Kamenev Sergey Sergeevich
Budyonny Semyon Mikhailovich
Frunze Mikhail Vasilievich
Chapaev Vasily Ivanovich
Kamenev Sergey Sergeevich
Battles and victories
One of the founders of the Red Army and its leaders during the Civil War. Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army is the highest position in Soviet Russia that a non-party military expert could count on.
For his services, he received, in particular, an Honorary Firearm - a Mauser pistol with the sign of the Order of the Red Banner on the handle.
Kamenev was born in Kyiv into a noble family, the son of a mechanical engineer at the Kyiv Arsenal plant, an artillery colonel. As a child, he dreamed of becoming a surgeon, but chose the military path. He graduated from the Vladimir Kiev Cadet Corps (1898), the elite Alexander Military School (1900, graduated third in his class) and the Nikolaev General Staff Academy in the 1st category (1907). Kamenev entered military service in 1900, going to his native Kiev, to the 165th Lutsk Infantry Regiment, served in the army infantry and only after graduating from the academy, after serving the combat qualification, he joined the service of the General Staff.
Before World War I, he held the positions of assistant to the senior adjutant of the headquarters of the Irkutsk Military District, senior adjutant of the headquarters of the 2nd Cavalry Division and assistant to the senior adjutant of the headquarters of the Vilna Military District. In addition, Kamenev taught tactics and topography at a military school. In the pre-war period, Kamenev participated in numerous maneuvers and field trips, which significantly expanded his horizons and training as a general staff officer and commander. During these trips, Kamenev visited the fortresses of Kovno and Grodno. Kamenev also studied the unsuccessful experience of the participation of the Russian army in the war with Japan.
Kamenev went to the front of World War I with the rank of captain. He served as senior adjutant of the operational department of the 1st Army headquarters and commanded the 30th Poltava Infantry Regiment. According to the certification in connection with his service at the headquarters of the 1st Army, Kamenev was assessed by his superiors as “in all respects an outstanding officer of the General Staff and an excellent combat commander.”
The officer was considered worthy of promotion to general positions.
As a regimental commander, Kamenev proved himself to be a firm commander, possessing courage, discretion and composure, loving military affairs, knowing the life of an officer and a soldier and caring for them. Concern for the soldiers apparently played a role in the fact that in 1917 he was elected regiment commander.
Then Kamenev served as chief of staff of the XV Army Corps (in this position he met the events of October 1917), chief of staff of the 3rd Army. During this period, Kamenev had to mainly deal with issues of demobilization of troops. The army headquarters was located in Polotsk, but due to the German offensive it was evacuated to Nizhny Novgorod, where Kamenev’s service in the old army ended.
Kamenev in 1919
Having experience working with committees, Kamenev quite early joined the Reds as a military specialist, voluntarily enlisting in the Red Army. Apparently, he considered it necessary to continue the fight against the external enemy, but initially did not seek to be involved in the Civil War. (The party pseudonym “Kamenev” was also worn by a prominent Bolshevik, member of the Politburo, and chairman of the Moscow Soviet).
Since April 1918, Kamenev served in the veil troops, covering the territory of Soviet Russia from a possible resumption of war with Germany, and was an assistant military leader and military leader of the Nevelsky veil detachment. From the very beginning of his new service, Kamenev was faced with the costs of the first period of the Red Army - partisanship, disobedience to orders, the presence of criminal elements in subordinate units, desertion.
In August 1918, Kamenev was appointed assistant to the military leader of the Western Veil, V.N. Egoryev, and military commander of the Smolensk region, with the Nevelsk, Vitebsk and Roslavl regions subordinate to him. Kamenev’s task at this time was to take over the districts of the Vitebsk province from the Germans who had abandoned them, as well as to form divisions for the Red Army. In a short time, under his leadership, the Vitebsk division and the Roslavl detachment were formed and sent to the Eastern Front.
They noticed Kamenev and began to promote him to major posts in the fall of 1918. It was then, in September 1918, that he was entrusted with the key post of commander of the Eastern Front at that time. The front was still being created. It was necessary to create a front headquarters, since the former commander I. I. Vatsetis, who became commander-in-chief, took the former headquarters with him. The fight against the Whites unfolded in the Volga region, and already in October 1918, front troops pushed the enemy back from the Volga to the east. At the end of 1918 - beginning of 1919, the Reds captured Ufa and Orenburg. However, due to the spring offensive of Kolchak’s armies, these cities had to be abandoned, and the front again rolled back to the Volga region.
Blucher and Kamenev at the parade
According to legend, V.I. Chapaev, having learned about the appointment of a colonel of the General Staff of the old army to the post of front commander, sent his representative Yakov Pugach to Kamenev to find out what kind of person led the front and, probably, whether there was a threat of counter-revolution. The messenger returned and reported (there are different variants of this “report”): “First of all - woooooow! The eyes are like those of the robber Churkin. What a kid you need.
Hands... in! One word, the old man is correct (Kamenev was actually 38 years old. - A G.). As soon as he blinks his eyes, goosebumps will appear on the back of his neck. He doesn't play around. He doesn’t keep orderlies or idlers in general around him. He cleans his boots himself, like our Vasily Ivanovich. Firm and bold in speech. He holds his assistants in his hands. They sit over the plans until the roosters crow. Baba didn’t notice at headquarters. The old man is “one of his own” and does not become arrogant: in one fell swoop he slipped into his hut. He says say hello to the valiant red troops of the Pugachev district and Chapaev. He himself, he says, will soon come to meet you, as soon as I take a breath here. He took my hand in farewell.”
During the 1919 campaign, Kamenev played an important role in the victory over the armies of Admiral A.V. Kolchak on the Eastern Front. However, in the midst of operations, as a result of a conflict with Commander-in-Chief I.I. Vatsetis, he was unexpectedly removed from his post and was forced to remain inactive for several weeks, although he tried to influence events at the front. Instead, the front was led by A. A. Samoilo, sent from the north of Russia. But due to a conflict with the front’s Revolutionary Military Council and his subordinates, Samoilo did not last long in this post, and the position of commander was again taken by Kamenev, who had secured the support of V.I. Lenin.
Personalized Mauser pistol
By his own admission, Kamenev was poorly oriented in the political situation, which he saw “as if in a fog.” Important role in the political development of Kamenev, S.I. Gusev, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Eastern Front, played a role. In July 1919, as a result of the scandalous “case” of the Field Headquarters of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, which became a manifestation of the political struggle of groups in the Bolshevik elite, Commander-in-Chief I. I. Vatsetis was removed and arrested along with his inner circle. Kamenev became the new commander-in-chief of all armed forces. It was S.I. Gusev who contributed to the fact that the Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin drew attention to Kamenev. As a result, Kamenev found himself in the post of commander-in-chief - the highest position in Soviet Russia that a non-party military expert could count on. Kamenev's closest ally during the Civil War, both on the Eastern Front and as commander in chief, was Pavel Pavlovich Lebedev, a former general and talented general staff officer.
“In the war of modern large armies, to truly defeat the enemy, you need a sum of continuous and systematic victories on the entire front of the struggle, consistently complementing one another and interconnected in time... Our 5th Army was almost reduced to nothing by Admiral Kolchak. Denikin almost destroyed the entire right flank of the Southern Front. Wrangel tore our 13th Army to the last.
And yet the victory did not belong to Kolchak, not to Denikin and not to Wrangel. The winner was the side that managed to sum up its blows, inflicting them continuously and thereby not allowing the enemy to heal his wounds.”
At the Field Headquarters of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic: S. S. Kamenev, S. I. Gusev, A. I. Egorov, K. E. Voroshilov, standing P. P. Lebedev, N. N. Petin, S. M. Budyonny, B M. Shaposhnikov
It fell to Kamenev to lead the fight against the troops of General A.I. Denikin, who were then advancing on Moscow. Even on the Eastern Front, he drew up a plan to fight Denikin, which included actions to prevent his connection with Kolchak’s armies. By the time Kamenev was appointed commander-in-chief, such a plan was already outdated, since Kolchak was defeated, and his union with the white armies of Southern Russia already seemed unlikely. Nevertheless, Kamenev showed great tenacity in defending his plan, which included an offensive through the Don region, where the Reds faced the most fierce resistance from the anti-Bolshevik Cossacks. Kamenev's plan was supported by the Bolshevik leader Lenin, who had little understanding of strategic issues. As a result, the Reds failed the August offensive of the Southern Front, and the Whites reached the distant approaches to Moscow (they reached Orel and Mtsensk, which threatened the main Soviet arsenal - Tula), threatening the existence of Soviet Russia.
“Only a successful combination of a communist and a general staff officer (officer of the General Staff) gives 100% command”
Plans had to be urgently changed and the situation urgently saved through coordinated actions of the fronts, as a result of which a turning point was achieved. As commander in chief, Kamenev led the struggle on other fronts - against General Yudenich near Petrograd, against the Poles during the Soviet-Polish War (Kamenev was the developer of plans for the attack on Poland), against General Wrangel in the South (in the latter case, Kamenev personally participated in the development of the plan Perekop-Chongar operation). After the end of the large-scale Civil War in November 1920, Kamenev had to lead operations to eliminate banditry, the insurgency, and suppress the uprising in Karelia (he traveled to the theater of military operations). He led the fight against Basmachism while directly in Turkestan. During this struggle, Enver Pasha, who tried to resist the Bolsheviks under the slogans of pan-Islamism, was eliminated.
Kamenev received mixed reviews from his contemporaries and descendants.
Military leaders of the Red Army are delegates to the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). 1934
Detractors described him as “a man with a big mustache and little ability.” An important characterization of Kamenev was given by the chairman of the Russian Military Socialist Republic L. D. Trotsky. In his opinion, Kamenev “was distinguished by optimism and quick strategic imagination. But his horizons were still relatively narrow, the social factors of the Southern Front: workers, Ukrainian peasants, Cossacks were not clear to him. He approached the Southern Front under the supervision of the commander of the Eastern Front. The closest thing was to concentrate the divisions removed from the East on the Volga and strike at Kuban, Denikin’s initial base. It was from this plan that he proceeded when he promised to deliver the divisions on time without stopping the offensive. However, my acquaintance with the Southern Front told me that the plan was fundamentally wrong... But my fight against the plan seemed to be a continuation of the conflict between the Military Council (RVSR. - A. G.) and the Eastern Front. Smilga and Gusev, with the assistance of Stalin, portrayed the matter as if I was against the plan because I did not trust the new commander-in-chief at all. Lenin apparently had the same fear. But it was fundamentally wrong. I did not overestimate Vatsetis, I met Kamenev in a friendly manner and tried in every possible way to make his work easier... It is difficult to say which of the two colonels (Vatsetis and Kamenev. - A. G.) was more gifted. Both had undoubted strategic qualities, both had experience of a great war, both were distinguished by an optimistic character, without which it is impossible to command. Vatsetis was more stubborn, more willful and undoubtedly succumbed to the influence of elements hostile to the revolution. Kamenev was incomparably more flexible and easily succumbed to the influence of the communists who worked with him... S.S. Kamenev was undoubtedly a capable military leader, with imagination and the ability to take risks. It lacked depth and firmness. Lenin later became very disappointed in him and more than once characterized his reports very harshly: “The answer is stupid and in places illiterate.”
Kamenev S.S. among the soldiers and commanders of the Red Army
In general, Kamenev enjoyed Lenin’s favor. It was under Kamenev that the Red Army defeated all its enemies and emerged victorious from the Civil War. He was an active proponent of the offensive strategy as the only possible method of warfare in the Civil War. A major military administrator, due to the severity of the conditions of the Civil War, he was forced to behave extremely carefully in relation to the party leadership, to curry favor with the party leadership.
For his activities during the Civil War, Kamenev was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. He also had rarer awards, testifying to his special services to Soviet Russia. So, in April 1920, Kamenev was awarded an Honorary Golden Weapon (saber) from the All-Russian Central Executive Committee for victories on the Eastern Front, and in January 1921 he received an Honorary Firearm - a Mauser pistol with the sign of the Order of the Red Banner on the handle (besides him, such an award Only S. M. Budyonny was awarded).
In the summer of 1922, Kamenev received the Order of the Red Star, 1st degree, of the Bukhara People's Soviet Republic for organizing the fight against Enver Pasha, and in September 1922, he decorated his chest with the Military Order of the Red Banner of the Khorezm Autonomous Soviet Republic “for helping the Khorezm working people in their struggle for their liberation and for their services in the fight against the enemies of the working people of the whole world.”
After the Civil War, Kamenev continued to work to strengthen the Red Army. In his military scientific works and lectures, he rethought the experience of the First World War and the Civil War. He participated in the development of new regulations for the Red Army, after the abolition of the position of commander-in-chief in March 1924, he held the posts of inspector of the Red Army, chief of staff of the Red Army, deputy people's commissar for military and naval affairs and chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR, chief leader of the Military Academy of the Red Army for tactics, head of the air defense department Red Army. In his last position, Kamenev made a significant contribution to increasing the country's defense capability; under him, the air defense troops were re-equipped with new equipment. Kamenev was also one of the founders of the famous Osoaviakhim (Society for Assistance to Defense, Aviation and Chemical Construction - a Soviet voluntary public organization dedicated to supporting the army and military industry), and contributed to the organization of Arctic development as chairman of the government Arctic Commission. He was the chairman of the commission on long flights organized by Osoaviakhim. Kamenev's last military rank in the old army was the rank of colonel, in the Red Army - army commander of the 1st rank.
Kamenev joined the party only in 1930, and in general his fate in Soviet times was successful, unlike dozens of his colleagues. Kamenev died as a result of a heart attack before the start of the Great Terror and did not go through the slander, humiliation and betrayal of his comrades. The urn with Kamenev's ashes was buried in the Kremlin wall. Nevertheless, Kamenev was posthumously ranked among the “enemies of the people,” and his name and works were consigned to oblivion for several decades. Subsequently, Kamenev's name was rehabilitated.
Budyonny Semyon Mikhailovich
Battles and victories
Soviet military leader, legendary hero of the Civil War, Marshal of the Soviet Union, three times Hero of the Soviet Union.
By defeating Denikin’s troops, the Budyonnovites essentially saved Soviet Russia from destruction; without their actions, the path to Moscow would have been open for the Whites. The strategic cavalry in the Red Army became a powerful striking force important factor Red victory. In the conditions of the Civil War, Budyonny's First Cavalry Army made it possible to carry out deep breakthroughs of the front, which changed the strategic situation.
Budyonny was born into the family of a farm laborer in the Kozyurin village of the Platovskaya Don Region. His ancestors came from the Voronezh province. In his childhood and youth, Budyonny worked as a merchant's boy, a blacksmith's assistant, a hammer hammer, a fireman, and a threshing machine operator. As for military education, initially Budyonny actually did not have one. He has completed equestrian courses for lower ranks at the Officer Cavalry School. But after the Civil War, he studied privately with an outstanding military scientist, General Staff of the old army, former General A.E. Snesarev, and in 1932 he graduated from the Military Academy. M. V. Frunze.
In the fall of 1903, the future marshal was drafted into the army, into the Primorsky Dragoon Regiment. He took part in the Russo-Japanese War, mainly in skirmishes with the Honghuzes. After the war, Budyonny was promoted to non-commissioned officer and remained for long-term service. During the First World War, Budyonny gained fame as a brave cavalryman, for his bravery he became a full Knight of St. George, received four St. George Crosses and four St. George medals, and ended the war as a senior non-commissioned officer. Among his exploits are the capture of a German convoy near Brzeziny in 1914, and the capture of a Turkish battery near Van. Budyonny repeatedly participated in risky reconnaissance searches in enemy territory.
After the February Revolution in Russia, in the summer of 1917, in Minsk he was elected chairman of the regimental committee and deputy chairman of the division committee. Participated in the disarmament of units loyal to L. G. Kornilov in Orsha. At the end of 1917 he returned home and did not take part in political events. Elected a member of the district executive committee and head of the land department of the Salsky district.
In February 1918, he formed and led a cavalry detachment, with which he acted against the whites, subordinate to B. M. Dumenko. The partisan detachment gradually grew to a regiment, brigade and division. Budyonny acted near Tsaritsyn. In 1919, Budyonny joined the RCP (b), although he did not intend to do so initially.
In June 1919, Budyonny's troops were deployed into a corps, and in November - into the First Cavalry Army. The creation of strategic cavalry in the Red Army as a powerful striking force became an important factor in the victory of the Reds. During the Civil War, cavalry made it possible to carry out deep breakthroughs at the front, which changed the strategic situation. Moreover, along with the superior cavalry and excellent equipment of the fighters, the First Cavalry had artillery, airplanes, armored trains and armored cars. At its core, the First Cavalry Army was peasant-Cossack. Captured White Guards were also put into service. Budyonny participated in the defeat of the troops of General A.I. Denikin in the Voronezh-Kastornensky operation. In fact, the Budyonnovites then saved Soviet Russia from destruction, since on the approaches to Moscow the Whites were able to defeat the 8th Soviet Army.
Semyon Budyonny - full Knight of St. George, hero of the First World War
Subsequently, the First Cavalry Army participated in the Donbass, Rostov-Novocherkassk, Tikhoretsk operations, and in the Battle of Yegorlyk. At the same time, during the fight against Denikin’s cavalry, Budyonny was twice defeated by the Whites on the Don - near Rostov and on Manych at the beginning of 1920.
The Battle of Yegorlyk took place from February 25 to March 2, 1920 during the Tikhoretsk operation. The confrontation unfolded between the Budennovites and the cavalry group of General A. A. Pavlov, a major cavalry commander on the White side. During an unexpected clash south of the village of Srednegorlykskaya, the Budennovites shot the marching columns of Cossacks with artillery and machine guns, after which they attacked them on horseback, putting them to flight. A total of up to 25,000 people took part in the battle on both sides.
“If we talk about myself, I don’t wish for a different fate than the one that befell me. I am happy and proud that I was the commander of the 1st Cavalry... I still have a photograph in which I was taken in the uniform of a senior non-commissioned officer of the Seversky Dragoon Regiment with four St. George crosses on the chest and four medals. As they used to say in the old days, I had a full St. George’s bow.
The medals bear the motto: “For Faith, Tsar and Fatherland.” But we, Russian soldiers, fought for the Fatherland, for Russia, for the people."
During the Soviet-Polish War, Budyonny's army was transferred in marching order to the Polish front (in 53 days), where it participated in the Kyiv operation, carried out the Zhitomir breakthrough, reaching deep behind enemy lines. The army liberated Zhitomir and Berdichev, Novograd-Volynsky, Rivne, Dubno, Brody. During the Lvov operation, Budyonny's army pinned down significant enemy forces and emerged from encirclement in Zamosc. However, the army was not transferred to Warsaw, where it was urgently needed. Budyonnovists took part in battles in Northern Tavria against Wrangel’s troops, in the Perekop-Chongar operation.
S. M. Budyonny, M. V. Frunze and K. E. Voroshilov. 1920
In 1920–1921 The army was engaged in eliminating banditry in Ukraine and the North Caucasus. The history of the First Cavalry was immortalized by a participant in the events, the writer Isaac Babel, in the collection of stories “Cavalry”. Budyonny was outraged by the way Babel described the events of the Polish campaign, and responded with a sharp rebuke: “Babel’s Babism from Krasnaya Novy.” The article was published in the magazine “October” in 1924, and the writer was called “a literary degenerate.”
Budyonny proved himself to be an excellent tactician in cavalry combat, but he did not have military leadership abilities or strategic thinking. For military distinctions during the Civil War, he was awarded three Orders of the Red Banner (1919, 1923, 1930), and honorary revolutionary edged weapons and firearms (1919, 1923). Abroad, Budyonny received the nickname “Red Murat”.
At the same time, the strength of the Red Army was precisely the possibility of promoting to leadership positions such “people’s commanders” who were unlikely to be promoted by the Whites, although they had outstanding leadership qualities.
In 1921–1923 Budyonny was a member of the RVS of the North Caucasus Military District. The First Cavalry Army was disbanded in October 1923. Budyonny took the post of assistant to the commander-in-chief of the Red Army for cavalry, and became a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR.
Veterans of the First Cavalry - K. E. Voroshilov and Budyonny - came to leadership positions in the Red Army. The cavalrymen formed a kind of community in the Red Army and helped each other.
In 1924–1937 Budyonny was an inspector of the Red Army cavalry.
In 1931, together with academy students, he made a parachute jump. In 1935, Budyonny became one of the first marshals of the Soviet Union. The question of Budyonny’s attitude to repression is ambiguous. On the one hand, he was one of the supporters of the policy of terror in the army, on the other, he contributed to the release of some of those arrested. During the repressions, Budyonny's wife was arrested.
Since 1937, he commanded the troops of the Moscow Military District. Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (since 1937), since 1938 - member of the Presidium of the Supreme Council, since 1934 - candidate member, since 1939 - member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. From August 1940 he held the post of 1st Deputy People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR (since 1939 he was Deputy People's Commissar). An active supporter of the formation of horse-mechanized formations in the army.
Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin gave a high, somewhat idealized assessment of Budyonny. In a conversation with Clara Zetkin in the fall of 1920, he said: “Our Budyonny should now probably be considered the most brilliant cavalry commander in the world. You know, of course, that he is a peasant guy. Like the soldiers of the French Revolutionary Army, he carried a marshal's baton in his knapsack, in this case in his saddle bag. He has a remarkable strategic instinct. He is brave to the point of extravagance, to the point of insane audacity. He shares with his cavalrymen all the cruelest hardships and the gravest dangers. For him they are ready to let themselves be cut into pieces.”
S. M. Budyonny with K. E. Voroshilov
During the Great Patriotic War he was a member of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command. Commander-in-Chief of the troops of the South-Western direction from July to September 1941. He gave the order to blow up the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station during the retreat of the Red Army, which led to extensive flooding, but the Germans did not get the industrial reserves of Zaporozhye.
Marshals of the Soviet Union: M. N. Tukhachevsky, S. M. Budyonny, K. E. Voroshilov, A. I. Egorov, V. K. Blyukher. 1935
During the September-October period he commanded the Reserve Front. It was he who hosted the legendary parade on Red Square on November 7, 1941. In April - May 1942, Budyonny served as commander-in-chief of the North Caucasus direction, and from May to August 1942 - commander of the North Caucasus Front. His activities during the war were not successful. In 1942 he was removed from command posts. In January 1943, he received an honorary appointment as commander of the cavalry of the Red Army and a member of the Supreme Military Council of the People's Commissariat of Defense.
Moscow, November 7, 1941 Red Square. Marshal of the Soviet Union S. M. Budyonny accepts the parade
After the war, along with the post of cavalry commander in 1947–1953. - Deputy Minister of Agriculture of the USSR for horse breeding. He was removed from the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1952, again becoming a candidate member of the Central Committee. Since 1954 - honorable retirement in the group of inspectors general of the USSR Ministry of Defense. Until a very old age, Budyonny rode horseback and loved horses all his life.
Marshal of the Soviet Union S. M. Budyonny
Already in old age, Budyonny became three times Hero of the Soviet Union for his previous services (1958, 1963, 1968), and published three-volume memoirs “The Path Traveled.” Budyonny died in Moscow at the age of 91 on October 26, 1973; his ashes were buried on Red Square near the Kremlin wall.
After the Great Terror, official propaganda turned him into one of the victors of the whites in the Civil War. Several settlements and many streets bear Budyonny’s name.
Ganin A.V., Ph.D., Institute of Slavic Studies RAS
Frunze Mikhail Vasilievich
Battles and victories
Soviet military-political figure, one of the leading officials of the Red Army during the Civil War and the first half of the 1920s. Frunze acquired the status of the conqueror of Kolchak, the Ural Cossacks and Wrangel, the conqueror of Turkestan, the liquidator of the Petliurists and Makhnovists.
Having replaced Trotsky in the military leadership, he was not a member of the Stalinist group, remaining a mysterious and unusual figure in the party leadership.
Mikhail Frunze was born in the city of Pishpek (Bishkek) in the Semirechensk region in the family of a Moldavian paramedic who served in Turkestan and a Voronezh peasant woman. Apparently, he was the bearer of a certain Turkestan worldview, imperial consciousness. Mikhail graduated from the gymnasium in Verny with a gold medal, and studied at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, where he studied economics. The student environment of the capital influenced the formation of Mikhail’s political views. Frunze was a romantic and an idealist.
Populist views played a significant role in his beliefs, but he saw his going to the people not in moving to the village and working there, but in working with the proletariat in factories.
Frunze's views changed over time. The pre-revolutionary period of Frunze’s activity can be called anti-state and anti-social (it is interesting that he combined this with patriotic views, for example, during the Russian-Japanese War). He never graduated from the institute, being carried away by the revolutionary struggle. In 1904, at the age of 19, Frunze joined the RSDLP. He took part in the demonstration on January 9, 1905 (Bloody Sunday), and was wounded in the arm. Under the pseudonym “Comrade Arseny” (there were other underground nicknames - Trifonych, Mikhailov, Vasilenko), Frunze became involved in active anti-government activities. Already in 1905, he worked in Ivanovo-Voznesensk and Shuya, which were the centers of the country's textile industry (the 3rd largest industrial region in the Russian Empire after St. Petersburg and Moscow), led a general strike of textile workers and created a fighting squad. The first Soviet of Workers' Deputies in Russia arose in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. Under the leadership of Frunze, strikes, rallies, seizures of weapons are held, leaflets are compiled and published. During this period, Frunze also collaborated with representatives of other political parties. In December 1905, Frunze and his fighters took part in an armed uprising in Moscow on Presnya. In 1906, at the IV Congress of the RSDLP in Stockholm, Frunze (the youngest delegate to the congress) met V.I. Lenin.
Frunze did not shy away from terrorist acts. Thus, under his leadership, an armed seizure of a printing house in Shuya was organized on January 17, 1907, and an armed attack on a police officer. For this, Frunze was twice sentenced to death, but under public pressure (including as a result of the intervention of the famous writer V.G. Korolenko), the sentence was commuted. He ended up in hard labor and later lived in exile in Siberia. In 1916 he escaped, moved to European Russia and went to the front as a volunteer. However, soon Frunze, on instructions from his party, got a job in the All-Russian Zemstvo Union, while simultaneously doing revolutionary work among soldiers on the Western Front (including campaigning for fraternization with the Germans). By this time, Frunze already had a reputation among the Bolsheviks as a military man (although he never received a military education), as a person associated with underground militant organizations. Frunze loved weapons and tried to carry them with him.
M. V. Frunze in 1907 Vladimir Central
In 1917, Frunze led the Minsk organization of the Bolsheviks, participated in battles in Moscow, where he ordered to send his detachment. With the coming of the Bolsheviks to power, the nature of Frunze's activities radically changed. If before 1917 he worked to destroy the state and disintegrate the army, now he became one of the active builders of the Soviet state and its armed forces. At the end of 1917, he was elected as a deputy of the Constituent Assembly from the Bolsheviks. At the beginning of 1918, Frunze became chairman of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk provincial committee of the RCP (b), military commissar of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk province. In August 1918, Frunze became military commissar of the Yaroslavl Military District, which included eight provinces. It was necessary to restore the district after the recent uprising in Yaroslavl; it was necessary to quickly form rifle divisions for the Red Army. This is where Frunze’s collaboration with former General Staff Major General F. F. Novitsky began. Cooperation continued with Frunze’s transfer to the Eastern Front.
According to Novitsky, Frunze had an amazing ability to quickly understand the most complex and new issues for him, separate the essential from the secondary, and then distribute the work between performers in accordance with the abilities of each. He also knew how to select people, as if by instinct, guessing who was capable of what...
Of course, the former volunteer Frunze did not have technical knowledge of preparing and organizing combat operations. However, he valued military professionals, former officers, and united around himself a galaxy of experienced General Staff officers, with whom he tried not to part ways. Thus, his victories were predetermined by the active and highly professional activities of the team of military specialists of the old army, whose work he led. Realizing the inadequacy of his military knowledge, Frunze carefully studied military literature and engaged in self-education. However, according to the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, L. D. Trotsky, Frunze “was fascinated by abstract schemes, he had a poor understanding of people and easily fell under the influence of specialists, mostly secondary ones.”
M. V. Frunze and V. I. Chapaev near Ufa. Artist Plotnov A. 1942
There is no doubt that Frunze had the charisma of a military leader, capable of leading the Red Army masses, and great personal courage and determination. It is no coincidence that Frunze loved to be in front of the troops, with a rifle in his hands in battle formations. He was shell-shocked in June 1919 near Ufa. However, above all, he was a talented organizer and political leader who knew how to organize the work of headquarters and the rear in emergency conditions. On the Eastern Front under Frunze, local mobilizations were successfully carried out.
From Frunze’s speech in 1919: “Every fool can understand that there, in the camp of our enemies, there cannot be a national revival of Russia, that on that side there can be no talk of fighting for the well-being of the Russian people. Because it is not because of their beautiful eyes that all these French and English are helping Denikin and Kolchak - it is natural that they are pursuing their own interests. This fact should be quite clear that Russia is not there, that Russia is with us... We are not weaklings like Kerensky. We are engaged in a mortal battle. We know that if they defeat us, then hundreds of thousands, millions of the best, most persistent and energetic in our country will be exterminated, we know that they will not talk to us, they will only hang us, and our entire homeland will be covered in blood. Our country will be enslaved by foreign capital. As for factories and factories, they have long been sold..."
Frunze gained direct front-line experience only in 1919, when he took the post of commander of the 4th Army of the Eastern Front and commander of the Southern Group of Front Forces, which delivered the main blow to the advancing troops of Admiral A.V. Kolchak. The attack by the Frunze group on the flank of the White Western Army in the Buzuluk area brought success and ultimately led to a turning point in the situation at the front and the transfer of initiative from the Whites to the Reds. The entire series of Red operations turned out to be successful - the Buguruslan, Belebey and Ufa operations, carried out from the end of April to the second half of June 1919. As a result of these operations, the Kolchakites were thrown back from the Volga region to the Urals, and later ended up in Siberia. Frunze commanded the Turkestan Army and the entire Eastern Front. For successes on the Eastern Front he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.
M. V. Frunze. Turkestan. 1920
From Frunze’s appeal to the Cossacks in 1919: “Has Soviet power collapsed? No, it exists in spite of the enemies of the working people, and its existence is stronger than ever. That this is so, just think about the following words of the sworn enemy of labor Russia, the English First Minister Lloyd George, which he said the other day in the English Parliament: “Apparently, hopes for a military defeat of the Bolsheviks are not destined to come true. Our Russian friends are for Lately suffered a number of significant failures..."
Who are Mr. Lloyd George's Russian friends? These are Denikin, Yudenich, Kolchak, who sold the property of the Russian people to English capital - Russian ore, timber, oil and bread, and for this they were awarded the title of “friends”.
What happened to Lloyd George's friends that made them lose faith in the military defeat of the Bolsheviks?
The answer to this is given by the picture of the military situation on the fronts of the Soviet Republic... two out of three main enemies labor Russia: Kolchak and Yudenich have already been removed from the scene... Soviet power, which is the power of the working people, is indestructible.”
“A people of many millions can be defeated, but they cannot be crushed... The eyes of the enslaved all over the world are turned to our poor, tormented country.”
From August 1919 to September 1920 he commanded the Turkestan Front. As a native and expert of Turkestan, he found himself in the right place. During this period, under the leadership of Frunze, the blockade of Turkestan was broken (on September 13, at the Mutodzharskaya station south of Aktyubinsk, units of the 1st Army united with Turkestan Red formations), the region was cleared of whites, the Southern, Separate Ural, Separate Orenburg and Semirechensk white armies were defeated , the Bukhara Emirate was liquidated, successes were achieved in the fight against the Basmachi.
M. V. Frunze. Artist Brodsky I. I.
In September 1920, Frunze, who had acquired a reputation as a successful party military leader, was appointed commander of the Southern Front, whose task was to defeat the Russian army of General P. N. Wrangel in the Crimea. The Perekop-Chongar operation against Wrangel’s Russian army with the passage through the Sivash was developed by a team of staff workers of the Southern Front that formed around M.V. Frunze on the Eastern and Turkestan fronts. Direct participation in the preparation of the operation was taken by Commander-in-Chief S.S. Kamenev and Chief of the Field Headquarters of the RVSR P.P. Lebedev. As a result of this operation, Wrangel's army was forced to evacuate from Crimea abroad. The large-scale Civil War in Russia ended here.
As a result of the Civil War, Frunze acquired the status of the winner of Kolchak, the Ural Cossacks and Wrangel, the conqueror of Turkestan, the liquidator of the Petliurists and Makhnovists. This was the status of a real party military nugget. In fact, of the three main enemies of Soviet power, Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel, Frunze was considered the winner of two.
M. V. Frunze receives a parade of troops on Red Square. 1925
In the early 1920s. Frunze headed the armed forces of Ukraine and Crimea. His main focus was on eliminating banditry in Ukraine, which he did brilliantly, earning the second Order of the Red Banner. In the summer of 1921, Frunze was wounded in a shootout with the Makhnovists. As a contemporary noted, “from the Central Committee of the CPB(u) for this risk, comrade. Frunze received the nadir, and from the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic - the second Order of the Red Banner.” In 1921–1922 Frunze went on a military-diplomatic mission to Turkey, where he brought financial aid to Mustafa Kemal.
Frunze was not a cruel person. During the Civil War, orders were issued under his signature on humane treatment of prisoners, which, for example, displeased party leader V.I. Lenin. As a decent person, he was a bad politician. It is no coincidence that V. M. Molotov subsequently noted that Frunze was not completely one of the Bolsheviks. Possessing a special sense of responsibility, he was more of a talented executor of orders from above than a leader.
During the period of the struggle of the Stalinist group with L. D. Trotsky in 1924, Frunze took the posts of Chief of Staff of the Red Army, Deputy Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR, and Head of the Military Academy of the Red Army. In 1925, he became chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR and People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs. Contrary to subsequent myths, Frunze, in leadership positions in the Red Army, continued Trotsky’s policy of reforming the army. The reform consisted of an attempt to create a personnel army, organize a territorial system of troops, improve the quality of command personnel and improve combat training, remove unreliable elements, reduce the central apparatus, reorganize supplies, introduce new military equipment, and strengthen unity of command. The military reform was not very well thought out and was largely influenced by the political struggle in the party.
From an article by Frunze in 1925: “The lack of modern military equipment is the weakest point of our defense... We must become independent from abroad not only in mass industrial activity, but also in constructive and inventive work.”
Frunze compiled a number of military theoretical works, including developing the military doctrine of the Red Army.
Monument to M. V. Frunze in Ivanovo
Having replaced Trotsky's proteges, and later the leader of the Red Army himself in the military leadership, Frunze, nevertheless, was not a member of the Stalinist group. He remained independent and had a certain authority among the troops, which, of course, could not suit the party elite. It is doubtful that Frunze had any Bonapartist intentions. However, for those around him he remained a mysterious and unusual figure at the top of the party.
The untimely death of 40-year-old Frunze on the operating table at the Soldatenkovsky (Botkin) hospital still remains largely mysterious. Versions that he was killed during a surgical operation on the orders of I.V. Stalin have become widespread since the mid-1920s. Frunze was buried near the Kremlin wall. Frunze's son Timur became a fighter pilot, died in battle in 1942, and was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
Academy named after Frunze. Moscow
After his death, the figure of M. V. Frunze was mythologized and idealized. His merits were beneficial for propagating the official ideology, since he was dead, and during his lifetime he was weakly connected with Trotsky. In fact, the figure of Frunze as the leader of the Red Army was replaced by the figure of the true leader of the army during the Civil War and the early 1920s. - Leon Trotsky. In the USSR, a posthumous cult of Frunze developed; his name was immortalized in the names of numerous settlements, districts, streets and squares, metro stations, in the names of geographical objects (Frunze Peak in the Pamirs, Cape Frunze in the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago), in the names of various enterprises and organizations , in many monuments, in books, philately and cinema.
Ganin A.V., Ph.D., Institute of Slavic Studies RAS
Chapaev Vasily Ivanovich
Battles and victories
A legendary figure of the Russian Civil War, a people's commander, a self-taught man who rose to high command positions due to his own abilities in the absence of special military education.
It is difficult to classify Chapaev as a traditional commander. This is more of a partisan leader, a kind of “red chieftain.”
Chapaev was born in the village of Budaika, Cheboksary district, Kazan province, into a peasant family. Chapaev's grandfather was a serf. The father worked as a carpenter to support his nine children. Vasily spent his childhood in the city of Balakovo, Samara province. Due to the difficult financial situation of the family, Chapaev graduated from only two classes of the parish school. Chapaev worked from the age of 12 for a merchant, then as a floor worker in a tea shop, as an organ grinder's assistant, and helped his father in carpentry. After serving his military service, Chapaev returned home. By this time, he managed to get married, and by the beginning of the First World War he was already the father of a family - three children. During the war, Chapaev rose to the rank of sergeant major, participated in the famous Brusilov breakthrough, was wounded and shell-shocked several times, his military work and personal bravery were awarded three St. George Crosses and the St. George Medal.
Chapaev. World War I
Due to his injury, Chapaev was sent to the rear of Saratov, the garrison of which was subjected to revolutionary disintegration in 1917. Chapaev also took part in the soldiers’ unrest, who initially, according to the testimony of his comrade in arms I. S. Kutyakov, joined the anarchists and eventually found himself the chairman of the company committee and member of the regimental committee. Finally, on September 28, 1917, Chapaev joined the Bolshevik Party. Already in October 1917, he became the military leader of the Nikolaev Red Guard detachment.
Chapaev turned out to be one of the military professionals on whom the Bolsheviks of the Nikolaev district of the Samara province relied in the fight against the uprisings of peasants and Cossacks. He took the post of district military commissar. At the beginning of 1918, Chapaev formed and led the 1st and 2nd Nikolaev regiments, which became part of the Red Army of the Saratov Council. In June, both regiments were consolidated into the Nikolaev brigade, which was headed by Chapaev.
In battles with the Cossacks and Czech interventionists, Chapaev showed himself to be a firm leader and an excellent tactician, skillfully assessing the situation and proposing the optimal solution, as well as a personally brave commander who enjoyed the authority and love of the fighters. During this period, Chapaev repeatedly personally led troops into attack. Since the fall of 1918, Chapaev commanded the Nikolaev division, which, due to its small numbers, was sometimes called Chapaev’s detachment.
According to the temporary commander of the 4th Soviet Army of the former General Staff, Major General A. A. Baltiysky, Chapaev’s “lack of general military education affects the technique of command and control and the lack of breadth to cover military affairs. Full of initiative, but uses it unbalanced due to the lack of military education. However, Comrade Chapaev clearly outlines all the data on the basis of which, with appropriate military education, both technology and a justified military scope will undoubtedly appear. The desire to receive a military education in order to get out of the state of “military darkness”, and then again join the ranks of the battle front. You can be sure that Comrade Chapaev’s natural talents, combined with military education, will give bright results.”
In November 1918, Chapaev was sent to the newly created Academy of the General Staff of the Red Army in Moscow to improve his education.
The following passage will say a lot about his academic success: “I haven’t read about Hannibal before, but I see that he was an experienced commander. But I disagree with his actions in many ways. He made many unnecessary changes in sight of the enemy and thereby revealed his plan to him, was slow in his actions and did not show persistence in order to completely defeat the enemy. I had an incident similar to the situation during the Battle of Cannes. This was in August, on the N. River. We let up to two white regiments with artillery through the bridge to our bank, gave them the opportunity to stretch out along the road, and then opened hurricane artillery fire on the bridge and rushed into the attack from all sides. The stunned enemy did not have time to come to his senses before he was surrounded and almost completely destroyed. His remnants rushed to the destroyed bridge and were forced to rush into the river, where most of them drowned. 6 guns, 40 machine guns and 600 prisoners fell into our hands. We achieved these successes thanks to the swiftness and surprise of our attack.”
Military science turned out to be beyond the capabilities of the people's leader; after studying for several weeks, Chapaev voluntarily left the academy and returned to the front to do what he knew and was able to do.
“Studying at the academy is a good thing and very important, but it’s a shame and a pity that the White Guards are being beaten without us.”
S.P. Zakharov - head of the Nikolaev division and brigade commander of this division V.I. Chapaev. September 1918
Subsequently, Chapaev commanded the Alexandrovo-Gai group, which fought the Ural Cossacks.
The opponents were worth each other - Chapaev was opposed by Cossack cavalry formations of a partisan nature.
At the end of March 1919, Chapaev, by order of the commander of the Southern Group of the Eastern Front of the RSFSR, M.V. Frunze, was appointed head of the 25th Infantry Division. The division acted against the main forces of the Whites, participated in repelling the spring offensive of the armies of Admiral A.V. Kolchak, and participated in the Buguruslan, Belebey and Ufa operations, which predetermined the failure of the Kolchak offensive. In these operations, Chapaev's division acted on enemy messages and carried out detours. Maneuver tactics became the calling card of Chapaev and his division. Even the whites singled out Chapaev and noted his organizational skills.
A major success was the crossing of the Belaya River, which led to the capture of Ufa on June 9, 1919 and the further withdrawal of the Whites. Then Chapaev, who was on the front line, was wounded in the head, but remained in the ranks. For military distinctions he was awarded the highest award of Soviet Russia - the Order of the Red Banner, and his division was awarded the honorary revolutionary Red Banners.
Chapaev stood out as an independent commander from the non-commissioned officers of the old army. This environment gave the Red Army many talented military leaders, including such as S. M. Budyonny and G. K. Zhukov. Chapaev loved his fighters, and they paid him the same. His division was considered one of the best on the Eastern Front. In many ways, he was precisely the people's leader, who fought using guerrilla methods, but at the same time possessed a real military instinct, enormous energy and initiative that infected those around him. A commander who strived to constantly learn in practice, directly during battles, a man who was simple-minded and cunning at the same time. Chapaev knew very well the combat area, located on the far-from-center right flank of the Eastern Front. By the way, the fact that Chapaev fought in approximately the same area throughout his entire career is a weighty argument in favor of the partisan nature of his activities.
Chapaev - Furmanov. Ufa, June 1919: “Comrade Furman. Please pay attention to my note to you, I am very upset by your departure, that you took my expression personally, of which I inform you that you have not yet managed to bring me any harm, and if I am so frank and a little hot , not at all embarrassed by your presence, and I say everything that is in my thoughts against some individuals, which you were offended by, but so that there are no personal scores between us, I am forced to write a report on my removal from office, rather than be in disagreement with my closest employee , which I am informing you about as a friend. Chapaev."
At the same time, Chapaev managed to fit into the structure of the Red Army and was fully used by the Bolsheviks in their interests. He was an excellent commander at the divisional level, although not everything in his division was going well, especially in terms of discipline. It is enough to note that as of June 28, 1919, in the 2nd brigade of the division, “unlimited drunkenness and outrages with strangers flourished - this does not indicate a commander at all, but a hooligan.” Commanders clashed with commissars, and there were even cases of beatings. The relationship between Chapaev and the commissar of his division, D. A. Furmanov, who met in March 1919, was difficult. They were friends, but sometimes quarreled because of the explosive nature of the division commander.
Chapaev. September 1918 Shot from the chronicle
After the Ufa operation, the Chapaev division was again transferred to the front against the Ural Cossacks. It was necessary to operate in the steppe area, far from communications (which made it difficult to supply the division with ammunition), in hot conditions with the superiority of the Cossacks in the cavalry. This situation constantly threatened the flanks and rear. The struggle here was accompanied by mutual bitterness, atrocities against prisoners, and uncompromising confrontation. As a result of a mounted Cossack raid into the Soviet rear, the headquarters of the Chapaev division in Lbischensk, located at a distance from the main forces, was surrounded and destroyed. On September 5, 1919, Chapaev died: according to some sources, while swimming across the Urals, according to others, he died from wounds during a shootout. Chapaev's death, which occurred as a result of carelessness, was a direct consequence of his impetuous and reckless character, expressing the unbridled element of the people.
Chapaev's division subsequently participated in the defeat of the Ural Separate Army, which led to the destruction of this army of Ural Cossacks and the death of thousands of officers and privates during the retreat through the desert regions of the Eastern Caspian region. These events fully characterize the cruel fratricidal essence of the Civil War, in which there could be no heroes.
Chapaev lived a short (died at 32 years old), but bright life. Now it is quite difficult to imagine what he really was like - too many myths and exaggerations surround the image of the legendary division commander. For example, according to one version, in the spring of 1919 the Reds did not surrender Samara to the enemy only because of the firm position of Chapaev and Frunze and contrary to the opinion of military experts. But, apparently, this version has nothing to do with reality. Another later legend is that L. D. Trotsky fought against Chapaev in every possible way. Unfortunately, even today such propaganda legends have their short-sighted supporters. In fact, on the contrary, it was Trotsky who awarded Chapaev a gold watch, distinguishing him from other commanders. Of course, it is difficult to classify Chapaev as a traditional commander. This is more of a partisan leader, a kind of “red chieftain.”
Appeal to the enemy: “I am Chapaev! Drop your weapons!
Some legends were created not by official ideology, but by popular consciousness. For example, that Chapaev is the Antichrist. Demonization of the image was a characteristic reaction of the people to the outstanding qualities of this or that figure. It is known that Cossack atamans were demonized in this way. Chapaev, over time, entered folklore in its more modern form - as the hero of many popular jokes. However, the list of Chapaev legends is not exhausted. Consider the widely spread version that Chapaev fought against the famous General V.O. Kappel. In reality, they most likely did not fight directly against each other. However, in the popular understanding, a hero like Chapaev could only be defeated by an opponent equal in strength to him, which Kappel was considered to be.
Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev had no luck with an objective biography. After the publication of D. A. Furmanov’s book in 1923 and especially after the release of the famous film by S. D. and G. N. Vasiliev in 1934, Chapaev, who was far from being a figure of the first order, was once and for all credited into the cohort of selected heroes of the Civil War. This group included politically safe (mostly already deceased) Red military leaders (M.V. Frunze, N.A. Shchors, G.I. Kotovsky and others). The activities of such mythologized heroes were covered only in a positive light. However, in the case of Chapaev, not only official myths, but also artistic fiction firmly overshadowed the real historical figure. This situation was reinforced by the fact that many former Chapaevites held high positions in the Soviet military-administrative hierarchy for a long time. From the ranks of the division came at least one and a half dozen generals alone (for example, A. V. Belyakov, M. F. Bukshtynovich, S. F. Danilchenko, I. I. Karpezo, V. A. Kindyukhin, M. S. Knyazev, S. A. Kovpak, V. N. Kurdyumov, A. A. Luchinsky, N. M. Mishchenko, I. V. Panfilov, S. I. Petrenko-Petrikovsky, I. E. Petrov, N. M. Khlebnikov) . The Chapaevites, along with the cavalrymen, formed a kind of veteran community in the ranks of the Red Army, kept in touch and helped each other.
Turning to the fate of other people's leaders of the Civil War, such as B. M. Dumenko, F. K. Mironov, N. A. Shchors, it is difficult to imagine Chapaev surviving to the end of the war. The Bolsheviks needed such people only during the period of fighting the enemy, after which they became not only inconvenient, but also dangerous. Those of them who did not die due to their own recklessness were soon eliminated.
Ganin A.V., Ph.D., Institute of Slavic Studies RAS
Blucher Vasily Konstantinovich
Battles and victories
Marshal of the Soviet Union, Soviet military-political figure, one of the prominent Soviet military leaders of the Civil War and the interwar period, led the Soviet armed forces in the Far East for a long time. The first holder of the Order of the Red Banner and the Red Star.
A number of successful operations made Blucher a legend of the Red Army, and in the Far East he embodied Soviet power itself. G.K. Zhukov admitted that he always wanted to be like this commander, and the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek said that one Blucher is equal to an army of one hundred thousand.
Blucher was born into a peasant family in the village of Barshchinka, Rybinsk district, Yaroslavl province. His family received an unusual surname during the Crimean War from a landowner in honor of the Prussian field marshal G. L. von Blucher. Vasily Blucher studied at the Serednevsky parochial school.
He worked from childhood. Already in the summer of 1904, his father took him to St. Petersburg, where Vasily began to serve as a boy at the store of the merchant Klochkov, then as a worker at the Berd factory.
It was in the capital that the first Russian revolution found young Vasily Blucher, which could not but influence the formation of his political views.
In 1906, Blucher returned to his native village and continued his studies.
In the fall of 1909 in Moscow, Blucher got a job in a metalworking workshop, later at a carriage building plant in Mytishchi, took part in riots, as a result of which he was imprisoned for three years. After his release, Blucher worked as a mechanic in the workshops of the Kazan Railway until he was mobilized.
Junior non-commissioned officer V.K. Blucher
Blücher participated in the First World War. As a militia warrior, he was enlisted in the 56th Kremlin reserve battalion, and from November 1914 he served at the front as a private in the 19th Kostroma Infantry Regiment. During the war years, he rose to the rank of junior non-commissioned officer, and distinguished himself as a brave and skillful fighter, and was awarded the St. George Medal, 4th degree. In March 1916, due to injury, Blucher was dismissed from the army. He worked at the Sormovsky shipyard near Nizhny Novgorod and in Kazan at the Osterman mechanical plant. In June 1916 he joined the Bolsheviks, and in May 1917, on instructions from the party leadership, he re-joined the army, ending up in the 102nd reserve regiment, where he became a comrade of the chairman of the regimental committee. In November 1917, Blucher became a member of the Samara Military Revolutionary Committee and participated in the establishment of Soviet power in the Samara province.
Blucher was one of the creators and organizers of the Red Army. From the end of 1917, as a commissar of one of the Red Guard detachments, he participated in the fight against the Orenburg Cossacks of Ataman A.I. Dutov, who opposed the Reds. Blucher was mainly based in Chelyabinsk, where until the spring of 1918 he carried out organizational work to create new local authorities. In March 1918, he was even elected chairman of the Chelyabinsk Council of Deputies and became chief of staff of the Red Guard.
The fight against the Orenburg Cossacks developed with varying degrees of success. Ataman A.I. Dutov with a small number of associates at the beginning of 1918 was driven into the Ural outback and was actually surrounded. However, his troops managed to break through and go to the Turgai steppes. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1918, a large-scale uprising of the Cossacks began, as a result of which the Bolsheviks were forced to send punitive expeditions to the villages. Blucher also took part in these expeditions, and he gained fame as a leader of decisive measures. At the same time, Blucher personally met with representatives of the Cossacks and negotiated with them. In May 1918, at the head of the 1,500-strong Consolidated Ural Detachment, Blucher was sent to Orenburg. The large-scale growth of Cossack uprisings was facilitated by the armed uprising of the Czechoslovak Corps against the Bolsheviks at the end of May 1918.
Engineering equipment of the Kakhovka bridgehead in August - October 1920
Blucher gained wide fame already in 1918, when he led an amazing 1,500-kilometer campaign along the white rear. After Orenburg was blocked as a result of the uprising of the Orenburg Cossacks, the leaders of the Red Guard detachments located in the city decided to break through to their own at the end of June 1918. Part of the troops retreated to Turkestan, and the detachments of Blucher and the Red Cossacks - N.D. Tomin and brothers I.D. and N.D. Kashirins moved north, hoping to find support in their native villages. However, the villagers for the most part were anti-Bolshevik, they failed to gain a foothold in Cossack territory, and as a result it was necessary to break through further. The movement passed through the Ural factories. During the campaign, the scattered detachments were united under the leadership of Blucher, and on August 2 he was elected commander-in-chief of the Combined Detachment of South Ural Partisans (over 10,500 people). The campaign revealed Blucher's great military-administrative abilities and ability to maneuver. From time to time, Blucher's troops encountered heterogeneous white forces, but there was no continuous front line. The formations of Blucher and his comrades not only passed through the entire Urals, but by September 12 they were able to connect with the main forces of Soviet Russia (parts of the 3rd Army of the Eastern Front), which was facilitated by both the intermittent front line of the Civil War and the low density of troops. For this campaign, on September 28, 1918, by resolution of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Blucher was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, becoming its first holder in Soviet Russia.
On September 20, 1918, Blucher headed the 4th Ural Division of the Red Army (from November - the 30th Infantry Division). From the end of January 1919, he was assistant to the commander of the 3rd Army of the Eastern Front of the RSFSR, and then formed and led the 51st Infantry Division, which later became legendary. Together with the division, Blucher participated in the offensive through the Urals into the territory of Siberia and in the defeat of Kolchak’s troops. The division captured Tobolsk, and it also took part in the capture of Omsk, the capital of White Siberia.
V. Blucher and I. Stalin. March 1926
In August 1920, Blucher's division was transferred to the south of Russia, where it took part in the fight against the troops of the Russian Army of General P. N. Wrangel. The Blucherites defended the Kakhovka bridgehead, where the Whites used English tanks en masse. In October 1920, Blucher's division was significantly strengthened by a shock-fire brigade and became the striking force of the front. Later, the division reached Perekop and took part in the assault on the Turkish Wall and its capture on November 9, 1920 (according to the White participants in the events, they left Perekop before the assault); on November 11, the Yushun positions of the Whites were taken. On November 15, units of the division entered Sevastopol and Yalta. For these successes, Blucher was awarded the second Order of the Red Banner. Blucher's division, which suffered heavy losses in the battles, received the honorary name of Perekopskaya.
Due to the fact that the Civil War was still ongoing in the Far East, Blücher was sent to this region. There he took the key post of Minister of War of the buffer Far Eastern Republic, created specifically to ensure that parts of the Red Army avoided clashes with Japanese invaders in the Far East. Under the leadership of Blucher as commander-in-chief, the People's Revolutionary Army of the Far Eastern Republic was created, which by the end of 1922 liberated the Far East from the whites and interventionists (Blucher was recalled from the Far East in July 1922). The most famous battles of this army were the battles near the Volochaevka station near Khabarovsk on February 10–12, 1922 (the assault on the White-fortified June-Koran heights) and near Spassk in October 1922. At the request of Blucher, his old comrade-in-arms from 1918 was sent to the Far East N. D. Tomin.
“In my letter sent to you before the battle near Volochaevka, I pointed out to you the behind-the-scenes diplomatic work of the interventionists, which is now going on behind your back, and the uselessness of your resistance. Now, through the battles near Volochaevka and Kazakevichevo, the People's Revolutionary Army has proven to you the insanity of further struggle against the people's will.
Draw an honest conclusion from this and submit to the will of the working Russian people without further persistent playing with human heads, who have entrusted their fate to you... I would like to know what number of victims, what number of Russian corpses is still needed to convince you of the uselessness and futility of your last attempts to fight the power of the revolutionary Russian people, who are building their new statehood on the ashes of economic ruin? How many Russian martyrs have you been ordered to throw at the foot of Japanese and other foreign capital?..
Do you now understand the tenacity with which our staunch revolutionary regiments are fighting under the Red Banner for their great new Red Rus'? We will win, because we are fighting for progressive principles in history, for a new statehood in the world, for the right of the Russian people to build their lives as their forces, awakened from centuries-old torpor, tell them...
The only way out for you, and the honorable way out, given your current situation, is to lay down your fratricidal weapons and end the last outbreak of the civil war with an honest soldier’s confession of your error and refusal of further service to foreign headquarters.”
From a letter to White General V.M. Molchanov on February 23, 1922.
Since the end of the Civil War, Blucher, despite the lack of military education and a very weak general education, became part of the military elite of Soviet Russia. On the fronts of the World War and the Civil War, Blucher received eighteen wounds.
In 1922, Blucher was appointed commander of the 1st Rifle Corps, and later headed the Petrograd fortified area. In 1924, he was seconded to the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR for particularly important assignments.
In 1924–1927 By decision of the leadership of the USSR (in connection with the request of the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen), Blucher, instead of the tragically deceased corps commander P. A. Pavlov, was sent to serve in China as the main military adviser in the south of the country. Blucher worked in the interests of the Cantonese government under the pseudonym Galin. During this period, Blucher was subordinate to a group of military-political advisers (their number reached approximately one hundred people by mid-1927), who oversaw the reform of the army and the creation of a new type of armed forces in China - the Kuomintang party army. In accordance with Blucher's plans in 1926–1927. The Northern Campaign of the National Revolutionary Army was implemented, the goal of which was to be the national unification and liberation of China. Blucher gained popularity and respect from the Chinese authorities. Subsequently, the leader of the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek, who knew Blucher, said that Blucher’s arrival in China during the struggle with Japan in the second half of the 1930s. “would be equivalent to sending an army of one hundred thousand.” For his work in China, Blucher was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and received a gold cigarette case with diamonds from the Comintern.
According to Marshal of the Soviet Union G.K. Zhukov, who met Blucher for the first time in the mid-1920s, “I was fascinated by the sincerity of this man. A fearless fighter against the enemies of the Soviet Republic, the legendary hero V.K. Blucher was an ideal for many. I won’t lie, I always dreamed of being like this wonderful Bolshevik, wonderful comrade and talented commander.”
The defeat of the Chinese militarists in 1929
Blücher commanded the Special Far Eastern Army since 1929, and in the same year he led the fight against Chinese militarists during the conflict on the Chinese Eastern Railway. In December 1929, a Soviet-Chinese agreement was signed to eliminate the conflict on the Chinese Eastern Railway. In 1930, Blucher became a member of the USSR Central Executive Committee. He was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the 1st convocation, a candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks since 1934. He was a kind of symbol of Bolshevik power in the Far East, and his sphere of influence extended to both military and economic issues, right up to participation in collective farm construction, supplying cities and mines. Blucher was a true legend of the Red Army. In the 1930s parents of conscripts sent him thousands of letters asking him to accept their children to serve in the Far Eastern Army.
“The Special Far Eastern Army achieved its victories due to the fact that it is strong in the support of the working class, strong in the alliance of the working class with the peasantry, and strong in the wise leadership of the party.
Comrade People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, I was only one of the particles of this glorious army forging the victory of the working class.
I was not embarrassed in battles and did not get lost. Today I am confused and therefore I can respond to the high award received with what a fighter, a proletarian, a party member can answer.
To the best of my ability and ability, I will honestly serve the party, the proletariat, and the socialist revolution. I assure you, People's Commissar, and ask you to convey to the Central Committee of the party and the government that I will continue to be an honest fighter of the party and the working class. And if the party and the working class demand my life for the cause of socialist construction, I will give my life without hesitation, fear, without a moment’s hesitation.”
From the speech of V.K. Blucher at the solemn plenum of the Khabarovsk city council when he was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Star on August 6, 1931.
Blücher in 1930
Blucher was the first holder of not only the Order of the Red Banner, but also the Order of the Red Star. He was awarded two Orders of Lenin and five Orders of the Red Banner. In 1935, Blucher was awarded the highest military rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. The People's Commissar of Defense and his deputies received similar titles.
Blucher was interested in the development of military thought, cared about increasing the horizons of the command staff, and even prepared some military scientific works himself. Despite the strictures of the 1930s, Blucher, through the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army, subscribed to foreign magazines and studied them.
Blucher also led the military operations against the Japanese on Lake Khasan in July - August 1938; the Japanese attack was then repelled, and the inviolability of the Soviet border was protected. After these events, Blucher was summoned to Moscow and never returned to the Far East.
Blucher actively participated in organizing political repressions against commanding officers in the Far East. Ultimately, he himself fell victim to them. He was arrested on October 22, 1938. During the investigation, the famous military leader was subjected to beatings and torture, in which the First Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR L.P. Beria personally participated.
During the investigation, Marshal Blucher was killed in the internal prison of the NKVD (according to other sources, in the Lefortovo prison). Rehabilitated posthumously on March 12, 1956.
Ganin A.V., Ph.D., Institute of Slavic Studies RAS
Tukhachevsky Mikhail Nikolaevich
Battles and victories
Soviet military leader, military political figure, Marshal of the Soviet Union (1935).
Tukhachevsky perfectly understood the nature of the Civil War and learned to achieve success in its conditions by imposing his will on the enemy and active offensive actions.
Mikhail Nikolaevich Tukhachevsky was born on the Aleksandrovskoye estate, Dorogobuzh district, Smolensk province, into a noble family. The commander's childhood was spent in the Penza province, on the estate of his grandmother Sofia Valentinovna, located near the village of Vrazhskoye, Chembar district. Since childhood, Misha was interested in playing the violin, astronomy, invention and design, and was involved in Russian and French wrestling. Tukhachevsky studied at the 1st Penza gymnasium, later at the 10th Moscow gymnasium and at the 1st Moscow Empress Catherine and Cadet Corps, which he graduated in 1912. For excellent studies, the name of Tukhachevsky was listed on the marble plaque of the corps. That same year he entered the Alexander Military School. After graduating in 1914, he was promoted to second lieutenant of the guard with assignment to the Semyonovsky Life Guards Regiment. Other representatives of the Tukhachevsky family had previously served in this regiment.
Literally a week after Tukhachevsky’s promotion to officer, the First World War began. The Semenovsky regiment was sent to East Prussia, and then reassigned to Warsaw. In battles, Tukhachevsky proved himself to be a brave officer. On February 19, 1915, near Warsaw, Tukhachevsky, who led the battle after the death of the commander, was captured. He was held captive together with future French President Charles de Gaulle. The young guards officer, thirsting for exploits and glory, was forced to remain inactive for several years. During his captivity, Tukhachevsky made five escape attempts. Only the last one was successful. In September 1917, he made his way to Switzerland, from where he went to France and, with the assistance of the Russian military agent in France, Count A. A. Ignatiev, returned to Russia through Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries. Tukhachevsky arrived in the reserve battalion of the Semenovsky regiment, stationed in Petrograd, where he was elected company commander, and then demobilized and left for an estate near Penza.
In the spring of 1918, Tukhachevsky arrived in Moscow, where he decided to link his future fate with the Red Army. Having missed, in fact, the entire world war, he could not boast of any awards or ranks that were awarded to the surviving fellow officers. Given Tukhachevsky’s morbid ambition, arrogance, posturing, his desire to “play a role”, imitate Napoleon, and his undoubted careerism, noted by his contemporaries, this turned out to be a significant factor influencing his further choice. Perhaps, not seeing any prospects for himself in the Whites, Tukhachevsky bet on the Reds - and he was right. Fate elevated him, a potentially hostile nobleman to the new government, a former monarchist, an officer of an elite guards regiment, to the top of the Soviet military-political Olympus for almost two decades. During the Civil War, Tukhachevsky was often driven by the desire to show his superiority to the old generals who led the white armies.
Already on April 5, 1918, he joined the Bolshevik Party. Apparently, his career aspirations had an effect, since neither at that time, nor ten or twenty years later, joining the party was still mandatory even for representatives of the senior command staff (it became such only after the Great Patriotic War). And in the future, Tukhachevsky, appropriately and inappropriately, demonstrated his devotion to party ideals. Former officers who joined the Bolshevik Party were such a rare occurrence that Tukhachevsky was immediately offered the post of representative of the military department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and a job in the Kremlin. It was necessary to inspect local military establishments, which gave Tukhachevsky insight into the nascent Red Army.
Soon, on May 27, a new responsible appointment followed - military commissar of the Moscow defense region, and on June 19, Tukhachevsky went to the Eastern Front at the disposal of front commander M. A. Muravyov to organize units of the Red Army into higher formations and lead them. On June 27, he accepted this post as commander of the 1st Army operating in the Middle Volga. During Muravyov's speech against the Reds that soon took place, Tukhachevsky was arrested by a rebel in Simbirsk and barely escaped execution as a Bolshevik. After Muravyov was killed on July 11, Tukhachevsky temporarily, until the arrival of I. I. Vatsetis, commanded the front.
It fell to Tukhachevsky and his comrades not only to create and strengthen the army, but also to reorganize it from disparate partisan formations into a regular unification. Tukhachevsky, who did not have military-administrative experience, relied on highly qualified cadres of old officers with higher military education. In the selection of personnel he showed himself to be a talented organizer. At the same time, he loved to be in battle formations, as if making up for what he was almost deprived of during the World War.
On September 12, Tukhachevsky’s troops took Simbirsk, the hometown of the Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin. In this regard, Tukhachevsky did not fail to send a congratulatory telegram to Lenin, who was wounded after the assassination attempt, stating that the capture of the city was the answer for one of Lenin’s wounds, and the second wound would be answered by the capture of Samara. Subsequently, victories followed one after another. Tukhachevsky took Syzran, the Whites retreated to the east.
In connection with the growing tension in the South, Tukhachevsky was appointed assistant commander of the Southern Front, and at the front he led the 8th Army, operating near Voronezh against the Don Army. It is interesting that back in the spring of 1919, Tukhachevsky advocated offensive actions by the Reds not through the Don region, but through the Donbass to Rostov. As a result of a conflict with front commander V.M. Gittis, Tukhachevsky asked for a transfer to another front.
He again found himself on the Eastern Front, now as the commander of the 5th Army, operating in the direction of the main attack of the Whites. Tukhachevsky successfully proved himself in the defeat of the Whites during the Buguruslan, Bugulma, Menzelinsk, Birsk, Zlatoust, Chelyabinsk, and Omsk operations. As a result of a series of victories, the Whites from the Volga region were thrown back to Siberia. For the liberation of the Volga region and the Urals and successes in the Chelyabinsk operation, Tukhachevsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, and at the end of 1919, following the results of the campaign, he was awarded an honorary golden weapon. The 27-year-old former second lieutenant defeated the troops of Admiral A.V. Kolchak.
From a lecture by M. N. Tukhachevsky in 1919: “We all see that our Russian generals failed to understand the Civil War, failed to master its forms. Only a very few White Guard generals, capable and imbued with bourgeois class consciousness, rose to the occasion. The majority arrogantly declared that our Civil War was not quite a war, just some kind of small war or commissar partisanship. However, despite such ominous statements, we see before us not a small war, but a large, systematic war, with almost millions of armies, imbued with a single idea and performing brilliant maneuvers. And in the ranks of this army, among its devoted commanders, born of the Civil War, a certain doctrine of this war begins to take shape, and with it, its theoretical justification ... "
Tukhachevsky's army had a powerful political composition - the largest number of communists were gathered here in comparison with other armies of the front. On the Eastern Front, Tukhachevsky collaborated with another genius in the highest positions of the Red Army - M. V. Frunze. At the same time, already at this time the obstinate character of the ambitious military leader manifested itself. Tukhachevsky, for example, came into conflict with former General A. A. Samoilo, who briefly commanded the front. As a result of Tukhachevsky’s alliance with members of the Front’s Revolutionary Military Council, who did not accept Samoilo (instead of the former commander S.S. Kamenev), the latter was recalled.
The first five marshals: Tukhachevsky, Voroshilov, Egorov (sitting), Budyonny and Blucher (standing)
After the defeat of Kolchak, Tukhachevsky at the beginning of 1920 was again sent to the South, where he headed the Caucasian Front. His tasks included completing the defeat of the white armies of Southern Russia under the command of General A.I. Denikin. After the elimination of white resistance in the Caucasus, Tukhachevsky issued an order to the 11th Army, which was part of the front, to occupy Azerbaijan, which was done. However, at this time Tukhachevsky was sent to save Soviet Russia to a new site - to the Western Front, where the fight against the Poles was becoming increasingly tense.
“We will shake Russia like a dirty carpet, and then we will shake the whole world... We will enter chaos and emerge from it only by completely destroying civilization.”
Tukhachevsky was appointed to the post of commander of this front on April 28. By this time he had gained a reputation as one of the best Bolshevik commanders. The most powerful specialists of the General Staff and experienced command staff in the republic were concentrated on the front entrusted to the Tukhachevsky Front. The rapid offensive undertaken by Tukhachevsky brought the Red Army from the Berezina to the Vistula in a month. In the first half of August 1920, Tukhachevsky’s units were actually under the walls of Warsaw, but there was not enough strength to capture the Polish capital.
Tukhachevsky’s military style was characterized by deep ramming strikes with the rapid introduction of reserves into battle (later Tukhachevsky became the developer of the theory of deep combat), which led to the depletion of troops and all sorts of surprises that there was nothing to counter. This approach was developed into the concept of sequential operations, in which enemy forces are sequentially depleted in successive battles.
In practice, Tukhachevsky implemented this concept in the fight against Kolchak’s troops.
“Successive operations will constitute, as it were, dismemberments of the same operation, but dispersed, due to the enemy’s retreat over a large area... Constant pursuit and pressure, associated with the increasing disorganization of the retreating, extremely increase the morale of the attacking troops, bringing it to a state capable of high heroism. On the contrary, even if discipline is maintained, the retreating person’s combat effectiveness is constantly decreasing.”
M. N. Tukhachevsky. High command issues. M., 1924
Soviet military commanders of the Red Army are delegates to the 17th Party Congress. 1934
Tukhachevsky made repeated attempts (both against the Whites and the Poles), but attempts to encircle the enemy widely were not crowned with success. Contemporaries noted not only the deep intelligence of the young Soviet commander, but also his penchant for adventurous enterprises. In general, Tukhachevsky perfectly understood the nature of the Civil War and learned to achieve success in its conditions by imposing his will on the enemy and active offensive actions. In this regard, his adventurism sometimes had a beneficial effect on the results of operations. At the same time, Tukhachevsky always relied on highly qualified staff teams. The question of the leadership abilities of Tukhachevsky himself remains open. It is also unknown how he could have shown himself as a commander in a major war, which was radically different from the Civil War.
At the celebration of the 18th anniversary of the revolution
The end of the Civil War was marked for Tukhachevsky by the leadership of the liquidation of the Kronstadt uprising and the suppression of the uprising of the Tambov peasants (at the same time, asphyxiating gases were used to a limited extent, but not in the form of large-scale gas attacks destroying all living things, as appears from the experience of the First World War, but in the form of shelling with chemical shells, widely used in the Civil War by both Reds and Whites).
“I am convinced that with good management, good staffs and good political forces, we can create a large army capable of great feats.”
During the Civil War and especially after it, Tukhachevsky began to actively speak out in the military-scientific field. His books “Class War” and “Maneuver and Artillery” were published one after another. And here he worked closely with the country's leading military-scientific personnel. Thus, his closest collaborator was the famous military scientist V.K. Triandafillov. Tukhachevsky’s in-depth acquaintance with the military-scientific world is associated with the period of his leadership of the Military Academy of the Red Army.
Marshal of the Soviet Union Tukhachevsky M.N.
In 1922–1924 Tukhachevsky commanded the Western Front, and the party elite, bogged down in internal squabbles and struggles, was extremely wary of his intervention in the political life of the country. Tukhachevsky really had political ambitions. He was under covert surveillance and compromising material was collected.
As a result, during the most intense period of confrontation between the supporters of I.V. Stalin and L.D. Trotsky, Tukhachevsky turned out to be completely passive.
In 1924 he became assistant chief of staff of the Red Army, and in 1925–1928. - Chief of Staff of the Red Army. Despite his busy schedule, Tukhachevsky also found time for military pedagogical work and gave lectures to academy students. In May 1928, he was commander of the troops of the Leningrad Military District.
In 1931, Tukhachevsky became deputy People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR K. E. Voroshilov. On the initiative of Tukhachevsky, new equipment was introduced into the army. The troops were rearmed and re-equipped with aircraft, tanks, and artillery. Tukhachevsky’s support included such innovative developments for that time as airborne assaults, radar, rocket-propelled weapons, missile technology, air defense, and torpedo-carrying aircraft. At the same time, Tukhachevsky was also characterized by excessive projectism, sometimes far from reality (it is enough to note that in 1919, according to an informed contemporary, he proposed to the Bolshevik leadership a project for introducing paganism in the country, and in 1930 he put forward an absurd program for an annual tank building standard in a country of 100,000 tanks by armoring tractors - in this way he counted on the practical implementation of the theory of deep operation).
As a supporter of the strategy of destruction, Tukhachevsky opposed the famous military scientist, former General A. A. Svechin, who was the ideologist of the strategy of attrition. In the spirit of the times, this discussion turned into persecution of the scientist, headed by Tukhachevsky. The executed “Red Bonaparte” was by no means averse to bullying his opponents. Tukhachevsky’s opponent was also the future Marshal of the Soviet Union B. M. Shaposhnikov.
In November 1935, Tukhachevsky became Marshal of the Soviet Union.
As A.I. Todorsky, who knew him, rightly noted, Tukhachevsky was not destined to live to see the Great Patriotic War. But Tukhachevsky, together with its heroes, smashed the fascist armies. The enemies were attacked by the equipment that Tukhachevsky built together with the party and the people. Soldiers and commanders destroyed the enemy, relying on Soviet military art, to which Tukhachevsky made a great contribution."
In 1937, Tukhachevsky, on false charges of preparing a fascist military conspiracy against the leadership of the USSR, was arrested and executed (rehabilitated in 1957). The reason for the repressions was Tukhachevsky’s ambitions, which went beyond his official boundaries, his undoubted authority, leadership in the senior command and many years of close ties with other high-ranking military leaders, which threatened a military coup. At the same time, he, of course, was not any foreign spy.
Ganin A.V., Ph.D., Institute of Slavic Studies RAS
Background to the conflict
To understand the nature of Russian-Polish relations, it is very important to apply the concepts discussed when analyzing the Polish national and national liberation movement.
For a hundred years (1815–1915), when the territory of ethnic Poland was part of the Russian Empire, a certain image of a “Russian” as a representative of the ruling system in the state took shape in the Polish public consciousness.
With such an interpretation of the manifestations of the national liberation struggle of the Polish people, when the main emphasis was placed on the presence or absence of an anti-Russian moment, an equal sign was put, as it were, between tsarism and Russia, the Russian people. At the same time, historians have strongly emphasized that these are different concepts, using to characterize the Polish uprisings and other actions such formulations as “anti-autocratic”, “anti-tsarist”, “directed against tsarism”, etc. These formulations, on the whole, correctly reflected the objective fact the non-identity of tsarism and the Russian people, nevertheless, did not take into account an important subjective factor, namely, that in the minds of the Poles such identification occurred under the influence of hatred of the tsarism that oppressed them, and this hatred was transferred to everything Russian. Just like in Russian society, just not most of managed to resist the ideas of the great power and rise to a genuine understanding of the Polish question, so in Poland not every revolutionary could separate the Russian people from the hated tsarism, but only the most perspicacious, thoughtful and sensitive. Distrust and hostility towards Russians became an element of national consciousness during the period of its formation. On the one hand, they affected the Polish national character, and on the other, they largely determined the stereotype of the Russian, entrenched in the consciousness of Polish society. All these moments were and are of great importance not only for Russian-Polish, and then Soviet-Polish relations, but in general for the destinies of peoples.
When analyzing national issues, assessing certain national manifestations, the researcher, as a rule, faces the question: where, when, under what conditions, why patriotism, national feeling, national liberation aspirations move into another category; where is the border separating them from nationalism.
It seems that we can talk about nationalism in a negative way when manifestations of national feeling are aimed at distrust and hatred of other peoples or to the detriment of the interests of these peoples, when one’s own people are put above others and judged by other standards. Such trends can be traced in Polish patriotism. Elements of national egoism and domination characterize the views of many of the most prominent representatives of the Polish liberation movement. This concerned not only the attitude towards Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, whom most Polish ideologists did not recognize as independent nations.
It should also be remembered that in 1815 Poland again disappeared from the political map of Europe. The borders established in Eastern Europe by the Congress of Vienna lasted until 1914, when the outbreak of the First World War raised the question of a new territorial redistribution.
Already on August 14, 1914, the Russian government announced its desire to unite all Poles within the borders of the Kingdom of Poland under the scepter of the Russian emperor. For their part, Germany and Austria-Hungary limited themselves to rather general declarations about the future freedom of the Poles without any specific promises.
On the first day of the war, the famous Appeal of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, to the Poles was published. Written in a high style, it became the basis of Russia's policy towards its Slavic neighbor. The text of the appeal read: “Poles! The hour has struck when the cherished dream of your grandfathers and fathers can come true. A century and a half ago, Poland's living body was torn to pieces, but her soul did not die. She lived in hope that the hour would come for the resurrection of the Polish people, their fraternal reconciliation with Great Russia!
Russian troops bring you the good news of this reconciliation. Let the borders that cut the Polish people into pieces be erased! May he be reunited under the scepter of the Russian Tsar! Under this scepter Poland will be reborn, free in its faith, in its language, in self-government.
Russia expects one thing from you - the same respect for the rights of those peoples with whom history has connected you!
WITH with an open heart, Great Russia is coming towards you with a brotherly outstretched hand. She believes that the sword that defeated the enemy at Grunwald will not rust. Russian armies are moving from the shores of the Pacific Ocean and the Northern Seas. The dawn of a new life is dawning for you. May the sign of the cross, the symbol of suffering and resurrection of nations, shine in that dawn!”
Written in a high style, with pathos quite appropriate here and designed for a strong emotional impact, the Appeal, according to the testimony of many Polish political figures of that time, found a fairly broad positive response from many parties and individual authorities both within Poland and among the Polish emigration.
The People's Democracy Party, the Polish Progressive Party, the Real Politics Party, and the Polish Progressive Association adopted a joint document on August 16, 1914, welcoming the Appeal of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army. In addition, the People's Democracy Party and the Real Politics Party protested in connection with the formation of J. Pilsudski's legions in Austria-Hungary with the aim of participating in the war against Russia. In general, the Appeal was assessed by the Polish side as an important positive political step towards granting Poland autonomy with the prospect of further transferring relations with Russia to a federal one and promoting the restoration of Polish state independence following the example of Finland.
A year later, speaking at the Russian Council of Ministers, its chairman I. L. Goremykin described the Polish government policy as follows: “I consider it my duty today to touch upon only one issue, standing, as it were, on the brink between the war and our internal affairs: This is a Polish question. Of course, it can be resolved in its entirety only after the end of the war. Now Poland is waiting first of all for the liberation of its lands from heavy German oppression. But even these days, it is important for the Polish people to know and believe that their future structure is finally and irrevocably predetermined by the Proclamation of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, announced by supreme command in the very first days of the war.
...His Majesty ordered the Council of Ministers to develop bills to grant Poland, at the end of the war, the right to freely structure its national, cultural and economic life on the basis of autonomy under the scepter of the Russian sovereigns and while maintaining a unified statehood.”
However, subsequent events showed a completely different course of events than the Petrograd plans. During the war, national Polish military units were created within the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and French armies. After the occupation of the Kingdom of Poland by German and Austro-Hungarian troops in 1915, the overwhelming majority of the Polish population came under the control of Germany and Austria-Hungary, which on November 5, 1916 proclaimed the “independence” of the Kingdom of Poland without specifying its borders. The Provisional State Council was created in December 1916 as a governing body. Russia's countermeasure was a statement on December 12, 1916 about the desire to create a “free Poland” from all its three parts. In January 1917, this statement was generally supported by England, France and the USA.
The conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty on March 3, 1918 set the government of the RSFSR the task of protecting its western border. Initially, this was carried out with the help of partisan and volunteer detachments put forward by the population of the border strip and reinforced by several similar formations sent from the center.
Already in March 1918, to unify the management of all these detachments, the headquarters of the Western section of the veil detachments was created. The task of this headquarters in combat terms was to guard and defend our western border; organizationally, it was necessary to rebuild all these partisan detachments and bring them into the same type of regular military formations in accordance with the decree on the formation of the Red Army.
At the same time, the position of the German Empire and its allies was increasingly deteriorating. On October 31, 1918, the revolution began in Austria-Hungary. In Lvov, on October 18, the Ukrainian National Council was created, headed by E. Petrushevich, which proclaimed the Western Ukrainian People's Republic (WUNR), the army of which was created on the basis of the Ukrainian military units of the Austro-Hungarian army. Accordingly, the Polish national movement intensified.
On October 1, the National Polish Council was formed in the Duchy of Cieszyn, which announced on October 30 the return of this territory to Poland. On October 23, the Polish Regency Council announced the creation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of War, headed by Józef Pilsudski, who was at that time imprisoned in the Magdeburg fortress in Germany.
On October 25, a Liquidation Commission was created in Krakow, taking over power in Western Galicia on behalf of the Polish state. On October 27, the Regency Council announced the creation of the Polish army with the inclusion of all Polish military formations. On November 7, a “people's government” arose in Lublin, which announced the dissolution of the Regency Council, proclaimed civil liberties, an 8-hour working day, the nationalization of forests, grants and primordial estates, the creation of self-governments and civil militia. All other social demands were postponed until decisions of the Legislative Diet.
Realizing that power was slipping from their hands, the Regency Council obtained from Germany the release of Pilsudski, who arrived in Warsaw on November 10. Negotiations with the Regency Council and the Lublin government led to the transfer of power to Piłsudski on November 14. On November 22, 1918, he signed a decree on the organization of supreme power in the Polish Republic, according to which Pilsudski was appointed “temporary head of state”, who had full legislative and executive powers. In fact, it was about the creation of Pilsudski's dictatorship, covered with a beautiful position - at the end of the 18th century. The head of state was Tadeusz Kościuszko.
On November 11, 1918, Germany signed an armistice in Compiegne, according to which it abandoned the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. On November 13, Moscow also annulled this treaty, making its provisions non-existent. On November 16, Pilsudski notified all countries except the RSFSR about the creation of an independent Polish state. On November 26–28, during an exchange of notes on the fate of the Regency Council mission located in Moscow, the Soviet government announced its readiness to establish diplomatic relations with Poland. On December 4, Warsaw announced that there would be no discussion of this problem until the issue of the mission was resolved.
During the exchange of notes in December 1918, the Soviet side proposed three times to establish diplomatic relations, but Poland, under various pretexts, refused these proposals. On January 2, 1919, the Poles shot the mission of the Russian Red Cross, which caused a new exchange of notes, this time with accusations from the RSFSR. Thus, Moscow recognized Poland and was ready to normalize relations with it, but Warsaw was preoccupied with defining its borders. Like most other politicians, Pilsudski was a supporter of restoring the Polish border of 1772 and believed that the longer the confusion continued in Russia, the more territory Poland would be able to control. Pilsudski’s unique maximum program was the creation of a number of national states on the territory of European Russia, which would be under the influence of Warsaw. This, in his opinion, would allow Poland to become a great power, replacing Russia in Eastern Europe.
It faced problems typical of young states born after the collapse of three empires: the formation of an internal power structure and the design of external borders. The latter was largely associated with the decision of the fate of the eastern territories still occupied by Oberkommando-Ost troops, although Austria-Hungary and Germany, paralyzed by the revolution, had already ceased hostilities. Under the terms of the armistice on November 11, 1918, Germany refused the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty and, in the matter of evacuation of troops from the eastern territories it occupied, was placed under the complete control of the Allied powers until the conclusion of a peace treaty. On November 13, after the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Red Army began its offensive to the west. Under these conditions, the head of the only representative of the Polish state in the international arena of the PNK in Paris, the leader of the National Democratic Party (Endek) Roman Dmowski appealed to the Entente with a request to delay the evacuation of German troops due to the threat to Poland from Bolshevik Russia, as well as the absence of the Polish army and the insecurity of the eastern borders.
By the autumn of 1918, two most common points of view on the problem of the eastern territories had emerged in Polish society. The Endeks developed the so-called “incorporation” doctrine, according to which the eastern territories that were part of Poland before 1772 were supposed to be included in the Polish state. In the memorandum on the territory of the Polish state, presented by the Endeks to US President William Wilson in Washington on October 8, 1918, there was the territory to which, according to the authors, Poland has the right as historically Polish, is designated.
It included part of Courland (the southern part of Lithuania), most of the Minsk province with Minsk and Slutsk, Kovno, the northwestern part of Vilna with Vilna, a significant part of the Suwalki province, as well as lands along the Lower Neman. Autonomy within the Polish state was provided for the 2.5 million Lithuanians living in this territory. In addition, the Endeks made claims to Eastern Galicia with Lvov and part of Volyn and Podolia and Kamenets-Podolsk. Territorially, Poland was supposed to be equal to Germany and border on Russia. As a result of expansion, its population would have grown to 38 million people, of which only 23 million were Poles. Later, the territorial program of the Endeks expanded further.
The peoples who inhabited the territories that, according to the Endeks, should have become part of Poland - Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians - were considered as not having the right to claim their own state due to their small numbers. This point of view was shared by Pilsudski's supporters.
The beginning of large-scale military operations
By the end of 1919, the Polish armed forces consisted of 21 infantry divisions and 7 motorized brigades - a total of 600 thousand soldiers. In the first months of 1920, mobilization was announced, which brought significant reinforcements to personnel. By the start of the 1920 campaign, Poland had deployed more than 700 thousand soldiers.
The Soviet government, seeking to move to a long-term peace, approached a number of European states, including Poland, with proposals for peace. However, the Polish government rejected the peace proposal, counting on a quick victory over the Soviet Republic devastated by the Civil War, and together with the Petliurists launched an offensive on April 25, 1920.
The Red Army could oppose the White Poles on the Southwestern Front with the 12th and 14th armies, and on the Western Front with the 15th and 16th armies. The four armies included 65,264 Red Army soldiers, 666 guns and 3,208 machine guns.
By the beginning of hostilities, the White Poles had a significant superiority in forces. On the Southwestern Front it was fivefold. This allowed the White Poles to succeed and create a direct threat to Kyiv.
Units of the 12th Army, having put up stubborn resistance, were still unable to hold back the superior forces of the White Poles and abandoned the cities of Ovruch, Korosten, Zhitomir, and Berdichev.
In the rear of the Red Army, the Petliurist, Makhnovist and other gangs significantly complicated the situation. To fight them, it was necessary to withdraw some troops from the Southwestern Front.
M. P. Grekov. Trumpeters of the first Cavalry Army. 1934 Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow
The 12th Army retreated to Kyiv across the Irpen River. And its flanks are towards the Dnieper River; The 14th Army fought stubborn battles in the Gaisin-Vapnyarka area. A gap of about 200 km formed between the armies, which was used by the White Poles command. The White Poles approached Kyiv. On May 6, units of the 12th Army left Kyiv and retreated beyond the Dnieper. Having captured Kiev, the Poles occupied a small bridgehead on the left bank of the Dnieper.
The Red Army command took decisive measures to disrupt the offensive of the Polish troops. The military operations of the troops of the 12th and 14th armies were intensified, and on May 14, 1920, the armies of the Western Front went on the offensive.
However, having underestimated the enemy and overestimated its own strength, the command of the Western Front led by M.N. Tukhachevsky, faced with the need to provide support to the troops of the Southwestern Front, launched an offensive without completing preparations and without organizing the interaction of the 15th and 16th armies. Due to poor communications, troop control was lost, which led to their scattering across different directions. All this allowed the Polish troops not only to avoid defeat, but also to counterattack and push back parts of the Western Front. However, the May offensive of the Red Army in Belarus still had a certain positive significance. It was possible to thwart the plans of the Polish command to attack in Belarus, and the area occupied by Soviet troops on the left bank of the Western Dvina could be used as a springboard for preparing a new offensive by the Red Army. The May offensive of Soviet troops in Belarus forced the Polish command to expend a significant part of its reserves and transfer some troops from the South-Eastern Front to the north, which weakened its strike force in Ukraine and forced it to abandon new operations in this direction. All this made it easier for the troops of the Southwestern Front to go on the offensive.
By that time, the Red Army had completely defeated the Kolchakites, the Ural and Orenburg White Cossacks and Denikin’s troops. But, unfortunately, many of the liberated Red Army units were located at a great distance from the new front, and the railways operated at low capacity.
To strengthen the Southwestern Front, the command of the Red Army sent the 25th Chapaev Division from the Uralsk region, the Bashkir Brigade from the Urals, and the 1st Cavalry Army from the Maykop region. Other military units were sent from different parts of the country.
During the battles with the Poles, the troops of the Southwestern Front, offering stubborn resistance, exhausted the enemy, but also suffered significant losses. To strengthen the front, Budyonny’s 1st Cavalry Army and Murtazin’s Bashkir Brigade arrived in the combat area. The 25th Chapaevskaya Division was also approaching. The offensive of the troops of the Southwestern Front was scheduled for May 26.
By the beginning of the operation, the armies of this front had 22.3 thousand bayonets and 24 thousand sabers. Opposite them were three Polish armies with 69.2 thousand bayonets and 9 thousand sabers.
The 3rd Polish Army occupied the Kyiv area, from the mouth of the Pripyat River to the Belaya Tserkov, and a small bridgehead on the left bank of the Dnieper. The White Poles had orders to hold the Kiev region at all costs. To the south of this army, to Lipovets, the 2nd Polish Army was located, and the 6th Army of the White Poles was located in the Lipovets - Gaysin sector to the Dniester. The enemy troops outnumbered the Red Army troops three times in the number of infantry. However, we had 2.5 times more cavalry. This was of great importance at that time. The troops of the Southwestern Front were given the immediate task: to encircle and destroy the 3rd Polish Army of General Rydz-Smigly, and then, together with the troops of the Western Front, defeat the enemy and liberate Ukraine.
The plan outlined by the command of the Southwestern Front to encircle and destroy the 3rd Polish Army, which was retreating from Kyiv, unfortunately, was not implemented. Firstly, because units of the 12th Army were unable to quickly cross the Dnieper: while retreating, the enemy blew up bridges. Secondly, a strong strike group was not created in a timely manner to cover the 3rd Polish Army from the north-west. Thirdly, the Fastov group failed to envelop the enemy from the flank and connect with the 12th Army. The 1st Cavalry Army was located in the areas of Zhitomir and Berdichev and was not transferred to the area of the Borodyanka station, where the enemy fought major battles, breaking through to the northwest.
After bloody battles, units of the 3rd Polish Army with heavy losses retreated through Borodyanka and Teterev, abandoning a large number of convoys and weapons.
The successful offensive of the Red Army on the Polish front caused confusion among the Pilsudski government and alarm in Entente circles. The Entente presented an ultimatum to the Republic of Soviets, which went down in history as the “ultimatum of Lord Curzon.” The Soviet government was demanded to stop military operations against the Polish invaders and conclude a truce. The line of location of the Polish troops was indicated: Grodno - Yalovka - Nemirov - Brest-Litovsk - Ustilug - Krylov, further west of Rava-Russkaya and east of Przemysl - to the Carpathians. The Red Army was asked to withdraw 50 kilometers east of this line.
British Foreign Minister Lord Curzon demanded that a truce also be signed with Wrangel and that the Crimean Isthmus be declared a “neutral zone.” If the Soviet government refused to accept these conditions, the Entente threatened to provide all possible assistance to the Polish troops.
Curzon's ultimatum caused general indignation of the Soviet people. In accordance with the decision of the Plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), the Soviet government sent a response note to England on July 17, 1920. The Bolshevik Party and government rejected the ultimatum. Curzon was told that England had no grounds or right to act as a mediator between Soviet Russia and lordly Poland.
A few days later, the Red Army, having launched a large-scale counteroffensive, not only liberated the occupied territory, but on August 12, 1920, approached Warsaw. However, the Polish troops defending their capital managed not only to repel the attack, but also, launching a counteroffensive, moved forward hundreds of kilometers and captured the western territories of Belarus and Ukraine.
The Battle of the Vistula began on August 13, 1920. As Soviet troops approached the Vistula and the capital of Poland, the resistance of Polish troops increased. The enemy tried, using water barriers, to delay the further advance of the Soviet troops and put their units in order in order to subsequently launch a counteroffensive. On August 13, the 21st and 27th Soviet divisions captured a strong enemy stronghold - the city of Radzimin, located 23 km from Warsaw. The breakthrough in the Radzimin area created an immediate threat to Warsaw. In this regard, General Haller ordered to accelerate the start of the counterattack of the 5th Polish Army and the strike force on the river. Wieprze. Having brought up two fresh divisions from the reserve, the Polish command launched fierce counterattacks on August 14, trying to restore the situation in the Radzimin area. Soviet troops repelled the enemy's onslaught and even advanced forward in some places. The Soviet 3rd Army, in cooperation with the left flank of the 15th Army, captured two forts of the Modlin fortress on that day. In the battles near Radzimin, the Soviet troops clearly showed a shortage of ammunition and especially shells. It is no coincidence that on the evening of August 13, the commander of the 27th division, V.K. on your own initiative, rather than to retreat under duress from the enemy and defeated.” Of course, this proposal was rejected.
On August 14, the Polish 5th Army went on the offensive. North of Warsaw, her cavalry group at 10 am on August 15 broke into Ciechanów, where the headquarters of the 4th Soviet Army was located. The disorderly retreat of the army headquarters led to their loss of contact both with their troops and with the front headquarters, as a result of which the entire right flank was left without control. Having received information about enemy action north of Warsaw, the command of the Western Front ordered the troops of the 4th and 15th Soviet armies to defeat the enemy wedged between them. However, unorganized counterattacks did not bring results, although units of the 4th Army had the opportunity to reach the rear of the Polish troops north of Warsaw. On August 14, by order of the chairman of the RVSR L. D. Trotsky, the commander-in-chief demanded that the troops of the Western Front occupy the Danzig corridor, cutting off Poland from the military supplies of the Entente.
During the fighting on the outskirts of Warsaw on August 14–15, Soviet troops were still fighting fiercely for Radzimin, which was eventually occupied by the enemy, and the 8th Infantry Division of the 16th Army broke through to the Vistula at Gura Kalwaria, but it was felt that these successes were achieved at the limit of their strength. At 14.35 on August 15, the command of the Western Front gave the order to regroup the 1st Cavalry Army in the Ustilug - Vladimir-Volynsky area in 4 transitions. However, the order, signed only by Tukhachevsky, caused correspondence between headquarters about its confirmation. On the same day, the front command, having received information from the 12th Army about the concentration of enemy forces across the river. Wieprz ordered the 16th Army to move the front south, but time had already been lost. News from the front indicated that the initiative was slowly beginning to pass to the enemy.
On August 16, the offensive of Polish troops began on the Ciechanow-Lublin front. At dawn of this day, Pilsudski's strike group went on the offensive from the Wieprz River, which without much effort broke through the weak front of the Mozyr group and began to quickly advance to the northeast. Having received information about the activation of the enemy on the front of the Mozyr group, its command and the command of the 16th Army initially decided that it was just a small counterattack. In this situation, Polish troops received an important gain in time for their operation and continued their rapid advance towards Brest-Litovsk, trying to cut off and press all the armies of the Western Front to the German border. Realizing the danger from the south, the Soviet command decided to create a defense along the pp. Lipovets and the Western Bug, however, it took time to regroup the troops, and there were no reserves in the rear of the front. Already on the morning of August 19, the Poles knocked out the weak units of the Mozyr group from Brest-Litovsk. An attempt to regroup the troops of the 16th Army also failed, since the enemy was ahead of the Soviet units when reaching any lines suitable for defense. On August 20, Polish troops reached the line Brest-Litovsk - Vysoko-Litovsk - pp. Narew and Western Bug, covering the main forces of the Western Front from the south. It should also be taken into account that all this time the Polish command had the opportunity to intercept and read radiograms from the Soviet command, which, of course, facilitated the actions of the Polish Army.
By August 25, the front had stabilized along the line Augustow - Lipsk - Kuznica - Wisloch - Belovezh - Zhabinka - Opalin. Back on August 19, when the troops of the Western Front had already retreated from Warsaw, the 1st Cavalry Army began to be withdrawn from near Lvov. However, sensing the weakening of the onslaught of the Soviet troops, the enemy launched a series of counterattacks, and on August 21–24, Cavalry formations had to support their neighbors. Trotsky’s directive of August 20 did not add clarity, demanding “energetic and immediate assistance from the Cavalry Army to the Western Front,” but drawing “special attention of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Army to ensure that the occupation of Lvov itself does not affect the deadline for the implementation of these orders.” Thus, instead of a clear order to stop Lvov’s attack, Moscow again limited itself to a vague order. Not to mention the fact that now the transfer of the 1st Cavalry Army was no longer needed. Moreover, on August 25, the 1st Cavalry Army, by order of the commander-in-chief, was thrown into a raid on Zamosc, which had neither meaning nor purpose.
After the hostilities, long peace negotiations began, the result of which was the Riga Peace Treaty, signed at 20.30 on March 18, 1921. The parties pledged to respect each other’s state sovereignty and not to create or support organizations fighting the other side. A procedure was provided for the selection of citizens. The Soviet side undertook to pay Poland 30 million rubles in gold in coins or bars and transfer the train and other property worth 18,245 thousand rubles in gold. Poland was freed from the debts of the Russian Empire and negotiations on an economic agreement were envisaged. Diplomatic relations were established between the parties. The treaty was ratified by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR on April 14, by the Polish Sejm on April 15, and by the Central Executive Committee of the Ukrainian SSR on April 17, 1921. On April 30, after the exchange of ratification instruments in Minsk, the treaty came into force. The Soviet-Polish war ended.
The events of 1920 showed that it was impossible to fully implement both Polish and Soviet plans, and the parties had to compromise. They finally looked at each other as equals, which was reflected in the peace negotiations and the Treaty of Riga. The territorial issue was resolved between Moscow and Warsaw by a classic compromise of force. The Soviet-Polish border was determined arbitrarily according to the randomly formed configuration of the front line. This new border had no other justification, and could not have had it. Having received 1/2 of the territory of Belarus and 1/4 of Ukraine, which were perceived as “wild outskirts” intended for polonization, Poland became a state in which Poles made up only 64% of the population. Although the parties abandoned mutual territorial claims, the Riga border became an insurmountable barrier between Poland and the USSR.
N. Kopylov
© Shishov A. V., 2016
© Veche Publishing House LLC, 2016
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A word from the author
If the First World War became the calvary of the Russian Empire, then, in fact, the Civil War that emerged from it put a bloody end to old Russia, starting with a coup d'etat in October 1917 and ending in 1922 on the shores of Sea of Japan in Primorye. The World War heated class contradictions to the limit, to which were added its disasters. In other words, the power of the Romanov dynasty did not withstand the test of war, as well as the three empires that sunk into history with it - German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman.
The Civil War divided Russia into two irreconcilable camps to the extreme - the Red Cause and the White Cause. If the vanquished fought to preserve the foundations of the old statehood, then the vanquished dreamed of a world revolution in which Soviet Russia was to become the first proletarian bastion. Those who did not want various reasons to participate in that internal war, came under the pressure of the slogan “He who is not with us is against us.” And they also were forced to take up arms to fight people like them.
If the vanquished tried in many ways to recreate the old Russian army with its centuries-old traditions, then the victors created an army of a new type - the Red Workers' and Peasants' Army, abbreviated as the Red Army. Each of them had its own generals and military leaders. If in the white troops these were overwhelmingly former tsarist generals and senior officers, then in the red troops these became, having gone through the crucible of the Civil War, as a rule, former junior officers of the old army and its lower ranks who had gone through the World War.
All the heroes of this book belong to the elite of the leaders of the Red Army. They are different in origin: from the proletarian systems of the city and village, from the Cossacks, many from the nobility. Most of them have military schools, the General Staff Academy, and wartime warrant officer schools behind them. During the Civil War, they were called military specialists (military specialists) in the ranks of the Red Army. A minority learned the art of command in war, but not always at the front. Both Supreme Commanders of the Soviet Republic, I. I. Vatsetis and S. S. Kamenev, were former colonels who successfully graduated from the Military Academy of the General Staff.
Four of them were professional underground revolutionaries - V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, K. E. Voroshilov, L. D. Trotsky and M. V. Frunze. N.I. Makhno can also be counted among them. All of them at different times served as People's Commissar for Military (and Naval) Affairs. Only the first of them had a military education; the rest were taught the art of command and war by the Civil War.
Some of the Red military leaders were the “nuggets” of that war, whom the revolutionary elements threw to the commanding heights of the Red Army. These are: S. M. Budyonny, O. I. Gorodovikov, P. E. Dybenko, G. I. Kotovsky and V. I. Chapaev. The rest, not named above, wore officer shoulder straps on their shoulders during the World War.
The civil war reached a particular intensity in the Cossack regions, the majority of whose population at the beginning swung to the side of the White cause. From the Cossack class, Don residents O. I. Gorodovikov and F. K. Mironov, Orenburg resident N. D. Kashirin and Kuban resident I. L. Sorokin became the military leaders of the Red Cause. The fate of the last three Red Cossacks is tragic.
All the heroes of the book began the Civil War by commanding various detachments, regiments, and brigades. But among them there were also those who immediately or almost immediately soared to the heights of the military power of the Red Cause at the very beginning of the all-Russian “fire”. These are: V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, I. I. Vatsetis, P. E. Dybenko, S. S. Kamenev, L. D. Trotsky, M. N. Tukhachevsky and V. I. Shorin. But their fate in the ranks of the Red Army is connected not only with ups, but also with downs. Only one of them, Kamenev, died by natural causes.
Half of the book’s heroes, who shone in the ranks of the fighting Red Army and left their personal mark on the history of the Civil War, became victims of Stalin’s repressions of the 30s. Their names: V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, V. K. Blyukher, I. I. Vatsetis, A. I. Gekker, P. E. Dybenko, A. I. Egorov, N. D. Kashirin, A. I Kork, M. N. Tukhachevsky, I. P. Uborevich, I. F. Fedko and V. I. Shorin. It is noteworthy that three of them, recognized Red commanders, became the first of five people awarded the title of Marshal of the Soviet Union for military services to the socialist Fatherland: Blucher, Egorov and Tukhachevsky. Vatsetis was the first Commander-in-Chief of the Republic. For almost two decades their names remained overboard national history. If they were remembered, it was with an unkind word.
One person, S.S. Kamenev, the former second Commander-in-Chief of the Republic, was ranked among the “enemies of the people” after his death, having “luckily” escaped execution by court in the 30s. But he too was temporarily “erased” from Soviet history, from the “faceless” history of the Civil War in Russia.
During the Civil War, such “nuggets” in the galaxy of Red military leaders as F.K. Mironov and I.L. Sorokin were killed without trial or investigation in Soviet prisons (in Moscow and Stavropol). Both of them came from the Cossacks, the first from the Don, the second from the Kuban. Neither one nor the other got along well in the ongoing war with the Moscow authorities. So their life ending for history does not look like something incomprehensible or illogical.
Soon after the end of the Civil War, another red “nugget” was killed by his own people - G.I. Kotovsky, also a man with a complex, rebellious character. There is still no consensus on the motives for the murder, and there never will be.
Of all the heroes of the book, only one legendary division commander, V.I. Chapaev, died in the fire of the Civil War. He died from a bullet sent by a white Cossack. But who can say what the fate of this “nugget” of the Red Cause would have been if he had lived to see Stalin’s repressions? The question is controversial and therefore open.
The former chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs during the Civil War, L. D. Trotsky, a personal enemy of Stalin and therefore who became an irreconcilable ideological enemy of the Soviet Union, was killed in Mexico by an NKVD agent. But the fact that he stood at the pinnacle of the military power of the Red Cause during that war is a fact that is difficult to dispute today.
Only three book heroes died by their own death before the Great Patriotic War. These are: S. S. Vostretsov (who could well have followed his Far Eastern comrades Blucher and Uborevich), M. F. Frunze, whose death after the operation raises many questions, and the non-party hero of the Civil War, who three times entered into an alliance with the Soviet government “father” N I. Makhno, who died unknown in a Warsaw hospital.
Only three of the personalities in this book survived the “execution” 30s and the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945: S. M. Budyonny, K. E. Voroshilov and O. I. Gorodovikov. All of them came from the ranks of the command staff of the famous 1st Cavalry Army, all of them were personally well known to J.V. Stalin. Budyonny and Voroshilov are among the five commanders of the Civil War who became the first Marshals of the Soviet Union. In terms of the number of lifetime laurels, not a single hero of the Civil War can compare with them.
They are all different, these commanders and military leaders of the Red Cause, who gave and are ready to give their lives for Soviet power, for the power of the working people. But she prepared for most of them death and obscurity for many years, about which there is no need to argue. But historical truth sooner or later takes its toll, paying a well-deserved tribute to the true merits of the heroes of this book in the field of the Civil War in Russia. That war that incinerated not only the country, but also the souls of its people.
Alexey Shishov,military historian and writer
Antonov-Ovseenko Vladimir Alexandrovich
The path from the storming of the Winter Palace to the post of firing squad prosecutor of the RSFSR
V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko could rightfully be called a man of amazing destiny during his lifetime. A professional revolutionary, party publicist, one of the leaders of the storming of the Winter Palace, People's Commissar for Military Affairs, commander of Soviet troops in the South of Russia and the Ukrainian Front, diplomat and People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR became a victim of Stalin's repressions of the 30s.
Born in 1883 in the ancient city of Chernigov. His father was an officer with the rank of captain A. A. Ovseenko, who received military awards for the war with the Turks. Vladimir had two brothers and two sisters. At the age of 18 he graduated from the Voronezh Cadet Corps.
In September 1901, Vladimir Ovseenko, at the insistence of his parents, entered the capital's Nikolaev Military Engineering School. But the next month, in October, the cadet, an unbalanced and hot-tempered man, was expelled from the school for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the “Tsar and the Fatherland.” So he protested against his parents’ “compulsion” to become, like his father, a military man. He was first arrested for 11 days.
At the end of the year, once in Warsaw, he became a member of the student Social Democratic circle. In the spring of the following year, 1902, having moved to St. Petersburg, he worked in the Alexander port and as a coachman for the Society for the Protection of Animals.
In the same 1902, Vladimir Ovseenko again entered the military school - Vladimir in St. Petersburg, which trained infantry officers. At the end of the year, he joined the ranks of the RSDLP and created an underground circle at the school, being close to the socialist revolutionaries (SRs), then established contact with the Bolshevik organization. He was engaged in the distribution of prohibited literature. Then he was not yet twenty years old.
He graduated from the military school in the first category, receiving the highest score in all subjects, that is, 12 points. This meant: “Knows everything covered very thoroughly, answers firmly, develops ideas clearly, arranging answers in a systematic order, resolves all questions, refutes all objections, expresses himself accurately, coherently and freely.”
Ovseenko graduated from school with the rank of second lieutenant with an appointment to the 40th Kolyvan Infantry Regiment stationed in Warsaw. Even before arriving at the regiment, while on leave, the young officer completed a party assignment, receiving illegal literature and appearances from the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania in Vilna. He constantly strived for active practical work as an illegal underground worker. For transporting a cargo of illegal literature, he was arrested for 10 days.
In Warsaw, Vladimir Ovseenko and his young wife Anna Mikhailovna, a graduate of the Bestuzhev courses, became activists of a local underground organization. The second lieutenant takes part in an unsuccessful attempt to free the famous Polish Social Democrat S. Kasprzak, sentenced to death, and succeeds in publishing the underground “Soldier's List”. During the revolutionary events of early 1905, he was included in the list of “unreliable” soldiers and officers of the Warsaw garrison.
In March 1905, second lieutenant Vladimir Ovseenko was assigned to the active army in Manchuria. But he did not get into the Japanese War, leaving military service and becoming an underground worker, that is, a professional revolutionary, which became his life’s work. Emigrates to Austria for a short time.
In the same year, he took part in an unsuccessful attempt to raise an uprising in the Warsaw suburb of Pulawy by soldiers of two infantry regiments - the 71st Belevsky and 72nd Tula and an artillery brigade. In those events, a second lieutenant who deserted from the army wounded a company sergeant major with a revolver shot and managed to escape. Ovseenko gets his first underground nickname, “Bayonet.”
He has to leave Poland for St. Petersburg. The capital committee of the RSDLP sends him for underground work to the sea fortress of Kronstadt, having documents for the Austrian citizen Stefan Dolnitsko. There he organizes illegal gatherings of soldiers and sailors. He was arrested, served his sentence in Kronstadt and was released at the end of the same 1905 under an amnesty.
Also in 1905, he participated in an attempt to organize an uprising in the garrison of St. Petersburg (railway battalion and sappers). Antonov-Avseenko on the pages of the “Red Fleet” (1924) spoke about that event as follows:
“...I, as a former officer, must take command. Starts early in the morning.
The night has passed. No one came, as agreed, for me. Later I found out that the soldiers refused to march.”
Before October, Antonov-Ovseyenko worked in various underground (military) organizations of the united RSDLP, joining the Mensheviks. He announced his entry into the Bolshevik Party at the end of May 1917. In March 1906, he escaped from the Sushchevsky arrest house. In May of the following year, a visiting session of the Odessa Military District Court sentenced Anton Kabanov to death. The execution was replaced by 20 years of hard labor. A month later he escaped from a Sevastopol prison. In 1909, he spent 6 months in prison as Anton Hooke, after which he emigrated to France.
There, in Paris, Vladimir Alexandrovich received the party pseudonym Antonov, and subsequently began to write himself as Antonov-Ovseyenko. Under this double surname, he entered the history of the Civil War in Russia, as well as the history of Stalinist repressions of the 30s.
In May 1917 he returned to Russia. In Helsingfors he edited the newspaper Priboy. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly from the Northern Front on the list of the RSDLP (b). Conducted party work in Finland and among the sailors of the Baltic Fleet. In mid-October he became secretary of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee (VRK).
Antonov-Ovseenko went down in the history of the October Revolution as one of the leaders of the storming of the Winter Palace and the leader of the arrest of the Provisional Government. On behalf of the Military Revolutionary Committee, he was in charge of the distribution of detachments of Baltic sailors to key points in the city on the Neva and headed the “field headquarters” for the capture of the Winter Palace. He signed an ultimatum addressed to the Commander-in-Chief of the Petrograd Military District, who, in the realities of October, commanded few people.
On the night of October 25-26 (November 7-8, new style), the Winter Palace was taken by revolutionary troops by assault. As a matter of fact, there was no one to defend the Provisional Government, and the Prime Socialist A.F. Kerensky managed to escape from the capital in time. V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko himself recalled the arrest of the Provisional Government as follows:
“...The ministers froze at the table, merging into one trembling pale spot.
“In the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee, I declare you under arrest.”
- What is there! Finish them!.. Hit!
- To order! The Military Revolutionary Committee is in charge here!”
American journalist A.R. Williams witnessed the historical storming of the Winter Palace and the subsequent events in red Petrograd. He wrote about Antonov-Ovseenko like this:
“I remember Antonov’s pale, ascetic face, thick, blond hair under a picturesque broad-browed hat, a calm, concentrated appearance that makes you forget his purely civilian appearance...
One sailor told me that at the top, after Chudnovsky had compiled a list of those arrested, Antonov asked: “Comrades, do we have cars?” Someone answered: “No.” And others shouted: “Nothing, they’ll walk on foot!” Enough, let's go!” Antonov asked for silence, thought a little and said: “Okay, we will take them to the (Peter and Paul) Fortress on foot.”
At about 4 o’clock in the morning, Antonov-Ovseenko ordered the arrested “temporary” ministers to be taken to the casemates of the Trubetskoy bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Saying goodbye to the already appointed commissar of the fortress, the “liquidator” of the Provisional Government said:
– I’m going to Smolny with a report...
At the Smolny Institute, Vladimir Alexandrovich addressed the delegates of the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets with a standing ovation from the audience. On October 27, Antonov-Ovseyenko was elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets (CEC) and joined the first composition of the Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government - the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom).
The Soviet government, elected by the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets, included the Committee on Military and Naval Affairs (renamed the Council of People's Commissars for Military and Naval Affairs), which consisted of three people's commissars: V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, warrant officer N. V. Krylenko and Chairman of Tsentrobalt P.E. Dybenko. During the formation of the Council of People's Commissars, V.I. Lenin distributed responsibilities between them as follows: “Dybenko - the naval ministry, Krylenko - the external front, Antonov - the military ministry and the internal front.” The “internal front” meant the fight against the rising counter-revolution.
The next day, October 28, Antonov-Ovseenko was appointed assistant commander of the Petrograd Military District. This was one of many cases when he, a former second lieutenant, came in handy with the knowledge acquired at the Vladimir Military School.
On November 7, he was appointed commander of the defense of Petrograd and the troops of the Petrograd Military District. The revolution needed to be defended: the 3rd Cavalry Corps of General P.N. Krasnov and Socialist Minister A.F. Kerensky was marching on Red St. Petersburg. In the capital itself, cadets from military schools could rebel. The “front” line, which Antonov-Ovseenko took up organizing, passed along the Pulkovo Heights.
Both the People's Commissar for Military Affairs and the commander of the 3rd Cavalry Corps turned out to be one of the main characters in the October events of 1917. Krasnov carried out the order of the head of the already former Provisional Government, who fled from the capital to the front-line Pskov, to march on the “rebellious” Petrograd. An attempt to take a city of a million people with a rebellious garrison of 300 thousand people with several thousand cavalry looked completely unrealistic. But in Smolny they took such a campaign of the class enemy more than seriously.
Moreover, only about nine less than a hundred of the 1st Don (9th and 10th Don Cossack regiments) and Ussuri Cossack divisions with 18 horse guns, one armored car and one armored train approached Petrograd. With these forces (they can even be called symbolic - only 700 Cossacks), Major General Krasnov launched an attack on red Petrograd in the area of the village of Pulkovo. That is, he embarked on an outright adventure.
Krasnov's troops were defeated in a multi-hour battle on October 30 at the Pulkovo Heights by thousands of detachments of St. Petersburg Red Guards and revolutionary Baltic sailors. They were commanded by the Left Socialist Revolutionary Lieutenant Colonel M. A. Muravyov. There is no need to talk about the equality of forces of the parties in terms of the number of people, cannons, machine guns and other things.
Before this, about 30 thousand mobilized people, sent from the capital to dig trenches, created the Zaliv-Neva defensive line in a matter of days. However, he found himself unclaimed in those events. In addition, the Krasnov Cossacks were not eager to fight for the “temporary” ministers and their head Kerensky and did not persist in battle.
This is how the term appeared in Russian (Soviet) history: the counter-revolutionary rebellion of Kerensky - Krasnov in October 1917. Today historians argue about its essence. First of all, it is debated whether these events constituted a “rebellion”, since the order to the 3rd Cavalry Corps was given by the head of the Russian government.
The battle on the Pulkovo Heights ended with negotiations in Krasnoye Selo with a delegation of revolutionary Baltic sailors. They ended with agreement for the Cossacks to go home with horses and weapons. Both sides were satisfied with this outcome of the armed confrontation near the capital. The corps commander was invited to negotiations, arrested and taken to Petrograd, to Smolny. After interrogation, he was released on the Russian officer’s parole not to speak out against the Soviet regime again. P.N. Krasnov escaped from house arrest using documents from the Don Cossack Committee.
The head of the Provisional Government, socialist A.F. Kerensky, warned by Krasnov, also successfully fled from red Petrograd from Gatchina. He had to change into a leather chauffeur suit and cover half his face with motorcycle goggles. He was not accepted into the White movement in the south of Russia, and soon found himself overseas, in the USA, where he ended his life. It seems that Antonov-Ovseenko, who “liquidated” the “provisional” government, was often remembered by Kerensky.
The People's Commissar himself at the Pulkovo Heights, who were defended from the “counter-revolutionary Cossacks” by the revolutionary detachments of Baltic sailors, Petrograd Red Guards and soldiers of the capital’s garrison that he had assembled, was not there for a compelling “good” reason. During a speech by the cadets in the capital, he was accidentally arrested by them and spent the night at the capital's telephone exchange seized by the rebels. The cadets exchanged Antonov-Ovseenko for a promise to save their lives, which was accepted by the Soviet side.
Returning to Smolny, Vladimir Alexandrovich got acquainted with the affairs of suppressing the cadet rebellion. Most attentively he read the report that the cadets of the Vladimir Military School, from which he graduated with the rank of second lieutenant thirteen years ago, held on most stubbornly and longest.
On November 23, Antonov-Ovseenko became a member of the board of the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs (at the same time as N. I. Podvoisky and N. V. Krylenko, with whom he was well acquainted in October).
Vladimir Aleksandrovich turned out to be the military leader of the newly established Soviet power, who was given the reins of power to suppress the emerging counter-revolution. On December 8, he was appointed commander of all Red forces in southern Russia. He was entrusted with general leadership of “operations against the Kaledin troops and their accomplices.”
There was no Red Army then, and the Red Guard units great strength didn't show up. The decree on the reduction of the old Russian army (it had already practically collapsed) at the front and in the rear was already signed by Lenin, Krylenko and Antonov-Ovseenko.
Appointed to lead operations against the troops of the Don military ataman A. M. Kaledin and the Ukrainian Rada, V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko left Petrograd on the same day, December 8, 1917, and on the 10th arrived in Kharkov with the mandate of the Council of People's Commissars, which read:
“This certificate was given to Comrade Antonov that he, with the consent of Commander-in-Chief Krylenko, Commissar Podvoisky and the entire board of military affairs, is authorized for the general management of operations against the Kaledin troops and their accomplices.
Prev. Sov. Nar. Com. V. Ulyanov (Lenin).”
On December 10, at the Mogilev Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, which still existed, the so-called Revolutionary Field Headquarters (RFH) was created. He was directly subordinate to V.A. Antonov-Ovseenko, carrying out his orders to concentrate forces collected against Ataman Kaledin.
Finding himself in Kharkov and having dealt with the situation in the South of Russia, where the first outbreaks of the Civil War had already broken out on the Cossack Don, Antonov-Ovseyenko drew up a plan to combat the southern counter-revolution. This plan was communicated to V.I. Lenin for discussion at a meeting of the Council of People's Commissars. What did the People’s Commissar of the Committee on Military and Naval Affairs of the Council of People’s Commissars, who was responsible for the “military ministry and the internal front”, propose:
“The plan was this - a defensive line from Poltava (the Rada troops were moving there. - A.Sh.), the capture of the junction stations Lozovaya, Sinelnikovo (connection with Yekaterinoslav), which ensures against the passage of hostile trains from the west and the route to the Donetsk basin (from Lozovaya - bypassing the unreliable route through Balakleya). Capture of Kupyansk, movement from Kharkov and Belgorod; an immediate attack on arming the workers of the basin, the Donetsk region, etc. After the concentration of some forces in the Donetsk basin - the displacement of Cossack bands prowling about 100 miles south of Nikitovka, and movement along several routes to the east against Kaledin, simultaneously with the advance to the east - a head strike from Voronezh (Kaledin’s main forces are located along the Voronezh-Rostov railway), from the east - from Tsaritsyn... and from the south - from the Caucasus ... "
The Antonov-Ovseenko plan was connected with the realities of what was happening. The “Kaledin counter-revolutionary nest” - the capital of the Don Cossack army, the city of Novocherkassk - was encircled and destroyed. The capture of junction stations on the railway line on the Southern Railway (Kharkov - Simferopol) made it possible to control the military trains that went from the collapsed Russian Front into the interior of Russia, and above all the trains with Cossack troops - regiments, individual hundreds, artillery batteries.
Antonov-Ovseenko named the forces that could be relied upon in the fight against Ataman Kaledin. These were a detachment of the former warrant officer R.F. Sivers, a “significant detachment” of Black Sea sailors from Sevastopol, a Moscow detachment of the Red Guard (200 people), a revolutionary reserve infantry regiment in Belgorod, workers of Donbass, who still had to be organized and armed.
This plan already in January 1918 underwent significant changes. The attacks on Novocherkassk from the side of Tsaritsyn and the Caucasus had to be “put aside”, and the attack on the Kaledin Don had to be made only from the side of the Donetsk coal basin. But Antonov-Ovseenko had already gathered more forces for this operation - a large detachment of Yu.V. Sablin from Moscow, Soviet detachments from the front-line Don Cossacks, an infantry regiment from Finland, Petrov’s detachment. The arrival of Latvian riflemen was expected.
These Soviet troops included the red “Ukrainian Cossack Regiment in Kharkov.” This was the 1st regiment of the Red Cossacks, formed on the basis of the disarmed 2nd reserve Ukrainian regiment of the “Petlyura orientation”. The regiment was formed and commanded by member of the Central Executive Committee of Ukraine V. M. Primakov, a hero of the Civil War and a victim of Stalinist repressions of the 30s.
Later, V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko, in his “Notes on the Civil War,” noted: “The main blow could only come from Donbass, since only from here could it be properly prepared.” There was no real help to be expected from the Tsaritsyn Defense Headquarters headed by S.K. Minin. The 39th Infantry Division, which voluntarily left the Caucasian Front, “settled to feed” in the villages of Kuban and Stavropol and soon found itself in the fire of Cossack uprisings.
In Kharkov, the People's Commissar immediately created the headquarters of the Southern Front. The left Socialist Revolutionary Lieutenant Colonel Muravyov, with whom Vladimir Aleksandrovich worked together in Petrograd, when the “rebellion” of the 3rd Cavalry Corps of General Krasnov was suppressed, was appointed as his chief.
Antonov-Ovseenko really had high professional military training. Memoirist M.Z. Levinson writes that when at the end of December a combined detachment of Putilov workers and soldiers of the 176th regiment arrived in Kharkov under his command, the commander and assistant N.P. Eremeev appeared in the Antonov-Ovseenko carriage. They saw a man with glasses, long hair, who looked like a musician or teacher. By the end of the conversation, having received a combat mission, they were convinced that they were dealing with a person who knew military affairs very well.
The People's Commissar, gathering the forces of the Red Guard in Kharkov, demonstrated assertiveness and organizational talent. This was the case with the formation of the Southern Revolutionary Automotive Armored Division here, which became the first such unit in the Red Army. It was created, as they say, from the world, piece by piece, and in a variety of ways. It consisted of six squads of 4–5 armored cars each. At the beginning of January, the command of these Red armored forces was entrusted to A.I. Selyavkin.
In Kharkov itself, warrant officer Sivers with his detachment, reinforced with artillery, attacked the barracks of the 19th armored vehicle division, which supported the Central Rada. He was disarmed, and the main trophies of the Reds were 4 armored cars.
10 armored vehicles were delivered by the Baltic sailor Khovrin, who with his detachment, on the way from Petrograd to the South in the city of Kursk, disarmed the reserve armored vehicle division of the British military mission.
An armored detachment of the Kharkov military commandant's office was mobilized to fight the Kaledin White Cossacks. It consisted of 5 heavy vehicles from the English company Persorats, armed with cannons.
In addition, V.A. Antonov-Ovseenko himself, who arrived in Kharkov with detachments of Red Guards, brought with him 12 Austin armored cars from Petrograd.
Antonov-Ovseenko had to lead not only military operations against the Whites on the Don, but also the fight against sabotage in areas where power was in the hands of the Soviets. On January 10, 1918, the commandant of the Aleksandrovsk station (now the city of Zaporozhye, Ukraine) Kuznetsov telegraphed the People's Commissar in Kharkov:
“All postal and telephone employees went on strike, as well as other local government employees.”
Two hours later, the following order from V.A. Antonov-Ovseenko was sent from there to Aleksandrovsk, which demanded:
“I declare the city under martial law. The senior officials of the post office, telephone and others should be arrested and taken to Kharkov. The rest are asked to report to work within 24 hours, those who do not show up are arrested according to the list and sent under escort to Yuzovka and Makeevka for forced labor to clean up the mines. Publish this order widely."
The attack on the white South began in three columns - the former ensign of the Bolshevik R.F. Sivers, the former ensign of the left Socialist Revolutionary Yu.V. Sablin (soon one of the leaders of the rebellion of the left Socialist Revolutionaries in Moscow) and the former colonel, then left Socialist Revolutionary A.I. Egorova. Sivers' column took Ilovaiskoe at the end of December, Sablin reached Lugansk and Rodakov, Egorov occupied Yekaterinoslav.
Directly against the forces of Ataman Kaledin, 17.5 thousand Red Guards, revolutionary sailors and soldiers attacked under the command of R. F. Sivers, Yu. V. Sablin and G. K. Petrov. At their disposal on the front line they had 48 artillery pieces, 4 armored trains, 4 armored vehicles and 40 machine guns.
Simultaneously with the attack on the White Cossack Don, the Red troops were advancing towards Kyiv, which was in the hands of the Central Rada. Kyiv was liberated largely thanks to the uprising of workers at the Arsenal plant. Antonov-Ovseenko's former assistant G.I. Chudnovsky, who was appointed by him as the first commandant of the Winter Palace, was released from prison. Now he, sentenced to death by the Rada, became the first commandant of Soviet Kyiv, to which the Central Executive Committee of Ukraine moved from Kharkov.
The red columns advanced with fighting. At the end of January, Antonov-Ovseenko reported to Moscow about the successes achieved: “The stations of Likhaya, Zverevo, Sulin, on the way north of Novocherkassk, are occupied by victorious revolutionary troops.”
Ataman A.M. Kaledin never managed to raise the Don to fight the Soviet regime, and he shot himself. The Don Army “swayed” to the side of the White Cause later, but not at the beginning of 1918: the Cossacks were tired of the war and had not yet experienced the Red Terror. In February, Red troops occupy the cities of Rostov and Novocherkassk, the capital of the Don region. The remnants of the White Cossacks went to the Salsky steppes, and the Kornilov Volunteer Army went on its first Kuban (“Ice”) campaign.
The impact on the white Don was impressive. The well-known Soviet historian of the Civil War N. E. Kakurin considered the advantages of a strategic solution to this difficult task to be “the flexibility of its decisions depending on the situation”, “the desire to concentrate as much of one’s forces as possible in the directions chosen for delivering the main attacks.”
Kavtaradze A.G. Military specialists in the service of the Republic of Soviets 1917-1920. Publishing house "Science", 1988
Chapter 4. Military specialists in the Red Army
MILITARY SPECIALISTS IN HIGH COMMAND AND STAFF POSITIONS IN THE ACTUAL RED ARMY http://istmat.info/node/21726
It is right to believe that it was precisely the system of operational formations established by the Supreme Military Council in March 1918, called “veils,” that laid the foundations for the high “share” of military specialists in the Active Red Army, especially in senior command and staff positions, which , essentially preserved until the end of the Civil War.
In order to substantiate this point of view, we will analyze command and staff positions in the unit front—army—division, based on what was published in “ Directives of the command of the fronts of the Red Army (1917-1922)"(M., 1978. T. 4. P. 529-595) list of its management team.
On the main fronts of the civil war in 1918-1920, starting from the Eastern against the White Czechs and internal counter-revolution (June 1918) to the Southern, created in September 1920 against General Wrangel, in positions front commander consisted 20 people(Moreover, M.V. Frunze-Mikhailov was appointed to this position three times, V.M. Gittis, A.I. Egorov, D.N. Nadezhny, M.N. Tukhachevsky and V.I. Shorin - twice).
Of these 20 people 17 , i.e. 85%, were military specialists - career officers (Table 18).
Positions chiefs of staff of the fronts Only military specialists - former career officers - replaced them: 22 General Staff officers (A.K. Anders, F.M. Afanasyev, A.A. Baltiysky, V.E. Garf, V.P. Glagolev, A.I. Davydov, N. N. Domozhirov, I. I. Zashchuk, A. K. Kolenkovsky, F. V. Kostyaev, V. S. Lazarevich, P. P. Lebedev, V. V. Lyubimov, P. M. Maigur, I. X. Pauka, A. M. Peremytov, N. V. Pnevsky, N. N. Petin, S. A. Pugachev, I. V. Sollogub, V. F. Tarasov, N. N. Shvarts) and three former colonels(E.I. Babin, P.V. Blagoveshchensky and E.A. Nikolich); all the chiefs of staff of the fronts were non-partisan, none of them betrayed Soviet power.
TABLE 18. MILITARY SPECIALISTS IN THE POSITION OF FRONT COMMANDER (1918-1920) *
* Compiled from: Directives of the command of the fronts of the Red Army (1917-1922): Sat. documents. M., 1978. T. 4. P. 529-533.
From 100 army commanders, military specialists were 82 people(see Appendix No. 5) 135 , of which there were former career officers 62 . There were 17 members of the RCP (b). Changed Soviet power 5 people, of which three were former career General Staff officers (B.P. Bogoslovsky, N.D. Vsevolodov, F.E. Makhin) and two former wartime officers (I.L. Sorokin, A.I. Kharchenko).
There were chiefs of army staff 93 , of which former career officers - 77 (83%), including 49 former General Staff officers, 8 former wartime officers; For eight people the previous service could not be established. There were no members of the RCP (b) among the army chiefs of staff; changed Soviet power seven people, including 5 former General Staff officers (V.A. Zheltyshev, V.Ya. Lundekvist, V.E. Mediokritsky, A.S. Nechvolodov, A.L. Simonov) and two career officers (V.V. Vdoviev- Kabardintsev and D. A. Severin). Among the chiefs of army staffs one can name such major military specialists as L.K. Aleksandrov, M.A. Vatorsky, V.I. Buimistrov, A.M. Zayonchkovsky, F.F. Novitsky, G.A. Plyushchevsky-Plyushchik, V. I. Stoykin and others.
Let us also consider the number of military specialists in the positions of division chiefs and division chiefs of staff - the level that during the civil war solved operational and tactical tasks directly on the battlefield.
As commanders of 142 rifle and 33 cavalry divisions 136 in 1918-1920 in total there were 485 people, of which 118 could not be established in service before October 1917. Of the remaining 367 people, 327 were military specialists ( almost 90%), including 209 career officers (over 55%), of which 35 are former officers of the General Staff. There were 40 non-military specialists (former non-commissioned officers, soldiers, sailors and those who did not serve in the army at all) in the positions of division chiefs (about 10%).
Among the heads of divisions - military specialists, one can name such as former General Staff Generals E. A. Iskritsky, V. A. Olderogge, D. P. Parsky, F. A. Podgursky, A. K. Remezov, P. P. Sytin, S. M. Sheideman; generals E. N. Martynov, M. M. Radkevich, A. V. Sobolev, A. V. Stankevich: General Staff colonels N. E. Kakurin, S. S. Kamenev; Colonels M. N. Vasiliev, I. I. Vatsetis, E. M. Golubintsev, V. F. Grushetsky, M. S. Matiyasevich, A. G. Skorobogach, I. F. Sharskov; General Staff Lieutenant Colonels M. I. Vasilenko, A. G. Keppen, V. V. Lyubimov, I. X. Pauka, E. I. Sergeev; Lieutenant Colonels G. K. Voskanov, V. N. Kakhovsky, N. G. Krapivyansky, V. I. Popovich, V. I. Solodukhin, S. S. Shevelev; military foreman F.K. Mironov; General Staff Captain N.V. Lisovsky; captains S. B. Volynsky, B. K. Kolchigin, M. K. Levandovsky; captain N.D. Kashirin; Staff Captain G.I. Baturin; former wartime officers G. D. Gai, E. I. Kovtyukh, A. D. Kozitsky, B. V. Maystrakh, G. I. Ovchinnikov, Yu. V. Sablin. A. I. Sedyakin, P. A. Solodukhin, A. I. Todorsky, N. I. Khudyakov, R. P. Eideman and others. Changed Soviet power former wartime officers N. A. Grigoriev, A. G. Sapozhkov and others ( less than 1% of the total number of division chiefs).
The position of chief of staff of the division consisted of 524 people, including 78 people who also filled the position of division chief and are already taken into account above. It was not possible to establish the service of 140 people before October 1917; We also did not take into account 133 people who held the position of division chief of staff for less than one month. The remaining 173 people were all military specialists, 87 of them were career officers, including 5 generals, 45 staff officers and 37 chief officers; 24 people were general staff officers. Among the division chiefs of staff one can name the names of former General Staff Generals E. E. Geggstrem, Z. I. Zaichenko, G. A. Plyushchevsky-Plyushchik, General Staff Colonels V. K. Gershelman, I. I. Zashchuk, M. E. Leontyev, V. V. Okerman, N. N. Rodkevich; famous cavalry colonels A. A. Gubin and K. K. Zholierkevich; former wartime officer F.I. Tolbukhin (later Marshal of the Soviet Union), etc.
Study of issues related to the total number of military specialists in the Red Army in 1918-1920. and the positions they filled in the Active Army, allows us to conclude that by the end of the civil war the total number of military specialists was on average 75 thousand. All categories of command personnel of the old army served in the Red Army: from the former Supreme Commander-in-Chief in the First World War, General A. A. Brusilov and the military ministers of the Tsarist and Provisional governments, Generals A. A. Polivanov, D. S. Shuvaev and A. I. Verkhovsky to warrant officers P. L. Romanenko and I. P. Shevchuk, promoted to officer from among soldiers for bravery. Starting from the “veil” system of operational associations, where almost all senior positions were occupied by former generals and career officers (mainly officers of the General Staff), in established fronts, formed armies and divisions, military specialists occupied the vast majority of senior command and staff positions (they accounted for 85% front commanders, 82% of army commanders, up to 70% of division chiefs; all front chiefs of staff and almost all army chiefs of staff were military specialists; in division headquarters they accounted for more than 50%). Job title commander in chief All the Armed Forces of the Republic were occupied by former Colonel I. I. Vatsetis and the General Staff Colonel S. S. Kamenev. Thus, not only in the central and local military authorities, in military educational institutions, etc., but also in the Active Army, military specialists filled the overwhelming majority of senior command and staff positions. Therefore, it is quite legitimate to say that former generals and officers took an active part not only in the military construction of the Soviet state, and in particular in the training of military personnel for it from workers and working peasants, but also in the defense of Soviet Russia on the fronts of the civil war against the forces of internal and external counter-revolution. This conclusion refutes the point of view of the authors, who claim that the overwhelming majority of military specialists - former career officers served in administrative positions in the rear, and “armies... were commanded, as a rule, by warrant officers and staff captains during wartime” and that this same category of former officers “very often” headed headquarters “from the lowest to the highest” 137.
The purpose of the monograph was not to study the issue of the proportion of military specialists in positions of senior and middle command personnel at the regiment commander - battalion commander level. But it's quite obvious that and in these positions, especially the regiment commander, military specialists predominated. Thus, in the 3rd Army of the Eastern Front at the end of 1918, out of 61 command personnel, ranging from division commander to battalion commanders inclusive, 47 people (up to 80%) were military specialists. Most of the positions of regimental commanders and a significant part of the positions of battalion commanders were also occupied by military specialists - wartime officers 138.
Notes
135 There were 13 army commanders of non-military specialists, including one former volunteer (M.V. Frunze-Mikhailov), five former non-commissioned officers (S.M. Budyonny, O.I. Gorodovikov, G.V. Zinoviev, M. M. Lashevich, T. S. Khvesin), two former sailors (P. E. Dybenko, I. I. Matveev), five who did not serve in the army (K. E. Voroshilov, I. S. Kozhevnikov, N. N. Kuzmin, G. Ya. Sokolnikov, I. E. Yakir); It was not possible to establish service for five people (V.P. Blokhin, S.I. Zagumenny, S.K. Matsiletsky, A.A. Rzhevsky, V.L. Stepanov) before October 1917.
136 Total in 1918-1920. 151 rifle divisions and 34 cavalry divisions were formed.
137 Gerasimov M. N. Awakening. M., 1965. P. 5 (preface by V. D. Polikarpov).
138 Spirin L. M. Classes and parties in the civil war in Russia. M., 1968. P. 15.
2. A complete list of army commanders, which I compiled on the basis of Appendix 5 and Kavtaradze’s data on army commanders who were not military experts.
Appendix 5. Military specialists - army commanders*
* Compiled from: Directives of the command of the fronts of the Red Army (1917-1922): Sat. documents, M., 1978. T. 4. P. 533-544: TsGVIA. F. 409. Service records.
Complete list of Civil War commanders
It's an amazing thing to watch the Civil War. Parallel after parallel.
Despite the fact that the Kyiv authorities are desperately trying to name their aggression in Donbass Patriotic War, and the Donetsk militias by the “Russian” army - it is clear to an unbiased observer that a Civil War is going on.
And as in any Civil War, faces appear on the battlefield that no one knew yesterday. Back in the fall of 2013, Strelkov was Girkin, and Semenchenko was a swindler. Who knew them? And today the newly-minted “Frunze” and “Gritsian-Tavrichesky” are heard by every Russian and Ukrainian.
Where do they come from? And, most importantly, where do they go?
The son of an innkeeper and a failed theologian Murat... Shot.
The son of a cooper and the scribe of the notary Ney... Shot.
A Cossack from a poor family, the cornet Semyonov... Hanged.
Nobleman, second lieutenant Lazo... Burnt in a locomotive firebox.
Of course, there are those who survived wars and repressions. Klim Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny are perhaps the most striking examples. Moreover, despite the post-Soviet legends that the “red marshals” were outdated by 1941, both Voroshilov and Budyonny fought quite well. Thus, on the front of the German Army Group North, which was opposed by Voroshilov, the Nazis failed to encircle large parts of the North-Western Front. Moreover, it was under the leadership of Soviet troops, for the first time in the war, that in the summer of 1941 they surrounded the 56th German Corps of the famous Manstein near Luga. The Germans then broke out, at the cost of huge losses. Such losses that they were never able to take Leningrad right away.
Who is Voroshilov versus Manstein? A mechanic versus a hereditary military man? Of course, it is unprofessional to attribute all the merits/failures to only one commander. Who, besides die-hard fans, will now remember the chiefs of staff and quartermasters? But the outcome of a particular operation depends no less, if not more, on them.
However, we are talking about the Civil War. And there are slightly different laws. When you don’t have prepared warehouses behind you, and all your reserves are made up of prisoners and peasants from a captured village, it’s not just the chief of staff who has to think.
Do you know that officers are divided into two categories?
There are “peacetime” officers. Their curbs are painted, their uniforms are ironed, their soldiers' boots shine like a cat's housekeeping, their wall newspaper is always fresh and there are no specks of dust in the barracks. Parade battalion, simply. At least now under cameras. But the fighters’ shooting standards are not very good. No time to run to the shooting range.
But for “wartime” officers it’s the other way around. If there is an excellent result at the shooting range, then the soldiers walk around like buffoons. And the officer himself is always dirty - in the bay near the BMP he rubs shoulders with the repairmen. And not everything is going well with his family - he always spends the night in good graces. And he also drinks. No, everyone drinks, no need for hypocrisy. Only “Mirny” is used exclusively for toast and at the table, and “Military” is used on the run and with stew.
And in peacetime, the first is in letters of gratitude and gratitude, and the second is in penalties. But when the war starts...
A “military” officer lives by war. He dreams of her, although he has never seen her. He is preparing for it, realizing that the life span given to him by his Motherland is from five minutes to five days, depending on his position.
And there are also “military” civilians. I mean, they're not professional soldiers. They served once, or maybe not. But they live in readiness for war. They drink themselves to death, crash, and adrenaline prevents them from living. They cannot live peacefully.
But here it begins...
Who was Grigory Kotovsky at the very beginning of his career?
An ordinary agronomist. Only after a murky, incomprehensible story - where the landowner for whom Grisha worked accused him of theft and adultery with his wife - did he become the Bessarabian Robin Hood.
He only robbed the rich, did not touch the poor.
But excuse me, what's the point of robbing the poor? Grigory Ivanovich was Napoleon in life. He was not interested in a pot of hominy from a peasant. He wanted to live well - I mean, beautifully! But it can only look beautiful on the rich. They are the ones who need to be robbed. And even then, in the 2000s, it was fashionable to be political. Just like now - “I rule for the people, and not anyhow!” They say that Kotovsky shared the loot from local oligarchs with the poor. Of course I shared. He wasn't a fool. Sharing with the poor? So they will give you shelter, and they won’t tell the police where you went. They will look at the police officer with honest eyes and send him in the other direction. I mean, to another forest, and not where the spoiled reader thought.
An adventurer, a slasher, a dashing and gambling boy with fun in his eyes - his whole life is a dashing game! An admirer of Pushkin, following the example of Dubrovsky, entering a rich house and taking out a revolver, smiled: “Calm down, everyone, I am Kotovsky.” That’s right, after a theatrical pause: “I am Kotovsky!” A real cat: he played with power with his paw, sometimes extending his claws. It was as if he was mocking the police and gendarmerie. Did he like the expression anarcho-communist? Great! Let's be anarcho-communists! What kind of woman is this? Vera Cold? And bring it here, I’ll heat it up! And he warmed up to the fact that he played with her in the film. Alas, the film has not survived.
We will return to Grigory Ivanovich, Moisey Volfovich Vinnitsky is waiting for us.
Another key figure of the Civil War in Odessa.
Alas, his life’s path is so covered in myths and legends of the lowest level that the very personality of Mishka Yaponchik has turned into an operetta Harlequin. In general, this is the tragedy of Odessa - the gangster Moldavanka became its face, and the language invented by the filmmakers turned into a poster. Well, they don’t sing chants here at every turn and the boater went out of fashion in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. We shot boaters.
So, Mishka Yaponchik, or rather simply Musya then, at the age of ten went to work in a mattress workshop. Before the age of 14, I managed to get a profession as an electrician - it’s like being a system administrator now - and I was also able to complete four classes of a gymnasium. Only in the 5th year, when he turned 14, did he join the Jewish self-defense unit. And he never returned to the factory. It must be said that Jewish society, like Russian society, was heterogeneous. Rich Jews studied to become lawyers and doctors, while poor Jews became beggars. The pogroms targeted the poor. So Jewish self-defense arose.
After the freestyle revolution, I no longer wanted to work; young adrenaline was seething in my blood and rushing into my head no worse than sex hormones. Of course, he was taken into custody. Like Kotovsky. They say they met in the cell.
Only in the summer of 1917, after Kerensky issued an amnesty for both criminal and some political, Mishka became Yaponchik. At first, he put together a small gang. He started with reckless robberies under the brand names “Revolution” and “Freedom”. He also robbed, only the rich - but what can you take from a shoemaker from Moldavanka? “Oh, “Rostislav” and “Almaz” for the republic! Our fighting motto is to slaughter the public!” The public was then called the rich. Those who could go to restaurants and theaters. I won’t say anything about cinematography - it was really expensive at first. It was under the Bolsheviks that cinema became accessible, just like unlimited Internet is now.
Mishka also did not forget about his charity - the Moldavian woman fed from his hand. They say he was afraid of blood? Those who were afraid of blood did not live long in those days. Mishka didn’t have to do it that long, but if he hadn’t shot himself, he wouldn’t have survived. There are different legends.
They say that at its peak - in the summer of 1918 - Mishka Yaponchik's gang consisted of as many as 20 thousand fighters. Bigger than Al Capone's gang. Why, Al Capone, this record has not been broken even now. Well, perhaps the Colombian cartels - but who thought they were? Who counted Mishka's fighters?
It is known that in the summer of 1919, the 54th Soviet Ukrainian Rifle Regiment named after. V.I. Lenin included from 1000 to 2000 Mishka bandits. Plus about seven hundred more students, who generally have a plug in every hole. So what's the result? After the second battle, this army simply fled.
And Mishka Yaponchik was shot by the stern red commissars. Namely, Commissioner Feldman - whose name Primorsky Boulevard once bore. Mishka was 28 years old. Goldfinch.
But the bandit Grishka “Berez” Kotovsky turned out to be an order of magnitude smarter than Mishka Yaponchik. Despite his adventurism, his addiction to adrenaline, Grigory Ivanovich made his choice on time and correctly.
The Japanese cowards were partially chopped down by the Kotovites, by the way. And they themselves fought, fought even when the number of wounded and sick reached 70%. But the Kotovites survived the terrible winter of 1919-1920. And they didn’t survive much; in 1920 they moved from a brigade to a division. And when they entered in full force... Oh, and Kotovsky drove the whites from Kherson to Tiraspol.
Having passed the suburbs of Odessa, the Kotovites began to pursue General Stessel’s White Guards retreating to Romania and on February 9–14 attacked the enemy near the village of Nikolaevka, captured Tiraspol, surrounded the Whites, pressing them to the Dniester. Kotovsky managed to capture some of the demoralized White Guards, whom the Romanian border guards refused to let into their territory. The Romanians met the fugitives with machine-gun fire, and the “red” commander Kotovsky accepted some officers and privates into his unit, ordering them to be treated humanely. ABOUT good attitude Kotovtsev to the captured White Guards writes V. Shulgin in his memoirs “1920”.
Kotovsky did not shoot any of the White Guards. Neither personally nor as a division. All those who surrendered to him were either accepted into the division or sent home. Like this.
Ahead there were battles with the White Poles, with Makhno, with Tyutyunnik - Kotovsky’s biography is the subject of a separate article, and even a thick book... And not all the battles were successful. And yet, the division commander becomes a corps commander.
The Civil War ends. Twin children die. Stomach ulcer. Contusion. Nervous breakdowns. Injuries. But he holds on.
Its cavalry corps is located in Uman. In the USSR - NEP.
Kotovsky created and controlled mills in 23 villages. He organizes the processing of old soldiers' uniforms into raw wool. Profitable contracts were signed with flax and cotton factories. Soldiers' free labor was used to make hay and harvest sugar beets, which were sent to the sugar factories of the horse corps, which produced up to 300 thousand pounds of sugar per year. The divisions had state farms, breweries, and butcher shops. The hops, which were grown in Kotovsky's fields on the Rhea state farm (subsidiary farm of the 13th Cavalry Regiment), were bought by merchants from Czechoslovakia for 1.5 million gold rubles per year. In August 1924, Kotovsky organized the Bessarabian Agricultural Commune in the Vinnitsa region.
In 1924, Kotovsky, with the support of Frunze, sought a decision on the creation of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Republic. Kotovsky draws the borders of this republic with his own hands. Moldovans - put up monuments to him on every corner! He created your country.
In 1925 he dies.
Mayorchik Seider
He was shot at point-blank range by Mayorchik Seider, a former owner of a brothel, later one of the commanders of the Mishka Yaponchik regiment. They give the seider - EVERYTHING! - ten years. But already in 1927 he was released.
In 1930, Seider would be killed by the Kotovites - Waldman and Strigunov. Both will go unpunished.
What is clear is that in the Civil War, not only those who are determined survive, but also those who manage to figure out which side is right?
However, everything is simple here - the side where there is internationalism and equal rights and responsibilities is historically more correct.
Every Russian knows that in the Civil War 1917-1922 two movements were opposed for years - "Red and White". But among historians there is still no consensus on where it began. Some believe that the reason was Krasnov's March on the Russian capital (October 25); others believe that the war began when, in the near future, the commander of the Volunteer Army Alekseev arrived on the Don (November 2); There is also an opinion that the war began with Miliukov proclaiming the “Declaration of the Volunteer Army”, delivering a speech at the ceremony called the Don (December 27). Another popular opinion, which is far from unfounded, is the opinion that the Civil War began immediately after the February Revolution, when the entire society was split into supporters and opponents of the Romanov monarchy.
"White" movement in Russia
Everyone knows that “whites” are adherents of the monarchy and the old order. Its beginnings were visible back in February 1917, when the monarchy was overthrown in Russia and a total restructuring of society began. The development of the “white” movement took place during the period when the Bolsheviks came to power and the formation of Soviet power. They represented a circle of people dissatisfied with the Soviet government, who disagreed with its policies and principles of its conduct.The “Whites” were fans of the old monarchical system, refused to accept the new socialist order, and adhered to the principles of traditional society. It is important to note that the “whites” were often radicals; they did not believe that it was possible to agree on anything with the “reds”; on the contrary, they had the opinion that no negotiations or concessions were acceptable.
The “Whites” chose the Romanov tricolor as their banner. The white movement was commanded by Admiral Denikin and Kolchak, one in the South, the other in the harsh regions of Siberia.
The historical event that became the impetus for the activation of the “whites” and the transition of most of the former army of the Romanov Empire to their side was the rebellion of General Kornilov, which, although suppressed, helped the “whites” strengthen their ranks, especially in the southern regions, where, under the leadership of the general Alekseev began to gather enormous resources and a powerful, disciplined army. Every day the army was replenished with new arrivals, it grew rapidly, developed, hardened, and trained.
Separately, it is necessary to say about the commanders of the White Guards (that was the name of the army created by the “white” movement). They were unusually talented commanders, prudent politicians, strategists, tacticians, subtle psychologists, and skillful speakers. The most famous were Lavr Kornilov, Anton Denikin, Alexander Kolchak, Pyotr Krasnov, Pyotr Wrangel, Nikolai Yudenich, Mikhail Alekseev. We can talk about each of them for a long time; their talent and services to the “white” movement can hardly be overestimated.
The White Guards won the war for a long time, and even let down their troops in Moscow. But the Bolshevik army grew stronger, and they were supported by a significant part of the Russian population, especially the poorest and most numerous strata - workers and peasants. In the end, the forces of the White Guards were smashed to smithereens. For some time they continued to operate abroad, but without success, the “white” movement ceased.
"Red" movement
Like the “Whites,” the “Reds” had many talented commanders and politicians in their ranks. Among them, it is important to note the most famous, namely: Leon Trotsky, Brusilov, Novitsky, Frunze. These military leaders showed themselves excellently in battles against the White Guards. Trotsky was the main founder of the Red Army, acting as a decisive force in the confrontation between “whites” and “reds” in the Civil War. The ideological leader of the “red” movement was known to every person Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Lenin and his government were actively supported by the most massive sections of the population of the Russian State, namely the proletariat, the poor, land-poor and landless peasants, and the working intelligentsia. It was these classes that most quickly believed the tempting promises of the Bolsheviks, supported them and brought the “Reds” to power.The main party in the country became Russian Social Democratic Bolshevik Labor Party, which was later turned into a communist party. In essence, it was an association of intelligentsia, adherents of the socialist revolution, whose social base was the working classes.
It was not easy for the Bolsheviks to win the Civil War - they had not yet completely strengthened their power throughout the country, the forces of their fans were dispersed throughout the vast country, plus the national outskirts began a national liberation struggle. A lot of effort went into the war with the Ukrainian People's Republic, so the Red Army soldiers had to fight on several fronts during the Civil War.
Attacks by the White Guards could come from any direction on the horizon, because the White Guards surrounded the Red Army from all sides with four separate military formations. And despite all the difficulties, it was the “Reds” who won the war, mainly thanks to the broad social base of the Communist Party.
All representatives of the national outskirts united against the White Guards, and therefore they became forced allies of the Red Army in the Civil War. To attract residents of the national outskirts to their side, the Bolsheviks used loud slogans, such as the idea of a “united and indivisible Russia.”
The Bolsheviks won the war thanks to the support of the masses. The Soviet government played on the sense of duty and patriotism of Russian citizens. The White Guards themselves also added fuel to the fire, since their invasions were most often accompanied by mass robbery, looting, and violence in other forms, which could not in any way encourage people to support the “white” movement.
Results of the Civil War
As has already been said several times, victory in this fratricidal war went to the “reds”. The fratricidal civil war became a real tragedy for the Russian people. The material damage caused to the country by the war was estimated to be about 50 billion rubles - unimaginable money at that time, several times greater than the amount of Russia's external debt. Because of this, the level of industry decreased by 14%, and agriculture by 50%. According to various sources, human losses amounted to about T 12 before 15 million.. Most of these people died from hunger, repression, and disease. More than one person gave their lives during the hostilities 800 thousand soldiers on both sides. Also during the Civil War, the balance of migration fell sharply - near 2 million Russians left the country and went abroad.
