Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Following the October Revolution, Shul′gin moved to Kiev and was active in the National Center and in assisting anti-Bolshevik officers to travel to the Don and the Kuban to join the Whites. In August 1918, he moved to Ekaterinodar and became one of the chief ideologues of the White movement as the éminence grise behind Osvag. He propagandized for the Volunteer Army through his newspaper Velikaia Rossiia (“Great Russia”), and in August 1918 was the main author of the statute of its political authority, the Special Council. He subsequently served on the latter as head of its Commission on Nationality Affairs and was also a founder of the Whites’ intelligence service, Azbuka.

In 1920, Shul′gin went into emigration, living mostly in Yugoslavia (serving there, from 1921 to 1922, as a member of the Russian Council of General P. N. Wrangel). In 1925–1926, he secretly visited the Soviet Union (without ever realizing that his trip had been organized by the OGPU, in order to observe those with whom he made contact). In the 1930s, he was an admirer of fascism, although chiefly in its Italian guise; he strongly opposed the German invasion of the USSR, for example. In 1944, Shul′gin was apprehended by Soviet security forces in Yugoslavia and was subsequently sent to Moscow for trial. Found guilty of “anti-Soviet activity,” he was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment, but was released under amnesty in 1956. Thereafter, he lived in Vladimir. There, he accommodated himself to the Soviet regime and, in the early 1960s, authored two appeals to the Russian emigration to cease its hostility to the USSR.

SHUMIATSKII, BORIS ZAKHAROVICH (4 November 1886–29 July 1938). The Soviet politician and Communist film mogul Boris Shumiatskii, who played a key role in Siberia during the civil wars, was born at Verkhneudinsk, Zabaikal oblast′, into the family of a bookbinder. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903 and thereafter aligned himself with the Bolsheviks. He was active during the 1905 Revolution, participating in armed uprisings in Krasnoiarsk and Vladivostok, for which actions he was imprisoned in 1906. He was subsequently under constant threat of rearrest and for a while, fled into exile to Argentina (1911–1913). He returned to Russia in 1913, but was immediately detained by the authorities and sent into the army. In 1917, he chaired the Siberian Bureau of the Central Committee of Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), acted as the party’s chief plenipotentiary in Siberia, and from November of that year until February 1918, was the chairman of Tsentrosibir′.

Following the collapse of Soviet power in Siberia in May–June 1918, Shumiatskii joined the Red Army as a military commissar and served subsequently as chairman of the Tiumen′ provincial revkom of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (October 1919–January 1920), then chairman of the Tomsk guberniia and city revkomy of the party (from March 1920). From June 1920, he was prominent as chairman of the party’s Dal′biuro and as minister of foreign affairs of the Far Eastern Republic (FER). He was subsequently chairman of the council of ministers of the FER (December 1920–April 1921), also serving as a member of the Revvoensovet of the 5th Red Army (5 January 1921–6 September 1922). In these capacities, he came into conflict with J. V. Stalin (then head of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities) over the issue of Buriat autonomy, which Shumiatskii strongly favored.