Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Zenzinov, Vladimir Mikhailovich (29 November 1880–20 October 1953). One of the most prominent figures in the Democratic Counter-Revolution of 1918 and in the Russian emigration, V. M. Zenzinov was born in Moscow into the family of a merchant. He graduated from the Moscow Classical Gymnasium (1899) and subsequently studied philosophy, economics, law, and history at the Universities of Berlin, Halle, and Heidelberg, graduating in 1904. He returned to Russia that same year and joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) and, in January 1905, was arrested in Moscow. After a six-month detention in the Taganka prison, he was exiled to northern Russia. He escaped to Switzerland, but in 1906 returned to Russia and briefly joined the PSRs’ terrorist wing, the so-called Fighting Organization. He was rearrested in 1907 and exiled to eastern Siberia. Zenzinov escaped again, hiking from Iakutsk to Okhotsk and traveling thence to Japan and back to Western Europe, where he became a member of the PSR Central Committee in 1908, leading its right wing in collaboration with N. D. Avksent′ev. He was arrested again in St. Petersburg in 1910 and, after six months in the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, was exiled to a village in the far north of the remote Iakutsk region, from where escape was impossible. After devoting himself to ethnographic and ornithological studies of northeastern Siberia, he returned to Moscow in 1915, declaring himself to be a defensist (i.e., a supporter of Russia’s war effort). In 1917, in the wake of the February Revolution, he worked on the commission established by the Russian Provisional Government to investigate the crimes of tsarist ministers and was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet.

Following the October Revolution, Zenzinov joined the anti-Bolshevik Committee to Save the Fatherland and the Revolution, was elected to the Constituent Assembly (as a representative of the PSR and the Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies), and having gone underground to escape persecution by the Soviet authorities, in May 1918 became a founding member of the Union for the Regeneration of Russia. In September 1918, at the Ufa State Conference, he was elected as a member of the Ufa Directory (as deputy for the absent N. V. Chaikovskii). When that regime was toppled, during the Omsk coup of 18 November 1918, he was exiled by the new regime of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and made his way, via China, back to Western Europe, settling first in Paris.

Zenzinov subsequently lived in emigration in Prague and Berlin, before returning once more to France. He published widely as a journalist and commentator in the émigré press and was an active proponent of continued military struggle against Soviet Russia. Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, he moved via London to New York, where he edited the émigré journal Za svobodu (“For Freedom”) and published widely on the revolutionary movement and the events of the revolution and civil wars in Russia, as well as contemporary affairs, in such journals as Novoe russkoe slovo (“The New Russian Word”), Novyi zhurnal (“The New Journal”), and Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (“The Socialist Herald”). He also penned various versions of his memoirs. Zenzinov died in New York in 1953. His cremains were interred at the Park West Memorial Chapel in the Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx.

ZHARDETSKII, VALERIAN (Valentin) ALEKSANDROVICH (1884–7 October 1920). Born at Arkhangel′sk into the family of a tsarist bureaucrat with the rank of collegiate advisor, V. A. Zhardetskii, the leader of the Kadets based at the Siberian White capital, Omsk, during the civil wars, studied at the Gymnasia of Nizhnii Novgorod and Rzhev. Having been active in the student movement, he was expelled from the latter institution and took his examinations externally at the Tver′ Gymnasium. He joined the Kadets in 1906 and subsequently graduated from the Law Faculty of Moscow University (1909). During the First World War, he worked with the Union of Town Councils, moving to Omsk in 1915, where he edited the Kadets’ regional newspaper Sibirskaia rech′ (“Siberian Discourse”) and became chairman of the local Kadet “club” (from 21 March 1917). In 1917, he was at the forefront of local politics, working in a number of public organizations (including the Omsk City Duma, the Omsk Coalition Committee, and the West-Siberian Committee of Unions, which he chaired).