Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

W

Wakhitov (Vakhitov), Mullanur Mullacan ulı (10 August 1885–19 August 1918). One of the foremost Tatar revolutionaries of the civil-war era, Mullanur Wakhitov was born into the family of a worker in a trading firm at Kazan′ and was involved with social-democrat study circles in the city from an early age. After graduating from the local Realschule (1907), he studied at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute (expelled in 1910) and graduated from the Law Department of St. Petersburg Psychoneurological Institute (1916). In 1917, he was active in the revolutionary movement in Kazan′, as a journalist and in helping to organize the Muslim Socialist Committee.

During the October Revolution, Wakhitov participated in the establishment of Soviet power at Kazan′ and soon afterward was elected to the Constituent Assembly by the Muslim caucus of his home city. His industriousness, efficiency, and radical edge brought him to the notice of the central authorities, including V. I. Lenin, and in January 1918 he was named head of the Central Muslim Section of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, where he was one of the initiators of the idea of a Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic. He was also a member of the Central Military Collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs, assisting in the formation of Muslim units in the Red Army. In sum, although he had not formally joined the Bolsheviks, Wakhitov was the most powerful Muslim figure in the Soviet regime during the first months of its existence. From July 1918, he worked also as extraordinary commissar for supplies in the Volga region; during the following month, as commander of the 2nd Tatar-Bashkir Battalion, he participated in the Reds’ failed defense of Kazan′ against the People’s Army of Komuch and the Czechoslovak Legion. He was captured by enemy forces on 7 August 1918 and executed by firing squad 12 days later. Some sources have it that his last words were “Communism cannot be killed!”

WAR COMMUNISM. This was the term applied retrospectively by V. I. Lenin (in the spring of 1921) to describe the Bolsheviks’ economic policies during the civil wars. He specifically applied it to the period from May–June 1918 to March 1921, to differentiate it from the earlier period (from the October Revolution to May–June 1918), which he said was characterized by “state capitalism” and workers’ control. Lenin’s transparent purpose was to argue that the most extreme economic policies (especially food requisitioning, or prodrazverstka) had been forced upon the regime by counterrevolution, the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, rapacious German imperialism (following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), and Allied intervention, and that these measures were only intended to be temporary in nature. However, some historians have argued that War Communism was, at least for some Bolsheviks, an ideal form of economic management that they sought to realize at the earliest opportunity.

The main planks of the system, which was overseen by VSNKh, were the nationalization of industry (beginning with large factories by a decree of 28 June 1918 and spreading to small enterprises by a decree of 20 November 1920); a high degree of central control over the production and distribution of goods; a state monopoly on foreign trade and a strict regulation of internal trade, to the extent that all private trade came to be regarded as illegal by 1920; the imposition of strict discipline in the factories; obligatory labor service for members of the bourgeoisie; the requisitioning of grain and other agricultural products from the peasantry (prodrazverstka) under a state “food dictatorship”; the rationing of food and other products; and a tendency for direct exchange of goods and services to obviate the need for currency. (It is of note, however, that fixed prices, rationing, and a state monopoly on grain purchases were not Bolshevik inventions; they had been introduced to Russia by the imperial government during the First World War and had been maintained by the Provisional Government in 1917.) However, the chaotic circumstances of the civil wars meant that the program could not be introduced fully or uniformly (if, indeed, it was a true program, rather than a series of ad hoc, desperate measures); for example, the black market (through bagmen) was responsible for the supply of most food consumed by urban dwellers throughout the period.

Although it is generally agreed that War Communism helped the Soviet government win the civil wars, it also aggravated many of the hardships suffered by the population. Peasants resented the requisitioning and turned against the Bolshevik regime from the spring of 1918 onward, and workers fled the cities to seek food, decreasing the production of manufactured goods that might have been bartered with the peasantry for food. Petrograd lost almost 75 percent of its population between 1918 and 1921, and Moscow lost at least 50 percent, while Soviet industrial production in 1921 reached just 21 percent of Russia’s prewar levels. The consequence were such episodes as the Belovodsk uprising, the Pitchfork Uprising, the Chapan War, the Tambov Rebellion, the Western Siberian Uprising, and the Kronshtadt Revolt (although, contrary to many accounts, the decision to abandon War Communism in favor of the New Economic Policy had been reached by Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee many weeks before the outbreak of the rebellion at Kronshtadt). Following resolutions made at the 10th Party Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in March 1921, a series of measures were introduced that replaced the system of War Communism with the mixed-economy NEP.

WARSAW, TREATY OF (21–24 April 1920). This secret agreement between the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) and the Second Polish Republic recognized Polish sovereignty over Western Volhynia and Eastern Galicia (Western Ukraine) and was fiercely opposed by the government-in-exile of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, which also laid claim to those territories.

Under the terms of the treaty, the Ukrainian–Polish border was established as running along the Zbruch River, continuing northeastward to Vyshgorodok, then farther east from Zdolnuiv, along the eastern boundary of the Rivne (Rovno) district to the Pripiat River. In return, the UNR secured Polish recognition of its independent existence and (under an annex to the treaty) an agreement for joint Polish–Ukrainian military action to expel Bolshevik forces from Ukrainian soil. Both countries agreed to protect the national and cultural rights of their ethnic minorities and vowed not to make third-party agreements that ran contrary to the Treaty of Warsaw. Poland, however, breached the terms of the agreement in signing the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921) with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (and in recognizing the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) at the end of the Soviet–Polish War, having launched the offensive against Kiev that reactivated that conflict on 25 April 1920, the day after securing the military alliance with UNR and its Ukrainian Army that the Treaty of Warsaw incorporated.

WEAPONRY (RED ARMY). Almost the entire stock of weapons and ammunition of the Imperial Russian Army was inherited by the Soviet government and its armed forces, as well as the plant to produce more (notably in the shape of the huge arsenal at Tula). The arms industry was overseen by VSNKh, and by 1920 its 2,000 factories claimed to have produced 3,000,000 rifles, 21,000 machine guns, 1,600,000 handguns, and 3,000 artillery pieces (as well as 5,600,000 greatcoats and 4,000,000 summer uniforms). Throughout the period, however, the supply of weapons to the Red Army was complicated by the great diversity of available equipment—more than 60 makes of artillery pieces and 35 types of rifle, for example—meaning that spare parts were often hard to obtain, and users of the weaponry had to frequently retrain.

Of the 1,300,000 rifles left over from the tsarist army, the majority were the Russian 7.62mm Mosin-Nagant M.1891, commonly known as the trekhlineika (literally, “the little three-liner,” from its caliber in the old Russian system). Most of these had been produced domestically, but some were manufactured to order during the First World War by the Remington Company in the United States. They were available in several versions: pekhotnaia (infantry), the shorter and lighter dragusnkaia (dragoon), and the bayonet-less kazachskaia (Cossack). Numerous foreign-manufactured rifles were also used, including 7.92mm German Mauser M.1898, the 8mm Austrian Mannlicher M.1895, the Japanese Ariska M.1905, and a version of the American Winchester M.1895 that had been adapted for Russian ammunition. The most commonly used revolver of the civil-war period was the 7.62mm Nagant M.1895, although members of the Cheka and military commissars greatly favored the German Mauser.

With regard to bladed weapons (which, because of the shortage of spare parts, often had to be resorted to), cavalrymen and artillerymen used the Cossack or (hand-guardless) Caucasian shashka (saber) or kinzhal (dagger), which could be intricately decorated, while all mounted forces also used the M.1910 lance.

The most widely used machine gun was the Maxim M.1910, although the French Hotchkiss M.1914, the American Colt, and the British Lewis M.1915 were also to be found. All types of machine gun could be mounted on a tachanka, and some were mounted on aircraft.

The most common mortar among Red Army forces was the imperial Russian Likhonin 47–58mm, while the 3-inch field gun M.1902, the 3-inch mountain gun M.1909, and the M.1910 Howitzer constituted the bulk of the light artillery deployed by the Reds. Heavy artillery was largely made up of the 107mm field gun M.1910 and the 6-inch M.1910 Howitzer, with some of the French 120mm cannon M.1878. Also deployed in smaller numbers were the 6-inch M.1904 siege gun, the British 6-inch and 8-inchVickers Howitzers, the 11-inch Howitzer M.1914, the 12-inch Obukhov Howitzer M.1915, the 10-inch coastal cannon, and the 37mm trench gun M.1915, as well as the 37mm and 40mm automatic guns.

In the early months of the civil wars, the Red Army’s access to artillery was limited, as most guns were located in areas of the front that had not yet come fully under Soviet control, but this situation eased by the spring and early summer of 1918. Thereafter, for ease of movement, artillery was often mounted on armored trains or trucks and on military flotillas. The Reds also utilized a number of tanks. In all circumstances, all sides in the civil wars tended to favor artillery operations in the “direct fire” mode, but this was more the case with the Reds (who often lacked training) than the Whites. Also, dominance was usually established by the side that could deploy its artillery first and fastest, so efforts to find concealed positions on the open steppe were kept to a minimum. The Soviet leadership were also fascinated by the potential presented by the German Army’s “Paris Gun,” which in March–July 1918 had bombarded Paris from a distance of 80 miles, and during the summer of 1918 they established a special subcommittee of the Artillery Directorate of the Main Field Staff of the Red Army to investigate means of increasing the range of its own artillery to a comparable distance (although nothing concrete was achieved during the civil-war years).

Finally, in Soviet historiography a great show is made of the ingenuity with which Red partisan forces, especially in Siberia, manufactured their own weaponry, including machine guns, mortars, and light artillery (although the illustrations used with these accounts suggest that these homemade guns might have been as lethal for anyone firing them as they were for their intended targets).

WEAPONRY (WHITE ARMIES). White and other anti-Bolshevik formations of the civil wars used all the major weapons also used by the Red Army, although far fewer of them were available to the anti-Bolsheviks. The shortfall was partly made good by supplies provided as part of the Allied intervention (mostly by Britain and the United States).

The precise total number of weapons imported is impossible to establish, but as an indication, by mid-1919 White Russian forces in the Baltic region had received, from Britain alone, 40,000 rifles, 500 Vickers and Lewis machine guns, and numerous tanks and aircraft. Supplies began to reach the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) in large quantities from February 1919, including (by the close of that year) 198,000 rifles, 6,177 machine guns, and 1,200 artillery pieces, while the United States also provided 100,000 rifles for the AFSR. In the Far East, between October 1918 and October 1919 (when supplies were diverted to South Russia, as a consequence of the collapse of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak), British vessels delivered 600,000 rifles, 6,831 machine guns, and 192 artillery pieces to Vladivostok. British naval guns (taken from ships at Vladivostok) were also deployed on White military flotillas (especially the Kama Military Flotilla). By March 1919, the United States had delivered to Kolchak’s forces a further 200,000 rifles, 100 machine guns, and 22 artillery pieces; in July 1919, they supplemented this with 12,000 Colt revolvers and 368,000 Mosin-Nagant rifles. Huge quantities of ammunition were also delivered to White forces in all theaters, as they almost entirely lacked the means to produce it for themselves.

It is difficult to ascertain, however, what proportion of the weapons and ammunition delivered to the Whites reached the front lines. Transportation (especially the railway network) was thinly developed, inefficient, and overloaded (particularly in Siberia, where Kolchak’s forces on the Urals front had to be supplied from the port of Vladivostok, 4,000 miles away, at the end of the predominantly single-track Trans-Siberian Railway); corruption was endemic; and divisions within the White camp could lead to the diversion of supplies away from the front (e.g., by local warlords like Ataman G. M. Semenov).

WESTERN ARMENIA, ADMINISTRATION FOR. This provisional government of Ottoman territories claimed (and partially occupied) by (Russian) Armenia (chiefly the provinces of Trabzon, Erzurum, Bitlis, Ardahan, and Van) was first established, under the Dashnaks’ leadership, in May 1915, following the Armenian uprising against the Turks at Van (the Van resistance) and the advance into the region of the Russian Army. It was initially called Free Vaspurakan, but it fell to the Turks in August 1915 and was reestablished as the Administration for Western Armenia in June 1916. Following the February Revolution of 1917 and the abolition of the Viceroyalty of the Caucasus, the administration was monitored by the Special Transcaucasian Committee (Ozakom) of the Russian Provisional Government.

In December 1917, following the October Revolution, the Transcaucasian Commissariat and (from 24 February 1918) the Transcaucasian Federation claimed jurisdiction over the administration, but the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers assigned the territory of the administration to Turkey. The Democratic Republic of Armenia, formed on 28 May 1918, refused to recognize that treaty and from its inception claimed sovereignty over the territory of the administration. This brought the country into conflict with the Ottoman Army, whose forces pushed into the area in April 1918, despite Armenian resistance. The Armenian republic was forced to recognize the loss of the territories of the administration in the subsequent Treaty of Batumi (4 June 1918), the terms of which were largely reaffirmed by the Treaty of Alexandropol (2 December 1920), the Treaty of Moscow (16 March 1921), and the Treaty of Kars (13 October 1921), which brought to an end the Turkish–Armenian War. Hopes were raised that a greater (“Wilsonian”) Armenia would be created by the Paris Peace Conference, when the territories of the administration fell within the Armenian borders delineated by the Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920). However, following the Kemalist victory in the Turkish War of Independence, that treaty was superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923), which returned the territories to Turkey.

The governors of the Administration for Western Armenia were Aram Manougian (June 1916–December 1917); Tovmas Nazerbekian (December 1917–March 1918); and Andranik Toros Oznanian (March–April 1918).

Western Army. This White military force (formally the Western Independent Army), part of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, was created on 1 January 1919, on the basis of the Kama and Samara groups of the former 3rd Urals Corps. Its staff was based at Cheliabinsk, and it initially conducted operations in the direction of Ufa.

First incorporated into the Western Army were the 3rd Urals Mountain Riflemen; the 6th Urals, the 8th Urals (Votkinsk and the Free Independent Division), and the 9th Volga Corps; the 2nd Ufa Cavalry Division; the 3rd Orenburg Cossack Division; the 2nd and 3rd Orenburg Cossack Brigades; and numerous other smaller units (including a regiment of Serbian volunteers, under a Major Blagotič). Many of these units had previously owed allegiance to the People’s Army of Komuch, or to the Ufa Directory. It also included the 9th (Bashkir) Division, which on 18 February 1919 deserted en masse to the Red Army, abandoning the front between Sterlitamak and Ufa. By April 1919, when it joined the Russian Army’s spring offensive, the Western Army could formally muster 23,600 infantry and 6,500 cavalry, with 590 machine guns and 134 field guns.

After initial successes (capturing Birsk on 10 March, Ufa on 14 March, Belebei on 7 April, and Bugul′ma on 10 April 1919), it had been planned that the Western Army would dig in and rest at the River Ik. However, Kolchak’s staff determined that the advance should continue, and Buguruslan was taken on 15 April 1919. This, however, left the Western Army overextended and grievously exposed on its left flank. On 28 April 1919, that flank was duly attacked by a special maneuvering group of the Reds’ Eastern Front (led by M. V. Frunze and featuring the forces commanded by V. I. Chapaev), which forded the Belaia River and retook Ufa on 7–9 June 1919. The Western Army more or less disintegrated under these blows, as it fled back across the Urals; at Cheliabinsk (in July 1919) it was reformed into the 3rd Army of Kolchak’s reconstituted Eastern Front.

Commanders in chief of the Western Army were General M. V. Khanzhin (24 December 1918–20 June 1919) and General K. V. Sakharov (21 June–22 July 1919). Its chiefs of staff were Major-General S. A. Shchepikhin (1 January–21 May 1919); Major-General K. V. Sakharov (20 May–20 June 1919); and Colonel V. I. Oberiukhtin (22 June–22 July 1919).

WESTERN FRONT. This Red front was created, in accordance with a directive of the main commander in chief of the Red Army (Jukums Vācietis) of 12 February 1919, with the aim of coordinating the activities of Soviet forces in western and northwestern Russia. Its staff was located initially at Staraia Russa, then, in succession, at Molodechno, Dvinsk, Smolensk, and Minsk. Its complement included the 7th Red Army (19 February 1919–10 May 1921), the (Red) Army of Soviet Latvia (from 7 June 1919), the 15th Red Army (19 February 1919–4 October 1920), the Western Army (19 February 1919–7 May 1921; from 13 March 1919 the Belorussian–Lithuanian Army and from 9 June 1919 the 16th Red Army), the Estonian Red Army (19 February–30 May 1919), the 12th Red Army (16 June–27 July 1919, 7 September–17 October 1919, and 14 August–27 September 1920), the Mozyr Group of Forces (18 May–September 1920), the 3rd Red Army (11 June–31 December 1920), the 4th Red Army (11 June–18 October 1920), the 1st Cavalry Army (14 August–27 September 1920), and the Dnepr Military Flotilla (12 February–22 December 1920). Initially numbering some 81,500 men, at the height of its activity (in the summer of 1920, when it was of central importance in the Soviet–Polish War) the Western Front eventually controlled over 180,000 men.

From the moment of its formation, the Western Front saw extensive battles along a 2,000-mile theater of operations, involving clashes with forces of the Allied intervention around Murmansk, White and White Finnish forces around Petrozavodsk and Olonets and in Karelia, and against White and nationalist forces in the Baltic region, as well as forces of the Austro-German intervention (including the Baltic Landeswehr and other Freikorps units) and the Poles. Red forces were largely pushed out of the emergent Baltic States by July 1919 (during the Estonian War of Independence, the Latvian War of Independence, and the Lithuanian Wars of Independence), while in Belorussia the Poles advanced as far as the River Berezina. By August 1919, the front stretched from near Narva, on the Gulf of Finland, through Pskov and Polotsk to the Berezina. In June, and from August to October 1919, forces of the Western Front (specifically the 7th and 15th Red Armies) held off two advances from Estonia toward Petrograd of the North-West Army of General N. N. Iudenich. In 1920, during the Soviet–Polish War, the Western Front was the most important area of battle of the Soviet Republic, and by mid-August of that year, its forces were approaching the gates of Warsaw. The Polish counteroffensive, however, drove them out of Poland and Lithuania and back into Belorussia by October 1920. The forces of the Western Front were thereafter kept on alert against any further Polish incursions, before being transformed into the forces of the Western Military District on 8 April 1924.

Commanders of the Western Front were D. N. Nadezhnyi (19 February–22 July 1919): V. M. Gittis (22 July 1919–29 April 1920); M. N. Tukhachevskii (29 April 1920–4 March 1921; and 24 January 1922–26 March 1924); I. I. Zakharov (acting, 4 March–20 September 1921); A. I. Egorov (20 September 1921–24 January 1922); A. I. Kork (acting, 26 March–5 April 1924); and A. I. Kuk (acting, 5–8 April 1924). Its chiefs of staff were N. N. Domozhirov (19 February–26 May 1919); N. N. Petin (26 May–17 October 1919); A. M. Peremytov (acting, 17 October–13 November 1919); V. S. Lazarevich (13 October 1919–9 February 1920); N. N. Shvarts (25 February–30 September 1920); N. V. Sollogub (1 October–6 December 1920); P. I. Ermolin (6 December 1920–7 June 1921); M. A. Batorskii (7 June–23 November 1921); S. A. Mezheninov (23 November 1921–6 July 1923); I. I. Gludin (acting, 6 July–30 September 1923); and A. I. Kuk (30 September 1923–8 April 1924).

WESTERN RUSSIAN (BERLIN) GOVERNMENT. This anti-Bolshevik authority was formed in the German capital on 7 July 1919, by the right-wing Russian Political Conference, and was headed by V. V. Biskupskii. It had as its aim the establishment, in the Baltic theater of the “Russian” Civil Wars, of a 220,000-strong, pro-German force that would fight against the Soviet government. The force was to be financed by German industrialists and bankers, in return for Russian recognition of the independence of Finland and the autonomy of the Baltic provinces. However, the Western Russian (Berlin) Government was unable to gain the support of the generally pro-Allied White leaders in Siberia and South Russia, or of the White delegations in France during the Paris Peace Conference, and its only contribution to the anti-Bolshevik war effort seems to have been to supply arms to the Western Volunteer Army of P. R. Bermondt-Avalov. Following the establishment of the Russian Western Governing Council at Mitau (Jelgava) in September 1919, Biskupskii’s regime ceased to operate.

WESTERN SIBERIAN COMMISSARIAT. This anti-Bolshevik grouping had been charged by P. Ia. Derber with the organization of an anti-Bolshevik underground in Western Siberia following the dispersal from Tomsk (in January–February 1918) of the Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia and his own flight to the Far East, in January 1918. The Western Siberian Commissariat first convened, in secret, at Novonikolaevsk on 14 February 1918, and subsequently gained the support of the cooperative movement in Siberia, notably the Zakupsbyt organization (which had its headquarters at Novonikolaevsk), but had little success in persuading proto-White, anti-Bolshevik officers’ organizations to recognize its authority (and little more success in attempting to establish a twin, Eastern Siberian Commissariat).

On 26 May 1918, the Western Siberian Commissariat emerged from the underground, in the wake of the collapse of Soviet power in the area during the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, and, on 1 June 1918 placed itself at the forefront of the Democratic Counter-Revolution, proclaiming its provisional authority over Western Siberia pending the reconvening of the Siberian Regional Duma. It then transferred its headquarters to Omsk, published a moderate-left program that envisaged the maintenance of some elements of the Soviet system (including keeping certain industrial concerns under state control and a toleration of workers’ soviets), and began the formation of the armed force that was to become the Siberian Army. Its Governing Council (consisting of four rather obscure members of the local organization of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, P. Ia. Mikhailov, V. O. Sidorov, M. E. Lindberg, and B. D. Markov) met with opposition, however, from its own head of the Department of Military Affairs, A. N. Grishin-Almazov, and its Business Cabinet, chaired by V. V. Sapozhnikov, in which more conservative (and forceful) representatives of Siberian regionalism predominated. The machinations of these elements, together with the scheming at Omsk of other, less radical members of the Derber government (notably I. A. Mikhailov), forced the Western Siberian Commissariat to cede power to the Provisional Siberian Government on 1 July 1918, in what could be said to be the beginning of the end for the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia.

Western Siberian upRising. During 1921 and 1922, western Siberia experienced the largest but probably the least well-known uprising ever seen against Soviet power, one that united much of the peasantry with Cossacks, workers, and elements of the region’s intelligentsia in demands for an end to prodrazverstka and to the monopoly of power held by the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), although (like the Tambov Rebellion) it was always described as a kulak uprising, organized by the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR), in Soviet historiography.

The rising began on 31 January 1921, in the Ishim district of Tiumen′ guberniia, and had soon engulfed all of Tiumen′, Omsk, and Akmolinsk gubernii and the eastern stretches of Cheliabinsk and Ekaterinburg gubernii, with some 100,000 rebels actively involved. During the spring of 1921, transport on the Trans-Siberian Railway was periodically interrupted by the insurgents, who also captured a number of major towns and cities, among them Petropavlovsk (14 February 1921), Tobol′sk (21 February 1921), Kokchetav (21 February 1921), Surgut (10 March 1921), Berezov (21 March 1921), Obdorsk (1 April 1921), and Karkaralinsk (5 April 1921), while the town of Ishim changed hands a number of times. In rebel-controlled areas, local elections were held under the banner “For Soviets without Communists,” and efforts were made to weld partisan forces into a regular army under V. A. Rodinym (described in Soviet sources as a member of the PSR who had fought for the Whites). Commanders were drawn, predominantly, from among the leaders of the Siberian partisans who had previously operated against the White forces of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and veterans of the First World War (among them the peasants Vasilii Zhetovskii and Stepna Danilov, both natives of Tobol′sk guberniia; Petr Shevchenko of Ishim; and Nikolai Bulatov, a peasant from Kurgan who had served as an ensign in the tsarist army and as a Vsevobuch instructor with the Red Army).

To organize the suppression of the uprising, on 12 February 1921 a troika was formed—of I. N. Smirnov (chair of the Bolsheviks’ Siberian Revolutionary Committee), V. I. Shorin (commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the Republic for Siberia), and I. P. Pavlunovskii (chairman of the Siberian Cheka)—and a number of Red units and armored trains were dispatched to the region, including special ChON forces. Large-scale repression ensued, which together with the concessions announced at the 10th Party Congress in March 1921 (the New Economic Policy), was sufficient to quell the uprising by the summer of that year, although pockets of resistance held out until 1922 in isolated districts.

WESTERN UKRAINIAN PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC. This short-lived state was established at Lemberg (L′viv), in October–November 1918, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War. In September 1918, a Ukrainian General Military Commission formed at L′viv and began preparations to use the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (of the Austro-Hungarian Army) for a military insurrection (the November Uprising). Meanwhile, in late October 1918, Ukrainian parties from the regional diets of Galicia and Bukovina formed the Ukrainian National Rada at L′viv, with Evhen Petrushevych at its head, and on 1 November 1918 proclaimed the existence of a Ukrainian state—the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic—that included lands chiefly occupied by Ukrainians in Galicia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia. These lands (or parts of them), however, were also claimed by Poland, Romania, and the emerging Czechoslovakia, and when a Polish commission set out from Kraków to L′viv at the end of October, the Rada decided to take matters into its own hands: on 31 October–1 November 1918, the Sich Riflemen took control of the city.

In a manifesto of 3 November 1918, the Ukrainian National Rada set out its political credo, promising elections to a constituent assembly, guarantees of autonomy for national minorities, and land reform to assist landless and poor peasants (although recognizing and respecting the existence of private property in land). On 13 November 1918, the democratic and constitutional foundations of the new state were laid out in a Provisional Fundamental Law, which also defined the territory of the state, its coat of arms (a golden lion, rampant, on a blue background), and its flag (azure and gold), while a law on military service heralded the creation of the Ukrainian Galician Army.

The republic extended across an area inhabited by some four million people. Elections were held from 22 to 25 November 1918 for the 150-member Rada, which was to serve as the legislative body. Approximately one-third of the seats were reserved for the national minorities (Poles, Jews, and others). The Jews participated and were represented by about 10 percent of the delegates. However, the Polish population of the region, as well as the Polish government in Warsaw, were openly hostile to the Ukrainian aspirations to govern what they viewed as historically Polish territory. Consequently, the Poles boycotted the elections and began military operations against the new republic, thereby starting the Ukrainian–Polish War. By the end of November 1918, Polish forces had captured the city of L′viv (wherein Poles outnumbered Ukrainians), and the Ukrainian National Rada retreated, first to Ternopil (Ternopol′) and then to Stanyslaviv (Ivano-Franivsk).

On 22 January 1919, the Rada signed an act of union (the Act of Zluka) with the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) at Kiev, but the political and military administrations of the two states remained quite separate. On 9 June 1919, as Polish forces pushed eastward into a small triangle of territory between the Zbruch and Dnestr Rivers, the government (Executive Committee) of the republic resigned and granted dictatorial powers to Petrushevych. However, when the army’s attempt to advance in June was turned by the Poles and it was forced back across the Zbruch, Petrushevych moved his administration to Kamianets-Podilskyi (the base of the UNR since the Red Army’s capture of Kiev in February 1919). There it lobbied for the Ukrainian authorities to come to an agreement for joint operations against the Red Army with the White forces of General A. I. Denikin, but the leader of the UNR, Symon Petliura, was utterly opposed to such a plan. Consequently, in November 1919 Petrushevych and his advisors moved to Vienna. From there, in exile, they led a campaign for international recognition of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, but to no avail, as the Allied powers favored strong Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak states as a barrier against Soviet Russia. Thus, under the terms of the Treaty of Saint-Germain (10 September 1919), the Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1919), and the Treaty of Trianon (4 June 1920), Bukovina was granted to Romania and Transcarpathia to Czechoslovakia, while by the Allied definition of the Curzon Line (8 December 1919), Western Ukraine (Eastern Galicia) was granted to Poland.

In fact, at the Paris Peace Conference the Council of Ten had decided, as early as 25 July 1919, that Western Ukraine (Eastern Galicia) would be granted to Poland. Warsaw’s right to the territory was also subsequently recognized by Petliura’s government under the terms of its alliance with Poland in the Treaty of Warsaw (21–24 April 1920), thereby severing the Act of Zluka. The Curzon Line was also a feature of the Treaty of Riga (18 March 1921), which brought to an end the Soviet–Polish War (and curtailed the brief existence of the Moscow-backed Galician Soviet Socialist Republic). Poland’s claim to Eastern Galicia was finally confirmed by the Allied Conference of Ambassadors at Paris on 15 March 1923; on the following day Petrushevych’s government-in-exile was wound up. This territorial settlement prevailed until the Second World War, when most of the lands claimed by the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic were incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

WESTERN VOLUNTEER ARMY. Formed on 9 May 1919, on the orders of General N. N. Iudenich, and commanded by Major-General P. R. Bermondt-Avalov (with Colonel P. P. Chaikovskii as his assistant commander), this anti-Bolshevik force (which operated mainly on Latvian territory) comprised the 1st Western Volunteer (General Keller) Corps under Colonel S. N. Pototskii and the 2nd Volunteer Corps under Colonel Vyrgolich. The army was nominally subordinate to the Western Russian (Berlin) Government, but Bermondt-Avalov was averse to obeying orders from anyone. Its roots can be traced to the Northern Army Corps, formed by General F. A. Keller at Kiev in late 1918, which after the fall of the regime of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii and the death of Keller moved to the Baltic. There, in June 1919, it united with remnants of the German forces in the region that were operating as the Baltic Landeswehr, following the latter’s defeat in the Landeswehr War. This was in contravention of the Allies’ demand that Freikorps forces leave the Baltic theater.

The Western Volunteer Army numbered some 50,000 men by September 1919, of whom at least 40,000 were reported to be Germans. The true loyalties and concerns of the army and its commanders were revealed when, rather than join Iudenich’s advance on Petrograd, in October 1919 the Western Volunteer Army attacked and briefly occupied Riga and attempted to drive the nationalist government of Kārlis Ulmanis from its capital. Driven back by Latvian forces, who were aided by the Royal Navy, and then routed by Lithuanian forces near Radviliškis (in early December 1919), many of the members of the army made their way home to Germany, where 20,000 of them were interned in East Prussia. Many members of the Western Volunteer Army subsequently joined the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA).

WHITE FLEET. The main naval forces controlled by the Whites during the course of the civil wars included the Black Sea Fleet, the Kama Flotilla, the Siberian Flotilla, the Flotilla of the Northern (Arctic) Ocean, and the Caspian Flotilla. Other, smaller anti-Bolshevik naval squadrons included the River Military Fleet of the People’s Army (a formation that included around 40 armed steamers, operational chiefly on the Volga, which assisted in the capture of Kazan′ on 1 August 1918); the Northern Dvina River Flotilla (formed in the winter of 1918–1919 and operational alongside the Northern Army and forces of the Allied intervention the following spring); the Lake Chud Flotilla (whose vessels were commandeered by Estonia in November 1918); the Lake Onega Flotilla (active alongside the North-West Army and forces of the Allied intervention in 1919); and the Don Flotilla (active with anti-Bolshevik forces in that region from March 1918 to August 1919). There were also several flotillas that operated in the rear of the Russian Army in Siberia, on the Enisei, Ob, and Irtysh Rivers and on Lake Baikal. As White regimes around the country subordinated themselves to Admiral A. V. Kolchak as “supreme ruler” during 1919, all White naval forces became theoretically subject to the authority of the (landlocked) naval ministry of the Omsk government, overseen by Vice Admiral M .I. Smirnov, but in practice they remained independent.

WHITE insurGENT ARMY. This White force, created mostly from units that were formerly attached to the Far Eastern (White) Army of Ataman G. M. Semenov (until that force was driven out of Transbaikalia in September 1920 by the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic), was organized at Vladivostok on 25 June 1921. Its complement was ever-changing, in the confused conditions of the time, but as of 10 November 1921 included the 3rd Rifle Corps, the 1st Rifle Brigade, the Izhevsk-Votkinsk Brigade (veterans of the Izhevsk-Votkinsk uprising), the Volga Brigade, the 2nd Rifle Corps, and other units. In total the White Insurgent Army mustered some 6,000 men, most of whom were survivors of campaigns on the Volga, in the Urals, and in Siberia of the previous years. The force achieved notable success in an offensive down the Ussurii in late 1921, recapturing Amginsk (2 December 1921) and Khabarovsk (22 December 1921) from the People’s-Revolutionary Army. Early in 1922, however, the Reds drove them out of Khabarovsk (14 February 1922). The forces of the White Insurgent Army were subsequently dispersed, some joining the Zemstvo Host.

The commander of the White Insurgent Army was Major General V. M. Molchanov.

WHITES. This is the term that is properly used to denote the rightist and militaristic opposition to the Soviet government that came to the fore in South Russia, Siberia, the Baltic, and North Russia following the collapse of the Democratic Counter-Revolution during the summer and autumn of 1918. It should not be employed to denote all opponents of the Bolsheviks, most of whom abhorred the Whites.

The term has its immediate roots during the civil-war period in the move to establish a military dictatorship in Russia in the summer of 1917, during the Kornilov affair. Rightist forces during the Finnish Civil War of early 1918 were also called “White Finns.” In Russia, the movement’s foremost early leaders were Generals M. V. Alekseev, A. I. Denikin, and L. G. Kornilov; later Admiral A. V. Kolchak and Generals E. K. Miller and P. N. Wrangel headed White regimes (in Siberia, North Russia, and Crimea, respectively), although Soviet sources always tended to conflate the Whites (or “White Guards,” as they were often termed) with rogue elements of the anti-Bolshevik movement that might better be classified under the term atamanshchina. It is also worth noting that, although the Whites are often portrayed as aristocrats (and not only in Soviet histories), of the named figures only Wrangel really fell into that category; Alekseev, Kornilov, and Denikin were born into poorer families than almost any member of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) in 1917, and their Weltanschauung had been molded not by social origins but by membership in the officer class of the Russian Army, wherein they had been isolated from politics and steeped in the army’s nationalistic code of honor.

How the Whites acquired their name is subject to debate. It is sometimes erroneously assumed to have been due to association with the Bourbons, deposed by the revolution in France in 1792, but the French royal standard was actually blue, with gold fleur-de-lis. The royalist rebels of the Vendée did adopt the White flag as their emblem, during their war against the republic of 1793–1796 (possibly to signal their purity in comparison to the blood-stained masters of the guillotine), but none of the above-named leading Russian Whites were monarchists; indeed, all had disavowed the monarchist cause in 1917 and had welcomed the February Revolution (although this was to a significant degree determined by their despair at the personal failings of Nicholas II), and in terms of their political beliefs tended to be in accord with the more right-wing elements of the Kadets. (The election to the Russian throne of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, by an assembly—the Zemskii sobor′—convened at Vladivostok, by the White General M. K. Diterikhs, in August 1922, should be regarded as a desperate aberration.) A perhaps more credible version has it that the term “Whites” was adopted to invoke the spirit and memory of the formidable General M. D. Skobelev, the hero of Russia’s war against Turkey of 1877–1878, and subsequent campaigns in Central Asia. Skobelev always went into battle on a white horse, wearing a white uniform, and was known to his men as the “White general.” His feats had been mythologized in late-tsarist Russia, and certainly no competitor to him as a symbol of imperial Russian military might had arisen during Russia’s generally miserable performance during the First World War.

What the Whites stood for is no easier to define precisely. The Beloe delo (“White cause”), however, certainly encompassed the aim of establishing a united Russia (a “Russia, One and Indivisible,” as the phrase went) that would have encompassed more or less all of what had been the Russian Empire (although most White leaders accepted the independence of Finland and the independence of Poland, albeit within very constricted borders) and in which the Russian Orthodox Church would play a prominent part. All this, of course, naturally put the White movement on a collision course not only with the Bolsheviks but also with non-Russian (and generally non-Orthodox) nationalists in Poland, Finland, the Baltic lands, Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and elsewhere. In South Russia, it also poisoned their relations with the Cossacks, especially the powerful Don Cossack Host, Kuban Cossack Host, and Terek Cossack Host, who supplied a significant proportion of the Whites’ fighting men but were committed to the autonomy of their territories. (Such factors as these, in the end, may have determined the Whites’ defeat in the civil wars as much as the challenge to them mounted by the Reds.) The Whites were also unabashedly anti-Semitic, and the more virulent Jew-haters among them engaged in pogroms. In this last respect, there is something to be said for General K. V. Sakharov’s assertion that the movement in which he had played a key role was “the first manifestation of fascism.” (Although this claim is complicated by the generally pro-Allied and anti-German orientation of most White leaders during the civil-war period, there was some cooperation between Whites in the Baltic theater—for example, the Western Volunteer Army of Major-General P. R. Bermondt-Avalov—and the proto-fascist German Freikorps in 1919.)

During the civil wars, the Whites also professed a commitment to “non-predetermination”; that is, to passing no permanent laws and signing no treaties or agreements that would determine the future constitution of Russia or what, geographically, belonged to “Russia.” All that was to be decided by a future national assembly. For some White leaders, this was clearly a convenient ruse to postpone the discussion of divisive social, national, and political issues. Also, the question remains unanswered as to what sort of national assembly White leaders might have summoned. (It was unlikely, for example, to have been one elected on such a broad franchise as to have repeated the results of the Constituent Assembly elected in November 1917, which was dominated by socialists; indeed, some Whites expressed themselves genuinely grateful to the Bolsheviks for having broken up that gathering.) Other Whites sincerely believed that priority had to be given to winning the war. Either way, it was not an approach likely to attract the support of those demanding immediate solutions to the blatant social, national, and political inequalities that characterized the former Russian Empire.

If anything, the “White cause” came only to be defined in a nuanced and positive manner (as opposed to meaning merely a desire to overturn the October Revolution) in the emigration (where many Whites ended up), by philosophers such as I. A. Il′in, who gave it a conservative, semimystical, and Slavophile tinge. (Beloe delo, it is worth noting, was the name of an important White émigré journal published in Berlin in the 1920s by General Wrangel’s collaborators in ROVS, Generals P. N. Shatilov and A. A. von Lampe, with the assistance of Il′in.) On the other hand, in the 1920s many other former Whites came to regard the Soviet government as being the legitimate bearer of authority (the “Russian Idea”) in Russia—after all, the Reds had won the civil wars and had largely reconstructed the Russian Empire in the form of the USSR—and cleaved to Smenovekhovstvo, the “Changing Landmarks” movement that sought accommodation between the Whites and the Soviets.

In contemporary Russia, however, Smena vekh has been almost forgotten, whereas the White generals are eulogized and have become the subject of many scholarly (and many more unscholarly) works, as well as works of fiction, feature films, etc. That many of the Whites collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War is, not surprisingly, also not a popular subject of investigation. But the fact remains that von Lampe recruited Russian volunteers for the Wehrmacht, General N. N. Golovin trained them, and General B. A. Shteifon commanded the Russian Corps that fought anti-Nazi partisans across the Balkans, while the former White generals A. P Arkhangel′skii, F. F. Abramov, A. G. Shkuro, and others were prominent in G. G. Vlasov’s collaborationist Committee for the Liberation of Russia.

WHITE SEA KARELIA, PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF. Also known as the Provisional Government of Arkhangelian Karelia, this nationalist, anti-Bolshevik, and (reluctantly) pro-Finnish authority was created on 21 July 1919 at the large Karelian village of Ukhta (now Kalevala) and claimed authority over the area of northern Karelia between the White Sea and the Finnish border (consisting of Kondokskoi, Ukhtinskoi, Voknabolokskoi, Tikhmozerskoi, and Kesmen′skoi volosti). The government initially had six full members and six candidate members and was chaired by S. A. Tikhonov (21 July 1919–25 March 1920), although it was reorganized in March 1920 and subsequently chaired by Kh. A. Tikhanov (25 March 1920–10 December 1920). It received financial subsidies (reportedly to the tune of 8 million Finnish marks) from the Finnish government, which also granted it full diplomatic recognition in May 1920, but was formally committed to independence for Karelia, not union with Finland. (It was the latter, however, that Helsinki desired, the landscape, language, and people of White Sea Karelia—supposedly free of Russian or Swedish “corruption”—having become a core motif of the more romantic brand of Finnish nationalism in the 19th century, as exemplified in Jean Sibelius’s Karelia Suite.) As Red forces marched into the region in March 1920 in the wake of the withdrawal of Allied and White forces from Murmansk and Arkhangel′sk, the regime summoned a regional congress (23 March–1 April 1920) and demanded that they withdraw. Negotiations broke down, however, and the Red Army continued to advance (capturing Ukhta on 18 May 1920); in late June 1920, the government fled to Finland, as the Soviet authorities established the Karelian Workers’ Commune. After the Finnish government had unsuccessfully attempted to utilize its existence as a bargaining chip in the negotiations that resulted in the Treaty of Tartu (14 October 1920), the existence of the Provisional Government of White Sea Karelia formally ended on 10 December 1920, when, with its members still in exile in Finland, it merged with the Olonets government to form the Karelian United Government.

WHITE TERROR. Although the Whites in the civil wars did not develop an institutional organizations akin to the Cheka for inflicting terror on the general population, did not pass laws ordering it (as was the case with the Red Terror), and did not write theoretical treatises defending it (as many Bolsheviks did), they practiced terror on a wide scale both individually and collectively. White leaders, such as Admiral A. V. Kolchak, frequently condemned lawless atamanshchina and the cruelty inflicted on the civilian population by rogue (chiefly Cossack) elements as “Bolshevism of the Right,” yet they were unable to prevent officers of their armies from taking merciless and often indiscriminate revenge against those whom they blamed for the collapse of the Russian Empire and Russia’s humiliation in leaving the world war. This was the case even on the streets of their own capitals, as in the Novoselov affair and the Omsk massacre in Siberia, and even when the victims of such terroristic violence were not Bolsheviks at all. General L. G. Kornilov, moreover, appeared to condone the use of terror, reportedly telling officers of the Volunteer Army in January 1918: “Take no prisoners. The greater the terror, the greater the victory.” And certainly individual orders were given by White commanders, throughout the conflict, to execute, without trial, any captured Reds who were suspected of being Bolsheviks, while villages suspected of harboring partisans were subject to widespread lynching and shooting.

The total number of the victims of the White Terror will never be known. It certainly runs into the tens of thousands, but is also certainly far less than that of the Red Terror (for the simple reason that the Soviet government controlled more highly and densely populated regions). The arguments over the justification of the White Terror are also unlikely to be resolved. At the time, and since, the Whites and their supporters claimed that theirs were acts of retribution for crimes previously committed by the Soviet government and its supporters (not least the execution of the Romanov family). That was vehemently denied by the Reds at the time and remains a dubious proposition in certain respects.

WINTER CAMPAIGNS. The Winter Campaigns were partisan operations undertaken by the Ukrainian Army, when it was on the point of collapse, in the rear of both the Red Army and (to a lesser extent) the Armed Forces of South Russia in 1919–1920 and 1921.

The first Winter Campaign lasted from 6 December 1919 to 6 May 1920, after the Ukrainian National Republic Directory had decided that defense of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) by conventional military means had become impossible. In this campaign, Ukrainian forces (mostly consisting of what remained of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and the Zaporozhian Corps) were commanded by General Mykhailo Omel′ianovych-Pavlenko, assisted by General Iurii Tiutiunnyk. Initially, the Ukrainian forces operated in the Elizavetgrad region, between the Red Army and the Whites, but when the Reds forced General A. I. Denikin’s armies southward, the Ukrainian group penetrated eastward, into the rear of the Reds. In February 1920, they crossed the Dnepr River into Zolonosha. Then, in April 1919, they fought their way back toward Iampil, which they reached on 6 May 1920. In this campaign, some 3,000 to 6,000 men (estimates vary) traversed at least 1,750 miles.

The second of the Winter Campaigns (sometimes termed the Ice Campaign or the November Raid) took place in late 1921, a year after the government of the UNR and the Ukrainian Army had been forced across the Zbruch River onto Polish territory (following the armistice that ended the Soviet–Polish War) and was there disarmed and interned. Some 1,200 volunteers from among the internees, commanded by General Tiutiunnyk and his chief of staff, Colonel Iurii Otmarshtian, set off from Poland into the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in October 1921. Their main (Volhynia) group (of 800 men) was commanded by Tiutiunnyk himself; the Podilian group (400 men) was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel M. Palii (and later by Colonel S. Chorny). General Andrii Huly-Hulenko’s Bessarabian group did not undertake any meaningful operations and after a few days retreated from Ukraine onto Romanian territory. All of these forces were poorly armed, clothed, and shod. The Podilian group set out on 25 October 1920 and thrust through Podilia to reach the village of Vakhnivka (40 miles north of Kiev), before being forced westward through Volhynia, crossing back over the Polish border on 29 November 1921. The Volhynia group advanced on 4 November 1920 and captured Korosten on 7 November 1920, but could not hold it. The group then moved as far east as the village of Leontivka, but having failed to establish a junction with the Podilian group, turned back west. As it retreated, the Volhynia group was encircled by Red cavalry commanded by Hryhorii Kotovski near Bazar, in the Zhitomir region. A large number of its men were killed in battle at Mali Mynky, on 17 November 1921, but the majority (443) were captured. Reportedly 359 of them were then executed at Bazar, on 23 November 1921. Only around 120 men and the staff of the group breached the encirclement and fought their way back to the Polish border, which they crossed on 20 November 1921. This was the last meaningful act of the Soviet–Ukrainian War.

wittenkopf, georg-hanz Heinrich. See Belov, Georgii Andreevich (wittenkopf, georg-hanz Heinrich).

Women’s Department of the central committee of the RKP(b). See zhenotdel.

Women soldiers. See female soldiers.

Worker–Peasant Red Army. See Red Army.

Workers’ Opposition. Formed chiefly from trade union leaders and industrial administrators, this faction of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) came to prominence in debates within the party in 1920 on the future of the trade unions in a Communist state. (As so often in the history of revolutionary Russia, the name of the group was not coined by the group itself but by V. I. Lenin, in his attacks upon it.)

The Workers’ Opposition had coalesced in the autumn of 1919, when one of its most prominent leaders, A. G. Shliapnikov, issued a call for trade unions to take control of the higher organs of the state and for them to be granted control of industrial production. Shliapnikov and his supporters (such as S. P. Medvedev) feared that both the party and the state were becoming stifled by bureaucracy, corruption, and cronyism, as a consequence of the huge influx into the administration of what they regarded as dangerous bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements, and were especially critical of the powers granted under War Communism to industrial “experts” (civilian administrators, often from the former propertied classes, akin to the military specialists of the Red Army), although they were not opposed to the employment of experts per se.

As a remedy, the Workers’ Opposition advocated political and economic decentralization and the replacing of existing structures with a hierarchy of elected worker assemblies, organized on a sectoral basis (textiles, metalworking, mining, etc.), with an elected “All-Russian Congress of Producers” at its peak. Thirty-eight Bolshevik leaders signed the theses of the Workers’ Opposition in December 1920 (although it had many thousands of followers in the factories, particularly in the metalworking sector). One especially notable adherent to the cause was A. M. Kollontai, who authored the pamphlet entitled The Workers’ Opposition, which circulated at the 10th Congress of the RKP(b) in March 1921 and which provided the fullest exposition of the organization’s platform. However, with the Kronshtadt Revolt, the Tambov Rebellion, the West Siberian Uprising, and other instances of armed resistance to Soviet power raging in the background, the party leadership was in no mood to tolerate internal opposition, and at that conference the Workers’ Opposition was effectively banned by resolutions “On the Anarchist and Syndicalist Deviation in the Party” and “On Party Unity” (the “Ban on Factions”), passed on 16 March 1921. In the former, the party resolved “to consider propagation of these ideas as incompatible with membership in the Russian Communist Party.” Nevertheless, Lenin argued that the Oppositionists should not be excluded from decision-making bodies, and Shliapnikov was even elected to the Central Committee of the RKP(b) at the 10th Congress.

Subsequently, though, a campaign to stifle the independence of trade unions took off. Members of the Workers’ Opposition did manage to publish a declaration (“The Letter of the 22”) in February 1922, addressed to the Komintern, in which the harassment of its adherents was criticized. But subsequently, at the 11th Congress of the RKP(b) (27 March–2 April 1922), they narrowly escaped expulsion from the party. They were then subjected to further restraints. By 1926, almost all leaders of the group had recanted their errors, although this did not save them (or members of the similar Workers’ Group of G. I. Miasnikov) from the predations of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. Despite this, the Workers’ Opposition’s platform of libertarian (or proletarian) Soviet democracy has endured as one of the “what ifs” of the revolutionary era.

Wrangel, Petr Nikolaevich (15 August 1887–25 April 1928). Colonel (12 December 1914), major general (13 January 1917), lieutenant general (22 November 1918). One of the most talented, determined, and charismatic of the White generals (and one of the few who was authentically, and unashamedly, aristocratic, earning him the title “the Black Baron” during the Soviet era), Baron P. N. Wrangel (Vrangel′) was born at Zarasai (now in northern Lithuania) into a noble Baltic family of Swedish and German origin. He was chiefly raised at Rostov-on-Don, where his father was director of an insurance company; attended the local Realschule; and then graduated from the Catherine II (St. Petersburg) Mining Institute in 1901. He then joined the Life Guards cavalry regiment as a private and graduated as a coronet from the Nicholas Cavalry School in 1902, before volunteering for service at the front during the Russo–Japanese War. During that conflict, he served with the 2nd Verkhneudinsk and 2nd Argunsk Cossack Regiments of the Transbaikal Cossack Host. From 6 January 1906, he served with the 55th Finland Dragoon Regiment, before returning to the Life Guards on 26 March 1907. In 1910, he graduated from the Academy of the General Staff and in 1911 completed a course at the Cavalry Officers School. From 22 May 1912, he was temporary commander, then commander, of His Majesty’s Guards Squadron, with which he entered the First World War. During the war, Wrangel subsequently served as chief of staff of the Independent Cavalry Division (12 September–December 1914) and was then an adjutant in the suite of Nicholas II (December 1914–October 1915). He then became commander of the 1st Nerchinsk Regiment (8 October 1915–16 December 1916), commander of the 2nd Brigade of the Ussurii Mounted Division (16 December 1916–13 January 1917), commander of the 7th Cavalry Division (13 January–10 July 1917), and commander of the Independent Mounted Corps (from 10 July 1917). On 9 September 1917, he was named commander of the 3rd Mounted Corps, but he did not take up that post. Instead, he left the army and went to Crimea, where in the aftermath of the October Revolution he was briefly arrested by local Bolsheviks and narrowly escaped execution.

With the arrival of forces of the Austro-German intervention in Crimea over the summer of 1918, Wrangel moved to Ekaterinodar and joined General M. V. Alekseev’s anti-Bolshevik and pro-Allied Volunteer Army on 25 August 1918. Wrangel had missed the Volunteers’ epochal First Kuban (Ice) March, but (to the chagrin of some of the Pervopokhodniki) rose rapidly up the Volunteer Army’s command: he served as commander of a brigade of the 1st Mounted Division (28–31 August 1918), commander of the 1st Mounted Division (31 August–November 1918), and commander of the 1st Mounted Corps (November 1918–January 1919). With the formation of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), he became commander of the Caucasian Volunteer Army (10 January–8 May 1919) and its successor, the Caucasian Army (8 May–4 December 1919). In that role, he led a successful offensive against the Red Army on the Volga, capturing Tsaritsyn (one of the Whites’ greatest prizes) on 2 July 1919. Subsequently, as the White advance on Moscow was repulsed by the Red Army, he was chosen to replace V. Z. Mai-Maevskii as commander of the Volunteer Army (4 December 1919–2 January 1920).

However, the haughty Wrangel never liked the reserved and relatively plebeian commander of the AFSR, General Denikin, and after a fierce quarrel between the two over strategy during the Whites’ Moscow offensive in the autumn of 1919, he was accused of conspiracy, dismissed, and exiled to Constantinople (28 February–20 March 1920). (Wrangel had argued in favor of forging a union with the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, rather than the advance on Moscow along a broad front favored by Denikin in his Moscow Directive, and felt he was constantly being deprived of troops by the commander in chief.)

Following the collapse of Denikin’s efforts, Wrangel was recalled to Crimea in late March 1920 and found enough support among other senior generals gathered at a military conference in Yalta to be chosen, on 4 April 1920, to succeed Denikin as commander in chief of the White forces in South Russia, which were now largely confined in Crimea. As a political leader, he was intolerant of opposition, distrusted all liberals, and remained at heart a monarchist, but he nevertheless formed a government (the Government of South Russia) that included moderate elements (notably P. B. Struve and A. V. Krivoshein) and promulgated a radical land reform in a belated attempt to win the support of the population (and the western Allies, who were by then despairing of the Whites). As a military commander and as commander in chief, he was a strict disciplinarian (e.g., dismissing the unhinged General Ia. A. Slashchov), and he successfully reorganized what remained of the AFSR (renaming it the Russian Army on 11 May 1920). However, a quarrel over command undermined a projected alliance with Józef Piłsudski’s Poland. Consequently, although Wrangel’s forces managed, during the summer of 1920, to break out of Crimea into Northern Tauride, once the Bolsheviks had effectively made peace with Piłsudski in October, ending the Soviet–Polish War, the Red Army was able to concentrate its vastly superior forces on the south and to drive the Russian Army back into Crimea.

In mid-November 1920, Wrangel organized a remarkable and very orderly evacuation of around 150,000 of his men and their dependents to Turkey, which was then under Allied control. He subsequently lived in emigration in Turkey (November 1920–1922); at Sremski Karlovci in the Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes (1922–September 1927); and in Brussels, Belgium (from September 1927). During that time, he endeavored to keep the scattered forces of the Russian Army unified through the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS), which he founded in 1924. Through this organization, Wrangel hoped to offer financial and social support to his men and to keep the émigré soldiers battle-ready and free from political affiliation, while striving to unite monarchists and republicans under the banner of non-predetermination (i.e., by not prejudging issues regarding the future, post-Bolshevik, government of Russia). However, in November 1924 he announced his recognition of the claim to the Russian throne of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich Romanov.

Wrangel died in Brussels in April 1928, just as he and his associates were planning the creation of terrorist organizations to be sent into the USSR. His children believed he had been poisoned by an agent of the Soviet secret police. He was initially buried in the cemetery of Uccle-Calevoet in Brussels, but on 6 October 1929, following a procession by carriage and train across Europe, his remains were reinterred at the Russian Cathedral (the Church of the Holy Trinity) in Belgrade, amid a funeral parade and requiem attended by thousands of Russian émigrés and King Alexander of Yugoslavia. A monument to Wrangel still stands in the town of Sremski Karlovci, which had served as his headquarters during his time in Serbia. Understandably, his descendants have refused requests from various groups that his remains be reinterred in the Donskoi Cathedral in Moscow, alongside those of General Denikin.