanish Civil War. At the same time, Trotsky was made the central figure of hate in Stalin’s Russia, while his part in the Bolsheviks’ victory during the revolution and civil wars was erased from the history books. (The town of Gatchina, which—to his intense irritation—had been renamed Trotsk in his honor in 1923, had reverted to its previous name in 1929.)

During the first great show trial in 1936 (“The Trial of the 16” or “The Trial of the Trotskyite–Zinov′evite Terrorist Center”), Trotsky was condemned to death in absentia, as the éminence grise behind the absurd charges of espionage and sabotage laid against the defendants. Trotsky’s guards and supporters subsequently thwarted several attempts to assassinate him, but his Mexican entourage was eventually penetrated by Ramón Mercader, an agent of the NKVD, who on 20 August 1940 attacked him with an ice pick as Trotsky was working at his desk. His blood soaked the manuscript of the book on which he was working: a biography of Stalin. He died in hospital in Mexico City the following day.

Trotsky was to become a hero of the anti-Stalinist Left in the West during the second half of the 20th century, his ruthlessness, arrogance, arbitrariness, and dictatorial nature being largely forgotten by his acolytes. He was the subject of innumerable academic studies and many fictional accounts (notably Joseph Losey’s 1972 feature film, The Assassination of Trotsky, in which he was played by Richard Burton). His last home, a fortified villa in Coyoacán, Mexico City, where Trotsky is buried, is preserved as a quiet and dignified museum in his memory. Yet in Russia, the Gorbachev regime never got around to rehabilitating him, although his image was allowed to appear on a postage stamp in 1987, while his son (Sergei Sedov, killed by the NKVD in 1937) was posthumously rehabilitated in 1988, and (from 1989) his books began to be republished and became once again available in Russian libraries.

TROTSKY’S TRAIN. The mobile command and propaganda center that L. D. Trotsky referred to merely as “the train” (formally known as “The Train of the Chairman of the Revvoensovet of the Republic”) was first formed at Moscow, on 7 August 1918. It initially consisted of 2 armored engines and 12 wagons, and was immediately dispatched for Sviiazhsk, on the Volga Front, with a unit of Latvian Riflemen on board. In the course of the civil wars, the train made 36 such visits to the various Red fronts and traveled at least 75,000 miles.

By late 1919, the configuration of Trotsky’s train had evolved to embrace two separate echelons that included several armored wagons (with turrets and embrasures for machine guns and cannon), flatbed trucks to transport armored cars and other vehicles (including Trotsky’s own command car, a Rolls-Royce that had been commandeered from the tsar’s garage), a telegraph station, a radio station, an electricity-generating wagon, a printing house (with presses), a library, a secretariat wagon, a kitchen, a bathhouse wagon, and even a special wagon for transporting a collapsible small aircraft. Also on board were a special guard unit of some 100 elite troops (mostly Latvians), who dressed in special red uniforms and hats of Red Army style (the budenovka), as well as cooks and other staff, mechanics, technicians, political agitators, and secretaries. By 21 January 1921, there were 407 people attached to the institution of “the train,” doing 80 different jobs.

The train was in action against White and other forces on 13 occasions during the civil wars, suffered 15 casualties (and 15 more “missing”), and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for its part in deflecting the advance on Petrograd of General N. N. Iudenich in October 1919. However, its role was not chiefly to fight. Rather, the train provided a secure and mobile base for the central army command, as well as serving, as Trotsky’s assistant Lieutenant Ia. Shatunovskii put it, as “a real school for Communism,” with the “militant brotherhood” of its highly disciplined staff acting as an example to the Red Army. Or, as Trotsky put it in his memoirs, albeit with some exaggeration: “The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October Revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement.”

Trubetskoi, Grigorii Nikolaevich (17 September 1874–6 January 1930). A graduate of Moscow University, where he defended his master’s thesis in 1896, the White politician Prince G. N. Trubetskoi (brother of the religious philosopher E. N. Trubetskoi and scion of an ancient noble family) made a career in the tsarist diplomatic service from 1896, working in the Russian embassies in Vienna, Berlin, and Constantinople, before retiring from the service in 1906 to devote himself to the cause of liberalism. He subsequently published many articles on foreign policy issues—in Moskovskii ezhenedel′nik (“Moscow Weekly”), which (together with his brother) he edited, and other liberal journals—that betrayed an element of pan-Slavism in his thought. He returned to the diplomatic service in 1912 and was appointed head of the Department of Near Eastern Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by his friend, the foreign minister, S. D. Sazonov. In June 1914, he was appointed special emissary to Serbia; in 1915, he was slated to be the future Russian governor of Constantinople; and in 1916–1917, he served as head of the diplomatic chancery at the headquarters of the Russian Army.

In 1917–1918, Trubetskoi was active in the All-Russian Church Council (Sobor′), campaigning successfully for the restoration of the patriarchate to the Russian Orthodox Church. Following the October Revolution, he moved first to Kiev and then to Ekaterinodar, where from 1919 to 1920 he served as chief of the Directorate of Religious Affairs in the Special Council of General A. I. Denikin and in the Government of South Russia of General P. N. Wrangel. In emigration, he lived briefly in Austria, then settled in the Paris suburb of Clamart, and was again active in church affairs, as a campaigner for church reform and the unification of the Orthodox community throughout the world.

Tsaritsyn affair. This incident in the autumn of 1918 was the most visible manifestation of tensions between revolutionaries and professionals in the nascent Red Army. Tsaritsyn was a key strategic city on the Volga, as a conduit for grain, oil, and other supplies that the Soviet government wished to extract from Baku and the North Caucasus, and was then holding out against attacks from White and Cossack forces moving north from the Don. The commander of its garrison, K. E. Voroshilov, supported by J. V. Stalin (who had been sent south to organize food supplies), were at loggerheads on a number of strategic issues with their fellow member of the Revvoensovet of the Southern Army Group, General P. P. Sytin (an appointee of commander in chief Jukums Vācietis), whom they instinctively distrusted as a military specialist.

On 31 September 1918, Voroshilov and Stalin abruptly informed Moscow that they had dismissed Sytin from his post. This breach of discipline and hierarchy was intolerable to War Commissar L. D. Trotsky, who had the support of V. I. Lenin, and subsequently Sytin was reinstated, while Stalin was recalled to Moscow for a dressing down. Thus, in the short term a victory was secured for Trotsky and his faith in centralism and the use of tsarist officers. However, in the longer term the future dictator’s resentment of Trotsky was certainly reinforced (as was the alliance among Stalin, Voroshilov, and S. M. Budennyi, who was also in Tsaritsyn at this juncture, that was to endure for decades). The disproportionate number of members of the 1919 Military Opposition to Trotsky who had served on the Tsaritsyn front is also of note.

TSARMOIEV (CHERMOEV), TAPA ABDUL MIGIT BEY ORTSA (1882–28 August 1937). Coronet (1901), captain (191?). The leader of the Mountain Republic of the North Caucasus, Tapa Tsarmoiev was born at Groznyi, in Chechnia, into the Chechen family of a general of the Russian Army, and was a graduate of the Vladikavkaz Gymnasium and the Nicholas Cavalry School in St. Petersburg (1901). He served with the Tsar’s Own Life Guard Regiment, but in 1908, following the death of his father, he retired from the army to run his family’s business concerns. He subsequently became one of the leading figures in the booming oil industry around Groznyi. During the First World War, he reenlisted in the Russian Army and served with distinction in the famous Savage Division, which was made up of men from various tribes of the Caucasus, rising to the command of its Chechen regiment. In that capacity, he played a role, albeit a secondary one, in the Kornilov affair of August 1917.

Following the October Revolution, Tsarmoiev returned, with his men, to Groznyi and was one of the prime movers behind the establishment, on 11 May 1918, of the anti-Bolshevik Mountain Republic of the North Caucasus, in which he served as prime minister (from 11 May 1918). In that capacity, he sought to establish good relations between the mountain peoples and the leaders of the Kuban Cossack Host. In March 1919, he led a delegation to the Paris Peace Conference to seek Allied recognition of the Mountain Republic, which he did not achieve. He did, however, sign an accord, in July 1919, with the Kuban Cossack delegation led by A. I. Kulabukhov, that seemed to strengthen the security and independence of the Mountain Republic. When the latter was overrun by the Red Army in January 1921, Tsarmoiev remained in emigration. He died in Lausanne, Switzerland, and is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. In 2009, his long-neglected and crumbling gravestone was restored on the initiative of Chechen nationalists.

Tsentrokaspyi. See Central Caspian Dictatorship.

Tsentrosibir′. This was the acronym by which was known the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Siberia. Based at Irkutsk, Tsentrosibir′ served as the center of Soviet power in the region from October 1917 to August 1918. Its basic function was to coordinate Soviet government in the region, in the periods between regional congresses of soviets. It was elected at the First Congress of Siberian Soviets at Irkutsk (16–24 October 1917) and was dominated by Bolsheviks and members of the party of Left-Socialists-Revolutionaries, although initially it also contained an admixture of members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, SR-Maximalists, and Menshevik-Internationalists. Its first chairman was the Bolshevik B. Z. Shumiatskii. At the Second Congress of Siberian Soviets in February 1918, Shumiatskii was succeeded by another Bolshevik, N. N. Iakovlev (who was less independent of the center and far less critical of V. I. Lenin’s determination to sign a separate peace with the Central Powers than had been his predecessor).

Tsentrosibir′ introduced Soviet power across eastern Siberia in the period November 1917 to February 1918; organized the suppression of the only notable armed opposition to it (a rising of officers and officer cadets at Irkutsk on 8–17 December 1917); and closed down its only serious political rival, the Siberian Regional Duma, at Tomsk on 26 January 1918. During the spring of 1918, Tsentrosibir′ also organized Red defenses against incursions into Transbaikalia that were launched from Manchuria by the forces of Ataman G. M. Semenov.

Following the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion and the collapse of Soviet power in Siberia in May–June 1918, the leaders of Tsentrosibir′ fled into the taiga. On 28 August 1918, a meeting of the organization at Urul′ga station (near Chita) voted to disband and to encourage members to engage in underground work against the forces of the Democratic Counter-Revolution (although many of them, including Iakovlev, were soon captured and executed). A year later, as the Red Army pushed across Siberia, VTsIK voted to establish a Siberian Revolutionary Committee to oversee Soviet policy east of the Urals, thereby superseding the defunct Tsentrosibir′.

TSERETELI, IRAKLI (KAKI) GEORGIEVICH (20 November 1881–21 May 1959). At the forefront of national politics in Russia in 1917, as the undisputed leader and ideologue of the Petrograd Soviet (despite the formal chairmanship of it by his friend N. K. Chkheidze), Irakli Tsereteli, as leader of the Mensheviks of the Georgian Social-Democratic Labor Party, was less prominent during the civil wars but still performed important roles.

Born at Kutaisi, in western Georgia, the youngest child of the influential radical (and Russianized) writer Giorgi Tsereteli, Irakli Tsereteli had socialism and internationalism in his blood. He entered the Law Faculty of Moscow University in 1900, but immediately devoted his life to the revolutionary movement. He was arrested in 1902 and exiled to eastern Siberia for five years. Released early, in 1903, Tsereteli joined the Tiflis committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party and became editor of Kvali (“The Furrow”), in which he argued against V. I. Lenin and all advocates of a narrow, centralized workers’ movement. He was rearrested in 1904, but managed to exile himself to Berlin, where he entered the university. Suffering with tuberculosis, he returned to Georgia during the 1905 Revolution and, in 1907, was elected to the Second State Duma, becoming a member of its Agricultural Commission and leader of the social-democratic faction. A brilliant orator, it was at this point that Tsereteli became a figure of national and even international renown. Following the dissolution of the Second Duma, he was arrested and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, subsequent to which, in 1913, he was exiled to Irkutsk.

He spent the First World War in exile, developing the policy that became known as “Siberian Zimmerwaldism”: a stance based on the notion that the international socialist movement could force an end to the war. Back in Petrograd following his release in March 1917, he joined the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and became an advocate of “revolutionary defensism,” while still proposing a general peace “without annexations or indemnities.” He joined the Russian Provisional Government on 5 May 1917, as minister of post and telegraph—a relatively minor portfolio—and in July 1917, he was briefly minister of the interior. However, his real power base was the Soviet, especially VTsIK, to which he was elected in June 1917. On its presidium, his was a dominant voice; the British journalist Morgan Philips Price once described him as being, in a debate, “like some Zeus from Olympus, contemplating the conflicts of the lesser gods.” However, his position was weakened following the failure of both prongs of the policy of “revolutionary defensism” to which his name was linked: the Russian Army’s summer offensive was a disaster, and efforts to stage an international socialist peace conference in Stockholm (to advocate a peace “without annexations and indemnities”) collapsed in the face of the intransiegence of Allied governments. The Kornilov affair also damaged him badly, as he had acquiesced in the appointment of L. G. Kornilov as commander in chief of the Russian Army. Despite this, in September 1917, Tsereteli firmly and successfully opposed those Mensheviks-Internationalists and members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries who sought to construct an all-socialist coalition to replace A. F. Kerensky’s Provisional Government; in so doing, however, he may have opened the door to the Bolsheviks.

Following the October Revolution, Tsereteli fled home to Georgia to escape arrest and became a pivotal figure in the Transcaucasian Sejm. With the establishment of the Georgian Democratic Republic (28 May 1918), though, his convinced internationalism (and his earlier expressed conviction that Georgia would fail, if it attempted to stand alone against Soviet Russia) condemned him to a secondary role in what became a distinctly nationalist entity, although he did undertake a number of missions abroad and was the Georgian republic’s plenipotentiary to the Paris Peace Conference and the San Remo Conference (19–26 April 1920).

Following the Soviet invasion of Georgia in February–March 1921, Tsereteli lived in exile in France and then (from 1940) in the United States. He remained the Georgian social democrats’ representative on the largely moribund International Socialist Bureau and a member of the Executive Committee of the equally lifeless Second International and in those roles consistently advocated the Government-in-Exile of the Georgian Democratic Republic’s cooperation with Russian socialists against Soviet Russia, opposing collaboration with narrow Georgian nationalists. This placed him in a difficult position among the Georgian emigration, and he gradually withdrew from politics, but history remembers him kindly as one of the most honest and charming figures of the revolutionary years. Tsereteli died and is buried in New York.

TSIURUPA, ALEKSANDR DMITRIEVICH (19 September 1870–8 May 1928). The Bolshevik agronomist who was primarily responsible for Soviet food supply during the civil-war period, A. D. Tsiurupa was born at Oleshki (renamed Tsiurupinsk in 1925), in northern Tauride guberniia, the son of the secretary of the city duma. He was drawn to Populist circles in his youth and suffered the first of numerous arrests and periods of imprisonment or exile in 1893, while studying at Kherson Agricultural School (from which he was then expelled). Between times, he worked as a statistician and agronomist in the state and local government and food supply apparatus (notably as an agronomist with the Ufa city supply directorate from 1908 to 1917), but his prime concern remained the revolutionary movement: he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1898, met V. I. Lenin in 1900, and became an agent (based at Ufa) in the distribution network of the Bolsheviks’ newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”). From March 1917, he was a member of the presidium of the Ufa committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), a member of the Ufa guberniia Supply Committee, and chairman of the Ufa city duma.

Following the October Revolution, Tsiurupa served initially on Sovnarkom as deputy people’s commissar for supply (November 1917–25 February 1918), organizing the dispatch of grain from the Volga and Urals regions and Western Siberia to Moscow and Petrograd, and was subsequently people’s commissar for supply throughout the early stages of the civil wars (25 February 1918–11 December 1921). In that capacity, he played a key role in formulating Soviet policies toward the countryside. It was Tsiurupa, for example, who spoke at Sovnarkom, on 8 May 1918, of the necessity of introducing a “Food Dictatorship” (introduced by the decree of 13 May 1918); in effect, he became commander in chief of the 75,000-strong Food Army (Prodarmiia) that was responsible for the requisitioning of food from the peasantry under War Communism (1918–1921). In poor health, he gave up that post to become deputy chairman of Sovnarkom and acting chairman of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defense (11 December 1921–6 July 1923), deputizing for Lenin and A. I. Rykov when they were ill or busy elsewhere. He was also named head of Rabkrin (25 April 1922–6 July 1923), as a replacement for J. V. Stalin, then chairman of the State Planning Commission, Gosplan (6 July 1923–18 November 1925), and finally, People’s Commissar for Trade of the USSR (18 November 1925–16 January 1926). He was also a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) from 1923 to 1928. In all these roles he found himself in frequent conflict with Stalin, and he would undoubtedly have become a victim of the Terror but for his early death at a sanatorium at Mukhalatka, in Crimea, in 1928. Tsiurupa is buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

TUKHACHEVSKII, MIKHAIL NILOAEVICH (Tuchaczewski, Michał) (4 February 1893–12 June 1937). Sublieutenant (1914), Marshal of the Soviet Union (20 November 1935). The revered Red commander and strategist M. N. Tukhachevskii was one of the most important and controversial figures in the history of the Soviet armed forces. He was born into an aristocratic Polish family, on their estate, Aleksandrovskoe, near Smolensk; was schooled at the 1st Penza Gymnasium (1904–1909); and graduated from the 1st Moscow Cadet Corps (1912) and the Alexander Military School (1914), then joined the elite Semenovskii Guards Regiment. During the First World War, he was captured by the enemy in February 1915 and imprisoned in Germany. He escaped four times and was each time recaptured (being held, latterly, in the Ingolstadt fortress in Bavaria, where me met another incorrigible escaper, Charles de Gaulle, who would fight against him during the Soviet–Polish War). On his fifth attempt, he made it back across the front lines into Russia, in August–September 1917.

Following the October Revolution, in early 1918 Tukhachevskii joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) and volunteered for service with the newly established Red Army. During the civil wars, he served as, successively VTsIK’s commissar for the Moscow Defensive Region (from May 1918); commander of the 1st Red Army on the Eastern Front (28 June 1918–4 January 1919); commander of the 8th Red Army on the Southern Front (24 January–15 March 1919); commander of the 5th Red Army on the Eastern Front (5 April–25 November 1919); commander of the Caucasian Front (4 February–24 April 1920); and commander of the Western Front (29 April 1920–4 March 1921 and 24 January 1922–26 March 1924). In those capacities, he played an outstanding role in the Red Army’s defeat of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in Siberia over the summer and autumn of 1919, in crushing the remnants of General A. I. Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia during the first months of 1920, and in the Red Army’s advance to the gates of Warsaw in July–August 1920, during the Soviet–Polish War. From 5 to 19 March 1921, Tukhachevskii was also in command of the forces (chiefly the 7th Red Army) that were assembled around the Gulf of Finland to extinguish the Kronshtadt Revolt. Having succeeded, ruthlessly, in that operation, he became commander of forces in Tambov guberniia (27 April–May 1921) and, equally ruthlessly, set about extinguishing the Tambov Rebellion. Essentially, Tukhachevskii was the Soviet leadership’s firefighter in this period, being deployed throughout the civil wars to regions where the military situation was most critical.

Following the civil wars, Tukhachevskii occupied many senior posts in the Red Army, including chief of the Red Military Academy (21 July 1921–24 January 22), assistant chief of staff of the Red Army (1924–November 1925), member of the Revvoensovet of the USSR (7 February 1925–20 June 1934), chief of staff of the Red Army (November 1925–5 May 1928), commander of forces of the Leningrad Military District (5 May 1928–June 1931), deputy chairman of the Revvoensovet of the USSR (11 June 1931–20 June 1934), deputy People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs (11 June 1931–20 June 1934), chief of armaments of the Red Army (from 1931), first deputy People’s Commissar for Defense of the USSR (1936–9 May 1937), and chief of the Directorate of Military Planning of the Red Army (1936–1937). He was also a candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (10 February 1934–26 May 1935). During the interwar years, Tukhachevskii also devoted himself to strategy and military theory, publishing widely on those subjects and developing the concept of “deep battle” (the use of aircraft, tanks, and heavy armor to penetrate and destroy the enemy’s defenses), which became part of the Provisional Field Regulations of the Red Army in 1936 and was successfully utilized by Soviet forces in the latter stages of the Second World War. His magnum opus was Future War (1928), which surveyed the scenarios for victory over all the potential enemies of the USSR. He was also responsible for a number of innovative weapon designs; oversaw aspects of the USSR’s secret military collaboration with German aircraft and chemical weapons experts (in the aftermath of the Treaty of Rapallo, 16 April 1922); and in sum (having overcome the initial resistance to “Red militarism” of J. V. Stalin and his cronies of the civil-war period, notably S. M. Budennyi and K. E. Voroshilov), was the chief architect of the modernized, industrialized Red Army that would emerge victorious from the Second World War.

At the height of the purges, however, in May 1937, Tukhachevskii was suddenly fired from his senior posts and demoted to commander of forces of the Volga Military District (13 May 1937). Shortly afterward, he was arrested (22 May 1937). On 12 June 1937, after a secret trial (“The Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization”), he was shot alongside seven other senior Red commanders: R. P. Eideman, B. M. Fel′dman, I. E. Iakir, A. I. Kork, V. M. Primakov, V. K. Putna, and I. P. Uborovich. The tribunal was chaired by V. V. Ulrikh and included P. E. Dybenko and the civil-war commanders Budennyi, I. P. Belov, and V. K. Bliukher among its members. Why Stalin ordered his execution remains an open question, but tensions between the two dated back to the civil-war period, when Stalin clashed with Tukhachevskii over strategy during the Soviet–Polish War and may have felt personally slighted by Tukhachevskii’s criticisms of the 1st Cavalry Army (in which Stalin served as chief political commissar). The case against Tukhachevskii rested largely on documents passed to the NKVD by President Edvard Beneš of Czechoslovakia and other “neutral parties,” which may have had their origin in the headquarters of the Gestapo in Berlin (the Germans wishing to fell Tukhachevskii in order to weaken Soviet defenses) or even among White émigré officers and politicians in France (notably S. N. Tret′iakov). Tukhachevskii was posthumously rehabilitated by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, on 31 January 1957, but suspicions remain in some circles that he really was involved in some plot against the Soviet leadership (although not the one of which he was found guilty). Tukhachevskii’s widow, Nina Evgen′evna, was executed on 16 October 1941.

Following his rehabilitation, numerous streets and other edifices were renamed in Tukhachevskii’s honor, and his likeness appeared on Soviet postage stamps (including the 4-kopek issue of 1963) and elsewhere. In fiction, he was the eponymous hero of L. I. Rakovskii’s tale Mikhail Tukhachevskii (1967) and was portrayed in the films Pyl′ pod solntsem (“Dust beneath the Sun,” dir. M. Gedris, 1977), Deti Arbata (“Children of the Arbat,” dir. A. A. Eshpai, 2004), and Tukhachevskii: zagovor marshala (“Tukhachevskii: The Marshal’s Plot,” dir. I. Iu. Vetrov, 2010). Interestingly, Tukhachevskii was almost the only Soviet figure portrayed at all positively in the Polish feature 1920 Bitwa Warszawska (“Battle for Warsaw, 1920,” dir. Jerzy Hoffman, 2011).

TURCHANINOV, PAVEL DMITRIEVICH. See CHERNYI, LEV (TURCHANINOV, PAVEL DMITRIEVICH).

TURKBIURO. The Turkestan Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) was established in June 1920, as the chief plenipotentiary of the party in Central Asia, as the Turkestan Front of the Red Army broke through White lines around Aktiubinsk and moved to establish direct communications with the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic at Tashkent. The Turkbiuro, working to guide VTsIK’s Turkestan Commission, strove initially to temper the anti-Muslim sentiments of local (Russian) Bolsheviks in Turkestan, but by 1921–1922 found it necessary to counter the perceived pan-Turkic policies of local Muslims drawn into the governments of the Turkestan ASSR, the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic, and the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic. It was also engaged in mobilizing the population for the struggle against the Basmachi. The Turkbiuro was disestablished in May 1922 and merged with the Central Asian Bureau of the RKP(b).

Original (as of 29 July 1920) members of the Turkbiuro were G. Ia. Sokol′nikov (chairman), L. M. Kaganovich, Jēkabs Peterss, G. I. Safarov, and Ia. E. Surits. The chairman of the Turkbiuro from March 1921 was Ia. E. Rudzutak, who was by A. A. Ioffe in October 1921 and S. I. Gusev in December 1921.

TURKESTAN ARMY. This White force was created on 22 January 1919, on the orders of General A. I. Denikin, as part of the Armed Forces of South Russia. Formed on the basis of the long-standing Turkomen Regiment, and utilizing finances and supplies from the British Military Mission of General Wilfred Malleson, it was intended to operate in coordination with the anti-Bolshevik government at Ashkhabad (the Transcaspian Provisional Government). As of 1 May 1919, it consisted of the Transcaspian Composite Infantry Division, the Turkestan Rifle Division, and the Cavalry Division and numbered 9,000 men in total (although it was also sometimes assisted by the 12,000-strong Basmachi forces of Junaïd-khan).

The Turkestan Army’s initial objective was to secure the region Krasnovodsk–Tashkent–Vernyi, but a Red Army offensive on the Transcaspian Front in May 1919 drove it back to the shores of the Caspian. Following a further heavy defeat to Red forces at Aidyn station on 19 October 1919, the Turkestan Army collapsed in early December of that year. Most of the remains of the force were evacuated on White vessels from Krasnovodsk to Daghestan on 6 February 1920, while some other units were shipped to Persia by the British.

The Turkestan Army was commanded during its key engagements by Lieutenant General I. V. Savitskii (10 April–22 July 1919), then by Lieutenant General A. A. Borovskii (22 July–8 October 1919) and Lieutenant General B. I. Kazanovich (October 1919–February 1920).

TURKESTAN AUTONOMOUS SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. This nominally autonomous polity within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was proclaimed on 30 April 1918 (with the original title Turkestan Socialist Federative Republic). It was based, territorially, on the former Turkestan krai of tsarist Russia; had its capital at Tashkent; and had a population of approximately 5,230,000, most of whom were Muslims. It was initially supported by both Russians (including many members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries) and progressive Muslims, including the Young Bukhanan Party and other proponents of jadidism.

The Turkestan Republic was intended to be a Soviet alternative to the Muslim-led Kokand Autonomy (led by Mustafa Chokaev), whose members had been driven out of Tashkent by the Russian-dominated Tashkent Soviet and then dispersed by force by Red Guards sent from Tashkent on 19 February 1918. Almost immediately, however, Tashkent’s links with Soviet Russia were cut by the revolt (the Dutov Uprising) of the Orenburg Cossack Host around the southern Urals. Thereafter, for much of the civil wars, Soviet Tashkent remained isolated and under threat from the various surrounding nationalist, Muslim, and White forces and had to defend itself with its own Turkestan Red Army. Internal dissent had also to be dealt with, notably the Osipov Rebellion of January 1919, organized by the Turkestan ASSR’s own, treacherous war commissar, A. P. Osipov.

Isolation also meant that Moscow was not fully able to temper the anti-Muslim excesses of the (largely Russian) Soviet leadership in Turkestan, which continued throughout 1918 and even beyond the time when direct communication between Moscow and Tashkent was restored (with the recapture of Orenburg by the Red Army in January 1919). Eventually, though, Moscow’s influence was brought to bear, through the dispatch to Tashkent of VTsIK’s Turkestan Commission, and on 24 September 1920, a new constitution of the Turkestan ASSR was proclaimed, in which Muslims participation was encouraged, although Pan-Turkism was tempered by the exclusion from Turkestan of Khiva (as the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic) and Bukhara (as the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic). The Turkestan ASSR was formally dissolved on 27 October 1924, and its territories were divided among the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic (now Turkmenistan), the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (now Uzbekistan), the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (now Tajikistan), the Kara-Kirghiz Autonomous Oblast′ (now Kyrgyzstan), and the Karakalpak Autonomous Oblast′ (now Karakalpakstan).

The chairmen of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Turkestan ASSR (Turksovnarkom) were F. I. Kolesov (15 November 1917–30 April 1918 and June–5 October 1918); P. A. Kobozev (30 April–June 1918); V. D. Figel′skii (23 October 1918–19 January 1919); K. E. Sorokin (30 March 1919–March 1920); K. S. Atabaev (19 September 1920–1922); T. R. Risqulov (1922–12 January 1924); and S. A. Ismalov (12 January–27 October 1924).

TURKESTAN COMMISSARS. See FOURTEEN TURKESTAN COMMISSARS.

TURKESTAN COMMISSION. The Turkestan Commission (or Turkkomissia) of the VTsIK and Sovnarkom of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was established on 8 October 1919. Its original members were G. I. Botkin, Sh. Z. Eliava, M. V. Frunze, F. I. Goloshchekin, V. V. Kuibyshev, and Ia. E. Rudzutak. It was granted full authority to act in the name of Sovnarkom and VTsIK within the borders of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and to assist the latter with the establishment of Soviet power in the region, as the White presence in the region collapsed.

The Turkkomissia arrived in Tashkent on 4 November 1919 and immediately concluded that the only way forward was to co-opt local nationalist leaders who were of a radical bent (chiefly the proponents of Jadidism) into the new Soviet institutions. Consequently, a Fifth Regional Party Conference of January 1920 elected a Regional Bureau that was largely Muslim and had the Jadid leader Tursan Hojaev as its secretary. Hojaev subsequently oversaw an attempt to turn the local Bolshevik organization into what Moscow interpreted (probably correctly) as an instrument of Pan-Turkic nationalism: he attempted to remove non-Turkic peoples from the organization, proposed the establishment of an independent Turkic Communist Party (at this point local Communists were affiliated with the Russian Communist Party), and argued in favor of a unitary Central Asian State. The Turkkommissia rejected all this, with the endorsement of Moscow (which established a party Turkbiuro, sent the Chekist Jēkabs Peterss to join the Turkkommissia to toughen it up, and made G. Ia. Sokol′nikov its chairman), and proposed instead the division of Turkestan into three separate ethnic republics (with Khiva and Bukhara separated from Turkestan). This was achieved in the new constitution of the Turkestan ASSR, proclaimed on 11 April 1921, which built on the previously established Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic (26 April 1920) and the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic (8 October 1920). Its work done, the activities of the Turkkommissia were wound up on 16 August 1922.

TURKESTAN FRONT. This Red front was created according to the orders of the Revvoensovet of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on 23 February 1919. On 14 August 1919, it was augmented by the southern group of forces from the Red Army’s Eastern Front, as that group’s offensive drove the Whites from the southern Urals. By early 1920, its forces numbered some 114,000 men from the Astrakhan Group (which was part of the 11th Red Army, prior to 14 October 1919), the 4th Red Army, the 1st Red Army, and the forces of the Turkestan ASSR.

In May–July 1919, forces of the Turkestan Front engaged with the Armed Forces of South Russia’s Turkestan Army in Transcaspia, as well as with the Southern Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. On 13 September 1919, Red forces broke through the White lines to unite with the forces of the Turkestan republic, and in October 1919, they overcame the forces of the Urals Cossack Host (commanded by General V. S. Tolstov). The following year, forces of the Turkestan Front closed on Khiva and Bukhara, forcing the respective emirs, Said Abdullah and Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, to flee, and thereby laying the ground for the establishment of the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic. For the next five years, forces of the Turkestan Front were engaged in campaigns against the Basmachi, along the Ferghana valley, until, in June 1926, they were reorganized as the Central Asian Military District. This marked the closure of the last active Red Army front of the civil-war period.

Commanders of the Turkestan Front were M. V. Frunze (15 August 1919–10 September 1920), G. Ia. Sokol′nikov (10 September 1920–8 March 1921), V. S. Lazarevich (8 March 1921–11 February 1922), V. I. Shorin (11 February–18 October 1922), A. I. Kork (18 October 1922–12 August 1923), S. A. Pugachev (12 August 1923–30 April 1924), M. K. Levandovskii (30 April 1924–2 December 1925), and K. A. Avksent′evskii (2 December 1925–4 June 1926). Its chiefs of staff were A. A. Baltiiskii (15–23 August 1919 and 2 October 1919–18 March 1920), F. F. Novitskii (acting, 23 August–2 October 1919), A. K. Anders (18 March–29 April 1920), P. B. Blagoveshchenskii (acting, 29 April–24 September 1920), F. P. Shafalovich (24 September 1920–16 December 1922), Gerardi (acting, 16 December 1922–17 February 1923), A. V. Kirpichnikov (17 February–15 October 1923), A. D. Shuvaev (15 October 1923–25 April 1924), N. I. Kamkov (25 April–28 June 1924), and B. N. Kondrat′ev (28 June 1924–4 June 1926).

TURKESTAN MILITARY ORGANIZATION. This was the name adopted by an underground organization of tsarist officers and other (chiefly Russian) anti-Bolsheviks at Tashkent that had the aim of overthrowing Soviet power in Turkestan. It began life in August 1918, as the Turkestan Union for the Struggle with Bolshevism, and was headed by Colonels P. G. Kornilov (brother of General L. G. Kornilov), Colonel I. M. Zaitsev, Lieutenant General L. L. Kondratovich, and the former tsarist assistant governor-general of Turkestan, E. Dzhunkovskii. It was subsequently joined by the Commissar for Military Affairs of the Turkestan ASSR, K. P. Osipov.

According to Soviet sources, the organization established contact with the British military mission of General Wilfred Malleson, who supplied it with funds and arms. A wave of arrests conducted by the Cheka in October 1918 damaged the Turkestan Military Organization, but did not destroy it, and Osipov was able to stage a serious but unsuccessful uprising against the Soviet authorities at Tashkent in January 1919 (the Osipov Rebellion), during which the Fourteen Turkestan Commissars were executed. When that uprising was crushed, the remnants of the organization fled the city.

TURKESTAN RED ARMY. This Red force was created by a directive of the commander of forces of the Red Army’s Eastern Front, S. S. Kamenev, on 5 March 1919. Its complement included the Orenburg (later 31st) Rifle Division (March–June 1919), the 3rd Turkestan Cavalry Division (March–June 1919), the 2nd Rifle Division (May–June 1919), the 24th Rifle Division (May–June 1919), and the 25th Rifle Division (May June 1919). The Turkestan Red Army was engaged in battles with forces of the Orenburg Cossack Host and other White formations around Orenburg during March and April 1919, and in May–June 1919 participated in the successful Red counteroffensive against the forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak’s Russian Army. The army was disbanded on 15 June 1919.

Commanders of the Turkestan Red Army were G. V. Zinov′ev (11 March–22 May 1919), V. S. Raspopov (22–24 May 1919), and M. V. Frunze (24 May–15 June 1919). Its chiefs of staff were A. I. Mitin (acting, 23 March–11 April 1919), V. P. Raspopov (11 April–22 May 1919), and V. S. Lazarevich (24 May–15 June 1919).

TURKISH–ARMENIAN WAR. This conflict between the 30,000-strong army of the Democratic Republic of Armenia and the approximately 50,000-strong forces of the Turkish National Movement that were deployed in eastern Anatolia lasted from 24 September to 2 December 1920. The war was a consequence of Armenia’s disputing, as the Central Powers collapsed at the end of the First World War, the transfer to Turkey, under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and the Treaty of Batumi (4 June 1918), of territories claimed by Turkey—notably the regions of Kars, Batumi, and Ardahan—the possession of which would have united the Armenian people and given their putative new state access to the sea.

There had already been armed conflict between the two sides in May 1918, prior to the Batumi agreement, but the situation was complicated in late 1918 by the declaration of an independent South-West Caucasian Democratic Republic, under Cihangirzade İbrahim Bey, claiming sovereignty over those areas ceded to the Ottoman Empire in the earlier treaties but evacuated by Turkish forces under the terms of the Armistice of Mudros, and by the occupation of the provinces of Lori and Javakheti and the Borchalo district by the Democratic Republic of Georgia (which resulted in the Georgian–Armenian War). Tensions grew over the following 18 months and broke into open conflict following Armenia’s partial occupation of the Otlu district in September 1920 (in the wake of hopes aroused in Yerevan by the Treaty of Sèvres, 10 August 1920). Turkish forces, commanded by Kazim Karabekir (Karabekir Pasha), reinforced by local Muslim militiamen, drove the Armenians out and pushed on into Armenian territory, prompting the Yerevan government to declare war on Turkey on 24 September 1920. The subsequent fighting was marked by the massacre and forced migration of civilians by the (semi-irregular) armies of both combatants, notably around Kars (which was occupied by the Turks on 30 October 1920) and Alexandropol (occupied by Turkey on 6 November 1920). As Turkish forces crossed the Araxi River, captured the strategic town of Agin, and prepared to advance on Yerevan, the Armenian government (which had been refused military assistance by the Allies and the Georgians) submitted to an armistice on 18 November 1920, and on 2 December 1920 signed the Treaty of Alexandropol, under which the Treaty of Sèvres and its promised Greater (“Wilsonian”) Armenia were renounced and almost all the disputed territories were ceded to Turkey.

Meanwhile, however, on 29 November 1920 the 11th Red Army had begun an invasion of Armenia from Azerbaijan, which quickly resulted in the establishment of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, meaning that the treaty was not ratified by the Armenian Republic. Nevertheless, Moscow’s desire to win the support of Turkey meant that the Alexandropol settlement was largely confirmed by the subsequent Treaty of Moscow (16 March 1921) and Treaty of Kars (13 October 1921), which bedevils Turkish–Armenian relations to this day, not least because the terms of those treaties allotted to Turkey lands in which lay two of the spiritual icons of the Armenian people: Mount Ararat and the ancient Armenian capital of Ani (Abnicum).

Turkul, Anton Vasil′evich (11 December 1892–20 August 1957). Colonel (1918), major general (April 1920). A famed commander of the White forces in South Russia (notably units of the Drozdovtsy), A. V. Turkul was born at Tiraspol′, into the nobility of Bessarabia guberniia, and attended school in Odessa (graduating in 1909). He volunteered for military service at the outbreak of the First World War and graduated from an officer training school (1914) to command a battalion of the 19th Infantry Division. He was wounded three times during the course of the war and was much decorated for bravery.

Turkul joined the Whites immediately after the October Revolution and participated in the 800-mile march from Jassy to Novocherkassk in the forces of General M. G. Drozdovskii (December 1917–May 1918). In the Volunteer Army, he participated in the 2nd Kuban (Ice) March, commanded a battalion (May 1918–September 1919), and was wounded on four more occasions. He was subsequently commander of the 1st Officers’ (Drozdovskii) Regiment (September 1919–June 1920) of the Armed Forces of South Russia and then the 3rd Drozdovskii Rifle Division in the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel (August–October 1920), before the evacuation of the Drozdovtsy from Crimea to the camps at Gallipoli.

In emigration, after leaving Turkey, Turkul lived at first in Bulgaria, as commander of the 2nd Officers (Drozdovskii) Rifle Regiment, and with General V. K. Vitkovskii participated in the crushing of the Communist rising in that country in September 1923. He then moved to France, where he was active in ROVS as a proponent of the continuation of the armed struggle against Soviet Russia and founded his own monarchist (and almost proto-fascist) organization, the Russian National Union of Participants in the War. He was expelled from France to Germany in 1938, and the following year, in the wake of the signing of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, went to live in Rome and then Sofia. During the Second World War, he collaborated with the Nazis and in 1945 took part in the formation of the Russian Liberation Army of General A. A. Vlasov in Austria, as commander of the Volunteer Brigade.

Turkul was arrested by the British authorities in Austria in May 1945 and was subsequently imprisoned and periodically interrogated until 1947. (The Allied intelligence services at first believed he was a Soviet agent, but concluded that he was innocently used by Moscow to feed misinformation to the Germans.) Thereafter, he lived in Munich, acting as chairman of the Committee of Russian Non-Returners and editor of the émigré newspaper Dobrovolets (“The Volunteer”). He is buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte- Geneviève-des-Bois in Paris.

TUVAN PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC. This polity, with its capital at Khem-Beldyr (formerly, until 1918, Belotsarsk, and subsequently renamed Kyzyl, meaning “Red” in Tuvan), was founded on 14 August 1921, on the territory of the former Russian protectorate of Tuva (also known as Uriankhaiskii krai), following the collapse of White forces in eastern Siberia and Soviet incursions into neighboring Mongolia. Until 1926, it was known as Tannu Tuva (the name adopted for their region, from 1911, by nationalist rebels who sought independence from their Chinese overlords). Its first prime minister was the former Lamaist monk Donduk Kuular of the pro-Bolshevik Tuvan People’s-Revolutionary Party. The Tuvan People’s Republic was nominally independent (although it was only recognized by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Mongolian People’s Republic) but was, in fact, controlled by Moscow. It was formally incorporated into the USSR as the Tuvan Autonomous Oblast′ on 11 October 1944.

12TH RED ARMY. This name was applied to two military formations of the Red Army in the course of the civil wars.

The first 12th Red Army was created by an order of the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front on 3 October 1918, in accordance with a directive of the Revvoensovet of the Republic of 11 September 1918, from various formations operating around Astrakhan and the eastern reaches of the North Caucasus. It was attached to the Southern Front, then (from 3 November 1918) the Caspian–Caucasian sector of the Southern Front, and later (from 8 December 1918) the Caspian–Caucasian Front. The army suffered from its isolation from other Red centers and from the thinly populated region in which it operated, and it consisted initially of only the Astrakhan (later the 33rd) Rifle Division. Consequently, its attempts to capture the railways from Gudermes to Petrovsk and Kizliar to Chervlennaia were thwarted by the Whites. On 13 February 1919, its ranks were swelled by elements of the 11th Red Army that had retreated from the North Caucasus, but it was still unable to hold off the attacks of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) in a front stretching from the North Caucasus to the Donbass. The army was disestablished on 13 March 1919. Commanders of the first 12th Red Army were A. I. Antonomov (3 October–15 November 1918, although he never took up the post); V. L. Stepanov (3 October 1918–14 February 1919); and N. A. Zhdanov (14 February–13 March 1919). Its chief of staff was D. A. Severin (3 October 1918–13 March 1919).

The second 12th Red Army was created on 16 June 1919, by an order of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, from elements of the 1st Ukrainian Soviet Army and the 3rd Ukrainian Soviet Army. It was attached to the Western Front, then (from 10 January 1920) the South-West Front, the Western Front (from 14 August 1920), and once more the South-West Front (from 27 September 1920). Its complement included the 1st Ukrainian Soviet Rifle Division (June–August 1919); the 7th (March–December 1920), 24th (June 1920), 25th (May–December 1920), 44th (June 1919–April 1920 and June–December 1920), 45th (June-October 1919 and March–April 1920), 46th (June–July 1919), 47th (September 1919–April 1920), 57th (February–March 1920), 58th (September 1919–August 1920 and September–November 1920), and 60th (August 1919–February 1920) Rifle Divisions; the Independent VOKhR Rifle Division (November–December 1920); and the 17th Cavalry Division (February–May 1920, and, in its reconstituted form, in October 1920).

In June 1919, the 12th Red Army occupied a region encompassing most of southern Ukraine (Kherson, Nikolaev, Odessa, Tiraspol′, Kamenets-Podol′skii) and was engaged in battles with forces of the AFSR and the Ukrainian Army. Its position was weakened in July–August of that year, as the AFSR captured Khar′kov, Poltava, and eventually Kiev (14 August 1919). When the White offensive was turned, the 12th Red Army went back on the offensive, recapturing Kiev (December 1919). With the onset of the Soviet–Polish War, it was driven out of Kiev (April 1920), but then formed part of the offensive on the South-West Front that recaptured the Ukrainian capital in June 1920. The army was disestablished on 25 December 1920. Commanders of the second 12th Red Army were N. G. Semenov (16 June–8 September 1919); S. A. Mezheninov (10 September 1919–10 June 1920); G. K. Voskanov (10 June–20 August 1920); N. N. Kuz′min (acting, 20 August–26 October 1920); and N. V. Lisovskii (26 October–25 December 1920). Its chiefs of staff were G. Ia. Kutyrev (16 June–2 October 1919); V. K. Sedachev (2 October 1919–13 October 1920); M. V. Molkochanov (13–16 October 1920); V. D. Latynin (17 October–17 November 1920); and I. D. Modenov (17 November–23 December 1920).

Twenty-six (baku) Commissars. The Twenty-Six Commissars (sometimes called the Baku Commissars) were the group of Bolsheviks, Dashnaks, and members of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries executed by firing squad, in controversial circumstances, between the stations of Pereval and Akhcha-Kuyma, on the Transcaspian Railway, on 20 September 1918.

The men were former leaders of the Baku Commune. Following the collapse of that regime on 26 July 1918, they had been imprisoned on 14 August 1918 by the succeeding Central Caspian Dictatorship, which was dominated by Dashnaks, Rightist members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks, and which enjoyed the support of the forces of the Allied intervention, in the shape of Dunsterforce. On 14 September 1918, as the Ottoman Army of Islam stormed Baku, Red Guards led by Anastas Mikoyan broke into the Bailovskii prison and freed the incarcerated Bolsheviks and their allies. The commissars then fled by sea, on board the ship Turkmen, hoping to reach Bolshevik-held Astrakhan, but for reasons that remain obscure the ship’s captain instead sailed for Krasnovodsk, on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. There, the commissars were detained by troops loyal to the anti-Bolshevik Transcaspian Provisional Government. When the commissars’ presence at Krasnovodsk became known to the commander of British forces in the region (Norperforce), Major General Wilfred Malleson, he asked the British intelligence officer at Ashkhabad, Captain Reginald Teague-Jones, to suggest to the local authorities that the prisoners be taken to India as hostages, in the hope of arranging an exchange for British citizens held in Russia (notably the men of a British military mission recently captured at Vladikavkaz). Teague-Jones attended the meeting of the Ashkhabad Committee at which the commissars’ fate was to be decided, but apparently did not communicate Malleson’s suggestion and left the meeting before a decision was taken. He discovered the next day (he later testified) that the Ashkhabad Committee had ordered that the men should be executed.

At around 6:00 a.m., on 20 September 1918, the sentence was carried out. (For reasons that are unclear, only 26 of the 35 men in captivity were executed. Among those who survived was the aforementioned Mikoyan (head of state of the USSR, 1964–1965, whom J. V. Stalin would later, mockingly—and threateningly—dub “the 27th Commissar”). After the civil wars, the Soviet government placed the blame for the execution of the Twenty-Six Commissars at the doors of the British, even alleging that it had been British agents on board the Turkman who had directed it to Krasnovodsk. They were supported in this view by the testimony of F. A. Funtikov, one of the leaders of the Ashkhabad regime, who (before he was tried and shot at Baku in 1926) charged that Teague-Jones had personally ordered the executions.

Funtikov’s version forms the basis for the official graphic memorial to the men, I. I. Brodskii’s 1925 painting The Execution of the 26 Baku Commissars, in which two British officers are visible in the left foreground as the shootings take place (The canvas’s composition, it should be noted, has a distinct resemblance to those commemorating the execution of the Communards in Paris in 1871.) The British government always denied that this had been the case (and there is certainly no evidence that any British officers were present at the executions). Nevertheless, this controversy soured interwar relations between Britain and the USSR and can be regarded as one of the roots of the Cold War.

The incident was largely forgotten in Britain, but in the Soviet Union the Twenty-Six Commissars were canonized and commemorated in innumerable books, films—notably 26 Komissarov (dir. N.M. Shengelaia, 1933, but micromanaged by the leaders of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic)—coins, stamps, songs and poems (e.g., Sergei Esinin’s “Song of the 26”), place-names, and statues. Indeed, following the return of the commissars’ remains to Baku in September 1920 (not coincidently, during the Congress of the Peoples of the East), the hagiography associated with “The Twenty-Six” was probably bested only by the Lenin cult in Soviet political culture. The most prominent piece of public commemorative art was the Twenty-Six Commissars’ Memorial in Baku, designed by Alesker Huseynov, which was raised in 1958 above the spot on Sahil Square where the men’s remains had been ceremonially reburied in 1920.

Commemoration of the Twenty-Six, however, was always problematic in Azerbaijan, where many Muslims regarded the commissars as bearing responsibility for the massacres of the March Days of 1918. Consequently, the eternal flame at the Sahil memorial was extinguished soon after the breakup of the USSR in the early 1990s, and in January 2009 the Azeri authorities took the controversial decision to demolish the monument and replace it with a fountain. On 26 January 2009, the commissars’ remains (or, rather, the remains of 23 of them, all that were recovered) were reburied at Baku’s Hovsan Cemetery. Across independent Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia, subway stations, streets, parks, and so forth, that once bore the names of the Twenty-Six Commissars, either individually or collectively, have also been renamed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Twenty-Six Commissars were S. G. Shahumian (chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Baku Commune and the Sovnarkom of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic’s extraordinary commissar for the Caucasus); Meshadi Azizbekov (deputy people’s commissar of internal affairs in the Baku Commune and guberniia commissar for Baku); Prokopius Dzhaparidze (chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Baku Soviet); I. T. Fioletov (chairman of the Council of the National Economy of the Baku Soviet); Vezirov, Mir-Hasan Kiazim oglu (people’s commissar for agriculture of the Baku Soviet); G. N. Korganov (people’s commissar for military and naval affairs of the Baku Soviet); Ia .D. Zevin (people’s commissar for labor of the Baku Soviet); G. K. Petrov (the Sovnarkom of the RSFSR’s military commissar for the Baku region); I. V. Malygin (deputy chairman of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Red Army of the Caucasus); Arsen Amiryan (editor-in-chief of the Bakinskii rabotnkik newspaper); Meyer Basin (member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Red Army of the Caucasus); Suren Osepyan (editor-in-chief of the Izvestiia of the Baku Soviet); Eigen Berg (sailor and chief of communications of Soviet forces in Baku); V. F. Polukhin (member of the collegium of the Commissariat for Military Affairs of the RSFSR); F. F. Solntsev (commissar of the Baku Military School); Armenak Boriyan (journalist); I. Ia. Gabyshev (brigade commissar); M. R. Koganov (member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Baku Soviet); Bagdasar Avakyan (commandant of Baku); Iraklii Metaksa (Shahumian’s bodyguard); Ivan Nikolayshvili (Dzhaparidze’s bodyguard); Aram Kostandyan (Deputy People’s Commissar for Food of the Baku Commune); Solomon Bogdanov (member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Baku Soviet); A. A. Bogdanov (clerk); Isay Mishne (secretary of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Baku Soviet); and Tatevos Amirov (commander of a cavalry unit and a member of the Dashnaks).