Dmitrii Zhloba

Zhloba, Dmitrii Petrovich 

Born June 3 (15), 1887; died June 10, 1938. Hero of the Civil War (1918–20). Member of the CPSU from 1917.

Zhloba was born in Kiev. He was the son of a Ukrainian farm laborer. He participated actively in the Revolution of 1905–07 and was a member of a detachment of armed workers in Nikolaev. Zhloba worked in the mines of the Donbas. He was arrested in May 1916 for participating in the Gorlovka-Shcherbinovka strike and drafted into the army. He graduated from aviation school in Moscow in 1917 and was elected a member of the Moscow soviet in the same year. During the October armed uprising of 1917 he commanded a Red Guard detachment in Moscow. At the end of 1917 he was sent to the Donbas as a military commissar. He organized a miners’ Red Guard detachment and fought with it in battles to liberate the Donbas, Kiev, and Rostov. He then commanded a regiment, a brigade, and the Steel Division in battles against the White Guards in the Kuban’ . In October 1918, Zhloba’ s division completed an 800-km march from Nevinnomysskaia to Tsaritsyn and on October 15 dealt a blow to the rear of General P. K. Krasnov’s forces, thus rendering great assistance to the defenders of Tsaritsyn. In 1919 he commanded a special partisan detachment and a force near Astrakhan. He also commanded a cavalry brigade that was part of B. M. Dumenko’s cavalry corps and participated in the liberation of Novocherkassk in January 1920. In February 1920 he became commander of the I Cavalry Corps and a cavalry group, which both operated against Wrangel’s forces in the summer of 1920. In March 1921 he commanded the 18th Cavalry Division, which completed a difficult crossing through the Goderdzi Pass and liberated Batumi. Zhloba was awarded two Orders of the Red Banner and gold-plated honorary arms. He worked in the economic sector from 1922.