White terror in Russia
White terror in Russia- a concept that means extreme forms repressive policy of anti-Bolshevik forces during the Civil War. The concept includes a set of repressive legislative acts, as well as their practical implementation in the form of radical measures directed against representatives of the Soviet government, the Bolsheviks and their sympathizers. White terror also includes repressive actions outside the framework of any legislation by various military and political structures of anti-Bolshevik movements of various persuasions. Separately from these measures, the white movement used a system of preventive measures of terror, as acts of intimidation against resisting groups of the population in the territories it controlled under emergency conditions.
The concept of white terror entered the political terminology of the period of revolution and civil war and is traditionally used in modern historiography, although the term itself is conditional and collective, since the anti-Bolshevik forces included not only representatives white movement, but also very heterogeneous forces.
Unlike the "Red Terror", proclaimed by the Bolsheviks in law as a response to the White Terror, the term "White Terror" itself had neither legislative nor even propaganda approval in the White movement during the civil war.
A number of researchers believe that the peculiarity of the White Terror was its unorganized, spontaneous nature, that it was not elevated to the rank of state policy, did not act as a means of intimidating the population and did not serve as a means of destruction. social classes or ethnic groups(Cossacks, Kalmyks), what was its difference from the Red Terror.
At the same time, modern Russian historians point out that orders coming from high officials white movement, as well as legislative acts of white governments testify to the sanctioning of military and political power repressive actions and acts of terror against the Bolsheviks and the population supporting them, about the organized nature of these acts and their role in intimidating the population of the controlled territories. .
The beginning of the white terror
Some consider October 28 to be the date of the first act of white terror, when, according to a common version, in Moscow, the cadets who freed the Kremlin from the rebels captured the soldiers of the 56th reserve regiment who were there. They were ordered to line up, allegedly for verification, at the monument to Alexander II, and then machine-gun and rifle fire was suddenly opened on unarmed people. About 300 people were killed.
Sergei Melgunov, characterizing white terror, defines it as "excesses on the basis of unbridled power and revenge", because, unlike the red terror, white terror did not come directly from the white authorities and was not justified "in acts of government policy and even in journalism this camp," while the terror of the Bolsheviks was secured by a series of decrees and orders. White decrees and the white press did not call for class-based massacres, they did not call for revenge and destruction social groups, unlike those of the Bolsheviks. As Kolchak himself testified, he was powerless over the phenomenon called "atamanism".
A very important point is the attitude towards the so-called. "White terror" by such a leader of the White movement as he was General Staff infantry general L. G. Kornilov. In Soviet historiography, his words are often cited, allegedly said at the beginning of the Ice Campaign: “I give you an order, very cruel: do not take prisoners! I take responsibility for this order before God and the Russian people!” The modern historian and researcher of the White movement V. Zh. Tsvetkov, who studied this issue, draws attention in his work that no issued “order” with such content was found in any of the sources. At the same time, there are testimonies of A. Suvorin, the only one who managed to publish his work "in hot pursuit" - in Rostov in 1919:
| The first battle of the army, organized and received its current name[Volunteer], there was an attack on Gukov in mid-January. Releasing an officer battalion from Novocherkassk, Kornilov admonished him with words that expressed his exact view of Bolshevism: in his opinion, this was not socialism, even the most extreme, but a call for people without conscience by people without conscience to pogrom all the working people and the state in Russia [in his assessment of "Bolshevism" Kornilov repeated his typical assessment by many of the then Social Democrats, for example, Plekhanov]. He said: " Don't take these scoundrels prisoner for me! The more terror, the more victory will be with them! Later he added to this stern instruction: We do not fight with the wounded!“… |
In the White armies, the death sentences of military field courts and the orders of individual commanders were carried out by the commandant's departments, which, however, did not exclude the participation of volunteers from the military ranks in the executions of captured Red Army soldiers. During the "Ice Campaign", according to N. N. Bogdanov, a participant in this campaign:
Those taken prisoner, after receiving information about the actions of the Bolsheviks, were shot by the commandant's detachment. The officers of the commandant's detachment at the end of the campaign were very sick people, before they got nervous. Korvin-Krukovsky developed some sort of morbid cruelty. The officers of the commandant's detachment had a heavy duty to shoot the Bolsheviks, but, unfortunately, I knew many cases when, under the influence of hatred for the Bolsheviks, the officers took upon themselves the duty of voluntarily shooting those taken prisoner. Shootings were necessary. Under the conditions in which the Volunteer Army moved, it could not take prisoners, there was no one to lead them, and if the prisoners were released, then the next day they would fight again against the detachment.
Nevertheless, such actions in the white South, as well as in other territories in the first half of 1918, were not in the nature of the state-legal repressive policy of the white authorities, they were carried out by the military in the conditions of the “theater of military operations” and corresponded to the widespread practice of “laws of military action”. time."
Another eyewitness to the events, A.R. Trushnovich, who later became a well-known Kornilovite, described these circumstances as follows: unlike the Bolsheviks, whose leaders proclaimed robbery and terror as ideologically justified actions, slogans of law and order were inscribed on the banners of Kornilov’s army, so she sought to avoid requisitions and unnecessary bloodshed. However, circumstances forced the volunteers at some point to begin to respond with cruelty to the atrocities of the Bolsheviks:
| Near the village of Gnilovskaya, the Bolsheviks killed the wounded Kornilov officers and a sister of mercy. Under Lezhanka, a guard was taken prisoner and buried alive in the ground. In the same place, the Bolsheviks ripped open the priest's stomach and dragged him by the intestines along the village. Their atrocities multiplied, and almost every Kornilovite had among his relatives tortured by the Bolsheviks. In response to this, the Kornilovites stopped taking prisoners.… It worked. The fear of death joined the consciousness of the invincibility of the White Army |
The coming to power of supporters of the Constituent Assembly in the cities of the Volga region in the summer of 1918 was accompanied by the massacre of many party and Soviet workers, the prohibition of Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries to serve in power structures. On the territory controlled by Komuch, state security structures, courts-martial were created, and "death barges" were used.
In 1918, under the “white” authorities in the northern territory with a population of about 400 thousand people, 38 thousand arrested were sent to the Arkhangelsk prison, of which about 8 thousand were shot, more than a thousand died from beatings and diseases.
Mass executions occurred in 1918 in other territories occupied by the White armies. So, in response to the brutal murder by the Bolsheviks of the captured regiment commander M.A. Zhebrak (he was burned alive), as well as all the ranks of the regiment headquarters captured with him, as well as in response to the use by the enemy in this battle near Belaya Glina for the first time in the entire history of the Civil War with explosive bullets, the commander of the 3rd division of the Volunteer Army M. G. Drozdovsky ordered to shoot about 1000 captured Red Army soldiers. Before the Commander's headquarters could intervene, they were shot several parties of the Bolsheviks that were in the area of the battle where the Drozdovites, tortured by the Reds, died. Sources testify that not all the Red Army soldiers taken prisoner by Drozdovsky in the battle of Belaya Glina were shot: most of them were poured into the Soldier's Battalion and other parts of the Volunteer Army.
In the territories controlled by P.N. Krasnov, the total number of victims in 1918 reached more than 30 thousand people. “I forbid arresting workers, but I order them to be shot or hanged; I order all the arrested workers to be hanged on the main street and not removed for three days ”- this is from the orders of the Krasnovsky Yesaul, the commandant of the Makeevsky District, dated November 10, 1918.
The data on the victims of the White Terror are quite different depending on the source, it is reported that in June 1918, supporters of the white movement in the territories they occupied shot 824 people from among the Bolsheviks and sympathizers, in July 1918 - 4,141 people, in August 1918 - more than 6,000 people .
Since the middle of 1918, in the legal practice of the white governments, a line has been visible towards separating cases related to the action of the Bolsheviks into separate legal proceedings. Orders of the Supreme Administration are issued almost simultaneously Northern region. "On the abolition of all organs of Soviet power" of August 2, 1918 and the Provisional Siberian Government "On determining the fate former representatives Soviet power in Siberia” dated August 3, 1918. According to the first, all workers of the soviets and commissars of the Bolsheviks were arrested. The arrest continued “until the investigating authorities clarified the degree of their guilt in the crimes committed by the Soviet authorities - murders, robberies, betrayal of the motherland, initiation of a civil war between the classes and peoples of Russia, plundering and malicious destruction of state, public and private property under the pretext of fulfilling official duty and in other violations of the basic laws of human society, honor and morality.
According to the second act, "supporters of Bolshevism" could be subjected to both criminal and political liability: "all representatives of the so-called Soviet power are subject to the political court of the All-Siberian Constituent Assembly" and "are held in custody until it is convened."
The justification for the use of harsh repressive measures against activists and supporters of the Bolshevik Party, employees of the Cheka, soldiers and officers of the Red Army was the consideration of a special investigative commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks, formed by order of the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the South of Russia, General A. I. Denikin, more than 150 cases, summaries, reports on mass executions and the use of torture, desecration of the shrines of the Russian Orthodox Church, killings of civilians, and other facts of the Red Terror. “All materials containing indications of criminal acts and the guilt of individuals, the Special Commission reported to the relevant investigative and judicial authorities ... leaving the most insignificant participants in the crime without reprisals leads to the need to eventually deal with them as the main culprits of another homogeneous crime”
Similar commissions were created in 1919 in other "regions just liberated from the Bolsheviks, ... from persons who held judicial positions"
Since the summer of 1918, the number of cases of individual white terror has increased significantly on the territory of Soviet Russia. At the beginning of June, an assassination attempt was organized in Petrozavodsk on the life of the investigator of the Regional Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Bogdanov. On June 20, 1918, the Commissar of the Northern Commune for Press, Propaganda and Agitation V. Volodarsky was killed by a terrorist. On August 7, an attempt was made on the life of Reingold Berzin, at the end of the same month, the Commissar of Internal Affairs of Penza Olenin was killed, on August 27, an attempt was made on the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Northern Commune, G.E. Zinoviev, in the Astoria Hotel. On August 30, 1918, as a result of assassination attempts, the chairman of the PChK, Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Northern Commune M.S. Uritsky was killed and Lenin was wounded.
A number of terrorist acts in the second half of June were carried out by M. M. Filonenko's organization. In total, in 22 provinces of Central Russia, counter-revolutionaries in July 1918 killed 4,141 Soviet workers. According to incomplete data, over the last 7 months of 1918, in the territory of 13 provinces, the White Guards shot 22,780 people, and total victims of "kulak" uprisings in the Soviet Republic exceeded 15 thousand people by September 1918.
White terror under Kolchak
The attitude of Admiral Kolchak towards the Bolsheviks, whom he called "a gang of robbers", "enemies of the people" was extremely negative.
With the coming to power of Kolchak, the Russian Council of Ministers, by a Decree of December 3, 1918, “in order to preserve the existing state system and the power of the Supreme Ruler,” adjusted the articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Empire of 1903. Articles 99, 100 established the death penalty as an attempt on the Supreme Ruler, and for an attempt to violently overthrow the government, seize territories. “Preparations” for these crimes, according to Article 101, were punishable by “immediate hard labor”. Insults of the VP in written, printed and oral form were punishable by imprisonment in accordance with Art. 103. Bureaucratic sabotage, non-execution of orders and direct duties by employees, according to Art. 329, was punishable by hard labor for a term of 15 to 20 years. Acts according to the Code were considered by the military district or field courts in frontline. Separately, it was stated that these changes are valid only "until the establishment of the basic state laws by the people's representation." According to these articles, for example, the actions of the Bolshevik-Socialist-Revolutionary underground, which organized the uprising in Omsk at the end of December 1918, were qualified.
Rather mild repressive measures against the Bolsheviks and their supporters were explained, first of all, by the need to preserve democratic elements in the conditions of a subsequent appeal to the world community with a proposal to recognize a sovereign state and the Supreme Ruler of Russia.
At the same time, the presence of articles 99-101 in the interim edition of the Criminal Code of December 3, 1918 made it possible, if necessary, to qualify the actions of “opponents of the authorities” according to the norms of the Criminal Code, which provided for the death penalty, hard labor and imprisonment and were not imposed Commissions of Inquiry, but by the bodies of military justice.
From documentary evidence - an excerpt from the order of the governor of the Yenisei and part Irkutsk province General S. N. Rozanov, Special Representative of Kolchak in Krasnoyarsk) dated March 27, 1919:
To the chiefs of military detachments operating in the area of the uprising:
1. When occupying villages previously captured by robbers, demand the extradition of their leaders and leaders; if this does not happen, and there is reliable information about the existence of such, then shoot the tenth.
2. Villages, the population of which will meet government troops with weapons, burn; to shoot the adult male population without exception; property, horses, carts, bread, and so on, to be taken away in favor of the treasury.
Note. Everything selected must be carried out by order of the detachment ...
6. Take hostages among the population, in case of action by fellow villagers directed against government troops, shoot the hostages mercilessly.
The political leaders of the Czechoslovak corps B. Pavlu and V. Girs in an official memorandum to the allies in November 1919 stated:
| Under the protection of the Czechoslovakian bayonets, the local Russian military authorities allow themselves actions that will horrify the entire civilized world. The burning of villages, the beating of peaceful Russian citizens by hundreds, the execution without trial of representatives of democracy on a simple suspicion of political unreliability are a common occurrence, and the responsibility for everything before the court of the peoples of the whole world lies with us: why we, having military force, did not oppose this lawlessness. |
In Yekaterinburg province, one of the 12 provinces under Kolchak's control, at least 25 thousand people were massacred under Kolchak, about 10% of the two million population were flogged. They flogged both men and women and children.
The merciless attitude of Kolchak's punishers towards the workers and peasants provoked mass uprisings. As A.L. Litvin notes about the Kolchak regime, “it is difficult to talk about support for his policy in Siberia and the Urals, if out of about 400 thousand red partisans of that time, 150 thousand acted against him, and among them 4-5% were wealthy peasants, or, as they were then called, kulaks.
White terror under Denikin
Denikin, speaking about the mistakes of the white movement and acts of cruelty on the part of white officers during the war against the "red scourge" in the struggle for "Great, United and Indivisible Russia", said:
Anton Ivanovich himself recognized the level of widespread rampant cruelty and violence in the ranks of his army:
G.Ya.William notes in his memoirs:
| In general, the attitude towards the captured Red Army soldiers on the part of the volunteers was terrible. General Denikin's order on this matter was openly violated, and he himself was called a "woman" for this. Cruelty was sometimes allowed such that the most inveterate front-line soldiers spoke of them with a blush of shame.
I remember that one officer from the Shkuro detachment, from the so-called "Wolf Hundred", who was distinguished by monstrous ferocity, telling me the details of the victory over the Makhno gangs, which seemed to have seized Mariupol, even choked when he named the number of already unarmed opponents shot: Four thousand! |
With the formation of the Special Meeting under the Civil Code of the All-Union Socialist Youth League and the creation of the Department of Justice in its composition, it became possible to bring into the system the measures of responsibility of the leaders of the Soviet government and activists of the Bolshevik Party. In Siberia and the South, the white authorities considered it necessary to amend the articles of the Criminal Code of 1903. On January 8, 1919, the Department of Justice proposed to restore the versions of articles 100 and 101 of August 4, 1917 in their original form. However, the protocol of the meeting of the Special Meeting No. 25 was not approved by Denikin, with his resolution: “You can change the wording. But change the repression death penalty) is completely impossible. Bolshevik leaders are sued under these articles - so what?! Melkote - the death penalty, and the ringleaders - hard labor? I do not approve. Denikin.
At Special Meeting No. 38 of February 22, 1919, the Department of Justice approved sanctions in accordance with the norms of the Code of 1903, establishing as a sanction under Article 100 the death penalty and fixed-term hard labor, hard labor for not more than 10 years under Article 101, restoring the wording of Article 102, which provided for responsibility " for participation in a community formed to commit a serious crime” with a sanction in the form of hard labor up to 8 years, for “conspiracy to form a community” hard labor followed for no more than 8 years. This decision was approved by Denikin and the minutes of the meeting were signed.
It should be noted that this law contained a clarification that for “guilty persons who provided insignificant assistance or favor due to unfortunate circumstances for them, fear of possible coercion or other respectable reason” there was a “release from liability”, in other words, only voluntary supporters and "accomplices" of the Soviets and the Bolshevik government.
These measures seemed not enough to punish the "criminal acts" of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet government. Under the influence of the Meinhardt commission to investigate the acts of the Red Terror, Special Meeting No. 112 of November 15, 1919 considered the law of July 23, intensifying the repression. The category of “participants in the establishment of Soviet power” included members of the “community called the Party of Communists (Bolsheviks) or another community that established the power of the soviets”, or “other similar organizations”. Punishable actions were: "Deprivation of life, attempted life, infliction of torture or grievous bodily harm, or rape." The sanction was left unchanged - the death penalty with confiscation.
"Fear of possible coercion" was excluded by Denikin from the "exemption from liability" section, since, according to his resolution, it is "hard to catch for the court."
Five members of the Special Conference opposed the execution for the mere fact of membership in the Communist Party. Prince G. N. Trubetskoy, a member of the Cadets, who expressed their opinion, did not object to the execution of communists at a time that immediately follows "the hostilities." But to pass such a law on the use of such measures in Peaceful time he considered politically short-sighted. This law, Trubetskoy emphasized in his note to the journal dated November 15, will inevitably become an act "not so much an act of justice, but of mass terror", and the Special Conference, in fact, "itself takes the path of Bolshevik legislation." He proposed “to establish a wide range of punishments, from arrest to hard labor. Thus, the court would be given the opportunity to take into account the peculiarities of each individual case”, “to distinguish between the responsibility of communists who have shown their belonging to the party by criminal acts, from the responsibility of those who, although they were members of the party, but no criminal acts in connection with party affiliation committed”, while the death penalty will cause widespread dissatisfaction among the masses of the people and “ideological errors are not eradicated, but intensified by punishments”.
Mitigation of terror and amnesty
At the same time, in the face of the inevitability of punishment for complicity with the RCP (b), in 1919 an amnesty was proclaimed several times for the ranks of the Red Army - all "who voluntarily go over to the side of the legitimate government." On May 28, 1919, an appeal was issued “From the Supreme Ruler and supreme commander to the officers and soldiers of the Red Army":
After the defeat of the VSYUR and the armies of the Eastern Front in 1919-1920, the work of the commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks practically ceased, amnesties increasingly followed. For example, January 23, 1920 chief boss of the Amur Military District, General V.V. Rozanov in Vladivostok issues order No. 4, which states that the captured partisans and Red Army soldiers who participated in the battles due to "an incorrect or peculiar understanding of love for the Motherland" were subject to a full amnesty "with oblivion of all deeds" .
Back in 1918, a rather unique punishment from the time of the White Terror was introduced - deportation to the Soviet of Deputies. Legislatively, it was enshrined in the Order of May 11, 1920. The commander-in-chief of the All-Russian Union of Youth Leagues, P. N. Wrangel, approved the norm according to which “expulsion to Soviet Russia” is subject to persons “exposed in non-public disclosure or dissemination of knowingly false information and rumors”, “in excitation by uttering speeches and other methods of agitation, but not in the press, to organizing or continuing a strike, participating in an unauthorized, by agreement between the workers, stopping work, in obvious sympathy for the Bolsheviks, in exorbitant personal gain, in evading the execution of work to assist the front "
According to the decree of the Ruler of the Amur Territory, General M.K. Diterikhs No. 25 dated August 29, 1922, which became practically the last act of the judicial and legal practice of the white governments, the death penalty is excluded, captured red partisans and peasants who sympathize with them are subjected to a rather unusual punishment: “to release at home under the supervision of the relevant rural societies”, “persuade them to leave behind criminal work and return to their peaceful hearth”, as well as the traditional decision - “send to the Far Eastern Republic”.
torture
The memoirs report on the facts of the use of torture in the White Army:
|
A member of the military field court, an officer from St. Petersburg, sometimes came to visit us... This one even told about his exploits with a certain pride: when he was sentenced to death in court, he rubbed his well-groomed hands with pleasure. Once, when he sentenced a woman to a noose, he ran to me, drunk with joy. |
| The murder itself presents a picture so wild and terrible that it is difficult to talk about it even for people who have seen a lot of horrors both in the past and in the present. The unfortunate were stripped, left in only one linen: the killers, obviously, needed their clothes. They beat them with all types of weapons, with the exception of artillery: they beat them with butts, stabbed with bayonets, chopped them with checkers, shot at them from rifles and revolvers. The execution was attended not only by the performers, but also by spectators. In front of this audience, N. Fomin was inflicted 13 wounds, of which only 2 were gunshot wounds. While still alive, they tried to cut off his arms with sabers, but the sabers, apparently, were blunt, resulting in deep wounds on the shoulders and under the armpits. It is hard, hard for me now to describe how they tortured, mocked, tortured our comrades. |
The minister of the Kolchak government, Baron Budberg, wrote in his diary:
Memory of the Victims of the White Terror
On the territory of the former Soviet Union There are a significant number of monuments dedicated to the victims of the White Terror. Often monuments were erected on the ground mass graves(mass graves) victims of terror.
Mass grave of victims of white terror in Volgograd is located in the park on Dobrolyubova street. The monument was built in 1920 on the site mass grave 24 Red Army soldiers shot by the Whites. The currently existing monument in the form of a rectangular stele was created by the architect D. V. Ershova in 1965.
In memory of the victims of white terror in Voronezh is located in a park near the regional Nikitin library. The monument was opened in 1920 on the site public execution in 1919, by the troops of K. Mamontov, party leaders of the city; modern look has since 1929 (architect A. I. Popov-Shaman).
The monument to the victims of the White Terror in Vyborg was opened in 1961 on the 4th kilometer of the Leningrad highway. The monument is dedicated to 600 prisoners shot by whites from a machine gun on the ramparts of the city.
Bibliography
- A. Litvin. Red and White Terror 1918-1922. - M.: Eksmo, 2004
- Tsvetkov V. Zh. White terror - crime or punishment? The evolution of judicial and legal norms of responsibility for state crimes in the legislation of white governments in 1917-1922.
- S. V. Drokov, L. I. Ermakova, S. V. Konina. The Supreme Ruler of Russia: Documents and materials of the investigation file of Admiral A. V. Kolchak - M., 2003 // Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Directorate of the RiAF of the FSB of Russia
- Zimina V.D. The white matter of the rebellious Russia: Political regimes Civil War. 1917-1920 M.: Ros. humanit. un-t, 2006. 467 s (Ser. History and memory). ISBN 5-7281-0806-7
Notes
- Zimina V.D. The White Case of Rebellious Russia: Political Regimes of the Civil War. 1917-1920 M.: Ros. humanit. un-t, 2006. 467 s (Ser. History and memory). ISBN 5-7281-0806-7, page 38
- Tsvetkov V. Zh. White terror - crime or punishment? The evolution of judicial and legal norms of responsibility for state crimes in the legislation of white governments in 1917-1922.
- A. Litvin. Red and White Terror 1918-1922. - M.: Eksmo, 2004
- The terror of the white army. A selection of documents.
- Ya. Ya. Peche "The Red Guard in Moscow in the battles for October", Moscow-Leningrad, 1929
- S. P. Melgunov. "Red Terror" in Russia 1918-1923
- Tsvetkov V.Zh. V.Zh. Tsvetkov Lavr Georgievich Kornilov
- Trushnovich A. R. Memoirs of a Kornilovite: 1914-1934 / Comp. Ya. A. Trushnovich. - Moscow-Frankfurt: Posev, 2004. - 336 p., 8 ill. ISBN 5-85824-153-0, pp. 82-84
- I. S. Ratkovsky, Red Terror and the activities of the Cheka in 1918, St. Petersburg: Publishing House of St. Petersburg. un-ta, 2006, p. 110, 111
- Gagkuev R. G.
- Gagkuev R. G. The Last Knight // Drozdovsky and the Drozdovites. M.: NP "Posev", 2006. ISBN 5-85824-165-4, p. 86
The flow of articles and notes about the "good Tsar-father", the noble white movement and the red ghouls-murderers opposing them does not diminish. I'm not going to speak for one side or the other. I'll just give the facts. Just the bare facts taken from open sources, and nothing more. The abdicated Tsar Nicholas II was arrested on March 2, 1917 by General Mikhail Alekseev, his chief of staff. The Tsarina and the family of Nicholas II were arrested on March 7 by General Lavr Kornilov, commander of the Petrograd Military District. Yes, yes, those same future heroes-founders of the white movement ...
The government of Lenin, which assumed responsibility for the country in November-17, offered the Romanov family to go to relatives - to London, but the English royal family REFUSED them permission to move to England.
The overthrow of the tsar was welcomed by all of Russia. “Even close relatives of Nikolai put on red bows on their chests,” writes historian Heinrich Ioffe. Grand Duke Mikhail, to whom Nicholas intended to transfer the crown, refused the throne. Russian Orthodox Church, having committed perjury to the church oath of allegiance, welcomed the news of the abdication of the king.
Russian officer. 57% of it was supported by the white movement, of which 14 thousand later switched to the red ones. 43% (75 thousand people) - immediately went for the Reds, that is, in the final analysis - more than half of the officers supported the Soviet government.
The first few months after the October uprising in Petrograd and Moscow were not in vain called "the triumphal procession of Soviet power." Out of 84 provincial and other large cities, it was established only in 15 as a result of armed struggle. “At the end of November, in all the cities of the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia, the power of the Provisional Government no longer existed. It passed almost without any resistance into the hands of the Bolsheviks, Soviets were formed everywhere, ”Major General Ivan Akulinin testifies in his memoirs“ The Orenburg Cossack Host in the Fight against the Bolsheviks 1917-1920.
“Just at that time,” he writes further, “they began to arrive in the Army from the Austro-Hungarian and Caucasian fronts combat units - regiments and batteries, but it turned out to be absolutely impossible to count on their help: they did not even want to hear about the armed struggle against the Bolsheviks. 
Russian officers were divided in their sympathies ...
How, under such circumstances Soviet Russia suddenly found herself in the ring of fronts?
And here's how: from the end of February - the beginning of March 1918, the imperialist powers of both coalitions fighting in the world war began a large-scale armed invasion of our territory.
On February 18, 1918, German and Austro-Hungarian troops (about 50 divisions) went on the offensive from the Baltic to the Black Sea. For two weeks they occupied vast areas.
March 3, 1918 was signed Brest Peace but the Germans did not stop. Taking advantage of the agreement with the Central Rada (by that time already firmly established in Germany), they continued their offensive in Ukraine, on March 1 they overthrew Soviet power in Kyiv and moved further east and south towards Kharkov, Poltava, Yekaterinoslav, Nikolaev, Kherson and Odessa .
5th of March German troops Under the command of Major General von der Goltz, they invaded Finland, where they soon overthrew the Finnish Soviet government. On April 18, German troops invaded the Crimea, and on April 30 they captured Sevastopol.
By mid-June, more than 15 thousand German troops with aviation and artillery were in Transcaucasia, including 10 thousand people in Poti and 5 thousand in Tiflis (Tbilisi).
Turkish troops have been operating in Transcaucasia since mid-February.
On March 9, 1918, an English landing entered Murmansk under the pretext ... of the need to protect warehouses of military equipment from the Germans.
On April 5, Japanese troops landed in Vladivostok, but already under the pretext ... of protecting Japanese citizens "from banditry" in this city.
May 25 - performance of the Czechoslovak Corps, whose echelons were located between Penza and Vladivostok.
It should be taken into account that the “whites” (generals Alekseev, Kornilov, Anton Denikin, Pyotr Wrangel, Admiral Alexander Kolchak), who played their part in the overthrow of the tsar, renounced the oath of the Russian Empire, but did not accept the new government, starting a struggle for their own rule in Russia. 
Entente landing in Arkhangelsk, August 1918
In the south of Russia, where the "Russian Liberation Forces" were mainly active, the situation was veiled by the Russian form of the "White Movement". Ataman of the "Don Troops" Pyotr Krasnov, when he was pointed out to the "German orientation" and set as an example of Denikin's "volunteers", replied: "Yes, yes, gentlemen! The volunteer army is pure and infallible.
But it's me, the Don ataman, with my dirty hands taking German shells and cartridges, washing them in the waves of the quiet Don and handing them clean to the Volunteer Army! The whole shame of this case lies with me!
Kolchak Alexander Vasilyevich, so beloved " romantic hero"modern "intelligentsia". Kolchak, violating the oath of the Russian Empire, was the first in the Black Sea Fleet to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government. Having learned about the October Revolution, he handed the British ambassador a request for admission to the British army. The ambassador, after consultations with London, handed Kolchak a direction to the Mesopotamian On the way there, in Singapore, he was overtaken by a telegram from the Russian envoy to China, Nikolai Kudashev, inviting him to Manchuria to form Russian military units. 
Killed Bolshevik
So, by August 1918, the armed forces of the RSFSR were completely or almost completely opposed by foreign troops. “It would be a mistake to think that throughout this year we fought on the fronts for the cause of Russians hostile to the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, the Russian Whites fought for OUR cause,” Winston Churchill later wrote.
White liberators or murderers and robbers? Doctor of Historical Sciences Heinrich Ioffe in the journal "Science and Life" No. 12 for 2004 - and this journal has managed to be noted in recent years by ardent anti-Sovietism - writes in an article about Denikin: arbitrariness, robberies, terrible Jewish pogroms reigned ... ".
There are legends about the atrocities of Kolchak's troops. The number of those killed and tortured in Kolchak's dungeons could not be counted. Only in the Yekaterinburg province, about 25 thousand people were shot.
"AT Eastern Siberia terrible murders were committed, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks, as is usually thought. I won’t be mistaken if I say, - American General William Sidney Graves, an eyewitness of those events, later admitted, - that for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were 100 people killed by anti-Bolshevik elements.
The "ideology" of the Whites in this matter was clearly expressed by General Kornilov:
“We went to power in order to hang, but it was necessary to hang in order to come to power” ...
Americans and Scots guard captured Red Army soldiers in Bereznik.
The "allies" of the white movement - the British, French and other Japanese - exported everything: metal, coal, bread, machine tools and equipment, engines and furs. They stole civilian ships and steam locomotives. Until October 1918, the Germans exported from Ukraine alone 52,000 tons of grain and fodder, 34,000 tons of sugar, 45 million eggs, 53,000 horses and 39,000 heads of cattle. There was a large-scale plunder of Russia.
And about the atrocities (no less bloody and massive - no one argues) of the Red Army and the Chekists, read in the writings of the democratic press. This text is intended solely to dispel the illusions of those who admire the romance and nobility of the "white knights of Russia". There was dirt, blood and suffering. Wars and revolutions cannot bring anything else...
"White Terror in Russia" - this is the name of the book of the famous historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences Pavel Golub. The documents and materials collected in it, stone on stone, do not leave from the widely circulating in the media mass media and publications on the historical theme of fiction and myths. 
There was everything: from demonstrations of the power of the interventionists to the execution of Red Army soldiers by the Czechs
Let's start with statements about the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Bolsheviks, who, they say, destroyed their political opponents at the slightest opportunity. In fact, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party became firm and implacable towards them as they learned the hard way that decisive action was necessary. And at the beginning there was a certain gullibility and even carelessness. After all, in just four months, October triumphantly marched from region to region of a huge country, which became possible thanks to the support of the power of the Soviets by the overwhelming majority of the people.
Hence the hope that its opponents themselves will realize the obvious. Many leaders of the counter-revolution, as can be seen from documentary materials, are Generals Krasnov, Vladimir Marushevsky, Vasily Boldyrev, a prominent political figure Vladimir Purishkevich, ministers of the Provisional Government Alexei Nikitin, Kuzma Gvozdev, Semyon Maslov, and many others were released on parole, although their hostility new government was not in doubt.
These gentlemen broke their word by taking an active part in the armed struggle, in organizing provocations and sabotage against their people. The generosity shown in relation to the obvious enemies of the Soviet power turned into thousands and thousands of additional victims, the suffering and torment of hundreds of thousands of people who supported the revolutionary changes. And then the leaders of the Russian communists made the inevitable conclusions - they knew how to learn from their mistakes ... 
Tomsk residents carry the bodies of the executed participants of the anti-Kolchak uprising
Having come to power, the Bolsheviks by no means banned the activities of their political opponents. They were not subjected to arrests, they were allowed to publish their own newspapers and magazines, hold rallies and marches, etc. The People's Socialists, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks continued their legal activities in the bodies of the new government, starting with the local Soviets and ending with the Central Executive Committee. And again, only after the transition of these parties to an open armed struggle against the new system, their factions were expelled from the Soviets by a decree of the Central Executive Committee of June 14, 1918. But even after that, the opposition parties continued to operate legally. Only those organizations or individuals who were caught in specific subversive actions were subjected to punishment. 
Excavations of the grave in which the victims of the Kolchak repressions of March 1919 were buried, Tomsk, 1920
Kolchak's victims in Novosibirsk, 1919
The "civilized" Czechoslovak punishers dealt with their "Slav brothers" with fire and bayonet, literally erasing entire towns and villages from the face of the earth. In Yeniseisk alone, for example, more than 700 people were shot for sympathy for the Bolsheviks - almost a tenth of those who lived there. During the suppression of the uprising of the prisoners of the Alexander transit prison in September 1919, the Czechs shot them point-blank from machine guns and cannons. The massacre lasted three days, about 600 people died at the hands of the executioners. And there are many such examples. 
Bolsheviks killed by the Czechs near Vladivostok
By the way, foreign interventionists actively contributed to the deployment on Russian territory new concentration camps for those who opposed the occupation or sympathized with the Bolsheviks. The Provisional Government began to create concentration camps. This is an indisputable fact, which the whistleblowers of the "bloody atrocities" of the communists are also silent about. When French and British troops landed in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, one of their leaders, General Poole, on behalf of the allies, solemnly promised the northerners to ensure "the triumph of law and justice" in the occupied territory.
However, almost immediately after these words, a concentration camp was organized on the island of Mudyug captured by the invaders. Here are the testimonies of those who happened to be there: “Several people died every night, and their corpses remained in the barracks until the morning. And in the morning a French sergeant appeared and gloatingly asked: "How many Bolsheviks are kaput today?" Of those imprisoned on the Mudyug, more than 50 percent lost their lives, many went crazy ... ". 
American invader posing near the corpse of a murdered Bolshevik
After the departure of the Anglo-French interventionists, power in the North of Russia passed into the hands of the White Guard General Yevgeny Miller. He not only continued, but also intensified repression and terror, trying to stop the rapidly developing process of "Bolshevization of the masses." Their most inhuman personification was the exile-convict prison in Yokanga, which one of the prisoners described as "the most brutal, sophisticated method of exterminating people by a slow, painful death."
Here are excerpts from the memoirs of those who miraculously managed to survive in this hell: “The dead lay on the planks together with the living, and the living were not better than dead: dirty, covered with scabs, in torn rags, decomposing alive, they presented a nightmarish picture. 
A Red Army prisoner at work, Arkhangelsk, 1919
By the time Yokangi was liberated from the whites, out of a thousand and a half prisoners, 576 people remained, of which 205 could no longer move.
The system of such concentration camps, as shown in the book, was deployed in Siberia and the Far East by Admiral Kolchak - perhaps the most cruel of all the White Guard rulers. They were created both on the basis of prisons and in those prisoner of war camps that were built by the Provisional Government. In more than 40 concentration camps, the regime drove almost a million (914,178) people who rejected the restoration of the pre-revolutionary order. To this must be added about 75 thousand more people languishing in white Siberia. More than 520,000 prisoners were taken by the regime into slave, almost unpaid labor in factories and agriculture.
However, neither in Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago", nor in the writings of his followers Alexander Yakovlev, Dmitry Volkogonov and others, there is not a word about this monstrous archipelago. Although the same Solzhenitsyn begins his "Archipelago" with a civil war, depicting the "Red Terror". A classic example of lying by mere silence! 
American Bolshevik hunters
In the anti-Soviet literature on the civil war, much and with anguish is written about the "barges of death", which, they say, were used by the Bolsheviks to massacre the White Guard officers. Pavel Golub's book cites facts and documents showing that "barges" and "death trains" began to be actively and massively used by the White Guards. When in the fall of 1918 on the eastern front they began to suffer defeat from the Red Army, to Siberia, and then to Far East"barges" and "trains of death" with prisoners of prisons and concentration camps were drawn.
Horror and death - that's what they brought to the people who rejected the pre-revolutionary regime, white generals. And this is by no means a publicistic exaggeration. Kolchak himself frankly wrote about the "vertical of control" he created: "The activities of the chiefs of district police, detachments special purpose, all kinds of commandants, heads of individual detachments is a complete crime. "It would be good to think about these words for those who today admire the" patriotism "and" selflessness "of the white movement, which, contrary to the Red Army, defended the interests of "Great Russia". 
Captured Red Army soldiers in Arkhangelsk
Well, as for the "Red Terror", its dimensions were completely incomparable with the White Terror, and it was mostly of a reciprocal nature. This was recognized even by General Grevs, commander of the 10,000-strong American corps in Siberia.
And this was not only in Eastern Siberia. This was the case throughout Russia.
However, the frank confessions of the American general by no means relieve him of guilt for participating in the reprisals against the people who rejected the pre-revolutionary order. Terror against him was carried out by the joint efforts of foreign interventionists and white armies.
In total, there were more than a million interventionists on the territory of Russia - 280 thousand Austro-German bayonets and about 850 thousand English, American, French and Japanese. The joint attempt of the White Guard armies and their foreign allies to inflict a Russian "thermidor" cost the Russian people, even according to incomplete data, very dearly: about 8 million were killed, tortured in concentration camps, died of wounds, starvation and epidemics. The material losses of the country, according to experts, amounted to an astronomical figure - 50 billion gold rubles ...
Who and when unleashed the Civil War?
The answer to these two questions is obvious to everyone - both communists and liberals. The first argue that after the Great October socialist revolution and the “triumphant march of Soviet power”, the Whites and the interventionists started the Civil War, but the time of its beginning varies from the end of 1917 (the Kaledin rebellion) to June 1918 (the Czechoslovak rebellion). Liberals, on the other hand, are of the opinion that the Bolsheviks staged the Civil War, but the dates of its start are left the same.
Everything is clear and understandable to both of them, but to me alone it is not. Let's figure it out. Fast forward to early December 1916 on the shores of Lake Geneva. A short, stocky 46-year-old man walks there, accompanied by two companions - his wife Nadia and the party lord Inessa. What is he thinking about? How to arrange a civil war in Russia? Yes, two years ago he put forward the slogan "to turn the imperialist war into a civil one," but what has been done in that time? Alas, nothing, everything was limited to chatter in narrow circle social democrats.
Moreover, a number of historians claim that at the end of 1916, Vladimir Ulyanov was in a depressed state and even argued that the current generation of revolutionaries could not wait for the collapse of the tsarist autocracy. And there were plenty of reasons for that. The World War greatly hampered the actions of the Bolsheviks. Hundreds of their functionaries in Russia were sent to Siberia or shot by court-martial. The actions of the Russian and foreign counterintelligence agencies made it extremely difficult to communicate both inside and outside the country. The war scattered the future Soviet leaders around the world - some in Switzerland, some in the USA, some "in the depths Siberian ores”, and in Petrograd in December 1916 - February 1917 there were no at least some influential Bolsheviks.
By 1917, the Bolshevik organizations that survived the police pogroms were extremely few in number, but they were saturated to the limit with agents of the Okhrana. Before the revolution, a member of the Central Committee and the editor of Pravda, M.E., worked for the Okhrana. Chernomazov (salary 200 rubles per month), member of the Central Committee and head of the Bolshevik faction in the IV State Duma R.V. Malinovsky (500 rubles). Members of district committees and students of the Leninist school in Longjumeau received less - 100, 75 and 50 rubles. The Soviet of Workers' Deputies formed after the February Revolution consisted of more than thirty Okhrana informers, one of whom was the chairman, three were his deputies, two were editors of Izvestia of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies, etc.
Where is Ulyanov thinking about organizing a civil war! Meanwhile, in December 1916, shock units specially created for the civil war in Russia were marching all over Europe. Already in February 1915, a scout camp was opened in Germany, initially for only 200 people. There, young Finnish guys studied military affairs, methods military intelligence and guerrilla warfare. Studying at the courses was not in vain: under Mannerheim, 165 graduates became officers, 25 of them became generals, forming the backbone of the Finnish army, police, special services and the guard. And by February 1917, thousands of Finnish rangers were under arms in Germany.
Germans and Austrians formed Polish legions, German submarines landed groups of separatists on the coast of the Caucasus. I emphasize, not saboteurs to blow up a bridge or a military warehouse, but future “field commanders”.
Already in August 1914, the nationalists founded the Zagalna Ukrainian Rada in Lvov, which was headed by Kost Levitsky, a member of the Austrian Reichstag. 28 thousand wide Ukrainians expressed a desire to kill the "evil Muscovites." However, only 2.5 thousand people joined the Ukrainian Legion. Later, the legionnaires were renamed "Ukrainian Sich Riflemen".
Let us note that neither the Finnish, nor the Polish, nor the Ukrainian parts of Berlin and Vienna threw battles into the fire, they say, let them die, and not full-fledged German soldiers. They were trained for the civil war in Russia.
Well, all right, Germany and Austria-Hungary were Russia's opponents in the war, and the Russians themselves formed Czechoslovak units in the same way.
And why did France, an ally of Russia, begin to form Polish units at home? Alas, Paris and London, no less than Berlin and Vienna, dreamed of the dismemberment of Russia, which could be carried out only the only way- civil war.
And so the February Revolution took place in Petrograd. Whether we like it or not, but it turned out to be a Masonic coup, as a result of which the Masonic Provisional Government came to power. And as a witness we will call ... Lenin. Why, he never once used the word "Masons"! So what. So after all, the Masons themselves did not call their associates (accomplices) Masons, but always expressed themselves somehow allegorically.
So this is what the leader wrote: “This eight-day revolution was, if I may say so metaphorically, “played out” exactly after a dozen major and minor rehearsals; The "actors" knew each other, their roles, their places, their situation inside and out, through and through, to any significant shade of political directions and methods of action. Replace the word "actors" with "brothers" - and everything will fall into place.
According to Freemason N.N. Berberova, the first composition of the Provisional Government (March-April 1917) included ten "brothers" and one "profane". Freemasons called "profane" people close to them, who, however, were not formally included in the lodges. Such a "layman" in the first composition of the Provisional Government turned out to be Cadet P.N. Milyukov, appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Berberova writes that the composition of the future government was presented to the "Supreme Council of the Peoples of Russia" already in 1915.
Berberova, without undue modesty, cites statistics: “If out of the eleven ministers of the Provisional Government of the first composition, ten turned out to be Freemasons, brothers of Russian lodges, then in the last composition, the“ third coalition ”(the so-called Directory), in September-October, when Minister of War Verkhovsky left, all were Masons except Kartashov, those who sat out the night from October 25 to October 26 in winter palace and those who were arrested and put in a fortress, and those who were "on the run."
Freemasons seized power in Petrograd relatively easily, forming the Provisional Government, and commissars of the Provisional Government were sent to the places of governors. But, alas, the Freemasons did not have any political, military or economic more or less satisfactory program.
In the summer of 1917, only individual army units and ships retained relative combat capability and were able to conduct active operations. The rest of the mass of troops did not want to fight and practically did not obey the commanders, both the old and those appointed by the Provisional Government.
The provisional government could not solve the agrarian question. Immediately give land to the peasants? Freemason ministers were afraid to offend the landlords. Send punitive detachments to the village with fire and sword to restore order? It is also impossible - there are no units capable of fulfilling this order. The only way out is to promise that, they say, at the end of the year we will convene the Constituent Assembly, which will decide the issue of land. But it is necessary to sow in the spring. And who will sow, harrow, etc., when it is not known who will get the harvest in the fall?
In March-June 1917, only in European Russia 2944 peasant uprisings took place. By the autumn of 1917 in Tambov province 105 landlord estates were captured and destroyed, in Oryol province- 30, etc. The scope of peasant uprisings was greater than during the times of Razin and Pugachev, but historians call those peasant uprisings peasant wars, and in March - October 1917, there seemed to be no civil war in Russia.
The main thing is that since March 1917, separatists have raised their heads throughout the Russian Empire. By October 1917, several hundred thousand servicemen of "illegal armed formations" created by separatists in Finland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Bessarabia, Crimea (Tatars), the Caucasus and Central Asia were put under arms. These formations (armies) were subordinated exclusively to the powerful state formations of the separatists.
I note that not only the self-appointed leaders of the "foreigners" wanted to secede from Russia, but also the top of the Cossacks in the Kuban, the "regionals" (left-liberal bourgeoisie) in Siberia, etc. At first they spoke only about the federal structure of Russia, and then directly about separation from the center, both Soviet and White Guard.
It is important to note that the separatists of all stripes claimed not only the lands inhabited by their peoples, but also vast regions dominated by people of other nationalities. So, the Poles demanded the revival of the Commonwealth "from May to May", that is, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Finns claimed Kola Peninsula, Arkhangelsk and Vologda provinces, as well as throughout Karelia. The territorial claims of the separatists were repeatedly blocked. So, Poles, Ukrainians and Romanians claimed Odessa. It is clear that without a major civil war, it was impossible to resolve these territorial disputes.
Suppose for a second that the Bolsheviks in mid-October 1917 decided to abandon the seizure of power, and their leaders would have gone back to Switzerland, the USA, Siberian exile, etc. Would the leaders of the separatists have abandoned their plans and disbanded their gangs? Would the German command have refused to strike at the collapsed Russian army and would not have colluded with the Baltic and Ukrainian nationalists?
In the spring and summer of 1918, a German invasion would inevitably take place. The Allies would also land in the North and Far East of Russia. The sluggish civil war would turn into an all-out civil war, but without the participation of the Bolsheviks.
The question arises - would the Provisional Government headed by Kerensky, who did not represent anyone, manage to win this war? The answer is unequivocal - no! And who would win? And I don’t want to think about it, but I refer those who are interested to the authors of numerous “fantasies” who will tell us what would happen if Hitler seized England, took Moscow, and so on and so forth ...
So it was the October Revolution and the subsequent dictatorship of the Bolsheviks that saved Russia from the disintegration that had been planned as far back as 1915 in the ministerial offices of London and Paris.
Was the Bolshevik dictatorship bloody? Yes, there was, but her opponents would have staged an even bloodier bath if they could. “If they say about the sovereign that he is kind, his reign failed,” - this was not said by Lenin, but by Bonaparte.
We went to power in order to hang, but we had to hang in order to come to power
The flow of articles and notes about the "good Tsar-father", the noble white movement and the red ghouls-murderers opposing them does not diminish. I'm not going to speak for one side or the other. I'll just give the facts. Just bare facts taken from open sources, and nothing more. The abdicated Tsar Nicholas II was arrested on March 2, 1917 by General Mikhail Alekseev, his chief of staff. The Tsarina and the family of Nicholas II were arrested on March 7 by General Lavr Kornilov, commander of the Petrograd Military District. Yes, yes, those same future heroes-founders of the white movement ...
The government of Lenin, which assumed responsibility for the country in November-17, offered the Romanov family to go to relatives - to London, but the English royal family REFUSED them permission to move to England.
The overthrow of the tsar was welcomed by all of Russia. " Even close relatives of Nikolai put red bows on their chests., - writes historian Heinrich Joffe. Grand Duke Mikhail, to whom Nicholas intended to transfer the crown, refused the throne. The Russian Orthodox Church, having committed perjury against the Church's oath of allegiance, welcomed the news of the abdication of the tsar.
Russian officer. 57% of it was supported by the white movement, of which 14 thousand later switched to the red ones. 43% (75 thousand people) - immediately went for the Reds, that is, in the end - more than half of the officers supported the Soviet government.
The first few months after the October uprising in Petrograd and Moscow were not in vain called "the triumphal procession of Soviet power." Out of 84 provincial and other large cities, it was established only in 15 as a result of armed struggle. “At the end of November, in all the cities of the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia, the power of the Provisional Government no longer existed. It passed almost without any resistance into the hands of the Bolsheviks, Soviets were formed everywhere, ”Major General Ivan Akulinin testifies in his memoirs“ The Orenburg Cossack Host in the Fight against the Bolsheviks 1917-1920. “Just at that time,” he writes further, “combat units — regiments and batteries — began to arrive in the Army from the Austro-Hungarian and Caucasian fronts, but it turned out to be absolutely impossible to count on their help: they didn’t even want to hear about the armed struggle against the Bolsheviks ".
Russian officers were divided in their sympathies ...
How, under such circumstances, did Soviet Russia suddenly find itself in the ring of fronts? And here's how: from the end of February - the beginning of March 1918, the imperialist powers of both coalitions fighting in the world war began a large-scale armed invasion of our territory.
February 18, 1918 German and Austro-Hungarian troops (about 50 divisions) went on the offensive from the Baltic to the Black Sea. For two weeks they occupied vast areas.
March 3, 1918 Brest Peace was signed, but the Germans did not stop. Taking advantage of the agreement with the Central Rada (by that time already firmly established in Germany), they continued their offensive in Ukraine, on March 1 they overthrew Soviet power in Kyiv and moved further east and south towards Kharkov, Poltava, Yekaterinoslav, Nikolaev, Kherson and Odessa .
5th of March German troops under the command of Major General von der Goltz invaded Finland, where they soon overthrew the Finnish Soviet government. April 18th German troops invaded the Crimea, and on April 30 captured Sevastopol.
To mid June more than 15 thousand German troops with aviation and artillery were in Transcaucasia, including 10 thousand people in Poti and 5 thousand in Tiflis (Tbilisi).
Turkish troops operated in Transcaucasia with mid February.
March 9, 1918 the English landing entered Murmansk under the pretext ... of the need to protect military equipment depots from the Germans.
April 5 Japanese troops landed in Vladivostok, but already under the pretext ... of protecting Japanese citizens "from banditry" in this city.
May 25- performance of the Czechoslovak corps, the echelons of which were located between Penza and Vladivostok.
It should be taken into account that the “whites” (generals Alekseev, Kornilov, Anton Denikin, Pyotr Wrangel, Admiral Alexander Kolchak), who played their part in the overthrow of the tsar, renounced the oath of the Russian Empire, but did not accept the new government, starting a struggle for their own rule in Russia.
Entente landing in Arkhangelsk, August 1918
In the south of Russia, where the "Russian Liberation Forces" were mainly active, the situation was veiled by the Russian form of the "White Movement". Ataman of the "Don Troops" Pyotr Krasnov, when he was pointed out to the "German orientation" and set as an example of Denikin's "volunteers", replied: "Yes, yes, gentlemen! The volunteer army is pure and infallible.
But it's me, the Don ataman, with my dirty hands taking German shells and cartridges, washing them in the waves of the quiet Don and handing them clean to the Volunteer Army! The whole shame of this case lies with me!
Kolchak Alexander Vasilievich, so beloved "romantic hero" of the modern "intelligentsia". Kolchak, violating the oath of the Russian Empire, was the first in the Black Sea Fleet to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government. Having learned about the October Revolution, he handed over to the British ambassador a request for admission to the British army. The ambassador, after consultations with London, handed Kolchak a direction to the Mesopotamian front. On the way there, in Singapore, he was overtaken by a telegram from the Russian envoy to China, Nikolai Kudashev, inviting him to Manchuria to form Russian military units.
Killed Bolshevik
So, by August 1918, the armed forces of the RSFSR were completely or almost completely opposed by foreign troops. “It would be a mistake to think that throughout this year we fought on the fronts for the cause of Russians hostile to the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, the Russian Whites fought for OUR cause,” Winston Churchill later wrote.
White liberators or murderers and robbers? Doctor of Historical Sciences Heinrich Ioffe in the journal "Science and Life" No. 12 for 2004 - and this journal has managed to be noted in recent years by ardent anti-Sovietism - writes in an article about Denikin: arbitrariness, robberies, terrible Jewish pogroms reigned ... ".
There are legends about the atrocities of Kolchak's troops. The number of those killed and tortured in Kolchak's dungeons could not be counted. Only in the Yekaterinburg province, about 25 thousand people were shot.
“Terrible murders were committed in Eastern Siberia, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks, as they usually thought. I won’t be mistaken if I say,” American General William Sydney Greves, an eyewitness of those events, later admitted, “that for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were 100 people, killed by anti-Bolshevik elements."
The "ideology" of the Whites in this matter was clearly expressed by General Kornilov:
“We went to power in order to hang, but it was necessary to hang in order to come to power” ...
Americans and Scots guard captured Red Army soldiers in Bereznik
The "allies" of the white movement - the British, French and other Japanese - exported everything: metal, coal, bread, machine tools and equipment, engines and furs. They stole civilian ships and steam locomotives. Until October 1918, the Germans exported from Ukraine alone 52,000 tons of grain and fodder, 34,000 tons of sugar, 45 million eggs, 53,000 horses and 39,000 heads of cattle. There was a large-scale plunder of Russia.
And about the atrocities (no less bloody and massive - no one argues) of the Red Army and the Chekists, read in the writings of the democratic press. This text is intended solely to dispel the illusions of those who admire the romance and nobility of the "white knights of Russia." There was dirt, blood and suffering. Wars and revolutions cannot bring anything else...
"White Terror in Russia" - this is the name of the book of the famous historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences Pavel Golub. The documents and materials collected in it, stone on stone, do not leave the fabrications and myths widely circulating in the media and publications on the historical theme.
There was everything: from demonstrations of the power of the interventionists to the execution of Red Army soldiers by the Czechs
Let's start with statements about the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Bolsheviks, who, they say, destroyed their political opponents at the slightest opportunity. In fact, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party became firm and implacable towards them as they learned the hard way that decisive action was necessary. And at the beginning there was a certain gullibility and even carelessness. After all, in just four months, October triumphantly marched from region to region of a huge country, which became possible thanks to the support of the power of the Soviets by the overwhelming majority of the people. Hence the hope that its opponents themselves will realize the obvious. Many leaders of the counter-revolution, as can be seen from documentary materials - Generals Krasnov, Vladimir Marushevsky, Vasily Boldyrev, a prominent politician Vladimir Purishkevich, ministers of the Provisional Government Alexei Nikitin, Kuzma Gvozdev, Semyon Maslov, and many others - were released on parole. word, although their hostility to the new government was not in doubt.
These gentlemen broke their word by taking an active part in the armed struggle, in organizing provocations and sabotage against their people. The generosity shown in relation to the obvious enemies of the Soviet power turned into thousands and thousands of additional victims, the suffering and torment of hundreds of thousands of people who supported the revolutionary changes. And then the leaders of the Russian communists made the inevitable conclusions - they knew how to learn from their mistakes ...
Tomsk residents carry the bodies of the executed participants of the anti-Kolchak uprising
Having come to power, the Bolsheviks by no means banned the activities of their political opponents. They were not subjected to arrests, they were allowed to publish their own newspapers and magazines, hold rallies and marches, etc. The People's Socialists, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks continued their legal activities in the bodies of the new government, starting with the local Soviets and ending with the Central Executive Committee. And again, only after the transition of these parties to an open armed struggle against the new system, their factions were expelled from the Soviets by a decree of the Central Executive Committee of June 14, 1918. But even after that, the opposition parties continued to operate legally. Only those organizations or individuals who were caught in specific subversive actions were subjected to punishment.
Excavations of the grave in which the victims of the Kolchak repressions of March 1919 were buried, Tomsk, 1920
As shown in the book, it was the White Guards, who represented the interests of the overthrown exploiting classes, who initiated the civil war. And the impetus for it, as one of the leaders of the white movement Denikin admitted, was the rebellion of the Czechoslovak corps, largely caused and supported by the Western "friends" of Russia. Without the help of these “friends”, the leaders of the White Czechs, and then the White Guard generals, would never have achieved serious success. And the interventionists themselves actively participated both in operations against the Red Army and in terror against the insurgent people.
Kolchak's victims in Novosibirsk, 1919
The "civilized" Czechoslovak punishers dealt with their "Slav brothers" with fire and bayonet, literally erasing entire towns and villages from the face of the earth. In Yeniseisk alone, for example, more than 700 people were shot for sympathy for the Bolsheviks - almost a tenth of those who lived there. During the suppression of the uprising of the prisoners of the Alexander transit prison in September 1919, the Czechs shot them point-blank from machine guns and cannons. The massacre lasted three days, about 600 people died at the hands of the executioners. And there are many such examples.
Bolsheviks killed by the Czechs near Vladivostok
By the way, the foreign invaders actively contributed to the deployment of new concentration camps on Russian territory for those who opposed the occupation or sympathized with the Bolsheviks. The Provisional Government began to create concentration camps. This is an indisputable fact, which the whistleblowers of the "bloody atrocities" of the communists are also silent about. When French and British troops landed in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, one of their leaders, General Poole, on behalf of the allies, solemnly promised the northerners to ensure “the triumph of law and justice” in the occupied territory. However, almost immediately after these words, a concentration camp was organized on the island of Mudyug captured by the invaders. Here are the testimonies of those who happened to be there: “Several people died every night, and their corpses remained in the barracks until the morning. And in the morning a French sergeant appeared and gloatingly asked: “How many Bolsheviks are kaput today?” Of those imprisoned on the Mudyug, more than 50 percent lost their lives, many went crazy ... ".
American invader posing near the corpse of a murdered Bolshevik
After the departure of the Anglo-French interventionists, power in the North of Russia passed into the hands of the White Guard General Yevgeny Miller. He not only continued, but also intensified repression and terror, trying to stop the rapidly developing process of “Bolshevization of the masses”. Their most inhuman personification was the exile-convict prison in Iokanga, which one of the prisoners described as "the most brutal, sophisticated method of exterminating people by a slow, painful death." Here are excerpts from the memoirs of those who miraculously managed to survive in this hell: “The dead lay on the planks together with the living, and the living were no better than the dead: dirty, covered with scabs, in torn rags, decomposing alive, they represented a nightmarish picture.”
A Red Army prisoner at work, Arkhangelsk, 1919
By the time Yokangi was liberated from the whites, out of a thousand and a half prisoners, 576 people remained, of which 205 could no longer move.
The system of such concentration camps, as shown in the book, was deployed in Siberia and the Far East by Admiral Kolchak - perhaps the most cruel of all the White Guard rulers. They were created both on the basis of prisons and in those prisoner of war camps that were built by the Provisional Government. In more than 40 concentration camps, the regime drove almost a million (914,178) people who rejected the restoration of the pre-revolutionary order. To this must be added about 75 thousand more people languishing in white Siberia. More than 520,000 prisoners were taken by the regime into slave, almost unpaid labor in factories and agriculture.
However, neither in Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago", nor in the writings of his followers Alexander Yakovlev, Dmitry Volkogonov and others, there is not a word about this monstrous archipelago. Although the same Solzhenitsyn begins his "Archipelago" with a civil war, depicting the "Red Terror". A classic example of lying by mere silence!
American Bolshevik hunters
In the anti-Soviet literature on the civil war, a lot and with anguish is written about the “barges of death”, which, they say, were used by the Bolsheviks to massacre the White Guard officers. Pavel Golub's book cites facts and documents showing that the "barges" and "death trains" began to be actively and massively used by the White Guards. When in the fall of 1918 on the eastern front they began to suffer defeat from the Red Army, “barges” and “death trains” with prisoners of prisons and concentration camps reached Siberia, and then to the Far East.
Horror and death - that's what the White Guard generals carried to the people, who rejected the pre-revolutionary regime. And this is by no means a publicistic exaggeration. Kolchak himself frankly wrote about the “vertical of control” he created: “The activity of the chiefs of district police, special forces, all kinds of commandants, heads of individual detachments is a complete crime.” It would be good to think about these words for those who today admire the “patriotism” and “selflessness” of the White movement, which, contrary to the Red Army, defended the interests of “Great Russia”.
Captured Red Army soldiers in Arkhangelsk
Well, as for the “Red Terror”, its dimensions were completely incomparable with the White Terror, and it was mostly of a reciprocal nature. This was recognized even by General Grevs, commander of the 10,000-strong American corps in Siberia.
And this was not only in Eastern Siberia. This was the case throughout Russia.
However, the frank confessions of the American general by no means relieve him of guilt for participating in the reprisals against the people who rejected the pre-revolutionary order. Terror against him was carried out by the joint efforts of foreign interventionists and white armies.
In total, there were more than a million interventionists on the territory of Russia - 280 thousand Austro-German bayonets and about 850 thousand English, American, French and Japanese. The joint attempt of the White Guard armies and their foreign allies to inflict a Russian “thermidor” cost the Russian people, even according to incomplete data, very dearly: about 8 million were killed, tortured in concentration camps, died from wounds, hunger and epidemics. The material losses of the country, according to experts, amounted to an astronomical figure - 50 billion gold rubles ...
Based on materials from varjag_2007 (LJ) and NoMaDe prepared by Konstantin Khitsenko
We went to power in order to hang, but we had to hang in order to come to power
The flow of articles and notes about the "good Tsar-father", the noble white movement and the red ghouls-murderers opposing them does not diminish. I'm not going to speak for one side or the other. I'll just give the facts. Just bare facts taken from open sources, and nothing more. The abdicated Tsar Nicholas II was arrested on March 2, 1917 by General Mikhail Alekseev, his chief of staff. The Tsarina and the family of Nicholas II were arrested on March 7 by General Lavr Kornilov, commander of the Petrograd Military District. Yes, yes, those same future heroes-founders of the white movement ...
The government of Lenin, which assumed responsibility for the country in November-17, offered the Romanov family to go to relatives - to London, but the English royal family REFUSED them permission to move to England.
The overthrow of the tsar was welcomed by all of Russia. “Even close relatives of Nikolai put red bows on their chests,” writes historian Heinrich Ioffe. Grand Duke Mikhail, to whom Nicholas intended to transfer the crown, refused the throne. The Russian Orthodox Church, having committed perjury against the Church's oath of allegiance, welcomed the news of the abdication of the tsar.
Russian officer. 57% of it was supported by the white movement, of which 14 thousand later switched to the red ones. 43% (75 thousand people) - immediately went for the Reds, that is, in the end - more than half of the officers supported the Soviet government.
The first few months after the October uprising in Petrograd and Moscow were not in vain called "the triumphal procession of Soviet power." Out of 84 provincial and other large cities, it was established only in 15 as a result of armed struggle. “At the end of November, in all the cities of the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia, the power of the Provisional Government no longer existed. It passed almost without any resistance into the hands of the Bolsheviks, Soviets were formed everywhere, ”Major General Ivan Akulinin testifies in his memoirs“ Orenburg Cossack Army in the fight against the Bolsheviks 1917-1920. “Just at that time,” he writes further, “combat units — regiments and batteries — began to arrive in the Army from the Austro-Hungarian and Caucasian fronts, but it turned out to be absolutely impossible to count on their help: they didn’t even want to hear about the armed struggle against the Bolsheviks ".
Russian officers were divided in their sympathies ...
How, under such circumstances, did Soviet Russia suddenly find itself in the ring of fronts? And here's how: from the end of February - the beginning of March 1918, the imperialist powers of both coalitions fighting in the world war began a large-scale armed invasion of our territory.
On February 18, 1918, German and Austro-Hungarian troops (about 50 divisions) went on the offensive from the Baltic to the Black Sea. For two weeks they occupied vast areas.
On March 3, 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, but the Germans did not stop. Taking advantage of the agreement with the Central Rada (by that time already firmly established in Germany), they continued their offensive in Ukraine, on March 1 they overthrew Soviet power in Kyiv and moved further east and south towards Kharkov, Poltava, Yekaterinoslav, Nikolaev, Kherson and Odessa .
On March 5, German troops under the command of Major General von der Goltz invaded Finland, where they soon overthrew the Finnish Soviet government. On April 18, German troops invaded the Crimea, and on April 30 they captured Sevastopol.
By mid-June, more than 15 thousand German troops with aviation and artillery were in Transcaucasia, including 10 thousand people in Poti and 5 thousand in Tiflis (Tbilisi).
Turkish troops have been operating in Transcaucasia since mid-February.
On March 9, 1918, an English landing entered Murmansk under the pretext ... of the need to protect warehouses of military equipment from the Germans.
On April 5, Japanese troops landed in Vladivostok, but already under the pretext ... of protecting Japanese citizens "from banditry" in this city.
May 25 - performance of the Czechoslovak Corps, whose echelons were located between Penza and Vladivostok.
It should be taken into account that the “whites” (generals Alekseev, Kornilov, Anton Denikin, Pyotr Wrangel, Admiral Alexander Kolchak), who played their part in the overthrow of the tsar, renounced the oath of the Russian Empire, but did not accept the new government, starting a struggle for their own rule in Russia.
Entente landing in Arkhangelsk, August 1918
In the south of Russia, where the "Russian Liberation Forces" were mainly active, the situation was veiled by the Russian form of the "White Movement". Ataman of the "Don Troops" Pyotr Krasnov, when he was pointed out to the "German orientation" and set as an example of Denikin's "volunteers", replied: "Yes, yes, gentlemen! The volunteer army is pure and infallible.
But it's me, the Don ataman, with my dirty hands taking German shells and cartridges, washing them in the waves of the quiet Don and handing them clean to the Volunteer Army! The whole shame of this case lies with me!
Kolchak Alexander Vasilievich, so beloved "romantic hero" of the modern "intelligentsia". Kolchak, violating the oath of the Russian Empire, was the first in the Black Sea Fleet to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government. Having learned about the October Revolution, he handed over to the British ambassador a request for admission to the British army. The ambassador, after consultations with London, handed Kolchak a direction to the Mesopotamian front. On the way there, in Singapore, he was overtaken by a telegram from the Russian envoy to China, Nikolai Kudashev, inviting him to Manchuria to form Russian military units.
Killed Bolshevik
So, by August 1918, the armed forces of the RSFSR were completely or almost completely opposed by foreign troops. “It would be a mistake to think that throughout this year we fought on the fronts for the cause of Russians hostile to the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, the Russian White Guards fought for OUR cause,” Winston Churchill later wrote.
White liberators or murderers and robbers? Doctor of Historical Sciences Heinrich Ioffe in the journal "Science and Life" No. 12 for 2004 - and this journal has managed to be noted in recent years by ardent anti-Sovietism - writes in an article about Denikin: arbitrariness, robberies, terrible Jewish pogroms reigned ... ".
There are legends about the atrocities of Kolchak's troops. The number of those killed and tortured in Kolchak's dungeons could not be counted. Only in the Yekaterinburg province, about 25 thousand people were shot.
“Terrible murders were committed in Eastern Siberia, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks, as they usually thought. I will not be mistaken if I say,” an eyewitness of those events, American General William Sidney Graves, later admitted, “that for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were 100 people, killed by anti-Bolshevik elements."
The "ideology" of the Whites in this matter was clearly expressed by General Kornilov:
“We went to power in order to hang, but it was necessary to hang in order to come to power” ...
Americans and Scots guard captured Red Army soldiers in Bereznik
The "allies" of the white movement - the British, French and other Japanese - exported everything: metal, coal, bread, machine tools and equipment, engines and furs. They stole civilian ships and steam locomotives. Until October 1918, the Germans exported from Ukraine alone 52,000 tons of grain and fodder, 34,000 tons of sugar, 45 million eggs, 53,000 horses and 39,000 heads of cattle. There was a large-scale plunder of Russia.
And about the atrocities (no less bloody and massive - no one argues) of the Red Army and the Chekists, read in the writings of the democratic press. This text is intended solely to dispel the illusions of those who admire the romance and nobility of the "white knights of Russia." There was dirt, blood and suffering. Wars and revolutions cannot bring anything else...
"White Terror in Russia" is the title of a book by the famous historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences Pavel Golub. The documents and materials collected in it, stone on stone, do not leave the fabrications and myths widely circulating in the media and publications on the historical theme.
There was everything: from demonstrations of the power of the interventionists to the execution of Red Army soldiers by the Czechs
Let's start with statements about the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Bolsheviks, who, they say, destroyed their political opponents at the slightest opportunity. In fact, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party became firm and implacable towards them as they learned the hard way that decisive action was necessary. And at the beginning there was a certain gullibility and even carelessness. After all, in just four months, October triumphantly marched from region to region of a huge country, which became possible thanks to the support of the power of the Soviets by the overwhelming majority of the people. Hence the hope that its opponents themselves will realize the obvious. Many leaders of the counter-revolution, as can be seen from documentary materials - Generals Krasnov, Vladimir Marushevsky, Vasily Boldyrev, prominent politician Vladimir Purishkevich, ministers of the Provisional Government Alexei Nikitin, Kuzma Gvozdev, Semyon Maslov, and many others - were released on parole. word, although their hostility to the new government was not in doubt.
These gentlemen broke their word by taking an active part in the armed struggle, in organizing provocations and sabotage against their people. The generosity shown in relation to the obvious enemies of the Soviet power turned into thousands and thousands of additional victims, the suffering and torment of hundreds of thousands of people who supported the revolutionary changes. And then the leaders of the Russian communists made the inevitable conclusions - they knew how to learn from their mistakes ...
Tomsk residents carry the bodies of the executed participants of the anti-Kolchak uprising
Having come to power, the Bolsheviks by no means banned the activities of their political opponents. They were not subjected to arrests, they were allowed to publish their own newspapers and magazines, hold rallies and marches, etc. The People's Socialists, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks continued their legal activities in the bodies of the new government, starting with the local Soviets and ending with the Central Executive Committee. And again, only after the transition of these parties to an open armed struggle against the new system, their factions were expelled from the Soviets by a decree of the Central Executive Committee of June 14, 1918. But even after that, the opposition parties continued to operate legally. Only those organizations or individuals who were caught in specific subversive actions were subjected to punishment.
Excavations of the grave in which the victims of the Kolchak repressions of March 1919 were buried, Tomsk, 1920
As shown in the book, it was the White Guards, who represented the interests of the overthrown exploiting classes, who initiated the civil war. And the impetus for it, as one of the leaders of the white movement Denikin admitted, was the rebellion of the Czechoslovak corps, largely caused and supported by the Western "friends" of Russia. Without the help of these “friends”, the leaders of the White Czechs, and then the White Guard generals, would never have achieved serious success. And the interventionists themselves actively participated both in operations against the Red Army and in terror against the insurgent people.
Kolchak's victims in Novosibirsk, 1919
The "civilized" Czechoslovak punishers dealt with their "Slav brothers" with fire and bayonet, literally erasing entire towns and villages from the face of the earth. In Yeniseisk alone, for example, more than 700 people were shot for sympathy for the Bolsheviks - almost a tenth of those who lived there. During the suppression of the uprising of the prisoners of the Alexander transit prison in September 1919, the Czechs shot them point-blank from machine guns and cannons. The massacre lasted three days, about 600 people died at the hands of the executioners. And there are many such examples.
Bolsheviks killed by the Czechs near Vladivostok
By the way, the foreign invaders actively contributed to the deployment of new concentration camps on Russian territory for those who opposed the occupation or sympathized with the Bolsheviks. The Provisional Government began to create concentration camps. This is an indisputable fact, which the whistleblowers of the "bloody atrocities" of the communists are also silent about. When French and British troops landed in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, one of their leaders, General Poole, on behalf of the allies, solemnly promised the northerners to ensure “the triumph of law and justice” in the occupied territory. However, almost immediately after these words, a concentration camp was organized on the island of Mudyug captured by the invaders. Here are the testimonies of those who happened to be there: “Several people died every night, and their corpses remained in the barracks until the morning. And in the morning a French sergeant appeared and gloatingly asked: “How many Bolsheviks are kaput today?” Of those imprisoned on the Mudyug, more than 50 percent lost their lives, many went crazy ... ".
American invader posing near the corpse of a murdered Bolshevik
After the departure of the Anglo-French interventionists, power in the North of Russia passed into the hands of the White Guard General Yevgeny Miller. He not only continued, but also intensified repression and terror, trying to stop the rapidly developing process of “Bolshevization of the masses”. Their most inhuman personification was the exile-convict prison in Iokanga, which one of the prisoners described as "the most brutal, sophisticated method of exterminating people by a slow, painful death." Here are excerpts from the memoirs of those who miraculously managed to survive in this hell: “The dead lay on the planks together with the living, and the living were no better than the dead: dirty, covered with scabs, in torn rags, decomposing alive, they represented a nightmarish picture.”
A Red Army prisoner at work, Arkhangelsk, 1919
By the time Yokangi was liberated from the whites, out of a thousand and a half prisoners, 576 people remained, of which 205 could no longer move.
The system of such concentration camps, as shown in the book, was deployed in Siberia and the Far East by Admiral Kolchak - perhaps the most cruel of all the White Guard rulers. They were created both on the basis of prisons and in those prisoner of war camps that were built by the Provisional Government. In more than 40 concentration camps, the regime drove almost a million (914,178) people who rejected the restoration of the pre-revolutionary order. To this must be added about 75 thousand more people languishing in white Siberia. More than 520,000 prisoners were taken by the regime into slave, almost unpaid labor in factories and agriculture.
However, neither in Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago", nor in the writings of his followers Alexander Yakovlev, Dmitry Volkogonov and others, there is not a word about this monstrous archipelago. Although the same Solzhenitsyn begins his "Archipelago" with a civil war, depicting the "Red Terror". A classic example of lying by mere silence!
American Bolshevik hunters
In the anti-Soviet literature on the civil war, a lot and with anguish is written about the “barges of death”, which, they say, were used by the Bolsheviks to massacre the White Guard officers. Pavel Golub's book cites facts and documents showing that the "barges" and "death trains" began to be actively and massively used by the White Guards. When in the fall of 1918 on the eastern front they began to suffer defeat from the Red Army, “barges” and “death trains” with prisoners of prisons and concentration camps reached Siberia, and then to the Far East.
Horror and death - that's what the White Guard generals carried to the people who rejected the pre-revolutionary regime. And this is by no means a publicistic exaggeration. Kolchak himself frankly wrote about the “vertical of control” he created: “The activity of the chiefs of district police, special forces, all kinds of commandants, heads of individual detachments is a complete crime.” It would be good to think about these words for those who today admire the “patriotism” and “selflessness” of the White movement, which, contrary to the Red Army, defended the interests of “Great Russia”.
Captured Red Army soldiers in Arkhangelsk
Well, as for the “Red Terror”, its dimensions were completely incomparable with the White Terror, and it was mostly of a reciprocal nature. This was recognized even by General Grevs, commander of the 10,000-strong American corps in Siberia.
And this was not only in Eastern Siberia. This was the case throughout Russia.
However, the frank confessions of the American general by no means relieve him of guilt for participating in the reprisals against the people who rejected the pre-revolutionary order. Terror against him was carried out by the joint efforts of foreign interventionists and white armies.
In total, there were more than a million interventionists on the territory of Russia - 280 thousand Austro-German bayonets and about 850 thousand English, American, French and Japanese. The joint attempt of the White Guard armies and their foreign allies to inflict a Russian “thermidor” cost the Russian people, even according to incomplete data, very dearly: about 8 million were killed, tortured in concentration camps, died from wounds, hunger and epidemics. The material losses of the country, according to experts, amounted to an astronomical figure - 50 billion gold rubles ...
L. LITVIN
RED AND WHITE TERROR IN RUSSIA 1917-1922/// DISCUSSIONS AND DISCUSSIONS 1993
A. L. LITVIN RED AND WHITE TERROR IN RUSSIA 1917-1922
Violence and terror have always been indispensable companions centuries of history humanity. But in terms of the number of victims, the legalization of violence, the 20th century has no analogues. This century is “owed”, first of all, to the totalitarian regimes in Russia and Germany, to the communist and national socialist governments.
Russia has traditionally been one of the countries where the price human life was meager, and humanitarian rights were not respected. The extremely radical socialists - the Bolsheviks, having seized power, proclaimed the immediate task of accomplishing the world revolution and the creation of the kingdom of labor in the shortest possible time, destroyed the semblance of rule of law, establishing a revolutionary lawlessness. Never before in history have utopian ideas been introduced into the minds of people so cruelly, cynically and bloody. The non-resistance offered to the century by Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy was not accepted either in Russia or in Germany. In a short ideological struggle, a merciless, fanatical evil won. brought so much unseen suffering to people. The policy of violence and terror 1 pursued by the Bolsheviks in Russia changed the consciousness of the population. Pushkin in "Boris Godunov" noted the silence of the people during executions; Bolshevik periodicals are full of vociferous approval of massacres. Eternal questions: who is to blame? What are the causes of the tragedy? How to explain, try to understand what happened?
The main trends in their solution were outlined for Soviet historiography by the statements of V. I. Lenin that the Red Terror during the years of the civil war in Russia was forced and became a response to the actions of the White Guards and interventionists. At the same time, the thesis was formulated: “Those repressive measures that the workers and peasants are forced to use to suppress the resistance of the exploiters cannot be compared with the horrors of the white terror of the counter-revolution” 3.
At the same time, by efforts, first of all, Russian emigration books and stories about the dungeons of the Cheka were created, the difference between the white and red terror was characterized. According to S.P. Melgunov, the red terror had an official theoretical justification, was of a systemic, governmental nature, and the white terror was seen "as excesses on the basis of unbridled power and revenge." Therefore, the red terror was worse than the white terror in its scope and cruelty 4. At the same time, a third point of view arose, according to which any terror was inhuman and should be abandoned as a method of fighting for power 5.
Politicized Soviet historiography long time engaged in justifying the Red Terror 6. Publicists were the first to criticize this provision. They saw the Red Terror not as an "extreme measure of self-defence", but as an attempt to create a universal means of solving any problems, an ideological justification for the criminal actions of the authorities, and in the Cheka - an instrument of mass murder.
At present, Melgunov's thesis has become widespread that whites, more than reds, tried to adhere to legal norms when carrying out punitive actions. . It's hard to agree with this statement.. The fact is that the legal declarations and resolutions of the confronting parties did not protect the population of the country in those years from arbitrariness and terror. Neither the decisions of the VI All-Russian Extraordinary Congress of Soviets (November 1918) on amnesty and "On Revolutionary Legality", nor the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on the abolition of the death penalty (January 1920), nor the instructions of the governments of the opposite side could prevent them. Both of them shot, took hostages, practiced decimation and torture. The comparison itself: one terror is worse (better) than the other is incorrect. Killing innocent people is a crime. No terror can be a model. The Whites also had institutions like the Cheka and revolutionary tribunals - various counterintelligence and military field courts, propaganda organizations with information tasks, such as Denikin's Osvag (the propaganda department of the Special Conference under the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the South of Russia).
The appeal of General L. G. Kornilov to officers (January 1918) not to take prisoners in battles with the Reds is very similar to the confession of the Chekist M. I. Latsis that similar orders were resorted to in relation to the Whites in the Red Army8. Those who viewed terror as a destructive force, which is a demoralizing factor for all its participants, are right.
The desire to understand the origins of the tragedy gave rise to several research explanations: the red terror and mass repressions of the 1930s were the result of Bolshevik rule in the country; Stalinism is a special type of totalitarian society; the leaders are to blame for all troubles - Lenin, Sverdlov, Stalin, Trotsky 10. Despite the apparent differences, the assertion of the guilt of the Bolsheviks is common. At the same time, the degree of influence on the Soviet repressive policy of the terrorist actions of the opponents of Bolshevism remains unclear.
In Russian historiography, one can single out periods of propaganda of the slogan “Stalin is Lenin today”, criticism of the “cult of personality” and the ongoing canonization of Lenin and Bolshevism (from the late 50s), the assertion of the formula: Stalinism arose on the basis of Leninism (from the late 80s to x years) 1 . The latter point of view coincides with the opinion widely held in the West 13
There is another opinion: Lenin was better than Stalin. Lenin carried out the Red Terror during the civil war, Stalin shot the unarmed population in peaceful conditions. R. Conquest wrote that in 1918-1920. terror was carried out by fanatics, idealists - "people in whom, for all their ruthlessness, one can find some features of a kind of perverted nobility." And he continued: in Robespierre we find a narrow but honest view of violence, which is also characteristic of Lenin. Stalinist terror was different. It was carried out by criminal methods, it was not launched during a crisis, revolution or war 14. This statement raises an objection.
Terror during the years of the civil war was carried out not by fanatics, not by idealists, but by people deprived of any nobility and mental complexes of the heroes of Dostoevsky's works. Only insufficient knowledge of the sources can explain Conquest's conclusion about Lenin's "honest" view of violence. Let us name only the instructions for committing the murder, written by the leader (they became known in recent times). Let's quote two of them. In a note to E. M. Sklyansky (August 1920), deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, Lenin, apparently appreciating the plan born in the depths of this department, instructed: “A wonderful plan! Finish it with Dzerzhinsky. Under the guise of "greens" (we will blame them later), we will go 10-20 versts and hang kulaks, priests, landowners. Bonus: 100,000 rubles for a hanged man "15.
In a secret letter to members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b), written on March 19, 1922, after the introduction of the New Economic Policy, Lenin proposed to take advantage of the famine in the Volga region and confiscate church valuables. This action, in his opinion, “should be carried out with merciless determination, without stopping at anything and in the shortest possible time. How more If we manage to shoot the representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie on this occasion, so much the better. It is precisely now that this public must be taught a lesson so that for several decades they will not even dare to think about any resistance. 16 This was a criminal, and not an “honest” view of violence, which differed from the execution lists signed by Stalin in that Stalin knew many of those whom he decided to execute, and Lenin did not know any of those whom he condemned to death..
Those who knew Lenin and met him noted his commitment to extreme measures violence 7. It was from Lenin that Stalin adopted the condemnation of the individual and the encouragement of mass terror, hostage-taking, power based on force, and not on law, the recognition of state arbitrariness as a highly moral deed. Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and other associates of the leader tried to theoretically substantiate such an anti-human practice.
Already the first acts of violence carried out by one, and then by two-party Soviet government(Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries): the closure of newspapers that defended the ideas of February, and not October 1917, the outlawing of the Kadet Party, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the introduction of the right of extrajudicial execution, the recognition of terror not as an emergency, but as a traditional means of fighting for power - caused rejection many. Among them were M. Gorky, R. Luxembourg, I. Bunin, thousands of residents of the country who left memories of this time, or protested even then 18. They protested against the murder of ideological opponents, the prohibition of dissent in the country, rampant arbitrariness and the means by which the Bolshevik leadership decided to achieve its goals.
Lenin and his associates defended the need for a tougher punitive policy in the country. This was especially reflected in their books directed against the works of K. Kautsky, who accused the Bolsheviks of being the first to use violence against other socialist parties 19 and created a situation in which “the opposition was left with only one form of open political action - civil war »2.
Lenin proceeded from the fact that “the benefit of the revolution, the benefit of the working class is the highest law”21, that only he is the highest authority that determines “this benefit”, and therefore can decide all issues, including the main one - the right to life and activity. The principle of the expediency of the means used to protect power was guided by Trotsky, Bukharin and many others. Moreover, they all considered the right to dispose of people's lives as natural. Trotsky, after the end of the civil war, to the question: “Do the consequences of the revolution, the victims it causes, justify at all?” - answered: “The question is theological and therefore fruitless. With the same right, in the face of difficulties and sorrows of personal existence, one can ask: is it worth being born into the world at all?
Kautsky held a different point of view, taking the abolition of the death penalty for granted for a socialist. He said about the victory of Bolshevism in Russia and the defeat of socialism there, argued that considering the red terror as a response to the white is the same as justifying one's own theft by the fact that others steal. He saw Trotsky's book as a hymn to inhumanity and myopia and prophetically predicted that "Bolshevism will remain dark page in the history of socialism" 24.
It is difficult to name the first acts of red and white terror. Usually they are associated with the beginning of the civil war in the country, which actually began with an act of armed seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. Their victory immediately set in motion the levers of political and economic terror (one-party ideological, state monopoly, expropriation of property, etc.). At the same time, cases of physical destruction of opponents became known. The process of transition from individual to mass terror took a little time. It is easy to see the connection between different types of terror and socio-political actions of governments and opposing organizations.
The assassination attempt on Lenin took place on the evening of January 1, 1918, shortly before the opening of the Constituent Assembly, and the murder of members of the Central Committee of the Cadet Party, deputies of this assembly, lawyer F.F. Kokoshkin and doctor A.I. Shingarev took place on the night of January 6-7 That is, at the time when the All-Russian Central Executive Committee approved Lenin's decree on its dissolution. The introduction of mass terror did not stop individual terror, but, as a rule, it was linked to tough political actions against the main part of the country's population - the peasantry (introduction of committees, food requisitions, levying an emergency tax, etc.). The connection between the military victories (defeats) of the parties and the tightening of the punitive policy is less traceable. The Crimean tragedy (autumn 1920) - the shooting of thousands of officers and military officials of the Wrangel army by Chekists - occurred after the victory of the Reds.
In Soviet historiography, for a long time there was an opinion that the white terror in the country began in the summer, and the red one - after the decision of the Council of People's Commissars of September 5, 1918, as a response to the white. There are other points of view linking the beginning of the Red Terror with the assassination royal family, with Lenin’s call for terror in Petrograd in response to the assassination of Volodarsky28, with the resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on July 29, 1918, on conducting mass terror against the bourgeoisie, with the fact that terror was the essence of the Soviet system and until August 1918 was carried out in fact, and “ since September 5, 1918 - officially. This last conclusion is closer to the truth, since Soviet decrees either fixed what was already happening or initiated an acceleration of what the authorities believed was slowing down. Among the reasons for the victory of Bolshevism in the country were: an ideology intolerant of dissent, meeting the momentary aspirations of the impoverished masses, demanding social justice; the right of the leadership to dispose of personnel, privileges, organization of authorities: cruel terror. The Bolsheviks succeeded in creating an illusory idea of fair equalization, in assuring the majority of the population that they would receive land, bread, and peace. War, famine, requisitions and terror became realities.
The class characteristics of the Red and White Terror appeared in 1918 to substantiate and justify the actions of the parties. The Soviet clarifications noted that the methods of both terrors are similar, but "decisively differ in their goals": the red terror is directed against the exploiters, the white terror is directed against the oppressed workers. Later, this formula acquired a broad interpretation and called the armed overthrow of Soviet power in a number of regions and the accompanying massacre of people as acts of white terror. This meant the presence of various forms of terror even 49 before the summer of 1918, and the term "white terror" meant the punitive actions of all anti-Bolshevik forces of that time, and not just the white movement itself. The lack of clearly developed concepts and criteria leads to discrepancies.
Although a manifestation of mass terror is the execution of about 500 soldiers in the Moscow Kremlin (October 28, 1917), the murders in Orenburg during the capture of the city by the Cossacks of Dutov (November 1917), the beating of the wounded Red Guards in January 1918 near Saratov, etc.
Dating various types Terror should begin not with reprisals against well-known public figures, not with decrees that legitimized the ongoing lawlessness, but with the innocent victims of the confronting parties. They are forgotten, especially defenseless sufferers of the Red Terror34. The terror was carried out by officers - participants in the ice campaign of General Kornilov; security officers who received the right to extrajudicial reprisals; revolutionary courts and tribunals; guided not by law, but by political expediency.
On June 16, 1918, People's Commissar of Justice P. Stuchka canceled all previously issued circulars on revolutionary tribunals and stated that these institutions "are not bound by any restrictions in the choice of measures to combat counter-revolution, sabotage, etc." On June 21, 1918, the Revolutionary Tribunal under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee ruled without hard evidence death sentence to the head of the naval forces of the Baltic Fleet, Captain A. M. Shchastny37. According to the rights granted to the Cheka and the tribunals, one can judge the development of the Soviet punitive policy, because these institutions considered mainly political crimes, and they included “everything that is against the Soviet regime” 38. Characteristically, the right of the Cheka to extrajudicial executions, composed by Trotsky, was signed by Lenin ; granted unlimited rights to the tribunals by the people's commissar of justice; the decree on the Red Terror was endorsed by the people's commissars of justice, internal affairs and the manager of the affairs of the Council of People's Commissars (D. Kursky, G. Petrovsky, V. Bonch-Bruevich); military tribunals were assigned tasks by the chairman of the Revolutionary military tribunal of the republic, K. Danishevsky. He stated: “Military tribunals are not and should not be governed by any legal rule. These are punishing bodies, created in the process of intense revolutionary struggle, which decide their sentences, guided by the principle of political expediency and the legal consciousness of the communists. Granting the right to sign the most important acts of punitive policy not only to the highest authorities, but also to lower ones, testified that these acts were not given paramount importance, that terror quickly became commonplace. The leadership of the Soviet Republic officially recognized the creation of a non-legal state, where arbitrariness became the norm, and terror became the most important tool for maintaining power40. Lawlessness was beneficial to the belligerents, as it allowed any action by referring to a similar one from the enemy. Its origin is explained by traditional cruelty Russian history, the sharpness of the confrontation between the revolutionaries and the autocracy, and, finally, the fact that Lenin and Plekhanov saw no sin in the murder of their ideological opponents, that "along with the poison of socialism, the Russian intelligentsia fully accepted the poison of populism" .
In a radical upheaval in Russia, on initial stage The creation of the dictatorial regime was also attended by the Left SRs. Not only did they become members of the Council of People's Commissars in early December 1917, but they were, along with the Bolsheviks, the creators of the Cheka and its local commissions, who were involved in the "sin of the revolution." Moreover, their representatives remained in the Cheka until July 6, 1918, although the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries left the Council of People's Commissars after Lenin signed the Brest peace treaty with Germany (March 1918). Terror was carried out not only by the Chekists. Parts of the Red Army, internal troops (VOHR - 71,763 people, in April 1920), special forces (CHON - from communists and Komsomol members), food detachments (23,201 people, in October 1918), food army (62,043 people, in December 1920)43. But the main conductor of terror was the Cheka, the leader of the policy of its implementation was the Bolshevik leadership. The Central Committee of the RCP (b) in a message to the Chekists reported: “The need for a special body of merciless reprisal was recognized by our entire party from top to bottom. Our party entrusted this task to the Cheka, endowing it with emergency powers and putting it in direct contact with the party center.
The Cheka was created as an elite organization: the majority are communists; almost unlimited power over people; increased salaries (in 1918 the salary of a member of the board of the Cheka - 500 rubles - was equal to the salary of people's commissars, ordinary Chekists received 400 rubles)45, food and industrial rations. Privileges were exercised. Many security officers became executioners, executors of the party will. The partocracy initiated and worked out a punitive policy, convincing itself and others of the importance of observing the class principle in doing so.
The constantly declared class principle was not always respected during the Red Terror. In the book of S.P. Melgunov, 1286 representatives are indicated among the victims of terror in 1918! intelligentsia, 962 peasants, 1026 hostages (officials, officers)46, etc. In the Soviet press of that time, the Bolshevik terror was often compared with the Jacobin terror. Thus, it was passed off as a traditional revolutionary method, without disclosing the results of Robespierre's actions... The Bolshevik leaders presented the "necessity" of terror as the will of the masses47, as a policy of the state of workers and peasants, carried out for the benefit of the working people. In order for the latter to be sure of this, N. Osinsky from the pages of the Pravda newspaper. On September 11, 1918, he asserted: "From the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, we have moved on to extreme terror - a system for the destruction of the bourgeoisie as a class." Latsis elaborated on this provision, giving instructions to the local Cheka: “Do not look in the case for accusatory evidence about whether he rebelled against the Soviet with weapons or words. Your first duty is to ask him what class he belongs to, what is his origin, what is his education and what is his profession. All these questions should decide the fate of the accused. This is the meaning of the Red Terror.”48
This call of Latsis for the merciless class destruction of enemies was not accidental, as was the demand of the Chekists of the Nolinsky district of the Vyatka province to use torture during interrogations until the arrested person “tells everything” 4 . This was a consequence of the party policy of arbitrariness and permissiveness 50.
The "necessity" of terror to keep Bolshevism in power was obvious, it was important to convince the population of this. The propaganda apparatus played on the feelings of the lumpen, assuring them that the terror would not affect them, but was directed only against "rich counter-revolutionaries." But the class principle, especially in the suppression of peasant uprisings, was not maintained.51 It was easier to justify the intensification of terrorist actions in response to the murders (or attempted murders) of Bolshevik leaders. The opinion about the omnipotence and ruthlessness of those in power was created by the executions of members of the royal family: if they were killed, then there’s nothing to say about the rest ... they will kill. The skillful use of these acts to incite hatred towards the opponents of the regime aimed at intimidating and suppressing the possible resistance of every citizen52.
Acquaintance with the investigation cases on the murder of the Commissar for Press, Propaganda and Agitation of the Petrograd Soviet V. Volodarsky, the Chairman of the Petrograd Cheka M. Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin's life raises many questions that are difficult to find answers53. Volodarsky was killed on June 20, 1918 in Petrograd by painter Sergeev, a Socialist-Revolutionary. It is not clear why it was Volodarsky who became the victim, why the car in which he was driving from the rally “broke down” on the road at the place where the terrorist was waiting for him. The investigation lasted a long time (until the end of February 1919), but yielded no results. The Bolsheviks used the act of assassinating Volodarsky to call for mass red terror, to launch a large-scale campaign against the democratic parties: the Mensheviks and the right SRs54.
But this was not enough to convince the population of the need for total terror. The murder of Volodarsky, who was little known in the country (a Jew, a Bolshevik with little party experience), could not cause mass indignation of the masses. The situation in the country became extremely aggravated. The Bolsheviks were moving towards the creation of a one-party system, inciting class struggle believing that only in this case they can stay in power. On June 14, 1918, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee expelled from its membership and offered to do this to the local I Soviets of the Socialist-Revolutionaries (right and center), the Mensheviks, "seeking to discredit and overthrow the power of the Soviets"55. At the same time, the Soviets created kombeds, intensified requisition measures, increased the number of the Cheka and ... were defeated by detachments of the Czechoslovak Corps and people's army Committee of members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), created by the Social Revolutionaries in Samara to restore the power of the Constituent Assembly.
The Soviets did away with the Left SRs and quickly began to turn the country into a "single military camp" full of concentration camps. A catalyst was needed to move to decisive action. And, as Latsis wrote, when “S.-R. staged an attempt on the life of comrade. Lenin, Volodarsky, Uritsky, and others, then the Cheka had no choice but to proceed with the destruction of the enemy’s manpower, with mass executions, i.e., with the red terror ”56. The murder of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin took place on the same day - 30 August 1918 Uritsky was not the worst of the Chekists, on the contrary, many found in him honesty and humanity57. The shooter at Uritsky was Leonid Akimovich Kannegisser, poet and socialist 58. In the course of the investigation, various versions motives for the murder of Uritsky59. The most probable was the one that Kannegisser imposed on the investigation: he shot in protest against the execution as a hostage of one gymnasium friend. The security officers aimed at disclosing political crimes could not prove otherwise.
However, the response was unusually cruel: up to 900 innocent hostages were shot in Petrograd. Kaplan was shot before the completion of the investigation, without trial, without a decision of the Board of the Cheka, on the oral instructions of the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Sverdlov, without proof that it was she who shot61.
The number of those executed in the first days of September 1918, before the decision of the Council of People's Commissars on the Red Terror, is difficult to calculate. It is important to note that this resolution fixed what was already happening and gave it a legislative basis, the authorities consecrated terror as a state policy. These days the Central Committee of the RCP(b) and the Cheka have developed practical instructions. It suggested: “Shoot all counter-revolutionaries. Grant the districts the right to shoot themselves ... Take hostages ... set up small concentration camps... This very night, the Presidium of the Cheka will consider the cases of counter-revolution and shoot all obvious counter-revolutionaries. The same should be done by the regional Cheka. Take measures so that the corpses do not fall into undesirable hands...” 62 Lawlessness exceeded the most gloomy expectations: 6185 people were shot, 14 829 were imprisoned, 6407 were sent to concentration camps, 4068 became hostages 63. These are approximate figures, since how to calculate how many lives were then ruined by the local Cheka is almost impossible. The Cheka explained: during the civil war legal laws are not written, because “the only guarantee of legality was the correctly selected staff of the Extraordinary Commission”64.
Thus, attempts on the life of the Bolshevik leaders contributed to the rampant mass terror in the country, which became long years an integral part of the military-communist state. This method will be used in the early 30s, when the inspired assassination of Kirov will lead to great terror and it will be carried out by the Chekists of the civil war: Yagoda, Beria, Agranov Zakovsky and many others ...
In September 1918, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs G. I. Petrovsky was indignant because of "an insignificant number of serious repressions and mass executions"and suggested that the provincial executive committees, i.e., the executive bodies of the Soviet government, show a "special initiative" in the spread of mass terror. This experience was used by Stalin when he criticized the actions of Yagoda and complained that the NKVD was two years late in deploying the great terror ...,
The Red Terror, with its indispensable companions - arbitrariness, concentration camps, hostage-taking, torture - functioned throughout the civil war. Its tides and some limitations depended on many circumstances, as did the development of its accompanying institutions. Such was the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of February 15, 1919, allowing the taking of "hostages from among the peasants so5 that if the snow is not cleared, they will be shot", or Dzerzhinsky's proposal on September 26, 1919 that "the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, not announcing the official mass Red Terror, instructed the Cheka to actually carry it out” 6 .
The investigation into the assassination attempt on Lenin was typical of that time and showed that the authorities were not interested in revealing the circumstances of the crime and the identity of the terrorist. The very fact of what happened was important to them in order to proceed to the total extermination of those whom they considered "counter-revolutionaries". By claiming that Kaplan represented the Right SR party (this has not been proven), the authorities attacked not only the members of this party, who at that time were fighting with the Reds "military actions, but also at all, potentially conceivable enemy in. They were shot in public, for intimidation. Patriarch Tikhon's call for reconciliation and an end to the extermination of fellow citizens was not heard 67.
At the same time and interconnected with the red, the white terror also rampaged in the country. And if we consider the Red Terror, unlike the White Terror, as the implementation of state policy, then we should probably take into account the fact that the Whites at that time also occupied vast territories and declared themselves as sovereign governments and state entities. None of the leaders of the opposing sides escaped the use of terror in relation to their opponents and the civilian population. The forms and methods of terror were different. But they were also used by adherents of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch in Samara, the Provisional Regional Government in the Urals, the Provisional Siberian Government, the Supreme Administration of the Northern Region), and the white movement itself. The coming to power of the founders in the cities of the Volga region in the summer of 1918 was characterized by the reprisals against many party and Soviet workers68, the prohibition of Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries from working in power structures69. One of the first departments of Komuch was the state guard (counterintelligence, 60-100 employees in cities), military field courts, which, as a rule, passed death sentences, trains and "death barges". On September 3, 1918, they brutally suppressed the uprising of workers in Kazan, and on October 1 - in Ivashchenkovo. “The regime of terror,” S. Nikolaev, a Komuchevite, admitted, “took on particularly cruel forms in the Middle Volga region, through which the movement of Czechoslovak legionnaires took place” 70.
In the Urals, in Siberia and Arkhangelsk, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Popular Socialists immediately announced their adherence to the Constituent Assembly and the arrests of Soviet workers and communists. In just a year of being in power in the northern territory with a population of 400,000 people, 38,000 arrested people passed through the Arkhangelsk prison. Of these, 8 thousand were shot and more than a thousand died from beatings and diseases 71.
The political regimes that were established in Russia in 1918 are quite comparable, primarily in terms of predominantly violent methods of resolving issues of organizing power. In November 1918, Kolchak, who came to power in Siberia, began with the expulsion and murder of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. “I forbid arresting workers, but I order them to be shot or hanged”; “I order all the arrested workers to be hanged on the main street and not removed for three days” - this is from the orders of the Krasnovsky Yesaul, the commandant of the Makeevsky District, dated November 10, 1918.72 Terror served as a means of maintaining power for the confronting parties, it was immoral and criminal, no matter who for whatever purposes it was used. As early as 1918, “environmental terror” began to dominate Russia, when the symmetry of the actions of the parties became inevitably similar. This found its continuation in 1919-1920, when both the Reds and the Whites simultaneously built dictatorial militarized states, where the implementation given goal prevailed over the value of human life.
Kolchak and Denikin were professional soldiers, patriots who had their own view on the future of the country. In Soviet historiography, Kolchak was characterized for many years as a reactionary and hidden monarchist; abroad, the image of a liberal who enjoyed the support of the population was created. This is extreme points vision. During interrogations in the Irkutsk Cheka in January 1920, Kolchak stated that he did not know about many facts of the ruthless attitude towards workers and peasants on the part of his punishers. Perhaps he was telling the truth. But it is difficult to talk about support for his policy in Siberia and the Urals, if out of about 400 thousand red partisans of that time, 150 thousand acted against him, and among them 4-5% were wealthy peasants, or, as they were then called, kulaks .
The Kolchak government created the punitive apparatus on the basis of the traditions of pre-revolutionary Russia, but changing the names: instead of the gendarmerie - the state guard, the police - the police, etc. out of expediency. And so it was, especially during the punitive actions. “A year ago,” A. Budberg, coniferous minister of the government of Kolchak, wrote in his diary on August 4, 1919, “the population saw us as deliverers from the heavy captivity of the commissars, and now they hate us just as much as they hated the commissars, if not more; and what is even worse than hatred, it no longer trusts us, expects nothing good from us.
Dictatorship is unthinkable without a strong repressive apparatus and conducted terror. The word "execution" was one of the most popular in the vocabulary of the Civil War. Denikin's government was no exception in this regard. The police in the territory captured by the general were called state guards. By September 1919, its numbers had reached almost 78,000 men 77 (note that Denikin's active army then had about 110,000 bayonets and cavalry). Denikin, like Kolchak, denied his participation in any repressive measures. He blamed this on counterintelligence, which had become a "hotbed of provocation and organized robbery", governors and military leaders 78. Osvag's reports informed Denikin about robberies, looting, military brutality towards the civilian population79, it was under his command that 226 Jewish pogroms, resulting in the death of 80 thousands of innocent people.
Numerous testimonies speak of the cruelty of the punitive policy of Wrangel8183 Yudenich82 and other generals. They were supplemented by the actions of many chieftains who spoke on behalf of the regular white armies. . The White Terror turned out to be just as senseless for achieving the set goal as any other. 84.
An essential part of the civil war were numerous peasant uprisings against the policy of the Soviet authorities in the field. For the most part, they broke out spontaneously, as a protest against requisitions, taxes, various duties, mobilization into the army, as a reaction of people who are robbed, offering a “bright future” in return for the selected food, that is, nothing.
Mass peasant uprisings began in the autumn of 1918 and reached their peak in 1920, contributing to the preservation of martial law in 36 provinces of the country until the end of 1922. Hundreds of thousands of multinational peasant population participated in the movement of resistance to the regime, elite armed units participated in its suppression : cadets, detachments of the corps of the Cheka, internal troops, CHON, Latvian Riflemen, internationalists (companies of Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Chinese and others who then served in the Red Army), the best commanders- M. N. Tukhachevsky, I. P. Uborevich, V. I. Shorin and others.
The fury and ruthlessness of the Russian rebellion then manifested itself in all its strength. In 1918, during the suppression of these protests, 5 thousand Chekists and approximately 4.5 thousand food detachments died86. The number of victims on the part of the peasants was immeasurably greater. In 1920, real war proletarian state with a majority of its own population. That is why Lenin called it more dangerous for the Soviet power than Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak put together. The ferocity and ruthlessness with which villages were burned, peasants were shot and whole hostages peasant families are yet to be the subject of study.
There are no exact estimates of the number of victims of the White and Red Terror. The figures cited in the literature are contradictory, their sources, calculation methods are not reported. The commission created by Denikin to investigate the acts of the Bolsheviks in 1918-1919, named 1,700 thousand victims of the Red Terror.
Latsis reported that during these two years the number of arrested VChKs amounted to 128010, of which 8641 people were shot. Modern Soviet historians have calculated that in 1917-1922. 15-16 million Russians died, of which 1.3 million became in * 1918-1920. victims of terror, banditry, pogroms, participation in peasant uprisings and their suppression.
Install exact numbers killed during the red or white terror is not possible 89.
An analysis of individual protocols of meetings of the Presidium of the Cheka/GPU shows that the number of people sentenced to death from among the considered cases is quite large. On May 8, 1919, 33 cases were considered - 13 people were sentenced to death; August 6, 1921, respectively - 43 and 8; August 20, 1921 - 45 & 17; September 3, 1921 - 32 & 26; November 8, 1922 - 45 and 18. According to the minutes of the meetings of the presidium of the Kazan Governorate Cheka, for two days of the meeting in December 1918, 75 cases of those arrested were considered, of which 14 were sentenced to death; in 1919, out of approximately 3 thousand cases considered, 169 were sentenced to death, in 1920 - 65, in 1921 - 16 9<0.
Reports of various terrorist attacks are inaccurate. It is known that after the evacuation of Wrangel's troops, tens of thousands of former officers and military officials remained in the Crimea, who, for various reasons, decided to refuse to emigrate. Many of them were registered and then were shot. The reported number of those shot varies from 50,000 to 120,000 people. Documentary evidence is not enough. The archive of the Crimean Cheka is not yet available to researchers. In the discovered award list of E. G. Evdokimov (1891-1940), a Chekist, in the fall of 1920, the head of the Special Department of the Southern Front, it is said that he was nominated for the Order of the Red Banner of War. The justification emphasized: “During the defeat of the army of General. Wrangel in the Crimea Comrade. Evdokimov with the expedition cleared the Crimean peninsula of the white officers and counterintelligence officers who remained there for the underground, seizing up to 30 governors, 50 generals, more than 300 colonels, the same number of counterintelligence officers and in general up to 12,000 white elements, which prevented the possibility of white gangs appearing in the Crimea. The figure in this document is impressive - 12 thousand people shot only by employees of the Special Front Department. But it should be noted that the Chekists in all cities and towns of Crimea were also involved in reprisals. Because the number of victims was much higher. Of course, it is impossible to assume that former governors or generals who ended up in Crimea would create gangs... But the stereotype of those years was this: arguments were not needed, political charges were equal to criminal ones.
Probably, the number of people who died from the Red Terror will eventually become known and once again shock the consciousness of people, and not only compatriots. The civil, fratricidal war with its millions of human victims has become a national tragedy, it has devalued life. It contains the beginning of that great terror, which the party-state dictatorship again unleashed with particular fury against its own people after a decade and a half. And no matter how the participants, eyewitnesses, historians describe the events of those years, the essence is the same - the red and white terror were the most barbaric method of fighting for power. Its results for the progress of the country and society are truly disastrous. This was recognized by contemporaries. But many still do not fully understand the fact that any terror is a crime against humanity, no matter how it is motivated.
Notes
1 The well-known researcher of totalitarianism H. Arendt is right in seeing the connection and difference between violence and terror. “Terror is not the same as violence, it is rather a form of government that is carried out when violence, having destroyed all power, does not exhaust itself, but gains new control.” (Ag e n d t Hannah. On Violence. N. Y., 1969. P. 55.)
2 Len and n V. I. PSS T. 39. C. 113-114, 405.
3 Bystryansky V. Counter-revolution and its methods. White terror before and now. Pb., 1920. S. 1.
4 Melgunov S.P. Red Terror in Russia. 1918-1923. Berlin, 1924. S. 5-6.
5 See: Gorky M. Untimely Thoughts. Notes on revolution and culture. Pg., 1918. S. 68, 101; V. G. Korolenko during the years of revolution and civil war. 1917-1921: Biographical chronicle. . Vermont, 1985, pp. 184-185; Martov and his relatives. New York, 1959, p. 151.
6 Golinkov D. L. The collapse of the anti-Soviet underground in the USSR. Book. 1. M., 1986. S. 137, 188; In e-l and d about in A. S. Preface to the Red Book of the Cheka. M., 1989. T. 1. S. 7. O. F. Soloviev even came to the conclusion that “the red terror brought immeasurably fewer victims than the white terror” (Soloviev O.F. Modern bourgeois historiography on the suppression of counter-revolution in Soviet Russia during the Civil War // Historical Experience of the Great October Revolution. M., 1975. P. 420.
7 Feldman D. Crime and ... justification // New World. 1990. No. 8. S. 253; Feofanov Yu. Ideology in power // Izvestia 1990. October 4; Vasilevsky A. Ruin // Novy Mir, 1991. No. 2. P. 253.
8 See: Ioffe G. 3. "White business". General Kornilov. M., 1989. S. 233; Latsis M.I. Do not take prisoners // Krasnoarmeyets. 1927. No. 21. S. 18.
9 See: L e w i n M. The Civil War: dynamics and legacy // Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War. Indiana University Press. 1989. P. 406; his own. Civil war in Russia: driving forces and heritage // History and historians. M., 1990. S. 375. Not only the red and white terror, but also banditry and pogroms were destructive. Only in Ukraine in 1918-1920. more than 200 thousand Jews were killed and about a million more were beaten and robbed. The pogroms covered about 1,300 towns and cities in Ukraine and about 200 in Belarus (Larin Yu. Jews and anti-Semitism in the USSR. M.; L., 1929. P. 39). V.P. Danilov gives other data: the Petliura terror (it can be called black or yellow) claimed 300,000 Jewish lives. Neither whites nor reds can take such sacrifices personally (Rodina, 1990, no. 10, p. 15).
10 Cohen S. Rethinking the Soviet Experience (Politics and History since 1917). Vermont, 1986, pp. 47-78; Avtorkhanov A. Lenin in the fate of Russia // Novy Mir, 1991. No. 1; Volkogonov D. A. Stalinism: essence, genesis, evolution // Questions of history. 1990. No. 3; Ts and p to A.S. Violence of a lie, or how a ghost got lost. M., 1990, etc. The accusations of modern Black Hundred organizations, the magazine "Young Guard" (1989. No. 6, 11) against the Jews as the perpetrators of the revolution and terror are anti-Semitic in nature and were sufficiently fully exposed on the pages of the newspaper "Izvestia" (1990 11, 29 August). Anti-Semitic inventions include speeches pointing to Sverdlov as the organizer of the civil war and to him and Trotsky as the initiators of the “decossackization”. Nazarov G. Ya. M. Sverdlov: the organizer of the civil war and mass repression // Young Guard, 1989. No. 10; his own. Further ... further ... further ... to the truth / / Moscow, 1989. No. 12; Literary newspaper. 1989. March 29.
11 The Reds and Whites explained the cruelty of the treatment by referring to similar actions by the opposite side - the newest type of "blood feud". See, for example, Stalin's telegram of January 10, 1939, (Izvestia of the Central Committee of the CPSU, 1989, No. 3, p. 145).
12 See, for example: Volkogonov D. “With merciless determination...”//Izvestiya, 1992. April 22.
13 See: Brzezinski 3. Big failure. N. Y., 1989, p. 29; Keper J. Lenin's Time Budget: the Smolny period // Revolutionin Russia: Reassessment of 1917. Cambridge, 1992. P. 354.
14Conquest R. The Great Terror. L., 1974. S. 16-17.
15 RTSKHIDNI, f. 2, 2, d. 380, l. 1. The document was partially published by D. A. Volkogonov (Izvestia. 1922. April 22).
17 Lenin told N. Valentinov in 1904 that the future revolution must be Jacobin and one should not be afraid to resort to the guillotine (Valentinov N. Meetings with Lenin. N. Y., 1979. P. 185). The II All-Russian Congress of Soviets abolished the death penalty in the country on October 25, 1917. Upon learning of this, Lenin was indignant: “Nonsense ... How can a revolution be made without executions.” Lenin proposed to cancel the decree. (Trotsky L. About Lenin: Materials for a biographer. M., 1925. S. 72-73). P. Kropotkin told I. Bunin about a meeting with Lenin in 1918: “I realized that it was completely useless to convince this man of anything! I reproached him for allowing two and a half thousand innocent people to be killed for the attempt on his life. But it turned out that this did not make any impression on him ... ”(Bunin I.A. Memoirs. Paris, 1950. P. 58). There are many such testimonials. Lenin more than once came out with a cynical demand for the execution of the innocent, substantiating them with the highest interests of the class struggle. (See: Lenin V. I. PSS, T. 38. S. 295; T. 45, S. 189; and others.) He, as a rule, defended the actions of the Cheka. In December 1918, M. Yu. Kozlovsky, a member of the Collegium of the People's Commissariat of Justice of the RSFSR, wrote to Lenin that he was sending 8 grandfathers from the Cheka, from which you can see "how things are done in the Cheka, with what light baggage they send them to a better world." Kozlovsky gave examples of such cases: the execution of the wife of a White Guard - an active monarchist - for stealing rye, etc. Sergeyeva was shot for participating in the work of Savinkov's organization. She stated that she confessed to this under threat of being shot. When Kozlovsky asked where this investigator was, he was told that he had been shot as a provocateur. There is no data on Sergeyeva's cooperation with Savinkov and his organization in the file. At a meeting of the Board of the Cheka on December 17, 1918. Kozlovsky's letter of protest was discussed. They decided that Kozlovsky had no right to interfere in the affairs of the Cheka, and demanded from him evidence of 50% of the innocently executed Cheka in order to file a protest on this issue with the Central Committee of the party, "to consider his actions as completely unacceptable and introducing complete disorganization into the work of the Cheka." At the suggestion of Dzerzhinsky, the Collegium of the Cheka demanded the full confidence of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) in their actions and declared the inadmissibility of control of their activities by the People's Commissariat of Justice. In response to this, Kozlovsky, declaring that his protest was supported by the Collegiums of the People's Commissariat of Justice, again wrote to Lenin on December 19, 1918, that he protested as illegal 16 executions out of 17 carried out by the Cheka. Lenin agreed with Dzerzhinsky. (RTSKHIDNI, f. 2. op. 2, d. 133, l. 1-2, 9, 11, 13; d. 134, l. 1.) Lenin did not object to the mass terror that Stalin perpetrated in Tsaritsyn in the summer of 1918 . (Medvedev R. About Stalin and Stalinism. M., 1990. S. 40-42).
18 See: Gorky M. Untimely Thoughts: Notes on Revolution and Culture. Pg., 1918; B u n i n I. A. Cursed days. L., 1984; Luxembourg R. Manuscript about the Russian Revolution // Questions of History, 1990. No. 2.
1 Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 38. The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky; Trotsky L. D. Terrorism and communism // Soch., M .; L., 1925. T. XII; Kautsky K. Dictatorship of the proletariat. Vienna, 1918; his own. Terrorism and communism. Berlin, 1919; his e. From democracy to state slavery (answer to Trotsky). Berlin, 1922.
20 Kautsky K. Moscow court and Bolshevism // Twelve suicide bombers. Trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries in Moscow. Berlin, 1922. S. 9.
21 Lenin V. I. PSS. T. 35. S. 185.
22 L. D. Trotsky substantiated: “The question of the form of repression, or of its degree, of course, is not “principled.” It is a question of expediency. furious struggle against her, cannot be frightened by the threat of imprisonment, since she does not believe in his activities. It is this simple but decisive fact that explains the widespread use of executions in the civil war ". Trotsky L. D. Works. T. XII. C 59. N. I. Bukharin was in solidarity with him: “From a broader point of view, that is, from the point of view of a large historical scale, proletarian coercion in all its forms, from executions to labor service, is , as paradoxical as it may sound, by the method of developing communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era. "(Bukharin N. I. Problems of the theory and practice of socialism. M., 1989. P. 168.)
23 Trotsky L. D. History of the Russian Revolution. T. II. Part II. Berlin, 1933. S. 376.
24 Kautsky K. Terrorism and communism. pp. 7, 196, 204; his e. From democracy to state slavery. pp. 162, 166.
25 The investigation into the case of the assassination attempt on Lenin and the murder of Kokoshkin and Shingarev was conducted by V. D. Bonch-Bruyevich, head of the affairs of the Council of People's Commissars, although the Cheka had been created by that time. He pointed out that the three officers who attempted to assassinate Lenin were arrested and then sent to the front against the German troops that had begun the offensive. (Bonch-Bruevich V. Three attempts on the life of V. I. Lenin. M., 1930. S. 10, 43-44.) An overview report on this attempt on Lenin was compiled by the NKVD in August 1936. It contains the testimony of the driver of the car Lenin Taras Gorokhovik dated January 2, 1918 and former lieutenant G. G. Ushakov arrested in 1935. The driver said that "the shooting began when the car was lowered from the bridge to Simeonovskaya Street." Gorokhovik said that he heard up to 10 shots and that F. Platten was wounded while saving Lenin's head. Ushakov "confessed" that, together with Semyon Kazakov, he was the perpetrator of the assassination attempt. But he threw a grenade not at the car, but at the Moika, other officers began to shoot at the car, but she quickly left. Ushakov was shot in 1936.
The investigation into the murder of Kokoshkin and Shingarev found out the actual organizers of the crime: the head of the police commissariat of Petrograd P. Mikhailov, his henchmen P. Kulikov and Basov, who provoked a group of sailors, soldiers and Red Guards to the atrocity. (I o f e G. 3. "White business ..." S. 246-247.)
26 Spirin L. M. Classes and parties in the civil war in Russia (1917-1920). M., 1968. S. 210, 213.
27 R. Piles: “When the government arrogates to itself the right to kill people because their death is ‘necessary’, we are entering a qualitatively new moral era. And this is the symbolic meaning of the events in Yekaterinburg that happened on the night of July 16-17, 1918» (Izvestia. 1990. November 27.) “The execution of the royal family,” wrote Trotsky, “was needed not only to intimidate, horrify, and deprive the enemies of hope, but also in order to shake up their own ranks, to show that retreats no, that ahead is complete victory or complete destruction. "(Trotsky L. D. Diaries and Letters. Tenafly, 1986. S. 100-101.)
29 Carr E. Bolshevik Revolution. 1917-1923. M., 1990. T. 1. S. 144. The resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of July 29, 1918, apparently, was based on calls from the localities. On July 28, 1918, F.F. Raskolnikov, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Eastern Front, telegraphed Trotsky that it was “completely unthinkable” to do without executions. He suggested: “All active White Guards convicted of preparing an armed uprising against the Soviet regime, or caught with weapons in their hands ... Black Hundred agitators ..., as well as all persons who dared to take power temporarily in one place or another, fallen out of hands of the Soviets, are outlawed and punishable by death without investigation or trial. (Motherland, 1992. No. 4. P. 100.)
30 Milyukov P. Russia at the turning point. Bolshevik period of the Russian revolution. T. 1. Paris, 1927. S. 192. Former People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR I. Steinberg wrote: “Terror is not a single act, not an isolated, random, although repeated manifestation of the government majority ... Terror is a legalized plan of mass intimidation , coercion, extermination by the authorities ... Terror is not only the death penalty ... The forms of terror are countless and varied ... " (Shteinberg I. The moral face of the revolution. Berlin, 1923. S. 18-24.)
31 See: Volkogonov D. Trotsky. Political portrait. M., 1992. S. 191. According to Yu. P. Gaven, the Red Terror was used long before its official introduction. So, in January 1918. he, being chairman of the Sevastopol Military Revolutionary Committee, ordered the execution of more than 500 "counter-revolutionary officers." (Motherland. 1992. No. 4. S. 100-101.)
32 Steklov Yu. White terror // Izvestia, 1918. September 5; Shishkin V.I. Debatable problems of October and civil war // Actual problems of the history of Soviet Siberia. Novosibirsk, 1990. S. 25.
33 Ground A. Ya. Moscow 1917. Revolution and counter-revolution. M., 1976. S. 318; Bolsheviks of the Urals in the struggle for the victory of the October Socialist Revolution. Sat. doc. and materials. Sverdlovsk, 1957, pp. 251-252; Diary of the Russian Civil War. Alexis Babin in Saratov. 1917-1922 // Volga. 1990. No. 5. S. 127.
34 General Ts. Grigorenko, recalling how during the years of the civil war in the Ukrainian village where he lived, whites raged and how security officers shot hostages for not surrendering weapons, he noted: “But here is a phenomenon. We all heard it, we knew it. It's been two years and they've already forgotten. We remember the executions by the whites of the first Soviets, we remember the stories of the atrocities of the whites, and the recent red terror was completely forgotten. Several of our fellow villagers were captured by the whites and tasted ramrods, but the head was brought home intact. And they also remembered the atrocities of the whites and were more willing to talk about white ramrods than about the recent KGB executions. (Grigorenko P. Memoirs.//Star. 1990. No. 2. P. 195.) He talked about this back in the 20s. General A. A. von Lampe: “When the Reds left, the population calculated with satisfaction what they had left ... When the Whites left, the population angrily calculated that they had taken from him ... The Reds threatened ... to take everything and they took part - the population was deceived and ... satisfied. The whites promised legality, they took little - and the population was embittered "(Denikin A.I., Lampe A.A. von The tragedy of the white army. M., 1991. S. 29.)
35 Gul R. Ice campaign. M., 1990. S. 53-54. Chekist M. Latsis claimed that in the first half of 1918 the Cheka shot 22 people. S. Melgunov counted 884 people according to newspaper sources. (Latsis M. Extraordinary commissions for the fight against counter-revolution. M., 1921. S. 9; Mel Gunov S. Red terror in Russia. S. 37.)
36 Collection of legalizations and orders of the Workers' and Peasants' Government (hereinafter referred to as SUR). 1918. No. 44. P. 536. In 1918, P. Stuchka told people's judges: "We now need not so much lawyers as communists." (Stuchka P. 13 years of struggle for the revolutionary Marxist theory of law. M., 1931. P. 67.)
38 In 1918, in the tribunals, cases of counter-revolutionary speeches accounted for 35%, in 1920 - 12%. The rest are cases of crimes ex officio, speculation, forgery, pogroms, etc. (T and o in Yu. P. Development of the system of Soviet revolutionary tribunals. M., 1987, p. 14; Rodin D. Revolutionary tribunals in 1920-1922 // Bulletin of Statistics. 1989. No. 8. P. 49. Berman, Ya., On revolutionary tribunals, Proletarian Revolution and Law, 1919, No. 1, p. 61; Portnov
B. P., S and in and N M. M-. Formation of justice in Soviet Russia (1917-1922). M., 1990.
C. 51-52, 122.
40 In his memoirs, Bonch-Bruevich quoted Dzerzhinsky, who had assumed the duties of chairman of the Cheka: “Do not think that I am looking for forms of revolutionary justice; We don't need justice now. Such a struggle - breast with breast, a struggle not for life, but for death - who will take! I propose, I demand the organization of a revolutionary reprisal against the leaders of the counter-revolution." (Bonch-Bruevich V. At the combat posts of the February and October revolutions. M., 1931. S. 191-192.)
41 See: Solomon G. A. Among the red leaders. Personally experienced and seen in the Soviet service. Part 1. Paris, 1930; S. 242.
42 Axelrod P.B. Experienced and rethought. Berlin, 1923. Book. 1. S. 195-199; Novgorodtsev P.I. On the ways and tasks of the Russian intelligentsia // From the depths. Paris, 1967, p. 258; Pips R. Russia under the old regime. Cambridge, 1981, p. 426; Clark R. Lenin: The man behind the mask. L., 1988. P. 90-91, 255; Antonov VF Populism in Russia: utopia or rejected opportunities // Questions of history. 1991. No. 1. S. 14 and others.
43 Internal Troops of the Soviet Republic. 1917-1922: Documents and materials. M., 1972. S. 165; Strizhkov Yu.K. Food detachments during the years of the civil war and foreign intervention. M., 1968. Dis. ... cand. ist. Sciences. pp. 183, 392.
45 Overview of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 13. A Red Army soldier received 150 rubles in 1918. per month, family - 250 rubles. (Portnov V., Slavin M. Legal foundations for the construction of the Red Army. M., 1985. P. 162.)
46Melgunov S.P. Decree. op. P. 105. According to P. Sorokin, in 1919 the terror of the authorities fell on the workers and peasants to a greater extent. He explained this by the fact that “since 1919, power has in fact ceased to be the power of the working masses and has become simply a tyranny, consisting of unprincipled intellectuals, declassed workers, criminals and various adventurers.” (Sorokin P. The current state of Russia // Novy Mir. 1992. No. 4. P. 198.)
47From Dzerzhinsky's point of view, "the Red Terror was nothing more than an expression of the inflexible will of the poorest peasantry and the proletariat to destroy all attempts to revolt against us" (Dzerzhinsky F.E. Selected Works. T. I. M., 1957. P. 274).
48 Red Terror (Kazan). 1918. No. 1. S. 1-2. It is believed that Lenin criticized the statement of Latsis, they refer to his words on this matter (Lenin V.I. pp. 225). Latsis recalled this episode as follows: “Vladimir Ilyich reminded me that our task is by no means the physical destruction of the bourgeoisie, but the elimination of those causes that give rise to the bourgeoisie. When I explained to him that my actions exactly corresponded to his directives and that I simply made a careless expression in the article, he delayed his article, scheduled for publication in Pravda. counter-revolution on the home front [Typescript], p. 41.) Lenin's article "A small picture to clarify big questions" was first published in Pravda on November 7, 1926, when the acuteness of the issue under discussion disappeared and Latsis's criticism of the issue of terror had no previous value.
49 VChK Weekly. 1918. No. 3. October 6. The Chekists demanded to torture the arrested Lockhart. As a result of public criticism of the actions and appeals of the Nolinsk Chekists, sanctions followed; The publication of the VChK Weekly was discontinued at the end of 1918, and the Presidium of the VChK decided on December 27, 1918: “To deny the district Nolinsk Cheka the right to execute executions. In urgent cases, it was proposed to act with the consent of the Executive Committee and the committee of the RCP (b). (Archive of the MB RF, f. 1, op. 2, d. 2, l. 11.)
50 Back in July 1918, the Petrograd newspapers demanded “ exterminate the enemies of the people”, and the Petrograd Soviet adopted a decision on August 28: “If even a hair falls from the heads of our leaders, we will destroy those White Guards who are in our hands, we will exterminate the leaders of the counter-revolution without exception.” (Past. Historical almanac. Paris, 1986. S. 94-95.)
1 Frenkin M. The tragedy of peasant uprisings in Russia. 1918-1921 Jerusalem, 1987. S. 93-95.
52 On February 24, 1918, shortly after the extrajudicial right of reprisal was granted to the Cheka, the Collegium of the Cheka introduced the institution of secret agents. 10% of the confiscated was paid to those of them who pointed to the speculator. (Overview of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 11.) On September 19, 1918, Dzerzhinsky declared: "The main task of the Cheka ... is the merciless struggle against counter-revolution, manifested in the activities of both individuals and entire organizations." (Collection of the most important orders and orders of the Cheka. T. 1. M., 1918. S. 12.)
53 Many details of the murder of Volodarsky, Uritsky and the assassination attempt on Lenin became known from the pamphlet of the former Socialist-Revolutionary, from 1921 communist G. Semenov “Military and combat work of the party of socialist revolutionaries for 1917-1918.” (M., 1922), published simultaneously in Berlin and in the GPU printing house on Lubyanka. Lenin knew its content and hurried publication in connection with the impending trial of the leaders of the Right SR party in 1922. In January 1922, he instructed the deputy chairman of the GPU, I. Unshlikht, to take measures “so that the manuscript known to him would be published abroad no later than than in 2 weeks. (RTSKHIDNI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 256, l. 2.) G.I. -R. Arrested by the Cheka in October 1918, after that he collaborated with the Chekists. In 1922 he was convicted and amnestied. Then he worked in the intelligence department of the Red Army. On February 11, 1937, he was arrested on charges of links with Bukharin and the creation of "terrorist groups under his leadership." This was not proven, but Semyonov, by the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, was shot on October 8, 1937. In August 1961, he was rehabilitated posthumously. (Archive of the MB RF, d. 11401, 1.)
54 Lenin, in a letter to the party leaders of Petrograd on June 26, 1918, resolutely advocating mass terror in the city, calling: "to encourage the energy and mass character of terror against counter-revolutionaries, and especially in St. Petersburg, whose example decides." (Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 50. S. 106.)
56 SUR. 1918. No. 44. S. 538.
57 Overview of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. S. 74.
57 The director of the Gatchina Museum, V.P. Zubov, recalled his meeting with Uritsky: “Before me, a man who is deeply honest, devoted to his ideas to the point of fanaticism and possessed somewhere in the depths of his soul a share of kindness. But fanaticism so forged his will that he knew how to be cruel. In any case, he was far from the type of sadists who ran the Cheka after him. (Zubov V.P. The Passionate Years of Russia. Memories of the Revolution of 1917-1952. Munich, 1968. S. 51.) "a more steadfast and resolute comrade, capable of firmly and unswervingly pursuing the tactics of ruthlessly suppressing and combating hostile elements that are destroying Soviet power and the revolution." This was prompted by Uritsky's protests against the Cheka's brutal interrogation methods, especially of children. Then Uritsky was left at his post. (Moscow News. 1991. November 10.)
58 L. A. Kannegisser (1896-1918) - comes from the family of an employee of the Ministry of Railways. In 1913-1917, he was a student at the Faculty of Economics of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, after February 1917, he was a cadet of the Mikhailovsky Artillery School, chairman of the Union of Socialist Junkers of the Petrograd Military District.
59 Investigators of the Petrograd Cheka, Otto and Rix, who were initially in charge of the case, stated that the murder of Uritsky was the work of the Zionists and Bundists, who took revenge on the chairman of the Cheka for internationalism. This statement was rejected by the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka N. Antipov, who dismissed these investigators for anti-Semitic sentiments (in 1919 they were again accepted into service in the Cheka), and wrote on January 4, 1919 in Petrogradskaya Pravda: “During interrogation, Leonid Kannegisser stated that he killed Uritsky not by order of the party or any organization, but on his own impulse, wanting to avenge the arrests of officers and for the execution of his friend Perelzweig, whom he had known for about 10 years. Antipov admitted that the Cheka failed to “definitely establish through direct evidence that the murder of Comrade. Uritsky was organized by a counter-revolutionary organization. This version was supported by Kannegisser's friend writer M. A. Aldanov, supplementing it with a note that Uritsky was chosen as a victim out of a Jew's desire to show the Russian people that among the Jews there are not only Uritskys and Zinovievs. Aldanov M. Leonid Kannegisser. Paris, 1928, p. 22). December 24, 1918 Antipov dropped the Uritsky murder case. Kannegisser was shot at the same time. Throughout the months of interrogation, he repeated the same thing: he killed because Uritsky signed the list of hostages sentenced to death, and among them was his friend from the gymnasium, that he was with Uritsky and warned him about this. (Archive of the KGB of the USSR, d. 196. In 11 volumes.)
6 Ilyin-Zhenevsky A.F. Bolsheviks in power. L., 1929. S. 133; Fedyukin S. A. Great October and the intelligentsia. M., 1971. S. 96. Contemporaries recalled the terrible terror that began in Petrograd after the murder of Uritsky. (Melgunov S.P. Memoirs and diaries. Issue 2. Part 3. Paris, 1964. S. 27; Smilg-Benario M. In the Soviet service // Archive of the Russian Revolution. T. 3. Berlin, 1921. S. 149-150, etc.) According to the instructions of the Cheka, a hostage is “a captive member of that society or organization that is fighting us. Moreover, such a member, which has a value, which this enemy cherishes ... For some village teacher, forester, miller or small shopkeeper, and even a Jew, the enemy will not intercede and will not give anything. What they value ... High-ranking dignitaries, large landowners, farbicants, prominent workers, scientists, noble relatives of persons in power and the like. (Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 190;),
F. E. Kaplan (F., H. Roitman. 1887-1918), comes from a family of a rural Jewish teacher. In 1906, she was wounded during the preparation of a terrorist act against the Kiev Governor-General; in 1907-1917 served hard labor. She returned sick and half-blind. The doubt that she shot at Lenin on August 30, 1918, was repeatedly expressed. (Lyandres S. The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin: a new look at the evidence // Slavik Review. 1989. V. 48. No. 3. P. 432-448 and others) Investigation file No. 2162 in the KGB Archive of the USSR does not contain substantiated evidence of Kaplan's guilt. 17 testimonies are contradictory and do not contain the assertion that it was she who shot. For more details, see: A. L. L. T. V. N. Who shot at Lenin? // Megapolis-Continent. 1991. July 30; his e. Case 2162 and other cases // Interlocutor. 1991. October. No. 42. On the execution of Kaplan, see: Malkov P. D. Notes of the commandant of the Moscow Kremlin. M., 1959. S. 159-161. On September 4, 1918, Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee reported on the execution of Kaplan by order of the Cheka: this was confirmed by the publication of the execution list in the Cheka Weekly (1918. No. 6, p. 27), where Kaplan was listed under No. 33. In the same list of executed - Archpriest Vostorgov, former Ministers of Justice Shcheglovitov, Internal Affairs Khvostov, Director of the Police Department Beletsky and others. But there is no information about the execution of Kaplan in the minutes of the meetings of the Presidium of the Cheka.
62 Overview of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. S. 190.
63 Latsis M. Two years of struggle on the home front. M., 1920. S. 75; f g e. The truth about the red terror // Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, 1920. February 6; L e g g e t t G. The CheKa: Lenin's Political Police. Oxford, 1981. P. 181.
64 Overview of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. pp. 183-189. In the autumn of 1918, members of the board of the Cheka, who carried out the policy of red terror, were: Dzerzhinsky, Peter, Latsis, Fomin, Puzyrev,
Ksenofontov, Polukarov, Yanushevsky, Yakovleva, Kamenshchikov, Pulyanovskiy, Skrypnik, Kedrov. It was they who worked out Order No. 158, according to which “in the republics that are part of the RSFSR, the orders of the Cheka can be canceled only with the consent of the Cheka” (Ibid., p. 194). At the end of 1920 among the employees of the provincial Cheka there were 49.9% of the communists and their sympathizers. 1.03% had higher education, 57.3% had primary education; illiterates were 2.3%. By national composition, the provincial Chekists were distributed as follows: Russians - 77.3%, Jews - 9.1%, Poles - 1.7%, Latvians - 3.5%, Ukrainians - 3.1%, Belarusians - 0.5% , the Germans - 0.6%, the British - 0.004% (2 people), etc. The financing of the Cheka increased throughout the years of the civil war and amounted to 1918-1920. RUB 6,786,121 (Ibid., p. 2(57, 271, 272, 287-289.)
67 Message of Patriarch Tikhon to the Council of People's Commissars October 26, 1918 // Our contemporary. 1990. No. 4. S. 161-162.
68 In Samara, 66 people were arrested on suspicion of Bolshevism, many fell victim to lynching.(Popov F.G., 1918 in the Samara province: Chronicle of events. Kuibyshev, 1972. S. 133, 134). On the outrages in Kazan, see: Kuznetsov A. Kazan under the rule of the Chekhouchredilovtsy // Proletarian Revolution. 1922. No. 8. S. 58; Maisky I. M. Democratic counter-revolution. M.; Pg., 1923, pp. 26-27; and etc.
69 Order of Komuch July 12, 1918 In August 1918, Kolchak wrote: “A civil war must of necessity be merciless. I order commanders to shoot all captured communists. Now we are betting on bayonets.” (Dotsenko P. The Struggle for democrasy in Siberia: Eyewiness account of contemporary. Stanford, 1983. P. 109.)
70 Nikolaev S. Emergence and organization of Komuch // Will of Russia. Prague, 1928. Vol. 8-9. S. 234.
71 Piontkovsky S. Civil war in Russia. Reader. M., 1925. S. 581-582; Marushevskiy V. V. Year in the North (August 1918 - August 1919) // White business. 1926. V. 2. S. 53, 54; Potylitsyn AI White terror in the North. 1918-1920. Arkhangelsk, 1931.
72 The coup d'etat of Admiral Kolchak in Omsk on November 18, 1918. Paris, 1919, pp. 152-153; Kolosov E. How was it? (Mass murders under Kolchak in December 1918 in Omsk and the death of N.V. Fomin) // Past. 1923. No. 21. S. 250; Rodina, 1990. No. 10. P. 79. Ioffe G. 3. Kolchak's adventure and its collapse. M., 1983. S. 179.
73Melgunov S.P. The tragedy of Admiral Kolchak. Part 2. Belgrade, 1930. S. 238; Fleming P. The Fate of Admiral Kolchak. N.Y., 1963. P. 111; and etc.
74 Interrogation of Kolchak. L., 1925. S. 210-213 ; Gins testified that Kolchak told him more than once: the civil war must be merciless. (Gins G.K. Siberia, allies and Kolchak. T. 1. Harbin, 1921. S. 4; Zhur o in Yu. V. Civil war in the Siberian village. Krasnoyarsk, 1986. S. 96, 109.
75 GA RF, f. 147, op. 2, d. 2 "D", l. 17 - Report of the governor of the Yenisei province Trotsky. General Sakharov, by order of the army on October 12, 1919, demanded that every tenth hostage or resident be shot, and in the event of armed uprisings against the military, “such settlements should be immediately surrounded, all residents should be shot, and the village itself should be destroyed to the ground.” (The party during the period of foreign military intervention and civil war / 1918-1920 /: Documents and materials. M., 1962. S. 357.)
76 Budberg A. Diary of a White Guard. L., 1929. S. 191. 78 Kin D. Denikinshchina. L., 1926. S. 80.
78 Denikin - Yudenich - Wrangel. M.; L., 1927. S. 64-65. For numerous facts of terrorist acts against the population under the Denikin government, see: Ustinov S. M. Notes of the head of counterintelligence (1915-1920). Berlin, 1923, pp. 125-126; William G. White. M., 1923. S. 67-68; Arbatov 3. Y. Yekaterinoslav. 1917-1922 / Archive of the Russian Revolution. T. 12. Berlin, 1923. S. 94. and others.
80 GA RF, f. 440, op. 1, d. 34, l. 2, 12, 73; d. 12, l. 1-33.
80 Sht and f N. I. Volunteers: and Jewish pogroms // Denikin - Yudenich - Wrangel. pp. 141, 154; Lekash B. When Israel dies ... L., 1928. S. 14, 22, 106; Fedyuk V.P. Denikin's dictatorship and its collapse. Yaroslavl, 1990. S. 57 and others.
81 See: Valentinov A. A. Crimean epic // Denikin - Yudenich - Wrangel. pp. 359, 373; Kalinin I. Under the banner of Wrangel. L., 1925. S. 92, 93, 168; R a k o v s k i y G. The end of the whites. Prague, 1921, p. 11; Sweetheart in Ya. Krym in 1920. M., L., 1923. S. 4-6, 44, 72. In the former Archive of the Crimean regional committee of the CPSU, many documents about the terror of the whites are stored. Here are some of them: on the night of March 17, 1919, 25 political prisoners were shot in Simferopol; On April 2, 1919, counterintelligence shot 15 people in Sevastopol; in April 1920, there were about 500 political prisoners in the Simferopol prison. (Archive of the Crimean OK CPSU, f. 150, op. 1, d. 49, l. 197-232; d. 53, l. 148).
82 In October 1919. The Minister of Justice of the Yudenich government, Lieutenant Colonel E. Kedrin, drew up a report on the establishment of the "State Commission for Combating Bolshevism." He proposed to investigate not individual "crimes", but "cover the destructive activities of the Bolsheviks as a whole." The report set the task of studying Bolshevism as a "social disease", and then developing practical measures "for a real fight against Bolshevism, not only within Russia, but throughout the entire world." (GA RF, f. 6389, op. 1, f. 3, d. 3, l. 17-19.) Eyewitnesses testified about the reprisals, and not only against the Bolsheviks, of Yudenich's punishers. (Gorn V. The Civil War in Northwestern Russia//Yudenich near Petrograd. L., 1927, l. 12, 128, 138.) Miller signed an order on June 26, 1919, according to which the Bolshevik hostages were shot for any officer life.
83 In May 1926 in Semipalatinsk, the former Major General of Kolchak's army Ataman B. V. Annenkov (1889-1927) was tried. In 4 volumes of the investigation file (Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, file 37751), hundreds of testimonies of peasants, workers of the city of Slavgorod, relatives of those who fell victim to the punishers of the Semirechye army, acting under the motto “We have no prohibitions! God and Ataman Annenkov are with us. Slash left and right." According to the verdict of the court, Annenkov was shot. In 1946, the former lieutenant general of Kolchak's army, ataman G. I. Semenov (1890-1946), was tried in Irkutsk. The investigation file took 25 volumes. They contain testimonies of former Red partisans, testifying to the reprisals against the civilian population of the Cossacks and soldiers of Semenov. According to the verdict of the court, Semyonov was executed.
84 As General Graves, commander of the US forces in Siberia, recalled, “in Eastern Siberia, for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were a hundred people killed by anti-Bolshevik elements” and “the number of Bolsheviks in Siberia by the time of Kolchak had increased many times over in comparison with the number of them at the time our parish." (Graves V. American adventure in Siberia / 1918-1920 /. M., 1932. S. 80, 175.)
86 Frunze M. V. Op. T. 1. M., 1929. S. 375.
88 Lenin V. I. PSS. T. 13. S. 24.
88 See: Frenkin M. The tragedy of peasant uprisings in Russia. 1918-1921. Jerusalem. 1987.
89 See: Melgunov S.P. Red Terror in Russia. S. 88; Lats and M. The Truth about the Red Terror // Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. 1920. February 6; Danilov V. For what 16 million Russians died // Motherland. 1990. No. 10. P. 19. Milyukov called 1,766,118 people victims of the Red Terror. (Milyukov P.N. Russia at a turning point. T. 1. Paris, 1927. P. 194). According to Solzhenitsyn, from June 1918 to October 1919, 16 thousand people were shot by the Reds, i.e. over a thousand per month. In 1937-1938. 28,000 arrested were shot a month. (Solzhenitsyn A. The Gulag Archipelago // Novy Mir. 1989. No. 9. P. 141, 143.) Note that the number of victims of terror (1.3 million people) exceeded the losses of the Red Army in 1918-1922. (939,755 people). (Secrecy stamp removed: Losses of the armed forces of the USSR in wars, hostilities and military conflicts. M., 1993. S. 407.)
90 Archive of the MB RF, f. 1, d. 1, l. thirteen; d. 3, l. 140, 145, 149; d. 7, l. one; Archive of the KGB of the Republic of Tatarstan. Minutes of the meetings of the Kazan GubChK from December 28, 1918 to 1921. For comparison: from December 1918 to December 1921, the Kazan GubChK shot 264 people, and only in August-December 1937, the NKVD of Tataria shot 2521 people. (this is the number officially registered in the protocols).
91 Melgunov S.P. Red Terror in Russia. S. 66; Gul R. Dzerzhinsky (beginning of terror). New York, 1974. P. 94. On the award list of E. G. Evdokimov, discovered in the RGVA by A. A. Zdanevich, there is a resolution of the commander of the Southern Front, M. V. Frunze: “I consider the activities of Comrade Evdokimov to be encouraged. Due to the special nature of this activity, it is not very convenient to carry out the awards in the usual way. Evdokimov was awarded the order without a public announcement about it. 62
