Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Ulagai, Sergei Georgievich (31 October 1875–20 March 1947). Colonel (1917), major general (12 November 1918), lieutenant general (1919). A controversial figure among the White military leadership, and probably best remembered for commanding the ill-fated effort to reestablish a White bridgehead in the Kuban during the summer of 1920, S. G. Ulagai was a graduate of the Voronezh Cadet Corps (1895) and the Nicholas Cavalry School (1897). He was a participant in the Russo–Japanese War and in the First World War rose, by 1917, to the command of the 2nd Zaporozhian Regiment of the Kuban Cossack Host (of which he had become a member through marriage, being born into a Cherkess family). He was arrested in September 1917, for complicity in the Kornilov affair, but escaped and made his way to the Kuban.

In the White movement, Ulagai served initially as an officer with a partisan detachment of the Kuban Cossacks (November 1917–January 1918) and was then a participant in the First Kuban (Ice) March, rising to command of the Kuban Cossack Infantry (Plastunskii) Battalion (May–July 1918) after the forces of the Kuban government had united with the Volunteer Army. After recovering from wounds, he then served as commander of the 2nd Kuban Cossack Division of the 2nd Army Corps of General V. P. Liakhov (22 July 1918–27 February 1919), contributing to the clearance of Red forces from the North Caucasus, and as commander of the 2nd Kuban Cossack Cavalry Corps that suffered defeats to Red forces around Rostov-on-Don (March–June 1919). From June to August 1919, he commanded a Cossack cavalry group of the Caucasian Army of General P. N. Wrangel at Tsaritsyn, before being hospitalized for illness. He returned to command the Composite Cavalry Group of Don and Kuban Cossacks in the Volunteer Army that suffered defeats in the Donbass and at Rostov (November–December 1919). In January 1920, he again fell ill with typhus, but again returned to service as commander of the remnants of the Kuban Army in the North Caucasus (29 February–13 April 1920). Together with his men, he was then evacuated to Crimea, where he was placed in the reserve of Wrangel’s Russian Army. Over the summer of 1920, he helped to plan and command the unsuccessful landing of Cossack forces along the coast of Kuban (sometimes termed “the Ulagai Landing”).

Evacuated back to Crimea as a general uprising in the Kuban failed to materialize and the operation collapsed, Ulagai was dismissed from the army by Wrangel and went into emigration in October 1920. He lived in Albania from 1920 to 1940, reportedly serving with the émigré Cossack group that helped bring King Zog to power and (from 1924) entering the ranks of the Albanian army. During the Second World War, he joined the collaborationist efforts of General P. N. Krasnov, seeking to raise Cossack forces in Yugoslavia and elsewhere to fight against the USSR in alliance with Nazi Germany, but (apparently because he had possession of full Albanian citizenship) he escaped extradition to Russia along with Krasnov and other Cossack émigré “victims of Yalta.” He moved to France, where he died at Marseille in 1947. On 22 January 1949, his remains were transferred to the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Paris.

Ulmanis, Kārlis (4 September 1877–20 September 1942). Kārlis Ulmanis, the first prime minister of independent Latvia, was born at Bērze, in Courland guberniia, and studied agronomy at universities in Switzerland and Germany before embarking on a career as a teacher and manager in a variety of agricultural institutions in his native province. He was arrested and imprisoned during the 1905 Revolution, and thereafter fled to the United States to escape persecution at the hands of the tsarist authorities. Having furthered his studies (and later taught) at the University of Nebraska, then opened a dairy business in Houston, he returned home following the amnesty declared by Nicholas II during the Romanovs’ tercentenary celebrations in 1913.