Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Tret′iakov, Sergei Nikolaevich (26 August 1882–16 April 1944). A leading industrialist and a prominent member of the White regimes in both Siberia and Crimea, S. N. Tret′iakov was the scion of an eminent textile business family (his grandfather was S. M. Tret′iakov, the Moscow mayor and founder of the eponymous art gallery) and a graduate of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University (1905). He made his own fortune in the textile business and was a stalwart of the right-liberal Progressist Party, as a founding member of its Central Committee from 1912. Also in 1912, he was made chairman of the Main Committee of the Moscow Stock Exchange. During the First World War, Tret′iakov was deputy chairman of the Moscow Military-Industrial Committee and, in September 1917, was appointed chairman of the Supreme Economic Council of the Russian Provisional Government. On 26 October 1917, he was arrested by the new Soviet authorities and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, but was released the following February.

Tret′iakov then moved to Moscow, where he became one of the founders of one of the major anti-Bolshevik underground organizations of the time, the National Center. He then moved on to Khar′kov and, in late 1918, emigrated to Paris. On the invitation of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, in September 1919 Tret′iakov arrived in Siberia and was named minister of trade and industry in the Omsk government (which was attempting to gild itself with new members of an all-Russian, rather than a parochial-Siberian, standing). Following Kolchak’s abandonment of his capital, Omsk, and the subsequent reshuffling of his government at Irkutsk, Tret′iakov became director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers (22 November 1919) of Kolchak’s still putatively all-Russian government. In December 1919, as anti-Kolchak forces became active at Irkutsk, he undertook a mission to Chita to encourage Ataman G. M. Semenov to send troops to the admiral’s aid, but was unable to forestall the collapse of the White regime during the uprising at Irkutsk organized by the Political Center that month.

In February 1920, Tret′iakov left Siberia and made his way to Crimea, where he acted as a member of the Financial Council of General P. N. Wrangel’s South Russian Government. Following the collapse of the White regime in Crimea, he returned to Paris, where he remained in emigration, acting as deputy chairman of the Russian Union of Trade and Industry, but living in circumstances far more modest than those to which his family was accustomed. In 1929, he became an agent of the NKVD, supplying Soviet Russia with information about ROVS; he was in a privileged position to do so as landlord in residence of the building in which the union’s Central Directorate was housed, and he had installed microphones in every room. In August 1942, Tret′iakov was arrested by the Gestapo as a Soviet agent. He was subsequently executed at Oranienburg, near Berlin.

TRIAPITSYN, IAKOV IVANOVICH (1898–July 1920). Ensign (191?). Ia. I. Triapitsyn, the man at the center of the controversial Nikolaevsk incident, was the son of an artisan-tanner from Velikii Ustiug, near Vologda. He was mobilized into the Russian Army in 1914 and won two Crosses of St. George for bravery in battles on the Eastern Front.

Following demobilization in late 1917, Triapitsyn was active in the establishment of Soviet power at Samara and later in Siberia, but was imprisoned by the Whites at Irkutsk following the Omsk coup. He escaped, however, and made his way to the northern reaches of the Maritime Province, where in the course of 1919 he built an independent force of Red partisans that may have numbered more than a thousand men. In late 1919, he directed this force toward Nikolaevsk-on-Amur, which his units surrounded in January 1920. Having finally captured the town in March 1920, Triapitsyn initiated a massacre of its Japanese defenders. On 22 April 1920, he was nevertheless made commander of the Okhotsk Front on the orders of G. Kh. Eikhe (commander in chief of the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic). However, he clashed with the Red command on a number of operational issues and was prone to extreme incidences of indiscipline and insubordination. For these offences, Triapitsyn was arrested; at a trial held at Blagoveshchensk on 7 July 1920, he was declared to be a bandit by the Soviet authorities. He was subsequently shot.