Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

SHAPOSHNIKOV, BORIS MIKHAILOVICH (20 September 1882–26 March 1945). Colonel (September 1917), army commander, first rank (20 November 1935), Marshal of the Soviet Union (7 May 1940). The leading Soviet military leader and theoretician B. M. Shaposhnikov was the son of a clerk from Zlatoust′, in the Urals, and was a graduate of the Aleksei Military School (1903) and the Academy of the General Staff (1910). Having served in Turkestan prior to the First World War, during the war he rose to the command of the Mingrelian Grenadier Regiment. Popular with the soldiery, in November 1917 he was elected to the command of the Caucasian Grenadier Division.

In May 1918, Shaposhnikov volunteered for service in the Red Army and was made assistant head of the Operational Directorate of the Supreme Military Council of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (22 May 1918). He subsequently served as head of the Reconnaissance Section of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (2 September–late October 1918), and from 30 September 1918 was a member of the Army Section of the Supreme Military Inspectorate of the Red Army. From 4 March 1919, he was first assistant chief of staff of the People’s Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and from 15 August 1919 was attached to the Field Staff of the Revvoensovet of the Republic, first as chief of the Reconnaissance Section and then (from 12 October 1919) as head of the Operational Directorate. In these capacities, he participated in the strategic planning of the Red Army’s successful operations against the Armed Forces of South Russia and the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel.

After the civil wars, Shaposhnikov held numerous senior military posts, including first assistant chief of staff of the Red Army (1921–1925), commander of the Forces of the Leningrad and then the Moscow Military Districts (1925–1927), chief of staff of the Red Army (1928–1931), commander of the Forces of the Volga Military District (1931–1932), chief military commissar and professor at the Red Military Academy (1932–1935), commander of the Forces of the Leningrad Military District (1935–1937), and chief of the General Staff of the Red Army (1937–1940). By this point, Shaposhnikov was one of J. V. Stalin’s closest military advisors and confidants (reportedly being the only general whom Stalin called by his name and patronymic and the only person allowed to smoke in Stalin’s office). In June 1937 (having opposed him in the 1920s), he sat on the special court that sentenced M. N. Tukhachevskii to death, and during the Second World War he was entrusted with numerous senior posts, culminating in the headship of the Military Academy of the General Staff (from June 1943). He died in Moscow, after a long illness, and was buried beneath the Kremlin wall. Innumerable places and institutions were renamed in his honor in the Soviet Union, while his three-volume work Mozg armii (“The Brain of the Army,” 1927–1929) became a key text of Soviet military theory and remains on the curriculum of the Russian General Staff Academy to this day.

Shapoval (SYbLIANSKII) Nikita IUKHIMOVICH (26 May 1822–25 February 1932). The Ukrainian politician and author Nikita Shapoval was born into the family of a retired NCO at Serebianka, in Ekaterinoslav guberniia. He attended a forestry college, then graduated from the Chuguev Officer School, and subsequently entered the Historical-Philosophical Faculty of Khar′kov University, but did not graduate. He was involved in the revolutionary movement from 1901 and was one of the founding members of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries. In 1917, he was elected to the Ukrainian Central Rada and was also a member of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly.