Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

TIMOSHKOV, SERGEI PROKOF′EVICH (18 October 1895–4 May 1972). Staff captain (1916), kombrig (5 December 1935), major general (4 June 1940). A Red commander active in Central Asia during the civil wars, who joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1919, S. P. Timoshkov was born at Zimnitsa, Smolensk guberniia; graduated from the Vil′na Officer School (relocated to Poltava, 1916); and rose to the rank of staff captain in the First World War, as commander of a machine gun detachment with the 4th Turkestan Rifle regiment. He joined the Red Army in 1918, as chief of a machine gun detachment with the 2nd Tashkent Battalion, and from July 1918 he was assistant commander of a detachment battling the anti-Soviet Ashkhabad uprising. From August 1918, he was active on the Transcaspian Front as commander of an independent detachment. He subsequently commanded the 1st Turkestan Rifle Regiment and, at the same time (from April 1919), was assistant commander of the Transcaspian Front. He was then made, successively, commander of the Transcaspian Front (8 August–22 November 1919), commander of the Transcaspian Army Group of the Turkestan Front (22 November–December 1919), and commander of the 1st Turkestan Rifle Division (December 1919–March 1920). From 1921 to 1922, he was commander of the Forces of Turkestan Oblast′, engaged in battles against the Basmachi.

Timoshkov remained in military service after the civil wars, eventually becoming (from May 1930) a senior professor at the Red Military Academy, and in the Second World War (from November 1943) was deputy commander of the 51st Rifle Corps. He was imprisoned in 1948, but was released (in July 1953) soon after the death of J. V. Stalin and was subsequently rehabilitated. He died in Moscow in 1972 and was buried in the Novodevich′e cemetery.

Tito (broz), Josip (7 May 1892–4 May 1980). Sergeant (Austro-Hungarian Army, 1914), sergeant major (Austro-Hungarian Army, 1915). The Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman—who like many other East European communist leaders (e.g., Béla Kun), participated in the “Russian” Civil Wars—was born Josip Broz, into the family of a blacksmith, in the Croatian village of Kumrovec, then in Austro-Hungary. After finishing school in 1905, he trained as a machinist in Sisak and became involved in the workers’ movement. He held down several jobs (including a spell as a test driver for Daimler at Wiener Neustadt, in Austria), before being mobilized into the Austro-Hungarian Army. During the First World War, he became the youngest sergeant major in the Austrian army and was recommended for a medal for bravery, but on 25 March 1915, before it could be awarded, he was wounded and captured by Russian forces in Bukovina. He spent 13 months in hospital at Sviansk, before being moved to POW camps at Ardatov (near Nizhnii Novgorod) and then at Kungur in the Urals in the summer of 1916. He was freed by rebelling workers during the February Revolution and arrested two months later for organizing demonstrations among prisoner groups, but escaped and made his way to Petrograd (where he participated in the July Days), then was captured when trying to flee to Finland and sent back to Kungur. He escaped again before arriving at the camps and made his way to Omsk.

Following the October Revolution, Broz joined a Red Guards unit there and became a member of the Yugoslav branch of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Despite some claims by Yugoslav communists that Broz then served on a number of fronts in the “Russian” Civil Wars with internationalist detachments, he seems to have played no significant part in the Red Army’s struggle against the Whites, living quietly (as he himself once admitted) with his new Russian wife in Siberia until September 1920, when they went to Yugoslavia. There, he joined the Yugoslav Communist Party (YCP) and was active in underground work for that illegal party between the wars (including a stint in Moscow in 1935 with the Komintern). He returned to Yugoslavia in 1937, to become chairman of the YCP (his predecessor, Milan Gorkić, having been killed in Moscow during the purges). From 27 June 1941, he was commander in chief of all Communist partisans in the struggle against the German invasion of Yugoslavia and (by now renamed Tito) came to be viewed by 1945 as the savior of his country. This popularity enabled him to defy Moscow in the postwar era, breaking free of the Soviet bloc from 1948. He then ruled Yugoslavia as the country’s president from 1953.