Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Smilga then embarked on a career in economic planning, as deputy chairman of VSNKh (1921–1928) and Gosplan (1925–1926). He was restored to the Central Committee in 1925, but in 1927 he joined the United Opposition of Trotsky, G. E. Zinov′ev, and L. B. Kamenev, authoring the economic program of the group. He was consequently expelled from the party and exiled to Khabarovsk for 15 years. He was briefly allowed to return to the fold (as a member of the presidium of VSNKh) in 1930, when Stalin’s regime adopted a Leftist program of rapid industrialization, and he publicly recanted his criticisms of the leadership, but soon fell from favor again, and, on 1 January 1935, in the aftermath of the assassination of S. M. Kirov, he was yet again arrested and then sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. On 10 January 1938, Smilga was charged with “membership of a terrorist organization” by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out the same day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 3 April 1987.

SMIRNOV, IVAN NIKITOVICH (NIKITICH) (1881–25 August 1936). A prominent Red activist member of the Left Bolsheviks, I. N. Smirnov was born into a peasant family in Riazan′ guberniia, but was raised in Moscow by his widowed mother. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party as a young worker in 1899, and was almost immediately arrested and imprisoned. Upon his release, he became a party activist in Tver′ guberniia, but was arrested and again imprisoned, from 1903 to 1905. During the 1905 Revolution, he was active in Moscow and participated in the December uprising there. He then undertook party work in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Khar′kov, and elsewhere, between further periods of imprisonment at Narym in Siberia (1910–1912 and 1914–1916). In 1916, he was enlisted into the army at Tomsk. Following the February Revolution, he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Soldiers’ Soviet at Tomsk, before returning to Moscow in August. During the October Revolution, he commanded a detachment of Red Guards in the city.

In the summer of 1918, Smirnov was sent to Kazan′ and became a member of the Revvoensovet of the Eastern Front (28 August 1918–1 April 1919) and of the party’s Sibbiuro, as well as one of the leading military commissars of the 5th Red Army (April 1919–May 1920). In that last capacity, he played a leading role in the defeat and destruction of the White regime of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in Siberia and in the negotiation of a truce with the forces of the Political Center at Irkutsk in January 1920. He was also a founding member of the Revvoensovet of the Republic (6 September 1918–8 July 1919), where he became a spokesman for the Military Opposition to L. D. Trotsky’s administration of the Red Army. (It was Smirnov who made the Opposition’s keynote address to the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 that won some concessions.) He was also made chairman of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)’s Siberian Revolutionary Committee (27 August 1919–29 August 1921), in which capacity he was responsible for extinguishing peasant resistance to Soviet rule in Siberia and oversaw the operation that captured Baron R. F. Ungern von Sternberg. Subsequently (1921–1923), he managed the armaments industry for VSNKh. He became a full member of the Central Committee of the RKP(b) in April 1920, but lost his seat in March 1921, having sided with Trotsky on the trade union question.