Until now, many are interested in how Brezhnev's great-granddaughter Galina lives, whose biography is filled with tragic events. People were sure that she was destined for a good fate. Galina was grandfather's favorite, a darling from birth. Everyone was sure that a bright future awaited the girl, but they were deeply mistaken. In return for a prosperous life, Brezhnev's great-granddaughter had to endure the betrayal of her mother, poverty and a mental hospital.

Galina Filippova, great-granddaughter of Brezhnev: biography

The fate of a woman has cracked since childhood. Already small, Galina had to take part in family dramas, more than once. In the future, everything was even worse.

Childhood, study, work

Filippova Galina Mikhailovna was born on 03/14/1973. Her father was a banker, and her mother, Victoria Milayeva (granddaughter of the General Secretary of the USSR). When Galina was five years old, her parents divorced. After some time, Gennady Varakuta became her stepfather. He loved Galina and raised her like a real daughter. At first, peace and harmony reigned in the new family, but then problems began and eventually a divorce followed.

Since childhood, relatives surrounded Galina with affection, love and care. The girl even had a personal nanny - Nina Ivanovna. Galina attended an elite school, with a bias in English. Then she entered the Moscow State University, the philological faculty. Everyone with whom Galina studied, she was remembered as very wayward and capricious.

As soon as she received her diploma, her stepfather helped her get a job as a secretary in a Moscow company. Galina answered calls, kept documentation and brewed coffee for the boss. All this quickly got boring. Galina went to work reluctantly, and when the layoffs began, she quit altogether.

Personal life

Brezhnev's great-granddaughter remained unmarried until the age of 25. Then her mother found the groom's daughter through an agency. Oleg Dubinsky, who worked as an engineer, became the chosen one. According to Galina's mother, he suited his daughter. She, in turn, did not even resist and married him. The wedding was played in 1998, however, without luxury.

Galina Filipova with her father, mother and husband

However, the marriage was unsuccessful. A year later, the couple divorced, but their relationship did not end. After a while, the young people reconciled. Then they lived in a civil marriage for 4 years. However, Galina failed to become a mother. Regular disputes flourished in the family. Galina was tired of such a life and the ex-spouses decided to finally leave.

Galina was left alone. Her husband, on the contrary, very quickly found a replacement for her. He started a relationship with another relative of the ex-General Secretary and became the owner of a personal car, in addition, he received a promotion. He also had a country house at his disposal.

Psychiatric hospital - first treatment

After the final separation from her husband, Galina returned to her mother. Started drinking out of grief. Victoria Evgenievna did not like this much and, in order to save her daughter from a bad habit, she sent her to a mental hospital named after him. Kashchenko. Galina at that time was already 28 years old. While she was being treated for alcohol addiction, her mother (due to real estate fraud) lost two expensive apartments and, left homeless, went to live in the suburbs, to her fiancé.

During the time that her daughter was in a psychiatric hospital, Victoria Evgenievna did not come there even once. Galina, leaving the hospital, turned out to be unnecessary to anyone, and she had to wander. For a year, a young woman walked through the doorways, eating leftovers from garbage cans. In the summer, she lived next to the Tretyakov Gallery, behind the garages, and in the winter she slept in houses on the playgrounds.

And again in Kashchenko

During the wanderings, Galina has changed beyond recognition. She was only 33 years old, but many teeth had already fallen out, her head was shaved baldly so as not to catch lice. Once a woman went to the entrance of her ex-husband to warm herself. The mother-in-law, seeing her, did not recognize her daughter-in-law and called an ambulance. So, Galina again ended up in Kashchenko.

She told her story, said that she was Brezhnev's great-granddaughter, but they did not believe her.

Then Galina gave the number of the nanny, who recognized her. Attitude towards women has changed. The hospital understood that she did not belong here, but they were in no hurry to drive her back out into the street. Galina was allowed to temporarily stay.

She started working as a cleaner, delivering meals. The medical staff loved her, but no one could leave Galina for permanent residence in the hospital. The alternative was to return to the doorways again. In order to avoid such a turn of events, the head of the psychiatric hospital helped Galina to apply for disability and settle in a boarding school for mentally ill people.

As a result, the woman spent 7 years in the hospital. During all this time, her own mother never remembered Galina, although her daughter regularly wrote letters to her and begged her to take her away. However, the requests remained unfulfilled. His own father, who was already living in Malta at that time, also did not respond to calls.

The man married a second time, and he was not worried about the fate of his eldest daughter. Only one person in the world always remembered Galina - her nanny. She sent out gifts and letters as much as possible.

Help

An unexpected help came to Galina from the circus performers Milayevs. They were my aunt and uncle. They lived in America for many years and did not even know what their niece had to endure. When the Milayevs returned to Russia, they found Galina in a psychiatric hospital and decided to help. Achieved that a new examination was carried out. As a result, Galina was declared healthy and able-bodied.

Uncle and aunt helped with paperwork and housing. To provide Galina with her own apartment, Natalya Milayeva appeared on television, describing the tragic fate of her niece. As a result, wealthy and compassionate people were found who were ready to help Brezhnev's great-granddaughter.

As a result, Galina became the owner of a one-room apartment in Zvenigorod and moved in there in 2014. However, another problem remained - work, since from childhood Brezhnev's great-granddaughter lived on everything ready and knew how to do practically nothing. Galina is ready to clean the floors, her pension of 14,000 rubles is not enough to live on. Most of it goes to pay utility bills, coffee and cigarettes.

In 2015, Galina turned 42 years old. She can still arrange her personal life, but is in no hurry to look for a soul mate. A woman is very afraid of being left without a roof over her head again and rejoices at what she has at the moment. Despite what she had to endure, Galina believes that there are still many good people in this world.

Galina Brezhneva, the youngest, repeated the fate of her famous grandmother. She also ended up in a mental hospital. Like her grandmother, Galina was treated for alcoholism.

Galina Brezhneva: “I started drinking. I was wondering what it is, I decided to try it. I was 28… I tried both vodka and cognac.”

She is a philologist by education, graduated from Moscow State University, but did not really work anywhere, like her mother Victoria. The famous surname became an obstacle: in perestroika, it became a stigma, and the Brezhnevs were the first on the lists for reduction.

Both the great-granddaughter and granddaughter of Brezhnev turned out to be unsuitable for the blows of fate. While one sought solace in alcohol, the other became a victim of black realtors. Victoria Brezhneva lost 4 apartments, one of them on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, the other in the government building in Granatny Lane. The granddaughter of the Secretary General was left without housing and without money.

Having lost everything, Victoria wandered around friends. And her daughter Galina, in protest, began to live on the street.

Galina Brezhneva: “I lived on the street, which means from summer to March. They forced me to shpendel from mom to dad, from dad to mom, they played the fool ... But I sent them: then I will sleep on the bench like a bum. Well, like that, for about half a year, I hung out in the children's courtyard, in the house.

So the great-granddaughter of the all-powerful Secretary General became a homeless beggar. In the end, Galina ended up in a mental hospital. Her mother arranged for her there and never took her away, despite Galina's requests. Three years later, the great-granddaughter of the General Secretary was discharged, and her wanderings threatened to end in a boarding school for the mentally ill. But at that moment, journalists were already interested in her fate. As a result, Brezhnev's great-granddaughter was presented with a one-room apartment and issued a tiny disability pension, but Galina was glad about this.

Then she lacked only one thing: news from her mother, whom she had not seen for several years. occurred on the air of the New Russian Sensations program. They reconciled, but this peace will not last long. Victoria Evgenievna soon died of cancer. After her death, her daughter disappeared again. Her search led to an unexpected place: to the house - Alexander and Natalya Milaev.

Alexander Milaev: “We took her away from there, it was more real help, that after all we pulled her out and helped her become an adequate, full-fledged person, made all her documents. We are the last ones left. And what was in the family, only I personally know, my sister Natalya Evgenievna and, to some extent, Galyuska, my niece.

Alexander Milayev has an answer to the question, where is now the famous collection of diamonds of his adoptive mother, the daughter of the Secretary General.

Alexander Milaev: "I have! I have all the diamonds. Galina Leonidovna left me before going to the hospital. I don’t show them to anyone and I’m not going to show them. ”

Whether this is actually the case is still unknown. Perhaps Milaev just wants to be talked about, or maybe he told the truth. Such an unexpected act is quite in the spirit of the extravagant antics of Galina Brezhneva: to deposit a fortune and forget about it.

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev held the highest post of the Soviet Union - the position of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU from 1966 to 1982. For so long, no one had the opportunity to stand at the helm of the USSR. Who were the people who surrounded the leader in the most intimate, family, atmosphere?

Big Brezhnev family. In the first row: wife Viktoria Petrovna and Leonid Ilyich himself with great-granddaughter Galya, in the second row: son-in-law Yuri Churbanov, grandchildren Victoria (Galina's daughter) and Leonid (Yuri's son), Galina with her brother Yuri, Elena (Leonid's wife), daughter-in-law Lyudmila (wife Yuri), grandson Andrey.

Parents

The father and mother of Leonid Ilyich - hereditary workers Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev and Natalya Denisovna Mazalova - were born in the current Kursk region.

Brother and sister

The younger brother is Yakov Ilyich Brezhnev (1912-1993). He bore little resemblance to Leonid Ilyich: short, reddish. He worked at a metallurgical plant as the head of a rolling shop, then at the USSR Ministry of Ferrous Metallurgy. He was successful with women. He had the nickname "wedding brother" - he was invited to feasts, he undertook to solve the personal affairs of petitioners. He was forcibly treated for chronic alcoholism and the deviations in the psyche that arose on this sad basis. Yakov has two daughters from his first marriage - Elena and Mila, and a daughter from his second.

Sister - Vera Ilyinichna Brezhneva (1910-1997). Since moving to Moscow in 1966, she has not worked, she was married to Nikifor Andreyevich Grechkin, an engineer.

Lyubov Yakovlevna Brezhneva. niece

Daughter of Yakov Ilyich from his second marriage. She became famous for her connections with foreigners. In 1990, she emigrated to the United States, in 1999 she published a book of memoirs, The Secretary General's Niece.

Victoria Petrovna Brezhneva (Denisova)

In 1925, a student at a technical school, Leonid Brezhnev, met Victoria, a student at the Kursk Medical College. In 1928 they signed. Despite her husband's career, Viktoria Petrovna devoted all her time to housekeeping, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In 1929 their daughter Galina was born, in 1933 their son Yuri was born.

Galina Leonidovna Brezhneva

She was distinguished by an unusually strong, passionate, restless character. Over the years of her life, the leader's daughter worked in the circus, in the Novosti press agency, in the archival department of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an adviser-envoy, at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Galina Leonidovna was only officially married three times and became famous for high-profile novels.

The first husband, an acrobat-strongman Yevgeny Milaev, was 20 years older than Galina and raised two children. For his sake, the daughter of the first secretary (at that time) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Moldova ran away from home and traveled around the country as a circus dresser. From this marriage, the only daughter of Galina Leonidovna, Victoria, was born. The second husband, 18-year-old illusionist Igor Kio, was 15 years younger than Galina. However, their official marriage, which infuriated Leonid Ilyich, lasted only 10 days ...

In 1971, Galina Brezhneva married Lieutenant Colonel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Yuri Churbanov, who was 7 years younger than her, left his wife and children for her, and became his second wife. For her, this marriage was the third.

In 1987, Churbanov was arrested on suspicion of corruption and expelled from the ranks of the CPSU, sentenced by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR to 12 years in prison with confiscation of property. While he was serving time, Galina Brezhneva filed for divorce and division of property.

During the third marriage, Galina started a high-profile romance with the artist of the Gypsy theater "Romen" Boris Buryatsa. At that time, the Secretary General's daughter was already over 50, and her lover was 17 years younger than her.

Galina abused alcohol, after the death of her father she was under virtual house arrest in the country. She went to a psychiatric clinic for treatment, where she died in the summer of 1998.

Victoria Milayeva

In the photo: Brezhnev with his granddaughter Victoria (to the left of the Secretary General), her second husband Gennady Varakuta and great-granddaughter Galya.

Victoria's first husband, Mikhail Filippov, worked at the Ministry of Foreign Trade, then at a bank. Today he lives in Malta. The second spouse - Gennady Varakuta, rose to the rank of lieutenant general of the KGB. After 1991, he divorced Victoria, a businessman.

Galina Filippova

Victoria Evgenievna in 1973 had a daughter (great-granddaughter of Leonid Brezhnev) Galina Filippova. In the photo she is on her knees with her grandmother and namesake Galina Brezhneva.

General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Leonid Brezhnev with his wife Victoria Petrovna and great-granddaughter Galya.

Galina Filippova today

She graduated from the philological faculty of Moscow State University, was married, became addicted to alcohol ... After many years of treatment in a psychiatric clinic, she lost all her property. Today she lives in a modest apartment in the Moscow region, which one of her relatives bought for her.

Yuri Leonidovich Brezhnev

Yuri Brezhnev was born in 1933. Pinnacle of career: Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade of the USSR. All my life I have been collecting porcelain dogs. There are four grandchildren and a great granddaughter. He died in 2013 at the age of 80.

His wife: Lyudmila Vladimirovna Brezhneva, in her youth was a pretty snub-nosed blonde with delicate pink skin. She behaved modestly. Unlike other nomenklatura wives of the Soviet elite, she is smart and well educated.

They had two sons: Leonid (born in 1956) is a teacher at the Faculty of Chemistry at Moscow State University, a businessman, he has three daughters (Alina, Maria) and a son, Yuri, a businessman.

The younger one is Andrei Yuryevich Brezhnev (born 1961), economist and Russian politician, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Social Justice.

Andrey Yurievich Brezhnev

Grandson of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Leonid Brezhnev, son of Yuri Brezhnev, Soviet economist and Russian politician. In 1983 he graduated from the Faculty of International Economic Relations of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

His first wife, Nadezhda Lyamina, later became the wife of the banker Alexander Mamut. Son Leonid works as a translator in the military department, and son Dmitry graduated from Oxford University. The second wife's name is Elena.

Leonid Ilyich with his wife and grandson Andrei at the dacha, 1971.

Leonid Yurievich Brezhnev

Grandson of General Secretary Brezhnev, son of his son Yuri. Doing business. In the early 2000s, he lived in his grandfather's apartment at 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Entrepreneur. Married four times, three children.

vladimir kalashnikov

Tragedy of the Quiet Don

Recently shown on the Rossiya TV channel, Sergei Ursulyak's new film Quiet Flows the Don, based on the novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, brings us back to the events of the Civil War, reminding us of its enormous cost and the importance of preserving civil peace and harmony.

For Russia today, this is a hot topic. It is no coincidence that it became central to Vladimir Putin's recent presidential address. But appeals alone cannot ensure civil accord: this is what the lessons of the history of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century speak about.

About the film and novel

The Quiet Flows the Don is the most amazing novel about the Civil War, and I decided in advance to see how a modern director would present it to a modern audience. There was a fear that Sergei Ursulyak would pay tribute to the political situation and lay the blame for the fratricidal conflict on the Bolsheviks, thereby distorting the essence of the novel.

The motive of the Bolsheviks' guilt is present in the film, but presented with a counterweight. The two figures represent the extremes of the conflict. On the one hand, this is Mishka Koshevoy, who kills the surrendered Pyotr Melekhov, the harmless deep old man Korshunov, and then burns down the houses of wealthy Cossacks. The director draws the viewer's attention to the image of Koshevoy with a burning torch in his hand in the center of the burning houses. On the other hand, this is Mitka Korshunov, the son of the first rich man on the Tatarsky farm, who brutally kills the Koshevoy family (mother and small children). The cruelty of these acts cannot be justified. The leitmotif of the film: an emotional condemnation of the Civil War, which brings grief to everyone.

In Sholokhov's novel, this idea is central, but it is presented in a context that is absent in Ursulyak's film.

The writer's intention is not simple and unambiguous. He is on the side of the Reds, but he showed the tragedy of the Don from the Cossack side, separating the Cossacks from the Whites, and the Cossack worker from the Cossack elite. The novel was written for its time and for its reader. Many readers participated in the Civil War and saw in the Don Cossacks those who for the most part were on the other side of the front. And so it was. In the summer - autumn of 1918, about 20% of the Don Cossacks fought for the Reds, the rest - for the Whites. And on the Don, most of the Reds and Whites died.

Sholokhov did not want to justify, but to explain and arouse sympathy for ordinary Cossacks who fell into the epicenter of the Civil War.

And that was hard to do. Anti-Cossack sentiments had deep roots. In Russia, they remembered 1905, when the Cossacks acted as guardsmen: they beat striking workers with whips, flogged and shot peasants who rebelled against the landowners. They also remembered the events of the summer-autumn of 1917, when almost all Cossack regiments were used to fight the peasant "unrest" in the rear and the "unrest" of the soldier units at the front. The peasants of the southern provinces of Russia remembered especially well the robberies and violence that the Cossacks carried out during each offensive in 1918 and 1919. Knowing this, Sholokhov wanted to show that the war was terrible for the Cossacks, that the Reds on the Don also committed violence. Often the writer portrayed the Reds in a more unattractive light than the Cossacks, trying to balance the active anti-Cossack propaganda. The sources used by the writer also played their role: the Don newspapers and magazines of that time, the stories of the Cossacks, the diaries and memoirs of the Don intelligentsia.

Sholokhov's idea gave rise to criticism of the writer and difficulties in publishing the third volume of the novel. It was published only after a direct order from Stalin, who considered that, on the whole, the novel "works for us, for the revolution." And for that time and that mass reader, Stalin was right.

Ursulyak's film was created in an era when many viewers did not read Sholokhov's novel, little is known about the events of the Civil War, and the sources of this knowledge can be very different. Unlike the novel, the general historical background in the film is given sparingly, and the actions of the film's characters stem from local events and are motivated by them.

In such a situation, individual episodes from Sholokhov's novel, reproduced in the film, no longer give the effect that Stalin was counting on. Rather, for many viewers, the effect was the opposite. It is no coincidence that many representatives of the older generation rated Ursulyak's film as a direct distortion of the essence of the novel, as the implementation of a social order. One can agree with this and one can argue.

Our task is different - to show some important features of the era against which the events of the novel and film unfolded. Perhaps this will allow us to more objectively evaluate what we saw on the screen.

About Don land:
Cossacks and peasants

The main conflict on the Don lay not within the Cossack estate, but between the Cossacks and the peasants. The intra-Cossack conflict was secondary, less acute, which forced many Cossacks to rush from side to side, as shown in the image of Grigory Melekhov. In the film, the peasants are mentioned, but briefly, they remain, as it were, outside the brackets. But without showing the peasant truth, the Cossack truth becomes one-sided.

It comes down to the monologue of the rich man Miron Korshunov that he has worked all his life and does not want to be equated with "what finger he did not stir to get out of need." But what about those who worked even harder than Miron, but did not come out of need? After all, there were most of them on the Don.

By 1917, the Cossacks accounted for approximately 43% of the population of the Don region (1.5 million out of 4 million), but the male soul of the Cossacks accounted for an average of 12.8 acres of arable and other land. Don native peasants (0.9 million, former serfs of local landowners) had 1.25 acres of land per male soul. The so-called out-of-town peasants (1.12 million people who arrived in the Don after the abolition of serfdom in 1861) had almost no land, rented it or worked as farm laborers (0.06 acres of their own and rented land per male soul). The Don Army owned 83.5% of all land in the region, while indigenous and nonresident peasants owned only 10% of the land.

Among the Cossacks, the middle peasants dominated - 51.6% of households. The wealthy accounted for 23.8%, the poor - 24.6%.

After the February Revolution, the Russian peasantry, including the Don peasantry, advocated an egalitarian redistribution of all land. Seeing this danger, the Cossack Congress of the Region of the Don Cossacks already in April 1917 considered plans to allocate land to the indigenous peasants at the expense of the landlords, who owned about 1 million acres on the Don, as well as plans to transfer part of the reserve land to the peasants (2 million dess.). These plans did not remove the problems of out-of-towners and, moreover, remained on paper. The Cossacks were in no hurry to give up the land. Taking into account the military strength of the Cossacks, it was clear that the land issue on the Don was fraught with a bloody war.

Lenin, realizing this, already in the Decree on Land proposed a compromise, adding the last line to the Socialist-Revolutionary project, drawn up on the basis of peasant mandates: "the land ... of ordinary Cossacks will not be confiscated." It was a course to carry out an agrarian reform in the Don only at the expense of withdrawing surplus land from the rich Cossacks and thereby avoiding war.

Ataman Kaledin

However, the proposed compromise was not suitable for the Cossack elite. The issue of land in the film is discussed in the dialogue between Gregory and his father. The son says that the indigenous peasants should be given land. The father is categorically against it. It is clear that it was not Pantelei Melekhov who started the Civil War. It was started by the Cossack elite, having made the middle peasants hostages of their policy. The position of the Cossack leaders is an important starting point of the tragedy. This theme is almost non-existent in the film.

And it was like that. After October, the Don ataman Kaledin immediately declared his refusal to recognize the power of the Soviets and declared the Don region independent until the formation of a legitimate government in Russia, acceptable to the Cossacks. Ataman tried to send several Cossack regiments to Moscow, but ordinary Cossacks did not want to fight the Soviet authorities.

Seeing the position of the Cossacks, at the end of November, the workers of Rostov and the mining villages of the Eastern Donbass proclaimed Soviet power. The Cossacks refused to go to Rostov. Kaledin received help from General M. V. Alekseev, the former commander-in-chief of the Russian army, who came to the Don to raise an army and lead it to Moscow and St. Petersburg. About 500 officers and junkers, who came to the Don at the call of Alekseev, defeated the workers of Rostov, shooting 62 captured Red Guard workers. In December, the Kaledinians shot 73 captive miners of the Yasinovsky mine, who were trying to defend their Soviet. These were the first mass executions on the Don.

Petrograd sent troops to the Don to crush the Kaledin counter-revolution. The Alekseyevites again came to the aid of Kaledin, who were now led by General L. Kornilov. The Alekseevskaya organization grew to 3,000 and became known as the Volunteer Army. In the battles near Rostov, Kornilov issued an order: do not take prisoners, which led to a further increase in mutual bitterness. Cruelty did not help, and Kornilov, fleeing from complete defeat, left Rostov at the end of January and took his detachment to the Kuban, where he died during the unsuccessful assault on Yekaterinodar. The Kornilovites are not shown in the film.

Detachments of the Cossack intelligentsia also stood up to defend the power of Kaledin, of which the detachment of Yesaul V. M. Chernetsov stood out, consisting mainly of Don junkers and students. On January 17, 1918, Chernetsov's detachment attacked the village of Kamenskaya, where the Donrevkom, which was created by the congress of front-line Cossacks as an alternative to the government of Kaledin, met. Kaledin entered into negotiations with the Donrevkom, and he himself secretly sent a detachment of Chernetsov to Kamenskaya. In these January days, the Chernetsov detachment and the companies of Kornilov officers sent to help shot more than 300 Red Army soldiers who were captured during the fighting. However, on January 21, Chernetsov's detachment was defeated.

On January 29, 1918, ataman Kaledin, having discovered that only 147 Cossacks were ready to defend his government, shot himself.

Soon Soviet power was established on the Don.

Chernetsov and Podtelkov

Let's return to the novel and the film and see how they reflect the events of the Kaledin period. In the novel, Sholokhov told that it was Kaledin who sent the Cossacks and Alekseyevites to smash the workers of Rostov and the Soviets in the mining settlements, and then against this background he reproduced the version that the Don newspapers reported on the anniversary of the death of the Chernetsov detachment. Then the whites dominated the Don, and a solemn reburial of Chernetsov was arranged. According to this version, the chairman of the Donrevkom, F. Podtelkov, as Denikin later wrote, “after wild abuses brutally hacked to death Chernetsov” and ordered 40 officers of his detachment to be hacked to death. No other details were given. Sholokhov invented the whole tragic scene described in the novel, trying to show the cruelty of the Civil War.

Ursulyak reproduced this episode exactly after Sholokhov and made it central in the series, which falls on the Kaledin period.

And in the next series, the execution of Podtelkov and his detachment is presented as retribution for the murder of Chernetsov and his officers. Grigory Melekhov directly says this to Podtelkov.

However, the real circumstances of Chernetsov's death were different. Residents of Chernetsov wrote about them in exile, many of whom, it turns out, survived. Three dozen captured Chernetsovites, sent to the rear, escorted by a small convoy, were able to escape from the confused convoy due to the unexpected appearance of an armored train. 15 people reached their own that same night, 5 were captured by a convoy and taken to the village. The fate of the rest is unknown. Chernetsov fled, but was soon extradited and again fell into the hands of Podtelkov. During his arrest, he was not searched, and at a convenient moment Chernetsov drew a small pistol and fired point-blank at Podtelkov. But there was a misfire or there was no cartridge in the barrel of the gun. Podtelkov drew his saber and hacked at Chernetsov without waiting for the second shot. And the head of the Donrevkom did not give orders to hack the captured Chernetsovites.

Against this background, the execution of Podtelkov does not look like a well-deserved retribution for the massacre of 40 captured officers, which was not.

Having made the episode with the massacre of the Chernetsovites central, the director wittingly or unwittingly laid the blame for the beginning of the terror not on the Kaledinians, but on the Red Cossacks.

Sholokhov does not have such an emphasis, although he does not relieve Podtelkov of responsibility for the executions of active Kaledinians, which were carried out in Rostov and Novocherkassk in February immediately after they were captured by the Reds. But this was revenge for the executed captured Red Guards, workers and miners.

* * *

The fight against Kaledin was the sharpest and longest phase of the civil confrontation that took place in Russia from October 1917 to the spring of 1918. In other regions, Soviet power was established peacefully or with little resistance from its opponents.

After the capture of Rostov by the Reds, Lenin believed that the Civil War in Russia was over.

There was hope that peace would also be established on the Don, although the greatest bloodshed had already been shed there.

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