Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Vakhrameev, IVAN IVANOVICH (3 October 1885–20 July 1965). The Soviet naval commander I. I. Vakhrameev, who was born at Iaroslavl′, served as a junior officer in the imperial Russian navy from 1908 and, during the First World War, was attached to the Baltic Fleet. Following the February Revolution, he was elected as a delegate to various fleet committees, and as a representative of the Russian Social-Democratic Party (Bolsheviks), which he joined in 1917, attended the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in October 1917. As an active participant in the October Revolution, Vakhrameev was named chairman of the Military-Naval Revolutionary Committee (26 October 1917). In that capacity, he organized detachments of Baltic sailors to combat the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising. From February to December 1918, he was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Naval Affairs (as well as deputy People’s Commissar for Naval Affairs) and from September 1918 was also attached to the Revvoensovet of the Republic, as an advisor on naval matters. Following the civil war, Vakhrameev served in an administrative capacity in the port authorities of Petrograd before returning to service with the Red Fleet as a teacher in various naval schools from 1932. He survived the purges of the 1930s, retired on a pension in 1949, and subsequently died in Leningrad.

Validov (Validi), Ahmed Zeki (Togan) (10 December 1890–26/28 July 1970). The preeminent exponent of Bashkir nationalism (and expert on Turkic history) Ahmed Zeki Validov was born, the son of an imam, in the village of Kuzianovo (in Ufa guberniia) and studied at Kasimiye Madrassa at Kazan′ and at Kazan′ University, where he also was employed (from 1909) as a researcher and lecturer. An accomplished linguist, fluent in numerous Turkic and Persian dialects as well as Russian, from 1915 to 1917, he worked for the Muslim Bureau in Petrograd, supporting Muslim members of the Fourth State Duma (to which he had also been elected in 1915 by the Muslim curia of Ufa guberniia). Trained as an orientalist, he was diverted from his scholarly activities toward politics by his move to the Russian capital, and then by the February Revolution. In May 1917, he helped organize the First All-Russian Muslim Congress in Moscow, where he advocated a federal reorganization of the Russian state and became a critic of those Tatar delegates calling for extraterritorial autonomy within a unitary state.

Following the October Revolution, Validov emerged as the head of the Bashkir nationalist movement that, at a congress of November–December 1917, promulgated an independent Bashkir republic, based at Orenburg. When that city fell to Red forces, he was arrested by the Soviet authorities (on 3 February 1918), but he escaped two months later (3–4 April 1918) and set about organizing Bashkir forces around Ufa, Cheliabinsk, and Orenburg, as the civil wars developed, uniting with Alash Orda and General A. I. Dutov’s Orenburg Cossack Host to oppose the Reds. Following the Omsk coup and the rise of Admiral A. V. Kolchak to power in Siberia, however, Validov’s relations with Russian anti-Bolshevik forces rapidly deteriorated, and in February 1919, he negotiated a truce with the Red Army and defected, with his forces, to the Soviet side, in return for a promise from V. I. Lenin that Bashkiriia would be granted full autonomy within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

Subsequently, Validov served as chairman of the Bashkir Revolutionary Committee (21 February 1919–17 May 1919 and 30 January–26 June 1920) and attended the first congress of the Komintern, having also helped found the Muslim Erk party. However, by June 1920 he had despaired of the Soviet government fulfilling its promises, and he left his post at the head of the Bashrevkom and fled, with his entourage, to Central Asia to work with the Basmachi, as head of the National Union of Turkestan until 1923. From 1 to 5 September 1920, he was also present in Baku, secretly monitoring the Congress of the Peoples of the East.