Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

In the White movement, Vitkovskii participated in the great march from Jassy (Iaşi) to Novocherkassk undertaken by General M. G. Drozdovskii and his followers (March–July 1918). He then commanded the 3rd Infantry Brigade and (from October 1919) the 3rd Rifle (Drozdovtsy) Division of the Volunteer Army, advancing from the Donbass to Orel, before retreating to Novorossiisk and being evacuated from there to Crimea (February 1919–March 1920). He then entered the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel, seeing action during the amphibious landings on the north shore of the Sea of Azov in the summer of 1920, before briefly replacing General Ia. A. Slashchev as commander of the 2nd Army Corps (from 17 August 1920). He then replaced General D. P. Dratsenko as commander of Wrangel’s 2nd Army (August–November 1920), before being evacuated with his men from Crimea to Gallipoli, where he took command of the 1st Infantry Division.

Vitkovskii subsequently lived in Bulgaria (1921–1924), as commander of the 1st Army Corps (elements of which he led in the suppression of the Communist rising in the country in September 1923), and as chairman of the Society of Gallipoliitsi, before moving on to France and then, after the Second World War, to the United States. In emigration, Vitkovskii was a lifelong ROVS activist. From 1937, he was chairman of the organization’s 1st (French) Department, but was forced to resign from that position by the occupying German authorities in 1942 (despite encouraging ROVS members to cooperate with the Nazis). He subsequently emigrated to the United States and died at Palo Alto, near San Francisco.

Vitovski, Dmytro (8 November 1887–8 July 1919). Major (Austrian Army, 191?), colonel (Ukrainian Galician Army, 1 January 1919). The Ukrainian military commander Dmytro Vitovski was born into a middle-class family at Medukha (Voronytsia), in Austrian Galicia. As a student activist at Lemberg University, where he studied law, he organized Ukrainian educational and paramilitary organizations, and during the First World War, served in the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen as a company commander.

In October 1918, Vitkovski was elected chairman of the Ukrainian Military Committee, which staged the November Uprising at Lemberg (L′viv). He was briefly (1–5 November 1918) the first commander of the Ukrainian Galician Army and then became minister of defense of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (to 13 February 1919). After serving on the Ukrainian National Rada (February–April 1919), he was sent to France to attend the Paris Peace Conference as a member of the Ukrainian delegation. Vitovski was killed when his plane crashed near Ratibor (Racibórz ), in Silesia, during his flight home. He was buried in Berlin.

VKP(b). The initialism for All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)—Vsesoiuznaia Kommunisticheskaia Partiia (bolsheviki)—by which, after changing its title from the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the party was formally known from 1925 (until it changed its name to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1952).

VLADIMIROV (SHEINFINKEL′ ALSO “LEVA”), MIRON KONSTANTINOVICH (15 November 1879–20 March 1925). The son of a tenant farmer from near Kherson, and a graduate of Kherson Agricultural School (1898), M. K. Vladimirov was a vital planner and administrator of the Reds’ supply system during the civil wars. He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1903 and was associated with the Bolsheviks from an early stage. During the 1905 Revolution, he was active in St. Petersburg, Odessa, Lugansk, and Ekaterinoslav, but was arrested and exiled to Siberia in 1907. He escaped in May 1908 and fled abroad. He then lived and undertook party work in Vienna and later Paris, gravitating away from the Bolsheviks and, from 1911, becoming associated with the Mensheviks, specifically the newspaper published by G. V. Plekhanov, Za partiiu (“For the Party”). During the First World War, however, he rejected Plekhanov’s defensism and worked with L. D. Trotsky on the Paris-based newspaper Nashe slovo (“Our Word”).