Northwestern Government

a counterrevolutionary puppet “government,” established in 1919 under N. N. Iudenich, commander in chief of the Northwestern Army of the White Guards. The Northwestern Government represented one of several attempts to conceal a White military dictatorship behind a democratic facade. It was established on Aug. 11, 1919, in Revel (now Tallinn), by a group of representatives of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois parties—Cadets, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks. The members of the “government,” headed by the Russian oil industrialist S. G. Lianozov, were chosen by General F. G. Marsh, a member of the British mission to the Baltic. The British occupiers demanded that the “government” recognize the independence of Estonia and that the Russian White Guards and Estonian White forces unite for a new march against Petrograd. The “government” disbanded on Dec. 5, 1919, after the collapse of Iudenich’s Petrograd offensive.