Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

SVANETIAN UPRISING. This was the name given to the unsuccessful uprising against Soviet power that broke out in the mountainous northwest Georgian province of Svaneti soon after the invasion of Georgia by the Red Army and the establishment of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (February–March 1921). In September 1921, Georgian guerrilla forces, led by Mosostr Dadeshkeliani, Nestor Gardapkhadze, Bidzina Pirveli, and others, overwhelmed Red strongholds across Svaneti and prepared to attack Kutaisi, but by the end of the year Red punitive detachments had regained control. Captured rebel leaders were immediately executed, and Red Terror was employed to quell the local populace, but the Kakhet–Khevsureti rebellion soon began, and many of those involved in the Svanetian uprising would also later participate in the general Georgian anti-Soviet August Uprising of 1924.

SVECHIN, ALEKSANDR ANDREEVICH (17 August 1878–29 July 1938). Major general (11 June 1916), lieutenant general (October 1917), komdiv (23 May 1936). One of the leading military specialists serving with the Red Army during the civil wars, and later an influential writer on military science in the USSR, A. A. Svechin was born at Ekaterinoslav, into a military family. (His elder brother Mikhail [1876–1969] also rose to the rank of major general in the tsarist army and fought with the Whites in the civil wars, before going into emigration.) He was a graduate of the St. Petersburg Cadet Corps, the Mikhail Artillery School (1897), and the Academy of the General Staff (1903). Thereafter, he was attached to the general staff and served in the Russo–Japanese War as commander of the 22nd East Siberian Regiment and as chief supply officer on the staff of the 16th Army Corps, then on the directorate of the quartermaster general of the 3rd Manchurian Army. During the First World War, he served initially with the staff of the main commander in chief and was then commander of the 6th Finnish Rifle Regiment (23 July 1915–January 1917), chief of staff of the 7th Infantry Division, head of the Office of the Black Sea Marine Division (26 January–14 May 1917), and chief of staff of the 5th Army (24 May–22 September 1917). Suspected of involvement in the Kornilov affair, he was removed from his command and transferred to the staff of the Northern Front.

Svechin joined the Red Army voluntarily in March 1918, and became assistant chief of the Petrograd Fortified Region, before being named commander of the Smolensk Region of the Western Screen and then chief of staff of the Western Screen (March–August 1918). He was then made chief of the Vseroglavshtab, the All-Russian Main Staff (August 1918–11 October 1918). In that capacity, he repeatedly clashed with the main commander in chief of the Red Army, Jukums Vācietis, and was consequently removed from the active army and utilized as a lecturer at the Red Military Academy from 28 November 1918. He served there until the mid-1920s, as head of the Department of the History of Military Science and Strategy, and chaired the Commission for Research into the Lessons of the War of 1914–1918. He was arrested in 1930, and subsequently released, but was arrested again on 21 February 1931, during Operation “Spring,” and on 18 July 1931, he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for counterrevolutionary activities. He was freed in March 1932 and returned to work in the Reconnaissance Directorate of the General Staff of the Red Army; from 1936 he worked again at the restructured Red Military Academy. He was rearrested on 30 December 1937, charged with terrorism and membership in a counterrevolutionary “officer-monarchist organization and a military-fascist plot.” On 29 July 1938, he was found guilty by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and sentenced to death. Svechin was shot that same day. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 8 September 1956.