Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Over the following weeks, 10,000 men were mobilized, in two regiments, as the Slutsk Brigade. Battles against the approaching Red forces began on 27 November 1920, but by 31 December 1920, the last remnants of the isolated and poorly armed Slutsk Brigade had been driven across the border into Poland by Soviet forces. Both Zhauryd and Prakulevich, after brief periods in emigration, returned to the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and found employment there in the 1920s, but both were arrested as “bourgeois nationalists” in the early 1930s. Prakulevich was executed by the NKVD in 1938; Zhauryd died in a labor camp in the Mari region the following year. Their fates were shared by many who had participated in the Slutsk defense. Efforts in contemporary Belarus to have 27 November declared a public holiday have been scorned by the regime of Aliaksandr Lukashenka.

SMENOVEKHOVSTVO. Named after the 1921 Prague publication Smena vekh (“Change of Signposts,” sometimes also translated as “Change of Landmarks”)—which had in turn taken its title from an earlier collection of essays, Vekhi (published in Russia in 1909 by M. O. Gershenzon), that considered the intelligentsia’s role in history—this was the name given to a strain of thought that emerged among a disparate group of Russian émigrés in the early 1920s. Apart from Prague, notable centers of the Smenovekhovtsy were Berlin and Sofia. They argued that the civil wars had been irretrievably lost, that the Soviet regime (whatever its faults) was legitimized by its victory and endurance, and that members of the emigration should “either recognize this Russia, hated by you all, or stay without Russia, because a ‘third Russia’ by your recipes does not and will not exist.”

Encouraged by the introduction of the New Economic Policy, the Smenovekhovtsy, grouped around the newspaper Nakanune (“On the Eve,” published in Berlin from 26 March 1922), called upon the émigré community to return to Russia to help rebuild the shattered state, but predicted that Communism would not endure and that Lenin’s regime would be tempered by a revival of Russian nationalism and the reestablishment of Russia as a great power. This “Russification of October,” they argued, would lead to the creation of the “Russia, One and Indivisible” that the Whites had always desired, not an international proletarian revolution. Throughout its existence (it endured until the Second World War), the movement, sometimes later termed “National Bolshevism,” was encouraged—and to some extent (albeit mostly unknown to its adherents) financed—by the Soviet secret services. Its leaders included the former White luminaries N. V. Ustrialov and Iu. V. Kliuchnikov, and it won the support of the novelists Aleksei Tolstoi and Andrei Belyi, both of whom returned to the Soviet Union.

Smetona, Antanas (10 August 1874–9 January 1944). Antanas Smetona, the leader of the Lithuanian national movement during the Lithuanian Wars of Independence and the first president of his country, was born in the village of Užulėnis, 50 miles northwest of Vil′na. He began his education at the Jelgava (Mitau) Gymnasium, but was expelled in 1896 for involvement in a nationalist organization. He then attended Gymnasium No. 9 in St. Petersburg and, in 1902, graduated from the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University, all the while expanding his activities on behalf of the Lithuanian national movement. Before the First World War, he wrote for and edited a number of Lithuanian-language newspapers, including Vilniaus Žinios (“Vilnius News”), Lietuvos Ūkininkas (“Lithuanian Farmer”), and Viltis Aušra (“The Dawn”), and was involved in the semilegal publication and distribution of Lithuanian-language books. During the war, he was vice chairman and later chairman of the Lithuanian Relief Society.

From 18–22 September 1917, at German-occupied Vil′na, Smetona participated in a Lithuanian Conference and was elected chairman of the Taryba (the Council of Lithuania, later the Council of State), in that capacity signing the declaration of independence of Lithuania (16 February 1918). When German forces retreated from the Baltic in the winter of 1918–1919 and the Red Army moved in, he went abroad, promoting the Lithuanian cause in Germany and Scandinavia. On 4 April 1919, he was elected president of Lithuania by the Council of State and served in that capacity until 19 June 1920.