Military-Political Leadership in the Black Earth Region in the Spring of 1918

Abstract

In the spring of 1918, the phenomenon of military-political leaderiship, i. e. a situation when military commanders attempted to control political power, clearly manifested itself in the provinces of the Central Black Earth Region (warlordism). Despite the large number of studies concerning this type of political leadership during the civil war, it should be noted that there are no special works on the Central Black Earth Region that would study this phenomenon comprehensively and indicate its place in the emerging political system. The result was a lack of systematic knowledge about military-political leadership in the territory that was almost constantly controlled by the Bolshevik regime. The main part of the study collects the most striking examples of military-political leadership, pointing out the multi-layered nature of this phenomenon, which encompassed not only provincial, but also district and even volost centres: the dictatorship of I.P. Sukhonosov, the regimes of M.V. Sluvis – E.N. Zabitskiy, G.K. Petrov, M.M. Sakharov, and others. The military-political leadership of the spring of 1918 is also presented as a universal phenomenon, i. e. characteristic of other regions controlled by the Bolshevik regime. The short-lived nature of this historical alternative for the formation of the Soviet political elite is emphasized. The conclusion points out that the Soviet political system was already capable of coping with the attempts of individual prominent leaders to establish a political dictatorship in 1918. It is suggested that such attempts lacked a stable social base in the peasant region, unlike in the Cossack territories, where anti-Bolshevik regimes were most often military-political dictatorships with leader-like leaders. Doubts are expressed about the need to apply the term “Bonapartism” to the military-political leadership of the Central Black Earth Region, as it was a short-lived, unsuccessful, and insufficiently large-scale phenomenon.

For citation: Razin’kov M.E. Military-Political Leadership in the Black Earth Region in the Spring of 1918. Vestnik Severnogo (Arkticheskogo) federal’nogo universiteta. Ser.: Gumanitarnye i sotsial’nye nauki, 2026, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 29–39. https://doi.org/10.37482/2687-1505-V525