Dmitri Zhloba

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Dmitri Petrovich Zhloba (Russian: Дмитрий Петрович Жлоба) (June 3, 1887 – June 10, 1938) was a Soviet military commander involved in the Russian Civil War.

He was born in Kiev, Ukraine, then part of Imperial Russia. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, he was a member of an armed workers’ detachment in Mykolaiv. In May 1916, he was arrested for participation in an anti-governmental strike and sent to the World War I fronts. In the days of the Bolshevik October coup 1917, he was a member of the Moscow Soviet and commanded a Red Guard detachment against the Kremlin-based Junkers. At the end of 1917, he was sent as a war commissar to Donbass where he organized a miners’ Red Guard unit which fought at Kiev and Rostov. He was assigned to the Caucasus Front of the Russian Civil War in May 1918. As a commander of the “Steel Brigade”, he led, in October 1918, a raid in the rear of the White Cossacks under Pyotr Krasnov. In 1919-1920, he commanded a cavalry brigade and then the 1st Cavalry Corps operating against Denikin’s and Wrangel’s armies. In February 1921, he led the 18th Cavalry Division which reinforced the 11th Soviet Red Army in the war against Georgia. During the March Batum Operation in Georgia, he traversed a virtually impermeable Goderdzi Pass in the Lesser Caucasus, to occupy Batumi for the Soviet government. For his successful campaigns, Zhloba was awarded with two Orders of the Red Banner. Since 1922, he served in the North Caucasus until being sacked and executed during Stalin’s Great Purges in 1938.