Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

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

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

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

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

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