Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

In an attempt to establish the basis of a future relationship with Germany, on 4 June 1918 the Taryba controversially voted to invite Duke Wilhelm of Urach, Count of Württemberg, to become the monarch of a Kingdom of Lithuania. He agreed, and was elected King of Lithuania (as Mindaugas II) on 13 July 1918, prompting the resignation of four members of the council. After the German revolution in early November 1918, that decision was annulled (2 November 1918), and the unity of the Taryba was reestablished. At this point, a first (republican) constitution was issued, and Augustinas Voldemaras was invited to form a government (11 November 1918). However, with the approach of Soviet forces, on 2 January 1919 the new Lithuanian authorities were obliged to move to Kaunas (Kovno), as the Lithuanian Wars of Independence began.

TASEEVO PARTISAN REPUBLIC. This is the name traditionally accorded to the area around the village of Taseevo, in southern Eniseisk guberniia, deep in the rear of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, which in 1919 was under the firm control of Red partisans and became a no-go area for the Whites. Partisans under V. G. Iakovenko, who had been active in the region since the summer of 1918, drove White forces out of Taseevo in an uprising on 28 December 1918, declared Soviet power, and subsequently (in early January 1919) formed the Taseevo Partisan Front. Following a White counterinsurgency operation, in June 1919 the partisans were forced to leave Taseevo and retreat into the taiga, but after a series of victories over their pursuers recaptured it on 23 September 1919. In November 1919, by which time their army was some 10,000 strong, the partisans went on the offensive against the Russian Army, which was by then reeling under the blows of the rapidly advancing Red Army, and on 2 January 1920, having negotiated a truce with elements of the Czechoslovak Legion that were moving through the area, the partisans entered Kansk. On 15 January 1920, advance units of the 5th Red Army reached Kansk, where the Taseevo forces were merged with them.

TASHKENT REBELLION.See OSIPOV (TASHKENT) REBELLION.

Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. This polity, which according to its constitution was an autonomous element of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, was created on 27 May 1920, with Kazan′ as its capital. Its territory incorporated land that had, in tsarist Russia, been part of the neighboring Kazan′, Simbirsk, and Ufa gubernii and more recently had been part of the abortive Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic.

Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic. An early example of the flexibility of Soviet nationalities policy (although critics would cite it as an example of the Bolsheviks’ lack of principles), this theoretically autonomous polity was established on the orders of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic on 22 March 1918, on territories that had previously formed parts of Ufa, Perm′, Viatka, Orenburg, Simbirsk, and Samara gubernii. Its chief inspirers were Mirsäyet Soltanğäliev and the Tatar Bolshevik Mullanur Wakhitov. However, a planned Constituent Congress, due to convene on 15 September 1918, did not meet because of the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion and the capture of the region by forces of the Democratic Counter-Revolution. Many Bolsheviks decried the experiment as a dangerous concession to “bourgeois nationalism,” and the republic was disestablished, following a decision of the Politbiuro of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), on 13 December 1919.