Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

The second of the Winter Campaigns (sometimes termed the Ice Campaign or the November Raid) took place in late 1921, a year after the government of the UNR and the Ukrainian Army had been forced across the Zbruch River onto Polish territory (following the armistice that ended the Soviet–Polish War) and was there disarmed and interned. Some 1,200 volunteers from among the internees, commanded by General Tiutiunnyk and his chief of staff, Colonel Iurii Otmarshtian, set off from Poland into the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in October 1921. Their main (Volhynia) group (of 800 men) was commanded by Tiutiunnyk himself; the Podilian group (400 men) was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel M. Palii (and later by Colonel S. Chorny). General Andrii Huly-Hulenko’s Bessarabian group did not undertake any meaningful operations and after a few days retreated from Ukraine onto Romanian territory. All of these forces were poorly armed, clothed, and shod. The Podilian group set out on 25 October 1920 and thrust through Podilia to reach the village of Vakhnivka (40 miles north of Kiev), before being forced westward through Volhynia, crossing back over the Polish border on 29 November 1921. The Volhynia group advanced on 4 November 1920 and captured Korosten on 7 November 1920, but could not hold it. The group then moved as far east as the village of Leontivka, but having failed to establish a junction with the Podilian group, turned back west. As it retreated, the Volhynia group was encircled by Red cavalry commanded by Hryhorii Kotovski near Bazar, in the Zhitomir region. A large number of its men were killed in battle at Mali Mynky, on 17 November 1921, but the majority (443) were captured. Reportedly 359 of them were then executed at Bazar, on 23 November 1921. Only around 120 men and the staff of the group breached the encirclement and fought their way back to the Polish border, which they crossed on 20 November 1921. This was the last meaningful act of the Soviet–Ukrainian War.

wittenkopf, georg-hanz Heinrich.See Belov, Georgii Andreevich (wittenkopf, georg-hanz Heinrich).

Women’s Department of the central committee of the RKP(b). See zhenotdel.

Women soldiers.See female soldiers.

Worker–Peasant Red Army.See Red Army.

Workers’ Opposition. Formed chiefly from trade union leaders and industrial administrators, this faction of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) came to prominence in debates within the party in 1920 on the future of the trade unions in a Communist state. (As so often in the history of revolutionary Russia, the name of the group was not coined by the group itself but by V. I. Lenin, in his attacks upon it.)

The Workers’ Opposition had coalesced in the autumn of 1919, when one of its most prominent leaders, A. G. Shliapnikov, issued a call for trade unions to take control of the higher organs of the state and for them to be granted control of industrial production. Shliapnikov and his supporters (such as S. P. Medvedev) feared that both the party and the state were becoming stifled by bureaucracy, corruption, and cronyism, as a consequence of the huge influx into the administration of what they regarded as dangerous bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements, and were especially critical of the powers granted under War Communism to industrial “experts” (civilian administrators, often from the former propertied classes, akin to the military specialists of the Red Army), although they were not opposed to the employment of experts per se.