Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Smetona became a controversial figure in Lithuanian politics in the early 1920s, on one occasion (in 1923) being imprisoned. In December 1926 (together with Augustinas Voldemaras and others), he staged a coup and promulgated a new constitution granting broad and authoritarian powers to the president of the republic. He then served as president until 15 June 1940, when Lithuania was invaded by the USSR. Smetona urged armed resistance to the USSR, but was opposed by his government and the majority of army leaders. Consequently, he resigned and fled with his family to Switzerland, via Germany. In 1941, Smetona emigrated to the United States, settling as a private citizen in Cleveland, Ohio, in his son’s house. He died in a fire there on 9 January 1944, and was buried at the city’s Knollwood Cemetery. In 1968, his remains were transferred to the All Souls Cemetery in Chardon, Ohio. In 1996, a statue of him was raised at Kaunas (near Vilniaus gatve, 33).

SMILGA, IVAR TENISOVICH (2 December 1892–10 January 1938). The head of PUR, the Political Administration of the Revvoensovet of the Republic during the civil wars, I. T. Smilga was born into a prosperous Lithuanian family in Livland guberniia. After his father, a forester, was executed for participating in political disturbances during the 1905 Revolution, in 1907 Smilga joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party and gravitated toward the Bolsheviks. He studied at Moscow University from 1909 to 1910, but in 1911 was exiled to Vologda for three years. He was liberated in 1914 and joined the Bolsheviks’ Petersburg Committee, but was again arrested and exiled, this time to Eniseisk, in May 1915.

Freed by the February Revolution, in April 1917 Smilga was elected to the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks). During the October Revolution, he was chairman of the regional executive committee of the Soviets of the army, fleet, and workers’ organizations in Finland and chairman of Tsentrobalt. As such, he was the Soviet government’s chief representative in Finland. In that capacity, he failed in the attempt to establish Soviet power in Finland during the Finnish Civil War. Back in Soviet Russia, he became one of the most prominent and active of the Red Army’s military commissars, serving successively as commissar of the Northern Screen (15 April–11 September 1928), member of the Revvoensovet of the Northern–Urals–Siberian Front (16–20 July 1918), member of the Revvoensovet of the 3rd Red Army (20 July–12 October 1918), member of the Revvoensovet of the Eastern Front (12 October 1918–15 April 1919), and chief of PUR (31 May 1919–19 January 1921). In these positions, he became a prominent member of the Military Opposition to L. D. Trotsky’s administration of the Red Army. Nevertheless, on 31 May 1919 he was made chairman of PUR and was conjointly a member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (8 May 1919–24 March 1923). He served also as a member of the Revvoensovet of the South-East Front (1 October 1919–16 January 1920) and the Revvoensovet of the Caucasian Front (16 January–18 May 1920), and was acting commander of the Caucasian Front (24 April–15 May 1920) during the destruction of the Armed Forces of South Russia. In 1920, he was removed from the Bolshevik Central Committee, being blamed by J. V. Stalin for the Red failure in the Soviet–Polish War, during which he had served as military commissar to the 7th Red Army (30 May–24 October 1920), under M. N. Tukhachevskii. On 19 January 1921, he was also removed as head of PUR.