Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Tsentrosibir′. This was the acronym by which was known the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Siberia. Based at Irkutsk, Tsentrosibir′ served as the center of Soviet power in the region from October 1917 to August 1918. Its basic function was to coordinate Soviet government in the region, in the periods between regional congresses of soviets. It was elected at the First Congress of Siberian Soviets at Irkutsk (16–24 October 1917) and was dominated by Bolsheviks and members of the party of Left-Socialists-Revolutionaries, although initially it also contained an admixture of members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, SR-Maximalists, and Menshevik-Internationalists. Its first chairman was the Bolshevik B. Z. Shumiatskii. At the Second Congress of Siberian Soviets in February 1918, Shumiatskii was succeeded by another Bolshevik, N. N. Iakovlev (who was less independent of the center and far less critical of V. I. Lenin’s determination to sign a separate peace with the Central Powers than had been his predecessor).

Tsentrosibir′ introduced Soviet power across eastern Siberia in the period November 1917 to February 1918; organized the suppression of the only notable armed opposition to it (a rising of officers and officer cadets at Irkutsk on 8–17 December 1917); and closed down its only serious political rival, the Siberian Regional Duma, at Tomsk on 26 January 1918. During the spring of 1918, Tsentrosibir′ also organized Red defenses against incursions into Transbaikalia that were launched from Manchuria by the forces of Ataman G. M. Semenov.

Following the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion and the collapse of Soviet power in Siberia in May–June 1918, the leaders of Tsentrosibir′ fled into the taiga. On 28 August 1918, a meeting of the organization at Urul′ga station (near Chita) voted to disband and to encourage members to engage in underground work against the forces of the Democratic Counter-Revolution (although many of them, including Iakovlev, were soon captured and executed). A year later, as the Red Army pushed across Siberia, VTsIK voted to establish a Siberian Revolutionary Committee to oversee Soviet policy east of the Urals, thereby superseding the defunct Tsentrosibir′.

TSERETELI, IRAKLI (KAKI) GEORGIEVICH (20 November 1881–21 May 1959). At the forefront of national politics in Russia in 1917, as the undisputed leader and ideologue of the Petrograd Soviet (despite the formal chairmanship of it by his friend N. K. Chkheidze), Irakli Tsereteli, as leader of the Mensheviks of the Georgian Social-Democratic Labor Party, was less prominent during the civil wars but still performed important roles.

Born at Kutaisi, in western Georgia, the youngest child of the influential radical (and Russianized) writer Giorgi Tsereteli, Irakli Tsereteli had socialism and internationalism in his blood. He entered the Law Faculty of Moscow University in 1900, but immediately devoted his life to the revolutionary movement. He was arrested in 1902 and exiled to eastern Siberia for five years. Released early, in 1903, Tsereteli joined the Tiflis committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party and became editor of Kvali (“The Furrow”), in which he argued against V. I. Lenin and all advocates of a narrow, centralized workers’ movement. He was rearrested in 1904, but managed to exile himself to Berlin, where he entered the university. Suffering with tuberculosis, he returned to Georgia during the 1905 Revolution and, in 1907, was elected to the Second State Duma, becoming a member of its Agricultural Commission and leader of the social-democratic faction. A brilliant orator, it was at this point that Tsereteli became a figure of national and even international renown. Following the dissolution of the Second Duma, he was arrested and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, subsequent to which, in 1913, he was exiled to Irkutsk.