Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

After his death, Shchors was largely forgotten until, in the 1930s, he began to be lauded as a hero by the Soviet propaganda machine. Subsequently, museums about him were opened; statues were raised in his honor (including a memorial at his grave in Samara); commemorative stamps and portraits bore his image; and he became the subject of innumerable stories, poems, plays, and patriotic songs, including the famous Pesnia o Shchorse (“Song About Shchors,” Mikhail Golodnyi and Matvei Blanter, 1935). The most famous (or infamous) of these fictional accounts is the feature film Shchors (1939), directed (following a suggestion put to him directly by J. V. Stalin) by the esteemed Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Dovchenko, who considered it to be his best film, although the making of it cost him his physical and psychological health and almost his life. During the filming, he was involved in a serious car accident that resulted from someone tampering with the steering of his vehicle. Such events, and the pressure put upon the director by Stalin, who met him frequently during the filming to criticize his efforts, made for a stilted, formulaic socialist-realist film (but apparently one that pleased the General Secretary). Bizarrely, Dovchenko (who had served in the Ukrainian Army of Symon Petliura, for which he had been arrested and charged by the Soviet authorities in 1919) was a friend of Dubovoi and was employing him as a military advisor on the film (in which he also acted a role) at the time of his arrest. Shchors’s death is not portrayed on screen in the film, and most of the historical characters Dovchenko originally scripted were excised, thereby adding further layers of obfuscation to the mystery.

Shchukin, nikolai nikolaevich (?–?). A mining engineer with extensive experience of the coal industry of Siberia, the White politician N. N. Shchukin served as temporary director of the Ministry of Trade and Industry of the Provisional Siberian Government (June–September 1918) and as minister of trade and industry in the cabinet of the Ufa Directory (4–18 November 1918) and (from 18 November 1918) in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. The limited sources available on his outlook and activity portray him as a liberal who was close to the cooperative movement of Siberia. In particular, he resisted demands from mine owners in the Urals that their enterprises, which had been nationalized by the Soviet regime in 1918, should be handed back to them and that the industry should be entirely deregulated. Instead, he attempted to coordinate the mining industry from his own office. However, he had not the means, the personnel, or the expertise to do this; in fact, both Kolchak’s minister of foreign affairs, I. I. Sukin, and the chief engineer of the Urals Mining Region, S. P. Postnikov, commented at various times that, as far as they could tell, Omsk’s Ministry of Trade and Industry “did not exist.”

Shchukin resigned from the Omsk government in May 1919, as rumors of corruption within his ministry emerged. It has been suggested that these may have originated with I. A. Mikhailov, the increasingly powerful minister of finance of the Omsk regime, whose regard for Shchukin was no higher than it was for the several other “Siberians” within the government whom he forced out of office in the spring of 1919—notably I. I. Serebrennikov and V. V. Sapozhnikov. Shchukin’s subsequent fate is unknown.

SHCHUS′, FEDIR(FEDOR) (1893–June 1921). Born into a peasant family at Bol′shaia Mikhailovka (not far from the home village of Nestor Makhno, Guliai-Pole), in Ekaterinoslav guberniia, Fedir Shchus′ was a prominent, daring, and ruthless commander in Makhno’s Revolutionary-Insurgent Army of Ukraine. He was drafted into the Russian navy in 1915 and joined Makhno’s group on 26 September 1918, having originally led a rival anarchist force around Dibrovka in combat with forces of the Austro-German intervention.