“Nosovich and Kovalevsky Are Politically Unreliable People”: S.S. Ioffe’s Memoir About the Work of the Supreme Military Inspectorate in the South of Russia in 1918

Abstract

The material presents the first publication of the memoir of Bolshevik S.S. Ioffe (1895–1938) about the work of the Supreme Military Inspectorate during the Civil War in South Russia in 1918. Ioffe served as deputy chairman of the inspectorate’s political section and was well aware of the situation in Tsaritsyn, which at that time was being defended from the Whites. The memoirist pays special attention to the activities of a White underground organization headed by former General A.L. Nosovich at the headquarters of the North Caucasus Military District. Ioffe wrote his memoir in May 1922 due to the fact that the Special Department of the State Political Administration, in the course of the preparation of the trial of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, was at that time investigating the case of conspiracies in Tsaritsyn in the summer of 1918. Almost four years passed between the events of the Civil War described and the writing of the memoir. According to him, Ioffe did not have any documents at hand and wrote from memory. Because of this, some facts and their sequence were stated inaccurately. Nevertheless, the memoir seems to be an important and interesting historical source containing new data on the events in and around Tsaritsyn during the first defence of the city in 1918. Moreover, the reliability of Ioffe’s testimony in a number of cases is confirmed by the recently published memoir of General A.L. Nosovich, a White Guard agent in the Red Army. The document is kept in the Archives of the Federal Security Service of Russia in the Volgograd Region and was declassified in 2022.