Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

From 1922, Zhloba worked in a variety of governmental and economic posts in the North Caucasus. He was arrested in 1937 and executed at Krasnodar the following year as an “enemy of the people.” He was posthumously rehabilitated on 30 May 1956.

Zhordania (“kostrov”), Noe (2 January 1868–11 January 1953). The foremost leader of independent Georgia during the civil-war period, Noe Zhordania was the son of a small landowner from Guria (Kutaisi guberniia), in western Georgia. He was educated at the Tiflis Seminary and at the Veterinary Institute in Warsaw, where he first became involved in Marxist circles. Back home in Georgia, in the early 1890s he was one of the leaders of the underground revolutionary organization Mesame Dasi (the “Third Group”)—another member of which was J. V. Stalin (with whom Zhordania frequently clashed)—and was widely recognized as a leading theorist of Georgian social democracy. To avoid arrest, he went into European exile from 1893 to 1897, but returned to become editor of the newspaper Kvali (“The Furrow”). From 1903, he sided firmly with the Mensheviks within the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) and from 1905 became an advocate of legalizing party work (in Leninist terms, he was a “liquidator”); he was an arch critic of the Bolsheviks through the Tiflis newspaper he edited, Sotsial-demokratia. In 1906, he was elected to the First State Duma, as a representative of Tiflis guberniia, and was the acknowledged leader of the social-democratic faction within it, but he then lost his political rights (and was imprisoned for three months) as a signatory of the Vyborg Manifesto. From 1907 to 1912, he was a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP and was again engaged in a fierce struggle against the Bolshevik faction. In 1914, he became associated with L. D. Trotsky through his work on the journal Bor′ba (“The Struggle”), but during the First World War adopted a staunchly defensist position. Following the February Revolution, on 6 March 1917 he was elected chairman of the Tiflis Soviet.

Zhordania refused to recognize the October Revolution and, on 26 November 1917, was elected chairman of the Georgian National Council. It was he who chaired the session of the council that, on 26 May 1918, declared the independence of Georgia, and on 24 July 1918, he succeeded Noe Ramishvili as prime minister of the new Democratic Republic of Georgia, a post he retained throughout the existence of the Republic and beyond, as the head of the Government-in-Exile of the Democratic Republic of Georgia until his death in Paris in 1953. He is buried in the Georgian cemetery at Leuville-sur-Orge, south of Paris.

ZHURAVLEV, PAVEL NIKOLAEVICH (22 July 1887–23 February 1920). Ensign (1917). One of the most prominent leaders of the Red partisans in Transbaikalia, who battled with the White forces of Ataman G. M. Semenov during the civil wars, P. N. Zhuravlev was born into an impoverished Cossack family at Aleksandrovskii Zavod and was sent to work in the gold fields at the age of 12 years, when his father died. In January 1915, he was drafted into the Russian Army and (after graduating from the Irkutsk Ensign School) served briefly as a battalion commander on the Romanian Front, where he was twice wounded, before being placed in a reserve detachment on the Don in 1917.

When, following the October Revolution, officers began gathering in the Don region to organize the Volunteer Army, Zhuravlev left the army and returned to Transbaikailia. By April 1918, he was at the head of a Red Guards detachment that engaged Semenov’s Special Manchurian Detachment as it moved out of Manchuria toward Chita. Zhuravlev subsequently lived under an assumed name (“Kudrin”) in the Amur oblast′ to escape persecution by the Whites. On 21 April 1919, he was elected commander of the Eastern Transbaikal Front. He was badly wounded in battle at Molodovskii on 19 February 1920 and died soon thereafter. Zhuravlev was buried in a mass grave in his hometown of Aleksandrovskii Zavod. During the Soviet period, numerous streets were named after him in settlements across (and beyond) Transbaikailia.