Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

In 1917, Zatonskii was one of the key Bolshevik leaders in Kiev. From 12 December 1917, he was people’s secretary for education of the People’s Secretariat of the Ukrainian People’s Republic of Soviets; in 1918, he was chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at Khar′kov. From November 1918 to January 1919, he was a member of the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine. From June 1919 to October 1920, he served at various times on the Revvoensovets of the 12th Red Army, the 13th Red Army, and the 14th Red Army; helped organize the Red Ukrainian Galician Army; and in the summer of 1920, during the Soviet–Polish War, served as head of the Galician Revolutionary Committee (Galrevkom), administering the ephemeral Galician Soviet Socialist Republic.

In March 1921, Zatonskii was one of the delegates to the 10th Party Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) who volunteered to assist personally in crushing the Kronshtadt Revolt and was subsequently awarded the Order of the Red Banner for his efforts. After the civil wars, he held many senior party and governmental posts in the Ukrainian SSR and from 1929 was a member of its Academy of Sciences. A victim of the purges, Zatonskii was arrested on 3 November 1937 and shot on 29 July 1938. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 10 March 1956.

ZAVKOM.See transcaucasian commissariat.

ZEELER, VLADIMIR FEODILOVICH (1874–27 December 1954). One of the chief propagandists of the White regime in South Russia, V. F. Zeeler trained as a barrister and was also a widely published journalist and critic. A member of the Kadets, in 1917 he was elected mayor of Rostov-on-Don. Zeeler was one of the most active civilian organizers of the Volunteer Army in 1917–1918. In 1919, he served as chief of the Propaganda Department of the National Center and from January to March 1920 was head of the Department of Internal Affairs on the Special Council of General A. I. Denikin.

In emigration from 1920, Zeeler settled in Paris and was a prominent figure among the Russian community, as a member of the local Zemgor committee and (from 1921) as one of the founders and then general secretary of the Union of Russian Writers and Journalists. He was also secretary of the Union of Russian Lawyers in Paris, in 1935 was the cofounder of the charitable Repin Fund, and from 1947 was on the editorial board of the journal Russkaia mysl′ (“Russian Thought”). He is buried in the Sainte-Genèvieve-des-Bois cemetery, Paris.

ZEFIROV, NIKOLAI STEPANOVICH (1887–24 February 1953). N. S. Zefirov, the disgraced minister of the Omsk government, was born into the family of a seminary teacher at Alatyr, Simbirsk guberniia. In 1906, when he was a supporter of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, he was arrested and exiled for political activities, but was able to graduate from St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute in 1912. He subsequently worked in the statistical and immigration department of the government administration of Akmolinsk oblast′ and authored a number of works on regional agriculture. Having undertaken various governmental commissions connected to supply issues during the First World War, in 1917 he was sent to the Volga region and then to Siberia and the Far East by the Russian Provisional Government in a similar capacity. During 1917, he joined the Simbirsk group of the Party of Popular Socialists.

As a vocal opponent of the October Revolution, Zefirov was briefly imprisoned by the Soviet authorities in January 1918, and from the summer of that year, having become close to I. A. Mikhailov, he served from 30 June 1918 as director of the Ministry of Food of the Provisional Siberian Government. He kept that post in the early administration of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, combining it with control of the Ministry of Supply of the Omsk government from December 1918. In that capacity, the fate of much of the economy of White Siberia was in his hands: under him, government policy was firmly directed along the path of deregulation and private trade, much to the disgust of the region’s powerful cooperative movement. Zefirov was also a member of Kolchak’s State Economic Conference.