1893–1968
○ Natural causes
Red commander who drove Kolchak's retreat to its collapse
In late 1919, Eiche's 5th Army drove Kolchak's retreat from the Tobol through Omsk and Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk.
Genrikh Eiche was a Latvian-born revolutionary, Red Army commander and military historian. On the Eastern Front in 1919, he led the 26th Rifle Division in bold operations against White rear areas, then commanded the 5th Army as Kolchak's forces retreated from the Tobol deep into Siberia. He later helped consolidate the Far Eastern Republic militarily, but was imprisoned on false charges during the Great Purge and rehabilitated in 1954.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1915–1917Company commander and staff captain, 245th Infantry Regiment, Imperial Russian Army
- 1917Chairman, Military Revolutionary Committee of the 245th Infantry Regiment
- 1918–1919Red Army regimental and brigade commander on the Eastern Front
- 1919Commander, 26th Rifle Division
- 1919–1920Commander, 5th Army
- 1920–1921Commander-in-chief, People's Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic
- 1922Soviet forces commander in Belarus and the Fergana region
- 1924–1936Official in the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade
- 1954–1968Military historian and author on the Civil War
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionCommander of the Red 5th Army in the pursuit of KolchakIn November-December 1919 he led the pursuit of Kolchak's retreating forces from the Tobol through Omsk to Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk.
- 1937–1938The Great PurgePrisoner during the Great PurgeHe was imprisoned on false charges during the Great Purge.
From Red commander to foreign-trade official: 1921–1938
After leaving the post of commander-in-chief of the Far Eastern Republic, Eiche was sent to Belarus in 1921, where as commander of the Minsk district forces he directed the liquidation of White partisan detachments and sabotage bands; on completing the task he received a certificate of honour from the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in 1922. In March 1922 he was transferred to Central Asia as commander of the Fergana region forces, tasked with operations against the Basmachi movement. Russian Wikipedia gives these Belarusian and Fergana commands as 1921–1923, and other biographical sources place them in the same period.
In 1923 Eiche was discharged from the army, and from 1924 he held senior posts in the USSR People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade (Narkomvneshtorg). Wikipedia states that from 1923 until his arrest in April 1938 he worked in civilian institutions in Moscow, spending more than twelve of those years in the foreign-trade system. A man who had commanded a division and an army at the front up to the early 1920s thus spent the following decade as an economic and trade administrator. That career shift formed the background to his arrest in May 1938 and his conviction on charges of belonging to a Latvian counter-revolutionary organization and of being a cousin of R. I. Eikhe. Because his imprisonment and 1954 rehabilitation are already treated in this person's biography, this section focuses on the 1921–1938 transition from battlefield commander to civilian economic official.