From 1923, Żeligowski served as inspector general of the Polish Army and commander of the Warsaw Military District, and from 1925 to 1927 was minister of military affairs. He then retired to write his memoirs and other works on recent Polish military history, before returning to politics in 1935, as a member of the Polish sejm until 1939. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, he volunteered for the army but was turned down on account of his age. Having escaped to Paris, he joined the Polish government-in-exile, which transferred to London after the fall of France. Żeligowski died in London, but his body was returned to Poland for burial in the military section of the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw.
Żeligowski Mutiny. This staged rebellion, led by the Polish general Lucjan Żeligowski in October 1920, during the Polish–Lithuanian War, led to the establishment of the short-lived Central Lithuanian Republic, thereby paving the way for Poland’s annexation of Vilnius/Wilno two years later.
As the Soviet–Polish War wound down in the autumn of 1920, Soviet Russia handed control of the area around Vilnius to Lithuanian forces, who had allowed the Red Army to occupy the area under the terms of the Soviet–Lithuanian Treaty of Moscow (12 July 1920), thereby denying it to the Poles. Lithuania’s possession of Vilnius seemed also to be confirmed by the Polish–Lithuanian Suwałki Agreement (7 October 1920). Poland’s leader, Józef Piłsudski, was determined that Vilnius should be controlled by Poland, but did not want to undermine the pro-Polish faction within Lithuania by a repeat of the Sejny uprising of 1919. He therefore instructed Żeligowski, who was a native of Lithuania, to lead his forces (the 14,000-strong 1st Lithuanian–Belarussian Infantry Division) in a “mutiny”: they were to “desert” from the Polish Army and “independently” seize Vilnius (which Lithuania claimed as its capital), enabling Warsaw to deny all involvement. Żeligowski moved against Vilnius on 8 October 1920, and the following day the outnumbered Lithuanian garrison abandoned the city. On 12 October 1920, the independence of the Central Lithuanian Republic was proclaimed.
ZEMGOR. Founded on 10 July 1915, to assist the tsarist government’s war efforts (chiefly in the fields of medicine, sanitation, food supply, and the care of refugees), Zemgor (the United Committee of the Union of Zemstvos and Municipal Councils) was officially disbanded by the Soviet government in January 1918, but was reactivated in February 1921 by local government leaders among the emigration, in response to the massive evacuation of military and civilian refugees from South Russia following the defeat of the forces of General P. N. Wrangel.
The organization was registered and based in Paris (although it had branches in Prague, Berlin, and other centers of the Russian diaspora) and was led, in succession, by G. E. L′vov, A. I. Konovalov, and N. D. Avksent′ev. In accordance with the wishes of the Russian Conference of Ambassadors in Paris, it became the central organization in the international efforts to assist Russian refugees across the world in the wake of the “Russian” Civil Wars. The organization received funds from various tsarist Russian bank accounts via the Conference of Ambassadors (which regarded Zemgor as the single organization authorized to disperse such monies). Although the dispensation of those funds caused many internal arguments (partly as a consequence of the variety of political affiliations—from socialists through liberals to monarchists—of those involved in Zemgor’s leadership) and although there were sharp conflicts over access to and control of funds with other émigré organizations (notably ROVS, which Zemgor, encouraged by French governments of the 1920s, refused to recognize as in any respect a repository of Russian state authority), the organization contributed significantly to the settlement, integration, and sometimes even survival of refugees during a difficult period. By October 1921, it was managing 370 refugee institutions across Europe, the majority of them in Turkey, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, and was feeding 2,500 people each day in Constantinople alone. Among its most outstanding achievements was the opening of dozens of schools and orphanages (as many as 90 by some accounts), in which work it was assisted by the Committee of Help to the Russian Child, which organized fund-raising drives (chiefly in the United States). The Paris Zemgor remains in existence to this day, running a rest home in the Cormeilles-en-Parisis district, northwest of the French capital.
ZEMLIACHKA (zalkind), ROSALIIA SAMOILOVNA (20 March 1876–21 January 1947). Probably the most famous (or infamous) of all female soldiers who served in the Red Army during the civil wars, Rosa Zemliachka, the daughter of a Jewish merchant, was born at Kiev and was educated at the Kiev Girls’ Gymnasium and the Faculty of Medicine of Lyons University. She joined a social-democratic organization in 1896 and engaged in underground work in France and Russia (where she was sentenced to a year’s internal exile in 1899) before becoming an agent of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party’s newspaper, Iskra (“The Spark”) at Odessa and Ekaterinoslav. Following the party schism in 1903, she gravitated toward the Bolsheviks, was active with the forerunners of the Military Organization of the RSDLP(b) during the 1905 Revolution, and was frequently arrested. Following further party work in Baku, she went into emigration in 1909, but returned to party work with the Bolsheviks’ Moscow Regional Bureau during the First World War. In early 1918, she sympathized with the Left Bolsheviks, opposing the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918). That same year, she began work as a military commissar in the Red Army, initially at brigade level, but soon rising to become chief military commissar of the 8th Red Army (1918–1919) and the 13th Red Army (1919–1920) on the Southern Front. In 1919, she was an active member of the Military Opposition, calling for the enhancement of the powers of the commissars. In 1920, she was also, briefly, chief military commissar of the Northern Railways.
During the civil wars, “Bloody Rosa,” as she was nicknamed by her enemies, was notorious for the prominent part she played, as secretary of the Crimean regional committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (20 November 1920–6 January 1921), in helping Béla Kun with the implementation of a campaign of Red Terror against the remnants of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel that had been stranded in Crimea following the Whites’ evacuation of the peninsula. She subsequently held numerous party and state posts and, having been an active supporter of the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, was eventually made a member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in March 1939. She died in January 1947 and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.