Having united with the Red Army
near Krasnoiarsk, in the wake of the collapse of the White regime of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in Siberia in early 1920, Shchetinkin filled a series of posts in the reestablished Soviet government in Siberia, then in August of that year organized and commanded a volunteer force (the 21st Siberian Rifle Regiment) that was sent to fight against the forces of General P. N. Wrangel in Crimea. In 1921, he led an expeditionary force into Mongolia to confront the forces of Baron R. F. Ungern von Sternberg. From 1922 to 1926, he was chief of staff of the OGPU’s Siberian Border District, before, in 1927, transferring to work as an instructor of the Mongolian army at Ulan Bator, where he died. He is buried at Novosibirsk. Shchetinkin’s exploits as a partisan leader were the subject of the Soviet feature filmSHCHORS, MYKOLA (NIKOLAI ALEKSANDROVICH) (25 May 1895–30 August 1919).
Sublieutenant (1917). The much-celebrated (and much-mythologized) Soviet hero of the civil wars—the Ukrainian equivalent of the Russians’ V. I. Chapaev—Mykola Shchors was born into the family of a railway worker at Snovsk (now Shchors), ChernigovFollowing the October Revolution
, Shchors joined the Bolsheviks (although probably not formally until mid-1918), and from February to April 1918, was active in forming and leading detachments of partisans in his home district (notably the Bohum Brigade) to fight against the forces of the Austro-German intervention and, subsequently, the Hetmanite Army of P. P. Skoropadskii’s Ukrainian State. In November 1918, he was placed in command of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Soviet Ukrainian Rifle Division; in a series of brilliantly executed campaigns, he assisted the Red Army in the capture of Chernigov and Kiev. On 5 February 1919, Shchors was named commandant of Kiev, but he went on to again lead the 1st Ukrainian Rifle Division in the offensive that led to the capture of Zhitomir, Vynnytsa, and other centers from the forces of the Ukrainian National Republic. In August 1919, as commander of the 44th (Tarashcha) Rifle Division of the 12th Red Army, he also played a pivotal role in the operations to defend Kiev that facilitated the successful evacuation of Red forces and institutions from the city prior to its recapture by Ukrainian and White units. However, far from being the idealized Bolshevik of Stalinist myth, he seems to have chafed against party discipline and to have been a critic of military specialists.Shchors died, on 30 August 1919, in somewhat murky circumstances, while involved in frontline fighting against the Ukrainian Galician Army
, near the village of Beloshitsa (now Shchorsovka): he was reported to have been killed by enemy machine gun fire, but in 1938, at the height of the purges, I. N. Dubovoi, who had been a military commissar in Shchors’s unit, admitted to having murdered him in order to take over as commander. (Dubovoi, however, who was a protégé of I. E. Iakir, was in the hands of the NKVD at the time of this “confession.”) The mystery was compounded by the fact that, in September 1919, Shchors’s remains were taken to Samara for burial, far from the battlefield and far from his home. The waters were further muddied by unconfirmed reports of a secret exhumation and autopsy in 1949 that concluded that the bullet hole in Shchors’s skull had been caused by a small-bore pistol fired from a distance of no more than 10–15 yards.