Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

From July 1919 to August 1921, Snesarev served as head of the Red Military Academy and subsequently lectured there. He helped found the Moscow Institute of Eastern Studies and, from 1921 to 1930, was its rector. He served at the same time as a professor in the Military-Aviation Academy (from 1924) and the Military-Political Academy (from 1926). On 27 January 1930, as a target of Operation “Spring,” Snesarev was arrested and was sentenced to death, although this was eventually commuted to 10 years’ imprisonment. From 1930, he was an inmate of the Solovetskii Special Camp, in the White Sea, but was released on the grounds of ill health in 1932. He died in a Moscow hospital in 1937, and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1958.

SOCHI CONFLICT. This three-way border conflict erupted among the White forces of General A. I. Denikin, the Soviet forces of the Taman (Red) Army and the Kuban–Black Sea Soviet Republic, and the forces of the Democratic Republic of Georgia over lands forming the southern stretches of what in 1917 was the Black Sea guberniia (but which until 1904 had been part of the Sukhumi district of the chiefly Georgian-populated Kutaisi guberniia).

With the blessings and assistance of their protector, the German Caucasus Mission, Georgian forces under General Giorgi Mazniashvili occupied Adler (2 July 1918), Sochi (6 July 1918), and Tuapse (27 July 1918), but Georgian claims to sovereignty over the region were not recognized by either Red authorities in the North Caucasus or the increasingly dominant White Volunteer Army. Eventually, on 6 February 1919, the Georgians were forced back across the Bzyb River by units of the Armed Forces of South Russia that were pushing southward along the Black Sea littoral. Following further clashes, a demarcation line along the Psou River was established and patrolled by British forces in the region. This came to be internationally accepted as the new border between Russia and Georgia (and remained so until the Russian Federation’s recognition of Abkhazian independence following the 2008 Russian–Georgian War again posed questions about borders in the region).

SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF NARGEN.See NARGEN, SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF.

Socialist Soviet Republic of Abkhazia.See Abkhazia, Socialist Soviet Republic of.

SOCIALIST SOVIET REPUBLIC OF BELORUSSIA. See BELORUSSIA, SOCIALIST SOVIET REPUBLIC OF.

Socialists-Revolutionaries, PARTY OF. The Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (the PSR, often erroneously termed the “Social Revolutionary Party”) was founded during the winter of 1901–1902, as diverse adherents of the earlier Populist (narodnik) movement, who had sought to inspire revolution among the Russian peasantry through a mixture of propaganda and terrorism, sought to respond to new conditions in Russia: notably, the growth of industry and concomitant urbanization, the growth of the social-democratic movement (in the shape of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party), peasant unrest, and student demonstrations. Its first organizations emerged along the Volga (notably at Saratov), but the party’s center of operations was later transferred to Moscow. Its members were referred to as SRs (in Russian, esery). Among its early leaders were G. A. Gershuni, E. K. Breshko-Breshkovskaia, A. A. Argunov, N. D. Avksent′ev, M. R. Gots, Mark Natanson, N. I. Rakitnikov, V. V. Rudnev, N. S. Rusanov, and I. A. Rubanovich. Its foremost ideologist was V. M. Chernov, editor of the PSR’s leading journal, the Switzerland-based Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia (“Revolutionary Russia”), whose “neo-Populist” theories advocated a revolutionary alliance of the proletariat, the peasantry, and the intelligentsia. A minimum program and a maximum program drafted by Chernov were adopted at the party’s First Congress at Imatra, in Finland (December 1905–January 1906): the former, advocating the socialization of land and a federal state, was to be implemented on the morrow of a revolution; the latter, calling for the socialization of industry, would be implemented only at some uncertain date in the future. (The reluctance of the party to agitate for the immediate introduction of the maximum program led to the immediate defection of the SR-Maximalists, while its reluctance to commit itself only to the minimum program and to renounce terrorism led to the defection of members on the party’s right, who went on to form the Party of Popular Socialists.)