Strod volunteered for the Red Army in early 1918, and was active on the Eastern Front and then in Siberia with the partisan detachment of N. A. Kalandarishvili, but was captured by the Whites and imprisoned at Olekminsk (November 1918–December 1919). He was released following the collapse of the anti-Bolshevik government of A. V. Kolchak and subsequently served with several Red Guard and partisan detachments in the Far East. In October 1920, he was placed in command of a cavalry detachment of the People’s-Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic, and in February–March 1923, led the Red forces that crushed the Iakutsk Revolt and captured the White general V. N. Pepeliaev. Having won the Order of the Red Banner on three occasions, Strod retired in 1927, due to ill health. He also joined the All-Union Communist Party in 1927. Thereafter, he worked for Osoaviakhim (the Union of Societies of Assistance of Defense and Aviation-Chemical Construction of the USSR) at Tomsk.
Strod’s fame did not prevent him being arrested, on 4 February 1937, and subsequently executed during the purges. He was posthumously rehabilitated, on 23 July 1957, and a general cargo ship built in 1975 (and still in service out of Vladivostok) was named in his honor.
Struve, Petr Berngardovich (26 January 1870–22 February 1944). The son of the Baltic German vice governor of Perm guberniia and a graduate of the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1895), P. B. Struve was a prominent philosopher, economist, historian, and political activist who offered advice and support to the White leaders in the “Russian” Civil Wars. He was elected to the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences in 1916, but was expelled (in absentia) by the Soviet authorities in 1928.
From the early 1890s, Struve had been active and influential in social-democratic circles in the Russian capital (the young V. I. Lenin was one of his admirers), and by the middle of that decade was acknowledged as the leading theorist of “legal Marxism.” In 1898, he wrote the founding charter of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, but his sympathies were evolving toward liberalism, and he went abroad in 1901 to found and edit (from 1902) the influential liberal journal Osvobozhdenie (“Liberation”). Struve returned to Russia in October 1905 and was one of the cofounders of the Kadets. Appalled by what he perceived as the irrational destructiveness of the Russian people and the unreasoning intransigence of the intelligentsia during the 1905 Revolution, he served from 1905 to 1915 as the leader and spokesman of the right wing of the party’s Central Committee, and in 1907, he was elected as a Kadet deputy to the Second State Duma. Following that Duma’s dissolution, he abandoned active politics and devoted himself to scholarship, becoming a professor at St. Petersburg University in 1913. He was also involved in numerous publishing projects before the revolutions of 1917, including editing the leading liberal newspaper Russkaia mysl′ (“Russian Thought”) and inspiring the hugely influential collection of essays Vekhi (“Signposts,” 1909), a critique of the Russian intelligentsia’s radical and rationalist traditions. He was a staunch defensist during the First World War, eventually (on 8 June 1915) resigning from the Kadets in protest against the party’s criticisms of the government.
Struve played only a secondary role in politics during 1917, as director of the Economic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Provisional Government, but following the October Revolution, he became a vocal opponent of the Soviet regime and an advocate of armed struggle against it and moved immediately to South Russia to join the political administration of the Volunteer Army. When Red forces drove the Volunteers out of the Don territory and onto the First Kuban (Ice) March, however, he returned to Moscow to live underground. In 1918, he contributed to the sequel to Vekhi, Iz glubiny (“From the Depths”) and joined one of the most influential anti-Bolshevik underground organizations, the Right Center, before (having tried and failed to find a safe route to Arkhangel′sk) fleeing to Finland in December 1918, both to escape arrest and to offer political advice to General N. N. Iudenich. There, from January 1919, he was a member of the Kadet-monarchist Political Conference, based at Helsinki. In 1919, he moved to Paris and was connected to the Russian Political Conference, before returning to South Russia to edit the mouthpiece of the White regime of General A. I. Denikin, the newspaper Velikaia Rossiia (“Great Russia”), and to work with the White intelligence service, Osvag. Together with A. V. Krivovshein, Struve was one of the closest political advisors of General P. N. Wrangel, and from April to November 1920, was director of foreign affairs of the South Russian Government. He was evacuated, with the rest of the Wrangel regime, to Turkey in November 1920, and moved from there to Bulgaria (1921), Czechoslovakia (1922–1923), and Berlin (1923–1926), before finally settling in Paris, as an influential and busy teacher, publicist, and writer. In emigration, Struve edited the newspapers Ruuskaia mysl′ (“Russian Thought”) and Vozrozhdenie (“Regeneration”) and remained a staunch opponent of the Soviet government, but during the Second World War, he excoriated collaborators with the Nazis. Struve was the author of some 660 published works.
Stučka, Pēteris (Stuchka, Petr Ivanovich) (26 July 1865–25 January 1932). The prolific writer and prominent Soviet jurist Pēteris Stučka was also head of the Bolshevik regime in Latvia during the Latvian War of Independence. Of Latvian peasant stock, he was born at Kokenhausen (Koknese), in Livland guberniia. After graduating from the Law Faculty of St. Petersburg University (1888), he worked as an assistant advocate in Riga and was editor of the progressive newspaper Dienas Lapa (“The Daily News”). He was exiled for five years in the 1890s for his political activities, before returning to Riga to found what was to become the Latvian branch of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1904, aligning himself with the Bolsheviks. In 1917, he became a member of the Petersburg Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) and worked on the editorial board of the party newspaper, Pravda (“The Truth”).
Following the October Revolution, Stučka worked in the People’s Commissariat for Justice (and served as commissar for justice from 18 March to 22 August 1918), drafting numerous Soviet laws, including that of 10 November 1917 abolishing the civil ranks of the imperial era, and in July 1918 prepared the draft instruction on revolutionary tribunals. He returned to Latvia at the end of that year, as chairman of the Sovnarkom of the newly proclaimed Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic (4 December 1918–22 May 1919) and chairman of its central executive committee (6 March 1919–13 January 1920), operating latterly from Latgale in opposition to the nationalist government in Riga and the Baltic Landeswehr. With the establishment of the independent, nationalist Latvian Republic, he moved to Moscow to become deputy people’s commissar for justice. He also worked in various other Soviet institutions, including the Communist Academy, and from 1923 until his death was chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Stučka was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. After his death, numerous places and institutions (including, from 1958 to 1990, the Latvian State University) were renamed in his honor.