Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

At its height, the union may have numbered around 6,500 men, most of them officers of the old army, and attracted the financial support of Allied agents in Russia (notably Robert Bruce Lockhart). However, following the arrest and interrogation in Moscow of 13 of its members on 29 May 1918, further Cheka operations netted large numbers of conspirators in the capital and elsewhere (notably at Kazan′, where the entire leadership of the union, under Major General I. I. Popov, was captured), some 600 of whom were then executed in early July (and many more during the Red Terror). Despite these losses, Savinkov’s union soon afterward staged a series of uprisings against the Soviet government, beginning at Rybinsk and Murom on 7–8 July and culminating in the Iaroslavl′ Revolt, but the expected assistance from Allied forces landing in North Russia did not materialize, and the organization was crushed. In January 1921, Savinkov resurrected the organization in Warsaw as the People’s Union for the Defense of Russia and Freedom. In Moscow’s Bratskoe Cemetery there now stands a black granite memorial to the many members of the union who were executed there in 1918.

UNION FOR THE REGENERATION OF RUSSIA. This anti-Bolshevik organization, formed in the spring of 1918 in Moscow, united Rightist members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) and the Party of Popular Socialists, Mensheviks, Left-Kadets, and nonparty public figures around a program of the resurrection of the coalition politics of 1917, the formation of a coalition directory to govern the country until the resummoning of the Constituent Assembly, the rejection of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) and the support of Allied intervention in Russia for the continuation of the war against the Central Powers, and the resurrection of the Russian borders of 1914 (with the exception of independent Finland and Poland). Leading figures included the Kadets N. I. Astrov, N. N. Shchepkin, N. M. Kishkin, and D. I. Shakhovskii; the Popular Socialists S. P. Mel′gunov, N. V. Chaikovskii, V. A. Miakotin, and A. V. Peshekhonov; the Menshevik A. N. Potresov; and N. D. Avksent′ev, V. M. Zenzinov, and A. A. Argunov of the PSR, although all members of the union joined it as individuals rather than as representatives of their parties.

Its members fanned out across the country in May–June 1918 and had a significant impact on the development of the Democratic Counter-Revolution over the summer (although its influence in Moscow declined markedly, especially after the arrest there of Mel′gunov). At Arkhangel′sk, the Supreme Administration of the Northern Region was committed to the union’s program, the Provisional Oblast′ Government of the Urals was also largely the creation of its members, and at the Ufa State Conference it was the union’s conception of a directory (rather than a dictatorship) to rule anti-Bolshevik Russia that won the day. However, the facts that the Ufa Directory consisted of five figures, not the three envisaged in the union’s program; that its military representative was V. G. Boldyrev not M. V. Alekseev, as originally agreed; and that it was charged to hand power not to a new constituent assembly, but to a reconvention of that elected in 1917, alienated many of its Kadet members. Moreover, in South Russia it was less influential than the more right-wing National Center, made little impact on the composition of the Special Council of the Volunteer Army, and was unable to unify contending parties at the Jassy Conference.

Following the military coup launched at Arkhangel′sk by Captain G. E. Chaplin on 6 September 1918, and the Omsk coup of 18 November 1918 in Siberia, the influence of the organization waned in the autumn of 1918, and it could do little to temper the extremes of the White military regimes of 1919, although it did not formally cease to exist until 1920.