Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Following the October Revolution, Tsiurupa served initially on Sovnarkom as deputy people’s commissar for supply (November 1917–25 February 1918), organizing the dispatch of grain from the Volga and Urals regions and Western Siberia to Moscow and Petrograd, and was subsequently people’s commissar for supply throughout the early stages of the civil wars (25 February 1918–11 December 1921). In that capacity, he played a key role in formulating Soviet policies toward the countryside. It was Tsiurupa, for example, who spoke at Sovnarkom, on 8 May 1918, of the necessity of introducing a “Food Dictatorship” (introduced by the decree of 13 May 1918); in effect, he became commander in chief of the 75,000-strong Food Army (Prodarmiia) that was responsible for the requisitioning of food from the peasantry under War Communism (1918–1921). In poor health, he gave up that post to become deputy chairman of Sovnarkom and acting chairman of the Council of Workers’ and Peasants’ Defense (11 December 1921–6 July 1923), deputizing for Lenin and A. I. Rykov when they were ill or busy elsewhere. He was also named head of Rabkrin (25 April 1922–6 July 1923), as a replacement for J. V. Stalin, then chairman of the State Planning Commission, Gosplan (6 July 1923–18 November 1925), and finally, People’s Commissar for Trade of the USSR (18 November 1925–16 January 1926). He was also a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) from 1923 to 1928. In all these roles he found himself in frequent conflict with Stalin, and he would undoubtedly have become a victim of the Terror but for his early death at a sanatorium at Mukhalatka, in Crimea, in 1928. Tsiurupa is buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

TUKHACHEVSKII, MIKHAIL NILOAEVICH (Tuchaczewski, Michał) (4 February 1893–12 June 1937). Sublieutenant (1914), Marshal of the Soviet Union (20 November 1935). The revered Red commander and strategist M. N. Tukhachevskii was one of the most important and controversial figures in the history of the Soviet armed forces. He was born into an aristocratic Polish family, on their estate, Aleksandrovskoe, near Smolensk; was schooled at the 1st Penza Gymnasium (1904–1909); and graduated from the 1st Moscow Cadet Corps (1912) and the Alexander Military School (1914), then joined the elite Semenovskii Guards Regiment. During the First World War, he was captured by the enemy in February 1915 and imprisoned in Germany. He escaped four times and was each time recaptured (being held, latterly, in the Ingolstadt fortress in Bavaria, where me met another incorrigible escaper, Charles de Gaulle, who would fight against him during the Soviet–Polish War). On his fifth attempt, he made it back across the front lines into Russia, in August–September 1917.

Following the October Revolution, in early 1918 Tukhachevskii joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) and volunteered for service with the newly established Red Army. During the civil wars, he served as, successively VTsIK’s commissar for the Moscow Defensive Region (from May 1918); commander of the 1st Red Army on the Eastern Front (28 June 1918–4 January 1919); commander of the 8th Red Army on the Southern Front (24 January–15 March 1919); commander of the 5th Red Army on the Eastern Front (5 April–25 November 1919); commander of the Caucasian Front (4 February–24 April 1920); and commander of the Western Front (29 April 1920–4 March 1921 and 24 January 1922–26 March 1924). In those capacities, he played an outstanding role in the Red Army’s defeat of the Russian Army of Admiral A. V. Kolchak in Siberia over the summer and autumn of 1919, in crushing the remnants of General A. I. Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia during the first months of 1920, and in the Red Army’s advance to the gates of Warsaw in July–August 1920, during the Soviet–Polish War. From 5 to 19 March 1921, Tukhachevskii was also in command of the forces (chiefly the 7th Red Army) that were assembled around the Gulf of Finland to extinguish the Kronshtadt Revolt. Having succeeded, ruthlessly, in that operation, he became commander of forces in Tambov guberniia (27 April–May 1921) and, equally ruthlessly, set about extinguishing the Tambov Rebellion. Essentially, Tukhachevskii was the Soviet leadership’s firefighter in this period, being deployed throughout the civil wars to regions where the military situation was most critical.