Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Starynkevich, Sergei Sazontovich (Sazonovich also SOZONtOVICH) (6 July 1874–1933). One of the few members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) to be granted a ministerial portfolio in a White government, S. S. Starynkevich was born at Lutsk, in Volynsk guberniia. He graduated from the Law Faculty of Moscow University in 1900, after studies that were twice interrupted by periods of administrative exile as a consequence of his political activities. He pursued a career as a barrister in Moscow, but as a talented orator, he became increasingly involved in political work during the 1905 Revolution, as an organizer of the Peasants’ Union and as a prominent member of the Lawyers’ Union. In 1905, he also joined the PSR and worked with the party’s terrorist wing, the Combat Organization. He went abroad in early 1906, to evade arrest, and lived in Warsaw, Munich, and Switzerland, but returned the following year to help organize a revolutionary officers’ organization in Finland. He was arrested in the autumn of 1907 and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, then was exiled to eastern Siberia. He then worked in a legal firm and as a journalist at Irkutsk and became closer to elements on the right of the PSR.

On 9 April 1917, Starynkevich was named procurator of the Irkutsk Legal Chambers; in that capacity, in early 1918 he attempted several times to intervene to temper the “revolutionary justice” being administered in eastern Siberia by the Cheka. For this, he was arrested and imprisoned by the Soviet authorities and received a public reprimand at a revolutionary tribunal. A supporter of the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia, in July 1918 he was named director of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Provisional Siberian Government, and in August 1918 became its minister of justice (in which capacity he supervised the investigation into the execution of the Romanov family at Ekaterinburg). He was also a member of the government’s Administrative Council. In September 1918, he attended the Ufa State Conference and was subsequently named minister of justice of the Ufa Directory (4 November 1918). He remained in that post in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and served also as procurator general of the Government Senate (in fact, he was one of the author’s of the Kolchak regime’s constitution, “The Statute on the Provisional Structure of State Power in Russia,” of 18 November 1918), for which he was ostracized by his party comrades, particularly after the failure of his ministry to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Omsk massacre in December 1918. However, Starynkevich expressed himself as increasingly frustrated by the illegalities of the White military—its propensity for samosud—and like other moderates in the government (A. N. Gattenberger, I. I. Serebrennikov, V. V. Sapozhnikov, et al.), felt obliged to resign his post, in the spring of 1919.

Starynkevich left office on 2 May 1919 and arrived at Vladivostok in early September of that year. There is some evidence that he had been invited to involve himself in the organizations that planned the rising at Vladivostok against the Kolchak regime in November 1919 (the Gajda putsch), but he left Russia on 19 September 1919, before those plans reached fruition. In emigration he lived at Tsuruga (in Japan) and later in France, where he involved himself in relief work among Russian refugees.

STATE ECONOMIC CONFERENCE. First convened at Omsk on 22 November 1918 by Admiral A. V. Kolchak, this body was intended as a forum for the discussion of economic issues and a source of expert advice for the Omsk government and its supreme ruler. Its main task was to examine issues relating to the supply of the Russian Army, particularly in the wake of the withdrawal from the front of the Czechoslovak Legion and its well-developed commissary network. The SEC was chaired by the Petrograd financier S. G. Feodos′ev (who had been state comptroller in the imperial government from 1 December 1916 to 1 March 1917) and included representatives of the Siberian cooperative movement and local branches of the Congress of Trade and Industry, as well as the ministers of war, finance, food, supply, trade and industry, and ways and communications of the Omsk government. However, it gradually atrophied and went into recess on 21 May 1919, pending a review of its statutes.