Kalandarishvili, Nestor Aleksandrovich

(party pseudonyms, Nestor, Dedushka [Granddad]). Born June 26 (July 8), 1876 (1874, according to other data), in the village of Shemokmedi, in present-day Makharadze Raion, Georgian SSR; died Mar. 6, 1922, near Yakutsk. One of the leaders of the partisan movement in Eastern Siberia during the Civil War of 1918–20.

Kalandarishvili studied at Tbilisi Teachers’ Seminary. He joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1903 and was involved in the 1905–06 peasant uprising in Guria (in Western Georgia). Arrested in 1907, he was confined in Siberia until February 1917. In 1917 he joined the anarcho-communist group and in 1921 became a member of the Communist Party. He helped establish Soviet power in Irkutsk. In 1918, on instructions from the underground Irkutsk province committee of the RCP (Bolshevik), he formed a partisan detachment that conducted operations in Irkutsk Province against Kolchak’s forces and later fought Ataman Semionov in Transbaikalia. In late 1921 he became commander of the troops in the Yakutsk region and in the Severnyi Krai. In January 1922 he went out with a unit of 300 men on an operation against a White Guard band. They were ambushed, and he was fatally wounded. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.