The issue of white and red terror is one of the most controversial in the history of the Civil War. IN last decade Many articles and publications have been devoted to this issue. But they, as a rule, create a one-sided idea of the “red” terror and the Bolsheviks as supposedly its ardent supporters.
After the victory October Revolution For 8 months, the Soviet government did not resort to judicial or extrajudicial executions of its political opponents. "Lenin condemned individual facts lynchings over representatives of the old government (the murder by sailors of two former ministers of the Provisional Government who were in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the murder in Mogilev of the commander-in-chief of the old army, General N.N. Dukhonin, by soldiers, etc.)."* Until the summer of 1918, not a single person was shot one political opponent of Soviet power.
The Soviet government did not seek to incite civil war and at first she treated her enemies very humanely. Released under " honestly"The Council of People's Commissars, General P. N. Krasnov, led the Cossack counter-revolution on the Don in the spring and summer of 1918, and the cadets released for the most part became active participants in the white cause. The first was the white terror, which caused the red terror in response.
Historian P. M. Spirin, back in 1968, correctly believed that in the summer of 1918 “... the bourgeoisie switched to mass and individual terror, pursuing the goal, on the one hand, to intimidate workers and peasants with numerous murders, and on the other - tear out its leaders and best activists from the ranks of the revolution."* White terror acquired a particularly large scale in the Don, Kuban, Volga region, Orenburg province, Siberia, that is, in those areas where there was a larger layer of kulaks, wealthy Cossacks, where many white officers had accumulated. In the North and Far East mass terror was carried out by interventionists and White Guards. Hundreds and thousands of “non-resident” peasants, who formed the support of Soviet power in the Cossack regions, fell at the hands of rich Cossacks. In the villages, hundreds of food contractors became victims of kulak terror. The officers hunted for communists and Soviet activists.
The chronicle of the events of the Novouzensky district of the Samara province for several days in May 1918, which is cited by L. M. Spirin, is tragic: “May 5 - the village of Aleksandrov-Gai was occupied by the Ural Cossacks, the chairman of the volost Council Chugunkov was torn to pieces in the village; many Soviet workers were shot. 6 May - the kulak congress in Novouzensk decided to shoot all the Bolsheviks. On May 9, in Aleksandrov-Gai, the Cossacks killed all the Red Army soldiers who surrendered (96 people), covered the wounded with earth in a common pit. In total, the whites shot 675 people in the village."* * Pages of history. Soviet society. M., 1989. P. 60.
Revelry white terror was accompanied by a revolt of the Socialist Revolutionaries under the leadership of Savinkov, raised on the night of July 6-7, 1918. The rebels held Yaroslavl for 16 days. Throughout the city, the White Guards were looking for party and Soviet workers and carried out reprisals against them. One of the active participants in the rebellion - former colonel B. Vesarov later wrote: “Those who fell into the hands of the rebel commissars, various kinds Soviet businessmen and their accomplices began to be taken to the courtyard of the Yaroslavl branch of the state bank. Bloody revenge was taking place here, they were shot without any pity."* More than 200 people were placed on a barge standing in the middle of the Volga, and were doomed to hunger and torture. When the prisoners tried to escape from the barge, they were shot at. Only on the thirteenth day did the prisoners of the floating prison manage to get off from anchor and bring the barge to the location of the Red Army troops.
Of these people, 109 remained alive. Mass terror was carried out in areas captured by the White Guards and interventionists. According to approximate data from the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR, “in July-December 1918, in the territory of 13 provinces alone, the White Guards shot 22,780 people.”* * White Generals. Rostov-on-Don. 1998. P. 205.
- On August 30, former cadet of the Mikhailovsky Artillery School, “people's socialist” L. Kanegiesser, on assignment underground group Right Socialist-Revolutionary Filonenko shot and killed the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, the Bolshevik M. S. Uritsky. At the same time, the Higher Military Inspectorate train crashed, in which the chairman of the Military Military Inspectorate N.I. Podvoisky miraculously survived. Earlier, a prominent Bolshevik, V. Volodarsky, was killed. A group of Socialist Revolutionary terrorists who arrived in Moscow after the murder of Volodarsky, under the leadership of the militant Semenov, began surveillance of V.I. Lenin. The city was divided into several sectors, each of which was assigned a terrorist executor. Among them was F. Kaplan. On August 30, she seriously wounded V.I. Lenin with two bullets. It is from this assassination attempt that the “Red Terror” should be counted.
- On September 5, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars adopted a resolution that went down in history as the resolution on the Red Terror, signed by the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs G.I. Petrovsky, the People's Commissar of Justice D.I. Kursky and the head of the affairs of the Council of People's Commissars V.D. Bonch-Bruevich. It said: "Advice People's Commissars, having heard the report of the chairman of the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution on the activities of this commission, finds that in this situation, ensuring the rear through terror is a direct necessity; that in order to strengthen the activities of the All-Russian Emergency Commission and introduce greater systematicity into it, it is necessary to send there possible larger number responsible party comrades; that it is necessary to secure the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps; that all persons connected with White Guard organizations, conspiracies and rebellions are subject to execution; that it is necessary to publish the names of all those executed, as well as the reasons for applying this measure to them."* * Golinkov D. L. The collapse of the anti-Soviet underground in the USSR. Book 1. M., 1980. P. 178.
Among those repressed by the decree of September 5 were many ardent counter-revolutionaries who distinguished themselves by their cruelty during the times of tsarism. Among them are monarchists - Minister of Internal Affairs A. N. Khvostov, Director of the Police Department S. P. Beletsky, Minister of Justice I. G. Shcheglovitov, high-ranking officials of the gendarmerie and security departments. Those servants of the old regime who did not take part in counter-revolutionary actions also came under repression and execution. “There were cases when, in order to confiscate surplus grain, and sometimes even non-surplus, requisition detachments used violence not only against the kulaks, but also against the middle peasants or subjected the rebels to artillery fire Cossack villages, and sometimes villages."* * Shevotsukov P. A. Decree. Op. P. 271.
In the fall of 1918, the hostage system was unjustifiably widely used. Moreover, it resulted not only in temporary isolation in concentration camps of population groups potentially dangerous to the Soviet regime, but, as R. Medvedev writes, also in “the physical destruction of some people for the misdeeds and crimes of other people.”* But such actions were not a system.
Condemning the Red Terror, some authors writing on this topic not only do not compare the White and Red Terror, but generally deny the existence of the former. Nevertheless, the comparison shows that the White Terror was more widespread and incredibly cruel. "For nine months (June 1918 - February 1919), the extraordinary commissions of the Soviet government shot 5,496 criminals on the territory of 23 provinces, including about 800 criminals. The White Guards, in seven months of 1918, killed 4 s in only 13 provinces one more time more people. In Siberia alone, in the spring of 1919, Kolchak’s men shot several tens of thousands of workers and peasants.”* * Sokolov B.V. Op. cit. p. 422.
Already on November 6, 1918*, by resolution of the VI Congress of Soviets, the first all-Russian amnesty was announced. All hostages were released from imprisonment, except those whose temporary detention was necessary as a condition for the safety of comrades who had fallen into the hands of enemies. From now on, only the Cheka could take hostages. The Central Committee appointed a political audit of the Cheka by a commission from the Central Committee consisting of Kamenev, Stalin and Kursky, instructing it to “examine the activities of the emergency commissions without weakening their fight against counter-revolutionaries.”* * Ibid. P. 431.
At the same time, M. Ya. Latsis, member of the Cheka commission, chairman of the Cheka Eastern Front, in the magazine “Red Terror” published in Kazan, spoke about the advisability of strict legal regulation of the activities of the Cheka. The article contained the following instructions to the local authorities of the Cheka: “Do not look for incriminating evidence in the case; whether he rebelled against the Soviets with weapons or in words. The first duty you must ask him is what class he belongs to, what origin he is, what education he has and what is his profession. These are the questions that should decide the fate of the accused.”* After criticizing this article in Pravda, I. Yaroslavsky M. Ya. Latsis, answering him, argued that “... at the moment of the most desperate class struggle it is impossible to achieve physical evidence. When a class has completely rebelled against a class, then the most valuable information for the investigation is precisely the data on belonging (currently) to the class and origin."* * Civil War in Russia. Crossroads of Opinions. Op. op. p. 220.
Regarding the spread of the Red Terror, Lenin, in a speech to employees of the Cheka in November 1918, noted: “When we took control of the country, we naturally had to make many mistakes and it is natural that the mistakes of the emergency commissions are most striking. individual mistakes of the Cheka, weep and rush with them. We say: we learn from mistakes, where determination, speed, and most importantly, loyalty are required. When I look at the activities of the Cheka, and compare it with attacks, I say: These are philistine rumors that are worthless.”* It would do well to think about these Leninist words for the authors of those publications who are inclined to reduce all the activities of the Cheka to terror, mistakes, and arbitrariness. Such statements, as we see, are not new, and they are far from reality.
In general, the use of red terror was more conscious and logical than white terror. On this occasion, we recall the Tambov uprising, which was led by the former village teacher Social Revolutionary A. Antonov. The uprising began in mid-1920, when Antonov’s detachment, numbering 500 people, defeated the guard battalion sent against him. At the beginning of 1921, Antonov’s army already had 20 thousand people. At the end of 1921, the commander of the troops Tambov province Tukhachevsky, who had already distinguished himself in suppressing the Krondstadt uprising, was appointed. On May 12, the day of his arrival in Tambov, Tukhachevsky issued extermination order No. 130. A popular summary of this order was published on May 17 by the Plenipotentiary Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee for the fight against banditry in the Tambov province, entitled “Order to members of bandit gangs”: 1) Workers' and Peasants' the authorities decided in the shortest possible time put an end to robbery and robbery in the Tambov province and restore peace and honest work in it; 2) The workers' and peasants' government has sufficient military forces in the Tambov province. All those who take up arms against Soviet power will be exterminated. You, members of gangs of bandits, have one of two options: either die, as mad dogs, or surrender to the mercy of Soviet power; 3) According to the order of the Red Command No. 130 and the “Rules on the Taking of Hostages”, published by the Plenipotentiary Commission on May 12, the family of those who evaded appearing at the nearest headquarters of the Red Army to surrender their weapons are taken as hostages, and their property is seized.* * Sokolov B . V. Op. p. 420.
On June 11, an even more formidable order No. 171 appeared. It ordered citizens who refused to give their names to be shot on the spot without trial. The families of the rebels were expelled, and the senior worker in the family was shot. Hostages from villages where weapons were found were also shot. This Order was carried out “...severely and mercilessly.”* Cruelty and superiority of forces were on the side of the Red Army and decided the matter. The uprising began to wane. By the end of May, concentration camps for 15 thousand people were hastily created in Tambov, Borisoglebsk, Kirsanov and other cities of the province and a list of “bandits” was ordered for each village. By July 20, all large detachments of Antonovites were destroyed or “scattered.” During the operation to eliminate the Antonov gangs, Tukhachevsky used chemical weapons. The rebellious province was blocked and there was no supply of food there. And it is unlikely that under the conditions of the NEP, yesterday’s rebels would have wanted to return to the forests after the end of the harvest season. But it was necessary to teach the rebels an objective lesson so that not only they, but also their children and grandchildren would be discouraged from rebelling. This is why the executions of hostages and gas attacks against those who sought refuge in the forests. Antonov himself died in a shootout in June 1922.
Thus, once again it must be noted that there was both white and red terror. Historically, it would be incorrect to speak only about the existence of the Red Terror, which was more natural and due to many reasons. The Bolsheviks acted as bearers of power in Russia, and, therefore, their measures were more legal than the actions of counter-revolutionaries.
Red terror.
One of the most difficult and destructive manifestations of the civil war was terror, the sources of which were both the cruelty of the lower classes and the directed initiative of the leadership warring parties. This initiative was especially evident among the Bolsheviks. The Red Terror newspaper of November 1, 1918 frankly admitted: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for materials and evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against the Soviets. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what origin, upbringing or profession he is. These questions should determine the fate of the accused. This is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.”
The Bolsheviks rigidly and assertively implemented their theoretical ideas in practice. In addition to various sanctions against direct participants Anti-Bolshevik movements they widely used the hostage system. For example, after the murder of M. Uritsky, 900 hostages were shot in Petrograd, and in response to the murder (in Berlin!) of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the Tsaritsyn Council ordered the execution of all hostages under arrest. After the assassination attempt on Lenin, several thousand people were executed in different cities. Anarchist terrorist attack on Leontyevsky Lane in Moscow (September 1919) resulted in executions large number arrested, the vast majority of whom had nothing to do with anarchists. Quantity similar examples great.
Executions were associated not only with hostage taking. In St. Petersburg, Odessa, Sevastopol, Kiev, mass executions of officers took place in 1918; after the workers' strike in Astrakhan in 1919 - only according to official data - over 4 thousand people were shot. “Ruthless mass terror” was declared against the Cossacks.
Repression affected both entire sections of the population and individuals. On the night of July 16-17, 1918 in Yekaterinburg, Nicholas II and his family were shot in the basement of the Ipatiev House. Even earlier, on the night of June 12-13, on the outskirts of Perm, the last of the Romanovs who bore the title of emperor, Mikhail, was shot.
Repressive actions were initiated by the central and local authorities Bolshevik power, but no less often they were manifestations of the cruelty of ordinary participants in the war. “A special commission to investigate the “atrocities of the Bolsheviks,” which worked in 1919 under the leadership of Baron P. Wrangel, identified numerous cases of cruel, bordering on sadism, treatment of the population and prisoners by the Red Army. On the Don, in the Kuban, in the Crimea, the commission received materials testifying to the mutilation and murder of the wounded in hospitals, to the arrests and executions of everyone who was pointed out as opponents of the Bolshevik government - often together with their families. All executions, as a rule, were accompanied by requisitions of property. White Terror Cruelty was also inherent in whites. Orders to bring prisoners from among those who voluntarily joined the Red Army to court martial were signed by Admiral Kolchak. Reprisals against the villages that rebelled against Kolchak’s followers were carried out in 1919 by General Maikovsky. Several concentration camps were created in Siberia for Bolshevik sympathizers. In the Makeyevsky district in November 1918, a commandant close to General Krasnov published an order with the words “... all arrested workers should be hanged on the main street and not removed for three days.” At the same time, the whites did not have organizations like the Cheka, revolutionary tribunals and revolutionary military councils. The top leadership of the White movement did not make calls for terror, hostages, or executions. At first, the whites, despite all the inhumanity of the civil strife, tried to hold on legal norms. But the defeats of the Whites at the fronts “opened an abyss of despair before them” - they could not count on the mercy of the Bolsheviks. Doom pushed whites to commit crimes. “Atamanism” brought a lot of suffering to the civilian population of Siberia. Robberies, pogroms and brutal executions accompanied Grigoriev's uprising in Ukraine. “The white movement was started almost by saints, and it ended almost by robbers,” one of the “white” ideologists, Vladimir Shulgin, bitterly admitted.
Many figures spoke out against the senseless cruelty of the civil war Russian culture- V. Korolenko, I. Bunin, M. Voloshin and others. “Russian cruelty” was branded by M. Gorky. Total losses in the civil war, which was fratricidal in nature, made up about 10% of the country's population (more than 13 million people).
L. LITVIN
RED AND WHITE TERROR IN RUSSIA 1917-1922/// DISCUSSIONS AND DISCUSSIONS 1993
A. L. LITVIN RED AND WHITE TERROR IN RUSSIA 1917-1922
Violence and terror have always been indispensable companions of the centuries-old history of mankind. But in terms of the number of victims and the legalization of violence, the 20th century has no analogues. This century “owes”, first of all, to the totalitarian regimes in Russia and Germany, the communist and national socialist governments.
Russia has traditionally been one of the countries where the price human life was meager, and humanitarian rights were not respected. Extremely radical socialists - the Bolsheviks, having seized power, proclaiming their immediate task to accomplish the world revolution in the shortest possible time and create the kingdom of labor, destroyed the semblance rule of law, establishing revolutionary chaos. Never before in history have utopian ideas been introduced into the consciousness of people so cruelly, cynically and bloodily. The non-resistance proposed to the century by Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy was not accepted either in Russia or in Germany. In a short ideological struggle, merciless, fanatical evil won. which brought so much unprecedented suffering to people. The policy of violence and terror 1 pursued in Russia by the Bolsheviks changed the consciousness of the population. Pushkin in “Boris Godunov” noted the silence of the people during executions; Bolshevik periodicals are full of vociferous approval of mass murder. The eternal questions: who is to blame? What are the causes of the tragedy? How to explain, try to understand what happened?
The main trends in their solution were outlined for Soviet historiography by V.I. Lenin’s statements that the Red Terror during the Civil War in Russia was forced and became a response to the actions of the White Guards and interventionists. At the same time, the thesis was formulated: “The repressive measures that workers and peasants are forced to use to suppress the resistance of the exploiters cannot be compared with the horrors of the white terror of the counter-revolution” 3.
At the same time, through the efforts of, first of all, the Russian emigration, books and stories were created about the dungeons of the Cheka, and the difference between the White and Red Terror was characterized. According to S.P. Melgunov, the Red Terror had an official theoretical justification, was systemic, governmental in nature, and the White Terror was seen “as excesses based on unbridled power and revenge.” Therefore, the red terror in its scale and cruelty was worse than the white one 4. At the same time, a third point of view arose, according to which any terror was inhuman and should be abandoned as a method of struggle for power 5.
Politicized Soviet historiography long time was engaged in justifying the Red Terror 6. Publicists were the first to criticize this position. They saw in the Red Terror not an “extraordinary measure of self-defense”, but an attempt to create universal remedy solutions to any problems, ideological justification for the criminal actions of the authorities, and in the Cheka - an instrument of mass murder 7.
Currently, Melgunov’s thesis has become widespread that the whites, more than the reds, tried to adhere to legal norms when carrying out punitive actions . It's hard to agree with this statement. The fact is that the legal declarations and resolutions of the confronting parties did not protect the population of the country in those years from tyranny and terror. They could not be prevented neither by the decisions of the VI All-Russian Extraordinary Congress of Soviets (November 1918) on amnesty and “On revolutionary legality”, nor by the resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on the abolition death penalty(January 1920), nor instructions from governments opposite side. Both of them shot, took hostages, practiced decimation and torture. The comparison itself: one terror is worse (better) than another is incorrect. Killing innocent people is a crime. No terror can be a model. The Whites also had institutions similar to the Cheka and revolutionary tribunals - various counterintelligence and military courts, propaganda organizations with information tasks, such as Denikin’s Osvag (the propaganda department of the Special Meeting under the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the South of Russia).
General L. G. Kornilov’s call to officers (January 1918) not to take prisoners in battles with the Reds is very similar to the admission of the security officer M. I. Latsis that similar orders were resorted to in relation to the Whites in the Red Army8. Those who viewed terror as a destructive force, a factor of demoralization for all its participants, were right.
The desire to understand the origins of the tragedy has given rise to several research explanations: the Red Terror and mass repression 30s - the result of Bolshevik rule in the country; Stalinism - special type totalitarian society; the leaders are to blame for all troubles - Lenin, Sverdlov, Stalin, Trotsky 10. Despite the apparent differences, the common thing is the assertion of the guilt of the Bolsheviks. At the same time, the measure of influence on the Soviet repressive policies terrorist actions by opponents of Bolshevism.
In domestic historiography, one can distinguish periods of propaganda of the slogan “Stalin is Lenin today”, criticism of the “cult of personality” and the ongoing canonization of Lenin and Bolshevism (from the late 50s), approval of the formula: Stalinism arose on the basis of Leninism (from the late 80s). x years)1 . The latter point of view coincides with the opinion widely held in the West 13
There is another opinion: Lenin was better than Stalin. Lenin carried out the Red Terror during the Civil War, Stalin shot the unarmed population in peaceful conditions. R. Conquest wrote that in 1918-1920. The terror was carried out by fanatics, idealists - “people in whom, for all their mercilessness, one can find some traits of a kind of perverted nobility.” And he continued: in Robespierre we find a narrow but honest view of violence, also characteristic of Lenin. Stalin's terror was different. It was carried out using criminal methods and was not started during a crisis, revolution or war. 14 This statement is objectionable.
Terror during the years of the Civil War was carried out not by fanatics, not by idealists, but by people deprived of any nobility and the mental complexes of the heroes of Dostoevsky’s works. Only insufficient knowledge of the sources can explain Conquest's conclusion about Lenin's “honest” view of violence. Let's just name the instructions for committing a murder written by the leader (they became known in lately). Let's quote two of them. In a note to E. M. Sklyansky (August 1920), deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, Lenin, apparently assessing the plan born in the bowels of this department, instructed: “An excellent plan! Finish it together with Dzerzhinsky. Under the guise of “greens” (we will blame them later) we will go 10-20 miles and hang the kulaks, priests, and landowners. Prize: 100,000 rubles for the hanged man” 15.
In a secret letter to members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), written on March 19, 1922, after the introduction of NEP, Lenin proposed taking advantage of the famine in the Volga region and confiscating church valuables. This action, in his opinion, “must be carried out with merciless determination, certainly stopping at nothing and in the shortest possible time. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie If we get shot on this occasion, so much the better. It is now necessary to teach this public a lesson so that for several decades they will not dare to think about any resistance” 16. This was a criminal, not an “honest” view of violence, which differed from the execution lists signed by Stalin in that Stalin knew many of those whom he decided to execute, but Lenin did not know any of those whom he condemned to death..
Those who knew Lenin and those who met him noted his commitment to extreme measures of violence. 7. It was from Lenin that Stalin adopted the condemnation of the individual and encouragement mass terror, hostages, power based on force and not on law, recognition of state arbitrariness as a highly moral matter. Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and other associates of the leader tried to theoretically substantiate such anti-human practices.
Already the first acts of violence carried out by one, and then by the two-party Soviet government (Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries): the closure of newspapers that defended the ideas of February, and not October 1917, the outlawing of the Cadet Party, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the introduction of the right of extrajudicial reprisals, recognition of terrorism not as an emergency, but traditional means struggle for power - caused the rejection of many. Among them were M. Gorky, R. Luxemburg, I. Bunin, thousands of residents of the country who left memories of this time, or expressed protest even then 18. They protested against the murder of ideological opponents, the ban on dissent in the country, the rampant arbitrariness of the authorities, those methods and the means by which the Bolshevik leadership decided to achieve its goals.
Lenin and his associates defended the need to tighten punitive policies in the country. This was particularly reflected in their books directed against the works of K. Kautsky, who accused the Bolsheviks of being the first to use violence against other socialist parties 19 and creating a situation in which “the opposition was left with only one form of open political action - civil war "2.
Lenin proceeded from the fact that “the benefit of the revolution, the benefit of the working class is the highest law”21, that only he is the highest authority that determines “this benefit”, and therefore can resolve all issues, including the main one - the right to life and activity. The principle of expediency of means used to protect power was guided by Trotsky, Bukharin and many others. Moreover, they all considered the right to dispose of people’s lives as natural. Trotsky, after the end of the civil war, answered the question: “Do the consequences of the revolution, the sacrifices it causes, generally justify it?” - answered: “The question is theological and therefore fruitless. With the same right, one can, in the face of the difficulties and sorrows of personal existence, ask: is it worth being born at all?”23
Kautsky adhered to a different point of view, taking the abolition of the death penalty as a matter of course for a socialist. He spoke about the victory of Bolshevism in Russia and the defeat of socialism there, argued that viewing the Red Terror as a response to the White Terror is the same as justifying one’s own theft by the fact that others steal. He saw Trotsky’s book as a hymn to inhumanity and myopia and prophetically predicted that “Bolshevism will remain a dark page in the history of socialism” 24.
It is difficult to name the first acts of red and white terror. They are usually associated with the beginning of the civil war in the country, which actually began with an act of armed seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. Their victory immediately put into action the levers of political and economic terror (one-party ideological, state monopoly, expropriation of property, etc.). At the same time, cases of physical destruction of opponents became known. The process of transition from individual to mass terror took little time. It is easy to see the connection between various types of terror and social political actions governments and opposing organizations.
The assassination attempt on Lenin occurred on the evening of January 1, 1918, shortly before the opening of the Constituent Assembly, and the murder of members of the Central Committee of the Cadet Party, deputies of this assembly, lawyer F.F. Kokoshkin and doctor A.I. Shingarev occurred on the night of January 6–75. That is, at the time when the All-Russian Central Executive Committee approved Lenin’s resolution on its dissolution. The introduction of mass terror did not stop individual terror, but, as a rule, it was linked with harsh political actions against the main part of the country's population - the peasantry (introduction of committees of poor people, food requisitions, levying an emergency tax, etc.). The connection between the military victories (defeats) of the parties and the tightening of punitive policies is less clear. The Crimean tragedy (autumn 1920) - the execution by security officers of thousands of officers and military officials of Wrangel's army - occurred after the victory of the Reds.
In Soviet historiography, for a long time there was an opinion that the white terror in the country began in the summer, and the red one - after the resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of September 5, 1918, as a response to the white terror. There are other points of view that link the beginning of the Red Terror with the murder royal family, with Lenin’s call for terror in Petrograd in response to the murder of Volodarsky28, with the resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on July 29, 1918 on carrying out mass terror against the bourgeoisie, with the fact that terror was the essence of the Soviet system and was carried out in fact until August 1918, and “ from September 5, 1918 - officially. This last conclusion is closer to the truth, since Soviet decrees either fixed what was already happening or initiated the acceleration of what, according to the authorities, was slowing down. Among the reasons that determined the victory of Bolshevism in the country were: an ideology intolerant of dissent that met the immediate aspirations of the impoverished masses demanding social justice; the right of management to dispose of personnel, privileges, and the organization of authorities: brutal terror. The Bolsheviks managed to create an illusory idea of fair equalization and convince the majority of the population that they would receive land, bread, and peace. War, famine, requisitions and terror became realities.
The class characteristics of the Red and White Terror appeared in 1918 to justify and justify the actions of the parties. Soviet explanations noted that the methods of both terrors were similar, but “decidedly diverged in their goals”: the red terror was directed against the exploiters, the white terror against the oppressed workers. Later, this formula acquired a broad interpretation and called the armed overthrow acts of white terror. Soviet power in a number of regions and the accompanying massacre of people. This meant the presence different forms terror still 49 before the summer of 1918, and the term “white terror” meant the punitive actions of all anti-Bolshevik forces that time, and not just the white movement itself. The lack of clearly developed concepts and criteria leads to different interpretations.
Although manifestations of mass terror are the shooting of about 500 soldiers in the Moscow Kremlin (October 28, 1917), the murders in Orenburg during the capture of the city by Dutov’s Cossacks (November 1917), the beating of wounded Red Guards in January 1918 near Saratov, etc.
Dating various types terror should not begin with reprisals against famous public figures, not from the decrees that legitimized the ongoing lawlessness, but from the innocent victims of the confronting sides. They are forgotten, especially the defenseless sufferers of the Red Terror34. The terror was carried out by officers - participants in the ice campaign of General Kornilov; security officers who received the right of extrajudicial execution; revolutionary courts and tribunals; guided not by the law, but by political expediency3.
On June 16, 1918, the People's Commissar of Justice P. Stuchka canceled all previously issued circulars on revolutionary tribunals and stated that these institutions “are not bound by any restrictions in the choice of measures to combat counter-revolution, sabotage, etc..” On June 21, 1918, the Revolutionary Tribunal under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee issued a death sentence to the chief without convincing evidence naval forces Baltic Fleet to Captain A.M. Shchastny37. Based on the rights granted to the Cheka and the tribunals, one can judge the development of Soviet punitive policy, since these institutions considered primarily political crimes, and they included “everything that is against Soviet power.” 38. It is characteristic that the right of the Cheka to extrajudicial executions, composed by Trotsky, was signed by Lenin ; the tribunals were given unlimited rights by the People's Commissar of Justice; the resolution on the Red Terror was endorsed by the People's Commissars of Justice, Internal Affairs and the head of the Council of People's Commissars (D. Kursky, G. Petrovsky, V. Bonch-Bruevich); The tasks of the military tribunals were determined by the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Tribunal of the Republic, K. Danishevsky. He stated: “Military tribunals are not and should not be guided by any legal rules. These are punitive bodies, created in the process of intense revolutionary struggle, which pronounce their sentences, guided by the principle of political expediency and the legal consciousness of communists.” Granting the right to sign the most important acts of punitive policy not only to higher authorities, but also to lower ones indicated that these acts were not given paramount importance, and that terror was quickly becoming commonplace. The leadership of the Soviet Republic officially recognized the creation of a non-legal state, where arbitrariness became the norm of life, and terror was the most important tool for maintaining power40. Lawlessness was beneficial to the warring parties, as it allowed any actions with references to something similar from the enemy. Its origins are explained by traditional cruelty Russian history, the severity of the confrontation between revolutionaries and autocracy, and finally, the fact that Lenin and Plekhanov saw no sin in killing their ideological opponents, that “along with the poison of socialism, the Russian intelligentsia fully accepted the poison of populism” .
In a radical revolution in Russia, on initial stage The Left Social Revolutionaries also took part in the creation of the dictatorial regime. Not only did they become members of the Council of People's Commissars in early December 1917, but they were also, along with the Bolsheviks, the creators of the Cheka and its local commissions, which were involved in the “sin of the revolution.” Moreover, their representatives remained in the Cheka until July 6, 1918, although the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries left the Council of People's Commissars after Lenin signed the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with Germany (March 1918). Terror was carried out not only by security officers. Units of the Red Army, internal troops (VOKhR - 71,763 people, in April 1920), units special purpose(CHON - from communists and Komsomol members), food detachments (23,201 people, in October 1918), food army (62,043 people, in December 1920)43. But the main conductor of terror was the Cheka, and the leader of the policy for its implementation was the Bolshevik leadership. The Central Committee of the RCP(b) in a message to the security officers reported: “The need for a special body for merciless reprisals was recognized by our entire party from top to bottom. Our party entrusted this task to the Cheka, providing it with emergency powers and placing it in direct contact with the party center” 44.
The Cheka was created as an elite organization: the majority were communists; almost unlimited power over people; increased salaries (in 1918, the salary of a member of the Cheka board - 500 rubles - was equal to the salary of people's commissars, ordinary security officers received 400 rubles)45, food and industrial rations. Privileges were worked off. Many security officers became executioners, executors of the party's will. The partyocracy initiated and developed a punitive policy, convincing itself and others of the importance of observing the class principle.
The constantly declared class principle during the Red Terror was not always respected. In the book by S.P. Melgunov, 1286 representatives are listed among the victims of terror in 1918! intelligentsia, 962 peasants, 1026 hostages (officials, officers)46, etc. In the Soviet press of that time, the Bolshevik terror was often compared with the Jacobin terror. Thus, it was presented as a traditional revolutionary method, without revealing the results of Robespierre’s actions... The Bolshevik leaders presented the “necessity” of terror as an expression of the will of the masses47, as a policy of the state of workers and peasants, carried out for the benefit of the working people. So that the latter can be sure of this, N. Osinsky from the pages of the Pravda newspaper. On September 11, 1918 he stated: “From the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, we have moved to extreme terror - a system of destroying the bourgeoisie as a class.” Latsis detailed this position, giving instructions to the local Cheka: “Do not look for incriminating evidence in the case as to whether he rebelled against the Council with weapons or words. The first thing you must ask him is to what class he belongs, what his origin is, what his education is and what his profession is. All these questions must decide the fate of the accused. This is the meaning of the Red Terror."48.
This call by Latsis for the merciless class destruction of enemies was not accidental, as was the demand of the security officers of the Nolinsky district of the Vyatka province to use torture during interrogations until the arrested person “tells everything” 4. This was a consequence of the party’s policy of arbitrariness and permissiveness 50.
The “need” of terror to maintain the power of Bolshevism was obvious; it was important to convince the population of this. The propaganda apparatus played on the feelings of the lumpen, assuring them that terror would not affect them, but was directed only against “rich counter-revolutionaries.” But the class principle, especially when suppressing peasant uprisings, was not maintained 51. It was easier to justify the strengthening terrorist actions in response to the murders (or attempted murders) of Bolshevik leaders. The idea of the omnipotence and mercilessness of those in power was created by the execution of members of the royal family: if they were killed, then there is nothing to say about the rest... they will be killed. The skillful use of these acts to incite hatred towards opponents of the regime was aimed at intimidating and suppressing possible resistance to it by every citizen52.
Getting to know the investigation into the murder of the Commissioner for Press, Propaganda and Agitation Petrograd Soviet V. Volodarsky, chairman of the Petrograd Cheka M. Uritsky and the assassination attempt on Lenin raises many questions to which it is difficult to find answers53. Volodarsky was killed on June 20, 1918 in Petrograd by the painter Sergeev, a Socialist Revolutionary. It is not clear why it was Volodarsky who became the victim, why the car in which he was driving from the rally “broke down” on the road at the place where the terrorist was waiting for it. The investigation lasted a long time (until the end of February 1919), but did not produce results. The Bolsheviks used the act of Volodarsky’s murder to call for mass Red Terror and launch a large-scale propaganda campaign against the democratic parties: the Mensheviks and the Right Socialist Revolutionaries54.
But this was not enough to convince the population of the need for total terror. The murder of the little-known Volodarsky in the country (a Jew, a Bolshevik with little party experience) could not cause mass indignation among the masses. The situation in the country has become extremely aggravated. The Bolsheviks moved towards creating a one-party system and inciting class struggle, believing that only in this case they could stay in power. On June 14, 1918, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee expelled from its composition and proposed to do so the local 1st Soviets of the Socialist Revolutionaries (right and center), Mensheviks, “seeking to discredit and overthrow the power of the Soviets”55. At the same time, the Soviets created committees of the poor, intensified requisition activities, increased the number of the Cheka and... were defeated by detachments of the Czechoslovak Corps and the People's Army of the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), created by the Social Revolutionaries in Samara to restore the power of the Constituent Assembly.
The Soviets put an end to the Left SRs and quickly began to turn the country into a “single military camp” filled with concentration camps. A catalyst was needed to move to decisive action. And, as Latsis wrote, when “S.-R. made an attempt on the life of comrade. Lenin, Volodarsky, Uritsky and others, then the Cheka had no choice but to begin the destruction of the enemy’s manpower, mass executions, i.e., the Red Terror” 56. The murder of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin occurred on the same day - 30 August 1918. Uritsky was not the worst of the security officers; on the contrary, many found honesty and humanity in him57. Shot Uritsky by Leonid Akimovich Kannegiesser, poet and socialist 58. During the investigation, accusations were made different versions motives for the murder of Uritsky59. The most probable was the one that Kannegiesser imposed on the investigation: he shot in protest against the execution as a hostage of a school friend. The security officers, who were aimed at solving political crimes, could not prove otherwise.
However, the response was unusually cruel: up to 900 innocent hostages were shot in Petrograd 60. A significantly larger number of victims is associated with the attempt on Lenin. Kaplan was shot before the investigation was completed, without a trial, without a decision of the All-Russian Cheka Collegium, on the verbal instructions of the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Sverdlov, without proof that it was she who fired61.
The number of those executed in the first days of September 1918, before the Council of People's Commissars' resolution on the Red Terror, is difficult to calculate. It is important to note that this resolution recorded what was already happening and gave it a legislative basis; the authorities sanctified terror as state policy. During these days, the Central Committee of the RCP(b) and the Cheka developed practical instructions. It suggested: “Shoot all counter-revolutionaries. Give districts the right to shoot on their own... Take hostages... organize small-scale operations in the districts concentration camps...Tonight the Presidium of the Cheka will consider the affairs of the counter-revolution and shoot all obvious counter-revolutionaries. The district Cheka should do the same. Take measures to ensure that corpses do not fall into unwanted hands...” 62 The mayhem exceeded the darkest expectations: 6,185 people were shot, 14,829 were sent to prison, 6,407 were sent to concentration camps, 4,068 became hostages 63. These are approximate figures, since it is impossible to calculate , how many lives were then ruined by the local Chekas is almost impossible. The Cheka explained: during the civil war, legal laws are not written, therefore “the only guarantee of legality was the correctly selected composition of the employees of the Extraordinary Commission”64.
Thus, attempts on the lives of Bolshevik leaders contributed to the rampant mass terror in the country, which became an integral part of the military-communist state for many years. This method will be used in the early 30s, when the inspired murder of Kirov will lead to great terror and it will be carried out by the security officers of the civil war: Yagoda, Beria, Agranov Zakovsky and many others...
In September 1918, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs G.I. Petrovsky was indignant at the “insignificant number of serious repressions and mass shootings"and proposed to the provincial executive committees, i.e. executive bodies Soviet authorities, to show “special initiative” in the spread of mass terror. Stalin used this experience when he criticized Yagoda’s actions and complained that the NKVD with its deployment great terror two years late...
The Red Terror with its indispensable companions - arbitrariness, concentration camps, hostages, torture - functioned throughout the civil war. Its tides and some limitations depended on many circumstances, as did the development of its attendant institutions. Such was the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of February 15, 1919, allowing to take “hostages from the peasants with the understanding that if the snow is not cleared, they will be shot,” or Dzerzhinsky’s proposal on September 26, 1919 that “the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, declaring the official mass red terror, he instructed the Cheka to actually carry it out” 6.
The investigation into the assassination attempt on Lenin was typical for that time and indicated that the authorities were not interested in identifying the circumstances of the crime and the identity of the terrorist. The very fact of what happened was important to them in order to move on to the total extermination of those whom they considered “counter-revolutionaries.” Having stated that Kaplan represented the right-wing Socialist Revolutionary Party (this has not been proven), the authorities attacked not only members of this party who were fighting with the Reds at that time "military actions, but also against all potentially conceivable enemies V. They were shot in public to intimidate them. Patriarch Tikhon’s call for reconciliation and an end to the extermination of fellow citizens was not heard 67.
At the same time and interconnected with the red terror, white terror was rampant in the country. And if we consider the Red Terror, unlike the White Terror, to be the implementation of state policy, then we should probably take into account the fact that the Whites at that time also occupied vast territories and declared themselves as sovereign governments and state entities. None of the leaders of the warring parties avoided the use of terror against their opponents and civilians. The forms and methods of terror were different. But they were also used by adherents of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch in Samara, the Provisional Regional Government in the Urals, the Provisional Siberian Government, the Supreme Administration Northern region), and the white movement itself. The coming to power of the founders in the cities of the Volga region in the summer of 1918 was characterized by reprisals against many party and Soviet workers68, and the prohibition of Bolsheviks and left Socialist Revolutionaries from working in government structures69. One of the first departments of Komuch was created state security(counterintelligence, 60-100 employees in cities), military courts, which, as a rule, handed down death sentences, trains and “death barges”. On September 3, 1918, they brutally suppressed the workers' uprising in Kazan, and on October 1 - in Ivashchenkovo. “The regime of terror,” admitted Komuchevets S. Nikolaev, “took particularly cruel forms in the Middle Volga region, through which the movement of Czechoslovak legionnaires took place” 70.
In the Urals, Siberia and Arkhangelsk, the Socialist Revolutionaries and People's Socialists immediately declared their commitment to Constituent Assembly and arrests of Soviet workers and communists. In just one year in power northern territory With a population of 400 thousand people, 38 thousand arrested people passed through the Arkhangelsk prison. Of these, 8 thousand were shot and more than a thousand died from beatings and illnesses 71.
The political regimes established in 1918 in Russia are quite comparable, primarily in their predominantly violent methods of resolving issues of organizing power. In November 1918, Kolchak, who came to power in Siberia, began with the expulsion and murder of the Socialist Revolutionaries. “I forbid arresting workers, but order them to be shot or hanged”; “I order all arrested workers to be hanged on the main street and not removed for three days” - this is from the orders of the Krasnov captain of the Makeyevsky district on November 10, 1918.72 Terror served as a means of maintaining power for the confronting parties; it was immoral and criminal, no matter who for whatever purposes it was used. Already in 1918, “environmental terror” began to reign in Russia, when the symmetry of the parties’ actions became inevitably similar. This continued in 1919-1920, when both the Reds and the Whites simultaneously built dictatorial militarized states, where the implementation of a given goal prevailed over the value of human life.
Kolchak and Denikin were professional military men, patriots who had their own views on the future of the country. In Soviet historiography, for many years Kolchak was characterized as a reactionary and a hidden monarchist; the image of a liberal who enjoyed the support of the population was created abroad. These are extreme points of view. During interrogations at the Irkutsk Cheka in January 1920, Kolchak stated that he did not know about many facts of the ruthless attitude towards workers and peasants on the part of his punishers. Perhaps he was telling the truth. But it is difficult to talk about support for his policies in Siberia and the Urals, if out of approximately 400 thousand red partisans of that time, 150 thousand acted against him, and among them 4-5% were wealthy peasants, or, as they were called then, kulaks .
The Kolchak government created the punitive apparatus on the basis of traditions pre-revolutionary Russia, but changing the names: instead of the gendarmerie - the state security, the police - the militia, etc. The managers of the punitive authorities in the provinces in the spring of 1919 demanded not to comply with legal norms created for peacetime, but to proceed from expediency75. This was true, especially during punitive actions. “A year ago,” the coniferous minister of the Kolchak government, A. Budberg, wrote in his diary on August 4, 1919, “the population saw us as deliverers from the heavy captivity of the commissars, but now they hate us just as much as they hated the commissars, if not more; and what’s even worse than hatred is that it no longer believes us, it doesn’t expect anything good from us.”6
A dictatorship is unthinkable without a strong repressive apparatus and ongoing terror. The word “execution” was one of the most popular in the vocabulary of the Civil War. The Denikin government was no exception in this regard. The police in the territory captured by the general were called state guards. Its numbers reached almost 78 thousand people by September 1919 77 (note that in active army Denikin then had about 110 thousand bayonets and sabers). Denikin, like Kolchak, denied his participation in any repressive measures. He blamed this on counterintelligence, which became “a hotbed of provocation and organized robbery,” on governors and military leaders. 78 Osvag’s reports informed Denikin about robberies, looting, and military cruelty towards civilians, 79; it was under his command that 226 Jewish pogroms took place, resulting in deaths thousands of innocent people 80.
Numerous evidence speaks of the cruelty of the punitive policy of Wrangel8183 Yudenich82 and other generals. They were complemented by the actions of many atamans who acted on behalf of the regular white armies . The White Terror turned out to be as senseless in achieving its goal as any other 84.
An essential part of the civil war were numerous peasant uprisings against the local policies of the Soviet authorities. For the most part they flared up spontaneously, as a protest against requisitions, taxes, various duties, mobilizations into the army, as a reaction of people who were robbed, offering in exchange for the taken food products a “bright future,” i.e., nothing.
Mass peasant uprisings began in the fall of 1918 and reached their climax in 1920, contributing to the preservation of martial law in 36 provinces of the country until the end of 1922. Hundreds of thousands of multinational peasant population participated in the resistance movement against the regime, and elite armed units took part in its suppression : cadets, units of the Cheka corps, internal troops, CHON, Latvian riflemen, internationalists (companies of Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Chinese, etc., who then served in the Red Army), best commanders- M. N. Tukhachevsky, I. P. Uborevich, V. I. Shorin and others.
Fury and mercilessness Russian revolt then manifested itself in all its strength. In 1918, during the suppression of these protests, 5 thousand security officers and approximately 4.5 thousand food detachments died86. The number of victims on the part of the peasants was immeasurably greater. In 1920 it was carried out real war proletarian state with a majority of its own population. That’s why Lenin called her more dangerous for the Soviet regime than Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak combined. The ferocity and mercilessness with which villages were burned, peasants were shot and entire peasant families were taken hostage is only just becoming the subject of study.
There are no exact estimates of the number of victims of the White and Red Terror. The figures given in the literature are contradictory; their sources and calculation methods are not reported. The commission created by Denikin to investigate the actions of the Bolsheviks in 1918-1919, named 1,700 thousand victims of the Red Terror.
Latsis reported that during these two years the number of those arrested by the Cheka was 128,010, of which 8,641 people were shot. Modern Soviet historians calculated that in 1917-1922. 15-16 million Russians died, of which 1.3 million were killed in* 1918-1920. victims of terror, banditry, pogroms, participation in peasant uprisings and their suppression.
Install exact numbers killed during the Red or White Terror is not possible 89.
An analysis of individual minutes of meetings of the Presidium of the Cheka/GPU shows that the number of people sentenced to death from among the cases considered is quite large. On May 8, 1919, 33 cases were considered - 13 people were sentenced to death; August 6, 1921, respectively - 43 and 8; August 20, 1921 - 45 and 17; September 3, 1921 - 32 and 26; November 8, 1922 - 45 and 18. According to the minutes of the meetings of the presidium of the Kazan Gubernia Cheka, during two days of meetings in December 1918, 75 cases of those arrested were considered, of which 14 were sentenced to death; in 1919, out of approximately 3 thousand cases considered, 169 were sentenced to death, in 1920 - 65, in 1921 - 16 9<0.
Reports of various terrorist attacks are inaccurate. It is known that in Crimea, after the evacuation of Wrangel’s troops, tens of thousands of former officers and military officials remained, who for various reasons decided to refuse emigration. Many of them were registered and then were shot. The estimated number of those executed ranges from 50 to 120 thousand people. Documentary evidence is not enough. The archive of the Crimean Cheka is not yet available to researchers. The discovered award list of E. G. Evdokimov (1891-1940), a security officer, and head of the Special Department of the Southern Front in the fall of 1920 speaks of his nomination for awarding the Order of the Red Banner of Battle. The rationale emphasized: “During the defeat of the army, Gen. Wrangel in Crimea comrade. Evdokimov and his expedition cleared the Crimean peninsula of white officers and counterintelligence officers remaining there for the underground, seizing up to 30 governors, 50 generals, more than 300 colonels, the same number of counterintelligence officers and in total up to 12,000 white elements, thereby preventing the possibility of white gangs appearing in Crimea” 91. The number in this document is impressive - 12 thousand people were shot only by employees of the Special Department of the Front. But it should be noted that the security officers also carried out reprisals in all cities and towns of Crimea. Because the number of victims was significantly higher. Of course, it is impossible to imagine that former governors or generals who found themselves in Crimea would start creating gangs... But the stereotype of those years was this: arguments were not needed, political charges were equal to criminal ones.
Probably, the number of people who died from the Red Terror will become known over time and will once again shake the consciousness of people, and not only their compatriots. The civil, fratricidal war with its millions of human victims became a national tragedy; it devalued life. It is the beginning of that great terror that the party-state dictatorship again unleashed with particular fury against its own people a decade and a half later. And no matter how the participants, eyewitnesses, historians describe the events of those years, the essence is the same - the Red and White Terror were the most barbaric method of struggle for power. Its results for the progress of the country and society are truly disastrous. Contemporaries realized this. But many still do not fully understand the fact that any terror is a crime against humanity, no matter what its motivation.
Notes
1 The famous researcher of totalitarianism X. Arendt is right in seeing the connection and difference between violence and terror. “Terror is not the same as violence; it is rather a form of government that occurs when violence, having destroyed all power, does not exhaust itself, but gains new control.” (A g e n d t Hannah. On Violence. N. Y., 1969. P. 55.)
2 Lenin V.I. PSS T. 39. P. 113-114, 405.
3 Bystryansky V. Counter-revolution and its methods. White terror before and now. Pb., 1920. P. 1.
4 Melgunov S.P. Red terror in Russia. 1918-1923. Berlin, 1924. pp. 5-6.
5 See: Gorky M. Untimely Thoughts. Notes on revolution and culture. Pg., 1918. S. 68, 101; V. G. Korolenko during the years of revolution and civil war. 1917-1921: Biographical chronicle. . Vermont, 1985. pp. 184-185; Martov and his relatives. New York, 1959. P. 151.
6 Golinkov D. L. The collapse of the anti-Soviet underground in the USSR. Book 1. M., 1986. S. 137, 188; In e-l and d about in A.S. Preface to the “Red Book of the Cheka”. M., 1989. T. 1. P. 7. O. F. Solovyov even came to the conclusion that “the red terror brought immeasurably fewer victims than the white terror” (O. F. Solovyov. Modern bourgeois historiography on the suppression of counter-revolution in Soviet Russia during the civil war // Historical experience of the Great October Revolution, M., 1975. P. 420.
7 Feldman D. Crime and... justification // New World. 1990. No. 8. P. 253; Feofanov Yu. Ideology in power // Izvestia 1990. October 4; Vasilevsky A. Ruin // New World, 1991. No. 2. P. 253.
8 See: Ioffe G. 3. “White Business”. General Kornilov. M., 1989. P. 233; Latsis M.I. Take no prisoners // Red Army soldier. 1927. No. 21. P. 18.
9 See: L e w i n M. The Civil War: dynamics and legacy // Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War. Indiana University Press. 1989. P. 406; him. Civil war in Russia: driving forces and legacy // History and historians. M., 1990. P. 375. Not only the Red and White Terror, but also banditry and pogroms were destructive. Only in Ukraine in 1918-1920. More than 200 thousand Jews were killed and about a million more were beaten and robbed. Pogroms covered about 1,300 towns and cities in Ukraine and about 200 in Belarus (Larin Yu. Jews and anti-Semitism in the USSR. M.; Leningrad, 1929. P. 39). V.P. Danilov gives different data: Petliura’s terror (it can be called black or yellow) claimed 300 thousand Jewish lives. Neither whites nor reds can take such victims personally (Rodina. 1990. No. 10. P. 15).
10 Cohen S. Rethinking the Soviet experience (politics and history since 1917). Vermont, 1986. pp. 47-78; Avtorkhanov A. Lenin in the destinies of Russia // New World, 1991. No. 1; V about l about about in D. A. Stalinism: essence, genesis, evolution // Questions of history. 1990. No. 3; Ts i p k o A. S. The violence of lies, or how a ghost got lost. M., 1990, etc. Accusations of modern Black Hundred organizations, the magazine “Young Guard” (1989. No. 6, 11) against Jews as the perpetrators of revolution and terror are anti-Semitic in nature and were quite fully exposed on the pages of the newspaper “Izvestia” (1990 . 11, 29 August). Anti-Semitic fabrications include speeches pointing to Sverdlov as the organizer of the civil war and to him and Trotsky as the initiators of “decossackization.” N azarov G. Ya. M. Sverdlov: organizer of the civil war and mass repressions // Young Guard, 1989. No. 10; him. Further... further... further... to the truth // Moscow, 1989. No. 12; Literary newspaper. 1989. March 29.
11 Reds and Whites explained the cruelty of treatment by reference to similar actions of the opposite side - the newest type of “blood feud”. See, for example, Stalin’s telegram of January 10, 1939 (Izvestia of the Central Committee of the CPSU. 1989. No. 3. P. 145).
12 See, for example: Volkogonov D. “With merciless determination...”//Izvestia, 1992. April 22.
13 See: Brzezinski 3. Big failure. N.Y., 1989. P. 29; K e e r J. Lenin's Time Budget: the Smolny period // Revolutionin Russia: Reassessment of 1917. Cambridge, 1992. P. 354.
14Conquest R. The Great Terror. L., 1974. pp. 16-17.
15 RCKHIDNI, f. 2, 2, d. 380, l. 1. The document was partially published by D. A. Volkogonov (Izvestia. 1922. April 22).
17 Lenin told N. Valentinov in 1904 that the future revolution must be Jacobin and there is no need to be afraid to resort to the guillotine (Valentinov N. Meetings with Lenin. N. Y., 1979. P. 185). The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets abolished the death penalty in the country on October 25, 1917. Upon learning of this, Lenin was indignant: “Nonsense... How can you make a revolution without executions.” Lenin proposed canceling the decree. (Trotsky L. About Lenin: Materials for a biographer. M., 1925. P. 72-73). P. Kropotkin told I. Bunin about his meeting with Lenin in 1918: “I realized that it was completely in vain to convince this man of anything! I reproached him for allowing two and a half thousand innocent people to be killed for the attempt on his life. But it turned out that this did not make any impression on him...” (Bunin I.A. Memoirs. Paris, 1950. P. 58). There is a lot of similar evidence. Lenin more than once came out with a cynical demand for the execution of innocents, justifying them in the highest interests of the class struggle. (See: Lenin V.I. PSS, T. 38. P. 295; T. 45, P. 189; etc.) He, as a rule, defended the actions of the Cheka. In December 1918, M. Yu. Kozlovsky, a member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Justice of the RSFSR, wrote to Lenin that he was sending 8 grandfathers from the Cheka, from which one can see “how things are conducted in the Cheka, with what light baggage they are sent there to a better world.” Kozlovsky gave examples of similar cases: the shooting of the wife of a White Guard - an active monarchist - for stealing rye, etc. Sergeeva was shot for participating in the work of Savinkov’s organization. She stated that she confessed to this under threat of execution. When Kozlovsky asked where this investigator was, he was told that he had been shot as a provocateur. There is no information in the case about Sergeeva’s cooperation with Savinkov and his organization. At a meeting of the Board of the Cheka on December 17, 1918. Kozlovsky's letter of protest was discussed. They decided that Kozlovsky did not have the right to interfere in the affairs of the Cheka, and demanded from him evidence about 50% of the innocent people executed by the Cheka in order to file a protest about this to the Central Committee of the party, “considering his actions completely unacceptable and introducing complete disorganization into the work of the Cheka.” At the suggestion of Dzerzhinsky, the Board of the Cheka demanded full confidence of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) in its actions and declared the inadmissibility of control of its activities by the People's Commissariat of Justice. In response to this, Kozlovsky, stating that his protest was supported by the Collegium of the People's Commissariat of Justice, again wrote to Lenin on December 19, 1918, that he protested 16 of the 17 executions carried out by the Cheka as illegal. Lenin agreed with Dzerzhinsky. (RTSKHIDNI, f. 2. op. 2, d. 133, l. 1-2, 9, 11, 13; d. 134, l. 1.) Lenin did not object to the mass terror that Stalin committed in Tsaritsyn in the summer of 1918 . (Medvedev R. About Stalin and Stalinism. M., 1990. P. 40-42).
18 See: Gorky M. Untimely Thoughts: Notes on Revolution and Culture. Pg., 1918; B u n i n I. A. Damned days. L., 1984; Luxemburg R. Manuscript about the Russian Revolution // Questions of History, 1990. No. 2.
1 Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 38. Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky; Trotsky L. D. Terrorism and communism // Soch., M.; L., 1925. T. XII; Kautsky K. Dictatorship of the proletariat. Wien, 1918; him. Terrorism and communism. Berlin, 1919; his e. From democracy to state slavery (answer to Trotsky). Berlin, 1922.
20 Kautsky K. Moscow court and Bolshevism // Twelve Death Rowers. The trial of socialist revolutionaries in Moscow. Berlin, 1922. P. 9.
21 Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 35. P. 185.
22 L. D. Trotsky justified: “The question of the form of repression, or its degree, of course, is not “fundamental.” This is a question of expediency. In a revolutionary era, a party thrown out of power, which does not put up with the stability of the ruling party and proves this with its frantic struggle against her, cannot be deterred by the threat of imprisonment, since she does not believe in his activities. It is this simple but decisive fact that explains the widespread use of executions in the civil war." Trotsky T. XII. 59. N.I. Bukharin agreed with him: “From a broader point of view, that is, from the point of view of a large historical scale, proletarian coercion in all its forms, from executions to labor conscription, is , as paradoxical as it may sound, by the method of developing communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era.” (Bukharin N.I. Problems of theory and practice of socialism. M., 1989. P. 168.)
23 Trotsky L. D. History of the Russian Revolution. T. II. Part II. Berlin, 1933. P. 376.
24 Kautsky K. Terrorism and communism. pp. 7, 196, 204; his e. From democracy to state slavery. pp. 162, 166.
25 The investigation into the case of the assassination attempt on Lenin and the murder of Kokoshkin and Shingarev was led by the manager of the Council of People's Commissars, V.D. Bonch-Bruevich, although the Cheka had been created by that time. He pointed out that the three officers who attempted to assassinate Lenin were arrested and then sent to the front against the German troops who had begun the offensive. (Bonch-Bruevich V. Three attempts on V.I. Lenin. M., 1930. P. 10, 43-44.) An overview report on this attempt on Lenin was compiled by NKVD officers in August 1936. It contains the testimony of the car driver Lenin Taras Gorokhovik dated January 2, 1918 and former second lieutenant G. G. Ushakov, arrested in 1935. The driver reported that “the shooting began as the car was descending from the bridge onto Simeonovskaya Street.” Gorokhovik said that he heard up to 10 shots and that F. Platten was wounded while saving Lenin's head. Ushakov “admitted” that, together with Semyon Kazakov, he was the perpetrator of the assassination attempt. But he threw the grenade not at the car, but at Moika, other officers began to shoot at the car, but it quickly drove away. Ushakov was shot in 1936.
The investigation into the murder of Kokoshkin and Shingarev revealed the actual organizers of the crime: the head of the Petrograd police commissariat P. Mikhailov, his henchmen P. Kulikov and Basov, who provoked a group of sailors, soldiers and Red Guards to commit the crime. (Io f e G. 3. “White matter...” P. 246-247.)
26 Spirin L. M. Classes and parties in the civil war in Russia (1917-1920). M., 1968. S. 210, 213.
27 R. Pyles: “When the government arrogates to itself the right to kill people because their death is “necessary,” we enter a qualitatively new moral era. And this is the symbolic meaning of the events in Yekaterinburg that happened on the night of July 16-17, 1918.” (Izvestia. 1990. November 27.) “The execution of the royal family,” wrote Trotsky, “was needed not just to intimidate, terrify, and deprive enemies of hope, but also to shake up one’s own ranks, to show that retreat no, that there is complete victory or complete destruction ahead." (Trotsky L. D. Diaries and letters. Tenafly, 1986. P. 100-101.)
29 Karr E. Bolshevik revolution. 1917-1923. M., 1990. T. 1. P. 144. The resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of July 29, 1918, apparently relied on calls from the localities. On July 28, 1918, a member of the RVS of the Eastern Front, F. F. Raskolnikov, telegraphed Trotsky that it was “completely unthinkable” to do without executions. He proposed: “All active White Guards who were caught preparing an armed uprising against the Soviet regime, or caught with weapons in their hands... Black Hundred agitators..., as well as all persons who dared to take power temporarily in one place or another, who had fallen from hands of the Soviets, are declared illegal and punishable by death without investigation or trial.” (Rodina, 1992. No. 4. P. 100.)
30 Miliukov P. Russia at a turning point. Bolshevik period of the Russian revolution. T. 1. Paris, 1927. P. 192. Former People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR I. Steinberg wrote: “Terror is not an isolated act, not an isolated, random, although repeated manifestation of the government majority... Terror is a legalized plan of mass intimidation , coercion, extermination by the authorities... Terror is not only the death penalty... The forms of terror are countless and varied...” (Shteinberg I. The moral face of the revolution. Berlin, 1923. P. 18-24.)
31 See: Volkogonov D. Trotsky. Political portrait. M., 1992. P. 191. According to Yu. P. Gaven, the Red Terror was used long before its official introduction. So, in January 1918 he, as chairman of the Sevastopol Military Revolutionary Committee, ordered the execution of more than 500 “counter-revolutionary officers.” (Motherland. 1992. No. 4. P. 100-101.)
32 Steklov Yu. White terror // Izvestia, 1918. September 5; Shishkin V.I. Discussion problems of October and the Civil War // Current problems of the history of Soviet Siberia. Novosibirsk, 1990. P. 25.
33 Grunt A. Ya. Moscow 1917. Revolution and counter-revolution. M., 1976. P. 318; Bolsheviks of the Urals in the struggle for the victory of the October Socialist Revolution. Sat. doc. and materials. Sverdlovsk, 1957. P. 251-252; Diary of the Russian Civil War. Alexis Babin in Saratov. 1917-1922 // Volga. 1990. No. 5. P. 127.
34 General Ts. Grigorenko, recalling how during the civil war the whites were rampant in the Ukrainian village where he lived and how security officers shot hostages for not surrendering their weapons, he remarked: “But here’s a phenomenon. We all heard it and knew it. Two years have passed and they have already forgotten. We remember the executions of the first Soviets by the Whites, the stories about the atrocities of the Whites are in our memory, but the recent Red Terror has been completely forgotten. Several of our fellow villagers were captured by the whites and tasted ramrods, but they brought their heads home intact. And they also remembered the atrocities of the whites and were more willing to talk about white ramrods than about the recent KGB executions.” (Grigorenko P. Memoirs.//Zvezda. 1990. No. 2. P. 195.) I talked about this back in the 20s. General A.A. von Lampe: “When the Reds left, the population counted with satisfaction what they had left... When the Whites left, the population angrily calculated what they had taken... The Reds threatened... to take everything and they took part - the population was deceived and... satisfied. The whites promised legality, took little - and the population was embittered" (Denikin A.I., Lampe A.A. von Tragedy of the White Army. M., 1991. P. 29.)
35 Gul R. Ice campaign. M., 1990. S. 53-54. Chekist M. Latsis claimed that in the first half of 1918 the Cheka shot 22 people. S. Melgunov counted 884 people according to newspaper sources. (Latsis M. Extraordinary commissions to combat counter-revolution. M., 1921. P. 9; Mel Gunov S. Red terror in Russia. P. 37.)
36 Collection of laws and orders of the Workers' and Peasants' Government (hereinafter - SUR). 1918. No. 44. P. 536. P. Stuchka in 1918 told the people’s judges: “We now need not so much lawyers as communists.” (Stuchka P. 13 years of struggle for the revolutionary Marxist theory of law. M., 1931. P. 67.)
38 In 1918, cases of counter-revolutionary actions in the tribunals accounted for 35%, in 1920 - 12%. The rest are cases of crimes in office, speculation, forgery, pogroms, etc. (T and about in Yu. P. Development of the system of Soviet revolutionary tribunals. M., 1987, P. 14; R o d i n D. Revolutionary tribunals in 1920-1922 // Bulletin of Statistics. 1989. No. 8. P. 49. B erman Ya. About revolutionary tribunals // Proletarian Revolution and Law 1919. No. 1. P. 61;
B.P., Slavin M.M-. The formation of justice in Soviet Russia (1917-1922). M., 1990.
pp. 51-52, 122.
40 Bonch-Bruevich in his memoirs quoted Dzerzhinsky, who had taken up the duties of chairman of the Cheka: “Do not think that I am looking for forms of revolutionary justice; We don't need justice now. Such a struggle - chest to chest, a struggle for life and death - who will win! I propose, I demand the organization of revolutionary reprisals against counter-revolutionary figures.” (Bonch-Bruevich V. At combat posts of the February and October revolutions. M., 1931. P. 191-192.)
41 See: Solomon G. A. Among the red leaders. Personally experienced and seen in Soviet service. Part 1. Paris, 1930; P. 242.
42 Axelrod P.B. Experienced and changed minds. Berlin, 1923. Book. 1. pp. 195-199; Novgorodtsev P.I. On the paths and tasks of the Russian intelligentsia // From the depths. Paris, 1967. P. 258; P a i p s R. Russia under the old regime. Cambridge, 1981. P. 426; Clark R. Lenin: The man behind the mask. L., 1988. P. 90-91, 255; Antonov V.F. Populism in Russia: utopia or rejected possibilities // Questions of history. 1991. No. 1. P. 14, etc.
43 Internal troops of the Soviet republic. 1917-1922: Documents and materials. M., 1972. P. 165; Strizhkov Yu. K. Food detachments during the civil war and foreign intervention. M., 1968. Dis. ...cand. ist. Sci. pp. 183, 392.
45 Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 13. A Red Army soldier received 150 rubles in 1918. per month, family - 250 rubles. (Portnov V., Slavin M. Legal principles of the construction of the Red Army. M., 1985. P. 162.)
46Melgunov S.P. Decree. Op. P. 105. According to P. Sorokin, in 1919 the terror of the authorities fell to a greater extent on workers and peasants. He explained this by saying that “since 1919, power has actually ceased to be the power of the working masses and has become simply a tyranny, consisting of unprincipled intellectuals, declassed workers, criminals and assorted adventurers.” (Sorokin P. Current state of Russia // New World. 1992. No. 4. P. 198.)
47From Dzerzhinsky’s point of view, “the red terror was nothing more than an expression of the unyielding will of the poor peasantry and the proletariat to destroy any attempts to rebel against us” (Dzerzhinsky F.E. Selected Works. T.I.M., 1957. P. 274).
48 Red Terror (Kazan). 1918. No. 1. P. 1-2. It is believed that Lenin criticized Latsis’s statement; they refer to his words on this matter (Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 37. P. 410; Golinkov D.L. The collapse of the anti-Soviet underground in the USSR. Book 1. M., 1986 . P. 225). Latsis recalled this episode as follows: “Vladimir Ilyich reminded me that our task is not the physical destruction of the bourgeoisie, but the elimination of those causes that give rise to the bourgeoisie. When I explained to him that my actions exactly corresponded to his directives and that I simply made a careless expression in the article, he delayed his article, scheduled for publication in Pravda. counter-revolution on the internal front [Typescript]. P. 41.) Lenin’s article “A small picture for clarifying big issues” was first published in Pravda on November 7, 1926, when the urgency of the issue under discussion had disappeared and Latsis’s criticism on the issue of terror had no effect. previous value.
49 Weekly of the Cheka. 1918. No. 3. October 6. The security officers demanded that Lockhart be tortured. As a result of public criticism of the actions and calls of the Nolin security officers, sanctions followed; The publication of the “Weekly of the Cheka” was stopped at the end of 1918, and the presidium of the Cheka decided on December 27, 1918: “Deny the district Nolinsk Cheka the right to execute. In emergency cases, it was proposed to act with the consent of the Executive Committee and the committee of the RCP (b).” (Archive of the Ministry of Bank of the Russian Federation, f. 1, op. 2, d. 2, l. 11.)
50 Back in July 1918, Petrograd newspapers demanded “ exterminate the enemies of the people“, and the Petrograd Soviet made a decision on August 28: “If even a hair falls from the heads of our leaders, we will destroy those White Guards who are in our hands, we will exterminate the leaders of the counter-revolution without exception.” (The past. Historical almanac. Paris, 1986. P. 94-95.)
1 Frenkin M. The tragedy of peasant uprisings in Russia. 1918-1921 Jerusalem, 1987. pp. 93-95.
52 On February 24, 1918, shortly after the Cheka was endowed with extrajudicial reprisals, the Cheka Collegium introduced the institution of secret agents. 10% of the confiscated money was paid to those who pointed out the speculator. (Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 11.) On September 19, 1918, Dzerzhinsky stated: “the main task of the Cheka ... is a merciless fight against counter-revolution, manifested in the activities of both individuals and entire organizations.” (Collection of the most important orders and instructions of the Cheka. T. 1. M., 1918. P. 12.)
53 Many details of the murder of Volodarsky, Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin became known from the brochure of the former Socialist Revolutionary, since 1921 communist G. Semenov, “Military and combat work of the Socialist Revolutionary Party for 1917-1918.” (M., 1922), published simultaneously in Berlin and in the GPU printing house on Lubyanka. Lenin knew its contents and hurried its publication in connection with the impending trial of the leaders of the Right Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1922. In January 1922, he instructed the Deputy Chairman of the GPU I. Unshlikht to take measures “so that the manuscript known to him would be published abroad no later than than in 2 weeks.” (RCKHIDNI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 256, l. 2.) G. I. Semenov-Vasiliev (1891 -1937) from 1915 - Socialist Revolutionary, in 1918 - leader of the party’s combat group. -r. He was arrested by the Cheka in October 1918, after which he collaborated with the security officers. In 1922 he was convicted and amnestied. Then he worked in the intelligence department of the Red Army. On February 11, 1937, he was arrested on charges of connections with Bukharin and the creation of “terrorist groups under his leadership.” This was not proven, but Semenov was shot on October 8, 1937 by the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. In August 1961, he was posthumously rehabilitated. (Archive of the Ministry of Bank of the Russian Federation, no. 11401, 1.)
54 Lenin, in a letter to the party leaders of Petrograd on June 26, 1918, strongly advocated mass terror in the city, calling: “to encourage the energy and mass character of terror against counter-revolutionaries, and especially in St. Petersburg, whose example decides.” (Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 50. P. 106.)
56 SUR. 1918. No. 44. P. 538.
57 Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 74.
57 The director of the Gatchina Museum, V.P. Zubov, recalled his meeting with Uritsky: “Before me was a deeply honest man, fanatically devoted to his ideas and possessing somewhere in the depths of his soul a share of kindness. But fanaticism forged his will so much that he knew how to be cruel. In any case, he was far from the type of sadists who ran the check after him.” (Zubov V.P. The difficult years of Russia. Memories of the revolution of 1917-1952. Munich, 1968. P. 51.) At the 1st conference of the Cheka (June 1918) the issue of recalling Uritsky from the post of chairman of the Petrograd Cheka and replacing him was discussed “a more persistent and decisive comrade, capable of firmly and unswervingly pursuing tactics of mercilessly suppressing and combating hostile elements that are destroying Soviet power and the revolution.” This was caused by Uritsky's protests against the brutal interrogation methods of the Cheka, especially children. Then Uritsky was left at his post. (Moscow News. 1991. November 10.)
58 L. A. Kannegisser (1896-1918) - comes from the family of an employee of the Ministry of Railways. In 1913-1917 - a student at the Faculty of Economics of the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, after February 1917 - a cadet at the Mikhailovsky Artillery School, chairman of the Union of Socialist Junkers of the Petrograd Military District.
59 Petrograd Cheka investigators Otto and Ricks, who initially led the case, stated that the murder of Uritsky was the work of Zionists and Bundists who took revenge on the chairman of the Cheka for internationalism. This statement was rejected by the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka N. Antipov, who fired these investigators for anti-Semitic sentiments (in 1919 they were re-hired to serve in the Cheka), and wrote on January 4, 1919 in Petrogradskaya Pravda: “During interrogation, Leonid Kannegisser stated “that he killed Uritsky not by order of the party or any organization, but on his own impulse, wanting to take revenge for the arrests of the officers and for the shooting of his friend Pereltsweig, whom he had known for about 10 years.” Antipov admitted that the Cheka was unable to “establish accurately through direct evidence that the murder of Comrade. Uritsky was organized by a counter-revolutionary organization.” This version was supported by Kannegiesser’s friend, writer M.A. Aldanov, adding a note that Uritsky was chosen as a victim out of the Jew’s desire to show the Russian people that among the Jews there are not only Uritskys and Zinovievs. Aldanov M. Leonid Kannegisser. Paris, 1928. P. 22). December 24, 1918 Antipov dropped the case of Uritsky's murder. Kannegiesser was shot at the same time. All months of interrogation, he repeated the same thing: he killed because Uritsky signed a list of hostages sentenced to death, and among them was his friend from the gymnasium, that he was with Uritsky and warned him about this. (Archives of the KGB of the USSR, no. 196. In 11 volumes.)
6 Ilyin-Zhenevsky A.F. Bolsheviks in power. L., 1929. P. 133; Fedyukin S.A. The Great October Revolution and the intelligentsia. M., 1971. P. 96. Contemporaries recalled the terrible terror that began in Petrograd after the murder of Uritsky. (M e l g u n o v S. P. Memoirs and diaries. Issue 2. Part 3. Paris, 1964. P. 27; Smilg-Benario M. In Soviet service // Archive of the Russian Revolution. Vol. 3. Berlin, 1921. pp. 149-150, etc.) According to the instructions of the Cheka, a hostage is “a captive member of the society or organization that is fighting us. Moreover, such a member that has value, which this enemy values ... For some village teacher, forester, miller or small shopkeeper, and even a Jew, the enemy will not stand up and will not give anything. They value something...High-ranking dignitaries, large landowners, farbikants, outstanding workers, scientists, noble relatives of those in power and the like.” (Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 190;),
F. E. Kaplan (F., H. Roitman. 1887-1918), came from the family of a rural Jewish teacher. In 1906, she was wounded during the preparation of a terrorist attack against the Kyiv governor-general; in 1907-1917 served hard labor. She returned sick and half-blind. Doubts that she shot Lenin on August 30, 1918 have been expressed more than once. (Lyandres S. The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin: a new look at the evidence // Slavik Review. 1989. V. 48. No. 3. P. 432-448, etc.) Investigative case No. 2162 in the Archives of the KGB of the USSR does not contain substantiated evidence of Kaplan's guilt. 17 witness statements are contradictory and do not state that she was the shooter. For more details, see: L i t v i n A. L. Who shot Lenin? // Megapolis-Continent. 1991. July 30; his e. Case 2162 and other cases // Interlocutor. 1991. October. No. 42. About the execution of Kaplan, see: Malkov P. D. Notes of the commandant of the Moscow Kremlin. M., 1959. S. 159-161. “Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee” on September 4, 1918 reported about the execution of Kaplan by order of the Cheka: this was confirmed by the publication of the execution list in the “Weekly Journal of the Cheka” (1918. No. 6, p. 27), where Kaplan was listed at No. 33. In the same list of executed - Archpriest Vostorgov, former ministers of Justice Shcheglovitov, Internal Affairs Khvostov, Director of the Police Department Beletsky and others. But in the minutes of the meetings of the Presidium of the Cheka there is no information about the execution of Kaplan.
62 Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. P. 190.
63 Latsis M. Two years of struggle on the internal front. M., 1920. P. 75; e g about e. The truth about the red terror // News of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, 1920. February 6; L e g g e t t G. The CheKa: Lenin's Political Police. Oxford, 1981. P. 181.
64 Review of the activities of the Cheka for 4 years. pp. 183-189. In the fall of 1918, members of the Cheka board who carried out the policy of red terror were: Dzerzhinsky, Petere, Latsis, Fomin, Puzyrev,
Ksenofontov, Polukarov, Yanushevsky, Yakovleva, Kamenshchikov, Pulyanovsky, Skrypnik, Kedrov. It was they who developed order No. 158, according to which “in the republics that are part of the RSFSR, the orders of the Cheka can be canceled only with the consent of the Cheka” (Ibid. p. 194). At the end of 1920 among the employees of the provincial Cheka there were 49.9% communists and their sympathizers. 1.03% had higher education, 57.3% had primary education; illiterate people accounted for 2.3%. By national composition, provincial security officers were distributed as follows: Russians - 77.3%, Jews - 9.1%, Poles - 1.7%, Latvians - 3.5%, Ukrainians - 3.1%, Belarusians - 0.5% , Germans - 0.6%, British - 0.004% (2 people), etc. Funding for the Cheka increased throughout the years of the civil war and amounted to 1918-1920. RUB 6,786,121 (Ibid. P. 2(57, 271, 272, 287-289.)
67 Message from Patriarch Tikhon to the Council of People's Commissars October 26, 1918 // Our contemporary. 1990. No. 4. P. 161-162.
68 In Samara, 66 people were arrested on suspicion of Bolshevism; many fell victim to lynchings.(Popov F.G., 1918 in the Samara province: Chronicle of events. Kuibyshev, 1972. P. 133, 134). About the atrocities in Kazan, see: Kuznetsov A. Kazan under the rule of the Czech founders // Proletarian Revolution. 1922. No. 8. P. 58; Maisky I.M. Democratic counter-revolution. M.; Pg., 1923, pp. 26-27; etc.
69 Order of Komuch July 12, 1918 In August 1918, Kolchak wrote: “A civil war, of necessity, must be merciless. I order the commanders to shoot all captured communists. Now we are relying on bayonets.” (Dotsenko P. The Struggle for democracy in Siberia: Eyewiness account of contemporary. Stanford, 1983. P. 109.)
70 Nikolaev S. The emergence and organization of Komuch // Will of Russia. Prague, 1928. T. 8-9. P. 234.
71 Piontkovsky S. Civil war in Russia. Reader. M., 1925. S. 581-582; Marushevsky V.V. A year in the North (August 1918 - August 1919) // White Business. 1926. T. 2. P. 53, 54; P o t y litsy n A. I. White terror in the North. 1918-1920. Arkhangelsk, 1931.
72 Coup d’état of Admiral Kolchak in Omsk on November 18, 1918. Paris, 1919. P. 152-153; Kolosov E. How was it? (Mass murders under Kolchak in December 1918 in Omsk and the death of N.V. Fomin) // Bygone. 1923. No. 21. P. 250; Rodina, 1990. No. 10. P. 79. Io f e G. 3. Kolchak’s adventure and its collapse. M., 1983. P. 179.
73Melgunov S.P. The tragedy of Admiral Kolchak. Part 2. Belgrade, 1930. P. 238; Fleming P. The Fate of Admiral Kolchak. N.Y., 1963. P. 111; etc.
74 Interrogation of Kolchak. L., 1925. S. 210-213 ; Gins testified that Kolchak told him more than once: the civil war must be merciless. (Gins G.K. Siberia, allies and Kolchak. T. 1. Harbin, 1921. P. 4; Zhur about in Yu. V. Civil war in a Siberian village. Krasnoyarsk, 1986. P. 96, 109.
75 GA RF, f. 147, op. 2, d. 2 "D", l. 17 - Report of the governor of the Yenisei province, Trotsky. General Sakharov, by order to the army on October 12, 1919, demanded that every tenth hostage or resident be shot, and also in the event of armed protests against the military, “such settlements should be immediately surrounded, all residents shot, and the village itself destroyed to the ground.” (The Party during the period of foreign military intervention and civil war /1918-1920/: Documents and materials. M., 1962. P. 357.)
76 Budberg A. Diary of a White Guard. L., 1929. P. 191. 78 K and N D. Denikinshchina. L., 1926. P. 80.
78 Denikin - Yudenich - Wrangel. M.; L., 1927. S. 64-65. For numerous facts of terrorist acts against the population under the Denikin government, see: Ustinov S. M. Notes of the head of counterintelligence (1915-1920). Berlin, 1923. pp. 125-126; William G. Whites. M., 1923. S. 67-68; Arbatov 3. Yu. Ekaterinoslav. 1917-1922 GSU/Archive of the Russian Revolution. T. 12. Berlin, 1923. P. 94. etc.
80 GA RF, f. 440, op. 1, d. 34, l. 2, 12, 73; d. 12, l. 1-33.
80 Sh t i f N. I. Volunteers: and Jewish pogroms // Denikin - Yudenich - Wrangel. pp. 141, 154; Lekash B. When Israel dies... L., 1928. P. 14, 22, 106; Fedyuk V.P. Denikin’s dictatorship and its collapse. Yaroslavl, 1990. P. 57, etc.
81 See: Valentinov A. A. Crimean epic // Denikin - Yudenich - Wrangel. pp. 359, 373; Kalinin I. Under the banner of Wrangel. L., 1925. S. 92, 93, 168; R akovsky G. The end of the whites. Prague, 1921. P. 11; S l a s h o v Ya. Crimea in 1920. M., L., 1923. pp. 4-6, 44, 72. The former Archive of the Crimean Regional Committee of the CPSU contains many documents about the terror of the Whites. Here are some of them: on the night of March 17, 1919, 25 political prisoners were shot in Simferopol; On April 2, 1919, counterintelligence shot 15 people in Sevastopol; in April 1920, there were about 500 political prisoners in the Simferopol prison. (Archive of the Crimean OK CPSU, f. 150, op. 1, d. 49, l. 197-232; d. 53, l. 148).
82 In October 1919 The Minister of Justice of the Yudenich government, Lieutenant Colonel E. Kedrin, compiled a report on the establishment of the “State Commission to Combat Bolshevism.” He proposed to investigate not individual “crimes,” but “to cover the destructive activities of the Bolsheviks as a whole.” The report set the task of studying Bolshevism as a “social disease”, and then developing practical measures “for the real fight against Bolshevism not only within Russia, but throughout the entire world.” (GA RF, f. 6389, op. 1, f. 3, d. 3, l. 17-19.) Eyewitnesses testified to the reprisals, and not only against the Bolsheviks, of Yudenich’s punitive forces. (Gorn V. Civil War in North-West Russia // Yudenich near Petrograd. L., 1927, l. 12, 128, 138.) Miller signed an order on June 26, 1919, according to which Bolshevik hostages were shot for any attempt on officer's life.
83 In May 1926, former major general of Kolchak’s army, ataman B.V. Annenkov (1889-1927), was tried in Semipalatinsk. In 4 volumes of the investigative file (Archive of the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation, no. 37751), hundreds of testimonies of peasants, workers of the city of Slavgorod, relatives of those who became victims of the punitive forces of the Semirechensk army, operating under the motto “We have no prohibitions!” God and Ataman Annenkov are with us. Cut right and left." According to the court's verdict, Annenkov was shot. In 1946, the former lieutenant general of the Kolchak army, ataman G.I. Semenov (1890-1946), was tried in Irkutsk. The investigative file took up 25 volumes. They contain testimonies of former Red partisans testifying to reprisals against the civilian population of Cossacks and Semenov’s soldiers. By court verdict, Semenov was executed.
84 As the commander of US forces in Siberia, General Graves, recalled, “in Eastern Siberia, for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were a hundred people killed by anti-Bolshevik elements” and “the number of Bolsheviks in Siberia by the time of Kolchak had increased many times in comparison with the number of them at the time of our parish." (Graves V. American adventure in Siberia /1918-1920/. M., 1932. P. 80, 175.)
86 Frunze M.V. Op. T. 1. M., 1929. P. 375.
88 Lenin V.I. PSS. T. 13. P. 24.
88 See: Frenkin M. The tragedy of peasant uprisings in Russia. 1918-1921. Jerusalem. 1987.
89 See: Melgunov S.P. Red Terror in Russia. P. 88; Lats and M. The truth about the red terror // News of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. 1920. February 6; Danilov V. Why 16 million Russians died // Motherland. 1990. No. 10. P. 19. Miliukov named 1,766,118 people as victims of the Red Terror. (Milyukov P.N. Russia at a turning point. T. 1. Paris, 1927. P. 194). According to Solzhenitsyn, from June 1918 to October 1919, the Reds shot 16 thousand people, i.e. more than a thousand a month. In 1937-1938 28 thousand arrestees were shot per month. (Solzhenitsyn A. Gulag Archipelago // New World. 1989. No. 9. P. 141, 143.) Note that the number of victims of terror (1.3 million people) exceeded the losses of the Red Army in 1918-1922. (939,755 people). (The classification has been removed: Losses of the armed forces of the USSR in wars, hostilities and military conflicts. M., 1993. P. 407.)
90 Archive of the Ministry of Bank of the Russian Federation, f. 1, d. 1, l. 13; d. 3, l. 140, 145, 149; d. 7, l. 1; Archive of the KGB of the Republic of Tatarstan. Minutes of meetings of the Kazan Gubernia Cheka from December 28, 1918 to 1921. For comparison: from December 1918 to December 1921, the Kazan Gubernia Cheka shot 264 people, and in August-December 1937 alone, the NKVD of Tatarstan shot 2,521 people. (this is the number officially recorded in the protocols).
91 Melgunov S.P. Red terror in Russia. P. 66; Gul R. Dzerzhinsky (beginning of terror). New York, 1974. P. 94. On the award list of E. G. Evdokimov, discovered in the RGVA by A. A. Zdanevich, there is a resolution from the commander of the Southern Front M. V. Frunze: “I consider the activities of Comrade Evdokimov worthy of encouragement. Due to the special nature of this activity, holding the awards ceremony in the usual manner is not entirely convenient.” Evdokimov was awarded the order without publicly announcing it. 62
Causes and beginning of the civil war in Russia. White and red movement. Red and white terror. Reasons for the defeat of the white movement. Results of the civil war
The first historiographers of the civil war were its participants. A civil war inevitably divides people into “us” and “strangers”. A kind of barricade lay in understanding and explaining the causes, nature and course of the civil war. Day by day we understand more and more that only an objective look at the civil war on both sides will make it possible to get closer to the historical truth. But at a time when the civil war was not history, but reality, it was looked at differently.
Recently (80-90s), the following problems of the history of the civil war have been at the center of scientific discussions: the causes of the civil war; classes and political parties in the civil war; white and red terror; ideology and social essence of “war communism”. We will try to highlight some of these issues.
The inevitable accompaniment of almost every revolution is armed clashes. Researchers have two approaches to this problem. Some view a civil war as a process of armed struggle between citizens of one country, between different parts of society, while others see a civil war as only a period in the history of a country when armed conflicts determine its entire life.
As for modern armed conflicts, social, political, economic, national and religious reasons are closely intertwined in their occurrence. Conflicts in their pure form, where only one of them would be present, are rare. Conflicts prevail where there are many such reasons, but one dominates.
Causes and beginning of the civil war in Russia
The dominant feature of the armed struggle in Russia in 1917-1922. there was a socio-political confrontation. But the civil war of 1917-1922 cannot be understood taking into account the class side alone. It was a tightly woven tangle of social, political, national, religious, personal interests and contradictions.
How did the civil war begin in Russia? According to Pitirim Sorokin, usually the fall of a regime is the result not so much of the efforts of revolutionaries as of the decrepitude, impotence and inability of the regime itself to do creative work. To prevent a revolution, the government must undertake certain reforms that would relieve social tension. Neither the government of Imperial Russia nor the Provisional Government found the strength to carry out reforms. And since the escalation of events required action, they were expressed in attempts at armed violence against the people in February 1917. Civil wars do not begin in an environment of social peace. The law of all revolutions is such that after the overthrow of the ruling classes, their desire and attempts to restore their position are inevitable, while the classes that have come to power try by all means to maintain it. There is a connection between revolution and civil war; in the conditions of our country, the latter after October 1917 was almost inevitable. The causes of the civil war are the extreme aggravation of class hatred and the debilitating First World War. The deep roots of the civil war must also be seen in the character of the October Revolution, which proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly stimulated the outbreak of civil war. All-Russian power was usurped, and in a society already split, torn apart by the revolution, the ideas of the Constituent Assembly and Parliament could no longer find understanding.
It should also be recognized that the Brest-Litovsk Treaty offended the patriotic feelings of broad sections of the population, primarily officers and intelligentsia. It was after the conclusion of peace in Brest that White Guard volunteer armies began to actively form.
The political and economic crisis in Russia was accompanied by a crisis in national relations. White and red governments were forced to fight for the return of lost territories: Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia in 1918-1919; Poland, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Central Asia in 1920-1922. The Russian Civil War went through several phases. If we consider the civil war in Russia as a process, it will become
it is clear that its first act was the events in Petrograd at the end of February 1917. In the same series are armed clashes on the streets of the capital in April and July, the Kornilov uprising in August, the peasant uprising in September, the October events in Petrograd, Moscow and a number of others places
After the abdication of the emperor, the country was gripped by the euphoria of “red-bow” unity. Despite all this, February marked the beginning of immeasurably deeper upheavals, as well as an escalation of violence. In Petrograd and other areas, a persecution of officers began. Admirals Nepenin, Butakov, Viren, General Stronsky and other officers were killed in the Baltic Fleet. Already in the first days of the February revolution, the anger that arose in people's souls spilled out onto the streets. So, February marked the beginning of the civil war in Russia,
By the beginning of 1918, this stage had largely exhausted itself. It was this situation that the leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries V. Chernov stated when, speaking at the Constituent Assembly on January 5, 1918, he expressed hope for a speedy end to the civil war. It seemed to many that the turbulent period was being replaced by a more peaceful one. However, contrary to these expectations, new centers of struggle continued to emerge, and from mid-1918 the next period of the civil war began, ending only in November 1920 with the defeat of P.N.’s army. Wrangel. However, the civil war continued after this. Its episodes included the Kronstadt sailors' uprising and the Antonovschina of 1921, military operations in the Far East, which ended in 1922, and the Basmachi movement in Central Asia, which was largely liquidated by 1926.
White and red movement. Red and white terror
We have now come to understand that a civil war is a fratricidal war. However, the question of what forces opposed each other in this struggle is still controversial.
The question of the class structure and the main class forces of Russia during the civil war is quite complex and requires serious research. The fact is that in Russia classes and social strata, their relationships were intertwined in the most complex way. Nevertheless, in our opinion, there were three major forces in the country that differed in relation to the new government.
Soviet power was actively supported by part of the industrial proletariat, the urban and rural poor, some of the officers and the intelligentsia. In 1917, the Bolshevik Party emerged as a loosely organized radical revolutionary party of intellectuals, oriented towards workers. By mid-1918 it had become a minority party, ready to ensure its survival through mass terror. By this time, the Bolshevik Party was no longer a political party in the sense in which it had been before, since it no longer expressed the interests of any social group; it recruited its members from many social groups. Former soldiers, peasants or officials, having become communists, represented a new social group with their own rights. The Communist Party turned into a military-industrial and administrative apparatus.
The impact of the Civil War on the Bolshevik Party was twofold. Firstly, there was a militarization of Bolshevism, which was reflected primarily in the way of thinking. Communists have learned to think in terms of military campaigns. The idea of building socialism turned into a struggle - on the industrial front, the collectivization front, etc. The second important consequence of the civil war was the Communist Party's fear of the peasants. The Communists have always been aware that they are a minority party in a hostile peasant environment.
Intellectual dogmatism, militarization, combined with hostility towards the peasants, created in the Leninist party all the necessary preconditions for Stalinist totalitarianism.
The forces opposing Soviet power included the large industrial and financial bourgeoisie, landowners, a significant part of the officers, members of the former police and gendarmerie, and part of the highly qualified intelligentsia. However, the white movement began only as an impulse of convinced and brave officers who fought against the communists, often without any hope of victory. White officers called themselves volunteers, motivated by ideas of patriotism. But at the height of the civil war, the white movement became much more intolerant and chauvinistic than at the beginning.
The main weakness of the white movement was that it failed to become a unifying national force. It remained almost exclusively a movement of officers. The white movement was unable to establish effective cooperation with the liberal and socialist intelligentsia. Whites were suspicious of workers and peasants. They did not have a state apparatus, administration, police, or banks. Personifying themselves as a state, they tried to compensate for their practical weakness by brutally imposing their own rules.
If the white movement was unable to rally the anti-Bolshevik forces, then the Cadet Party failed to lead the white movement. The Cadets were a party of professors, lawyers and entrepreneurs. In their ranks there were enough people capable of establishing a workable administration in the territory liberated from the Bolsheviks. Yet the role of the cadets in national politics during the Civil War was insignificant. There was a huge cultural gap between the workers and peasants, on the one hand, and the Cadets, on the other, and the Russian Revolution was presented to the majority of the Cadets as chaos, a rebellion. Only the white movement, according to the cadets, could restore Russia.
Finally, the largest group of the Russian population is the wavering part, and often simply passive, observing events. She looked for opportunities to do without the class struggle, but was constantly drawn into it by the active actions of the first two forces. These are the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, the proletarian strata who wanted “civil peace,” part of the officers and a significant number of representatives of the intelligentsia.
But the division of forces proposed to readers should be considered conditional. In fact, they were closely intertwined, mixed together and scattered throughout the vast territory of the country. This situation was observed in any region, in any province, regardless of whose hands were in power. The decisive force that largely determined the outcome of revolutionary events was the peasantry.
Analyzing the beginning of the war, it is only with great convention that we can talk about the Bolshevik government of Russia. In fact, in 1918 it controlled only part of the country's territory. However, it declared its readiness to rule the entire country after dissolving the Constituent Assembly. In 1918, the main opponents of the Bolsheviks were not the Whites or the Greens, but the Socialists. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries opposed the Bolsheviks under the banner of the Constituent Assembly.
Immediately after the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the Socialist Revolutionary Party began preparing for the overthrow of Soviet power. However, soon the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionaries became convinced that there were very few people willing to fight with weapons under the banner of the Constituent Assembly.
A very sensitive blow to attempts to unite anti-Bolshevik forces was dealt from the right, by supporters of the military dictatorship of the generals. The main role among them was played by the Cadets, who resolutely opposed the use of the demand for the convening of the Constituent Assembly of the 1917 model as the main slogan of the anti-Bolshevik movement. The Cadets headed for a one-man military dictatorship, which the Socialist Revolutionaries dubbed right-wing Bolshevism.
Moderate socialists, who rejected the military dictatorship, nevertheless compromised with the supporters of the generals' dictatorship. In order not to alienate the Cadets, the general democratic bloc “Union for the Revival of Russia” adopted a plan for creating a collective dictatorship - the Directory. To govern the country, the Directory had to create a business ministry. The Directory was obliged to resign its powers of all-Russian power only before the Constituent Assembly after the end of the fight against the Bolsheviks. At the same time, the “Union for the Revival of Russia” set the following tasks: 1) continuation of the war with the Germans; 2) creation of a single firm government; 3) revival of the army; 4) restoration of scattered parts of Russia.
The summer defeat of the Bolsheviks as a result of the armed uprising of the Czechoslovak corps created favorable conditions. This is how the anti-Bolshevik front arose in the Volga region and Siberia, and two anti-Bolshevik governments were immediately formed - Samara and Omsk. Having received power from the hands of the Czechoslovaks, five members of the Constituent Assembly - V.K. Volsky, I.M. Brushvit, I.P. Nesterov, P.D. Klimushkin and B.K. Fortunatov - formed the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch) - the highest state body. Komuch transferred executive power to the Board of Governors. The birth of Komuch, contrary to the plan for creating the Directory, led to a split in the Socialist Revolutionary elite. Its right-wing leaders, led by N.D. Avksentiev, ignoring Samara, headed to Omsk to prepare from there the formation of an all-Russian coalition government.
Declaring himself the temporary supreme power until the convening of the Constituent Assembly, Komuch called on other governments to recognize him as the center of state. However, other regional governments refused to recognize Komuch's rights as a national center, regarding him as a party Socialist Revolutionary power.
Socialist Revolutionary politicians did not have a specific program for democratic reforms. The issues of the grain monopoly, nationalization and municipalization, and the principles of army organization were not resolved. In the field of agrarian policy, Komuch limited himself to a statement about the inviolability of ten points of the land law adopted by the Constituent Assembly.
The main goal of foreign policy was to continue the war in the ranks of the Entente. Relying on Western military assistance was one of Komuch's biggest strategic miscalculations. The Bolsheviks used foreign intervention to portray the struggle of Soviet power as patriotic and the actions of the Socialist Revolutionaries as anti-national. Komuch's broadcast statements about continuing the war with Germany to a victorious end came into conflict with the sentiments of the popular masses. Komuch, who did not understand the psychology of the masses, could rely only on the bayonets of the allies.
The anti-Bolshevik camp was especially weakened by the confrontation between the Samara and Omsk governments. Unlike the one-party Komuch, the Provisional Siberian Government was a coalition. It was headed by P.V. Vologda. The left wing in the government consisted of the Socialist Revolutionaries B.M. Shatilov, G.B. Patushinskiy, V.M. Krutovsky. The right side of the government is I.A. Mikhailov, I.N. Serebrennikov, N.N. Petrov ~ occupied cadet and pro-archist positions.
The government's program was formed under significant pressure from its right wing. Already at the beginning of July 1918, the government announced the cancellation of all decrees issued by the Council of People's Commissars, the liquidation of the Soviets, and the return of their estates to the owners with all inventory. The Siberian government pursued a policy of repression against dissidents, the press, meetings, etc. Komuch protested against such a policy.
Despite sharp differences, the two rival governments had to negotiate. At the Ufa state meeting, a “temporary all-Russian government” was created. The meeting concluded its work with the election of the Directory. N.D. was elected to the latter. Avksentyev, N.I. Astrov, V.G. Boldyrev, P.V. Vologodsky, N.V. Tchaikovsky.
In its political program, the Directory declared the main tasks to be the struggle to overthrow the power of the Bolsheviks, the annulment of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty and the continuation of the war with Germany. The short-term nature of the new government was emphasized by the clause that the Constituent Assembly was to meet in the near future - January 1 or February 1, 1919, after which the Directory would resign.
The Directory, having abolished the Siberian government, could now, it seemed, implement an alternative program to the Bolshevik. However, the balance between democracy and dictatorship was upset. The Samara Komuch, representing democracy, was dissolved. The Social Revolutionaries' attempt to restore the Constituent Assembly failed. On the night of November 17–18, 1918, the leaders of the Directory were arrested. The directory was replaced by the dictatorship of A.V. Kolchak. In 1918, the civil war was a war of ephemeral governments whose claims to power remained only on paper. In August 1918, when the Socialist Revolutionaries and Czechs took Kazan, the Bolsheviks were unable to recruit more than 20 thousand people into the Red Army. The people's army of the Social Revolutionaries numbered only 30 thousand. During this period, the peasants, having divided the land, ignored the political struggle that parties and governments waged among themselves. However, the establishment by the Bolsheviks of the Pobedy Committees caused the first outbreaks of resistance. From this moment on, there was a direct relationship between the Bolshevik attempts to dominate the countryside and the peasant resistance. The more diligently the Bolsheviks tried to impose “communist relations” in the countryside, the harsher the resistance of the peasants.
Whites, having in 1918 several regiments were not contenders for national power. Nevertheless, the white army of A.I. Denikin, initially numbering 10 thousand people, was able to occupy a territory with a population of 50 million people. This was facilitated by the development of peasant uprisings in areas held by the Bolsheviks. N. Makhno did not want to help the Whites, but his actions against the Bolsheviks contributed to the Whites’ breakthrough. The Don Cossacks rebelled against the communists and cleared the way for the advancing army of A. Denikin.
It seemed that with the nomination of A.V. to the role of dictator. Kolchak, the Whites had a leader who would lead the entire anti-Bolshevik movement. In the provision on the temporary structure of state power, approved on the day of the coup, the Council of Ministers, the supreme state power was temporarily transferred to the Supreme Ruler, and all the Armed Forces of the Russian state were subordinate to him. A.V. Kolchak was soon recognized as the Supreme Ruler by the leaders of other white fronts, and the Western allies recognized him de facto.
The political and ideological ideas of the leaders and ordinary participants in the white movement were as diverse as the movement itself was socially heterogeneous. Of course, some part sought to restore the monarchy, the old, pre-revolutionary regime in general. But the leaders of the white movement refused to raise the monarchical banner and put forward a monarchical program. This also applies to A.V. Kolchak.
What positive things did the Kolchak government promise? Kolchak agreed to convene a new Constituent Assembly after order was restored. He assured Western governments that there could be “no return to the regime that existed in Russia before February 1917,” the broad masses of the population would be allocated land, and differences along religious and national lines would be eliminated. Having confirmed the complete independence of Poland and the limited independence of Finland, Kolchak agreed to “prepare decisions” on the fate of the Baltic states, Caucasian and Trans-Caspian peoples. Judging by the statements, the Kolchak government took the position of democratic construction. But in reality everything was different.
The most difficult issue for the anti-Bolshevik movement was the agrarian question. Kolchak never managed to solve it. The war with the Bolsheviks, while Kolchak was waging it, could not guarantee the peasants the transfer of landowners' land to them. The national policy of the Kolchak government is marked by the same deep internal contradiction. Acting under the slogan of a “united and indivisible” Russia, it did not reject “self-determination of peoples” as an ideal.
Kolchak actually rejected the demands of the delegations of Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, the North Caucasus, Belarus and Ukraine put forward at the Versailles Conference. By refusing to create an anti-Bolshevik conference in the regions liberated from the Bolsheviks, Kolchak pursued a policy doomed to failure.
Kolchak’s relations with his allies, who had their own interests in the Far East and Siberia and pursued their own policies, were complex and contradictory. This made the position of the Kolchak government very difficult. A particularly tight knot was tied in relations with Japan. Kolchak did not hide his antipathy towards Japan. The Japanese command responded with active support of the ataman, which flourished in Siberia. Small ambitious people like Semenov and Kalmykov, with the support of the Japanese, managed to create a constant threat to the Omsk government deep in Kolchak’s rear, which weakened it. Semyonov actually cut off Kolchak from the Far East and blocked the supply of weapons, ammunition, and provisions.
Strategic miscalculations in the field of domestic and foreign policy of the Kolchak government were aggravated by mistakes in the military field. The military command (generals V.N. Lebedev, K.N. Sakharov, P.P. Ivanov-Rinov) led the Siberian army to defeat. Betrayed by everyone, both comrades and allies,
Kolchak resigned the title of Supreme Ruler and handed it over to General A.I. Denikin. Having not lived up to the hopes placed on him, A.V. Kolchak died courageously, like a Russian patriot. The most powerful wave of the anti-Bolshevik movement was raised in the south of the country by generals M.V. Alekseev, L.G. Kornilov, A.I. Denikin. Unlike the little-known Kolchak, they all had big names. The conditions in which they had to operate were desperately difficult. The volunteer army, which Alekseev began to form in November 1917 in Rostov, did not have its own territory. In terms of food supply and recruitment of troops, it was dependent on the Don and Kuban governments. The volunteer army had only the Stavropol province and the coast with Novorossiysk; only by the summer of 1919 did it conquer a vast area of the southern provinces for several months.
The weak point of the anti-Bolshevik movement in general and in the south especially was the personal ambitions and contradictions of the leaders M.V. Alekseev and L.G. Kornilov. After their death, all power passed to Denikin. The unity of all forces in the fight against the Bolsheviks, the unity of the country and power, the broadest autonomy of the outskirts, loyalty to agreements with allies in the war - these are the main principles of Denikin’s platform. Denikin’s entire ideological and political program was based on the idea of preserving a united and indivisible Russia. The leaders of the white movement rejected any significant concessions to supporters of national independence. All this stood in contrast to the Bolsheviks' promises of unlimited national self-determination. The reckless recognition of the right to secession gave Lenin the opportunity to curb destructive nationalism and raised his prestige much higher than that of the leaders of the white movement.
The government of General Denikin was divided into two groups - right and liberal. Right - a group of generals with A.M. Drago-mirov and A.S. Lukomsky at the head. The liberal group consisted of cadets. A.I. Denikin took the position of center. The most clearly reactionary line in the policy of the Denikin regime manifested itself on the agrarian issue. In the territory controlled by Denikin, it was planned to: create and strengthen small and medium-sized peasant farms, destroy the latifundia, leave the landowners with small estates on which cultural farming could be carried out. But instead of immediately starting to transfer the landowners' land to the peasants, the commission on the agrarian question began an endless discussion of the draft law on land. As a result, a compromise law was adopted. The transfer of part of the land to the peasants was supposed to begin only after the civil war and end 7 years later. In the meantime, the order for the third sheaf was put into effect, according to which a third of the collected grain went to the landowner. Denikin's land policy was one of the main reasons for his defeat. Of the two evils - Lenin's surplus appropriation system or Denikin's requisition - the peasants preferred the lesser.
A.I. Denikin understood that without the help of his allies, defeat awaited him. Therefore, he himself prepared the text of the political declaration of the commander of the armed forces of southern Russia, sent on April 10, 1919 to the heads of the British, American and French missions. It spoke of convening a national assembly on the basis of universal suffrage, establishing regional autonomy and broad local self-government, and carrying out land reform. However, things did not go beyond broadcast promises. All attention was turned to the front, where the fate of the regime was being decided.
In the fall of 1919, a difficult situation developed at the front for Denikin’s army. This was largely due to a change in the mood of the broad peasant masses. Peasants who rebelled in territory controlled by the whites paved the way for the reds. The peasants were a third force and acted against both in their own interests.
In the territories occupied by both the Bolsheviks and the Whites, the peasants fought a war with the authorities. The peasants did not want to fight either for the Bolsheviks, or for the whites, or for anyone else. Many of them fled into the forests. During this period the green movement was defensive. Since 1920, the threat from the whites has become less and less, and the Bolsheviks have been more determined to impose their power in the countryside. The peasant war against state power covered all of Ukraine, the Chernozem region, the Cossack regions of the Don and Kuban, the Volga and Ural basins and large regions of Siberia. In fact, all grain-producing regions of Russia and Ukraine were a huge Vendée (in a figurative sense - a counter-revolution. - Note ed.).
In terms of the number of people participating in the peasant war and its impact on the country, this war eclipsed the war between the Bolsheviks and the Whites and surpassed it in duration. The Green movement was the decisive third force in the civil war.
but it did not become an independent center claiming power on more than a regional scale.
Why did not the movement of the majority of the people prevail? The reason lies in the way of thinking of Russian peasants. The Greens protected their villages from outsiders. The peasants could not win because they never sought to take over the state. The European concepts of a democratic republic, law and order, equality and parliamentarism, which the Social Revolutionaries introduced into the peasant environment, were beyond the understanding of the peasants.
The mass of peasants participating in the war was heterogeneous. From the peasantry came both rebels, carried away by the idea of “plundering the loot,” and leaders, eager to become new “kings and masters.” Those who acted on behalf of the Bolsheviks, and those who fought under the command of A.S. Antonova, N.I. Makhno, adhered to similar standards of behavior. Those who robbed and raped as part of the Bolshevik expeditions were not much different from the rebels of Antonov and Makhno. The essence of the peasant war was liberation from all power.
The peasant movement put forward its own leaders, people from the people (suffice it to name Makhno, Antonov, Kolesnikov, Sapozhkov and Vakhulin). These leaders were guided by concepts of peasant justice and vague echoes of the platforms of political parties. However, any peasant party was associated with statehood, programs and governments, while these concepts were alien to local peasant leaders. The parties pursued a national policy, but the peasants did not rise to the level of awareness of national interests.
One of the reasons that the peasant movement did not win, despite its scope, was the political life inherent in each province, which ran counter to the rest of the country. While in one province the Greens were already defeated, in another the uprising was just beginning. None of the Green leaders took action beyond the immediate area. This spontaneity, scale and breadth contained not only the strength of the movement, but also helplessness in the face of systematic onslaught. The Bolsheviks, who had great power and a huge army, had an overwhelming military superiority over the peasant movement.
Russian peasants lacked political consciousness - they did not care what the form of government in Russia was. They did not understand the importance of parliament, freedom of the press and assembly. The fact that the Bolshevik dictatorship withstood the test of the civil war can be considered not as an expression of popular support, but as a manifestation of the still unformed national consciousness and the political backwardness of the majority. The tragedy of Russian society was the lack of interconnectedness between its various layers.
One of the main features of the civil war was that all the armies participating in it, red and white, Cossacks and greens, went through the same path of degradation from serving a cause based on ideals to looting and outrages.
What are the causes of the Red and White Terrors? V.I. Lenin stated that the Red Terror during the Civil War in Russia was forced and became a response to the actions of the White Guards and interventionists. According to the Russian emigration (S.P. Melgunov), for example, the Red Terror had an official theoretical justification, was systemic, governmental in nature, the White Terror was characterized “as excesses based on unbridled power and revenge.” For this reason, the Red Terror was superior to the White Terror in its scale and cruelty. At the same time, a third point of view arose, according to which any terror is inhuman and should be abandoned as a method of struggle for power. The very comparison “one terror is worse (better) than another” is incorrect. No terror has the right to exist. The call of General L.G. is very similar to each other. Kornilov to the officers (January 1918) “do not take prisoners in battles with the Reds” and the confession of the security officer M.I. Latsis that similar orders regarding whites were resorted to in the Red Army.
The quest to understand the origins of the tragedy has given rise to several research explanations. R. Conquest, for example, wrote that in 1918-1820. The terror was carried out by fanatics, idealists - “people in whom one can find some features of a kind of perverted nobility.” Among them, according to the researcher, is Lenin.
Terror during the war years was carried out not so much by fanatics as by people devoid of any nobility. Let's name just a few instructions written by V.I. Lenin. In a note to the Deputy Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic E.M. Sklyansky (August 1920) V.I. Lenin, assessing the plan born in the depths of this department, instructed: “A wonderful plan! Finish it together with Dzerzhinsky. Under the guise of the “greens” (we will blame them later) we will march 10-20 miles and outweigh the kulaks, priests, and landowners. Prize: 100,000 rubles for a hanged man."
In a secret letter to members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) dated March 19, 1922, V.I. Lenin proposed taking advantage of the famine in the Volga region and confiscating church valuables. This action, in his opinion, “must be carried out with merciless determination, certainly stopping at nothing and in the shortest possible time. The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie we manage to shoot on this occasion, the better. It is now necessary to teach this public a lesson so that for several decades they will not dare to think about any resistance.”2 Stalin perceived Lenin's recognition of state terror as a high-government matter, power based on force and not on law.
It is difficult to name the first acts of red and white terror. They are usually associated with the beginning of the civil war in the country. Terror was carried out by everyone: officers - participants in the ice campaign of General Kornilov; security officers who received the right of extrajudicial execution; revolutionary courts and tribunals.
It is characteristic that the Cheka’s right to extrajudicial killings, composed by L.D. Trotsky, signed by V.I. Lenin; the tribunals were given unlimited rights by the People's Commissar of Justice; The resolution on the Red Terror was endorsed by the People's Commissars of Justice, Internal Affairs and the head of the Council of People's Commissars (D. Kursky, G. Petrovsky, V. Bonch-Bruevich). The leadership of the Soviet Republic officially recognized the creation of a non-legal state, where arbitrariness became the norm and terror became the most important tool for maintaining power. Lawlessness was beneficial to the warring parties, as it allowed any actions by reference to the enemy.
The commanders of all the armies appear to have never been subject to any control. We are talking about the general savagery of society. The reality of the civil war shows that the differences between good and evil have faded. Human life has become devalued. The refusal to see the enemy as a human being encouraged violence on an unprecedented scale. Settling scores with real and imagined enemies has become the essence of politics. The civil war meant the extreme bitterness of society and especially its new ruling class.
"Litvin A.L. Red and White Terror in Russia 1917-1922 // Russian History. 1993. No. 6. P. 47-48.1 2 Ibid. P. 47-48.
Murder of M.S. Uritsky and the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918 provoked an unusually brutal response. In retaliation for the murder of Uritsky, up to 900 innocent hostages were shot in Petrograd.
A significantly larger number of victims is associated with the assassination attempt on Lenin. In the first days of September 1918, 6,185 people were shot, 14,829 were sent to prison, 6,407 were sent to concentration camps, and 4,068 people became hostages. Thus, attempts on the lives of Bolshevik leaders contributed to the rampant mass terror in the country.
At the same time as the Reds, white terror was rampant in the country. And if the Red Terror is considered to be the implementation of state policy, then it should probably be taken into account that whites in 1918-1919. also occupied vast territories and declared themselves as sovereign governments and state entities. The forms and methods of terror were different. But they were also used by adherents of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch in Samara, the Provisional Regional Government in the Urals), and especially by the white movement.
The coming to power of the founders in the Volga region in the summer of 1918 was characterized by reprisals against many Soviet workers. Some of the first departments created by Komuch were state security, military courts, trains and “death barges”. On September 3, 1918, they brutally suppressed the workers' uprising in Kazan.
The political regimes established in Russia in 1918 are quite comparable, first of all, in their predominantly violent methods of resolving issues of organizing power. In November 1918 A.V. Kolchak, who came to power in Siberia, began with the expulsion and murder of the Socialist Revolutionaries. It is hardly possible to talk about support for his policies in Siberia and the Urals, if out of approximately 400 thousand Red partisans of that time, 150 thousand acted against him. The government of A.I. was no exception. Denikin. In the territory captured by the general, the police were called state guards. By September 1919, its number reached almost 78 thousand people. Osvag's reports informed Denikin about robberies and looting; it was under his command that 226 Jewish pogroms took place, as a result of which several thousand people died. The White Terror turned out to be as senseless in achieving its goal as any other. Soviet historians have calculated that in 1917-1922. 15-16 million Russians died, of which 1.3 million became victims of terror, banditry, and pogroms. The civil, fratricidal war with millions of casualties turned into a national tragedy. Red and white terror became the most barbaric method of struggle for power. Its results for the progress of the country are truly disastrous.
Reasons for the defeat of the white movement. Results of the civil war
Let us highlight the most important reasons for the defeat of the white movement. Relying on Western military assistance was one of the whites' miscalculations. The Bolsheviks used foreign intervention to present the struggle of Soviet power as patriotic. The Allies' policy was self-serving: they needed an anti-German Russia.
The white national policy is marked by deep contradictions. Thus, Yudenich’s non-recognition of the already independent Finland and Estonia may have been the main reason for the failure of the Whites on the Western Front. Denikin’s non-recognition of Poland made it a permanent enemy of the whites. All this contrasted with the Bolshevik promises of unlimited national self-determination.
In terms of military training, combat experience and technical knowledge, the whites had every advantage. But time was working against them. The situation was changing: in order to replenish the dwindling ranks, the whites also had to resort to mobilization.
The white movement did not have widespread social support. The White army was not supplied with everything it needed, so it was forced to take carts, horses, and supplies from the population. Local residents were drafted into the army. All this turned the population against whites. During the war, mass repression and terror were closely intertwined with the dreams of millions of people who believed in new revolutionary ideals, while tens of millions lived nearby, preoccupied with purely everyday problems. The vacillation of the peasantry played a decisive role in the dynamics of the civil war, as did the various national movements. During the civil war, some ethnic groups restored their previously lost statehood (Poland, Lithuania), and Finland, Estonia and Latvia acquired it for the first time.
For Russia, the consequences of the civil war were catastrophic: a huge social upheaval, the disappearance of entire classes; huge demographic losses; severance of economic ties and colossal economic devastation;
the conditions and experience of the civil war had a decisive influence on the political culture of Bolshevism: the curtailment of intra-party democracy, the perception by the broad party masses of an orientation towards methods of coercion and violence in achieving political goals - the Bolsheviks were looking for support in the lumpen sections of the population. All this paved the way for the strengthening of repressive elements in government policy. The Civil War is the greatest tragedy in Russian history.
Currently, we have come to understand that a civil war is a fratricidal war. However, the question of what forces opposed each other in this struggle is still controversial.
The question of the class structure and the main class forces of Russia during the civil war is quite complex and requires serious research. The fact is that in Russia classes and social strata, their relationships were intertwined in the most complex way. Nevertheless, in our opinion, there were three major forces in the country that differed in relation to the new government.
Soviet power was actively supported by part of the industrial proletariat, the urban and rural poor, some of the officers and the intelligentsia. In 1917, the Bolshevik Party emerged as a loosely organized radical revolutionary party of intellectuals, oriented towards workers. By mid-1918 it had become a minority party, ready to ensure its survival through mass terror. By this time, the Bolshevik Party was no longer a political party in the sense in which it had been before, since it no longer expressed the interests of any social group; it recruited its members from many social groups. Former soldiers, peasants or officials, having become communists, represented a new social group with their own rights. The Communist Party turned into a military-industrial and administrative apparatus.
The impact of the Civil War on the Bolshevik Party was twofold. Firstly, there was a militarization of Bolshevism, which was reflected primarily in the way of thinking. Communists have learned to think in terms of military campaigns. The idea of building socialism turned into a struggle - on the industrial front, the collectivization front, etc. The second important consequence of the civil war was the Communist Party's fear of the peasants. The Communists have always been aware that they are a minority party in a hostile peasant environment.
Intellectual dogmatism, militarization, combined with hostility towards the peasants, created in the Leninist party all the necessary preconditions for Stalinist totalitarianism.
The forces opposing Soviet power included the large industrial and financial bourgeoisie, landowners, a significant part of the officers, members of the former police and gendarmerie, and part of the highly qualified intelligentsia. However, the white movement began only as an impulse of convinced and brave officers who fought against the communists, often without any hope of victory. White officers called themselves volunteers, motivated by ideas of patriotism. But at the height of the civil war, the white movement became much more intolerant and chauvinistic than at the beginning.
The main weakness of the white movement was that it failed to become a unifying national force. It remained almost exclusively a movement of officers. The white movement was unable to establish effective cooperation with the liberal and socialist intelligentsia. Whites were suspicious of workers and peasants. They did not have a state apparatus, administration, police, or banks. Personifying themselves as a state, they tried to compensate for their practical weakness by brutally imposing their own rules.
If the white movement was unable to rally the anti-Bolshevik forces, then the Cadet Party failed to lead the white movement. The Cadets were a party of professors, lawyers and entrepreneurs. In their ranks there were enough people capable of establishing a workable administration in the territory liberated from the Bolsheviks. Yet the role of the cadets in national politics during the Civil War was insignificant. There was a huge cultural gap between the workers and peasants, on the one hand, and the Cadets, on the other, and the Russian Revolution was presented to most Cadets as chaos and rebellion. Only the white movement, according to the cadets, could restore Russia.
Finally, the largest group of the Russian population is the wavering part, and often simply passive, observing events. She looked for opportunities to do without the class struggle, but was constantly drawn into it by the active actions of the first two forces. These are the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, the proletarian strata who wanted “civil peace,” part of the officers and a significant number of representatives of the intelligentsia.
But the division of forces proposed to readers should be considered conditional. In fact, they were closely intertwined, mixed together and scattered throughout the vast territory of the country. This situation was observed in any region, in any province, regardless of whose hands were in power. The decisive force that largely determined the outcome of revolutionary events was the peasantry.
Analyzing the beginning of the war, it is only with great convention that we can talk about the Bolshevik government of Russia. In fact, in 1918 it controlled only part of the country's territory. However, it declared its readiness to rule the entire country after dissolving the Constituent Assembly. In 1918, the main opponents of the Bolsheviks were not the Whites or the Greens, but the Socialists. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries opposed the Bolsheviks under the banner of the Constituent Assembly.
Immediately after the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the Socialist Revolutionary Party began preparing for the overthrow of Soviet power. However, soon the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionaries became convinced that there were very few people willing to fight with weapons under the banner of the Constituent Assembly.
A very sensitive blow to attempts to unite anti-Bolshevik forces was dealt from the right, by supporters of the military dictatorship of the generals. The main role among them was played by the Cadets, who resolutely opposed the use of the demand for the convening of the Constituent Assembly of the 1917 model as the main slogan of the anti-Bolshevik movement. The Cadets headed for a one-man military dictatorship, which the Socialist Revolutionaries dubbed right-wing Bolshevism.
Moderate socialists, who rejected the military dictatorship, nevertheless compromised with the supporters of the generals' dictatorship. In order not to alienate the cadets, the general democratic bloc “Union for the Revival of Russia” adopted a plan for creating a collective dictatorship - the Directory. To govern the country, the Directory had to create a business ministry. The Directory was obliged to resign its powers of all-Russian power only before the Constituent Assembly after the end of the fight against the Bolsheviks. At the same time, the “Union for the Revival of Russia” set the following tasks: 1) continuation of the war with the Germans; 2) creation of a single firm government; 3) revival of the army; 4) restoration of scattered parts of Russia.
The summer defeat of the Bolsheviks as a result of the armed uprising of the Czechoslovak corps created favorable conditions. This is how the anti-Bolshevik front arose in the Volga region and Siberia, and two anti-Bolshevik governments were immediately formed - Samara and Omsk. Having received power from the hands of the Czechoslovaks, five members of the Constituent Assembly - V.K. Volsky, I.M. Brushvit, I.P. Nesterov, P.D. Klimushkin and B.K. Fortunatov - formed the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch) - the highest state body. Komuch transferred executive power to the Board of Governors. The birth of Komuch, contrary to the plan for creating the Directory, led to a split in the Socialist Revolutionary elite. Its right-wing leaders, led by N.D. Avksentiev, ignoring Samara, headed to Omsk to prepare from there the formation of an all-Russian coalition government.
Declaring himself the temporary supreme power until the convening of the Constituent Assembly, Komuch called on other governments to recognize him as the center of state. However, other regional governments refused to recognize Komuch's rights as a national center, regarding him as a party Socialist Revolutionary power.
Socialist Revolutionary politicians did not have a specific program for democratic reforms. The issues of the grain monopoly, nationalization and municipalization, and the principles of army organization were not resolved. In the field of agrarian policy, Komuch limited himself to a statement about the inviolability of ten points of the land law adopted by the Constituent Assembly.
The main goal of foreign policy was to continue the war in the ranks of the Entente. Relying on Western military assistance was one of Komuch's biggest strategic miscalculations. The Bolsheviks used foreign intervention to portray the struggle of Soviet power as patriotic and the actions of the Socialist Revolutionaries as anti-national. Komuch's broadcast statements about continuing the war with Germany to a victorious end came into conflict with the sentiments of the popular masses. Komuch, who did not understand the psychology of the masses, could rely only on the bayonets of the allies.
The anti-Bolshevik camp was especially weakened by the confrontation between the Samara and Omsk governments. Unlike the one-party Komuch, the Provisional Siberian Government was a coalition. It was headed by P.V. Vologda. The left wing in the government consisted of the Socialist Revolutionaries B.M. Shatilov, G.B. Patushinskiy, V.M. Krutovsky. The right side of the government is I.A. Mikhailov, I.N. Serebrennikov, N.N. Petrov ~ occupied cadet and pro-monarchist positions.
The government's program was formed under significant pressure from its right wing. Already at the beginning of July 1918, the government announced the cancellation of all decrees issued by the Council of People's Commissars, the liquidation of the Soviets, and the return of their estates to the owners with all inventory. The Siberian government pursued a policy of repression against dissidents, the press, meetings, etc. Komuch protested against such a policy.
Despite sharp differences, the two rival governments had to negotiate. At the Ufa state meeting, a “temporary all-Russian government” was created. The meeting concluded its work with the election of the Directory. N.D. was elected to the latter. Avksentyev, N.I. Astrov, V.G. Boldyrev, P.V. Vologodsky, N.V. Tchaikovsky.
In its political program, the Directory declared the main tasks to be the struggle to overthrow the power of the Bolsheviks, the annulment of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty and the continuation of the war with Germany. The short-term nature of the new government was emphasized by the clause that the Constituent Assembly was to meet in the near future - January 1 or February 1, 1919, after which the Directory would resign.
The Directory, having abolished the Siberian government, could now, it seemed, implement an alternative program to the Bolshevik. However, the balance between democracy and dictatorship was upset. The Samara Komuch, representing democracy, was dissolved. The Social Revolutionaries' attempt to restore the Constituent Assembly failed. On the night of November 17–18, 1918, the leaders of the Directory were arrested. The directory was replaced by the dictatorship of A.V. Kolchak. In 1918, the civil war was a war of ephemeral governments whose claims to power remained only on paper. In August 1918, when the Socialist Revolutionaries and Czechs took Kazan, the Bolsheviks were unable to recruit more than 20 thousand people into the Red Army. The people's army of the Social Revolutionaries numbered only 30 thousand. During this period, the peasants, having divided the land, ignored the political struggle that parties and governments waged among themselves. However, the establishment by the Bolsheviks of the Pobedy Committees caused the first outbreaks of resistance. From this moment on, there was a direct relationship between the Bolshevik attempts to dominate the countryside and the peasant resistance. The harder the Bolsheviks tried to impose “communist relations” in the countryside, the tougher the resistance of the peasants.
Whites, having in 1918 several regiments were not contenders for national power. Nevertheless, the white army of A.I. Denikin, initially numbering 10 thousand people, was able to occupy a territory with a population of 50 million people. This was facilitated by the development of peasant uprisings in areas held by the Bolsheviks. N. Makhno did not want to help the Whites, but his actions against the Bolsheviks contributed to the Whites’ breakthrough. The Don Cossacks rebelled against the communists and cleared the way for the advancing army of A. Denikin.
It seemed that with the nomination of A.V. to the role of dictator. Kolchak, the Whites had a leader who would lead the entire anti-Bolshevik movement. In the provision on the temporary structure of state power, approved on the day of the coup, the Council of Ministers, the supreme state power was temporarily transferred to the Supreme Ruler, and all the Armed Forces of the Russian state were subordinate to him. A.V. Kolchak was soon recognized as the Supreme Ruler by the leaders of other white fronts, and the Western allies recognized him de facto.
The political and ideological ideas of the leaders and ordinary participants in the white movement were as diverse as the movement itself was socially heterogeneous. Of course, some part sought to restore the monarchy, the old, pre-revolutionary regime in general. But the leaders of the white movement refused to raise the monarchical banner and put forward a monarchical program. This also applies to A.V. Kolchak.
What positive things did the Kolchak government promise? Kolchak agreed to convene a new Constituent Assembly after order was restored. He assured Western governments that there could be “no return to the regime that existed in Russia before February 1917,” the broad masses of the population would be allocated land, and differences along religious and national lines would be eliminated. Having confirmed the full independence of Poland and the limited independence of Finland, Kolchak agreed to “prepare decisions” on the fate of the Baltic states, Caucasian and Trans-Caspian peoples. Judging by the statements, the Kolchak government took the position of democratic construction. But in reality everything was different.
The most difficult issue for the anti-Bolshevik movement was the agrarian question. Kolchak never managed to solve it. The war with the Bolsheviks, while Kolchak was waging it, could not guarantee the peasants the transfer of landowners' land to them. The national policy of the Kolchak government is marked by the same deep internal contradiction. Acting under the slogan of a “united and indivisible” Russia, it did not reject “self-determination of peoples” as an ideal.
Kolchak actually rejected the demands of the delegations of Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, the North Caucasus, Belarus and Ukraine put forward at the Versailles Conference. By refusing to create an anti-Bolshevik conference in the regions liberated from the Bolsheviks, Kolchak pursued a policy doomed to failure.
Kolchak’s relations with his allies, who had their own interests in the Far East and Siberia and pursued their own policies, were complex and contradictory. This made the position of the Kolchak government very difficult. A particularly tight knot was tied in relations with Japan. Kolchak did not hide his antipathy towards Japan. The Japanese command responded with active support of the ataman, which flourished in Siberia. Small ambitious people like Semenov and Kalmykov, with the support of the Japanese, managed to create a constant threat to the Omsk government deep in Kolchak’s rear, which weakened it. Semyonov actually cut off Kolchak from the Far East and blocked the supply of weapons, ammunition, and provisions.
Strategic miscalculations in the field of domestic and foreign policy of the Kolchak government were aggravated by mistakes in the military field. The military command (generals V.N. Lebedev, K.N. Sakharov, P.P. Ivanov-Rinov) led the Siberian army to defeat. Betrayed by everyone, both comrades and allies,
Kolchak resigned the title of Supreme Ruler and handed it over to General A.I. Denikin. Having not lived up to the hopes placed on him, A.V. Kolchak died courageously, like a Russian patriot. The most powerful wave of the anti-Bolshevik movement was raised in the south of the country by generals M.V. Alekseev, L.G. Kornilov, A.I. Denikin. Unlike the little-known Kolchak, they all had big names. The conditions in which they had to operate were desperately difficult. The volunteer army, which Alekseev began to form in November 1917 in Rostov, did not have its own territory. In terms of food supply and recruitment of troops, it was dependent on the Don and Kuban governments. The volunteer army had only the Stavropol province and the coast with Novorossiysk; only by the summer of 1919 did it conquer a vast area of the southern provinces for several months.
The weak point of the anti-Bolshevik movement in general and in the south especially was the personal ambitions and contradictions of the leaders M.V. Alekseev and L.G. Kornilov. After their death, all power passed to Denikin. The unity of all forces in the fight against the Bolsheviks, the unity of the country and power, the broadest autonomy of the outskirts, loyalty to agreements with allies in the war - these are the main principles of Denikin’s platform. Denikin’s entire ideological and political program was based on the idea of preserving a united and indivisible Russia. The leaders of the white movement rejected any significant concessions to supporters of national independence. All this stood in contrast to the Bolsheviks' promises of unlimited national self-determination. The reckless recognition of the right to secession gave Lenin the opportunity to curb destructive nationalism and raised his prestige much higher than that of the leaders of the white movement.
The government of General Denikin was divided into two groups - right and liberal. Right - a group of generals with A.M. Drago-mirov and A.S. Lukomsky at the head. The liberal group consisted of cadets. A.I. Denikin took the position of center. The most clearly reactionary line in the policy of the Denikin regime manifested itself on the agrarian issue. In the territory controlled by Denikin, it was planned to: create and strengthen small and medium-sized peasant farms, destroy the latifundia, leave the landowners with small estates on which cultural farming could be carried out. But instead of immediately starting to transfer the landowners' land to the peasants, the commission on the agrarian question began an endless discussion of the draft law on land. As a result, a compromise law was adopted. The transfer of part of the land to the peasants was supposed to begin only after the civil war and end 7 years later. In the meantime, the order for the third sheaf was put into effect, according to which a third of the collected grain went to the landowner. Denikin's land policy was one of the main reasons for his defeat. Of the two evils - Lenin's surplus appropriation system or Denikin's requisition - the peasants preferred the lesser.
A.I. Denikin understood that without the help of his allies, defeat awaited him. Therefore, he himself prepared the text of the political declaration of the commander of the armed forces of southern Russia, sent on April 10, 1919 to the heads of the British, American and French missions. It spoke of convening a national assembly on the basis of universal suffrage, establishing regional autonomy and broad local self-government, and carrying out land reform. However, things did not go beyond broadcast promises. All attention was turned to the front, where the fate of the regime was being decided.
In the fall of 1919, a difficult situation developed at the front for Denikin’s army. This was largely due to a change in the mood of the broad peasant masses. Peasants who rebelled in territory controlled by the whites paved the way for the reds. The peasants were a third force and acted against both in their own interests.
In the territories occupied by both the Bolsheviks and the Whites, the peasants fought a war with the authorities. The peasants did not want to fight either for the Bolsheviks, or for the whites, or for anyone else. Many of them fled into the forests. During this period the green movement was defensive. Since 1920, the threat from the whites has become less and less, and the Bolsheviks have been more determined to impose their power in the countryside. The peasant war against state power covered all of Ukraine, the Chernozem region, the Cossack regions of the Don and Kuban, the Volga and Ural basins and large regions of Siberia. In fact, all grain-producing regions of Russia and Ukraine were a huge Vendée (in a figurative sense - a counter-revolution. - Note ed.).
In terms of the number of people participating in the peasant war and its impact on the country, this war eclipsed the war between the Bolsheviks and the Whites and surpassed it in duration. The Green movement was the decisive third force in the civil war.
but it did not become an independent center claiming power on more than a regional scale.
Why did not the movement of the majority of the people prevail? The reason lies in the way of thinking of Russian peasants. The Greens protected their villages from outsiders. The peasants could not win because they never sought to take over the state. The European concepts of a democratic republic, law and order, equality and parliamentarism, which the Social Revolutionaries introduced into the peasant environment, were beyond the understanding of the peasants.
The mass of peasants participating in the war was heterogeneous. From the peasantry came both rebels, carried away by the idea of “plundering the loot,” and leaders who longed to become new “kings and masters.” Those who acted on behalf of the Bolsheviks, and those who fought under the command of A.S. Antonova, N.I. Makhno, adhered to similar standards of behavior. Those who robbed and raped as part of the Bolshevik expeditions were not much different from the rebels of Antonov and Makhno. The essence of the peasant war was liberation from all power.
The peasant movement put forward its own leaders, people from the people (suffice it to name Makhno, Antonov, Kolesnikov, Sapozhkov and Vakhulin). These leaders were guided by concepts of peasant justice and vague echoes of the platforms of political parties. However, any peasant party was associated with statehood, programs and governments, while these concepts were alien to local peasant leaders. The parties pursued a national policy, but the peasants did not rise to the level of awareness of national interests.
One of the reasons that the peasant movement did not win, despite its scope, was the political life inherent in each province, which ran counter to the rest of the country. While in one province the Greens were already defeated, in another the uprising was just beginning. None of the Green leaders took action beyond the immediate area. This spontaneity, scale and breadth contained not only the strength of the movement, but also helplessness in the face of systematic onslaught. The Bolsheviks, who had great power and a huge army, had an overwhelming military superiority over the peasant movement.
Russian peasants lacked political consciousness - they did not care what the form of government in Russia was. They did not understand the importance of parliament, freedom of the press and assembly. The fact that the Bolshevik dictatorship withstood the test of the civil war can be considered not as an expression of popular support, but as a manifestation of the still unformed national consciousness and the political backwardness of the majority. The tragedy of Russian society was the lack of interconnectedness between its various layers.
One of the main features of the civil war was that all the armies participating in it, red and white, Cossacks and greens, went through the same path of degradation from serving a cause based on ideals to looting and outrages.
What are the causes of the Red and White Terrors? V.I. Lenin stated that the Red Terror during the Civil War in Russia was forced and became a response to the actions of the White Guards and interventionists. According to the Russian emigration (S.P. Melgunov), for example, the Red Terror had an official theoretical justification and was systemic, governmental in nature, while the White Terror was characterized “as excesses based on unbridled power and revenge.” For this reason, the Red Terror was superior to the White Terror in its scale and cruelty. At the same time, a third point of view arose, according to which any terror is inhuman and should be abandoned as a method of struggle for power. The very comparison “one terror is worse (better) than another” is incorrect. No terror has the right to exist. The call of General L.G. is very similar to each other. Kornilov to the officers (January 1918) “do not take prisoners in battles with the Reds” and the confession of the security officer M.I. Latsis that similar orders regarding whites were resorted to in the Red Army.
The quest to understand the origins of the tragedy has given rise to several research explanations. R. Conquest, for example, wrote that in 1918-1820. The terror was carried out by fanatics, idealists - “people in whom one can find some features of a kind of perverted nobility.” Among them, according to the researcher, is Lenin.
Terror during the war years was carried out not so much by fanatics as by people devoid of any nobility. Let's name just a few instructions written by V.I. Lenin. In a note to the Deputy Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic E.M. Sklyansky (August 1920) V.I. Lenin, assessing the plan born in the depths of this department, instructed: “A wonderful plan! Finish it together with Dzerzhinsky. Under the guise of “greens” (we will blame them later) we will march 10-20 miles and outweigh the kulaks, priests, and landowners. Prize: 100,000 rubles for a hanged man."
In a secret letter to members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) dated March 19, 1922, V.I. Lenin proposed taking advantage of the famine in the Volga region and confiscating church valuables. This action, in his opinion, “must be carried out with merciless determination, certainly stopping at nothing and in the shortest possible time. The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie we manage to shoot on this occasion, the better. It is now necessary to teach this public a lesson so that for several decades they will not dare to think about any resistance” 2. Stalin perceived Lenin's recognition of state terror as a high-government matter, power based on force and not on law.
It is difficult to name the first acts of red and white terror. They are usually associated with the beginning of the civil war in the country. Terror was carried out by everyone: officers - participants in the ice campaign of General Kornilov; security officers who received the right of extrajudicial execution; revolutionary courts and tribunals.
It is characteristic that the Cheka’s right to extrajudicial killings, composed by L.D. Trotsky, signed by V.I. Lenin; the tribunals were given unlimited rights by the People's Commissar of Justice; The resolution on the Red Terror was endorsed by the People's Commissars of Justice, Internal Affairs and the head of the Council of People's Commissars (D. Kursky, G. Petrovsky, V. Bonch-Bruevich). The leadership of the Soviet Republic officially recognized the creation of an illegal state, where arbitrariness became the norm of life, and terror was the most important tool for maintaining power. Lawlessness was beneficial to the warring parties, as it allowed any actions by reference to the enemy.
The commanders of all the armies appear to have never been subject to any control. We are talking about the general savagery of society. The reality of the civil war shows that the differences between good and evil have faded. Human life has become devalued. The refusal to see the enemy as a human being encouraged violence on an unprecedented scale. Settling scores with real and imagined enemies has become the essence of politics. The civil war meant the extreme bitterness of society and especially its new ruling class.
"Litvin A.L. Red and White Terror in Russia 1917-1922 // Russian History. 1993. No. 6. P. 47-48. 1 2 Ibid. P. 47-48.
Murder of M.S. Uritsky and the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918 provoked an unusually brutal response. In retaliation for the murder of Uritsky, up to 900 innocent hostages were shot in Petrograd.
A significantly larger number of victims is associated with the assassination attempt on Lenin. In the first days of September 1918, 6,185 people were shot, 14,829 were sent to prison, 6,407 were sent to concentration camps, and 4,068 people became hostages. Thus, attempts on the lives of Bolshevik leaders contributed to the rampant mass terror in the country.
At the same time as the Reds, white terror was rampant in the country. And if the Red Terror is considered to be the implementation of state policy, then it should probably be taken into account that whites in 1918-1919. also occupied vast territories and declared themselves as sovereign governments and state entities. The forms and methods of terror were different. But they were also used by adherents of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch in Samara, the Provisional Regional Government in the Urals), and especially by the white movement.
The coming to power of the founders in the Volga region in the summer of 1918 was characterized by reprisals against many Soviet workers. Some of the first departments created by Komuch were state security, military courts, trains and “death barges”. On September 3, 1918, they brutally suppressed the workers' uprising in Kazan.
The political regimes established in Russia in 1918 are quite comparable, first of all, in their predominantly violent methods of resolving issues of organizing power. In November 1918 A.V. Kolchak, who came to power in Siberia, began with the expulsion and murder of the Socialist Revolutionaries. It is hardly possible to talk about support for his policies in Siberia and the Urals, if out of approximately 400 thousand Red partisans of that time, 150 thousand acted against him. The government of A.I. was no exception. Denikin. In the territory captured by the general, the police were called state guards. By September 1919, its number reached almost 78 thousand people. Osvag's reports informed Denikin about robberies and looting; it was under his command that 226 Jewish pogroms took place, as a result of which several thousand people died. The White Terror turned out to be as senseless in achieving its goal as any other. Soviet historians have calculated that in 1917-1922. 15-16 million Russians died, of which 1.3 million became victims of terror, banditry, and pogroms. The civil, fratricidal war with millions of casualties turned into a national tragedy. Red and white terror became the most barbaric method of struggle for power. Its results for the progress of the country are truly disastrous.
