Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Shliapnikov lost his Central Committee seat in 1922, however, and, following his adherence to a protest to the Komintern regarding Bolshevik authoritarianism (the “Letter of the Twenty-Two”), like his former lover (and fellow oppositionist) A. M. Kollontai, he was sidelined into diplomatic work (as assistant ambassador to France, 1923–1925). Upon his return to Russia, he was placed in several secondary roles, chiefly in economic administration, and occupied himself with the writing of his memoirs, but was subject to repeated investigations regarding alleged factional activities. After numerous arrests and investigations, he was finally expelled from the party in 1933 and was exiled to Karelia in 1934, then to Astrakhan in 1935. He was arrested again on 2 September 1936 and subsequently executed as a counterrevolutionary. Shliapnikov was posthumously rehabilitated in 1963.

Shmidt, Vasilii Vladimirovich (17 December 1866–29 July 1938). The Soviet politician V. V. Shmidt was born into a German workers’ family in St. Petersburg and completed only four years of schooling. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1905, gravitating toward the Bolsheviks, and was forced into exile in Germany in 1907. He returned to Russia in 1911 and was active in the metalworkers’ union, but he was arrested on several occasions. From March 1917, he became secretary of the Bolsheviks’ St. Petersburg Committee and was at the same time secretary of the Petrograd Trade Union Council.

During the October Revolution, Shmidt was an active member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. He was then, briefly, acting people’s commissar for trade and industry in Sovnarkom (4 November 1917–7 February 1918). From 3 March 1918 to 18 March 1919, he was also a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee (thereafter he was repeatedly reelected as a candidate member until 26 January 1934). From 8 December 1918 to 6 July 1923, he was people’s commissar for labor of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, combining the post with that of secretary of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions (1918–1920). Shmidt occupied numerous other important governmental posts in the 1920s, but in the 1930s fell foul of the regime of J. V. Stalin and was demoted to chairman of the executive committee of the Khabarovsk Soviet (1934–1936), in the Far East. He was arrested on 5 January 1937 and was subsequently executed as a spy. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 30 July 1957.

SHOLOKHOV, MIKHAIL ALEKSANDROVICH (24 May 1905–21 February 1984). The author of what is probably the most famous literary treatment of the “Russian” Civil Wars, Tikhii Don (“The Quiet Don,” often rendered in English as And Quiet Flows the Don) and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature, M. A. Sholokhov was born at Kruzhlinin in the Veshenskaia (Vioshki) stanitsa, in the northern reaches of the territory of the Don Cossack Host. His parents, who were not Cossacks, were of Russian and Ukrainian stock (although his mother’s first husband had been a Cossack). He moved to Moscow in 1922, where heworked as a journalist, but also took laboring jobs to make ends meet. He published his first work in Iunosheskaia pravda (“Young Truth”) in 1923.

After returning to his home village in 1924, Sholokhov began work on his epic tale of the Don territory during the civil wars in 1926. It would take him 14 years to complete. Various critics (including Alexander Solzhenitsyn) later argued that the work was plagiarized from the writings of F. D. Kriukov, who had fought on the side of the Whites in the civil wars and died of typhus in 1920. That this charge was false was made clear in 1987, when Sholokhov’s notes and drafts of many chapters were discovered. His authorship of the work was proven categorically in 1999, when drafts in his own hand (and that of his wife), written on paper known to have been manufactured in the 1920s, were located by the Russian Academy of Sciences. Skeptics, however, still maintain that Sholokhov’s work was based on another (unpublished) manuscript in his possession (perhaps by Kriukov); they also point to his youth at the time of the civil-war events he portrays in the novel and contrast its masterly narrative and sophisticated language with the rather prosaic nature of the other “Don Tales” the author had published earlier in the 1920s. Finally, Sholokhov’s doubters point out that it was rather strange that a pro-Soviet author should paint such a sympathetic portrait of the (largely anti-Bolshevik) Don Cossacks.