Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Following the October Revolution, Stepanov took an active part in organizing and funding the dispatch of officers to the Don region to join the nascent Volunteer Army. On 28 November 1917, he was arrested by the Cheka, but was soon released. He then moved to Moscow and was active in all the major cross-party, anti-Bolshevik underground organizations that were founded during the spring of 1918: the Right Center, the Nationalist Center, and the Union for the Regeneration of Russia. In August 1918, he traveled to Ekaterinodar to join the Don Civil Council of General M. V. Alekseev. As state controller in the Special Council of General A. I. Denikin in 1918–1919, he spoke out in favor of military dictatorship and the restoration of a (constitutional) monarchy, was regarded as an expert on the nationalities question, and was one of the authors of the Denikin regime’s “constitution,” “The Provisional Statute on the Governance of the Regions Occupied by the Volunteer Army” (2 February 1919).

Stepanov was evacuated from Novorossiisk in February 1920 and subsequently traveled to Paris as an advocate of the White cause. In May 1920, he returned to Crimea to inform the government of General P. N. Wrangel of the mood in the Allied capitals; he was on his way back to France by sea when he died suddenly, of unknown causes.

STEPIN (STEPIN′SH), ALEKSANDR (ARTUR) KARLOVICH (1886–29 February 1920). Ensign (1912), lieutenant (1916). The Red commander A. K. Stepin was born into a Latvian peasant family at Ascheraden (now Aizkraukle), in central Livland guberniia, and participated in workers’ strikes and demonstrations during the 1905 Revolution. He was mobilized into the army in 1907 and served with distinction during the First World War (winning three St. George’s Crosses for valor). Following the February Revolution of 1917, he was elected as head of his regiment by its soldiers. He joined the Red Army in 1918 and the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919, and led Red units around Balash and Kamyshin on the Volga, then became commander of the 14th Rifle Division (January–June 1919). From 16 June 1919, he commanded the 9th Red Army, but contracted typhus and had to give up his post on 9 February 1920. Stepin died shortly afterward and was buried at Kamensk-Shatinsk, near Rostov-on-Don. The 14th Rifle Division was subsequently renamed in his honor.

Stevens, John Frank (25 April 1853–2 June 1943). One of the most successful and renowned American engineers of the 20th century, known as “Big Smoke” for his love of cigars, John F. Stevens played an interesting part in the “Russian” Civil Wars. He was born in Maine and had little formal education, but worked his way up the railway engineering profession, becoming chief engineer of the Great Northern Railway in 1895. In 1905, he was hired by President Theodore Roosevelt as chief engineer on the Panama Canal. Having completed the railway infrastructure of that project, however, he unexpectedly resigned in 1907. In May 1917, he was appointed by President Wilson to lead an advisory committee of railway experts that was dispatched to Russia to assist the Provisional Government and was subsequently placed at the head of the 300-strong Russian Railway Service Corps of American railwaymen that was to be sent into Russia via Siberia. However, the corps arrived at Vladivostok in November 1917, just as the Bolsheviks took power, and Stevens was obliged to evacuate to Nagasaki, returning to Russia only in the summer of 1918, as Allied intervention in Siberia started.

In January 1919, under the Inter-Allied Railway Agreement, Stevens was named chairman of the Technical Board of the Inter-Allied Railway Commission, based at Harbin. In that role, he was nominally subordinate to the Allied diplomats on the commission and to its chair, the minister of communications of the Omsk government, L. A. Ustrugov, but in effect the entire Trans-Siberian railway system was placed under Stevens’s control. He had some success in bringing order to the network and in increasing traffic (not least through the introduction of a centralized dispatching circuit from Vladivostok to Omsk, to replace the cumbersome station-to-station relay system previously used by the Russians), but his successes came too late to assist significantly in the White war effort and served only to rouse the jealousy and hostility of local administrators.