Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

As the Caucasian Front disintegrated in the aftermath of the October Revolution, Silikyan led the organization of Armenian national units around Yerevan, as the commander of the 1st Armenian Rifle Division from January 1918. In May 1918, in the wake of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), he led the Democratic Republic of Armenia’s military resistance to the Ottoman 3rd Army, as it advanced into the territories around Batumi, Kars, and Ardahan that had been ceded to Turkey by the Bolsheviks, repulsing them at the Battle of Bash Abaran (21–24 May 1918) and the Battle of Sardarapat (24–26 May 1918). He also commanded Armenian forces on the Karssk–Alexandropol Front during the Turkish–Armenian War (24 September–2 December 1920).

Following the Sovietization of Armenia and the establishment of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Silikyan was removed from the army but found work in numerous Soviet establishments. He was arrested on 8 August 1937, at the height of the purges, and was subsequently executed alongside a number of other former leaders of the Armenian army (including Kristopor Araratov) at the Nork Gorge, near Yerevan. He was posthumously rehabilitated in 1958.

SINKLER, VLADIMIR ALEKSANDROVICH (12 January 1879–16 March 1946). Colonel (6 December 1914), major general (1917), lieutenant general (Ukrainian Army, 3 July 1920). The Ukrainian military leader Vladimir Sinkler was born at Novyi Margelan (Ferghana) into the noble family of a military engineer of Scottish ancestry. He was a graduate of the Orenburg Nepliuevsk Cadet Corps (1896), the Mikhail Artillery School (1899), and the Academy of the General Staff (1905). Following service on the staff of the main commander in chief in the Far East during the Russo–Japanese War, he commanded a regiment of the Pavlovsk Life Guards and was then assigned work on the staff of the St. Petersburg Military District. During the First World War, he served as chief of staff of the 2nd Guards Infantry Division (from 24 March 1915) and commander of the 176th Pervipolchnensk Regiment (from 11 May 1916), as well as chief of staff of the 2nd Guards Corps (from 28 April 1917), but illness forced him into retirement in late 1917.

In the spring of 1918, Sinkler joined the staff of the Ukrainian Army and remained in that post following the coup that brought Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii to power, rising to quartermaster general of the Hetmanite Army (from 12 October 1918). Following the collapse of the Ukrainian State in late 1918, he transferred his loyalty back to the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), serving as assistant chief of the general staff of the Ukrainian Army from January 1919. From summer 1919, he was chief of staff of the Trans-Dnepr group of forces of the UNR, and from March to July 1920, was chief of the general staff of the Ukrainian Army, which was by then based on Polish territory. In that last capacity, he helped negotiate the Polish–Ukrainian Treaty of Warsaw (21–24 April 1920). Later, in 1921, he joined Symon Petliura’s Supreme Military Council, but when hopes for Ukrainian independence were crushed at the end of the Soviet–Polish War, he left military service, refusing a commission in the Polish Army, and found work as a check-weighman at Bořislav.

On 13 March 1945, Sinkler was netted by Soviet military intelligence services (SMERSH) in a raid at Katowice and was sent to the Lukianivska prison in Kiev for interrogation. The local procurator suggested a 10-year sentence for his crimes against Soviet power, but before that could be imposed Sinkler, who had suffered severe heart problems in the past, was transferred to the prison hospital with acute angina and died soon thereafter of a heart attack. He was posthumously rehabilitated by the procurator general of Ukraine in May 2005.