Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Viktorov joined the All-Union Communist Party in 1932, and in March of that year was placed in command of the new Pacific Fleet (called the Naval Forces of the Far East until January 1935). In August 1937, at the height of the purges (in the prosecution of which Viktorov was gravely complicit), he was made head of naval forces of the Red Army and a member of the Revvoensovet of the USSR, following the arrest of his predecessor, V. M. Orlov. That same year, he was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He was arrested on 22 April 1938, charged with membership in a counterrevolutionary organization, found guilty, and shot in Moscow. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 14 March 1956.

VIKZHEL′. The Russian acronym used to denote the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Union of Railway Workers and Employees. Formed at the First All-Russian Constituent Congress of Railwaymen at Moscow in the summer of 1917, Vikzhel′ initially consisted of 14 members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, 6 Mensheviks, 3 Bolsheviks, and 17 other members. Syndicalist in nature and committed to workers’ control, during the October Revolution it opposed the Bolsheviks, threatened a general transportation strike, blocked the movement of troops loyal to the new Soviet government, and demanded negotiations for the creation of a “united socialist [coalition] government.” So powerful was the union that the negotiations duly took place, beginning on 29 October 1917. They were taken seriously by some Bolshevik leaders, notably L. B. Kamenev, especially while the outcome of the Kerensky–Krasnov uprising remained uncertain, but once the immediate military threat to the Bolsheviks’ hold on Petrograd had subsided, the talks were deliberately wrecked by V. I. Lenin, an action described by his supporters as an attack on the forces of counterrevolution and by his detractors as a deliberate attempt to provoke civil war between the Bolsheviks and their socialist rivals and to obliterate any hopes of a compromise. The talks did, however, lead indirectly to the admission of some members of the Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries into the Soviet government.

Subsequently, in line with a resolution of 23 November 1917, Sovnarkom gathered a new (pro-Bolshevik) Extraordinary All-Russian Congress of Railway Workers and Foremen to Petrograd on 12 December. This group passed votes in favor of Soviet power and of no confidence in Vikzhel′ and initiated the organization (in January 1918) of an alternative All-Russian Executive Committee of Railwaymen (known by its acronym, Vikzhedor). Thereafter, like other trade unions, the railwaymen’s union became chiefly an instrument of the Soviet state.

Vil′kitskii, Boris Andreevich (22 March 1885–6 March 1961). Rear admiral (16 October 1919). A White naval commander of the civil-war years and a renowned hydrographer, surveyor, and explorer, B. A. Vil′kitskii was a graduate of the Naval Corps (1901) and the Naval Academy (1908), and in the Russo–Japanese War he served in the Pacific Squadron during the siege of Port Arthur. From 1913 to 1915, he was engaged in hydrographical expeditions in the Arctic Ocean, traveling from Arkhangel′sk to Vladivostok along the Northern Sea Route. For his achievements, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Russian and French Geographical Societies, and the straits between the Taimyr peninsula and the Severnaia Zemlia archipelago were named after him, as was an island in the Laptev Sea. During the First World War, he saw action with the Baltic Fleet, as commander of the destroyer Letun (which had its stern blown off by a German mine on 7 November 1916).

Following the October Revolution, Vil′kitskii remained for some time at work in the Main Hydrographical Directorate of the Admiralty, in Petrograd, before joining the Whites in North Russia and placing himself at the service of the Supreme Administration of the Northern Region. He remained there under the regime of General E. K. Miller, and when the anti-Bolshevik movement collapsed in North Russia, he commanded the evacuation of White forces from Arkhangel′sk to Tromsø, in Norway, in February 1920. From there, he sailed the steamship Kos′ma Minin to Crimea to join the White Fleet of General P. N. Wrangel.