Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

STREKOPYTOV UPRISING. This is the name given to the anti-Bolshevik uprising among units of the 8th Rifle Division of the Red Army around Gomel of 24–29 March 1919, led by Ensign M. A. Strekopytov (according to Soviet sources, a member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries). The rebels, who demanded an end to War Communism and the transfer of power to the Constituent Assembly, seized Gomel and several surrounding villages and arrested a number of local Soviet leaders. Within a few days, however, they had been driven from the region by Red forces withdrawn from the Western Front. Strekopytov and his closest supporters were said to have escaped into Poland.

STROD, IVAN IAKOVLEVICH (29 March 1894–19 August 1937). Ensign (1916). A much-lauded Red hero of the civil wars, I. Ia. Strod was born at Ludza in Latgale (eastern Latvia), the son of a Latvian Feldscher. He fought in the First World War and won the Cross of St. George on no fewer than four occasions.

Strod volunteered for the Red Army in early 1918, and was active on the Eastern Front and then in Siberia with the partisan detachment of N. A. Kalandarishvili, but was captured by the Whites and imprisoned at Olekminsk (November 1918–December 1919). He was released following the collapse of the anti-Bolshevik government of A. V. Kolchak and subsequently served with several Red Guard and partisan detachments in the Far East. In October 1920, he was placed in command of a cavalry detachment of the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic, and in February–March 1923, led the Red forces that crushed the Iakutsk Revolt and captured the White general V. N. Pepeliaev. Having won the Order of the Red Banner on three occasions, Strod retired in 1927, due to ill health. He also joined the All-Union Communist Party in 1927. Thereafter, he worked for Osoaviakhim (the Union of Societies of Assistance of Defense and Aviation-Chemical Construction of the USSR) at Tomsk.

Strod’s fame did not prevent him being arrested, on 4 February 1937, and subsequently executed during the purges. He was posthumously rehabilitated, on 23 July 1957, and a general cargo ship built in 1975 (and still in service out of Vladivostok) was named in his honor.

Struve, Petr Berngardovich (26 January 1870–22 February 1944). The son of the Baltic German vice governor of Perm guberniia and a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1895), P. B. Struve was a prominent philosopher, economist, historian, and political activist who offered advice and support to the White leaders in the “Russian” Civil Wars. He was elected to the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences in 1916, but was expelled (in absentia) by the Soviet authorities in 1928.

From the early 1890s, Struve had been active and influential in social-democratic circles in the Russian capital (the young V. I. Lenin was one of his admirers), and by the middle of that decade was acknowledged as the leading theorist of “legal Marxism.” In 1898, he wrote the founding charter of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, but his sympathies were evolving toward liberalism, and he went abroad in 1901 to found and edit (from 1902) the influential liberal journal Osvobozhdenie (“Liberation”). Struve returned to Russia in October 1905 and was one of the cofounders of the Kadets. Appalled by what he perceived as the irrational destructiveness of the Russian people and the unreasoning intransigence of the intelligentsia during the 1905 Revolution, he served from 1905 to 1915 as the leader and spokesman of the right wing of the party’s Central Committee, and in 1907, he was elected as a Kadet deputy to the Second State Duma. Following that Duma’s dissolution, he abandoned active politics and devoted himself to scholarship, becoming a professor at St. Petersburg University in 1913. He was also involved in numerous publishing projects before the revolutions of 1917, including editing the leading liberal newspaper Russkaia mysl′ (“Russian Thought”) and inspiring the hugely influential collection of essays Vekhi (“Signposts,” 1909), a critique of the Russian intelligentsia’s radical and rationalist traditions. He was a staunch defensist during the First World War, eventually (on 8 June 1915) resigning from the Kadets in protest against the party’s criticisms of the government.