Gregory Oreshkin – an unwitting perpetrator of the arrest of the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Faction of the 5th All-Russian Congress of Soviets

Abstract

Gregory Oreshkin, head of the Main Headquarters Operations Department of the All-Russian militant organization of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (Internationalists) Party hold a lifelong grudge against Ya.M. Sverdlov, Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, leader of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee’s Secretariat. On July 6, 1918, the day of the assassination of the German ambassador to Soviet Russia Wilhelm von Mirbach and the beginning of the Socialist Left rebellion, Oreshkin commanded the leftist Socialist-Revolutionaries (SR) squad, which, by order of the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, was included in the armed guard of the Bolshoi Theater during the V All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Sverdlov, in a conversation with Oreshkin, under the pretext of providing security, asked Oreshkin and his combatants to urgently arrive at the meeting of the Left SRs. After Oreshkin and his squad left the Bolshoi Theater building, the entire faction of the Left SRs of the Congress was arrested.

Gregory Oreshkin has only recently become the object of historians’ attention; no biography of him has yet been written. The present article, based on the published sources and the materials of the Central State Archives of Moscow, is an attempt to partially correct the indicated historiographical gap.