Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Vladimirov returned to Russia in 1917, by which time he was associated with Trotsky’s Inter-District Group. Like Trotsky, he joined the Bolsheviks in the summer of 1917, and during the October Revolution was a leading member of the Military-Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, acting as its commissar for supplies. During the civil wars, he worked from December 1917 on the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Supply, from April 1918 as extraordinary commissar on the All-Russian Evacuation Committee, and from 1918 to 1919 as extraordinary commissar for railways. He was then prominent on the Revvoensovet of the 1st Ukrainian Army (1919), the Revvoensovet of the Southern Front (June–December 1919 and October–December 1920), and that of the South-West Front (January–June 1920). He served simultaneously as chairman of the Special Supply Commission of the Southern Front (June–December 1919), and in that capacity was instrumental in running the requisitioning policy of the Soviet government to feed the Red forces fighting the Armed Forces of South Russia.

As the civil wars wound down, Vladimirov became, successively, people’s commissar for supply (October 1920–November 1921) and people’s commissar for agriculture (1921–1922) of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. From December 1922 to November 1924, he was people’s commissar of finance of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (from 1 January 1923, of the USSR) and then deputy people’s commissar of finance of the USSR (July 1923–November 1924). From November 1924, he was deputy chairman of VSNKh, and he was also made a candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (from 31 May 1924). He died suddenly in 1925, and was the first Soviet hero to be buried beneath the Kremlin Wall. Family protests persuaded the Soviet authorities to refrain from renaming Kherson “Vladimirsk” in his honor.

VOENSPETSY.See Military specialists.

VOIKOV, PETR LAZAREVICH (1 August 1888–7 June 1927). The Soviet politician and diplomat P. L. Voikov, whose fate was linked with that of the Romanov family, was born at Kerch, in Crimea, the son of either a mining engineer or a teacher (sources differ). He joined the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1903 and sided initially with the Mensheviks when the party split. He was expelled from the Aleksandrovsk Gymnasium in Yalta following a botched assassination attempt on the town’s mayor in 1906 and was later also expelled from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. In 1907, he went into exile in Switzerland, and eventually graduated from the Natural Science Faculty of the University of Geneva. He returned to Russia on 12 April 1917, and in August 1917 joined the Bolsheviks, after having been sent on a mission to Ekaterinburg by the Russian Provisional Government’s Ministry of Supply.

From October 1917, Voikov was secretary of the regional trade union bureau and chairman of the Ekaterinburg town council. In January 1918, he was named Sovnarkom’s commissar of supply for the Urals region, in which role he was responsible for applying the policy of food requisitioning (prodrazverstka). It was apparently Voikov who was responsible for selecting and requisitioning the house of the Ekaterinburg merchant N. N. Ipat′ev as the place of incarceration of Nicholas II and his family in April 1918. Following the execution of the Romanov family on 16–17 July 1918, it was also Voikov who was given responsibility for the disposal of the bodies of the members of the royal family. From December 1918, he worked for the cooperative organization Tsentrosoiuz (from March 1919, as its deputy chairman), and from October 1920, he worked in Moscow with the Commissariat for Foreign Trade, charged with selling abroad imperial treasures from the Kremlin Armory and Diamond Fund in order to raise capital for the Soviet regime. He was dismissed from that post for corruption, but on 16 October 1924 was made Soviet ambassador to Poland.