Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

The city of Tsaritsyn, which was renamed Stalingrad on 10 April 1945, was redubbed Volgograd in 1961, as part of the program of de-Stalinization instituted by Stalin’s successor, N. S. Khrushchev. At the same time, Stalin’s body, which following his death had been embalmed and placed alongside that of Lenin in the Red Square Mausoleum, was removed and buried, without ceremony, in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The thousands of other statues and portraits of Stalin across the former Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc have also been removed, particularly, after 1991, in the former non-Russian republics. The one place that a significant post-Soviet memorial remained was in his hometown of Gori, the Joseph Stalin Museum, built (from 1951) around the hovel in which he was raised. However, in the aftermath of the 2008 Soviet–Georgian War, on 24 September 2008 Georgia’s minister of culture, Nikoloz Vacheishvili, announced that the Stalin museum would be transformed into a “Museum of Russian Aggression.” The first signs of this scheme’s realization were manifested on 25 June 2010, when a towering statue of Stalin was removed from a nearby square, and the Georgian government announced that it would be replaced by a monument to the victims of war.

STARK, GEORG (GEORGII) KARLOVICH (20 October 1878–2 March 1950). Captain, second rank (1912), captain, first rank (6 December 1916), rear admiral (28 July 1917). A prominent figure in the White Fleet, G. K. Stark, who was of Swedish (and, ultimately, Scottish) ancestry, was born into a naval family in St. Petersburg and lived in the United States and in Dresden as a boy, before his family returned to Russia, where he graduated from the Naval Cadet Corps (1897). He served mostly thereafter on vessels in the Baltic Fleet, journeying around the world with it during the Russo–Japanese War and sustaining injuries during the Battle of Tsushima (27–28 May 1905). After teaching at the mine-laying school at Kronshtadt (1910–1912), he became a senior officer on the cruiser Avrora (1912–1913), then commander of the destroyers Strashnyi and Donskoi kazak (1914–1916), and finally, commander of a mining division (March–November 1917), all with the Baltic Fleet.

Stark left the service in April 1918 and made his way to Siberia, where he joined the Whites and briefly commanded the Kama Flotilla. On the orders of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, he then formed and commanded the Krasnoiarsk Division (originally Brigade) of naval riflemen (December 1918–January 1920). After a bout of typhus, he went into emigration at Harbin (from June 1920), but on 18 June 1921 he was named commander of the Siberian Flotilla by the Merkulov regime at Vladivostok (the Provisional Priamur Government). As forces of the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic approached Vladivostok on 24 October 1922, on the orders of General M. K. Diterikhs, Stark moved the flotilla to Pos′et Bay, where it took on board the remnants of the Whites’ Zemstvo Host and many civilian refugees and conveyed them to Korea. Stark then commanded a smaller group of vessels from the Siberian Flotilla that moved on to Shanghai and, ultimately, Manila, where the flotilla was disbanded. Stark then went into emigration, living in Paris, where he worked for many years as a taxi driver. He also later served as chairman of the Union of Russian Naval Officers in Emigration (1946–1949). He died in Paris and is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois cemetery.