Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

He spent the First World War in exile, developing the policy that became known as “Siberian Zimmerwaldism”: a stance based on the notion that the international socialist movement could force an end to the war. Back in Petrograd following his release in March 1917, he joined the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and became an advocate of “revolutionary defensism,” while still proposing a general peace “without annexations or indemnities.” He joined the Russian Provisional Government on 5 May 1917, as minister of post and telegraph—a relatively minor portfolio—and in July 1917, he was briefly minister of the interior. However, his real power base was the Soviet, especially VTsIK, to which he was elected in June 1917. On its presidium, his was a dominant voice; the British journalist Morgan Philips Price once described him as being, in a debate, “like some Zeus from Olympus, contemplating the conflicts of the lesser gods.” However, his position was weakened following the failure of both prongs of the policy of “revolutionary defensism” to which his name was linked: the Russian Army’s summer offensive was a disaster, and efforts to stage an international socialist peace conference in Stockholm (to advocate a peace “without annexations and indemnities”) collapsed in the face of the intransiegence of Allied governments. The Kornilov affair also damaged him badly, as he had acquiesced in the appointment of L. G. Kornilov as commander in chief of the Russian Army. Despite this, in September 1917, Tsereteli firmly and successfully opposed those Mensheviks-Internationalists and members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries who sought to construct an all-socialist coalition to replace A. F. Kerensky’s Provisional Government; in so doing, however, he may have opened the door to the Bolsheviks.

Following the October Revolution, Tsereteli fled home to Georgia to escape arrest and became a pivotal figure in the Transcaucasian Sejm. With the establishment of the Georgian Democratic Republic (28 May 1918), though, his convinced internationalism (and his earlier expressed conviction that Georgia would fail, if it attempted to stand alone against Soviet Russia) condemned him to a secondary role in what became a distinctly nationalist entity, although he did undertake a number of missions abroad and was the Georgian republic’s plenipotentiary to the Paris Peace Conference and the San Remo Conference (19–26 April 1920).

Following the Soviet invasion of Georgia in February–March 1921, Tsereteli lived in exile in France and then (from 1940) in the United States. He remained the Georgian social democrats’ representative on the largely moribund International Socialist Bureau and a member of the Executive Committee of the equally lifeless Second International and in those roles consistently advocated the Government-in-Exile of the Georgian Democratic Republic’s cooperation with Russian socialists against Soviet Russia, opposing collaboration with narrow Georgian nationalists. This placed him in a difficult position among the Georgian emigration, and he gradually withdrew from politics, but history remembers him kindly as one of the most honest and charming figures of the revolutionary years. Tsereteli died and is buried in New York.

TSIURUPA, ALEKSANDR DMITRIEVICH (19 September 1870–8 May 1928). The Bolshevik agronomist who was primarily responsible for Soviet food supply during the civil-war period, A. D. Tsiurupa was born at Oleshki (renamed Tsiurupinsk in 1925), in northern Tauride guberniia, the son of the secretary of the city duma. He was drawn to Populist circles in his youth and suffered the first of numerous arrests and periods of imprisonment or exile in 1893, while studying at Kherson Agricultural School (from which he was then expelled). Between times, he worked as a statistician and agronomist in the state and local government and food supply apparatus (notably as an agronomist with the Ufa city supply directorate from 1908 to 1917), but his prime concern remained the revolutionary movement: he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1898, met V. I. Lenin in 1900, and became an agent (based at Ufa) in the distribution network of the Bolsheviks’ newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”). From March 1917, he was a member of the presidium of the Ufa committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), a member of the Ufa guberniia Supply Committee, and chairman of the Ufa city duma.