Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

The final chapter of the Soviet–Ukrainian War occurred a year later, in November 1921, in the second of the UNR’s Winter Campaigns, when some 1,200 Ukrainian forces marched into Soviet Ukraine from Podolia and Volynia, hoping (but failing) to inspire a general peasant rising. The collapse of this campaign brought the Soviet–Ukrainian War to an end in terms of conventional military action, although the partisan movement in Ukraine remained active until at least mid-1922, and émigré, anti-Soviet, nationalist organizations (notably the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) flourished between the wars and got a second wind during Nazi Germany’s occupation of Ukraine during the Second World War. Remnants of these organizations survive to the present day, both in Ukraine and among the Ukrainian diaspora.

Of the many literary and artistic portraits of this brutal war, the best known (and most accomplished) is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard (1926), which opens with the observation, “Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second.”

SOVNARKOM. The acronym (sometimes abbreviated to SNK) by which was generally known the body that, from 1917 to 1946, constituted the government (or cabinet) of the Rusian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and later the USSR: the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovet narodnykh kommissarov). The term was also widely applied to the governing bodies of that state’s various constituent Soviet socialist republics and autonomous Soviet republics.

The Sovnarkom of the RSFSR—or, rather, of what was to become the RSFSR—was created, on the initiative of V. I. Lenin, at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 26 October 1917, in the midst of the October Revolution, to act as the government of the new Soviet regime. It would meet on an almost daily basis through 1918, although thereafter meetings gradually became less frequent (e.g., three or four a week in 1919). Between 20 and 30 persons were usually in attendance (although sometimes more than 40 attended), with less than half of them being members of the Central Cmmittee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) and later the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The term “commissars” was deliberately chosen to differentiate them from the ministers of “bourgeois” governments, both to signal Sovnarkom’s revolutionary intent and to indicate that the administration was in the hands of collective commissions (commissariats), not individuals. However, the range of portfolios was almost identical with that which had prevailed under the Russian Provisional Government of February–October 1917.

Sovnarkom initially consisted of a chairman (Lenin) and 11 individual people’s commissars—Foreign Affairs (L. D. Trotsky), Internal Affairs (A. I. Rykov), Justice (G. I. Lomov), Labor (A. G. Shliapnikov), Education (A. V. Lunacharskii), Post and Telegraph (N. P. Glebov), Nationality Affairs (J. V. Stalin), Finance (I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov), Agriculture (V. P. Miliutin), Trade and Industry (V. P. Nogin), and Food and Supplies (I. A. Teodorovich)—plus a three-man collegium representing the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs (V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, N. V. Krylenko, and P. E. Dybenko). These were soon supplemented by the heads of newly created commissariats: State Charity (A. M. Kollontai, from 30 October 1917, renamed Social Security, 26 April 1918); Health (N. A. Semashko, from 7 November 1917); Ways and Communications (M. T. Elizarov, from 8 November 1917); State Properties (V. A. Karelin, from 12 December 1917, abolished 11 July 1918); Local Government (V. E. Trutovskii, from 12 December 1917, abolished June 1918); and State Control (K. I. Lander, from 9 May 1919, reorganized as Rabkrin from 7 February 1920).