“Pretty Much Obeyed All Requirements of the Authorities and the Circumstances ...”: Milestones in the Biography of the Law Officer, General–Major N.M. Senitsky

Abstract

The article presents a historical and biographical study devoted to General N.M. Senitsky – the military lawyer, who served in Omsk in the “old” and later in the White army, became a Soviet employee, was subjected to political oppression. The case-study of social adaptation of the general sheds light on the military and socio-political situation in Siberia on the eve of and during the Civil War and in the first decade after its end. The nature of the study determines its key methods: biographical and problem-chronological. The biographical method allows the author to interpret the events of the era, linking them with Senitsky’s professional activities and personal life. The problem-chronological method permits to trace the logic behind the changes in the military-political sphere of the region and behind the facts of Senitsky’s biography and to underscore their correlation. The source base of the article is the complex of unpublished documents from the 1920–30s found by the author in the fonds of the Historical Archive of the Omsk Region and in the archive of the Directorate of the Federal Security Service of Russia for the Omsk Region: sources of personal provenance (N.M. Senitsky's autobiographies and questionnaires), documents from the special register on former White Guard officers, and investigatory records of the Soviet state security bodies, as well as personal file of the lishenetz (disenfranchised person). The identified sources help to reconstruct N.M. Senitsky’s biography in great detail.