Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

URITSKII, MOISEI (MIKHAIL) SOLOMONOVICH (14 January 1873–30 August 1918). Born into a merchant family at Cherkasy, Podol′sk guberniia, the future Chekist and Soviet martyr Moisei Uritskii (sometimes known as “Boretskii” or “Ratner”) was a graduate of the Law Faculty of Kiev University (1897) and became involved in revolutionary politics during his studies there. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party upon its foundation in 1898, initially gravitating toward the Bund and then (from 1903) the Mensheviks. He endured several arrests and terms of internal exile in Russia, then went abroad on the eve of the outbreak of war in 1914. He made his way from Germany via Scandinavia to France, where he worked with L. D. Trotsky on the newspaper Nashe slovo (“Our Word”). He returned to Russia in 1917, and like Trotsky, joined the Bolsheviks and was elected to the party Central Committee in July 1917.

Uritskii played a prominent role in the October Revolution, as a member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and as an elected member of VTsIK, and subsequently worked in the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. As a prominent member of the Left Communists in 1918, he opposed the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), but although he announced his resignation from the Bolshevik Central Committee, he continued to work as a member of the Committee for the Defense of Petrograd and (from March 1918) as head of the Petrograd Cheka and commissar for internal affairs of the Northern Regional Commune.

On 30 August 1918 (the same day as the attempt made on the life of V. I. Lenin by Fania Kaplan), Uritskii was assassinated by the officer cadet Leonid Kannegeiser, apparently in revenge for the Cheka’s execution of one of his friends. Kannegeiser was caught and subsequently executed. Uritskii was buried on the Field of Mars in Petrograd. It was partly in retribution for Uritskii’s assassination that the Soviet government unleashed the first major wave of the Red Terror the following week.

USSR, Treaty on the Creation of the (30 December 1922). This treaty, signed by the representatives of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, united the separate Soviet republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (commonly referred to as the Soviet Union or the USSR). It resulted from a meeting of delegates from the republics on the previous day that had formally constituted itself as the First Congress of Soviets of the USSR, but had been under consideration for some months. Subsequent amendments to the treaty admitted newly created Soviet republics to the union, the first being the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, which were formed from the former Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in October 1924. The treaty was terminated on 25 December 1991.

USSURII COSSACK HOST. Occupying lands in the Maritime Province stretching from Khabarovsk to Suifun (along the Ussurii and Sungacha Rivers, which mark the Chinese border), the Ussurii Cossack Host was divided among 6 stanitsy and 69 smaller settlements. Its territorial center was originally at Vladivostok, but from January 1918 (with Vladivostok in the hands of local Bolsheviks) it was at Iman. By 1917, the Host population was 35,000, of which some 2,500 were under arms.