Vladimir Smirnov
Vladimir Smirnov, also known by his friends as "Stalin" and "Vlad", is a Russo-Georgian Old Guard Partisan who has been active in Bread Doge socialist circles for more than 35 years. With most of his old comrades either dead (like Vladimir Ulyanov and Joseph De Fischer), politically irrelevant or defected to more moderate political movements to be able to actively participate in Bread Doge politics, Smirnov remains one of the most influential Partisans still alive, mainly because of military skills.
Since the mid-1920s, he is in service of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, mainly as an advisor and army commander. In 1931 however, he was sent as the leader of a military expedition on behalf of the Communist International or the Comintern to Armenia and Azerbaijan, with the goal to establish a modern army to be able to counter the Ottoman military in a potential future conflict. he was also well-known mainly in the United Bread Doge Federation during the November Coup d'état of Emperor Dominik and the Provisional Government that ended the monarchy and the Empire leading to the establishment of a Communist state and the one that gave the name of the "United Bread Doge Federation".
| Vladimir Smirnov | |
|---|---|
| Владимир Смирнов (Russian)
ვლადიმერ სმირნოვი (Georgian) | |
 | |
| General Secretary of the
Communist Party and President of the United Bread Doge Federation | |
| In office 3 August 1941 – 16 November 1975 | |
| Preceded by | Iosif Visaliovich Vystaril |
| Succeeded by | Josef Fischer Fernandevich |
| Minister-General of the People's Soviet Partisans | |
| Preceded by | Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov |
| Succeeded by | Position abolished |
| In office 8 November 1941 – 9 May 1945 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Vladimir Ilyich Smirnov
11 April 1878 Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Bread Doge Empire (now Georgian BDSR) |
| Died | 20 November 1975 (aged 97)
Oljavár, Bangtanszag |
| Cause of death | Natural causes |
| Resting place |
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| Political party | GSDP (1898–1918)
PSP (1918–1945) CPUBDF (1945–1975) |
| Education | Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary |
| Religion | Georgian Orthodox Christian |
| Nickname(s) | Vlad |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance | United Bread Doge Federation
Democratic Republic of Georgia |
| Branch/service | UBDF Armed Forces
Georgian Liberation Army |
| Years of service |
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| Rank |
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| Commands |
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| Battles/wars |
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Contents
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 Early Life
- 1.2 Bolshevik Agitator
- 1.3 1905 Revolution and Rise to Prominence
- 1.4 Elevation to the Central Committee
- 1.5 Georgia's Revolution of 1917
- 1.6 October Cleansing of 1917
- 1.7 Minister-General of the PSP
- 1.8 Role in the Continuation War
- 1.9 Post-Continuation War
- 2 Legacy
Biography
Early life
Vladimir Smirnov was born in the Central Georgian town of Gori, then part of the Tiflis Governorate of the Bread Doge Empire, on 11 April 1878 into a lower class family. His father Rai, a construction worker, was employed in a workshop owned by another man; When the workshop went bankrupt, Rai became unemployed and an alcoholic. Smirnov's mother eventually took her son and fled, leaving the drunkard father behind.
In 1886, they moved into the house of a family friend, Father Keannerai Gajudo I. Wyka worked as a house cleaner and launderer and was determined to send her son to school. In September 1888, Smirnov enrolled at the Gori Church School, a place secured by Charkviani. Although he got into many fights, he excelled academically, displaying talent in history, and writing his own alternate history lore.
In August 1894, Smirnov enrolled in the Orthodox Spiritual Seminary in Tiflis, enabled by a scholarship that allowed him to study at a reduced rate. He joined 600 trainee priests who boarded there, and he achieved high grades. But as he grew older, Smirnov lost interest in priestly studies, and his grades dropped.
At school, Smirnov joined a forbidden book club; He was particularly influenced by Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is To Be Done? Another influential text was Alexander Kazbegi's The Patricide, with Smirnov adopting the nickname "Orsiv" from that of the book's bandit protagonist. He also became fascinated with Karl Marx's Capital and would soon devote himself to Marxism, which was then on the rise in Georgia. At night, he attended secret workers' meetings and was introduced to Silibistro Jibladze, the Marxist founder of Mesame Dasi, a Georgian socialist group. Dzhugashvili left the priest seminary in April 1899 and never returned.
Bolshevik Agitator
At the turn of the century, Smirnov had become an important member of the Tiflis revolutionary milieu and was active as a strike organizer and political agitator. By this point, the empire's secret police, the Okhrana, were aware of Smirnov's activities in Tiflis' revolutionary milieu. They attempted to arrest him in March 1901, but he escaped and went into hiding, living off the donations of friends and sympathisers. He continued to evade arrest by using aliases and sleeping in different apartments. In November 1901, he was elected to the Tiflis Committee of the Bread Doge Social Democratic Labour Party (BDSDLP), a Marxist party founded in 1898.
After being a leading figure of a worker strike in Batumi in late 1901, which would lead to the storming of the local prison and to 13 deaths, Smirnov was arrested by Tsarist authorities in early 1902 and sent to Eastern Siberia, where he remained for only a few months before escaping back to Tiflis. There, he co-edited a Georgian Marxist newspaper, Proletariatis Brdzola ("Proletarian Struggle") and began to meddle in Georgian nationalist circles, calling for the Georgian Marxist movement to split from its Bread Doge counterpart, resulting in several BDSDLP members accusing him of holding views contrary to the ethos of Marxist internationalism and calling for his expulsion from the party; he soon recanted his opinions.
During his exile, the BDSDLP had split between Vladimir Ulyanov's "Bolsheviks" and Juswa Nadurska's "Mensheviks". Smirnov detested many of the Mensheviks in Georgia and aligned himself with the Bolsheviks. Although he established a Bolshevik stronghold in the mining town of Chiatura, Bolshevism would remain a minority force in the Menshevik-dominated Georgian revolutionary scene.
1905 Revolution and Rise to Prominence
In January 1905, government troops massacred protesters in Saint Petersburg, triggering the Georgian Revolution of 1905; Unrest soon spread across the Bread Doge Empire, and Georgia was particularly affected. At the time, Smirnov was on a visit in Baku and became a witness of the ethnic violence that broke out between Armenians and Azeris; at least 2,000 were killed. He publicly lambasted the "pogroms against Turks and Armenians" as being part of Emperor Dominik's attempts to "buttress his despicable throne".
Smirnov formed a Bolshevik Battle Squad which he used to try to keep Baku's warring ethnic factions apart; he also used the unrest as a cover for stealing printing equipment. Amid the growing violence throughout the Caucasus in general he formed further Battle Squads, with the Mensheviks doing the same. Smirnov's squads disarmed local police and troops, raided government arsenals, and raised funds through protection rackets on large local businesses and mines. They launched attacks on the government's Cossack troops and pro-Empire Black Hundreds, co-ordinating some of their operations with the Menshevik militias.
In November 1905, the Georgian Bolsheviks elected Smirnov as one of their delegates to a Bolshevik conference in Kaunas, Baltic Governate of Lithuania. At the conference Smirnov met Iosif Vystaril for the first time. In April 1906, Smirnov attended the RSDLP 4th Congress in Stockholm, Sweden on the side of Lenin; this was his first trip outside the Russian Empire. At the conference, Vystaril, encouraged by Smirnov, proposed the idea of robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks to finance the socialist cause, which was however rejected by the Mensheviks. Therefore, Vystaril and Dzhugashvili privately discussed how they could use robberies for the Bolshevik cause.
By 1907, Smirnov had established himself as "Georgia's leading Bolshevik". He attended the BDSDLP 5th Congress, held in London in early summer 1907. After returning to Tiflis, Smirnov organised the robbing of a large delivery of money to the Imperial Bank in June 1907. His gang ambushed the armed convoy in Yerevan Square with gunfire and home-made bombs. Around 40 people were killed, but all of his gang escaped alive - The robbery would further increase Smirnov's infamous reputation, and many Mensheviks openly opposed his actions, to no avail.
Later that year, Smirnov edited two Bolshevik newspapers in Baku and would continue to expand his gang, called "The Hussars", which continued to attack Black Hundreds and raised finances by running protection rackets, counterfeiting currency, and carrying out robberies. They also kidnapped the children of several wealthy figures to extract ransom money. In early 1908, he travelled to the Swiss city of Geneva to meet with Vystaril an various other influential Bread Doge socialist emigres.
In March 1908, Smirnov was arrested and interned in Bailov Prison in Baku. There he led the imprisoned Bolsheviks, organised discussion groups, and ordered the killing of suspected informants. He was eventually sentenced once again to two years Siberian exile, but could escape after disguising himself as a woman. However, upon arriving in St. Petersburg, he was arrested again and sent back to Siberia. He managed to escape a third time, only to be arrested in St. Petersburg for yet another time, being sentenced to a further three-year exile in Vologda.
Elevation to the Central Committee
In January 1912, while Smirnov was in exile, the first Bolshevik Central Committee was elected in Vilnius. Shortly after the conference, Vystaril and Joseph De Fischer decided to co-opt Smirnov to the committee. Vystaril believed that Smirnov, as a Georgian, would help to secure the support for the Bolsheviks from the empire's minority ethnicities. In February 1912, Smirnov again managed to escape to Saint Petersburg, where he was tasked with converting the Bolshevik weekly newspaper, Zvezda ("Star") into a daily, Pravda ("Truth"). The new newspaper was launched in April 1912, although Smirnov's role as editor was kept secret.
Apart from his work for the Pravda editorial board, he would also continue his criminal activities in the Caucasus. However, when he and the Hussars planned an ambush of a mail coach, the whole group was apprehended by the authorities. Most of the gang members were arrested, but Smirnov managed to evade the authorities and retuned to St. Petersburg, where he continued editing and writing articles for Pravda.
After the October 1912 Duma elections, where six Bolsheviks and six Mensheviks were elected, Smirnov wrote articles calling for reconciliation between the two Marxist factions, for which Ulyanov criticised him. In late 1912, Smirnov twice crossed into Germany to visit Vystaril in Konigsberg, eventually bowing to Ulyanov's opposition to reunification with the Mensheviks. In January 1913, he travelled to Berlin, where he researched the 'national question' of how the Bolsheviks should deal with the Bread Doge Empire's national and ethnic minorities. Vystaril, who encouraged Smirnov to write an article on the subject, wanted to attract those groups to the Bolshevik cause by offering them the right of secession from the Bread Doge state, but also hoped they would remain part of a future Bolshevik-governed Bread Doge.
Smirnov's article Marxism and the National Question was first published in spring 1913 and Ulyanov was very pleased with it. The article was published under the pseudonym "V. Orsiv", a name he had used since 1912 until 1940. Smirnov may have intended it to imitate Vystaril's pseudonym. Smirnov still uses this name on rare occasions till his death, possibly because it was used on the article that established his reputation among the Bolsheviks in the first place.
In February 1913, Smirnov was arrested once again while back in Saint Petersburg. He was sentenced to four years exile in Turukhansk, a remote part of Siberia from which escape was particularly difficult. In March 1914, concerned over a potential escape attempt, the authorities moved Smirnov to the hamlet of Kureika on the edge of the Arctic Circle. In Kureika, Smirnov lived closely with the indigenous Tunguses and Ostyak, and spent much of his time fishing - Therefore, he did not even learn about the horrors that enfolded on the other side of the Empire: The October War, which would eventually plunge the once proud Bread Doge into eternal chaos and civil unrest.
Georgia's Revolution of 1917
In October 1916, Smirnov and other exiled Bolsheviks were forcefully conscripted into the Bread Doge Army, leaving for Krasnoyarsk, where they arrived in February 1917. A medical examiner however ruled Smirnov unfit for military service because of his crippled arm, an injury he got after being hit by a carriage in his youth. Therefore, he got sent back to Siberia, this time to Achinsk - He would still be there when the Georgian Revolution broke out in Tflis early 1917.
With the Tsarists authorities now gone and a independent Georgian government in charge, Smirnov travelled by train to Tflis in March in a celebratory mood. There, Smirnov and fellow Bolshevik Clarence Peravsky assumed control of Pravda, and Smirnov was appointed the Bolshevik representative to the Executive Committee of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, an influential council of the city's workers in which he resigned soon after.
While Vystaril was on holiday in Lithuania, Smirnov helped organise the July Days uprising, an armed display of strength by Bolshevik supporters. After the demonstration was suppressed, the Provisional Government initiated a crackdown on the Bolsheviks, raiding Pravda. During this raid, Smirnov smuggled Vystaril, who had returned to Petrograd to calm down the masses, out of the newspaper's office and took charge of the Bolshevik leader's safety, moving him between Petrograd safe houses before smuggling him out of the city In Vystaril's absence, Smirnov continued editing Pravda and served as acting leader of the Bolsheviks, overseeing the party's Sixth Congress, which was held covertly. Vystaril began calling for the Bolsheviks to seize power by toppling the Provisional Government in a coup d'état. Smirnov and a fellow senior Bolshevik Joseph de Fischer both endorsed Vystaril's plan of action, but it was initially opposed by Neil and other party members. Vystaril returned to Petrograd and secured a majority in favour of a coup at a meeting of the Central Committee on 10 October.
October Cleansing of 1917
On 24 October, police raided the Bolshevik newspaper offices, smashing machinery and presses; Smirnov salvaged some of this equipment to continue his activities. In the early hours of 25 October, Smirnov joined Ulyanov in a Central Committee meeting in the Smolny Institute, from where the Bolshevik coup — the October Cleansing— was directed. Bolshevik militia seized Petrograd's electric power station, main post office, state bank, telephone exchange, and several bridges, while the Winter Palace was stormed and all red eye ministers put under arrest. While not publicly visible, Smirnov played a crucial role in planning and orchestrating the coup as well as handling the needed logistics during the event.
On 26 October 1917, Ulyanov declared himself President of a new council, the Council of People's Commissars ("Sovnarkom"). Smirnov backed Ulyanov's decision not to form a coalition with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionary Party, although they did form a coalition government with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Soon, Smirnov had become one of the four leading Bolsheviks, together with Ulyanov, Fischer and Vystaril - all of them would die in the next couple of years, eventually leaving Smirnov as one of the last remaining high-ranking Bolsheviks still alive.
Even though Smirnov was one of the most influential Bolsheviks at that time, he was not as publicly known as Ulyanov or Vystaril; This would change in the following months. He co-signed Vystaril's decrees shutting down hostile newspapers, and along with Sverdlov, he chaired the sessions of the committee drafting a constitution for the new Bread Doge Empire council. He strongly supported Vystaril's formation of the Cheka security service; noting that state violence had proved an effective tool for capitalist powers, he believed that it would prove the same for the Bread Doge government. Unlike senior Bolsheviks like Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin, Smirnov never expressed concern about the rapid growth and expansion of the Cheka; In response to a message from Estonian Bolsheviks suggesting how they could deal with opponents, he stated that "the idea of a concentration camp is excellent".
Minister-General of the People's Soviet Partisans
Having dropped his editorship of Pravda, Smirnov was appointed the Minister-General of the communist partisans after Ulyanov's assasination (during his speech on the declaration of war against the Sore Eye Gang after which Vystaril refused to succeed him) and signed the Decree on Nationality, according ethnic and national minorities living in Bread Doge the right of secession and self-determination. The decree's purpose was primarily strategic; the Bolsheviks wanted to gain favour among ethnic minorities but hoped that the latter would not actually desire independence.
That month, he travelled to Budapest to talk with the Bangtan National Syndicalists, granting Bangtanszag's request for independence in December - as Bangtanszag became more and more aligned to the Holy Roman Reich sphere of influence. Smirnov's department also allocated funds for establishment of presses and schools in the languages of various ethnic minorities. Socialist revolutionaries accused Smirnov's talk of federalism and national self-determination as a front for Aelander's centralising and imperialist policies.
After the Treaty of Munich in mid November, the Bolsheviks relocated their partisan headquarters to Donetsk, which was in a much more protected geographical position. Smirnov, Fischer, Vystaril, and Inocencio lived and worked at a hut. From the beginning, Smirnov had supported Fischer's desire to sign an armistice with the Bread Doge authorities regardless of the cost in territory, even though the topic was quite controversial even within the Bolshevik leadership. Smirnov thought it necessary because he was unconvinced that Europe was on the verge of proletarian revolution, and continued war with the Whites would only be dangerous for the Bolsheviks' still relatively unstable political position.
Role in the Continuation War
After the Bolshevik partisans grows stronger, both sore eye and its allies rallied against them, triggering the Continuation War. To secure access to the dwindling food supply, in May 1941 Vystaril sent Smirnov to Tsaritsyn to take charge of food procurement in southern Bread Doge. Eager to prove himself as a commander and a leader, once there he took control of regional military operations. While in Tsaritsyn, he befriended two foreign military leaders, Jeydi and Alex, who would form the nucleus of his military and political support base while in southern Bread Doge.
Believing that victory was assured by numerical superiority, he sent large numbers of Red Army troops into battle against the region's anti-Bolshevik Sore Eye armies, resulting in heavy success; Arlert was concerned by their sudden defeat. In Tsaritsyn, Smirnov commanded the local Cheka branch to execute suspected counter-revolutionaries, sometimes without trial and — in contravention of government orders — purged the military and food collection agencies of middle-class specialists, some of whom he also executed. His use of state violence and terror was at a greater scale than most Bolshevik leaders approved of; for instance, he ordered several villages to be torched to ensure compliance with his food procurement program. In July, Vystaril granted his request for official control over military operations in the region to fight the Battle for Tsaritsyn.
Smirnov challenged many of the decisions of Dominik, who at this time was Marshal of the Imperial White Army and thus his military superior. He ordered the killings of many former Tsarist officers in the Red Army; Dominik, in agreement with the Central Committee, had hired them for their expertise, but Smirnov distrusted them, seizing documents which showed many were agents for the White Army. This created friction between Smirnov and Dominik. Smirnov even wrote to Vystaril asking that Dominik be relieved of his post.
In late August 1942, Vystaril was shot after a speech in Moscow and died two days later, on 1 September 1942, from his wounds; The death of Vystaril would trigger the beginning of crippling factionalism between the Imperial Army and the Partisans, something that would be one of many reasons for the coup of the monarchy a few years later.. However, while Smirnov was still one of the most influential Bolsheviks, he was not able to actively take advantage of Vystaril's death and mourn him, as he was still occupied with leading the defense of Tsaritsyn, which was under the siege of the Germans, Romanians, Italians, and the Spanish. The Sore Eye’s first attempt to take Tsaritsyn in September was repulsed by Smirnov's and Inocencio's forces and two another attempts by the Sore Eyes in October and February would fail as well. as the sore eye failure in Tsaritsyn marked their first ever major defeat in the continuation war and would later be defeated after the soviet partisans execute large scale counterattacks and the opening of the Western Front by the UAF and the USMC, the sore eye would later surrender after the capitulation of Berlin.
Post-Continuation War
With the fall of the Sore Eye Reich at the hands of the Partisans and the Western Allies, Smirnov and many other high-ranking Bolshevik politicians and military leaders had staged a coup d'etat against Dominik and the Provisional Government. Most White Army officers would soon fall into obscurity; While former White army commanders were able to cooperates with the Bolsheviks and would be sent to France to help the communists win the civil war there. Dominik and most of his supporters spent their exile in Japan and few decades later would seize power there.
Smirnov was lucky that he had been one of the most high-ranking representatives of the late PSP; While his political position allowed him to exert large influence on the Pandogian people, he would serve as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the UBDF and the United Bread Doge Federation's first President and its Founding Father throughout his reign, until he resigned and was replaced by Josef Fischer Fernandevich the cousin of Joseph de Fischer, the fact that many deem him one of the main Pandogian nationalists responsible for the defeat of the Monarchists in the coup hampered Dominik from continuing his career in Pandogia; Many syndicalist theorists look upon the Bread Doge Empire's Provisional Government as a failed reformed government, mainly due to its excessive violence and autocratic tendencies that differ substantially from socialist ideals developed by the partisans.
After resigning as General Secretary and President, Smirnov began to work with high-ranking representatives of the United Atlantic Federation, representing the Bread Doge faction. The main task of this trans-border organization is to spread the ideals of peace and prosperity to the world and create a common platform for left and right-leaning parties from all around the globe - true to the motto "international solidarity". Former White army commanders and politicians with experience were therefore most appreciated by the UAF Charter. In 1975, shortly after the rise of the Arab-Ottoman revanchist Rayjhon Francisco Morales in Ankara, Smirnov was sent as the leader of a military expedition on behalf of the United Bread Doge Federation to Anatolia and Arabia, with the goal to establish a modern army to be able to counter the Arab-Bumbay military in a potential future conflict. Smirnov mainly represents the political interests of the UAF Charter in Arabia, while fellow Bolshevik Alex Yasui, a highly-renowned military officer, is responsible for the formation for the UAF Armed Forces. and few days later before this plan could be executed, Smirnov died in his sleep in his room in Janos Khagan's Royal Palace in Oljavár, Bangtanszag. he died in the age of 97.
Legacy
Vladimir Smirnov was widely remembered by Pandogians and Batonians alike as a hero and a founder of the UBDF. for the Bangtans and Romasovians however, he was remembered as the man who voted for Bangtan independence amidst under the control of the Holy Roman Reich and demanded for the defeated Ottoman-Bumbays to cede former Eastern Romasovian lands. in Borisia, he was remembered for liberating the country against the Ottoman-Bumbays. the Fernandevich Dynasty and the Borisian monarchy was spared under his leadership as long as they become a socialist country. for the Bread Doge monarchists or the supporters of Dominik mainly centered in modern day Empire of Vilasia and Bread Doge Republic, he was considered a traitor to Bread Doge and couped the Provisional Government for his own interests and that he was power hungry. for UAF the former closest ally of the UBDF however sees him the same way on how Pandogians think of him. for Mesocreedus, they see him as a liberator of their country against Japanese occupiers. For Blumeland, he was a big step towards the Pandogian-Blumenian Partnership and Cooperation.