Shcherbachev, Dmitrii

Shcherbachev, Dmitrii Grigor’evich 

Born Feb. 6 (18), 1857; died Jan. 18, 1932, in Nice. Russian military leader. General of the infantry (1914).

The son of a nobleman, Shcherbachev graduated from the Mikhail Artillery School in 1876 and the Academy of the General Staff in 1884. Between 1901 and 1906 he commanded a regiment and a rifle brigade. He was head of the Academy of the General Staff from 1907 to 1912, when he assumed command of the IX Army Corps, which fought in the battle of Galicia at the start of World War I and occupied L’vov.

Shcherbachev was commander of the Eleventh Army of the Southwestern Front from April to October 1915 and the Seventh Army of the same front from October 1915 to April 1917. In April he was appointed assistant to the king of Rumania for military operations and commander in chief of the Russian armies on the Rumanian Front.

The Rumanian and Southwestern fronts were combined in December 1917 to form the Ukrainian Front under Shcherbachev’s command. Shcherbachev adopted a counterrevolutionary position and supported the Ukrainian Directory until January 1918. In February of that year he concluded an armistice with Germany in Focsani, and in March he consented to the introduction of Rumanian troops into Bessarabia.

Shcherbachev attempted to form six corps based on nationality (two Polish, two Ukrainian, one Russian, and one Muslim), which were to be used for counterrevolutionary purposes. His efforts, however, were unsuccessful. In April 1918, in Paris, he set up an agency of the Volunteer Army. The agency helped the White Guards with the Entente’s supplies but failed in its efforts to form White Guard units in Bohemia and Serbia from among Russian prisoners of war and from volunteers.

After the Civil War, Shcherbachev withdrew from public life.