November 14 (27) led the rebellion on the cruiser "Ochakov" and other ships of the Black Sea Fleet. Schmidt declared himself commander of the Black Sea Fleet, giving a signal: “I command the fleet. Schmidt. On the same day, he sent a telegram to Nicholas II: “The glorious Black Sea Fleet, sacredly faithful to its people, demands from you, sovereign, the immediate convocation of the Constituent Assembly and no longer obeys your ministers. Fleet Commander P. Schmidt.

Throwing out the admiral's flag on the Ochakovo and giving a signal: "I command the fleet, Schmidt," with the expectation that this would immediately attract the entire squadron to the uprising, he sent his cruiser to the Prut in order to free the Potemkinites. No resistance was offered. "Ochakov" took the convict sailors on board and went around the entire squadron with them. A salutatory "cheers" sounded from all the ships. Several of the ships, including the battleships "Potemkin" and "Rostislav", raised the red flag; on the latter, however, it fluttered for only a few minutes.

November 15 at 9 a.m. In the morning, a red flag was hoisted on Ochakovo. Against the insurgent cruiser, the government immediately began hostilities. On November 15, at 3 pm, a naval battle began, and at 4:45 pm. the tsarist fleet has already won a complete victory. Schmidt, along with other leaders of the uprising, was arrested.

Death and funeral

Schmidt, along with his associates, was sentenced to death by a closed naval court, held in Ochakovo from February 7 to February 18, 1906. The surrender of a retired captain of the second rank Schmidt to a court-martial was illegal [ ], since the court-martial had the right to judge only those who were on active military service. Prosecutors alleged that Schmidt allegedly plotted while still a lieutenant on active duty. Schmidt's lawyers convincingly refuted this unproven fact by the fact that, for patriotic reasons, Schmidt, who voluntarily entered active service during the Russo-Japanese War, was considered to be subject to a court-martial illegally, since for health reasons he was not subject to conscription, regardless of his patriotic impulse, state his health is quite obvious, and his legitimate military rank is the rank of naval lieutenant, which did not exist for many years, the betrayal of which to a court-martial is not just a legal incident, but flagrant lawlessness.

On February 20, a verdict was passed, according to which Schmidt and 3 sailors were sentenced to death.

On May 8 (21), 1917, after the plans of the masses under the influence of a revolutionary impulse became known, to dig up the ashes of "counter-revolutionary admirals" - participants in the Defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War and in their place to rebury Lieutenant Schmidt and his comrades who were shot for participation in the November 1905 Sevastopol uprising, the remains of Schmidt and the sailors shot with him were, by order of the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Vice Admiral A. V. Kolchak, expeditedly transported to Sevastopol, where they were temporarily buried in the Intercession Cathedral. This order of Kolchak made it possible to bring down the intensity of revolutionary passions on the Black Sea Front and finally stop all talk about the exhumation of the remains of admirals who died during the Crimean War and rested in the Vladimir Cathedral of Sevastopol.

11/14/1923 Schmidt and his comrades were reburied in Sevastopol at the city cemetery Kommunarov. The monument on their grave was made of a stone that previously stood on the grave of the commander of the battleship "Prince Potemkin" - Tauride, captain of the 1st rank E. N. Golikov, who died in 1905. For the pedestal, they used granite confiscated from former estates and left after the erection of a monument to Lenin.

Family

Awards

• Medal "In memory of the reign of Emperor Alexander III", 1896.
• In May 1917, Minister of War and Naval A.F. Kerensky laid an officer’s St. George’s Cross on Schmidt’s gravestone.

Ratings

Retired captain of the second rank Pyotr Schmidt was the only known officer of the Russian Navy who joined the revolution of 1905-1907. To explain the transition of the nephew of the Admiral General to the side of the revolution by the class struggle, Peter Schmidt was "assigned" the rank of junior officer of the fleet - lieutenant. So, on November 14, 1905, V. I. Lenin wrote: “The uprising in Sevastopol is growing ... The command of the Ochakov was taken over by a retired lieutenant Schmidt ..., the Sevastopol events mark the complete collapse of the old, slavish order in the troops, the order that turned soldiers into armed machines, made them instruments of suppression of the slightest aspirations for freedom.

At the trial, Schmidt stated that if he had really prepared a conspiracy, then the conspiracy would have won, and he agreed to lead the uprising that was being prepared by the left and broke out without his participation only in order to avoid the massacre of all representatives of the privileged classes and non-Russians by the sailors and to introduce the rebellion into a constitutional channel.

Memory

Since Schmidt streets are located in several cities on different banks of the Taganrog Bay, journalists talk about the informal “widest street in the world” (tens of kilometers) (the official record holder - 110 meters - is  9 July Street in Buenos Aires, Argentina).

The P.P. Schmidt Museum in Ochakov was opened in 1962, at present the museum is closed, some of the exhibits were moved to the former Palace of Pioneers.

Since 1926, P.P. Schmidt has been an honorary member of the Sevastopol Council of Working People's Deputies.

Lieutenant Schmidt in art

• The story "The Black Sea" (chapter "Courage") by Konstantin Paustovsky.
• Poem "Lieutenant Schmidt" by Boris Pasternak.
• The novel-chronicle "I swear by the earth and the sun" by Gennady Aleksandrovich Cherkashin.
• The film "Post novel" (1969) (in the role of Schmidt - Alexander Parr) - the story of the complex relationship between P. P. Schmidt and Zinaida Rizberg (in her role - Svetlana Korkoshko) based on their correspondence.
• "Lieutenant Schmidt" - painting by Zhemerikin Vyacheslav Fedorovich (oil on canvas), 1972 (Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts)

Children of Lieutenant Schmidt

• In Ilf and Petrov's novel The Golden Calf, "thirty sons and four daughters of Lieutenant Schmidt" are mentioned - fraudulent impostors wandering in the outback and begging for material assistance from local authorities, under the name of their famous "father". O. Bender became the thirty-fifth descendant of Lieutenant Schmidt. The real son of Pyotr Petrovich - Evgeny Schmidt-Zavoisky (memoirs about his father were published under the name "Schmidt-Ochakovsky") - was a Socialist-Revolutionary and an emigrant.
• In Berdyansk, the name of P.P. Schmidt is the central city park, named after his father, the founder of the park, and not far from the entrance to the park near the Palace of Culture. N. A. Ostrovsky installed a pair of sculptures (works by G. Frangulyan), depicting the “sons of Lieutenant Schmidt” sitting on a bench - Ostap Bender and Shura Balaganov.
• In the film "Vodovozov V. V. // Encyclopedic Dictionary Brockhaus and Efron: in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - St. Petersburg. , 1890-1907.
• "Crimean Herald", 1903-1907.
• "Historical Bulletin". 1907, no. 3.
• Vice Admiral G.P. Chukhnin. According to colleagues. SPb. 1909.
• Neradov I.I. Red Admiral: [Lieutenant P.P. Schmidt]: a true story from the revolution of 1905. Moscow: Will, .
• Calendar of the Russian Revolution. From-in "Rose", St. Petersburg, 1917.
• Lieutenant Schmidt: letters, memoirs, documents / P. P. Schmidt; ed. and foreword. V. Maksakov. - M.: New Moscow, 1922.
• A. Izbash. Lieutenant Schmidt. Memories of a sister. M. 1923.
• I. Voronitsyn. Lieutenant Schmidt. M-L. Gosizdat. 1925.
• Izbash A.P. Lieutenant Schmidt L., 1925 (sister PPSh)
• Genkin I. L. Lieutenant Schmidt and the uprising on the Ochakovo, M., L. 1925
• Platonov A.P. Uprising in the Black Sea Fleet in 1905. L., 1925
• Revolutionary movement in 1905. Collection of memories. M. 1925. Society of political prisoners.
• "Katorga and exile". M. 1925-1926.
• Karnaukhov-Kraukhov V.I. Red lieutenant. - M., 1926. - 164 p.
• Schmidt-Ochakovsky. Lieutenant Schmidt. "Red Admiral". Memories of a son. Prague. 1926.
• Revolution and autocracy. A selection of documents. M. 1928.
• A. Fedorov. Memories. Odessa. 1939.
• A. Kuprin. Works. M. 1954.
• The revolutionary movement in the Black Sea Fleet in 1905-1907. M. 1956.
• Sevastopol armed uprising in November 1905. Documents and materials. M. 1957.
• S. Witte. Memories. M. 1960.
• V. Long. Purpose. Novel. Kaliningrad. 1976.
• R. Melnikov. Cruiser Ochakov. Leningrad. "Shipbuilding". 1982.
• Popov M. L. Red Admiral. Kyiv, 1988
• V. Ostretsov. Black Hundred and Red Hundred. M. Military Publishing. 1991.
• S. Oldenburg. Reign of Emperor Nicholas II. M. "Terra". 1992.
• V. Korolev. Riot on your knees. Simferopol. "Tavria". 1993.
• V. Shulgin. What we don't like about them. M. Russian book. 1994.
• A. Podberezkin. Russian way. M. RAU-University. 1999.
• L. Zamoysky. Freemasonry and globalism. Invisible Empire. M. "Olma-press". 2001.
• Shigin. Unknown Lieutenant Schmidt. "Our Contemporary" No. 10. 2001.
• A. Chikin. Sevastopol confrontation. Year 1905. Sevastopol. 2006.
• L. Nozdrina, T. Vaishlya. Guide to the memorial house-museum of P. P. Schmidt. Berdyansk, 2009.
• I. Gelis. November uprising in Sevastopol in 1905.
• F. P. Rerberg. Historical secrets of great victories and inexplicable defeats

Notes

1. According to some reports, having unexpectedly received an inheritance after the death of his maternal aunt, A. Ya. Esther, Schmidt, with his wife and little Zhenya, leaves for Paris and enters Eugene Godard's aeronautics school. Under the name of Leon, Aera is trying to master ballooning. But the chosen enterprise did not promise success, the family was in poverty, and at the beginning of 1892 they moved to Poland, then to Livonia, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, where the flights of Leon Aer also did not give the desired fees. In Russia, on one of his demonstration flights, a retired lieutenant suffered an accident, and as a result, for the rest of his life, he suffered from kidney disease caused by a hard impact of a balloon basket on the ground. Further flights had to be stopped, the Schmidts ran into debt for the hotel. The balloon, along with the flight support equipment, had to be sold.. “In the midst of the ball, during a respite in dancing, the senior officer of the Anadyr transport Muravyov, who was dancing with a blue-eyed, blond beauty, Baroness Krudener, was sitting and talking with his lady. At this time, the senior officer of the Irtysh transport Schmidt, who was at the other end of the hall, came close to Muravyov and, without saying a word, slapped him in the face. Baroness Krüdener shrieked and fainted; several people from those sitting nearby rushed towards her, and the lieutenants grappled in a deadly fight and, striking each other, fell to the floor, continuing to fight. From under them, like from under fighting dogs, pieces of paper, confetti, and cigarette butts flew. The picture was disgusting. Captain Zenov was the first to rush to the fighters of the 178th Infantry Regiment, his example was followed by other officers who pulled the fighters by force. Immediately they were arrested and sent to the port. When they were led out into the hallway, whose large crystal glass windows overlooked Kurgauzsky Prospekt, where hundreds of cab drivers stood in line, Schmidt grabbed a heavy yellow chair and threw it into the glass. According to Rerberg, Schmidt staged this incident specifically in order to be expelled from the service. Fragment from the memoirs of the chief of staff of the Libau fortress F.P. Here Schmidt saw Lieutenant D., who in the days of their youth was the cause of his family drama. Since then, he has not met D., but he did not forget his promise to “settle accounts” at the first meeting. On that ill-fated evening, many years later, this meeting took place, and when the dancing was over and almost the entire audience had dispersed, Schmidt went up to D. and, without much conversation, hit him in the face. /G. K. Graf “Essays from the life of a naval officer. 1897-1905./
, p. 166 Links

The only naval officer who participated in the Revolution of 1905-1907 on the side of the Socialist Revolutionaries. He was shot on March 6, 1906.

Pre-revolutionary life

An unsuccessful and famous revolutionary, a fighter for the rights of the peasants, but not a Bolshevik by vocation. Different sources respond differently and describe the life and deeds of the famous "Lieutenant Schmidt". Peter Schmidt was born as the sixth child on February 5 (17), 1867 in the family of a respected nobleman, naval officer, rear admiral and later mayor of Berdyansk P. P. Schmidt (1828-1888) and princess of the royal Polish family E. Ya. Schmidt (1835- 1876). As a child, Schmidt read Tolstoy, Korolenko and Uspensky, played the violin, studied Latin and French. Even in his youth, he was imbued with the idea of ​​democratic freedom from his mother, which subsequently influenced his life.

In April 1876, Schmidt's father, captain of the 1st rank, was appointed mayor of Berdyansk. In the autumn of the same year, the future "red lieutenant" entered the Berdyansk men's gymnasium, which, after his death, was named after him. In 1880 he graduated from the gymnasium and entered the Naval Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg. After 7 years, he was enlisted in the rifle team of the 8th Baltic naval crew with the rank of midshipman. On January 21, 1887, he was sent on a six-month vacation and transferred to the Black Sea Fleet. According to some sources, the vacation was associated with a nervous attack, and according to others - because of radical political views and frequent quarrels with personnel.

In 1888, Peter Schmidt married a street prostitute, Dominika Gavrilovna Pavlova (for the purpose of re-education), whom he had previously hired. This trick greatly outraged Father Schmidt, this "immoral act" tarnished the name and was supposed to put an end to the military career of the younger Schmidt. But by chance, due to the death of his father, the care of the future lieutenant fell on the shoulders of his uncle, military hero, admiral and senator Vladimir Petrovich Schmidt. An influential uncle hushed up the incident with the marriage and sent his nephew to serve with his student, Rear Admiral G.P. Chukhnin, on the Beaver gunboat in the Siberian Flotilla of the Pacific Squadron. In 1889, he filed a petition for dismissal to the reserve for health reasons, and went to be treated at the private hospital "Dr. Savey-Mogilevich for the nervous and mentally ill in Moscow."

On July 22, 1892, after a petition, Peter Schmidt was enlisted as a watch officer on the 1st rank cruiser Rurik of the Baltic Fleet. In 1894 he was transferred from the Baltic Fleet to the Siberian naval crew. He was appointed watch commander of the destroyer Yanchikhe, then the cruiser Admiral Kornilov. In the same year, due to the increased frequency of nervous attacks, Schmidt was written off to the coast of Nagasaki for treatment. On December 6, 1895, Peter Schmidt was promoted to the rank of lieutenant and until 1897 served as a staff officer and senior officer of the fire department. In August 1898, due to frequent quarrels with senior officers and refusal to participate in the suppression of the strike, he was finally transferred to the reserve, with the right to serve in the merchant navy.

In 1898, Schmidt entered the service as an assistant captain of the Kostroma steamship of the Volunteer Fleet, where he served for 2 years. In 1900, he joined ROPIT (Russian Society of Shipping and Trade) as an assistant captain of the steamer Olga.

From 1901 to 1904, Schmidt was the captain of the merchant and passenger ships Igor, Polezny, and Diana. Over the years of service to the merchant fleet, he gained respect among sailors and subordinates. In his spare time, Peter Schmidt taught the sailors how to read and write and navigate, was a good friend and a dedicated person. “The navigators were instructed to deal with the sailors at a time specially designated for this. For classes, textbooks and educational supplies were purchased at the expense of the ship. The “teacher Petro” himself, as we called Schmidt, sat on the quarterdeck among the team and told a lot ”(Karnaukhov-Kraukhov“ Red Lieutenant ”, 1926). In 2009, divers retrieved the propeller from the sunken steamship Diana in the Sea of ​​Azov and handed it over to the Schmidt Museum. On April 12, 1904, due to martial law (the Russo-Japanese War), Schmidt, with the rank of lieutenant, was called up for military service in the Black Sea Fleet, and a month later he left as a senior officer on the Irtysh coal transport ship of the 2nd Pacific squadron. Shortly before the defeat of the Pacific squadron near the island of Tsushima by the Japanese, Schmidt's influential uncle helped his nephew in Suez to write off to the shore and leave for Sevastopol.

Participation in the revolution

In February 1905, Schmidt was appointed commander of destroyer No. 253 (Ai-Todor destroyer of the Bierke type) in the Black Sea Fleet in Izmail to patrol the Danube. In March of the same year, he stole a ship's cash register of 2.5 thousand gold pieces and went to the Crimea. A few weeks later he was caught on a bicycle in Izmail, and once again an influential uncle took care of his nephew, and Schmidt was released. In the summer of 1905, Lieutenant Schmidt began to conduct propaganda activities in support of the revolution. In early October 1905, he organized in Sevastopol the "Union of Officers - Friends of the People", then participated in the creation of the "Odessa Society for Mutual Assistance of Merchant Navy Sailors". Conducting propaganda among sailors and officers, Schmidt called himself a non-party socialist. On October 18, 1905, Schmidt, at the head of a crowd, surrounded the city prison, demanding the release of imprisoned workers. On October 20, at the funeral of those who died during the riots, he took the following oath, which became known as the "Schmidt Oath": "We swear that we will never cede to anyone one inch of the human rights we have won." On the same day, Schmidt was arrested for propaganda, this time Schmidt's uncle, having even impressive power and connections, could not help his unlucky nephew. On November 7, Schmidt was dismissed with the rank of captain of the 2nd rank. While under arrest on the battleship "Three Saints", he was elected by the workers of Sevastopol "deputy of the Soviet for life." Soon, under pressure from the indignant masses, he was released on bail.

Sevastopol uprising

Inspired by the ideas of the revolutionaries, but not taking part in the organization, on November 13, 1905, Peter Schmidt was elected head of the revolutionary movement of sailors and sailors. It is not known exactly how he got on board, but the next day he boarded the cruiser Ochakov with his son and led the rebellion. Immediately, he gave a signal to all ships in the port - “I command the fleet. Schmidt. Later, a telegram was sent to Nicholas II: “The glorious Black Sea Fleet, sacredly faithful to its people, demands from you, sovereign, the immediate convocation of the Constituent Assembly and no longer obeys your ministers.

Fleet Commander P. Schmidt. Lieutenant Schmidt considered himself the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, and expected the red flag to be raised on all ships of the fleet, but except for the disarmed Panteleimon (the battleship Potemkin) and a pair of destroyers, all ships remained loyal to the government. To aggravate the situation, Schmidt was going to blow up the Bug destroyer filled with sea mines, but the destroyer's crew managed to scuttle the ship. On November 15, when it became obvious that the rebellion was suppressed and the Ochakov would be shot from the guns of the squadron, the “red captain”, together with his sixteen-year-old son, on the destroyer No. 270 loaded with coal and water (Pernov-class destroyer), was about to flee to Turkey. The escape was nearly realized, but the destroyer was damaged by artillery fire from the battleship Rostislav. Schmidt was found in the hold under the planks of a sailor dressed in uniform and taken into custody.

Effects

During the eleven-day investigation, Prime Minister Witte reported to Nicholas II - "Peter Schmidt is a mentally ill person and all his actions were guided by madness." The king replied - "... that if he is mentally ill, then an examination will establish this." But there was no examination, not a single doctor wanted to conduct it. Lieutenant Schmidt, along with three accomplices, was sentenced to death. On March 6, 1905, the sentence was carried out on the island of Berezan. 48 young sailors from the gunboat "Terets" fired. Behind them stood soldiers ready to shoot at the sailors, and the guns of the Tertz were aimed at the soldiers.

Schmidt's son Eugene during the next revolution was an opponent of Soviet power and soon emigrated. Admiral Chukhnin was killed by the Socialist-Revolutionaries shortly after the execution of Schmidt. In 1909, uncle Vladimir Petrovich Schmidt, who did not survive the disgrace, died. Half-brother Vladimir Petrovich Schmidt, also a naval officer, in consequence of shame changed his last name to Schmitt until the end of his life.

Although Schmidt became a folk hero after the execution, having given birth to “the sons and daughters of Lieutenant Schmidt” by his feat, the Soviet authorities did not seek to make a real hero out of him, since he was not a socialist, but just happened to be in the right place at the right time. This is probably why, in the famous novel by Ilf and Petrov, the Soviet authorities allowed the authors to mock the red lieutenant.

perpetuation of memory

Streets, parks and boulevards of many cities of the post-Soviet space are named after Lieutenant Schmidt: Astrakhan, Vinnitsa, Vologda, Vyazma, Berdyansk, Tver (Boulevard), Vladivostok, Yeysk, Dnepropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kazan, Murmansk, Bobruisk, Nizhny Tagil, Novorossiysk, Odessa, Pervomaisk, Ochakov, Samara, Sevastopol, Simferopol. Also in Baku, the plant is named after him. Peter Schmidt.

Since 1980, a museum has been opened in Berdyansk in the house of Schmidt's father, and the park is named after P. Schmidt. On the island of Berezan, a monument to Peter Schmidt was erected at the place of execution.

Image in art

The image of a desperate revolutionary nobleman inspired many writers and directors to shed light on the true identity of the famous lieutenant Schmidt. Among the most famous are worth noting.

150 years ago, on February 17, 1867, a Russian naval officer, one of the leaders of the Sevastopol uprising of 1905, Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt, was born. Pyotr Schmidt was the only Russian officer who joined the revolution of 1905-1907 and led a major uprising, so his name became widely known.

Pyotr Petrovich, who is now mainly remembered in connection with the “sons of Lieutenant Schmidt” from The Golden Calf, lived a short, but very dramatic, full of contradictions life. Born on February 5 (17), 1867 in the city of Odessa, Odessa district, Kherson province, in a noble family. His father, Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt, is a hereditary naval officer, a participant in the Crimean War, a hero of the defense of Sevastopol, later a rear admiral, the mayor of Berdyansk and the head of the Berdyansk port. Schmidt's mother is Ekaterina Yakovlevna Schmidt, nee von Wagner. Uncle, also a hero of the defense of Sevastopol, Vladimir Petrovich, had the rank of admiral and was the senior flagship of the Baltic Fleet. It was his uncle (at the time of his father's death, Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt Jr. was only 22 years old) who became the main assistant in the young officer's career.

Peter Schmidt Jr. from childhood dreamed of the sea and, to the pleasure of his family, in 1880 he entered the St. Petersburg Naval School (Naval Cadet Corps). After graduating from the Naval College in 1886, he was promoted to midshipman on the exam and assigned to the Baltic Fleet. The young man was distinguished by great abilities in his studies, he sang excellently, played music and painted. But along with good qualities, everyone noted his increased nervousness and excitability. The authorities turned a blind eye to the strangeness of the cadet, and then the midshipman Schmidt, believing that over time everything would work out by itself: the harsh life of the ship's service would do its job.

However, the young officer surprised everyone. Already in 1888, two years after being promoted to officer, he married and retired "due to illness" with the rank of lieutenant. He was undergoing treatment in a private hospital for the nervous and mentally ill in Moscow. Schmidt's wife, to put it mildly, stood out from the crowd. The tradesman's daughter, Dominikia Gavrilovna Pavlova, was a professional prostitute and had a "yellow ticket" instead of a passport. It is believed that Schmidt wanted to "morally re-educate" her, but in general, their family life did not work out. His wife considered all his teachings to be a fool, she did not put a penny and openly cheated. In addition, in the future, Pyotr Petrovich had to take care of the household and educate his son Eugene, since Dominicia was indifferent to household duties. The father did not accept this marriage, broke off relations with his son and soon died. In general, this case, shocking for the society of that time, had no consequences for Peter, but there was no reaction from the fleet command. They didn’t even demand an explanation from him, because behind midshipman Schmidt, the figure of his uncle, Vladimir Schmidt, the senior flagship of the Baltic Fleet, towered like a mighty cliff.

Interestingly, during his retirement, Peter Schmidt lived in Paris, where he became seriously interested in aeronautics. He acquired all the necessary equipment and intended to fly professionally in Russia. But, returning to Russia for demonstration performances, the retired lieutenant crashed in his own balloon. As a result, for the rest of his life he suffered from kidney disease caused by a hard hit of a balloon on the ground.

In 1892, Schmidt petitioned the highest name “for enrollment in the naval service” and returned to the fleet with the same rank of midshipman, enlisting in the 18th naval crew as a watch officer on the 1st rank cruiser “Rurik” under construction. Two years later, he was transferred to the Far East, to the Siberian Flotilla (the future Pacific Fleet). Here he served until 1898 on the destroyer "Yanchikha", the cruiser "Admiral Kornilov", the transport "Aleut", the port ship "Strongman" and the gunboats "Ermine" and "Beaver". However, soon the disease again reminded of itself. He had an exacerbation of a nervous illness that overtook Peter during a foreign campaign. He ended up in the naval infirmary of the Japanese port of Nagasaki, where he was examined by a council of squadron doctors. On the recommendation of the council, Schmidt was written off to the reserve. The 31-year-old lieutenant is enrolled in the reserve and goes to serve on merchant (or, as they used to say, on “commercial”) ships.

During six years of sailing on ships of the merchant fleet, Peter managed to serve as an assistant to the captain and captain on the steamships Olga, Kostroma, Igor, St. Nicholas, Diana. With the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, the lieutenant was called up for active service and sent to the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet. Pyotr Petrovich was sent to the Baltic and was appointed senior officer of the huge Irtysh transport at that time with a displacement of 15 thousand tons. The ship was intended to supply Admiral Rozhdestvensky's 2nd Pacific Squadron with the necessary materials and supplies. Peter went by transport only to the Egyptian port of Suez, where he was written off to the shore due to an exacerbation of kidney disease. "Irtysh" during the Tsushima battle received one large hole in the bow, not counting other less serious damage, and sank.

Schmidt spent the next few months as part of the Black Sea Fleet, commanding the destroyer No. 253, which was stationed in Izmail. In October 1905, unexpectedly for his friends and acquaintances, he took part in a political demonstration in Sevastopol, after which he was arrested. In the course of the ensuing investigation, the embezzlement of state money from the destroyer and the neglect of service were revealed. In November, Schmidt was dismissed from the service. Many naval officers were sure that the former commander of destroyer No. 253 managed to avoid trial solely thanks to the eternal patronage of his uncle admiral.

Thus, in the fall of 1905, Pyotr Petrovich found himself without certain occupations and special prospects in Sevastopol. Schmidt was not a member of any party. He generally avoided "herding", as he considered himself a unique person. But when the buzz began in Sevastopol, he, embittered by the "injustices", joined the opposition and became very active. Being a good speaker, Petr Petrovich, participating in anti-government rallies, spoke so sharply and energetically that he quickly became a famous person. These speeches and his term in the guardhouse created a reputation for him as a revolutionary and a sufferer.

In November, during the revolution that swept Russia, strong unrest began in Sevastopol (). On November 24, 1905, the unrest turned into a mutiny. On the night of November 26, the rebels with Schmidt arrived on the cruiser Ochakov and called on the sailors to join the uprising. "Ochakov" was the newest cruiser and for a long time stood at the "finishing" in the factory. The team assembled from different crews, closely communicating with the workers and the agitators of the revolutionary parties among them, turned out to be thoroughly propagandized, and among the sailors there were their informal leaders, who actually acted as the initiators of insubordination. This sailor elite - several conductors and senior sailors - understood that they could not do without an officer, and therefore recognized the supremacy of a revolutionary leader who suddenly appeared and was determined. The sailors under the leadership of the Bolsheviks A. Gladkov and N. Antonenko took the cruiser into their own hands. The officers who tried to disarm the ship were driven ashore. Schmidt was at its head, declaring himself commander of the Black Sea Fleet.

His plans were grandiose. According to Schmidt, the capture of Sevastopol with its arsenals and warehouses was only the first step, after which it was necessary to go to Perekop and place artillery batteries there, block the road to the Crimea with them and thereby separate the peninsula from Russia. Further, he intended to move the entire fleet to Odessa, land troops and take power in Odessa, Nikolaev and Kherson. As a result, the "South Russian Socialist Republic" was created, at the head of which Schmidt saw himself.

The forces of the rebels outwardly were large: 14 ships and vessels and about 4.5 thousand sailors and soldiers on ships and on the shore. However, their combat power was insignificant, since most of the ship's guns had been rendered unusable even before the uprising. Only on the cruiser "Ochakov" and on the destroyers the artillery was in good order. The soldiers on the shore were poorly armed, lacking machine guns, rifles and ammunition. The rebels missed a favorable moment for the development of success, the initiative. The passivity of the rebels prevented them from attracting the entire Black Sea squadron and the Sevastopol garrison. Schmidt sent a telegram to Tsar Nicholas II: “The glorious Black Sea Fleet, sacredly faithful to its people, demands from you, sovereign, the immediate convocation of the Constituent Assembly and no longer obeys your ministers. Fleet Commander P. Schmidt.

However, the authorities have not yet lost their will and determination, as in 1917. Commander of the Odessa Military District, General A.V. Kaulbars, Commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Vice Admiral G.P. Chukhnin, and Commander of the 7th Artillery Corps, Lieutenant General A.N. thousand soldiers and were able to field 22 ships with 6 thousand crew members. The rebels were given an ultimatum to surrender. Having received no response to the ultimatum, troops loyal to the government went on the offensive and opened fire on "internal enemies." The order was given to open fire on the rebel ships and vessels. Not only ships fired, but also coastal artillery, guns of the ground forces, as well as soldiers from machine guns and rifles from the shore. As a result, the rebellion was crushed. The wounded Schmidt with a group of sailors tried to break into the Artillery Bay on the destroyer No. 270. But the ship was damaged, lost speed, and Schmidt and his comrades were arrested. At the trial, Schmidt tried to mitigate the punishment of others, took all the blame on himself, and expressed his complete readiness to be executed.

In general, given the scale of the rebellion and its danger to the empire, when there was a possibility of an uprising by a significant part of the Black Sea Fleet, with the support of part of the ground forces, the punishment was quite humane. But the uprising itself was suppressed harshly and decisively. Hundreds of sailors died. The leaders of the Sevastopol uprising P. P. Schmidt, S. P. Chastnik, N. G. Antonenko and A. I. Gladkov were shot on Berezan Island in March 1906 by the verdict of the naval court. Over 300 people were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment and hard labor. About a thousand people were disciplined without any trial.

It is worth noting that in the Russian Imperial Navy there was a strict ban on political activity. Moreover, the “taboo” was rather informal, but strictly observed. Even those naval officers who were considered liberals in the fleet, for the most part, did not violate the established unwritten rules. Vice Admiral Stepan Makarov has always said directly that the army and navy should be out of politics. The business of the armed forces is to stand guard over their Fatherland, which must be defended regardless of the form of the existing system.

Schmidt is a rare exception. It is possible that the reason for the abrupt transition of the naval officer to the side of the revolutionaries is Peter's mental instability. In Soviet historiography, taking into account the popularization of this character, this issue was bypassed. Pyotr Petrovich was an excitable person, he had previously been treated in a hospital "for the nervous and mentally ill." His illness was expressed in sudden fits of irritability, turning into a rage, followed by hysteria with convulsions and rolling on the floor.

According to midshipman Harold Graf, who served with Peter on the Irtysh for several months, his senior officer “came from a good noble family, knew how to speak beautifully, played the cello superbly, but at the same time he was a dreamer and dreamer.” It cannot be said that Schmidt also fit into the category of "friends of sailors." “I myself saw how several times he, brought out of patience by the indiscipline and rude answers of the sailors, immediately beat them. In general, Schmidt never fawned over the team and treated her in the same way as other officers did, but he always tried to be fair, ”Graf noted. According to the naval officer: “Knowing Schmidt well from the time of joint service, I am convinced that if his plan succeeded in 1905 and the revolution triumphed throughout Russia ... he would be the first to be horrified by the results of his deeds and would become a sworn enemy of Bolshevism.”

Meanwhile, revolutionary events in the Russian Empire continued to boil, and very soon after the execution of the lieutenant, young people began to appear at rallies of various parties, who, calling themselves "the son of Lieutenant Schmidt", on behalf of their father, who had died for freedom, called for revenge, to fight the tsarist regime, or to provide all possible material aid to the revolutionaries. Under the "son of a lieutenant" not only revolutionaries acted, but simply speculators. As a result, a completely indecent number of "sons" divorced. Moreover, even "Schmidt's daughters" appeared! For some time, the “children of the lieutenant” flourished quite well, but then, with the decline of the revolutionary movement, Lieutenant Schmidt was practically forgotten.

In Soviet times, the "children of a lieutenant" were revived in the second half of the 1920s. In 1925, the twentieth anniversary of the first Russian revolution was celebrated. While preparing the holiday, party veterans, to their considerable surprise and chagrin, discovered that the majority of the country's population does not remember at all or does not know at all the heroes who died during the first revolution. The party press began an active information campaign, and the names of some revolutionaries were hastily extracted from the darkness of oblivion. A lot of articles and memoirs were written about them, monuments were erected to them, streets, embankments, etc. were named after them. Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt became one of the most famous heroes of the first revolution. True, the propagandists were somewhat hasty and in a hurry missed some facts unfavorable for the hero. Thus, prominent tsarist admirals turned out to be relatives of the revolutionary, and his son Eugene participated in the Civil War on the side of the White movement and died in exile.

Known as Lieutenant Schmidt, he was born on February 17 (February 5, old style), 1867 in Odessa.

Lieutenant P.P. Schmidt

From the school bench, we all know the portrait of the famous "Ochakov" Schmidt. A thin aristocratic face with a piercing look. A black naval cape is thrown over the shoulders with buckles in the form of lions baring their muzzles. He is noble and unhappy, lonely and sacrificial - a democrat naval officer misunderstood by his contemporaries, doomed to death in advance.

Involuntarily, an episode from the wonderful Soviet film "We'll Live Until Monday" comes to mind, in which the teacher Melnikov (V. Tikhonov), reproaching the students for their ignorance, sings a whole ode to Lieutenant Schmidt, calling him "great clever", "Russian intellectual" and barely whether not the conscience of the nation. Alas! The "honest" history teacher, like several generations of Soviet people, fell victim to true historical myth-making...

As the screenwriter of this film G. Polonsky rightly noted, the first and very serious doubts about the identity of Lieutenant Schmidt began to appear among Soviet citizens immediately after reading the famous novel by Ilf and Petrov "The Golden Calf". Here, the adventures of "the children of Lieutenant Schmidt" are described in a very frivolous way. This author's move, one way or another, cast a shadow on the lieutenant himself - the romance of the first revolution, almost its idol.

The first magazine publication of The Golden Calf dates back to 1931. In 1933, despite the resistance of officials from literature, the novel was published in the USSR as a separate book. Now imagine what it meant publicly, from the pages of central magazines, to cast a shadow on the hero of the revolution? In those years, even more innocent statements were punished very harshly. It would never have occurred to anyone to compose such stories, for example, about the "children" of Bauman, Shchors, Chapaev or other dead heroes. Only I. Ilf and E. Petrov got away with all their frivolities about the legendary Schmidt. Why?

As we know from the memoirs of E. Petrov and his other contemporaries, the publication of the Golden Calf in the USSR was greatly helped by M. Gorky. And subsequently, until the end of the 1940s, nothing criminal was seen in the works of Ilf and Petrov, beloved by the people.

This happened because the generation of the first revolutionaries, including Stalin and Gorky, knew the truth about the rebellious lieutenant. The older generation of pre-Soviet people also knew her. Until February 1917, the figure of P.P. Schmidt was considered by contemporaries, rather, in a tragicomic than in a heroic perspective. This was facilitated both by the details about the life of Lieutenant Schmidt known to society - marriage to a prostitute, mental illness, scandals, repeated dismissals from service - and press coverage of the events of the Ochakov uprising and the behavior of its ex-leader at trial.

The "romanticization" of the exploits of the rebellious lieutenant began under Kerensky. Most of the officers of the Russian Imperial Navy did not accept the February events of 1917. After the extrajudicial reprisals against officers in Kronstadt, Helsingfors, Riga and other coastal cities, the Provisional Government seriously attended to the cause of revolutionary propaganda and the glorification of the heroes of the 1905 revolution. Schmidt's merits before the revolution were marked by an officer's St. George's Cross. At the place of his execution on the island of Berezan, they decided to erect a monument.

Under the Soviets, the tradition of propaganda myth-making was successfully continued, and P.P. Schmidt also "fell into the cage" of the most revered idols. His name was constantly set as an example to all former officers, "military experts" who went over to the service of the Bolshevik government.

Meanwhile, this was a man who lived a short but very dramatic life, full of deep contradictions.

Admiral Schmidt's son

Pyotr Schmidt was born on February 5 (17), 1867 in the family of a highly respected and honored veteran of the first Sevastopol defense. Both by father and mother, he was from the Russified Germans.

Rear Admiral Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt

Father - Rear Admiral Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt (1828-1882). Together with his older brother Vladimir Petrovich, he participated in the defense of Sevastopol and received more than one wound there, and later became the head of the port in Berdyansk. Not without interest is the fact that the mother of the "red lieutenant" Schmidt E. Ya. von Wagner (1835-1877) met her future husband there, in the besieged Sevastopol, where she arrived with other sisters of mercy from Kyiv. She worked in a hospital under the guidance of the great N. Pirogov.

The career of the eldest of the brothers, Vladimir Petrovich Schmidt (1827-1909), was even more successful: he was the junior flagship of the famous Admiral G. Butakov, commanded the Pacific Squadron, became a member of the Admiralty Council, became a full admiral and gentleman of all those who were at that time time in Russia orders, and then a senator. Throughout their lives, the Schmidt brothers maintained close family relations, were very attached to each other. Therefore, Vladimir Petrovich, who was also the godfather of Peter Schmidt Jr., treated his nephew as his own son, and after the death of his brother he never left him with truly paternal attention and care.

Needless to say, the future lieutenant Schmidt was literally destined to become a naval officer? For a boy from the Schmidt family, neither father nor uncle thought of any other fate. The mother of the future lieutenant died quite early, his father married a second time, other children appeared in the family. In September 1880, thirteen-year-old Pyotr Schmidt quit his studies at the Berdyansk Men's Gymnasium and entered the junior preparatory class of the Naval School in St. Petersburg.

According to the general reform of military educational institutions, the Naval Corps - the forge of personnel of the Russian Navy - was renamed the Naval School on June 2, 1867. The school received a new Charter, according to which it was classified as a higher educational institution. Its successful graduates automatically became the elite of the Russian navy - receiving the rank of midshipman, they were sent to the best ships of the Baltic and Black Sea squadrons.

In all known biographies of Schmidt, it was said that the young man seemed to be distinguished by great learning abilities, sang excellently, played music and painted. But along with these excellent qualities, teachers and fellow students more than once noticed his increased nervousness and excitability. The funds of the Central Naval Museum contain memoirs of Schmidt's classmates, written in the 1920s. Former comrades, despite all the hype raised around the "red lieutenant", wrote very unpleasant things about him. Due to the inability or unwillingness to build relationships with other people, Schmidt had practically no friends. None of the former classmates at the school subsequently maintained either acquaintance or friendship with him. Schmidt was repeatedly suspected of stealing small money from overcoats hanging in the wardrobe. Fellow students already then called the future revolutionary a “crazy man”: he periodically had inexplicable tantrums and mental breakdowns. Any other young man in his place would be instantly expelled from an elite educational institution. Only the intercession of his uncle - the hero of the Sevastopol defense and an influential military leader - led to the fact that the young man, unable for health reasons to serve in the sea, was released from the school in 1886 by the 53rd (!) According to the list, with the assignment of the rank of midshipman.

In the same 1887, midshipman P.P. Schmidt began his duties in the training rifle team of the 8th naval crew (Baltic Fleet).

As we can see, thanks to the patronage of a relative, Peter Schmidt at the very beginning of his life took a wrong place. And subsequently, his behavior was largely determined by what is now commonly called the “golden youth syndrome”. The feeling of impunity, the confidence that a high-ranking uncle would help get out of any, even the most insoluble life situation, played a truly fatal role in the fate of the future revolutionary.

Midshipman Schmidt

Shortly after graduating from the school, midshipman Schmidt surprised everyone by marrying Domnikia Gavrilovna Pavlova, a professional street prostitute who had a “yellow ticket” instead of a passport.

However, at that time it was fashionable among the liberal students and intelligentsia, having come together with a "fallen" woman, to try to "save" her. In his notorious story "The Pit" A. Kuprin devoted many pages to this topic.

However, in the case of Schmidt, the piquancy of the situation lay precisely in the fact that the “savior” was in the service of the navy, where even such a thing as marriage could not do without strict regulation, approval or disapproval of higher authorities. Navy officers could enter into marriage only with the permission of their superiors, but not earlier than reaching the age of 23. At the age of 23 to 25 - only if there is real estate that brings in at least 250 rubles of net income per year. In addition, the command without fail considered the "decency" of the marriage. A naval officer did not have the right to marry a noblewoman, and if he did, then there could be no question of his further promotion in the service.

Is it worth talking about the reaction of relatives, colleagues and just acquaintances of Schmidt to his impudent trick? This marriage, according to some biographers, literally killed Rear Admiral P.P. Schmidt Sr. He cursed his son, severed all relations with him, and died shortly thereafter.

Even the revolutionary myth-makers, hushing up the details of the scandalous marriage of the Ochakov hero, certainly noted that "Schmidt's family life did not work out," and blamed the lieutenant's wife for everything. Domnikia Gavrilovna Pavlova, a year after the wedding, gave birth to a son, who was named Eugene, and then actually returned to her previous studies. Schmidt's son Eugene recalled: "My mother was so terrible that one has to marvel at the inhuman patience and, indeed, the angelic kindness of my father, who bore the 17-year hard labor yoke of family hell on his shoulders."

For the original midshipman, the prospect of dismissal from service with the shameful wording "for actions contrary to officer honor" looked real. But there was no reaction from the fleet command. They didn’t even demand an official explanation from him, because behind the midshipman Schmidt, the figure of his uncle, Vladimir Petrovich Schmidt, the senior flagship of the Baltic Fleet, towered like a mighty cliff.

Uncle took care to hush up the scandal and in July 1888 transferred his beloved nephew to the Black Sea Fleet. But even here the midshipman did a big trick. Appearing for an appointment with the commander of the fleet, Admiral Kulagin, Schmidt threw a real tantrum in his office - "being in an extremely excited state, he said the most absurd things." Directly from the headquarters, the midshipman was taken to the naval hospital, where he was kept for two weeks, and upon discharge, the doctors strongly advised Pyotr Petrovich to appear to be good psychiatrists.

The track record of P. P. Schmidt includes:

“December 5, 1888, by the highest order of the Maritime Department No. 432, he was dismissed on leave, due to illness, within the Empire and abroad, for 6 months.”

twice fired

After a long course of treatment, compassionate Vladimir Petrovich sent his nephew to the Pacific squadron, under the wing of his student and successor Rear Admiral G.P. Chukhnin. My uncle naively believed that the harsh service in the Far East would change the character of the young midshipman, turning him into a real naval officer. And again I was wrong.

During his service in the Pacific, Schmidt changed almost all the ships of the squadron, and on each of them he was necessarily expelled from the wardroom. At one time, historians explained this exclusively by the democratic views of Schmidt and the noble reactionary nature of the rest of the naval officers. But it is absolutely impossible to believe in it. In the 90s of the 19th century, there were quite a few very decent, educated, progressive-minded officers in the Russian fleet (and in particular in the Pacific squadron). In their youth, some of them took part in the Narodnaya Volya movement and adhered to very liberal views, which subsequently did not prevent them from being highly respected people in the navy, successfully commanding various ships, and then dying heroically in the Battle of Tsushima. Schmidt did not get along with any of them, and his ambition, frequent mental seizures, unpredictable behavior only became the causes of new scandals, which had to be hushed up by his patron G.P. Chukhnin and a high-ranking uncle.

Entrusted to the cares of Chukhnin, P.P. Schmidt literally played the role of an "evil genius" in the fate of the unfortunate admiral. Having created a lot of problems for his patron during his lifetime, the rebellious lieutenant became an indirect cause of Chukhnin's tragic ending, as well as all posthumous curses addressed to him.

In the spring of 1889, Schmidt was undergoing treatment at the Moscow clinic for nervous and mentally ill Dr. Savey-Mogilevich. His illness was expressed in sudden fits of irritability, turning into a rage, followed by hysteria with convulsions and rolling on the floor. The sight was so terrible that the little son Eugene, who witnessed his father's sudden attack, was so frightened that he remained a stutterer for life.

On June 24, 1889, by the Highest Order of the Maritime Department No. 467, midshipman P.P. Schmidt was dismissed from service due to illness, lieutenant (by law, officers retired with the assignment of the next rank).

From 1889 to 1892 P.P. Schmidt with his wife and son lived in Berdyansk, Taganrog, Odessa, went to Paris, where he entered the school of aeronautics of Eugene Godard. Under the name of Leon Aer, he tried to master ballooning and earn money from "air tourism". But the chosen enterprise was not successful, the retired lieutenant's family was in poverty. According to one version, in one of the demonstration flights, Schmidt's balloon crashed, the basket hit the ground, and the lieutenant himself was injured, which resulted in kidney disease. The flights had to be stopped, and the balloon, along with all the equipment, had to be sold.

On March 27, 1892, Schmidt petitioned the highest name "for admission to the naval service." They went to meet him, enrolled with the former rank of midshipman, in the 18th naval crew as a watch officer on the 1st rank cruiser Rurik, which was under construction.

In 1894, Schmidt again went to the Far East - to the Siberian naval crew, to an old acquaintance - Admiral Chukhnin.

Already in December 1895, not without the patronage of G.P. Chukhnin, he was promoted to lieutenant, and again began his wanderings through the ships of the Siberian flotilla. Lieutenant Schmidt did not stay on any ship for more than a few months.

In 1894-95, Schmidt was a watchman on the destroyer Yanchikhe, then on the cruiser Admiral Kornilov, a staff officer on the port ship Strongman, and on the Ermak transport. In 1896, he was the head of the fire department of the gunboat "Ermine", the chief of the watch and the commander of the company of the gunboat "Beaver". During a foreign voyage in 1896-1897, another scandal happened to Schmidt again.

In the city of Nagasaki, where "Beaver" had one of its hospitals, the Schmidt family rented an apartment from a wealthy Japanese. Once, Schmidt's wife had a serious quarrel with the landlord over the terms of renting an apartment. The Japanese did not remain indebted to the former priestess of love, uttering insolence to her. Dominikia Gavrilovna complained to her husband. He demanded an apology from the Japanese, and when the latter refused to bring them, he went to the Russian consulate in Nagasaki and, having obtained an audience with the consul V. Ya. Kostylev, demanded that he take immediate measures to punish the Japanese. Kostylev told Schmidt that, by law, he could only send all the materials of the case to a Japanese court for a decision. Then Schmidt made a scandal in the consulate, began to shout that he ordered the sailors to catch the Japanese and flog him, or he himself would kill him on the street with a revolver. Obviously, this whole everyday story ended with another nervous attack. Schmidt was decommissioned from the ship "Bobr" and sent to the Nagasaki coastal hospital "for treatment from the disease of neurasthenia."

In March 1897, he was recalled to Vladivostok, where he served as a senior staff officer on the icebreaker Nadezhny.

In August of the same year, Schmidt had a sharp conflict with the commander of the squadron of the Pacific Ocean and the port of Vladivostok, Admiral G.P. Chukhnin. The main reason for this conflict was mentioned by Soviet historians somehow indistinctly and in passing: they say, Lieutenant Schmidt had already refused to comply with the order of the "Tsar's satrap" Chukhnin to suppress the dockers' strike in the port of Vladivostok. For this, the former patron ordered him to be arrested, and then to undergo a medical examination and be transferred to the reserve for health reasons.

According to another version, the reason for the conflict between the admiral and the lieutenant was a very incoherent report by P. Schmidt on his immediate superior, the commander of the Nadezhny LD N.F. Yuryev, whom the lieutenant accused of having connections either with poachers or with Japanese spies. Obviously, being in a state of a nervous attack, Schmidt allowed himself some anti-disciplinary actions against the ship's commander, for which he was placed under arrest for three weeks. The reaction to Schmidt's report was the order of Rear Admiral G. Chukhnin dated 10/28/1897: “... As a result of the report of Lieutenant Schmidt, I propose that the chief doctor of the Vladivostok hospital, V.N. provide me."

Most likely, in this case, Lieutenant Schmidt acted as a champion of justice, sincerely worrying about the honor of the state and the Russian fleet, but the commander of the port, Chukhnin, did not need a loud scandal. It was much more profitable to attribute everything to the state of health of the truth-seeking officer, sending him into retirement.

On September 24, 1898, by order of the Naval Department No. 204, Lieutenant Schmidt was dismissed from service for the second time, but with the right to serve in the commercial fleet.

After his second resignation, Pyotr Petrovich again turned to the help of his uncle. On his recommendation, Schmidt got a job in the Volunteer Fleet, becoming an assistant captain of the merchant ship Kostroma, and from there in 1900 he left for the Society of Shipping and Trade. In the period from 1901 to 1904, the retired lieutenant served as the captain of merchant ships: Igor, St. Nicholas, Polezny, Diana.

His wife stayed with him, but the family actually fell apart: a trail of scandalous rumors dragged behind Domnikia, and Pyotr Petrovich, escaping from them, was almost never at home, spent most of the year sailing and lived without getting out in the captain's cabin on the "Diana". On commercial flights, he was often accompanied by his son Eugene.

Past Tsushima

Perhaps at this stage, Schmidt's life somehow calmed down: he was the captain of the ship, spent all his time at sea, did his favorite job, raised his son. But in 1904, the Russo-Japanese War began. From the very beginning of hostilities in the Far East, the naval officer corps suffered heavy losses. They needed to be urgently replenished, and therefore the medical commission considered it possible to call up a not quite healthy person - reserve officer Schmidt - to the navy.

For the third time, Schmidt, who was already under forty years old, returned to the fleet, was reinstated in the rank of lieutenant and sent to the Baltic. He was appointed senior officer of the Irtysh coal transport, which was preparing to move to the Pacific theater of operations as part of the Rozhdestvensky squadron. The post of "ship dragon" was not at all for Pyotr Petrovich. The duties of a senior officer of a warship include maintaining strict discipline, and the lieutenant did not want to "tighten the screws": on his "Diana" he easily smoked with the sailors, read books to them, and they familiarly called him "Petro".

The Irtysh was sent along a shortened route through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. In Suez, Schmidt suddenly leaves the ship for everyone. Domestic historians vaguely talk about some kind of illness that allegedly struck an officer who was rushing to the battlefield. Due to his health, Schmidt could not stay in tropical latitudes for a long time. Previously, while serving on the Diana, he could, but now suddenly not. In addition, the squadron was supposed to be in the southern latitudes for a very short time, since it had the goal of marching on Vladivostok.

Schmidt among the officers of the Irtysh (sitting, third from left)

Another version of Schmidt's write-off says that he did not find a common language with the captain and other officers of the Irtysh. The senior liberal officer was corrupting discipline on the ship, and the captain dreamed of getting rid of this eccentric who had fallen on his head before a long ocean voyage. Oil was added to the fire by an accident during the release of the Irtysh to the sea: it happened during Schmidt’s watch, and although his actions in a difficult situation actually saved the ship, according to an old naval tradition, the watch officer was made “extreme”. According to the captain's report, the squadron commander put the lieutenant under arrest, and in the parking lot in Port Said, at the entrance to the Suez Canal, ill-wishers wrote off Lieutenant Schmidt "due to illness."

However, the officer of the same Irtysh transport, Harald Graf, in his memoirs interprets the fact of Schmidt's sudden flight from the ship in a slightly different way: “... I learned that the commander received an order from the Main Naval Staff to write off the senior officer, it seems, at his own request, as a reserve officer who had passed a certain age. This order just by chance did not find us in Libava, and therefore Schmidt made the transition to Said ... "

There is no reason not to believe G. Graf. The former midshipman of the Irtysh writes about Schmidt quite objectively and even with some sympathy. This version is confirmed by the memoirs of the chief of staff of the Libau fortress F.P. Rerberg, telling about the public scandal perpetrated by Schmidt in Libau. At a ball organized by the Red Cross Society, Schmidt got into an unreasonable fight with one of the guests, deliberately broke the glass with a chair and really expected to be arrested so as not to follow the squadron to the Far East. Why, then, was the romantic lieutenant, who, by his own admission, despised death and dreamed of serving the people, so stubbornly refused to move towards a possible feat?

The researcher V. Shigin, in his essay “Unknown Lieutenant Schmidt”, explains the behavior of our hero solely by his connections with some hypothetical organization of conspirators that led the revolutionary events in Odessa and Sevastopol in the summer and autumn of 1905. This organization (committee), according to Shigin, made plans for separating some southern regions from Russia and creating an economically sovereign Jewish state on their territory, with its capital in Odessa. And Lieutenant Schmidt, as a naval officer, was supposed to lead the rebellion on the Potemkin, lead the fleet and ensure the “technical side” of victory. The Committee allegedly forbade Schmidt to leave the territory of Russia, and he did everything to be at the right time in the right place, i.e. spend the summer of 1905 not on the Pacific Ocean, but on the Black Sea.

The tendency to explain all the misfortunes of Russia by Jewish conspiracies and the intrigues of some behind-the-scenes forces is again becoming fashionable today, actively infiltrating the public consciousness from television screens and pages of pseudo-scientific publications. But in the case of Schmidt, it does not stand up to scrutiny. To invite a mentally ill person to the key role of the leader of the uprising, moreover, a completely inept officer who was dismissed from the service three times is a very strange step for enterprising adventurers ...

Most likely, writing off the ship due to age, Schmidt simply went on about his subconscious fears. It is possible that the captain of the merchant ship "Diana" liked his peaceful life. Schmidt did not want to die for Russia in the distant Pacific Ocean, as almost his entire team died along with the Irtysh transport. By that time, one of the younger half-brothers of Pyotr Petrovich had already died on the battleship Petropavlovsk, along with Vice Admiral S. Makarov, and the second, seriously wounded in bayonet attacks, was in Japanese captivity. In the event of the death of his father, the son of Lieutenant Eugene would have been left unattended.

It is possible that the uncle-admiral again put his hand to the rescue of the third, beloved nephew. Even an all-powerful relative could not completely free Schmidt from military service during the war. However, at his request, a safe place was found for the lieutenant in the Black Sea Fleet, which was now headed by the same Admiral G.P. Chukhnin.

embezzler

In the spring of 1905, P.P. Schmidt was appointed to command a detachment of two destroyers based in Izmail. But already in the summer of 1905, state money disappeared from the cash desk of the detachment - 2.5 thousand rubles. Lieutenant Schmidt didn't think of anything smarter than running. Some time later, he was arrested and an investigation began.

Judging by the surviving materials, Pyotr Petrovich, like any person inexperienced in such matters, awkwardly lied and made excuses. At first, he said that he lost money when he rode a bicycle along Izmail, then he put forward a version of a robbery on a train, then he came up with fables about his sister who was allegedly in trouble and the need for his urgent trip to Kerch, etc. etc. In the end, the lieutenant had to confess to embezzlement and desertion: having taken state money, Schmidt did not go to Kerch, but to Kyiv, where he completely lost on the run.

By the way, it was during this trip that he first met his latest "romantic passion" - Zinaida (Ida) Riesberg. Riesberg, in her memoirs, unequivocally points to the fact that she first saw the “strange officer” not on the train, but at the hippodrome, where he played for high stakes, squandering stolen money. Then they (accidentally or not?) ended up together in a compartment, where they met. In the next six months, Schmidt began a virtual romance with his fellow traveler in letters that many historians still consider to be almost the main source of information about the personality of Lieutenant Schmidt. Ida Rizberg turned out to be a more than practical lady: she kept all the messages of Pyotr Petrovich. When the campaign began to exalt the exploits of her correspondent, Rysberg declared herself his last love and fighting girlfriend. As evidence, she provided Schmidt's letters for publication, thus gaining the status of the hero's official "widow" and a lifetime Soviet pension. The scam is quite in the spirit of "the children of Lieutenant Schmidt" from the "Golden Calf"!

The embezzler Schmidt himself got out of the criminal history with embezzlement very simply. Appearing in Sevastopol, he let his uncle know about his misfortune. He, in order to avoid court and the shame of the family, paid all 2.5 thousand of his personal money. The case was closed. Schmidt is fired from the fleet within a few days, since by this time peace negotiations with Japan are already underway. To ensure his nephew's return as a captain to the commercial fleet, Admiral V.P. Schmidt persistently seeks dismissal with the simultaneous promotion of Pyotr Petrovich to captain of the 2nd rank. However, the Naval Ministry finds this unnecessary, and Schmidt is fired as a lieutenant, but quietly, without publicizing the true reasons.

To Ochakov!

So Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt in the autumn of 1905 found himself without certain occupations and special prospects in Sevastopol. This happened just on the eve of the revolutionary events, when the sailor's "buza" was ripening in the coastal barracks and on the ships.

After the publication in October 1905 of the tsar's manifesto on the granting of freedoms, the lower ranks demanded clarification. They were told that the freedoms granted to them did not apply. At the entrance to the Sevastopol Primorsky Boulevard, as before, there was a shameful sign: “Entrance with dogs and lower ranks is prohibited”; the dismissal to the reserve of those who served their terms was delayed; the families of those called up from the reserve with the end of the war ceased to receive benefits, and the breadwinners were not allowed to go home, and each letter from home had an effect on the servicemen more than any revolutionary proclamation. All this heated up the situation in the city and on the courts to the extreme, and the authorities, faithful to the precepts of antiquity, sought to “keep and not let go,” which led to the first clashes and casualties.

P.P. Schmidt was not a member of any party. In general, he avoided "herding", because he fancied himself an extraordinary person, for whom all parties are cramped. But when political events began to boil in Sevastopol, he, embittered by the "injustices", joined the opposition and became very active.

After his resignation, instead of going to Odessa and being hired as a captain in the merchant fleet (as his uncle expected), Pyotr Petrovich begins to speak at anti-government rallies. His strange figure really attracted the attention of the public, and this strangeness seemed to many to be some kind of special originality of the leader and fanatical martyr of the idea. Being a good speaker, Schmidt reveled in his power over the crowd, spoke so sharply and energetically that right during a speech at a rally on October 25, he suffered a mental attack. The speaker following him, a certain Orlovsky, under the impression of Schmidt's fit, faints. An excited-hysterical state is transmitted to the crowd: the manifestation of mental pathology was taken by people for a revolutionary obsession. The authorities understand that the situation is about to get out of control. Schmidt is arrested. Here neither Chukhnin nor his uncle can do anything: the gendarmerie has taken over Schmidt. A retired lieutenant is sent to prison. From there he writes appeals to freedom one after another. Now Schmidt is not just some retired lieutenant, he is a martyr for freedom! The “Martyr” is immediately elected a life-long deputy of the Sevastopol city council, where at that time the Socialist-Revolutionaries run everything.

Schmidt was the only naval officer (albeit a former one) who took the side of the revolution. Historians believe that it was for this reason that the deputation of the crew of the cruiser Ochakov turned to him, heading to a meeting of representatives of teams and crews. At spontaneous meetings of the lower ranks, it was decided at this meeting to formulate their general requirements for the authorities, and the sailors wanted to consult with the "revolutionary officer". As soon as Schmidt was released from prison, the cruiser's delegation came to his apartment. Schmidt greeted everyone by the hand, seated them at the table in the living room: all these were signs of unprecedented democracy in relations between officers and sailors. Having familiarized himself with the requirements of the Ochakovites, Pyotr Petrovich advised them not to waste their time on trifles (the sailors wanted to improve their living conditions, service conditions, increase payments, etc.). He recommended that they put forward political demands - then they will be seriously listened to, and there will be something to "bargain" about in negotiations with superiors.

Schmidt himself later assured the court that the sailors begged him to go to the Ochakov and lead the uprising. But this version, later picked up by the revolutionaries and long perceived by historians as an indisputable truth, existed only in the sick imagination of the most retired lieutenant. To rebel, and even more so - to conduct military operations - none of the crew of the cruiser seriously planned. Completely fascinated by the reception, the sailors-deputies left for their meeting, and Schmidt, dressed in the uniform of a captain of the 2nd rank, rushed to the Sevastopol pier.

Uprising on "Ochakovo"

The further actions of Lieutenant Schmidt can be regarded either as the adventurism of a criminal terrorist, confident in his impunity, or as the actions of a mentally ill person obsessed with some idea of ​​his own.

The title of captain of the 2nd rank was automatically assigned to Schmidt when he was transferred to the reserve in the usual manner, but under the circumstances under which he was fired, the lieutenant did not have the right to wear a captain's tunic. Therefore, he had no right to appear in this form even on the street. Nevertheless, the false captain arrived at the pier, quickly found the boat of the cruiser Ochakov, on which the deputies arrived ashore, and said that he had been appointed captain by the meeting of the teams. The impostor ordered the watchmen to deliver him to the cruiser. He almost certainly acted: the crew members who came to him said that after the sailors began to sabotage the execution of orders, the officers in full force left the ship.

Arriving aboard the Ochakov, Schmidt gathered a team on the quarterdeck and announced that, at the request of the general meeting of deputies, he had taken command of the entire Black Sea Fleet, which he ordered to immediately notify the sovereign emperor by urgent telegram. Which was done.

Here we should say a few words about the most legendary cruiser.

Cruiser "Ochakov"
1901 - 1933

The armored cruiser "Ochakov" was laid down in 1901 and built in Sevastopol at the State Shipyard by ship engineer N. Yankovsky. Launched on October 1, 1902, but entered service only in 1907. In 1905, he spent a long time at the completion of the factory. According to some modern researchers, a number of technical errors were made during the construction of Ochakov, which were the result of financial abuses by the management of the Sevastopol port and the State Shipyard. Many of the works were carried out not by workers, but by sailors - in the past, workers. The difference in wages went into the pocket of clever schemers. Some of the technical innovations that the cruiser relied on for the project existed only on paper. Admiral Chukhnin, as the commander of the fleet and head of the port, could not help but know about this: a special commission was organized in the case of the builders of the Ochakov, which conducted an investigation. However, the version about the involvement of G.P. Chukhnin himself in the identified abuses and his desire to deliberately “bomb” the ill-fated ship in order to hide all the ends is in no way confirmed by further events.

The Ochakov team, assembled from different crews, closely communicating with the workers and the agitators of the revolutionary parties dissolved among them, turned out to be thoroughly propagandized. Among the sailors there were their own influential persons, who actually acted as the initiators, if not of a rebellion, then at least of defiant insubordination. This sailor elite - several conductors and senior sailors - could not help but understand that on November 14, 1905, the cruiser was not ready for any military operations. He had just returned from a training trip and without the supply of fuel, food and water, in a few days he would have turned into a metal colossus with cooled boilers, inoperative instruments and mechanisms. In addition, specialist officers are needed to operate a warship. Without them, "Ochakov" could not even be taken out of the bay. The battleship Potemkin, for example, was captured at sea, already on the move, but even there, having shot the officers, the rebels still left two, forcing them to fulfill their duties by force. It was not possible to repeat this on the Ochakov - all the officers managed to move ashore, and the team got into a deadlock.

Under such circumstances, the whole idea of ​​​​the uprising was doomed to failure in advance. Nevertheless, the sailor leaders, out of habit, obeyed the resolutely disguised captain, who fell on them like snow on their heads.

Schmidt told the team that on the shore, in the fortress and among the workers, "his people" were just waiting for the signal to start an armed uprising. According to him, the capture of Sevastopol with its arsenals and warehouses was only the first step, after which it was necessary to go to Perekop and build artillery batteries there, block the road to the Crimea with them and thereby separate the peninsula from Russia. Further, he intended to move the entire fleet to Odessa, land troops and take power in Odessa, Nikolaev and Kherson. As a result, the "South Russian Socialist Republic" was formed, at the head of which Schmidt saw himself, his beloved.

The team covered Schmidt's speech with a thunderous "hooray!" and followed Schmidt, as the peasants used to follow the schismatic “apostles” who had come from nowhere, saying that in a dream they had a place where happiness and universal justice awaited everyone.

It is difficult to say whether Schmidt himself believed in what he said. Most likely, he did not think about it, but acted under the impression of the moment. F. Zinko's essay about Schmidt says: "Exalted, struck by the grandeur of the goals opening up before him, Schmidt did not so much direct events as he was inspired by them."

Initially, the rebels were successful: Schmidt's bosses recognized the teams of two destroyers, by his order port tugs were captured, and armed groups of sailors from the Ochakov circled around the squadron ships anchored in the Sevastopol Bay, landing boarding teams on them. On the night of November 15, strike detachments captured the mine cruiser "Griden", the destroyer "Svirepy", three numbered destroyers and several small vessels, and seized a number of weapons in the port. At the same time, the crews of the gunboat "Uralets", the destroyers "Zavetny", "Zorkiy", the training ship "Dniester" and the mine transport "Bug" joined the rebels.

Taking the officers by surprise, the rebels captured them and took them to the Ochakov. Having thus gathered more than a hundred officers on board the cruiser, Schmidt declared them hostages, whom he threatened to hang, starting with the most senior in rank, if the command of the fleet and the Sevastopol fortress took hostile actions against the rebels. In addition to the officers, the passengers of the Pushkin steamer, which was on its regular flight to Sevastopol, were also held hostage. At sunrise on November 15, Schmidt, in the presence of the crew and captured passengers, raised a red flag over Ochakovo. At the same time, a signal was given: "I command the fleet - Schmidt." From the board of the Ochakov, another telegram was delivered to the shore for sending to Nicholas II: “The glorious Black Sea Fleet, sacredly faithful to its people, demands from you, sovereign, the immediate convocation of the Constituent Assembly and ceases to obey your ministers. Fleet Commander Citizen Schmidt.

Interestingly, during the raising of the red flag, the orchestra played "God save the Tsar!". By this, he wanted to win over other ships of the squadron to his side, to reassure the officers and sailors of other ships, convincing them that he was not a rebel. However, they were indifferent to this signal.

In order to attract the entire squadron to the side of the rebels, Schmidt bypassed it on the destroyer "Svirepy". But his appearance did not cause much enthusiasm among the sailors. Some teams raised red flags at the approach of the Ferocious, and as soon as the destroyer was out of sight, they immediately lowered them. The commander of the St. George cruiser "Memory of Mercury" shouted point-blank to P. P. Schmidt: "We serve the tsar and the fatherland, and you, the robber, force yourself to serve."

Then the Ferocious headed for the Prut transport, which had been turned into a prison. An armed detachment of sailors led by Schmidt freed the Potemkinites who were on the ship. The team of "Saint Panteleimon" (formerly "Potemkin") joined the rebels, but the battleship itself no longer represented a large military force, since it was disarmed even before the uprising began.

At noon on November 15, the rebellious lieutenant promised that he would hang all the hostages if his demands were not met. He wanted the Cossack units to be withdrawn from Sevastopol and the Crimea in general, as well as those army units that remained true to the oath. From a possible attack from the shore, he covered himself by placing the Bug mine transport with a full load of sea mines between the Ochakov and coastal batteries - any hit on this huge floating bomb would have caused a catastrophe: the force of the explosion would have demolished part of the city adjoining the sea.

As we can see, Schmidt acted like a true lone terrorist, so all his plans were doomed to failure in advance. The fleet did not rise, there was no help from the shore. Despite the threats, no one was in a hurry to immediately fulfill the demands of the rebel. When Schmidt realized that the crews of the squadron ships remained deaf to his revolutionary calls, another hysteria happened to him.

The commander of the fleet, Chukhnin, quite rightly believed that in the person of Schmidt he was dealing with a sick person, and therefore was in no hurry to give orders for military operations. Hoping to resolve the matter amicably, he sends a truce to Schmidt with a proposal to surrender. He convinces the rebels that the cause is lost, but it is still possible to save human lives. Yes, they will be punished, but the blood has not yet been shed, and therefore the punishment will not be too severe, especially for the general mass of sailors. Schmidt releases the civilian passengers of the Pushkin and declares that he will negotiate only with his classmates in the Naval Corps. Chukhnin accepts this condition as well. Several of his former classmates-officers immediately go to Schmidt. As soon as they step on the deck of the Ochakov, they are immediately declared hostages. Schmidt tells Chukhnin that after each shot at the cruiser, he will hang an officer on the yardarms (apparently, his former schoolmates annoyed him a lot!). Chukhnin issues a new ultimatum, this time for Ochakov to surrender within an hour.

Meanwhile, the Bug mine transport team, which was covering the Ochakov from coastal artillery fire, changed its mind and opened the kingstones. According to the "Soviet" version, she was forced to do so by the Terets gunboat, loyal to the government troops, whose commander, Captain 2nd Rank Stavraki (by the way, also Schmidt's classmate at the Naval School) was about to open fire on the Bug. Whatever it was, but the ship with dangerous cargo went to the bottom, leaving the rebellious cruiser at gunpoint.

According to eyewitnesses, Admiral Chukhnin did not want to start a battle at all, believing that "psychotherapy" could be dispensed with - saving hundreds of human lives and a new, just rebuilt warship. But the general command of the government troops at that moment was carried out by General Miller-Zakomelsky, who had recently arrived in Sevastopol, and had very wide powers. The general demanded to speed up the denouement. At 16.00, the ultimatum expired, and the ships of the squadron fired several shots at the Ochakov. The signal “Outraged by the actions of the squadron” soared over the cruiser. Then the cruiser began firing back at government troops and coastal batteries.

Subsequently, in the domestic historical literature, the opinion was established about the most severe execution of "Ochakov". The main author of this version was, of course, Peter Schmidt himself. According to him, there was no such execution to which "Ochakov" was subjected in the entire history of the world! Military historians could only smile skeptically here: if the lieutenant had not escaped at one time from the squadron marching towards Tsushima, he would have known what real artillery shelling is. For Schmidt, who had never been in combat, the very sluggish and unproductive shelling of the cruiser might well have seemed unprecedented. As they say, fear has big eyes.

In fact, the command of the Black Sea Fleet, being of sound mind and solid memory, did not set the task of destroying its own cruiser, which had not even entered service yet.

According to official reports, the Ochakov squadron fired only six volleys from small-caliber guns. The upper part of the ship and the deck were fired on mainly so as not to break through the armor belt, that is, not to hit the vital compartments. Heavy coastal artillery fired more accurately, but with shrapnel, and its roar was needed, rather, to create a psychological effect. The main casualties and damage on the Ochakovo arose due to a fire that no one was going to put out in the general turmoil. In January 1906, the ship's construction engineer N. I. Yankovsky submitted a detailed report describing the damage inflicted on the Ochakov. In the upper part of the ship's hull, 52 holes were counted (mainly from the coast), so Ochakov needed a complete restructuring of the upper decks, replacement of expensive expensive instruments that failed, repair of gun mounts, etc. But all this turned out to be possible to do on the spot, in Sevastopol, without transferring the cruiser to a more powerful shipyard in Nikolaev. And already in 1907 (a little over a year after the "terrible shelling") "Ochakov" under the name "Kahul" entered service with the Black Sea squadron.

As for, in fact, the losses of the rebels, the most contradictory information is given here - from twenty to two hundred killed, from sixty to five hundred wounded. It is currently not possible to establish the exact number of deaths on the Ochakovo. It is known that on November 15 there were up to 380 crew members on the ship, not counting sailors from the squadron and coastal units. According to other sources, there were about 700 people on the Ochakovo. The Bolshevik newspaper Borba wrote in 1906 that “no more than forty or fifty people were saved. 39 Ochakovites were brought to trial. The gendarmerie captain Vasiliev in his report indicated: “... both the dead and the wounded remained on the Ochakov after it caught fire, and everyone burned down ... at nine in the evening I myself saw the red-hot sides of the Ochakov.

However, there is evidence that after the flight of their leader Schmidt, the sailors made an attempt to deal with the hostage officers. As a result, only one person was killed and three were injured. The hostages managed to break out of the locked cabins, lower the red flag, hoisting a white sheet in its place, after which the shelling of the ship immediately stopped. Where, then, could so many dead be taken? All the surviving participants in the events were removed from the vessel by rescue boats, the wounded were sent to the hospital, none of the hostages was injured. Admiral Chukhnin immediately reported this to Nicholas II.

Final of Lieutenant Schmidt

Soviet historiography, grinding up the details of the Ochakov events, lamented for a long time that the rebels during the battle with the squadron did not use all the capabilities of their newest cruiser: they did not torpedo the ships standing in the roadstead, did not dare to ram the battleship that fired at them, etc. They explained this by the high human qualities and humanism of Schmidt, who did not want to shed too much blood. But today we can state with all confidence: Lieutenant Schmidt was not present at Ochakov during the battle, and the uncontrollable team in a panic sought only to avoid their own death.

According to V. Shigin, even before the start of the shelling, foreseeing an unfavorable development of events, Schmidt ordered destroyer No. 270 with a full supply of coal and water to be prepared from the rear side of the Ochakov. As soon as the side of the cruiser began to shudder from the first hits, Schmidt and his son, taking advantage of the general confusion, were the first (and this was documented) to leave the ship under fire. Perhaps Schmidt intended to escape to Turkey, but under the threat of artillery shelling, the destroyer 270 was stopped, and an inspection team was landed on board, which found naked Pyotr Petrovich and Evgeny Petrovich Shmidtov in the bow compartment. They tried to impersonate stokers, but were immediately arrested.

There followed a high-profile trial and the execution of Schmidt on the deserted island of Berezan. Not without interest was the report of Prime Minister S. Witte to Nicholas II on Schmidt’s mental abnormality: “I am told from all sides that Lieutenant Schmidt, who was sentenced to death, is a mentally ill person, and that his criminal actions are explained only by his illness ... All statements to me are made with a request to report this to Your Imperial Majesty ... "On the letter, the resolution of Nicholas II:" I have not the slightest doubt that if Schmidt was mentally ill, this would have been established by a forensic examination.

But there was no psychiatric examination. None of the psychiatrists agreed to go to Ochakov to examine Schmidt. Why? Most likely, because the Socialist-Revolutionaries took up the creation of the myth about the hero, and the jokes were bad with their militants. They did not need a living Schmidt, and given his mental state, he was even dangerous.

The fate of Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt can be compared with a heavy-duty, but initially faulty locomotive, which rushes at full speed on the way to a high cliff. Helpful "switchmen" - high patrons - out of the best of intentions tried to make this path the least dangerous and thorny, not even suspecting that by doing so they were bringing the inevitable death of their ward closer.

This time even V.P. could not soften the fall by “laying straws”. Schmidt is an admiral and a senator. At the news of what his beloved nephew had done, the elderly uncle seemed to have passed away even before his physical death. He did not appear in public, did not communicate with almost any of his former acquaintances, even on holidays he did not attend the Sea Meeting. The shame that fell on the family was so great that the youngest of Peter Schmidt's half-brothers, Vladimir, also a naval officer and hero of the Russo-Japanese War, was forced to change his surname and since then was written everywhere as Schmitt. Ironically, it was he who from 1912 to 1914 served as a senior officer on the cruiser "Cahul" (formerly "Ochakov"). The sisters, having married, changed their surnames earlier and, until the well-known events of February 1917, did not advertise their relationship with the “rebellious lieutenant”. The legal wife after the execution of Schmidt also refused his name. For that, during the trial in Ochakovo, a recent acquaintance of Schmidt, Mrs. Risberg, showed up, who, having learned about what had happened, immediately arrived from Kyiv and corresponded with Schmidt until the last day.

Schmidt's trial caused a lot of noise among then-Democrats. The press, sparing no effort, reproached the official authorities for cruelty, and Schmidt was declared the conscience of the nation and a petrel of future upheavals. At the same time, the Socialist-Revolutionaries passed their death sentence to Vice-Admiral G.P. Chukhnin. After all, it was he who demanded the death penalty for Schmidt at the trial. On their instructions, the sailor Akimov, a “sympathetic” socialist, got a job as a gardener at a dacha near Chukhnin, where on June 28, 1906, he mortally wounded the admiral with a shot from a gun.

"Sons" of Lieutenant Schmidt

Schmidt's son Eugene, who was then in his sixteenth year, arrived at Ochakov on November 15, after his father declared himself commander. As soon as the shelling of the rebel cruiser began, he jumped overboard with his father. Then both Schmidts were arrested on board the destroyer 270, which was trying to break out of the Sevastopol harbor.

Yevgeny Schmidt, a minor, was soon released, he was not put on trial and was not subjected to any persecution. But, willy-nilly, a reflection of his father's revolutionary "glory" fell on him. In numerous newspaper publications about the Sevastopol events, they certainly mentioned him. Since until that time the young man was completely unknown to anyone, and there was no place to get accurate information about the young man, the newspapermen indicated the different ages of the “boy”, but did not mention the name at all. Most often, Eugene was written precisely as “the son of Lieutenant Schmidt”.

Meanwhile, revolutionary events in the country continued to boil. Very soon after the execution of the lieutenant, young people began to appear at rallies of various parties, who, calling themselves “the son of Lieutenant Schmidt”, on behalf of their father who died for freedom, called for revenge, to fight the tsarist regime or to provide all possible assistance to the revolutionaries, donating to the organizers of the rally, as much as possible. Under the "son of a lieutenant" the revolutionaries made good fees. And since there were many parties, and everyone wanted to "seize the opportunity", the "sons" divorced a completely indecent number. Not only that: even the “daughters of Lieutenant Schmidt” arose from somewhere!

Further - more: "sons" appeared who had nothing to do with the parties, but worked "for themselves." Newspapers, every day, wrote about the capture of another "young man who called himself the son of Lieutenant Schmidt," and this newspaper formula literally stuck in the teeth of the layman. For about a year, the “children of the lieutenant” flourished quite well, and then, when the rallies and gatherings, where it was possible to bypass the audience with a hat, ended with a decline in revolutionary sentiment, they disappeared somewhere, apparently changing their repertoire.

In Soviet times, the “children of a lieutenant” could well have been reborn precisely in the second half of the 20s, exactly coinciding with the chronology of the novel by Ilf and Petrov. As we remember, the "Sukharev Convention" on the initiative of Shura Balaganov was concluded in the spring of 1928, and three years earlier, in 1925, the twentieth anniversary of the first Russian revolution was celebrated. While preparing the holiday, the veterans of the party, to their considerable chagrin, discovered that the majority of the country's population does not remember at all or does not know at all the heroes who died on the barricades of 1905. The party press rang the bells, and the names of some revolutionaries were hastily extracted from the darkness of oblivion. A lot of memoirs were written about them, monuments were erected to them, everything that was somehow connected with them or even not connected at all was named after them.

Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt is a real champion in this regard: his posthumous fame has crossed all reasonable limits. But in a hurry, party ideologists overlooked the fact that the candidate for revolutionary idols, as they said then in the commissions for party purges, "is not prosperous in terms of relatives." The fact is that the lieutenant's son, Yevgeny Petrovich, did not accept the October coup in 1917, joined the white movement and fought against the reds until 1920. At the end of the Civil War, he was evacuated with other Wrangelites from the Crimea, stayed in the camps at Gallipoli, then settled in Prague. Later he moved to Paris, where, under the surname Schmidt-Ochakovsky, he wrote and published a book about his father. He died in 1951 in France.

The half-brother of the lieutenant, Vladimir Petrovich Schmitt (1883-1965), also belonged to white emigrants - captain of the 1st rank, hydrograph and oceanographer, teacher at Columbia University, lived in the USA since 1925, was an active member of the Society of Former Russian Naval Officers in America .

The true story of the son and other relatives of Lieutenant Schmidt was carefully concealed from the Soviet people, and this gave all sorts of swindlers a trump card. The revolutionary myth about the lieutenant and the vague memory that he had either a son or sons could well feed more than a dozen crooks touring the Land of Soviets with epic stories about a heroic dad. “Go and don’t give him what he asks, but he will roll up a complaint to the party instance, and then they will sew on political myopia,” the local bureaucrats reasoned approximately like this, supplying the “sons” with everything necessary. The bureaucrats gave away not their own, but state property, so it was not a pity. And in addition, they did not forget themselves, writing off a lot more for a sop to the “child” of the Ochakov hero than actually fell to Shura Balaganov or Mikhail Samuelevich Panikovsky.

Compilation by Elena Shirokova based on materials:

Boiko V. Vice Admiral G.P.

Of course, it is quite natural that on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the rebellion in Sevastopol (November 11-16, 1905 according to the old style or November 24-29 "according to modern reckoning") the name of Peter Schmidt began to appear more and more often in the media and even feature films. The context of these "media-historical messages" is very different (as it should be in our discordant time) - from "sacred-traditional" assessments in the spirit of "hero and patriot!" to less benevolent characteristics - "scoundrel and schizophrenic!" ... But here we will not talk about the role and place of Lieutenant Schmidt in the "world historical process", but about the events around him. Those who shaped this person exactly the future that we know (only now as "traditions of antiquity deep").

Initially, it seemed that the "life cycle" of the young Schmidt did not at all imply his rapid transformation into a "socialist outside the party", "deputy for life" (of the Sevastopol Soviet of the "model of 1905" - this meeting even lasted five days) and so on and so forth. On February 5, 1867 (hereinafter all dates are given according to the old style) in Odessa, in the family of the assistant to the commandant of the military port, Petr Petrovich Schmidt, the long-awaited son was born - Petr Petrovich Jr. (as it was then customary not only to say, but also to indicate in documents - Schmidt 3rd). This was the sixth child of a hereditary nobleman and military sailor and Ekaterina Yakovlevna Schmidt. The previous five children were girls, but by the time Peter was born, three sisters had died in infancy. Considering the fact that the father was a naval officer, the mother and sisters were engaged in the education of the future revolutionary. Subsequently, in one of his letters to Zinaida Ivanovna Rizberg, the rebellious "lieutenant commander" wrote that he grew up in a female environment of his sisters and mother, since his father was always on the voyage.

The relatives of Lieutenant Schmidt were a classic, moreover, a textbook example of service for the good of the fatherland. Judge for yourself. Father - Rear Admiral Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt 2nd. Born in 1828 in a family of hereditary nobles and naval officers. Actually, his father - captain of the 1st rank Peter Petrovich Schmidt 1st - founded the "sea dynasty". After graduating from the Naval Corps, Schmidt II served on battleships and frigates of the Baltic and Black Sea fleets. From September 13, 1854 to May 21, 1855 - a participant in the defense of Sevastopol on the Malakhov Kurgan. On the bastions, he became friends with Lieutenant Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. He was twice wounded and shell-shocked. For courage and courage in the defense of Sevastopol, he was awarded orders. On March 19, 1876, by royal decree, he was appointed mayor of Berdyansk and head of the port. For "diligence in labor" in 1885 he was promoted to rear admiral.

Uncle - father's older brother - Admiral Vladimir Petrovich Schmidt was born in 1827. Like his brother, he served in the Baltic and Black Seas. A participant in the defense of Sevastopol - for his personal courage and courage, he was awarded, in addition to orders, with a nominal weapon - a golden broadsword "For Courage". From 1890 to 1909 - the first in seniority among the naval ranks of the Russian fleet, the senior flagship of the Baltic Fleet. According to his will, he was buried in Sevastopol, in the tomb of admirals - Vladimir Cathedral - next to Kornilov, Nakhimov, Istomin, Shestakov, Lazarev ...

Mother - Ekaterina Yakovlevna (nee Baroness von Wagner, on the maternal side - from the princes of Skvirsky) was a much less "single-line" figure. Ekaterina Schmidt was born in 1835 into a family of Russified German nobles and an ancient Polish-Lithuanian princely family. At the age of 19, against the will of noble parents, impressed by the spiritual impulse of Maria Grigorieva, Ekaterina Bakunina (Kutuzov's granddaughter) and Ekaterina Griboedova, she came to the besieged Sevastopol to become a sister of mercy. It was then that she abandoned the prefixes "baroness" and "background", taking her mother's maiden name (although her father, Baron Yakov Wilhelmovich von Wagner, was a military general, a participant in the Patriotic War of 1812). A fragile girl from a noble family had to learn the lessons of life "three hundred steps from the battlefield" (literally).

They say that those whom the war does not break, it tempers, teaches life. It's probably true. But only not in those cases when the one who got into the war does not have the psychological opportunity (or ability, or both) to feel it as a routine. There is a big difference between a feat on the front line and just hard and dirty work, a "front line". The war taught Baroness von Wagner to be a heroine. And this is not a "figure of speech": when Ekaterina Yakovlevna died on the eve of 1878, she was escorted on her last journey by a three-time military salute from a platoon of sailors - the last earthly privilege of a Knight of St. George, and by no means the wife of the mayor. Only 51 women were awarded such honors in the Russian Empire. The future Ekaterina Schmidt knew how to carry the wounded from the battlefield, dress them, donate blood when it was urgently needed during the operation. And she was brilliant. But to learn how to live in the real world - I could not ...

All her short life she was drawn to "revolutionary educational work." Apparently, in it she tried to find an outlet for her desire to be useful, to serve people directly, as then - on the Sevastopol bastions. A hereditary noblewoman - and undisguised sympathy for Belinsky and Chernyshevsky. "Mayor" - and a good friend of the future regicide Sophia Perovskaya. All this could not but have an impact on the son. Moreover, the authority of the mother in his eyes was enormous. Already an officer, Schmidt wrote a little-known article in memory of her, "Women's Influence on the Life and Development of Society." In his own diaries, Pyotr Petrovich left the following entry: "If I managed to accomplish anything in my life, it was only thanks to the influence of my mother."

But the harsh reality of naval service was very different from family comfort and high ideals. In the Naval Corps, young Schmidt felt “not well” - although he was diligent in his studies, and he loved the sea business very much. Moreover, the attitude towards him was relatively mild (compared to most other pupils of the corps): after all, he was the nephew of Vladimir Petrovich Schmidt himself - the senior flagship of the Baltic Fleet!

And yet ... Here is an excerpt from a letter from Pyotr Schmidt to Evgenia Alexandrovna Tillo: “I curse my comrades, sometimes I just hate them. I curse fate that she left me on an environment where I can’t arrange my life as I want, and I’m getting rude. Finally, I'm afraid for myself. It seems to me that such a society leads me too quickly down the path of disappointment. On others, maybe it would not have affected so much, but I'm impressionable to the point of illness ... ". With the completion of training and the transition to the ranks, the "command-feminine" character of the young officer fell all the more "out of court": in the wardroom, senior officers set the tone, and not midshipmen with "Bestuzhev's suffering."

Only in one society did the young idealist Schmidt feel confident - in women's. But here, too, disappointment soon awaited him: he was looking for that woman who would understand his "Don Quixote aspirations." The core of the worldview of the young midshipman Schmidt, his "philosophical religion" was the struggle for the happiness of the whole people (inseparable from enormous personal ambition). But, as they say now, his "social environment" did not need to fight for their rights at all! Schmidt was left with the only possibility - to try to bring happiness to at least one person. Create for yourself a world of "individual care for the salvation of an individual lost soul." And Schmidt did end up in another world... of St. Petersburg prostitutes. The performer of the role of the "rescued lost sheep" in the life of Peter Schmidt was "Dominik" (Dominikia Gavrilovna Pavlova), "mademoiselle of easy virtue" from the Vyborg side.

From the diary of Peter Schmidt: “She was my age. It became a pity for me to become unbearable. And I decided to save her. I went to the bank, I had 12 thousand there, took this money rank of second lieutenant, he received 2,000 rubles a year for shed blood. - Auth.) and gave everything to her. The next day, seeing how much spiritual rudeness in her, I realized that here it was necessary to give not only money, but everything myself. To get her out of the quagmire, I decided to marry. I thought that by creating an environment for her, in which, instead of human rudeness, she would find only attention and respect, and I would pull her out of the pit ... ".

With this "extraordinary" (to put it mildly) act, Schmidt challenged society, the corps of naval officers, and all his relatives. It is clear that a further career was out of the question. Former fellow officers deleted him from their lives, his father and uncle cursed him, and the sisters simply could not (or did not want to) do anything. And again Schmidt was left alone with himself and his ideas. In this state, he remained until the summer of 1889, when he was dismissed due to illness. The illness was a nervous breakdown. It was seen as the end. Still - life has passed without a trace for history.

The chance to "play back the lost battle against life" came only 16 years later. In November 1905, using the rebellious sailors (and not they, as is commonly believed), the retired lieutenant Schmidt realized his cherished dream - he finally became the FIRST. Let him be outside the law, even if for less than one day (from the morning of November 15, 1905 to five in the evening of the same day), but he became one. "I command the fleet. Schmidt" ... And on March 6, 1906, on the deserted island of Berezan, not far from Ochakov, the four main instigators of the uprising (including Peter Schmidt) were shot by a military court. The irony of fate: almost exactly 17 years later, Captain 2nd Rank Mikhail Stavraki, who led the execution, would be shot not far from this place.

After the Sevastopol events, Schmidt's uncle, a full admiral, seemed to have gone into oblivion before the end of his life. He never appeared in public, even on holidays without attending the Sea Meeting. Half-brother Vladimir died along with Admiral Makarov on the battleship "Petropavlovsk" during the Russian-Japanese war, which Lieutenant Schmidt never got into. The second brother changed his surname to Schmitt. The sisters, having married, changed their surnames earlier and, until the well-known events of February 1917, did not advertise their relationship with the "rebellious lieutenant". After the execution of Schmidt, the legal wife refused his name, and the son never returned to his dissolute mother. It seemed that only the civil wife Zinaida Ivanovna Rizberg kept in her heart the memory of "postal romance".

And then glory came again. Schmidt became not just a hero, but a symbol, an idol of the revolution, a cult figure (as he wanted). This cult, like the cult of Chapaev, was by no means always respectful, but even outlived the ideas it served. True, the psychological image of the unknown lieutenant (the "visual" image was forgotten long ago) ceased to be an object of not only worship, but also respect. But on the other hand, it imperceptibly became something incomparably greater - a part of the national memory (even if in ridicule). So, if Lieutenant Peter Schmidt wanted "historical immortality" - he won "his personal year 1905". Perhaps the only one of all (both the Reds and those who remained loyal to the "Throne and Fatherland" in those days) participants in the Sevastopol rebellion.

Sergey SMOLYANNIKOV
"Kyiv Telegraph"
November 25 - 31, 2005

People need heroes. This simple rule was strictly observed by the Soviet authorities. However, it often led to the fact that some individuals, "canonized" by propaganda, in fact, only partially corresponded to their bright images.

In the case of the legendary naval officer, one of the leaders of the Sevastopol uprising of 1905, Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt, this part was, perhaps, too small. His fake sons-swindlers, who bred in the 20s, oddly enough, actually had a lot in common with their illustrious "father".

The glorious dynasty of naval officers, the offspring of which was Peter Schmidt, gave Russia quite a few valiant military sailors. His father, who rose to the rank of rear admiral at the end of his life, was a hero of the defense of Sevastopol in 1854-1855. It was during these dramatic events that he met his future wife, the Kiev noblewoman Catherine von Wagner. The girl valiantly fulfilled her duty, working as a nurse. So the young Pyotr Petrovich, who was born in February 1867, was destined for the fate of a military man.

Petr Petrovich Schmidt

We must pay tribute to Peter Schmidt, he really raved about the sea from childhood, and in 1880 he entered the St. Petersburg Naval School (Naval Cadet Corps). True, it quickly became clear that in reality military discipline was not for him. The boy immediately began to have nervous breakdowns and seizures. Only with the help of authoritative relatives did he overcome this stage of life and, upon graduation, was sent as a midshipman to the Baltic Fleet.

However, after two years of service, the young officer commits an act that should put an end to his entire future career - he marries a woman with a "yellow ticket" - i.e. professional prostitute Dominikia Pavlova. Peter Schmidt's father fell ill from such an antics of his son and soon died. Further, his uncle, Vladimir Schmidt, the senior flagship of the Baltic Fleet, was responsible for his fate. An influential relative managed to hush up the scandal and transfer the unlucky nephew to the Pacific Fleet.

Petr Petrovich Schmidt

In principle, the entire history of the service of Pyotr Petrovich Schmidt can serve as an example of how harmful family ties can be in cases where protégés really do not fit their place. His track record is a motley "patchwork" in which positions, ships, "sick leaves" and punishments succeed each other in a continuous series.

However, in 1895 he rose to the rank of lieutenant. Several times he quit and then returned to duty. Interestingly, during his retirement, Peter Schmidt lived for some time in Paris and studied aeronautics there. He returned to Russia, inspired by the idea of ​​​​conquering the air spaces, but during the first demonstration flight, his balloon crashed. As a result, until the end of his life, he suffered from kidney disease, resulting from a stroke in an accident.

It should be noted that this man was indeed mentally ill. In 1889, he even underwent treatment at Dr. Savey-Mogilevich's Private Hospital for the Nervous and Mentally Ill in Moscow, and before that he treated neurasthenia at the Nagasaki Coastal Infirmary. From early youth, he was prone to fits of uncontrollable rage, which often ended in convulsions and convulsions.

It is possible that if he had been born in a more peaceful period for our country, his career would have ended quietly and ingloriously without becoming part of history. However, in moments of global change, such people, who often have charisma, talent as an orator and the ability to lead a crowd, sometimes turn out to be real “lighters” for revolutionary events.

Postcards depicting the hero of the Sevastopol uprising of 1905 P.P. Schmidt

By 1905, Lieutenant Schmidt, once again attached by his uncle to a “warm” and quiet place - the commander of a detachment of two obsolete destroyers in Izmail, managed to escape on a trip to the south of Russia, taking with him a detachment cash desk. So, because of 2.5 thousand rubles, he once again, and now for the last time, parted with the fleet. Desertion in wartime, and even embezzlement, even a high-ranking relative could no longer cover up. True, he helped return the money, but Pyotr Petrovich was expelled from military service.

Offended by everyone, Schmidt plunged headlong into politics - he began to participate in rallies and speeches even before his dismissal, and now he openly joined the opposition during the riots in Sevastopol. Among the revolutionaries, a naval officer, and even with a well-delivered speech, was just in his place and quickly gained popularity. His former numerous imprisonments in the guardhouses, and even his nervous temperament with periodic attacks (one happened right during the performance), created an aura of a sufferer for him.

One of the most famous was the speech of Peter Schmidt at the funeral of eight people who died during the riots. His fiery speech has been preserved in history as the "Schmidt oath": “We swear that we will never cede to anyone a single inch of the human rights we have won.”

"The Oath of Lieutenant Schmidt", illustration from the Italian newspaper "II Secolo", 1905

In November 1905, when the unrest turned into a mutiny, Schmidt was practically the only Russian officer among the revolutionaries, which made him an indispensable figure. On the night of November 26, the rebels, along with Schmidt, arrived on the cruiser Ochakov and called on the sailors to join the "freedom movement." The sailors took the cruiser into their own hands. Schmidt declared himself commander of the Black Sea Fleet, giving the signal: "I'm in command of the fleet. Schmidt". And immediately after that he sent a telegram to Nicholas II: “The glorious Black Sea Fleet, sacredly faithful to its people, demands from you, sovereign, the immediate convocation of the Constituent Assembly and no longer obeys your ministers. Fleet Commander P. Schmidt.

If the plans of the newly-minted hero were realized, the Crimean peninsula would separate from Russia, forming the “South Russian Socialist Republic” with Lieutenant Schmidt himself, of course, at the head. As midshipman Harold Graf, who served with Pyotr Petrovich for several months, later recalled, Schmidt "came from a good noble family, knew how to speak beautifully, played the cello superbly, but at the same time he was a dreamer and dreamer". Of course, he did not have the slightest opportunity to realize his fantasies. After the suppression of the rebellion, all the leaders of the Sevastopol uprising, including P.P. Schmidt, were shot on the island of Berezan by the verdict of the naval court in March 1906.

Schmidt being escorted to the courthouse, February 1906

However, the death of a bright and memorable person, as often happens, even made him even more popular. After the February Revolution of 1917, this name was again used as a symbol of the revolutionary struggle, as a result of which the unlucky officer and unsuccessful rebel became one of the most famous faces of the revolution.

To the question of who he really was - a hero, a mentally ill person or a swindler-squanderer, one can probably answer that he was, indeed, both one and the other, and the third. Being in the right place at the right time, this strange and controversial personality was able to leave his mark on history. A huge number of streets, parks, factories and educational institutions named after him in our country still keep this name for posterity.

Monument at the grave of P. P. Schmidt at the Communards cemetery in Sevastopol