Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Štefánik died in a plane crash near Pozsonyivánka (now Ivanka pri Dunaji), near Bratislava. The plane was shot down, possibly by accident, but the perpetrators were never identified, and some Slovak nationalists continue to insist that Štefánik was assassinated by Czech extremists. In 1927–1928, a gigantic memorial to a man now remembered as the father of his nation was constructed (to a design by Dušan Jurkovič) on the Bradlo hill, at Brezová pod Bradlom. There are many other memorials of Štefánik, including identical statues of him in an aviator’s outfit on Petřín hill in Prague and atop a war memorial in Paulhan (Hérault department, Languedoc-Roussillon), France; a bust (alongside one of Masaryk) at Košice, Slovakia; and another (raised in 1922, by M. Frico Motoska) in Wade Park, Cleveland, Ohio. There is also a Place Général Stéfanik in Paris’s 16th Arrondisement. In 1993, Bratislava’s international airport was renamed in Štefánik’s honor, and at Košariská, in his childhood home, the Slovak National Museum was established, which also bears his name. Since 2 February 2004, the Štefánik Cross has been awarded to Slovak citizens who have served in the defense of the Slovak Republic, by saving a human life or saving considerable material wealth by sacrificing their lives.

STEINBERG (SHTEINBERG), ISAAK NAHMAN (ZAKHAROVICH) (13 July 1888–2 January 1957). A leading socialist critic of the Soviet regime, which he briefly served during the civil wars, Isaak Steinberg was born at Dvinsk, the son of a Jewish merchant. He entered Moscow University in 1906 and in the same year joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, although his political inclinations bordered on anarchism. In 1907, he was arrested for his political and journalistic activities and sentenced to two years of exile at Tobol′sk, on completion of which he moved to Germany, where he graduated from the Law Faculty of the University of Heidelberg (1910). He returned to Russia and worked as a lawyer, appearing in a number of high profile cases as the representative of Jewish victims of persecution. He adopted an antiwar (defeatist) stance in 1914, and was frequently arrested thereafter. At the time of the February Revolution, he was working as a lawyer at Ufa, where he subsequently became a leading figure of the breakaway Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries (as head of their Ufa guberniia committee and a member of the party’s Central Committee).

In November 1917, Steinberg was elected to the Constituent Assembly, and from 12 December 1917 to 18 March 1918, he served as people’s commissar for justice in the Bolshevik–Left-SR Soviet government, but resigned in protest against the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). He subsequently became an arch-critic of the Soviet regime, in particular the Red Terror (once commenting to V. I. Lenin that it would be more honest to rename the People’s Commissariat for Justice “the People’s Commissariat for Social Extermination”). He journeyed to South Russia in 1918, to advocate a partisan war against the Austro-German intervention, and subsequently lived underground on Soviet territory.

Arrested by the Cheka in February 1919, and constantly hounded by the Soviet authorities, Steinberg went into emigration in Germany in 1923, where he was active in the so-called 2½ International. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Steinberg moved to London, where he became a cofounder of the Freeland League, which sought to find a safe haven for European Jews fleeing the Nazis. A lifelong critic of the Zionist movement, he sought to establish a self-governing Jewish settlement outside the Middle East and directed most of his efforts to obtaining permission to settle Jews in the northern reaches of Western Australia, basing himself in Perth from 1939 to 1943. This project (the “Kimberley Plan”) came to nothing, although Steinberg labored at it until his death, in New York, in 1957. His son, Leo Steinberg (born 1920), became an influential art historian.