Valentin Andreevich Trifonov

Born Aug. 27, 1888; died Mar. 15, 1938. Participant in the October Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918–20; Soviet military figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1904.

The son of a cossack, Trifonov was born in the stanitsa (large cossack village) of Novocherkasskaia (now the city of Novocherkassk) in the Region of the Don Cossack Host, and he became a machinist. He took part in the armed uprising of 1905 in Rostov-on-Don and then did party work in Ekaterinburg (now Sverdlovsk), Tiumen’, and Petrograd. He was arrested and exiled several times.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Trifonov was named secretary of the Bolshevik faction of the Petrograd Soviet. He became the secretary of the central command of the Red Guard in August 1917 and a member of the main headquarters of the Red Guard in October. From December 1917 to April 1918, Trifonov was a member of the collegium of the People’s Commissariat for War and of the All-Russian Collegium on Organization and Formation of the Red Army. From 1918 to 1921 he organized units of the Red Army in the Urals. During the same period, Trifonov was also a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Third Army (November 1918 to February 1919), commander of the Don Expeditionary Corps, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Special Group of Forces of the Southern Front, and a member of the revolutionary military councils of the Southeastern Front (October to December 1919) and the Caucasian Front (January 1920 to May 1921).

From 1924 to 1925, Trifonov was chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. From 1921 to 1923 and again from 1925, he held various executive administrative positions. Trifonov was a delegate to the Ninth Congress of the RCP(B) in 1920.