Kravchenko, Aleksandr

Born 1881 in Voronezh Province; died Nov. 21, 1923, in Rostov-on-Don. One of the leaders of the partisan movement in Siberia during the Civil War of 1918–20. A member of the CPSU from 1920.

In 1907, Kravchenko began to work as an agronomist in the village of Shushenskoe, Minusinsk Okrug, Siberia. In 1914 he was drafted into the army and served in Achinsk. After the February Revolution of 1917 he was a deputy of the Achinsk soviet. In 1918 he organized a partisan detachment to fight Kolchak’s forces. In April 1919, Kravchenko’s partisan detachment joined with the partisan detachment of P. E. Shchetinkin; a partisan army was created under Kravchenko’s command and won a number of victories; by November 1919 it had grown to 18,000 men. In January 1920 it joined with the Red Army. After the Civil War he worked in the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture; in 1922 he became manager of the provincial agriculture department in Piatigorsk. He was the author of the memoirs “The Kamarchag Front” (published in the book Years of Fire: A Collection of Memoirs, 1962).