(1895 - 1925) Russian poet

On the eve of his death, Yesenin wrote a farewell poem:

Goodbye my friend, goodbye.

My dear, you are in my chest.

Destined parting

Promises to meet in the future.

Goodbye, my friend, without a hand, without a word,

Do not be sad and do not sadness of the eyebrows, -

In this life, dying is not new,

But to live, of course, is not newer.

Yesenin gave this poem to his Leningrad friend, the poet Wolf Erlich, who recalled: “Yesenin bends down to the table, pulls out from the notebook sheet, shows from afar: poetry. He says, folding the sheet in four and putting it in the pocket of my jacket: "For you." Ustinova (Erlich's friend) wants to read it. “No, you wait, he will be left alone - he will read ...” They said goodbye. I returned from Nevsky for the second time: I forgot my briefcase. Yesenin sat at the table calmly, without a jacket, throwing on a fur coat, and looked through old poems. A folder was unfolded on the table. We said goodbye a second time."

The poem remained in Erlich's pocket, but he read it only the next day, when Yesenin was no longer alive.

On the morning of December 28, 1925, the poet was found hanged in a room at the Angleterre Hotel in Leningrad. A district police officer was called, and the first document related to Yesenin's death appeared.

« ACT

On December 28, 1925, this act was drawn up by my accountant. warden 2nd from. L. G. M. N. Gorbov in the presence of the manager of the hotel International * comrade. Nazarov and witnesses. According to a telephone message, the manager of the hotel, grazh. Nazarova V. Mikh. about a citizen hanging himself in a hotel room. Arriving at the place, I found a man hanging on the central heating pipe in the following form: the neck was not tightened with a dead loop, but only on the right side of the neck, his face was turned to the pipe, and with his right hand he grabbed the pipe, the corpse hung under the very ceiling and his legs were about 1 1/2 meters, near the place where the hanged man was found, an overturned pedestal lay, and the chandelier standing on it lay on the floor. When removing the corpse from the rope and examining it, it was found on the right arm above the elbow on the palm side of the cut on the left arm on the hand, scratches, a bruise under the left eye, dressed in gray trousers, a nightgown, black socks and black patent leather shoes. According to the documents presented, Yesenin Sergei Alexandrovich, a writer who arrived from Moscow on December 24, 1925, turned out to hang himself.

Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky, P. Medvedev, M. Froman, and V. Erlikh (all writers) signed for those who understood this "Act".

Yesenin's friend, the poet Ivan Gruzinov, writes that a prominent party member, literary functionary Georgy Ustinov lived in the same hotel, who “I simply adored Yesenin both as a poet and as a friend. Sergei knocked on his door before hanging himself. Georgy Ustinov was not at home. If a conversation had started, a noose would not have been tied up and a somewhat provincial death poem would not have been written.

The death of the poet shocked his contemporaries. “Hundreds of people have asked me; "Why did he do it?" - Yesenin's friend Anatoly Mariengof writes and tries to find the answer to this question in his memoirs.

“Somewhere, once I happened to read the biography of a Scottish princess of the 15th century. If memory serves, her name was Margarita.

Dying, the princess said:

- Don't care about life!

She was nineteen years old.

Nobody heard Yesenin's last words. And it is unlikely that in the dull room of the Angleterre hotel in St. Petersburg at the last minute he talked to himself. I never noticed this bad theatrical habit in him. But since 1963, that is, after returning from a honeymoon trip abroad (with Isadora Duncan), the whole meaning of his existence was the same as that of the Scottish princess:

Yesenin - Chaliapin (daughter of the singer).

Yesenin and Chaliapin

Yesenin - Duncan.

Yesenin and Duncan

Yesenin-Tolstaya (granddaughter of Leo Nikolaevich).

Yesenin and Tolstaya

And his only love, according to Mariengof, Zinaida Reich, Yesenin missed.

Yesenin and Zinaida Reich

“In the last months of his tragic existence,” continues Mariengof, “Yesenin was a man no more than one hour a day.

From the first, morning, glasses, his consciousness was already darkening.

And after the first, as an iron rule, followed - the second, third, fourth, fifth ...

From time to time, Yesenin was taken to the hospital, where the most famous doctors treated him with the latest methods. They helped as little as the oldest ways that they also tried to treat him.

... By the end of 1925, the decision to “leave” became manic for him. He lay down under the wheels of a suburban train, tried to jump out of the window, cut a vein with a piece of glass, stab himself with a kitchen knife.

And the day before, Yesenin was with Nikolai Klyuev. Among the glowing lamps, he read poems to his "elder brother" in poetry.

Klyuev was sitting on an unpainted oak bench under the icon of Mykola the Wonderworker.

- Well, how? - Yesenin asked quietly. - Poems?

Yesenin and Klyuev

The elder brother kissed him three times:

— Sensitive, Serezhenka. Sensitive lyrics. They should be printed on vellum paper, with vignettes: cupids, doves, lyres. And weave in morocco. Or in brocade. And so that with a golden edge. For young ladies from Zamoskvoretsk ... Do you remember how Nadson was intertwined? And then - Severyanin Igor, the king of poets. If only, Serezhenka, we could intertwine your poems the same way. After these words, Yesenin began to cry.

It was his last meeting…”

And the conclusions of Mariengof are as follows: “The Yesenin tragedy is extremely simple. Doctors called it a "clinic". He himself in The Black Man said frankly: Alcohol showers brains. That cursed alcohol and showered brains, showered life.

In 1990, another discussion unfolded around the death of Yesenin. This time on based on posthumous photographs of the poet, taken in a hotel, during a forensic examination, at the funeral, the voluntariness of his departure from life was called into question. In these photographs, the supporter of the version of violent death claims, one can see “a black round hole, in addition to the brine on the forehead. Sometimes they tried to assure me that it was just a hematoma. The forensic experts I contacted believe it looks like a bullet or impact mark.”

Another adherent of this version also refers to photographs found in the archives, in particular, to one where “Yesenin is lying on the sofa ... his hair is disheveled, his upper lip is swollen, his right hand hangs in the air in stiffness. It has cut marks on it. And no matter how much I peered into the photograph, I did not see signs of death from suffocation. There was no tongue sticking out of the mouth, giving the face of the gallows a terrible expression. Yes, and the very fact that the corpse was laid on the sofa was surprising, because the muscles of the bladder and other muscles weaken in the hanged.”

The above arguments are based only on photographs, which, as you know, could be retouched. Until the negatives are found, these arguments will remain rather dubious. In addition, there is evidence of people who saw Yesenin after his death. So, Ivan Gruzinov wrote about the funeral of the poet: “An alien face lay in the coffin. Always lush curls were combed smoothly back. This is
made the face a stranger and a barbershop. All the illuminating expression was gone. And we remember a face not by its features, but by the expression of the eyes and lips. I stood in my head: badly smeared abrasions on my face were visible. It was Seryozha who fought against the steam heating, already hanging.

However, supporters of the version of violent death are looking for other evidence. So, one of them wonders how “Sergey Aleksandrovich, so neat in life, even in a moment of despair, could turn everything in the room literally upside down, turn the contents of his suitcase inside out. It is strange, but already in the course of examining the room by the local authorities, the poet's jacket mysteriously disappeared from the back of the chair. The conclusion of those years that the mark on Yesenin's forehead is a burn mark from a hot water heating pipe is highly illogical. In those days it was warm in Leningrad and the heating did not work. It is obvious that a person with a fractured skull and wounds on his body could not himself climb a high bedside table (1.5 meters high) and hang himself ... ".

The room where Yesenin died

If you carefully read the memoirists of Yesenin's contemporaries, then you can find counterarguments to many of the arguments of the supporters of the version of the murder. For example, the myth about the accuracy of the poet is easily dispelled by such a recollection of Mariengof, dating back to 1923: “... [Yesenin] lifts the lid. In a huge suitcase lie a stupid pile - wine-drenched silk shirts, gloves torn at the seams, ties, handkerchiefs, mufflers and brown-stained hats. But Yesenin was once a neat man!

So the controversy continues.

The remarkable Russian poet Sergei Yesenin died at the age of 30, on December 28, 1925 in St. Petersburg. He was found hanging from a heating pipe in room 5 of the Angleterre Hotel. Around the death of the poet, many legends and rumors arose the very next day.

Until now, there are disputes - he himself hanged himself, or he was killed. The same facts are interpreted in exactly the opposite way, adjusted to a previously accepted version. Some facts are not mentioned at all.

How Sergei Yesenin actually died

Petersburg writer Nikolai Astafiev published a book where, based on research that lasted more than 20 years, he convincingly proved that many documents related to the tragic death of the great Russian poet Sergei Yesenin in Leningrad were falsified in order to hide the fact of his villainous murder.

Until now, encyclopedias set out the official version of Yesenin's death, according to which he hanged himself in the Angleterre Hotel. However, in a book published this year in St. Petersburg by Nikolai Astafiev "The Tragedy at Angleterre: Actors and Performers" it is convincingly proved that many documents relating to the circumstances of the Yesenin case are fakes. This allows us to draw an unambiguous conclusion: the great Russian poet was killed.

Where did I start? From the very beginning,” Nikolai Astafiev told Petersburg Diary. - From the study of the telegram that Yesenin allegedly sent to Leningrad on December 7, 1925, notifying his friend Wolf Erlich of his arrival. For many months I sat in the Central Museum of Communications in St. Petersburg, studying the telegrams of that time. And the conclusion turns out to be this: the telegram with which Yesenin allegedly informed Erlich of his arrival and asked him to find housing for him is a gross fake. Firstly, the form does not correspond to the forms of that time; neither its number nor the number of the post office from which it was sent is indicated on it.

Having studied more than a hundred telegrams of that year, I found that the average time for their passage from Moscow to Leningrad was at least 2 hours. And according to the numbers on the telegram, supposedly sent to Erlich, it was sent from Moscow at 15:20 and received in Leningrad at 15:31. Record speed! This could not be. Those who made the fake did not seem to know what time to put down.

Moreover, it was possible to establish that in fact this telegram could have been sent from a post office not in Moscow, but in Leningrad to another post office in the same city.

Yesenin's "note" to Erlich is also a fake: " Vova, take things to my hotel..."Comparing it with Yesenin's handwriting, even a layman can see that it was written by a different person. This was done in order to prove that Yesenin, having arrived in Leningrad to "his friend" Erlich, himself, on his own initiative, settled in Angleterre.

Wolf Ehrlich's interview protocol indirectly mentions a single note about things in the hotel, allegedly created by Yesenin's hand, and a completely different Yesenin's note appears in the memoirs, which refers to a restaurant and there is not a word about the hotel where Yesenin allegedly went. Both powers of attorney for receiving money, allegedly issued by Yesenin in the name of Wolf Erlich, were also falsified.

Were they fake?

For a long time, the fact that Yesenin's room was locked from the inside was portrayed as "convincing" evidence of suicide. However, convincing evidence was found of the destruction of a niche with a door to an adjacent room with a balcony, where the criminals could have gone, staging the poet's suicide.

For a long time, cuts on his arm were explained by the fact that Yesenin allegedly wrote poetry with blood. But in the protocols of the survey there is not a word that Yesenin cut his hands and wrote a "dying" poem. This myth was created by newspapermen.

In fact, the incision on the right arm was made the next day, December 28, in order to straighten the arm that was frozen at the neck.

It's time to investigate objectively

Nikolai Astafiev mentions that in the archive of Yuri Prokushev, who is considered almost the main Yesenin scholar of the country, many valuable documents are stored, including the poet's diary, but no one has ever seen him. No other specialists had and do not have access to it. There is no doubt that this is a murder, the writer concludes in his book.

“The time has come,” he calls, “to reconsider case No. 89 on the death of the poet, to achieve the annulment of the decision of the people’s investigator D.I. Brodsky dated 01.23. evidence of the suicide of Sergei Yesenin is sufficient, and to initiate a criminal case in connection with the newly discovered circumstances, which will allow investigating the circumstances of the tragic death of the poet objectively, within the legal framework ... "

He was doomed

Yesenin was killed, and it was not an "accidental" murder. The great Russian poet simply could not help but be "liquidated", as they said in those days. And not at all for his “bold” conversations, numerous scandals ... but for the poems that he wrote, speaking with hatred and contempt not only about the communist regime, but also about its leaders.

Many facts indicate that Yesenin was not at all, as they say, in a state of manic depression during his arrival in Leningrad.

According to contemporaries, the poet was determined to work, read poetry to friends, talked about a new magazine. In 1925, he published eight books, he prepared a complete collection of works. There was an agreement with the State Publishing House for the payment of royalties for the complete collection of works.

Supporters of the version of suicide invariably cite the fact of his stay in a psychiatric clinic in Moscow as evidence of Yesenin's inclination to suicide. In fact, Yesenin ended up in the clinic not for health reasons at all. He was placed there, saving him from a trial that they wanted to arrange against him after the scandal on the Baku-Moscow train, where he had a sharp argument with the diplomatic courier Alfred Roga and Yuri Levit, a close acquaintance of the all-powerful Lev Kamenev. Roga and Levit, through the office of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, filed a lawsuit against the poet, demanding retribution. The way out of the difficult situation was suggested by the sisters of the poet Katya and Shura - to "hide" in the clinic of Moscow University.

Indications Svarog

Encyclopedias claim that after the death of Yesenin, no one talked about the murder for "several decades". On the contrary, they started talking about it right away.

The artist Vasily Svarog, who made a drawing of the dead Yesenin without makeup, said in 1927: “It seems to me that this Erlich slipped something into him at night, well ... maybe not poison, but a strong sleeping pill. No wonder he "forgot" his briefcase in Yesenin's room. And he didn't go home to "sleep" - with Yesenin's note in his pocket. It was not in vain that he was spinning nearby all the time, probably, their whole company was sitting and biding their time in neighboring rooms ... First there was a "noose "- with his right hand, Yesenin tried to loosen it, so the hand stiffened in a cramp. The head was on the arm of the sofa when Yesenin was hit above the bridge of the nose with the handle of the revolver. Then they rolled him into a carpet and wanted to lower him from the balcony, a car was waiting around the corner. It was easier to kidnap. But the balcony door did not open wide enough, they left the corpse by the balcony, in the cold. They drank, smoked, all this dirt remained ... They hung up in a hurry, already late at night, and it was not easy on a vertical riser. When they fled, Erlich stayed behind to do something check and prepare for the version of suicide ... "

Didn't live in Angleterre

However, the most sensational discovery was made by the St. Petersburg writer V. Kuznetsov. Studying the documents of the Angleterre Hotel, he discovered that Yesenin did not live in it at all! The poet's surname is not on the list of residents of this hotel at the time when his corpse was allegedly found hanging on a steam heating pipe. Those who remember Soviet times know well what it meant then to get a hotel room. Each settled was registered, the administrator wrote down the data of his passport. The authorities followed this very strictly.

None of the hotel staff and Yesenin's guests who lived there saw these days. And all the "witnesses" who later testified about the communication with the poet in his issue of Angleterre, including Erlich, were secret agents of the GPU.

According to Kuznetsov, as soon as Yesenin appeared in Leningrad, he was immediately arrested and brought to the GPU investigation house on the street. Mayorova, 8/23. There he was interrogated with prejudice. The operation was led by Chekist Yakov Blyumkin (the same Blyumkin who killed the German ambassador Mirbach in July 1918, and in 1929 he himself was shot by order of the OGPU collegium. Note ed.).

It is unlikely that Trotsky personally gave the order to kill the poet, but it just happened. Apparently, Yesenin, accustomed to fights, resisted and pushed Blumkin with force, he fell. Then a shot rang out. The photograph shows a trace of a bullet wound, and after that Blumkin hit Yesenin with a revolver handle in the forehead. After that, they decided to stage a suicide - fortunately, the sinister house 8/23 was directly opposite the Angleterre. The corpse was transferred to a room in which no one lived ...

Disputes about the death of the great poet do not subside

The 120th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian poet Sergei Yesenin was celebrated this year. But there is still a fierce debate about whether he committed suicide or was killed. The official version, the one that is given in encyclopedias, is the old one - we are talking about suicide. Such it was in Soviet times, such it remains now.

However, after the collapse of the USSR and the disclosure of archives, a lot of publications, books, documentaries appeared, which carry out a different version - Yesenin was killed. Moreover, some researchers, in particular, the St. Petersburg writer Viktor Kuznetsov, managed to obtain such documentary evidence that the version of the murder looks more than convincing.

However, more about this later - and now we will talk about what many previous researchers for some reason paid little attention to, or did not pay attention at all. Yesenin was not just killed, he could not help but be "liquidated", as they said in those days. And not at all for his "bold" conversations, numerous scandals and fights, ... but for the poems that he wrote. Let us remember how Osip Mandelstam was erased into camp dust for just one poem about the "Kremlin highlander". And Yesenin had a lot of such poems, where he speaks with hatred and contempt not only about the leaders of the communist regime, but also about this regime in general. Why didn't they pay attention to it? And, probably, for a very simple reason: these poems were not published under the Soviet regime, and if something was printed, then with cuts that have survived to our times.

The real challenge to the communist authorities was his poem "The Country of Scoundrels" - as he called the USSR in it.

Empty fun.

Some conversations!

So what?

Well, what did we take in return?

Those crooks came, the same thieves

And along with the revolution, everyone was taken prisoner ...

Gangs! Gangs!

Countrywide.

Wherever you look, wherever you go

You see how in space

on horseback

And no horses

Ossified bandits are jumping and walking ...

One of the main characters of this poem is Chekistov-Leibman, in whom the powerful Leiba Trotsky is easily guessed. In this Yesenin poem, he speaks of the Russians like this:

Lived all their life as beggars

And they built temples of God ...

Yes I had them a long time ago

Rebuilt into latrines.

The Ryazan brawler allowed himself sharp attacks against members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), characterized the Civil War as "vile and evil savagery", which ruined thousands of the finest talents:

They have Pushkin

Lermontov,

Koltsov,

And our Nekrasov in them.

I am in them.

They even have Trotsky

Lenin and Bukharin.

Is it because of my sadness

The verse blows

Looking at them

Unwashed hari.

All these seditious lines were steadily thrown out of the poet's collections from 1926 to 1990, and even today the poem "Homeless Russia" in many collections does without them.

It is possible that Yesenin’s phrase, said in Berlin to the émigré writer Roman Gul, could also reach Trotsky: “I won’t go to Russia while it is ruled by Trotsky-Bronstein.<...>He shouldn't rule."

Trotsky certainly knew about all such attacks against him, how could he treat Yesenin after that? Moreover, in The Country of Scoundrels, the poet called Trotsky even sharper. And in those days, anti-Semitism was a criminal offense in the USSR, for such attacks they could well have been put up against the wall. They would have put anyone else, but they decided to remove the famous poet in a different way.

However, among our liberal historians there is a tendency to portray Trotsky as almost a patron of Yesenin. How does, for example, Nikolai Svanidze, who concocted a documentary about Yesenin. To justify Trotsky, Svanidze cites the fact that after the death of the poet, Trotsky published a laudatory obituary about him in Pravda. But it was nothing more than an action to cover up a crime. Trotsky-Chekistov could not in any way like the poetry of the Russian peasant poet, he fiercely hated and despised such. After all, it is no coincidence that after a magnificent funeral, the poet's poems were banned in the USSR. The enemy of Yesenin was not satisfied with his poetry of recent years, which was alien to October, about which the "architect of the revolution" himself wrote in Pravda: "The poet died because he was not akin to the revolution."

In a word, "haris" remembered everything and did not forgive anything. It was not for nothing that Lenin, himself a treacherous politician, called Trotsky "Jewish", spoke of his "Jesuitism" and "refined treachery." After Yesenin returned from abroad, Trotsky even wanted to "tame" him, offering him to head a new literary magazine, but failed to agree with the poet. Yesenin perfectly understood what awaited him for such verses from "unwashed mugs" and wrote, anticipating his tragic fate:

And the first

I need to hang

Crossing my arms behind my back

For the fact that the song

hoarse and sick

I interfered with the sleep of my native country ...

Here they hung...

Was full of creative plans

Many facts testify that Yesenin was not at all, as they say, in a state of manic depression during his arrival in Leningrad. According to contemporaries, the poet was determined to work, read poetry to friends, talked about a new magazine. In 1925, he published 8 books, he prepared a complete collection of works. Yesenin's financial situation was successful - and not only thanks to a future well-paid job. There was an agreement with the State Publishing House for the payment of royalties for the complete collection of works for a year and a half. The first transfer for 640 rubles has already been received. Back in Moscow, Yesenin told the publisher Evdokimov about his plans - work in the Polyana magazine, the leadership of which Kirov promised him. The poet’s niece Svetlana Yesenina said: “Soon, Yesenin had to move his family to Leningrad, as evidenced by his telegram dated December 7, in which the poet asked Wolf Erlich to find him a three-room apartment.” All this speaks of his positive attitude.

There is another circumstance that could not but set the poet in an optimistic mood. In Baku, he met Sergei Kirov, who treated him very well.

On December 18, 1925, the XIV Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks began its work in Moscow. A grandiose political drama unfolded on it. The opposition of L. Kamenev and G. Zinoviev lost outright to Stalin. Kamenev was promoted to candidate member of the Politburo, Zinoviev lost control of the Leningrad party organization, the cleaning of which was entrusted to Kirov. Kirov was about to be transferred to Leningrad, appointing Zinoviev to his place. Moreover, Trotsky was already losing his power.

Supporters of the version of suicide invariably cite, as evidence of Yesenin's inclination to suicide, the fact of his stay in a psychiatric clinic in Moscow. Like, the poet moved with his mind on the basis of drunkenness, left the psychiatric hospital, arrived in Leningrad and immediately hanged himself. In fact, Yesenin ended up in the clinic not for health reasons at all. He was placed there, saving him from a trial that they wanted to arrange against him after the scandal on September 6, 1925 on the Baku-Moscow train, where he sharply quarreled with the diplomatic courier Alfred Roga and Yuri Levit, a close acquaintance of the all-powerful Lev Kamenev. Roga and Levit, through the office of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, filed a lawsuit against the poet, demanding "retribution." Court secretary V. Goldberg scribbled threatening instructions to Yesenin. They took a written undertaking not to leave him. Yesenin's position was becoming threatening.

The way out of the difficult situation was suggested by the sisters of the poet Katya and Shura - to "hide" in the clinic of Moscow University. The poet did not agree for a long time, but nevertheless he was forced to go to the hospital on November 26, 1925. Professor Pyotr Gannushkin took care of him here, protecting him from bailiffs and all those who sought to "put" him in prison at all costs. He even gave him a certificate for this:

"Certificate

The office of the psychiatric clinic hereby certifies that the patient Yesenin S.A. has been treated in a psychiatric clinic since November 26 of this year. and to the present; due to his health, he cannot be interrogated in court.

Clinical assistant Gannushkin.

Chekists came to the clinic to arrest Yesenin, but the doctors did not extradite him.

The fact that Yesenin, in the sense of the state of the psyche, was completely healthy is evidenced by the fact that it was in the clinic that he wrote some of his poetic masterpieces: “You are my fallen maple, icy maple ...”, “You don’t love me, don’t feel sorry ..” , "Who am I? What am I? Only a dreamer…” and others. There is a version that for the same reason – fleeing from the court, he hastily left for Leningrad.

Testimony of Svarog

Contrary to statements in encyclopedias that immediately after Yesenin’s death, no one spoke about the murder for “several decades”, they began to talk about it right away. The artist Vasily Svarog, who made a drawing of the dead Yesenin without make-up, wrote in 1927: “It seems to me that this Erlich added something to him at night, well ... maybe not poison, but a strong sleeping pill. No wonder he "forgot" his briefcase in Yesenin's room. And he didn’t go home to “sleep” - with Yesenin’s note in his pocket. It was not in vain that he was spinning nearby all the time, probably, their whole company was sitting and biding their time in neighboring rooms.

The situation was nervous, there was a congress in Moscow, people in leather jackets were walking in the Angleterre all night. Yesenin was in a hurry to remove, so everything was so awkward and there were many traces.

The frightened janitor, who was carrying firewood and did not enter the room, heard what was happening, rushed to call the commandant of the hotel Nazarov. Where is the janitor now? At first there was a “noose” - Yesenin tried to loosen it with his right hand, so the hand stiffened in a cramp. The head was on the armrest of the sofa when Yesenin was hit above the bridge of the nose with the handle of a revolver. Then they rolled him up in a carpet and wanted to lower him off the balcony, a car was waiting around the corner. It was easier to steal. But the balcony door did not open wide enough, leaving the corpse by the balcony, in the cold. They drank, smoked, all this dirt remained ... Why do I think that they rolled it into a carpet? When I was drawing, I noticed a lot of tiny specks on my trousers and a few in my hair... they tried to straighten their arm and slashed the tendon of their right hand with a Gillette razor, these cuts were visible... They took off their jacket, wrinkled and cut, put valuable things in their pockets and then they took everything away ... They were in a hurry ... They “hung up” in a hurry, already late at night, and it was not easy on a vertical riser. When they fled, Erlich stayed to check something and prepare for the version of suicide...”.

The testimony of Svarog, who was one of the few who saw the still uncleaned corpse of Yesenin, was not attached to the case in violation of the law.

There is another mysterious person in the case of the death of Yesenin, a certain L. Sosnovsky, a friend of Trotsky, a feuilletonist. It was on his accusation that the case of 4 poets accused of anti-Semitism arose (Yesenin, Klychkov, Oreshin, Ganin). All the poets died a violent death, as well as Sosnovsky (it is his name that appears in the case of the execution of the royal family), who was shot in 1937. Another victim is A. Sobol, who stood up for "anti-Semitic" poets. Shortly after Yesenin's funeral, he was found near the monument to Dostoevsky with a shot through his head.

Didn't live in Angleterre?

However, the most sensational discovery was made by the already mentioned St. Petersburg writer V. Kuznetsov: refuting the version of suicide, studying the documents of the Angleterre Hotel, he discovered that Yesenin did not live in it at all!

The poet's surname is not on the list of residents of this hotel at the time when his corpse was allegedly found hanging on a steam heating pipe. Those who remember Soviet times know well what it meant then to get a room in a prestigious hotel (and Angleterre, located next to the most prestigious hotel in the city, Astoria, was just that). Each settled was registered, the porter wrote down the data of his passport. The authorities followed this very strictly. On each floor there were special bellboys connected with the GPU, so that an unnamed tenant without registration in such a hotel could not appear in any way.

And he did not appear, because none of the hotel staff and Yesenin's guests who lived there saw these days. And all the "witnesses" who later testified about communicating with the poet in his Angleterre issue, including Erlich, were secret agents of the GPU and said what was required of them. Moreover, we note that Yesenin was then followed, in Moscow a criminal case was opened against him, and his appearance in Leningrad could generally be considered as an escape from justice. And with such in the USSR, the conversation was short.

According to Kuznetsov, there was a short conversation with Yesenin. As soon as he appeared in Leningrad, he was immediately arrested and brought to the investigation house of the GPU at Mayorova Street, 8/25. There he was interrogated with prejudice. The operation was led by the famous Chekist Yakov Blyumkin. The meaning of the interrogations was that they wanted to recruit Yesenin as a secret employee of the GPU.

There is another version according to which the poet was required to hand over the document that compromised L. Kamenev.

In Moscow, the intoxicated Yesenin told the prose writer Tarasov-Rodionov that after the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917, the throne was offered to his brother Mikhail and Kamenev from Siberian exile immediately sent a telegram with congratulations to the new tsar. And Michael renounced the throne. Yesenin (he served on the ambulance train in Tsarskoe Selo) boasted that this telegram, dangerous to Kamenev, was allegedly kept by him: "It is safely hidden with me." The prose writer, an informer of the GPU, immediately knocked on the right place. And Yesenin was expected in Leningrad ...

It is unlikely that Trotsky personally gave the order to kill the poet, but it just happened. Apparently, Yesenin, accustomed to fights, resisted and pushed Blumkin with force, he fell. Then a shot rang out. The photograph shows a trace of a bullet wound, and after that Blumkin hit Yesenin with a revolver handle in the forehead.
Blumkin, after the assassination from Leningrad, contacted Trotsky and asked what to do with Yesenin's corpse. He answered him that tomorrow his article would appear in the newspaper that the unbalanced, decadent poet had laid hands on himself, and everyone would be silent. They decided to stage a suicide - fortunately, the sinister house 8/25 was not far from the Angleterre. The corpse was moved to a room in which no one lived.

Of course, there is no direct evidence that this was the case, and indeed cannot be. All the witnesses are long dead, and the documents have been destroyed. However, Kuznetsov managed to get acquainted with a friend who worked at Angleterre, a cleaning lady, Varvara Vasilyeva. Before her death, she managed to tell her that late on the evening of December 27, some drunken thugs were dragging a dead body either from the attic or from the basement labyrinth. It is possible that this was Yesenin's corpse.

There are many other facts about the murder. So, for example, it is alleged that the poet wrote the famous dying verses “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye ...” in blood, since there was supposedly no ink in the room. However, in the photograph of the room where the poet was hanged, an inkwell is clearly visible on the table. In addition, it is not known where the pen with which he allegedly wrote these poems disappeared. Yesenin's jacket also disappeared from the room without a trace. Where did these things disappear, which are not in the inventory, if it was a question of suicide?

Moreover, the cuts from which Yesenin allegedly took blood to write poetry were made on his right hand, although the poet was not at all left-handed.

How could he dip a pen in them? It is very uncomfortable! Such cuts should be on his left arm. So, these are traces of torture or beatings. And how, for example, to explain the bruise under Yesenin's eye? And abrasions on the body, which are clearly visible in the photo? The dent on his forehead was explained by the fact that, having hanged himself, he pressed his forehead against a red-hot pipe of steam heating, which, they say, was this terrible burn. However, at that time the batteries in Leningrad, including the Angleterre, were barely warm. It was cold. The same Erlich testifies in his testimony that when he came to the room, he found Yesenin sitting in a fur coat!

It turns out that the only documentary evidence of suicide was the farewell poem of the poet himself. However, it was published by Erlikh, who called himself a "friend of Yesenin", but in fact the former was just a "six" spinning around the poet (and, as has long been established, a secret agent of the GPU). It is in no way possible to believe that the poet could entrust him with his tragic "message to posterity."

They say that the handwriting examination later confirmed that the handwriting belonged to Yesenin. But there is another perfectly logical explanation for this. Yakov Blyumkin was a handwriting forger. In his Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn cites the fact that Blumkin confessed in his cell that he had made a fake letter to Savinkov, so cleverly that everyone later believed it. For the GPU, the forgery of other people's letters was generally a common thing.

Contribution of "friends"

A significant contribution to the approval of the myth of Yesenin's "suicide", alas, was made by his fellow poets. In 1926, A. Kruchenykh's book "The Death of Yesenin" was published. In it, this eminent poet, who was by no means engaged by the Soviet authorities, wrote: “The stupid, hopeless whining of Yesenin and the Yesenists makes their “poetry” a howl of suicide candidates! Yes, living the way Yesenin lived, of course, is not new. Modern poets must live a new life and it is necessary to make sure that they want and can live this life and that nothing of the dying old world remains in their work ... ".

But here's the paradox, about Kruchenykh and other ill-wishers of Yesenin have long been forgotten, and the bright name of the Russian genius Sergei Yesenin and his amazing poems are still with us!

Especially for "Century"

Many are convinced: Sergei Yesenin could not voluntarily die. Hanging yourself is too trivial and… unpoetic for a legendary poet.

So was Yesenin killed or not?

Versions of the murder

There are many versions claiming that Yesenin was killed. Some believe that in the 5th room of the International Hotel (formerly Angleterre), where the poet settled, he was first severely beaten, and only then, in an unconscious state, hung in a noose.

Another version. They put Yesenin on the sofa, hit him on the forehead with the butt of a pistol, where a dent formed, then wrapped him in a carpet, tried to pull him out onto the balcony in order to lower him down and take him out. But the door jammed, then the killers sat down to drink, messed around in the room, dragged the body back and, cutting the tendon to straighten the already frozen right arm, hung it in a noose (in the picture, the right arm is really bent at the elbow joint, it has a wound).

All these conflicting versions are based on the same documents: the act of examining the scene of the incident, compiled by the district warden of the 2nd police department of the city of Leningrad N. Gorbov and the act of the forensic medical examination of the corpse by Professor G. Gilyarevsky, post-mortem photographs and face masks poet. It is worth noting that among the enthusiasts who tried to unravel the mystery of Yesenin's death were poets, journalists, doctors, philosophers, teachers, artists, even a pathophysiologist and a former investigator, but there was not a single professional - a forensic physician or forensic scientist.

All this prompted the All-Russian Yesenin Committee of Writers to seek help from the Bureau of Forensic Medical Examination of the Moscow Health Committee with a request to create a commission to clarify the circumstances of the death of the poet. Later, professionals from the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation and leading experts in the field of forensic medicine were involved in the case.

Investigative experiment

The act of inspection of the scene was drawn up by N. Gorbov superficially, unprofessionally: the situation in the room, the state of door and window locks, cadaveric changes, and so on, were not described.

According to the protocol, Yesenin's body hung right under the ceiling - this gave reason to doubt suicide, since the ceiling height in the room was supposedly 4-5 m, and the size of the overturned pedestal was 1.5 m and the height of the poet was 168 cm.

It was necessary to find out the real height of the ceiling. The matter was complicated by the fact that in 1986 the Angleterre hotel was reconstructed. But a photograph of the 5th issue has been preserved with an inscription on the back: “May 18, 1926, 5th number of the guest. Leningradskaya, formerly Angleterre, where Yesenin lived and died. The picture was taken through an open door, showing a vertical steam heating pipe, a carpeted floor, a fragment of the ceiling, a desk, a lamp, a chair, a wardrobe.

Criminologists, using well-known formulas and landmarks (in particular, along the back of the table, which is closest to the plane of the wall), calculated the height of the ceiling, which amounted to ... no more than 352 cm!

But there was one more "weighty" argument of the supporters of the poet's murder. So, former investigator E. Khlystalov writes that it is impossible to tie a rope to a vertically standing pipe: under the weight of the body, it will surely slip down. In support of his words, he recalls an experiment conducted by students of the Literary Institute at Angleterre, when the hotel was still intact: a rope tied to a vertical pipe was jerked down by a jerk of the hand.

And although judicial practice shows that you can hang yourself not only on such a pipe, but also on the door handle, the back of a chair, special experiments had to be carried out: an extra 169 cm tall tied twisted hemp ropes, cotton ropes alternately to oil-painted pipes of different diameters , silk with a thickness of 0.6 to 1.0 cm. Making from 1 to 6 turns and tying all kinds of knots, he unsuccessfully tried to pull the rope off the vertical. Its freely hanging end withstood a weight load of more than 100 kg.

Is it possible to jump out of the loop?

Supporters of the murder were embarrassed that the loop did not capture the entire surface of the neck - the furrow was directed obliquely upwards and was not closed. When hanging, the furrow is always directed in this way, since one end of the rope is strengthened by an object, in this case, a pipe, and the other end is dragged down by the weight of the body, and this place of the neck has the greatest pressure.

Could Yesenin jump out of an open loop? Is self-help possible in the loop? No. Forensic medicine professors Minovich from Romania and Fleichman from Germany, independently of each other, wanting to study the phenomena of asphyxia (suffocation caused by a lack of oxygen in the blood), conducted experiments on themselves: assistants hung them on a soft rope, and Minovich managed to stay in the loop for up to 26 seconds ! Scientists noted terrible pain in the neck, excessive heaviness in the head, whistling in the ears, turning into a bell ringing, and deadly melancholy. But, most importantly, from the very first seconds there is a desire to drop the loop and ... the inability to move even a finger! With the onset of asphyxia, muscle adynamia occurs. Even if a person hangs himself on the door handle, he cannot straighten his knees.

What did the masks say?

Most of the versions were generated by an entry in the act: “In the middle of the forehead ... a depressed furrow 4 cm long and 1.5 cm wide.” Gilyarevsky himself explained it by the pressure drop in the skull during strangulation. Supporters of the murder theory interpreted the impression as a blow with a pistol handle, an iron, a blunt heavy object "with terrible force."

According to the act of examination of the corpse, it is clear that the bones of the skull are not damaged and there is no fracture. But the "pathfinders" doubted Gilyarevsky's impartiality. Then the forensic experts conducted a study of five death masks of the poet, establishing that the impression of a “slightly arched shape” has a depth of 0.4-0.5 mm (and this is the thickness of the skin) without mechanical damage to the bones of the skull. So, it is obvious that this is a trace from the pipe: since the loop knot was on the left, the head deviated to the right and at the time of death was leaning against the pipe.

To confirm the conclusion, plasticine casts were made from plaster masks, which were hit in the frontal part with cylindrical objects. As the experiment showed, the object had to have a diameter of 3.7 cm, which just corresponds to the parameters of a water pipe.

And while bleeding...

The version that Yesenin's veins were first cut, and then the poet was hung in a noose, is found by many. It is known that during the inspection, the district police officer found a cut “on the right arm above the elbow on the palmar side” and “on the left hand there were scratches on the wrist”. Is it possible to move a cut arm, tie a rope to a pipe, move furniture with blood loss? Forensic experts have repeatedly come across the fact that people did not do the same with cut veins and arteries. But what kind of "loss of blood" are we talking about? No traces of it were found in the room, and from the act it follows that all wounds are superficial and do not penetrate into the thickness of the skin. This means that Yesenin's veins were not cut. It is known from various sources that from December 26 to 27, Yesenin composed, but, not finding ink in the room, he decided to write down the verses in blood and made an incision on himself. Already today, experts have established the authenticity of Yesenin's handwriting and the fact that the poem "Goodbye, my friend, goodbye" was written in blood in an amount of ... no more than 0.02 ml.

And yet, asphyxia

So, Yesenin's death came from asphyxia - squeezing the organs of the neck with a loop tightening under the weight of the body. He could hang himself at that height. There were no deep cuts on the arms. There is a pipe mark on the forehead. It is safe to say that there are no marks on Yesenin's body that are characteristic of struggle or self-defense.

It should be noted that all experiments were carried out in the presence of a forensic prosecutor of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation.

"Kill" at any cost?

It would seem that an end has been put in the Yesenin case. But versions of contract killings continue to multiply and infiltrate the minds of the townsfolk: the recent television series of the father and son of the Bezrukovs is eloquent confirmation of this.

Why so persistently continue to "kill" Yesenin? Because he is a true Russian poet, and the church, to put it mildly, does not welcome suicide? Or maybe, as it was accurately expressed, however, about another person, T. Flor-Yesenin: “Alien fame is always attractive because it makes it possible ... to “break through the blockade” of one’s own obscurity”?

On December 28, 1925, Sergei Yesenin died. For more than 90 years, the departure of the poet has haunted historians, researchers and admirers of his work.

Protocol with violations

A lot of accusations come against the district warden of the 2nd police department Nikolai Gorbov. The act of finding the body of Sergei Yesenin, signed by Gorbov, does not inspire confidence either in terms of grammar or professionally. A person who worked in an active-secret criminal investigation department should know that this document is called a protocol and is drawn up according to the model. To remove the body from the loop, as well as to describe the scene and evidence, according to all the rules, should be in the presence of attesting witnesses.
Gorbov's act (or just signed by his last name?) does not give a clear picture of what happened. And it's hard to imagine that this district warden was so illiterate, because 19 years before that he worked as a typesetter in a printing house. The handwriting and signature of this man can be reconstructed from his surviving documents: a statement and autobiography. Neither the handwriting nor the signature match.

Lack of hotel registration

Not a single document has been found confirming that Yesenin lived at the Angleterre Hotel in December 1925. And it is not clear why the poet had to stay in it, if he could stay with his close friends. Probably Yesenin never lived in Angleterre. Then the version that he was killed in another place, and after that they played the story of suicide in a hotel room, looks more convincing.

Incomplete medical examination

The act of the medical examination drawn up by the forensic expert Gilyarevsky also seems doubtful. His conclusion reads: “Based on the autopsy data, it should be concluded that Yesenin’s death was caused by asphyxia caused by compression of the airways through hanging. An impression on the forehead could have occurred from pressure during hanging. The dark purple color of the lower extremities, punctate bruising on them indicate that the deceased was hanged for a long time."
However, for some reason, this act does not indicate all the injuries that were on the face of the poet. This is confirmed by the photo of Yesenin, preserved in the National Public Library in St. Petersburg in a special department. In this photograph, a bullet hole in the poet's forehead and a blow mark under the right eye are clearly distinguishable. This blow could have been inflicted with the handle of a pistol, which, by the way, the poet himself had.

Predicament

Then the question arises: why was Yesenin hanged? Wouldn't it have been easier to shoot him to make it look like a suicide? Many historians are inclined to the version that Trotsky personally approved the murder of the poet. And the menial work was entrusted to the famous revolutionary Yakov Blyumkin, who got into a difficult situation during the murder, and therefore he had to play the option of hanging.

Why hanging?

The question is, why then it was necessary to “hang” the poet, if everything could be attributed to death from a shot from a revolver, which Yesenin himself had? Although, on the other hand, why did the poet himself, according to the official version, hang himself, and not shoot himself?

Valuable Witness

The magazine "Miracles and Adventures" published a letter from retired military Viktor Titarenko from the Khabarovsk Territory, in which he spoke about his conversation in the mid-70s with former prisoner Nikolai Leontiev. According to him, in 1925 he served in the OGPU together with Blumkin. Once Blumkin received an order from Trotsky to adequately punish Yesenin physically. The security officers planned to deprive the poet of his masculinity and, as if jokingly, began to pull off his trousers. The poet grabbed a copper candlestick and hit Blumkin on the head with it. He fell unconscious, and the frightened Leontiev pulled out a revolver and fired at Yesenin.
Titarenko says that Blumkin, waking up, hit Yesenin in the forehead with the handle of the revolver, and then contacted Trotsky and agreed with him on staging suicide and on measures to eliminate bloody traces. A few days later, Nikolai Leontiev was sent to the Far East for underground work at the headquarters of Ataman Semenov. There, after the war for treason against the Chekist cause, he received a 25-year sentence.
It is difficult to rely on one letter in reasoning. But in the drawing by V. Svarog, made on the morning of December 28, 1925, the poet's trousers are unbuttoned and lowered. The artist also reports that he noticed traces of a struggle in the room and a lot of villi from the carpet on the shirt and in the poet's hair. V. Svarog even then suggested that Yesenin was wrapped in a carpet after the murder.

Bullying

It was not easy to live in the USSR in 1923-1925. Trotsky considered murder a justified means of establishing the communist idea. “We must,” he wrote, “turn Russia into a desert inhabited by white Negroes, to which we will give such a tyranny that even the inhabitants of the East have never dreamed of. Through bloodbaths, we will bring the Russian intelligentsia to complete stupefaction, to idiocy, to an animal state. .."
Yesenin, it seems, knew what was hindering the plan:

And the first
I need to hang
Crossing my arms behind my back
For the fact that the song
hoarse and sick
I interfered with sleep
Native country.

It is also known that in the last years of the poet's life, the authorities subjected him to massive psychological persecution.
The truth about the death of the last poet of the village will be revealed only together with the archives of the NKVD (FSB).