Starynkevich, Sergei Sazontovich (Sazonovich also SOZONtOVICH) (6 July 1874–1933). One of the few members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR) to be granted a ministerial portfolio in a White government, S. S. Starynkevich was born at Lutsk, in Volynsk guberniia. He graduated from the Law Faculty of Moscow University in 1900, after studies that were twice interrupted by periods of administrative exile as a consequence of his political activities. He pursued a career as a barrister in Moscow, but as a talented orator, he became increasingly involved in political work during the 1905 Revolution, as an organizer of the Peasants’ Union and as a prominent member of the Lawyers’ Union. In 1905, he also joined the PSR and worked with the party’s terrorist wing, the Combat Organization. He went abroad in early 1906, to evade arrest, and lived in Warsaw, Munich, and Switzerland, but returned the following year to help organize a revolutionary officers’ organization in Finland. He was arrested in the autumn of 1907 and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, then was exiled to eastern Siberia. He then worked in a legal firm and as a journalist at Irkutsk and became closer to elements on the right of the PSR.
On 9 April 1917, Starynkevich was named procurator of the Irkutsk Legal Chambers; in that capacity, in early 1918 he attempted several times to intervene to temper the “revolutionary justice” being administered in eastern Siberia by the Cheka. For this, he was arrested and imprisoned by the Soviet authorities and received a public reprimand at a revolutionary tribunal. A supporter of the Democratic Counter-Revolution in Siberia, in July 1918 he was named director of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Provisional Siberian Government, and in August 1918 became its minister of justice (in which capacity he supervised the investigation into the execution of the Romanov family at Ekaterinburg). He was also a member of the government’s Administrative Council. In September 1918, he attended the Ufa State Conference and was subsequently named minister of justice of the Ufa Directory (4 November 1918). He remained in that post in the Omsk government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak and served also as procurator general of the Government Senate (in fact, he was one of the author’s of the Kolchak regime’s constitution, “The Statute on the Provisional Structure of State Power in Russia,” of 18 November 1918), for which he was ostracized by his party comrades, particularly after the failure of his ministry to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Omsk massacre in December 1918. However, Starynkevich expressed himself as increasingly frustrated by the illegalities of the White military—its propensity for samosud—and like other moderates in the government (A. N. Gattenberger, I. I. Serebrennikov, V. V. Sapozhnikov, et al.), felt obliged to resign his post, in the spring of 1919.
Starynkevich left office on 2 May 1919 and arrived at Vladivostok in early September of that year. There is some evidence that he had been invited to involve himself in the organizations that planned the rising at Vladivostok against the Kolchak regime in November 1919 (the Gajda putsch), but he left Russia on 19 September 1919, before those plans reached fruition. In emigration he lived at Tsuruga (in Japan) and later in France, where he involved himself in relief work among Russian refugees.
STATE ECONOMIC CONFERENCE. First convened at Omsk on 22 November 1918 by Admiral A. V. Kolchak, this body was intended as a forum for the discussion of economic issues and a source of expert advice for the Omsk government and its supreme ruler. Its main task was to examine issues relating to the supply of the Russian Army, particularly in the wake of the withdrawal from the front of the Czechoslovak Legion and its well-developed commissary network. The SEC was chaired by the Petrograd financier S. G. Feodos′ev (who had been state comptroller in the imperial government from 1 December 1916 to 1 March 1917) and included representatives of the Siberian cooperative movement and local branches of the Congress of Trade and Industry, as well as the ministers of war, finance, food, supply, trade and industry, and ways and communications of the Omsk government. However, it gradually atrophied and went into recess on 21 May 1919, pending a review of its statutes.
The SEC was reconvened on 19 June 1919, with a slightly broader and more democratic membership and with a more clearly defined constitution and remit, including the right to review and comment upon (but not veto) all government legislation. From late August, however, when the SEC demanded still wider powers from the supreme ruler and was rebuffed, it again ceased to function. It was reconvened at Irkutsk, on 8 December 1919, following the Kolchak regime’s relocation to that city, but government ministers walked out when some delegates demanded that the regime make peace with the Bolsheviks, and thereafter the conference ceased to operate.
State Guard (of the ARMED FORCES OF SOUTH RUSSIA). This force was created on the orders of the White leader General A. I. Denikin, on 25 March 1919, to fulfill military-police functions on the territory occupied by the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR). It included provincial, city, and district subsections, as well as special railway, port, and river detachments, and was jointly controlled by the guard command and the local civilian authorities. The former were also answerable to the chief of the Directorate of Internal Affairs of the Special Council of the commander in chief of the AFSR. Among its most powerful units were the Black Sea (1,920 men), Stavropol′ (3,342 men), and Ekaterinoslav provincial brigades.
In command of the State Guard of the AFSR (from 19 September 1919) was General N. N. Martos. Its chief of staff was General D. N. Parkhomov (from 6 November 1919).
STATE UNITY COUNCIL OF RUSSIA. This anti-Bolshevik organization was ostensibly a multiparty coalition (like the Union for the Regeneration of Russia, the National Center, and others), but it was dominated by right-wing Kadets and other Rightist elements and never succeeded in attracting support from the Left. Nevertheless, the Council’s 45 members claimed to represent the State Duma and the State Council of the imperial regime, as well as city dumas, the zemstvos, trade and industry organizations, the Russian Orthodox Church, academic organizations, and so forth. Chairman of the organization, and head of its nine-man Central Bureau, was the landowner Baron V. V. Meller-Zakomel′skii, but among its leading members were such prominent liberal figures as P. N. Miliukov, A. V. Krivovshein, and N. S. Tret′iakov.
The State Unity Council was created at Kiev in late October 1918, chiefly by those (like Miliukov and Krivoshein) who (paradoxically, given the council’s title) held that, for the sake of Russia’s “unity,” even collaboration with Germany and Ukrainian nationalists could be condoned, if that would hasten the collapse of the Bolsheviks. However, the following month the group sent a delegation (led by Meller-Zakomel′skii, Miliukov, and Krivoshein) to the Jassy Conference, and from December 1918 (as the socialist Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic captured Kiev), it was centered at Odessa. There (in light of the collapse of the Central Powers), it sought, unsuccessfully, to influence the direction and purposes of Allied intervention. The organization collapsed in the wake of the withdrawal of French and Greek forces from Odessa in April 1919.