Mironov, Filipp Kuzmich

Born Oct. 14 (26), 1872; died Apr. 2, 1921. Soviet army commander. Member of the Communist Party from January 1920.

Mironov was born in the stanitsa (large cossack village) of Ust’-Medveditskaia, Voiska Donskogo Oblast (now the city of Serafimovich, Volgograd Oblast), into a cossack family. He graduated from the Novocherkassk Cossack Officers School in 1898 and served in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. In 1906 he sided with the trudoviki (labor group) and participated in revolutionary actions of the cossacks, for which he was dismissed from service. In World War I (1914–18) he was given the rank of host starshina and awarded four orders and the St. George Weapon.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Mironov joined the Socialist Revolutionaries-Maximalists and was elected commander of the 32nd Don Cossack Regiment. In January 1918 he led the regiment to the Don and participated in the struggle for Soviet power; he served as regional commissar on the Upper Don. From 1918 to early 1919, Mironov commanded a regiment, a brigade, the 23rd Rifle Division, and a group of forces of the Ninth Army in fighting against General P. N. Krasnov’s White Cossack troops. He was named commander of an expeditionary corps on the Southern Front in June 1919.

Mironov was arrested in late September 1919 for insubordination by departing in late August 1919 from the Southern Front with units of the Special Cossack Corps that had been formed in Saransk; in October he was sentenced by a military tribunal to be shot but was immediately pardoned by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and rehabilitated by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik). He was a member of the Don Executive Committee and chief of the land department from late October. Mironov successfully commanded the Second Cavalry Army in combat against General P. N. Wrangel’s troops from Sept. 2 to Dec. 6, 1920. He was awarded two Orders of the Red Banner and the Honorary Revolutionary Weapon.