Tsarist general turned Red Army theorist who clashed with Stalin at Tsaritsyn
At Tsaritsyn in 1918 he reported on Voroshilov: "As a troop commander he lacks the necessary qualities. He is insufficiently imbued with the duty of service and does not adhere to the elementary rules of commanding troops." Days later he and his entire staff were arrested.
Andrei Snesarev was a military intellectual and Orientalist who crossed from tsarist lieutenant general to Red Army commander. After rising to corps command in WWI, he joined the Red Army in 1918 but was dismissed and arrested during the Tsaritsyn defence for clashing with Stalin and Voroshilov over the value of military expertise. As head of the General Staff Academy (1919–1921) he established its three-year curriculum and pioneered lectures on the philosophy of war; as rector of the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies (1921–1930) he laid the foundations of Soviet Orientology. Made the first Hero of Labour among Soviet commanders in 1928, he was swept into the fabricated 'Spring' case in 1930, sentenced to death, reprieved by Stalin's personal note, and died in 1937 after strokes suffered in the camps.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1888–1899Moscow University (physics & mathematics); Moscow Infantry Junker School; General Staff Academy (1st class)
- 1900–1913Staff officer Turkestan MD, Pamir detachment chief; military-geographic study of India and Afghanistan; Central Asian intelligence
- 1914–1917WWI: regiment, brigade, division, corps commander; lieutenant general; Orders of St. George 3rd & 4th class
- 1918Joined Red Army; military leader North Caucasus MD — clashed with Stalin & Voroshilov at Tsaritsyn, arrested then cleared
- 1919–1921Head of RKKA General Staff Academy: established 3-year curriculum, inaugurated lectures on the philosophy of war
- 1921–1930Rector & professor Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies; chief lecturer military geography; Hero of Labour (1928)
- 1930–1937Arrested in 'Spring' case, death→10 years; strokes in camp, released 1934, died 1937, rehabilitated 1958
Related historical events
Reconnaissance in India and the Pamirs, and the Orientalist writings (1899–1913)
After graduating at the top of his General Staff Academy class, Snesarev served from 1899 in the Turkestan military district, where he was assigned to the Central Asian and Indian directions. Between June 1899 and February 1900, on the personal instruction of War Minister Kuropatkin, he was sent to India with Colonel Polozov to study the lands between Russian Turkestan and British India and to collect military-statistical, that is intelligence, information on the Anglo-Indian army. The route ran from Tashkent through Andijan, Osh, the Pamir plateau, the princely states of Hunza and Nagar, Gilgit, and the upper Indus to Srinagar and Lahore, with visits onward to Agra and Simla; he was received by the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon. His intelligence pseudonym was 'Musafir'. In autumn 1900 he visited England, worked in the British Museum library on Orientalist literature and gathered material for his book The North Indian Theatre. In 1900–1904 he took part in reconnaissances in the Pamirs and Eastern Bukhara, and in 1902–1903, as chief of the Pamir detachment, he conducted military-geographical research in the Pamirs. He headed the Central Asian department of the Imperial Society of Orientalists in 1905 and in 1908 presented two papers at the 15th International Congress of Orientalists in Copenhagen, on the religions and customs of the Western Pamir mountaineers and on the awakening of national self-consciousness in Asia. The political, geographical and ethnographic material gathered in India was worked up into such studies as The Pamirs (1903), The North Indian Theatre (1903), Eastern Bukhara (1906), India as the Chief Factor in the Central Asian Question (1908) and Afghanistan (1921); this field experience and his command of several Eastern languages became the foundation of his later lectures on military geography and Orientology at the General Staff Academy and the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies.