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May 22 last year marked the 130th anniversary of the birth of Yakov Sverdlov. The man who supported the shooting royal family, leader of the “red terror” in the Urals. In his honor, the city of Yekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk in 1924 and retained this name until the early 2000s, and the region to this day is called Sverdlovsk, which was formed instead of the Ural province under the tsars. So what was he really like, this bloody mechanic of the Soviet regime, nicknamed the “black devil”?

The “fiery revolutionary” kept a huge amount of jewelry and gold.
In 1994, a letter from Genrikh Yagoda to I.V. was discovered in the former archives of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee. To Stalin, July 27, 1935. In it, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs reported: Ya.M.'s personal safe was discovered in the warehouse of the Kremlin commandant. Sverdlov, which has not been opened for 16 years since his death, and the key to which was lost. There were gold coins of royal mintage worth an astronomical amount, over seven hundred gold items with precious stones, a lot of blank passport forms and completed passports in the name of Sverdlov himself and unknown persons, tsarist-era bonds.

Why and for what purpose the “fiery revolutionary” kept all this in his personal safe remains a mystery to this day.

Yakov Sverdlov is generally considered one of the most mysterious figures of the Russian revolution.
Firstly, his real name is not Sverdlov at all. His father, the tradesman Miraim-Movsha Izrailevich Gauchmann, with his wife Elizaveta Solomonovna, moved from the Pale of Settlement into the interior of Russia and settled in Nizhny Novgorod, where he signed up as an artisan under the name Movsha Sverdlin, later turning into Sverdlova. Not everything is clear with the name. According to historian I.F. Plotnikov, “according to some sources, Sverdlov was called Yeshua-Solomon Movshevich from birth, and according to others, Yankel Miraimovich.” And when he became a revolutionary, they called him either “Comrade Andrei”, then “Max”, then “Mikhail Permyakov”, then “Smirnov”...

The fate of his relatives was also surprising. His older brother Zinovy became the godson of Maxim Gorky, who actually adopted him, turning him into Peshkov. Which, however, did not stop Zinovy from emigrating, ending up in France, then joining the Foreign Legion, becoming a French general and receiving the Order of the Legion of Honor. The career of another brother, Benjamin, was less successful. After mysterious adventures in the United States in 1938, he was arrested and then shot as a “Trotskyist.”

Like many other Bolsheviks, young Yasha did not abuse his studies at all. He graduated from only four classes of the gymnasium, then began to study pharmacy. But he soon retrained as a professional revolutionary - he became a well-known underground worker in Nizhny Novgorod. Then everything was the same as with his other colleagues: agitation, proclamations, expropriations, prisons, exile, escapes...

He “sat” successfully: in 1912, in Narym, Yakov Mikhailovich met Stalin. And then Turukhansk ended up with him. For some time they even lived in the same house. Here is how Stalin describes some details of their life together with Sverdlov in exile: “We mainly lived by catching nelma. This did not require much specialization. We also went hunting. I had a dog, I named it “Yashka”. Of course, this was unpleasant for Sverdlov: he is Yashka, and the dog is Yashka...”

In general, the revolutionaries in tsarist exile did not have any special problems. We lived on benefits from the government, so we didn’t have to work. In addition, they were also fed from the party treasury, which consisted of expropriations, that is, bank robberies, as well as from contributions from capitalists who sympathized with them.

At the 7th (April) conference of the RSDLP, Sverdlov for the first time personally met with V.I. Lenin and began to carry out his instructions. Then he was elected a member of the Central Committee and headed the then created Secretariat of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, becoming the main organizer of work on the promotion and placement of personnel in key positions.

It was then that he received the nickname “Black Devil” - after the color of his leather jacket, which he never took off in public, and which later became Bolshevik fashion. However, he also had leather riding breeches and even a cap. Outwardly, Sverdlov was a dark-haired man with sharp facial features and a thick, powerful bass voice. “It’s okay, Sverdlov will tell them this in a Sverdlovsk bass voice, and the matter will be settled,” Lenin usually said in difficult cases.
Unlike the eloquent Leon Trotsky, Sverdlov did not make pretentious speeches, did not tour the fronts in luxurious royal carriages, did not give interviews to the foreign press, and did not appear on the pages of newspapers. He remained, as it were, in the shadows all the time.
Its intelligent appearance with his invariable pince-nez and beard, he was more likely to think of a university professor than of the leader of the revolutionary party. Anatoly Lunacharsky wrote about Sverdlov like this: “Of course, there was a lot of internal fire in him, but outwardly he was an absolutely icy man. When he was not on the podium, he always spoke in a low voice, walked quietly, and all his gestures were slow.” Sverdlov had a phenomenal memory, he was called " notebook Lenin,” he remembered everything and everyone.

When the Bolsheviks began to be hunted as German spies, Sverdlov personally came to Lenin and organized his transition to an underground position, hiding him near the Razliv station near Sestroretsk, while he himself remained in Petrograd to organize the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks.

However, Sverdlov was probably called the “Black Devil” not only for his black leather jacket. Historians provide evidence of his involvement in black magic. So, in exile, Sverdlov acquired a dog, which he named Pes. The dog was endlessly attached to his owner and never parted with him. At the end of 1916, the Dog died. Yakov Mikhailovich grieved terribly. He asked a local hunter to skin the corpse of his faithful friend and tan it. And then he took her with him everywhere. In the Kremlin, this skin always lay by Sverdlov’s bed. We are talking about a black magic ritual. With such rituals, they try to “pull” the spirit of a deceased creature to the earth, not to allow it to go into another world in order to use it for their own purposes.

At the suggestion of Lenin, Sverdlov, as the chief personnel officer, was appointed chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. He carried out the main work on the creation of Soviet authorities in the center and locally. “Sometimes it seemed that like V.I. Lenin came to Russia after the victory of the February Revolution with ready-made political blueprints for the entire revolution, so Ya.M. Sverdlov came from distant exile with ready-made organizational drawings of the entire work of the party and with a ready-made plan for the distribution of the main groups of workers according to sectors of work,” Grigory Zinoviev later recalled.

It was Sverdlov who opened the first meeting Constituent Assembly January 5, 1918, announcing the “Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People,” in which Russia was proclaimed a republic. He was also the chairman of the commission for the development of the Constitution of the RSFSR, which declared the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Things were getting to the point where it was no longer Lenin, but Sverdlov who began to be called the “Red Tsar.” But still, until his complete “reign”, Sverdlov was hampered by the authority of Ilyich, who was much higher.

“If you look at who benefited from eliminating Lenin at that moment, Sverdlov won the most,” he writes. - After the assassination attempt, Sverdlov was the first to arrive in the Kremlin. Sverdlov’s wife reports that that same evening he occupied Lenin’s office, taking over the Council of People’s Commissars, the Central Committee, and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.” Roy Medvedev writes the same thing: “When Lenin was seriously wounded by the Socialist-Revolutionary Kaplan, Sverdlov became the de facto head of the Soviet state for several weeks.”

It was Sverdlov who carried out a hasty investigation into the case of Fani Kaplan; it was on his orders that Kaplan was hastily shot and burned in metal barrel on the territory of the Kremlin. Although she was a friend of Yakov Sverdlov’s sister.

Through his relatives, Yakov Mikhailovich was connected with the foreign backstage. Researcher Peter Multatuli writes that his brother Benjamin traveled to the USA even before the revolution, where he worked as a banker for some time. And there he came into contact with the bank Kuhn, Leib and Co. and the banker Jacob Schiff, who, as has already been established, financed the Bolsheviks, as well as the “transfer” of Trotsky and a group of his militants to Russia from the United States.

Sverdlov was famous for his pathological cruelty. His desire to always go to extreme measures surprised even his party comrades. In the Urals, on the eve of the 1905 revolution, Sverdlov created an organization called the “Combat Detachment of People's Arms.” It was an honor to be in Sverdlov’s “brigade,” but not everyone passed the test. Thus, one of the future killers of the royal family, Ermakov, “on instructions from the party” in 1907 killed a police agent and cut off his head.

Sverdlov was the author of cruel directives that prescribed fierce punitive measures in suppressing Cossack uprisings against Soviet power on the Don. After the assassination attempt on Lenin, Sverdlov signed an appeal “on the transformation of the Soviet Republic into a single military camp,” supplemented by the resolution “On Red Terror” issued by the Council of People’s Commissars on September 5.

In May 1918, Sverdlov provoked the start of a fratricidal war in the village. In his report “On the tasks of the Soviets in the countryside,” he says: “Only if we can split the village into two irreconcilably hostile camps, if we can kindle the same civil war“, which was going on not so long ago in the cities, if we succeed in restoring the rural poor against the rural bourgeoisie, only then can we say that we are doing in relation to the countryside what we were able to do for the cities.” And in July 1918 he said: “I want to dwell on the question of the death penalty. I must point out that the Revolutionary Tribunal, with its first decision on the death penalty, showed, in my deep conviction, that it correctly took into account the given moment that we are experiencing at this time.”

Regicide was an obsession for him. At the time of the massacre in Yekaterinburg, Sverdlov was in Moscow. Adventurer V.N. Orlov, posing as a white counterintelligence agent, recalled: “In July 1918, when I was interviewing agents in the Cheka building, a messenger brought a telegram addressed to Dzerzhinsky, who was next to me. He quickly read it, turned as pale as death, jumped to his feet and, exclaiming “Again they are acting without consulting me!”, rushed out of the room. Dzerzhinsky hurried to the Kremlin. What on earth happened?

The next day we learned the news. The imperial family was shot without the knowledge of the Cheka! Independently, on the instructions of Sverdlov and one of the highest bosses in the Central Committee of the Communist Party!

According to the general opinion in the Cheka, the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Kremlin, the decision to kill was made and implemented by Sverdlov’s authorities. He carried out the preparations in secret from his comrades, and only after the execution confronted them with a fait accompli.”

The “Black Devil” died unexpectedly, at the age of only 34, although, as they said, he had good health. According to the official version, he allegedly fell ill with the Spanish flu. And so, on March 16, 1919, Sverdlov died and was buried with pomp at the Kremlin wall. “We lowered into the grave the proletarian leader who did most to organize the working class, for its victory,” Lenin said mournfully at the funeral.

Monument to Ya. Sverdlov in Yekaterinburg
Doctor of Law Arkady Vaksberg wrote: “The exact cause of his death is unknown. At the same time, an apparently not unfounded rumor spread that in the city of Oryol he had been fatally beaten by workers, but this fact was allegedly hidden so as “not to disgrace the revolution” and “not to inflame even more anti-Semitic passions.”

The French communist writer Louis Aragon wrote: “Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov, Lenin’s most faithful comrade, who became the first chairman of the Central Executive Committee, that is, the first head of the new Soviet state, and who, unfortunately for the whole world, was to die of the Spanish flu at thirty-four of the year. I said “to the misfortune of the whole world,” because, of course, if he had survived, Sverdlov, and not Stalin, would have succeeded Lenin.” Stalin probably understood this no worse than Aragon.

However, there could be another reason for the unexpected death of the “Black Devil”, a very banal one - money. The fact is that Sverdlov was the custodian of a kind of “Bolshevik common fund”. This was done by his second wife, Claudia Timofeevna, née Novgorodtseva. The Politburo Diamond Fund was hidden in her apartment. Part of this “common fund” was probably later discovered in the safe in Sverdlov’s office.

...They say that when a person dies, all his vices or virtues are imprinted on his face. As usual, the “fiery revolutionary” was removed death mask. Seeing her, psychiatrist Evgeny Chernosvitov exclaimed: “Sverdlov’s mask is the embodiment of evil, it’s unpleasant to look at!”

Vladimir Malyshev. "Safe of Yakov Sverdlov"

...“The Black Devil of the Bolsheviks” by Y.M. Sverdlov can safely be considered the initiator of inciting the civil war.

http://www.ptiburdukov.rf/%D0%A1%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA /%D0%91%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%B8/%D0%A1%D0%B2%D0%B5 %D1%80%D0%B4%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%AF%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%85%D0 %B0%D0%B9%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87

Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov

Among the biographies of the “old Bolsheviks” and comrades of V.I. There is no more mythologized biography of Lenin, rich in intentional errors and distortions, than the biography of Ya.M. Sverdlov. His name for a long time worn by the cities and streets of our country. In the squares of central and not-so-central cities, there were monuments, busts, and memorial plaques dedicated to this virtually unknown, but very popular “hero of the revolution” already in the Soviet period. If, for ideological reasons, it was necessary to change the old, pre-revolutionary name to a new one, for some reason the name of Sverdlov immediately came to mind. It was believed that this comrade-in-arms of Lenin was in no way involved in the outrages of the times of the cult of personality and the crimes of the Stalin era. And he died seemingly heroically: either he overstrained himself at a rally for Soviet power, or the “internal enemies” of the revolution decided to beat the Jews, and they started with him...

In the second half of the 1980s, at the very dawn of the so-called “perestroika,” sensational revelations of the activities of many revolutionary leaders began to leak into the press. The mass destruction of monuments of the Soviet era and the onset of the time of “reverse renaming” were being prepared. Ya.M. did not escape these perestroika revelations either. Sverdlov.

Complaining about the almost complete lack of sources about his pre-revolutionary party life, journalists broke their spears in disputes: did the fiery orator Sverdlov belong to the Bolsheviks before 1917? Or was he a Menshevik who “adhered” to Lenin’s party, or even a Socialist-Revolutionary, no worse than those who sat in the last composition of the Provisional Government?

Today, the question of Sverdlov’s party affiliation, like many other issues of ideological differences in Russian Social Democracy, is not so relevant. Before the court of history, one thing is clear: Ya.M. Sverdlov, like all his comrades-in-arms, are guilty of inciting the “fire of the world revolution,” which ultimately led to chaos, anarchy, the destruction of Russian statehood, the expulsion and death of millions of Russian people.

The names of Lenin, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky and other bloody executioners, indeed, have no place on the map of our homeland. On the other hand, they are individuals who not only entered the history of Russia, but also completely turned this history around, bringing to life the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.

Ya.M. Sverdlov is a figure significantly mythologized by Soviet historiography, debunked and overthrown in the era of “perestroika,” and completely forgotten by modern researchers.

In fact, there are not enough sources to shed light on his real activities. In this article we will try to at least recreate the main stages of his biography, without stooping to Soviet myth-making and “perestroika” defamation.

Childhood and family

Yakov Mikhailovich (Movshovich) Sverdlov was born on May 22 (June 3, new style) 1885 in Nizhny Novgorod, on Pokrovka (later Sverdlov Street). Father Miraim Izrailevich (according to other sources, Movsha, because documents often mention Y. Sverdlov’s patronymic - Movshovich) was not an “artisan engraver,” as reported in the article about Sverdlov in the TSB, but the owner of an engraving workshop. For some reason, Yakov himself does not indicate his father’s real name anywhere.

Real name of Yakov Sverdlov

In the domestic media and on the pages of Internet resources, very emotional discussions about the personality of Ya. Sverdlov, his role in the events of 1917-1918, and the execution of the royal family continue to persist. The true circumstances of his early, unexpected death raise many questions. Judging by the number of search queries, today almost half of the population of the entire post-Soviet space is trying to find out the real name of this colorful character.

Obviously because the man who went down in history under the name Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov had very little of the present.

However, if we put aside most of the anti-Semitic insinuations and idle speculation that appear in modern publications about Sverdlov and turn directly to known archival documents, the surname Sverdlov (Sverdlin) should be recognized as real.

In 1882, Ya.M. Sverdlov’s father registered with the city government of Nizhny Novgorod as an artisan Movsha Izrailevich Sverdlin.

Where and when the family of the future revolutionary came to Nizhny Novgorod is unknown. Under what surname it existed until 1882 - too. Some sources indicate that Movsha Izrailevich arrived in the late 1870s “from Lithuania.” Investigator N.A. Sokolov, who conducted the investigation into the murder of Nicholas II and his family, called Yakov Sverdlov “a tradesman of the city of Polotsk, Vitebsk province,” immediately pointing out that he was born in Nizhny Novgorod.

Yakov Sverdlov was indeed born in Nizhny Novgorod. In the Nizhny Novgorod Book of Records of the Birth of Jewish Children for 1885, he is recorded on May 23 (not 22) under the name Yakov-Aaron. All his brothers and sisters, also born in Nizhny Novgorod, bore the surname Sverdlovs (Sverdlins).

In modern publications, a version has appeared more than once that the engraver Movsha Sverdlin in his former life “beyond the Pale of Settlement” supposedly existed under the surname Gauchmann, and signed up as Sverdlin “for conspiracy”, because began to collaborate with the revolutionary underground. Widow of Ya.M.Sverdlov - K.T. Novgorodtseva in her memoirs directly indicates that Movsha Izrailevich produced stamps and seals for false passports and had a wide clientele among revolutionaries, as well as criminals. But long years Sverdlin’s engraving workshop operated quite legally, and its owner did not need “conspiracy” at all.

The version about the surname Gauchmann is currently not confirmed by any documentary sources.

And the reference to the British journalist Robert Wilton, who was very superficially familiar with the materials of the case of the murder of the royal family, looks completely funny. The Briton simply confused Kamenev and Sverdlov, calling the main organizer of the crime a certain Yakov Moishevich Rosenfeld, who never existed in the world. In the same way, English journalists “invented” General Kharkov in 1919, and King George V, without understanding it, made him, along with Denikin and Kolchak, an honorary member of the Order of Michael and George. The reward for this mythical character had to be received by the commander of the Volunteer Army V.Z. Mai-Maevsky. And after his death, Sverdlov had to appear in the Western press as Rosenfeld.

Wikipedia has launched a very extensive discussion on finding out the real name of Sverdlov. Unfortunately, none of its participants has genuine documentary data, so the question remains open to this day.

Yakov had brothers (Zinovy, Benjamin, Lev) and two sisters (Sarah and Sophia) from his father’s first marriage. From his father's second marriage - brothers Alexander and German. Almost nothing is known about Sverdlov’s mother, except that her name was Elizaveta Solomonovna and that she was a housewife. My paternal grandfather is a Saratov merchant. Sister Sophia was also married to a jeweler - the owner of an engraving workshop, Averbakh. One of Sverdlov's brothers emigrated to the USA and became a banker there.

According to the recollections of sisters Sarah, Sophia and brother Benjamin, “in childhood, Yakov was playful beyond his years, he seemed older than his years. If he made promises, he always kept them. If he set any goal for himself, he achieved it, no matter how much work it cost him.”

The interrogation protocol of Sverdlov (dated January 12, 1910) provides the following details of his biography: in the column “religion” - “Jewish”, in the column “origin and nationality” - “from the philistines, Jew”, in the column “education” - “in In 1900, he graduated from the 4th grade, 15 years old” in the column “whether he was previously involved in inquiries, how, and how they ended” - “he was involved in 1902 and 1903 in Nizhny Novgorod for belonging to a secret society; the investigations were stopped..."

Revolutionary

It is generally accepted that Sverdlov’s revolutionary biography began in Nizhny Novgorod, when Yakov was barely 16 years old. Some contemporary publications contained information that Sverdlov’s father, an artisan engraver, made and sold counterfeit stamps that were used by political and criminal criminals to forge documents. It is possible that Yakov, while still a teenager, acted as a mediator in these transactions, and therefore he so easily and quickly entered the revolutionary environment, becoming “one of his own” even among criminals in Siberian exile.

According to documents, for the first time Yakov Sverdlov was arrested (detained) by the police for two days on December 3, 1901 for participating in a demonstration during the send-off of A. M. Gorky into exile.

On May 5, 1902, he was arrested for fourteen days for participating in a demonstration at the funeral of student B.I. Rurikov.

On April 14, 1903, Sverdlov was arrested at his apartment. During the search, leaflets of the Nizhny Novgorod Committee of the RSDLP were taken. On August 11, he was released from arrest. On November 12, he was subject to public police supervision for two years at the place of residence of his parents.

On November 24, 1903, he again participated in the funeral of student A.V. Yarovitsky. December 7 - at the funeral of A.V. Panov, who was under police supervision in Nizhny Novgorod. On March 21, 1905, he took part in the funeral of high school student Panov, who shot himself in Yaroslavl. On April 3, again in Nizhny Novgorod, he takes part in the funeral of N.I. Devyatkov, who shot himself. On June 17, 1905, he speaks at a meeting of clerks in the premises of the All-Estate Club in Nizhny Novgorod with an appeal to get the owners to satisfy their demands “by force and weapons.”

The picture turns out strange. Sverdlov either sees off or buries some suicides, or gives speeches to clerks... Actually, apart from storing leaflets, it is impossible to attribute any “revolutionary” activity known to the police to him.

His “revolutionary work” in Kostroma, Kazan, Yaroslavl, Perm, Yekaterinburg and other cities, which is written about in the TSB, raises even more bewilderments and questions.

From the memoirs of his wife Claudia Timofeevna Novgorodtseva, it is known that on September 28, 1905, Sverdlov came to Yekaterinburg for a purpose unknown to her, where they met. Claudia Timofeevna is the daughter of an Ekaterinburg merchant (one of the streets in the former Sverdlovsk is named after her). She was eight years older than Sverdlov and was considered his wife, although no official marriage was registered between them.

Further, in the documents of the gendarme department and Sverdlov’s case, it is said that on June 10, 1906, “after the defeat of the military organization,” he was arrested on the street in Perm with a passport in the name of L. S. Hertz. On September 22 - 23, 1907, he was sentenced to two years by the verdict of the Kazan Court Chamber. Who this military organization consisted of is not stated in the report of the Perm gendarme department to St. Petersburg. The Bolsheviks, as is known, did not have military organizations. Mindful of the fate of his elder brother, Lenin fundamentally led the party along a “different path.” It turns out that in the revolution of 1905 Sverdlov acted hand in hand with some extremists, like the Socialist Revolutionaries?

After serving exactly two years (Sverdlov’s only prison sentence), he left for Moscow. The TSB reports that on December 13, 1909, Sverdlov was again arrested directly at a meeting of the executive commission of the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP under the name of I. I. Smirnov. But the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP was defeated back in 1905 (four months after its formation), and its first secretary Zemlyachka (nee Zalkind Rozalia Samoilovna) was arrested. Her replacement, V.M. Likhachev was arrested in December 1908. The Moscow organization of the Bolsheviks itself dates back only to March 1917 (see: Moscow city organization of the CPSU, 1917 - 1988. Moscow worker, 1989.) Another myth-making?

In the article about Sverdlov, published in the encyclopedia “The Great October Socialist Revolution” (Soviet Encyclopedia Publishing House, 1977), nothing is reported about the arrest at a meeting of the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP.

On March 1, 1910, by decree of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Sverdlov was sentenced to deportation for three years to the Narym region for revolutionary agitation. On March 17, Sverdlov submits a petition to the police department to replace the deportation to Siberia with travel abroad. They refuse him. On March 31, 1910, he was sent from Moscow by convoy to the Tomsk province. In exile, Sverdlov met Philip (party nickname) Isaich Goloshchekin (aka Shaya Isaakovich Goloshchekin) and other revolutionaries, whom he later, as chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, provided patronage.

According to the memoirs of V.M. Kosarev, written 30 years after Sverdlov’s death, “as soon as Yakov Mikhailovich arrived in Narym, he immediately began giving lectures on political economy.” The question arises: where did he study it with four classes of education? Already on July 27, Sverdlov escapes from exile. In September 1910, he appears in St. Petersburg, and on November 10 he writes a leaflet in connection with the death of Tolstoy, signed “Group of Social Democrats.”

On November 14, 1910, Sverdlov was arrested in St. Petersburg as an “agent of the Bolshevik Central Committee” (from the Red Archive magazine). When did Sverdlov join the Bolsheviks? The documents are silent about this.

The 50th volume of the TSB (1st edition) says this: “Sverdlov...since 1901 he took part in the Social Democratic movement.” That's all.

In his speech dedicated to the memory of Sverdlov in 1919, V.I. Lenin also found it difficult to name the exact date the arrival of such a prominent Bolshevik in the party: “In the first period of his activity, still quite a youth, he, barely imbued with political consciousness, immediately and completely surrendered to the revolution” (Speech in memory of Ya. M. Sverdlov at an emergency meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on March 18, 1919 // About Yakov Sverdlov. Politizdat, 1985). Not a word is said about Sverdlov’s membership in the Bolshevik Party since 1901 in his obituary (see: Pravda. 1919, March 18).

Neither his brother German Sverdlov nor K. T. Novgorodtseva address this issue in their memoirs about her husband. (See: About Yakov Sverdlov. pp. 181 - 221)

However, sisters Sophia, Sarah and brother Benjamin, many years after the death of their brother, recalled that “by the age of fifteen he had already become a revolutionary, and at sixteen he joined the party.” Which one, if Bolshevism, as a movement political thought(according to the well-known expression of V.I. Lenin) arose at the Second Congress of the RSDLP, held in London in 1903?..

On April 30, 1911, by resolution of the Special Meeting of Ya.M. Sverdlov is again sent to the Narym region, this time for four years. On December 7, 1912 he escapes. On February 10, 1913, he was arrested at the apartment of G.I. Petrovsky in St. Petersburg. On April 4, by resolution of the Special Meeting, he was sentenced to deportation for five years to the Turukhansk region.

Here Sverdlov was very familiar with I.V. Stalin. At one time they even lived in the same house, but then they quarreled on purely domestic grounds. According to the memoirs of Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, Stalin once told him that the “clean” Sverdlov washed his dishes after every meal, while the future father of nations simply put the plate on the floor, where his hunting dog licked it clean. In retaliation for Sverdlov’s “sour face”, Stalin took and named the dog Yashka. Sverdlov was mortally offended.

In March 1917, former neighbors Sverdlov and Stalin also returned separately from exile in Turukhansk. On March 21, Sverdlov stopped in Krasnoyarsk, where “he spoke at party and Soviet meetings, exposing the Menshevik-SR compromisers” (from the book “Selected Articles and Speeches of Sverdlov,” 1944).

For very short term(from the moment of leaving Krasnoyarsk on March 23, arriving in St. Petersburg, and from there to Yekaterinburg) Sverdlov suddenly became “the favorite of the Ural workers,” who on April 15, 1917, at the Ural Party Conference, “elected Sverdlov as a delegate to the All-Russian April Conference.” It is still unknown what faction he represented at the April Conference? Bolsheviks, Mensheviks or Bundists?

Sverdlov and Lenin

It is also unknown where and when Lenin met Sverdlov. There are two versions: either at the April Conference of 1917, or in October, immediately before the uprising.

According to the official version of the TSB, after the April conference, little-known Sverdlov was unexpectedly elected head of the Organizational Bureau for convening the VI Congress of the RSDLP (b). After the congress, he “headed the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b), was the main speaker at Bolshevik rallies and received the nickname “black devil of the Bolsheviks” from political opponents (based on the color of his leather jacket, which he never parted with, then this became Bolshevik fashion - E. Sh.), participated in the leadership of the Military Organization under the Central Committee, established connections with local party organizations, maintaining constant contact with V.I. Lenin, who was underground.”

If about the black jacket it’s pure truth, then about the constant connection with Lenin it’s an absolute hoax.

The name of Sverdlov was first mentioned in the 34th volume of the Complete Works of V.I. Lenin (July - October 1917), on page 434, which contains Lenin’s first (and only) short letter-note to Sverdlov, written on October 23, 1917 (that is, literally two days before the coup). This note contains no indication of Lenin’s earlier acquaintance with his addressee:

Comrade Sverdlov.

Only last night I learned that Zinoviev denies in writing his participation in Kamenev’s speech in Novaya Zhizn. How come you don’t send me anything??? I sent all the letters about Kamenev and Zinoviev only to members of the Central Committee. You know that; Isn’t it strange after this that you definitely doubt it? In the case of Zinoviev and Kamenev, if you... demand a compromise, make a proposal against me to submit the case to the party court... this will be a delay. "Kamenev's resignation accepted"? From the Central Committee? Send the text of his statement.

V.I. Lenin’s note was ignored by Sverdlov, as well as by other members of the Central Committee formed at the VI Congress of the RSDLP(b).

Sverdlov was the chairman at the meetings of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) on October 10 (23) and 16 (29), 1917, which decided on an armed uprising; elected a member of the Military Revolutionary Center for the leadership of the uprising. Delegate to the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets, head of the Bolshevik faction of the congress.

In power

Few people know that on October 27 (November 9), 1917, on the second day after the coup, at the first meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, L. V. Kamenev (Rosenfeld) was elected Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. But due to the disorganization policy and insubordination of the Central Committee, Kamenev was removed from the post of Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee eleven days later. On November 8 (21), 1917, he was replaced in this post by Sverdlov. It was V.I. Lenin who nominated him. As N.K. Krupskaya recalled, “the choice was extremely successful.”

How successful is indicated by the events that took place during Sverdlov’s stay in power (a year and four months).

In his speech at the opening of the Constituent Assembly on January 5, 1918 (which everyone was waiting for), Sverdlov emphasized the merciless suppression of exploiters, the establishment of a socialist organization of society and the victories of socialism in all countries. Here, “in the interests of ensuring full power... the armament of the working people is decreed.” Sverdlov ended his speech with strange, far-reaching words: “Let us hope that the foundations of the new society specified in this declaration will remain unshakable and, having established themselves in Russia, will gradually cover the whole world.”

When Sverdlov said that the Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies had instructed him to open the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, voices were heard in the hall from the right and center: “You have blood on your hands, enough blood...”

The Constituent Assembly lasted 12 hours and 40 minutes. The Bolsheviks gained only 25 percent of the votes, and the elections were declared invalid and counter-revolutionary.

“The Black Devil of the Bolsheviks” by Y.M. Sverdlov can safely be considered the initiator of inciting the civil war.

In his well-known speech at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on May 20, 1918, Sverdlov frankly said that “if in the cities we have already managed to practically kill our big bourgeoisie, then we cannot yet say the same about the countryside. Only if we can split the village into two irreconcilable hostile camps, if we can kindle there the same civil war that not so long ago was going on in the cities, if we succeed in restoring the rural poor against the rural bourgeoisie - only if we We will be able to say that we will do for the village what we were able to do for the city.”

He said this at a time when the Civil War in Russia had already actually begun, but had not yet completely covered the entire territory of the country. The peasantry was still a homogeneous, inert mass, which was just waiting to be “pushed” into a split from the right or the left. Through surplus appropriation, robbery and violence, the Bolsheviks very soon achieved the desired result.

Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Sverdlov is directly related to the murder of the royal family.

On May 9, 1918, at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Sverdlov announced that seven family members and four servants had been transported from the Tobolsk provincial house to Ipatiev’s house in Yekaterinburg. On July 12, 1918, member of the Ural Council F.I. Goloshchekin (an old acquaintance of Sverdlov, to whom he provided all kinds of patronage) returned from Moscow to Yekaterinburg. Subsequently, the Bolsheviks justified the destruction of the Romanovs by the threat of the capture of Yekaterinburg by the Whites (allegedly they did not have time to take them out, they were afraid that the Tsar would be released, etc.)

However, today it is reliably known that direct instructions for the destruction of the family were given by Sverdlov.
In the building of the Volga-Kama Bank in Yekaterinburg, the Ural Council met (chaired by A.G. Beloborodov), at which the fate of the tsar, his wife, five minor children and four more from the servants was decided. The order of the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Sverdlov was carried out: everyone was sentenced to death. On July 18, Sverdlov received a message about the execution of the sentence.

In the evening, the Council of People's Commissars chaired by V.I. Lenin meets in the Kremlin. The floor is given to Sverdlov: “I must state the following. A message was received from Yekaterinburg that, by order of the Ural Regional Council, a person had been shot there. former king Nikolai Romanov... The Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which met today, decided: the decision and actions of the Ural Council were recognized as correct.”

In fact, everything was decided single-handedly by Sverdlov in a narrow circle of close associates (three or four people). He conveyed this decision with Goloshchekin to Yekaterinburg not in writing, but in words.

Sverdlov is also one of the initiators, ideologists and implementers of the “Red Terror” policy. After the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918, Sverdlov signed the appeal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on September 2 “on the transformation of the Soviet republic into a single military camp,” supplemented on September 5 by the “Resolution on Red Terror” issued by the Council of People’s Commissars, which declared mass red terror against all enemies of the revolution.

On January 24, 1919, Sverdlov single-handedly signed a directive from the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), ordering the implementation of harsh punitive measures in suppressing Cossack uprisings against Soviet power on the Don.

Here are some excerpts from this ominous directive:

“The Central Committee decides to carry out mass terror against the White Cossacks, exterminating them without exception; carry out merciless mass terror against all Cossacks who took any direct or indirect part in the fight against Soviet power... Confiscate bread and force all surpluses to be poured into specified points, this applies to both bread and all other agricultural products. .. All commissioners appointed to certain Cossack settlements are invited to show maximum firmness and steadily implement these instructions.”

In fact, the Central Committee did not decide anything. The Plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) on March 16, 1919 (the day of Sverdlov’s death) canceled the January directive. But it was already too late - the infernal machine was set in motion. And how can it be stopped if the directive came from the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee himself, who was not elected by the people?

Having reached power, upstarts like Sverdlov spared neither the elderly, nor women, nor children. When the extermination of the Cossacks was already in full swing and they, defending themselves from unheard-of terror, rebelled against Soviet power, on the day of Sverdlov’s funeral the VIII Congress of the RCP (b) opened. V.I. Lenin, speaking with a political and organizational report, noted the role of Sverdlov as follows:

“I am not able to replace him even by a hundredth part, because in this work (organizing the work of the Central Committee - E.Sh.) we were forced to rely entirely and had every reason to rely on Comrade. Sverdlov, who often made decisions single-handedly.”

Speaking in the debate, a delegate from the Moscow provincial organization of the RCP (b) N. Osinsky said:

“We need to pose the question directly. We did not have a collegial, but an individual solution to issues. The organizational work of the Central Committee was reduced to the activities of one comrade - Sverdlov.
All the threads were held by one person. This was an abnormal situation. The same must be said about the political work of the Central Committee. During this period between congresses, we did not have a friendly collegial discussion and decision.
We must state this. The Central Committee, as a collegium, actually did not exist... It was considered a great personal merit to Comrade Sverdlov that he could embrace the immensity within himself, but for the party this is far from a compliment...”

In many speeches at the congress, it was noted with bitterness that “we are increasingly developing patronage of close people, protectionism, and at the same time, abuses, bribery, and obvious outrages are being committed by party workers.” And the delegate of the congress from the Military Food Bureau, M. M. Kostelovskaya, criticizing the policy of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in the village, directly said: “This method of work (of Sverdlov) proved that in this way we not only do not introduce class stratification, civil war into the village, but, on the contrary, restore “All strata of the peasantry - large, medium and small - are against us, we are driving a wedge between the city and the countryside, that is, in the wrong place where it is required.”

The final

How did the life of this “fiery revolutionary” end? And here are the questions. On March 6, 1919, Sverdlov gave a short speech in Kharkov at the III All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets of Workers, Peasants and Red Army Deputies. On the same day, he sent telegrams to Serpukhov, Tula, Kursk, Belgorod and Orel, in which he considered it advisable to see his comrades (apparently, the leaders of local party bodies). On the same day, at 21:00, he left Kharkov.

The train to Orel arrived on March 7, at 10 am. Sverdlov, judging by the last telegram, did not intend to get out of his carriage, but he still had to get out: at that time there was a strike of railway workers at the station. According to the memoirs of P. S. Vinogradskaya, published 53 years after Sverdlov’s death, “Yakov Mikhailovich had to hold a rally. This happened in Orel. As the train approached the platform, a meeting of railway workers took place near the station. Comrade B.M. Volin (aka Fradkin), who was then the chairman of the Oryol provincial executive committee, came to Sverdlov to ask him to speak at the rally... A delegation came on behalf of the workers and stated that the railway workers only wanted to listen to Sverdlov... He was enthusiastic met by the workers, shared with them his joyful thoughts about the creation of the Third Communist International. Yakov Mikhailovich returned completely hoarse...”

It seemed to Vinogradskaya that Sverdlov “caught a cold.” Is it so? What actually happened during his meeting with the workers? How can one explain that the train with Sverdlov arrived in Moscow only on March 11? Because the railway workers, having enjoyed the speech about the Third International, peacefully continued the strike on the rails? And it’s unlikely that the striking (and therefore seriously dissatisfied) workers in 1919 would have been delighted by a leather commissar chatting about the world revolution...

The white press of the South of Russia, and behind it the emigrant press, actively disseminated the version that the “black devil of the Bolsheviks” Sverdlov was beaten by peasants at a rally in Orel, from which he subsequently died. This message is most likely a typical newspaper “duck”, propaganda of the white OSVAG. Convinced opponents of Soviet power really wanted to believe that the people again began to “save Russia” by beating the Jews...

There is no doubt that Sverdlov most likely had some kind of inflammatory process before his death. But he was not going to die, since according to some sources he spoke at one of the meetings a day before his death. And according to the medical report, a serious deterioration in health occurred on March 14. The fateful VIII Congress of the RSDLP (b) was scheduled for March 18, 1919, at which a fierce struggle was to flare up.
Lenin, after being wounded, was no longer so energetic.
The white armies inflicted one defeat after another on the red ones. The question of personnel changes in both the government and law enforcement agencies could arise. In the event of Lenin's displacement, the fullness of not only executive, but also state power would be concentrated in the hands of Sverdlov. And a day and a half before the start of the congress, on May 16, at 16.45, Sverdlov unexpectedly dies, although before that he was in good health.

The version that Sverdlov caught the Spanish flu on his trip to Kharkov is also not without foundation. This disease could take a young, quite young man to the grave in a few days. healthy person. If we take into account some of the speeches we cited earlier at the congress (after the death of the all-powerful chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee), then we can assume that opposition to his methods of work in the party still existed.
Sverdlov's death itself smoothed over these growing contradictions. The version of poisoning was not seriously considered by anyone, but it is also possible that yesterday’s comrades tactfully “helped” such an odious figure leave the political arena.

Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov was born on May 22, 1885 (according to some sources - May 23). Future political and statesman grew up in Nizhny Novgorod. The career of a Bolshevik and revolutionary led Sverdlov to the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), RCP (b). Fellow party members knew Yakov Mikhailovich under the pseudonyms “Smirnov”, “Andrey”, “Mikhail Permyakov”, “Max”.

Childhood and youth

A son, Yakov, was born into the family of Mikhail Izrailevich and Elizaveta Solomonovna Sverdlov. The only breadwinner was the father. He worked as an engraver. Mom ran the household. In addition to Yakov, the Sverdlov family had five children, including two daughters.

Experts believe that the real name of the future revolutionary is not Sverdlov, but Gauchmann. Historian I.F. Plotnikov actually thinks that at birth Yakov was named Yeshua-Solomon Movshevich or Yankel Miraimovich.

In 1900, a tragedy occurs in the family - Yakov Sverdlov’s mother dies. But the widower did not grieve for long. Soon Mikhail Izrailevich married a second time and even converted to Orthodoxy for his wife’s sake. The revolutionary's stepmother was Maria Aleksandrovna Kormiltseva. She gave birth to two brothers for Yakov.

The house where Yakov Sverdlov lived as a child

About childhood and youth young man little is known. Sverdlov completed his studies at the gymnasium in his fourth year, then began studying pharmacy. In Nizhny Novgorod, already at a young age, Yakov became famous for his underground affairs. From numerous photographs left in history, one can judge that Sverdlov constantly wore glasses due to poor eyesight.

Before the revolution

Yakov Sverdlov, a year after the death of his mother, joined the ranks of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Already in 1903 he began to call himself a Bolshevik and revolutionary. Yakov traveled around Russia with propaganda speeches. He visited Yekaterinburg, Kostroma, Kazan. In the capital of the Urals he tried to become the head of the local committee of the RSDLP.

Sverdlov organized a group that included experienced underground workers, including workers’ university teacher N.N. Baturin, Maria Aveide, Mikhail Zavodskoy, head of the fighting squad F.F. Syromolotov, A.E. Minkin. Yakov Mikhailovich provoked protests by revolutionaries in Yekaterinburg. The underground worker communicated with E.S.’s vigilantes. Kadomtsev, and then arrived with them in St. Petersburg. The organization of fighting squads among the working class helped Sverdlov become popular.

In Yekaterinburg in 1905, Sverdlov founded the Council of Workers' Deputies. Later he moves to Perm. Yakov Mikhailovich often fell into the hands of law enforcement agencies and was even in prison, and then in exile. But he also used this time for good - he was engaged in self-education. In 1910, Sverdlov, while in exile in Narym, escaped and began corresponding with.

Revolutionary years

Immediately after returning from exile, Sverdlov went to Yekaterinburg to hold the Ural Regional Party Conference. But in parallel with this, Yakov Mikhailovich was preparing for the proletarian uprising in the Urals. This was a backup option in case the revolution in Petrograd did not go according to plan.

The February Revolution was successful, the Bolsheviks achieved the abdication of the emperor. The Tsar and his family were transported to Tobolsk, and then to Yekaterinburg. The decision to execute was made in July 1918. The initiator of the execution was the Council of People's Commissars. While the experts carried out the sentence, Sverdlov was in Moscow. But he recalled later that Yakov Mikhailovich played an important role in the decision to execute.

First meeting of V.I. Lenin and Sverdlov took place on April 24, 1917, during the 7th conference of the RSDLP. The leader gave various kinds of instructions to Yakov Mikhailovich. It was Lenin who contributed to the appointment of the Bolshevik as a member of the Central Committee and head of the secretariat of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. Sverdlov actively implemented the leader’s ideas. A lot of information was collected around him, which he could use to strengthen his position. Yakov Mikhailovich managed to organize and direct the masses in the right direction.

Leon Trotsky outlined his version of Sverdlov’s behavior in his book “Portraits of Revolutionaries.” He believed that the Bolshevik wanted the presidium to have political significance. But the Council of People's Commissars and the Politburo did not like this. Yakov Mikhailovich even had friction on this issue with members of organizations.

Sverdlov was the first to present the “Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People.” This document made it possible to unite the Council of Peasants' Deputies and the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. The revolutionary was appointed chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the RSKD. For several months, Yakov Mikhailovich was a member of the Bureau of the Revolutionary Defense Committee of Petrograd.

The Bolshevik dealt with the personnel who governed the country. A school was organized at the All-Russian Central Executive Committee especially for their education. Later it was renamed the Communist University. Ya.M. Sverdlov. In 1939 educational institution transformed into the Higher Party School.

The commission that created the Constitution of the RSFSR was also headed by Yakov Mikhailovich. The revolutionary wanted socialism to flourish in the country. All Soviet republics could be free nations. At the request of the residents of the regions, it was possible to create autonomous unions.

Sverdlov announced the policy of splitting the village into camps of the poor and kulaks at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which took place in May 1918. Probably with light hand Yakov Mikhailovich issued a directive that allowed the use of harsh punitive measures in the event of Cossack uprisings on the Don. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries wanted to arrest the Bolshevik, but were unsuccessful. The leaders of the opposing side themselves ended up behind bars.

The Soviet Republic became a single military camp after the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918. Sverdlov was behind this decision. During this period, Yakov Mikhailovich introduced the “Red Terror”, directed against the enemies of the revolutionary movement in the country.

Sverdlov took over the duties of chairman of the Council of People's Commissars while Lenin underwent treatment. The revolutionary signed papers on behalf of the leader of the proletariat and went to meetings. Yakov Mikhailovich became an experienced organizer of political events. The Bolshevik organized the 1st Congress of the Communist International, participated in the congresses of the Communist Parties of Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine and Latvia.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin spoke of his comrade-in-arms with respect. The manager considered Yakov Mikhailovich’s work valuable and important. According to the leader, Sverdlov’s absence will immediately become noticeable. After the death of the Bolshevik, Lenin called him a professional revolutionary who achieved victory for the working class in the revolution.

The thoughts of contemporaries about the career of the Bolshevik are presented in the documentary film “Yakov Sverdlov. Bloody mechanic of the Soviet regime." Experts have studied information about a safe found 16 years after the death of Yakov Mikhailovich, in which the gold of the royal family was stored. Documentary makers tried to identify the connection between Sverdlov and the assassination attempt on Lenin.

Personal life

IN at a young age Yakov Sverdlov tied the knot with E.F. Schmidt. When the revolutionary turned 20, his daughter E.Ya was born. Sverdlov. But the marriage broke up.

The Bolshevik soon married Claudia Timofeevna Novgorodtseva. In Soviet circles, the young woman introduced herself as Olga Novgorodtseva. The girl hid in own apartment"The Politburo Diamond Fund". Kept by Novgorodtseva cash were required, in the event of loss of power, for the development of the revolutionary movement and the comfortable existence of the Bolsheviks.

In 1911, a son, Andrei Yakovlevich, was born into the family. The young man was not friends with the NKVD, and twice fell into the hands of law enforcement officers. In the personal file of the revolutionary’s son, it is said that Andrei was put behind bars for anti-Soviet statements.

Despite his dislike for the Soviet system, Sverdlov’s son later joined the NKGB and the USSR MGB. As a colonel, Andrei again ended up in prison, but escaped trial due to death. Two years later, there were more children in the Sverdlov family - a daughter was born. Nothing is known about the life of Vera Sverdlova.

Death

Death overtook Yakov Sverdlov unexpectedly. The official biography of the Bolshevik says that on March 6, 1919, the revolutionary left Kharkov for Moscow. On the way, Yakov Mikhailovich fell ill with the Spanish flu. Dangerous disease progressed quickly. Only two days later Sverdlov reached the capital. The Bolshevik's health condition was assessed as serious. Yakov Mikhailovich lived until March 16.

In those years it was normal to make death masks, so it is not surprising that specialists followed this order. The funeral of a prominent political figure took place on March 18, 1919. Sverdlov’s grave is located next to the Kremlin wall, descendants bring flowers to the monument to the Bolshevik.

Doctor of Law Arkady Vaksberg believes that the exact cause of Yakov Mikhailovich’s death has not yet been established. In those years, there were rumors that the Bolshevik was allegedly beaten by workers during a trip to Oryol. The reason was the Jewish origin of the revolutionary. Citizens felt that this disgraced the revolution and incited anti-Semitic passions.

A similar idea was put forward by historian Yu.G. Felshtinsky. According to the scientist, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin also had a hand in the murder of Sverdlov. But this hypothesis has not yet found official confirmation.

Memory

1938 – “The Great Glow”
1940 – “Yakov Sverdlov”
1957 – “Baltic Glory”
1965 – “Conspiracy of Ambassadors”
1965 – “Emergency Assignment”
1968 – “The Sixth of July”
1975 – “Trust”
1982 – “Red Bells”
1998 – “The Romanovs. Crowned family"
2007 – “The Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno”

“The Black Devil,” as he was nicknamed, was born 130 years ago. There is no unity in the date of birth of Yakov Sverdlov; some call it the third, others - the fourth of June.

In 1994, a letter from Genrikh Yagoda to I.V. was discovered in the former archives of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee. To Stalin, July 27, 1935. In it, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs reported: Ya.M.'s personal safe was discovered in the warehouse of the Kremlin commandant. Sverdlov, which has not been opened for 16 years since his death, and the key to which was lost. There were gold coins of tsarist minting worth an astronomical amount, over seven hundred gold items with precious stones, many blank passport forms and completed passports in the name of Sverdlov himself and unknown persons, bonds of tsarist times.

Why and for what purpose the “fiery revolutionary” kept all this in his personal safe remains a mystery to this day.

Yakov Sverdlov is generally considered one of the most mysterious figures of the Russian revolution.
Firstly, his real name is not Sverdlov at all. His father, the tradesman Miraim-Movsha Izrailevich Gauchmann, with his wife Elizaveta Solomonovna, moved from the Pale of Settlement into the interior of Russia and settled in Nizhny Novgorod, where he signed up as an artisan under the name Movsha Sverdlin, later turning into Sverdlova. Not everything is clear with the name. According to historian I.F. Plotnikov, “according to some sources, Sverdlov was called Yeshua-Solomon Movshevich from birth, and according to others, Yankel Miraimovich.” And when he became a revolutionary, they called him either “Comrade Andrei”, then “Max”, then “Mikhail Permyakov”, then “Smirnov”...

Like many other Bolsheviks, young Yasha did not abuse his studies at all. He graduated from only four classes of the gymnasium, then began to study pharmacy. But he soon retrained as a professional revolutionary - he became a well-known underground worker in Nizhny Novgorod. Then everything was the same as with his other colleagues: agitation, proclamations, expropriations, prisons, exile, escapes...

Unlike the eloquent Leon Trotsky, Sverdlov did not make pretentious speeches, did not tour the fronts in luxurious royal carriages, did not give interviews to the foreign press, and did not appear on the pages of newspapers. He remained, as it were, in the shadows all the time.
His intelligent appearance with his constant pince-nez and wedge beard suggested more of a university professor than the leader of the revolutionary party. Anatoly Lunacharsky wrote about Sverdlov like this: “Of course, there was a lot of internal fire in him, but outwardly he was an absolutely icy man. When he was not on the podium, he always spoke in a low voice, walked quietly, and all his gestures were slow.” Sverdlov had a phenomenal memory, he was called “Lenin’s notebook”, he remembered everything and everyone.

At the suggestion of Lenin, Sverdlov, as the chief personnel officer, was appointed chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. He carried out the main work on the creation of Soviet authorities in the center and locally. “Sometimes it seemed that like V.I. Lenin came to Russia after the victory of the February Revolution with ready-made political blueprints for the entire revolution, so Ya.M. Sverdlov came from distant exile with ready-made organizational drawings of the entire work of the party and with a ready-made plan for the distribution of the main groups of workers by branches of work,” Grigory Zinoviev later recalled.

It was Sverdlov who opened the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly on January 5, 1918, announcing the “Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People,” in which Russia was proclaimed a republic. He was also the chairman of the commission for the development of the Constitution of the RSFSR, which declared the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In this regard, the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918 looks very mysterious. Researcher V.E. Shambarov directly points to Sverdlov’s attempt to kill Lenin in order to completely seize power.
“If you look at who benefited from eliminating Lenin at that moment, Sverdlov won the most,” he writes. - After the assassination attempt, Sverdlov was the first to arrive in the Kremlin. Sverdlov’s wife reports that that same evening he occupied Lenin’s office, taking over the Council of People’s Commissars, the Central Committee, and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.” Roy Medvedev writes the same thing: “When Lenin was seriously wounded by the Socialist-Revolutionary Kaplan, Sverdlov became the de facto head of the Soviet state for several weeks.”

It was Sverdlov who carried out a hasty investigation into the case of Fani Kaplan; it was on his orders that Kaplan was hastily shot and burned in a metal barrel on the territory of the Kremlin. Although she was a friend of Yakov Sverdlov’s sister.

In May 1918, Sverdlov provoked the start of a fratricidal war in the village. In his report “On the tasks of the Soviets in the countryside,” he says: “Only if we can split the village into two irreconcilably hostile camps, if we can kindle there the same civil war that was going on not so long ago in the cities, if we It will be possible to restore the rural poor against the rural bourgeoisie, only then will we be able to say that we are doing for the countryside what we were able to do for the cities.” And in July 1918 he said: “I want to dwell on the question of the death penalty. I must point out that the Revolutionary Tribunal, with its first decision on the death penalty, showed, in my deep conviction, that it correctly took into account the given moment that we are experiencing at this time.”

The next day we found out. The imperial family was shot without the knowledge of the Cheka! Independently, on the instructions of Sverdlov and one of the highest bosses in the Central Committee of the Communist Party!
According to the general opinion in the Cheka, the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Kremlin, the decision to kill was made and implemented by Sverdlov’s authorities. He carried out the preparations in secret from his comrades, and only after the execution confronted them with a fait accompli.”

The “Black Devil” died unexpectedly, at the age of only 34, although, as they said, he had good health. According to the official version, he allegedly fell ill with the Spanish flu. And so, on March 16, 1919, Sverdlov died and was buried with pomp at the Kremlin wall. “We lowered into the grave the proletarian leader who did most to organize the working class, for its victory,” Lenin said mournfully at the funeral.

Doctor of Law Arkady Vaksberg wrote: “The exact cause of his death is unknown. At the same time, an apparently not unfounded rumor spread that in the city of Oryol he had been fatally beaten by workers, but this fact was allegedly hidden so as “not to disgrace the revolution” and “not to inflame even more anti-Semitic passions.”

The French communist writer Louis Aragon wrote: “Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov, Lenin’s most faithful comrade, who became the first chairman of the Central Executive Committee, that is, the first head of the new Soviet state, and who, unfortunately for the whole world, was to die of the Spanish flu at thirty-four of the year. I said “to the misfortune of the whole world,” because, of course, if he had survived, Sverdlov, and not Stalin, would have succeeded Lenin.” Stalin probably understood this no worse than Aragon.

...They say that when a person dies, all his vices or virtues are imprinted on his face. As usual, the death mask was removed from the “fiery revolutionary”. Seeing her, psychiatrist Evgeny Chernosvitov exclaimed: “Sverdlov’s mask is the embodiment of evil, it’s unpleasant to look at!”

Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov(May 22 (June 3), 1885 or May 23 (June 4), 1885, Nizhny Novgorod - March 16, 1919, Moscow) - Russian political and statesman, revolutionary, Bolshevik. Member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b), RCP(b). Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (formal head of the RSFSR) in November 1917 - March 1919. Party pseudonyms: Comrade Andrei, Max, Mikhail Permyakov, Smirnov, etc. As chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, he was one of the organizers of the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, decossackization.

Many modern historians recognize as an established fact the sanctioning of the execution of Nicholas II by the Bolshevik leadership in the person of Lenin and Sverdlov (not all modern historians - specialists on this topic agree with this opinion), while the question of the existence of Moscow sanctions for the murder of the relatives of Nicholas II remains controversial in modern historiography : some historians recognize the existence of sanctions from the central government also for their execution, some do not.

Born into a Jewish family. According to the historian I.F. Plotnikov, “according to some sources, Sverdlov was called Yeshua-Solomon Movshevich from birth, and according to others, Yankel Miraimovich.” Father - Mikhail Izrailevich Sverdlov (died in 1921) - was an engraver; mother - Elizaveta Solomonovna (died in 1900) - a housewife. There were six children in the family: two daughters (Sophia and Sarah) and four sons (Zinovy, Yakov, Benjamin and Lev). After the death of his wife (1900), Mikhail Izrailevich Sverdlov converted to Orthodoxy and married for a second marriage to Maria Alexandrovna Kormiltseva; In this marriage, two more sons were born - Herman and Alexander.

Elder brother - Peshkov, Zinovy Alekseevich (1884-1966), before baptism - Yeshua-Solomon (Zolomon) Sverdlov. Godson of M. Gorky, who actually adopted him. He emigrated to France and served in the Foreign Legion. Upon retirement, he received the rank of corps general. Knight of the Legion of Honor. He was on friendly terms with Charles de Gaulle.
Brother - Sverdlov, Veniamin Mikhailovich (1887-1938). In 1938, he was shot by the All-Russian Military Commission as a “Trotskyist.”
Brother - Sverdlov, Lev Mikhailovich (1893-1914).
Sisters - Sophia (1882-1951) and Sarah (1890-1964).
Brothers from his father's second marriage - German and Alexander.
First wife - E.F. Schmidt; daughter from this marriage - E. Ya. Sverdlova (born 1905).
The second wife is Sverdlova (nee Novgorodtseva) Claudia Timofeevna (1876-1960). Pseudonym - Olga Novgorodtseva. The keeper of the “diamond fund of the Politburo” (it was hidden in her apartment. “Its purpose was to provide members of the Politburo with the means to live and continue revolutionary activities in the event of loss of power”). Author of a book of memoirs about Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov.

Andrei Yakovlevich Sverdlov (1911-1969) - son of the Sverdlovs Yakov Mikhailovich and Klavdia Timofeevna. Twice - in 1935 and 1937 - he was arrested by the NKVD for “anti-Soviet” statements among young people, which did not prevent him from subsequently serving in the central apparatus of the NKGB and the USSR MGB. In October 1951, Colonel A. Ya. Sverdlov was arrested for the third time, but did not go to trial due to the death of Stalin.

Daughter of the Sverdlovs Yakov Mikhailovich and Claudia Timofeevna - Vera (born 1913).

Ida Averbakh is the niece of Yakov Sverdlov. She was married to G. Yagoda.

Leopold Averbakh is the nephew of Ya. Sverdlov.

A frequent guest of the Sverdlov family was Maxim Gorky, who lived in Nizhny Novgorod in those years. One of Yakov’s childhood friends is Volodya Lubotsky (V. M. Zagorsky).

Youth

He graduated from four classes of the gymnasium, then studied pharmacy. Already in his youth he was a famous underground fighter in Nizhny Novgorod.

1901-1917

Since 1901, in the ranks of the RSDLP, after the split at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, he became a Bolshevik and a professional revolutionary, campaigned in Kostroma, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, and became the leader of the Yekaterinburg and Ural committees of the RSDLP.

In September 1905 he was sent to the Urals as a representative agent of the Central Committee.

Organized an activist group of experienced underground workers. Among them were N. N. Baturin (teacher at the workers’ university), N. E. Vilonov (Mikhail Zavodskoy), S. A. Cherepanov, Maria Aveide, Kamagantsev (Kuzma), F. F. Syromolotov (chief of the fighting squad), A E. Minkin (Mark) and a number of others.

In 1905, he organized revolutionary demonstrations of the masses in Yekaterinburg and studied the practice of combat from the combatants of E. S. Kadomtsev, who organized the Bolshevik fighting squads in the Urals, brought Kadomtsev’s combatants to revolutionary St. Petersburg, where they organized fighting squads of workers, which served to expand Sverdlov’s fame as a practical leader of the masses

In October 1905, he created and headed the Yekaterinburg Council of Workers' Deputies.
Since 1906, Sverdlov has been in Perm, where the largest Motovilikha cannon factory in the Urals was located.

He was repeatedly arrested and sentenced to imprisonment and exile; in prison he engaged in self-education.

From June 10, 1906 to September 1909, Sverdlov was imprisoned in the Urals - in the Perm correctional prison department and in the Nizhneturinsky Nikolaev correctional prison department. His associates and wife were also arrested. On December 19, 1909, Sverdlov was arrested again in Moscow. On March 31, 1910, he was exiled to the Narym region for 3 years, from where he fled without staying even four months.

From the beginning of 1912, on his initiative, a deeply secret organization was created in Narym exile, specifically engaged in arranging escapes for exiled Bolsheviks. Boris Kraevsky was appointed chairman of the Bureau of Escapes.

In February 1913, together with Stalin, he was extradited by secret police agent Malinovsky and exiled to Turukhansk. They served exile in the north of the Yenisei province (Kureika settlement) in the same house for some time. Later Sverdlov wrote: “...we know each other too well. What’s saddest of all is that in conditions of exile, prison, a person reveals himself to you, reveals himself in all his little details... My friend and I are now in different apartments, and we rarely see each other.” The misunderstanding between the two future leaders of the revolution was, apparently, not based on political grounds. Here is how Stalin describes (as presented by N. S. Khrushchev) some details of their life together with Sverdlov in Turukhansk exile:

“We cooked our own lunch. Actually, there was nothing to do there, because we did not work, but lived on the funds that the treasury gave us: three rubles a month. The party also helped us. We mainly made a living by catching nelma. This did not require much specialization. We also went hunting. I had a dog, I named it “Yashka”. Of course, this was unpleasant for Sverdlov: he is Yashka and the dog Yashka. So, Sverdlov used to wash spoons and plates after dinner, but I never did this. I’ll eat, put the plates on the floor, the dog will lick everything, and everything will be clean. And he was a neat guy.”

On October 1, 1913, at a meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, the issue of organizing the escape from exile of Sverdlov and Stalin was discussed, but it was not carried out.

Under the Provisional Government

After returning from exile in March 1917, after the February Revolution, Sverdlov was sent by the Central Committee to Yekaterinburg to organize the work of the Ural Regional Party Conference, preparing a proletarian uprising in the Urals - in case it did not work out in Petrograd.

At the 7th (April) conference of the RSDLP (April 24, 1917), Sverdlov personally met Lenin for the first time, and began to carry out various current affairs and assignments for him. Under the influence of Lenin, Sverdlov was elected a member of the Central Committee and headed the then organized Secretariat of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (main executive agency Central Committee, which implements the decisions of party leaders).

Having become the main organizer of work on the promotion and placement of personnel in key positions, Sverdlov established connections between them and organized interaction between party structures. Many of the workers he nominated to prominent positions, whom he personally knew, later became party leaders. Sverdlov personally supervised affairs in factory and plant committees, sending them experienced leaders and instructors, the same was done for regional-level committees. During the mass protests on July 3-4, organized by the Bolsheviks Blaichman, Roshal and Raskolnikov (despite Lenin’s warnings not to give in to provocations), Sverdlov was the main speaker from the Bolshevik Central Committee and received the nickname “black devil of the Bolsheviks” from his political opponents (after the color of his leather jacket , which he did not part with, then it became a Bolshevik fashion). When the Bolsheviks were declared counter-revolutionaries and German spies, Sverdlov personally came to Lenin and organized his transition to an underground position, hiding him near the Razliv station near Sestroretsk, while he himself remained in Petrograd to organize the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. Subsequently, he maintained contact between the Central Committee and Lenin, in every possible way prevented his ill-considered attempts to return to legal activities and supplied him with general information about the progress of affairs in Petrograd. Later, Sverdlov organized Lenin’s movement even further - to Finland, from where he wrote to the Foreign Bureau of the Central Committee: “I am writing this letter personally on my own behalf, because I have no opportunity to either ask the Central Committee or even communicate with it...”

While Lenin was writing his fundamental work “State and Revolution” in a hut near Razliv, which determined the principles of the structure of the proletarian state, Sverdlov developed vigorous activity to implement his ideas. Having prepared and held the 6th Congress of the RSDLP, he strengthened his position as a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP and head of the Secretariat (Organizing Bureau) of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. Being at the center of events, he concentrated the information of the army of agitators sent to the localities, and brought organization and purposefulness to the movement of the masses.

At the historic meeting of the Central Committee on October 10, 1917, which decided on an armed seizure of power, Sverdlov was the chairman and was appointed a member of the Military Revolutionary Center, created to lead the uprising. In this capacity, he began recruiting members of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee, whose former members were mainly sent to lead the uprising in the provinces. To strengthen the Military Revolutionary Committee, I. Flerovsky, F. Goloshchekin, P. Bykov, V. Galkin and other Bolsheviks known to him were sent to it, in addition, he selected and sent 51 Military Revolutionary Committee commissars to parts of the Petrograd garrison.

Chairman of the All-Russian Central Election Commission

On November 8, at the suggestion of Lenin, Sverdlov, as the chief personnel officer, was appointed chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. Acting in this capacity, Sverdlov carried out the main work on creating bodies of Soviet power “in the center and locally.”

Sometimes it seemed that just as V. I. Lenin came to Russia after the victory of the February Revolution with ready-made political blueprints for the entire revolution, so Ya. M. Sverdlov appeared from distant exile with ready-made organizational blueprints for the entire work of the party and with a ready-made plan for the distribution of the main groups of workers branches of work.
Grigory Zinoviev

Leon Trotsky, in his book “Portraits of Revolutionaries,” argued that “Sverdlov tried to give the presidium (CEC) political significance, and on this basis he even had friction with the Council of People’s Commissars, and partly with the Politburo.”

On behalf of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, he opened the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly on January 5, 1918, announcing the “Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People,” according to which Russia was declared a republic of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. On January 13, Sverdlov achieved the unification of the Soviets of Peasants' Deputies with the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, becoming chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the RSKD. In February and March 1918 he was a member of the Bureau of the Revolutionary Defense Committee of Petrograd.

Sverdlov paid great attention to the formation of proletarian personnel to govern the country, organizing for them a school of instructors and agitators at the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (in 1919 it was transformed into the Communist University named after Ya. M. Sverdlov, which in 1939 was transformed into the Higher Party School under the Central Committee).

Sverdlov was the chairman of the commission for the development of the Constitution of the RSFSR. The Constitution he prepared declared in Russia the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to establish socialism in the state in the form of a Republic of Soviets on the basis of a free union of free nations as a federation of Soviet national republics (that is, the power of the Soviets on the principles of national autonomies), in which

Councils of regions, distinguished by their special way of life and national composition, can unite into autonomous regional unions, at the head of which, as at the head of any regional associations that can be formed in general, are regional congresses of Soviets and their executive bodies...

Moreover, this Constitution especially emphasized that

The Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic grants the right of asylum to all foreigners persecuted for political and religious crimes.

At a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on May 20, 1918, Sverdlov for the first time proclaimed a policy of splitting the village into two warring camps of the poor and the kulaks. Sverdlov is credited with the authorship of the directive of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) dated January 24, 1919, which ordered the implementation of harsh punitive measures in the suppression of Cossack uprisings against Soviet power on the Don. During the rebellion of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in the summer of 1918, the arrest of Sverdlov was one of the main goals of the rebels, in response to which Sverdlov and Lenin ordered the arrest of the leadership of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who were in the Bolshoi Theater at a meeting of the V Congress of Soviets.

After the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918, Sverdlov signed the appeal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on September 2 “on the transformation of the Soviet republic into a single military camp,” supplemented on September 5 by the “Resolution on Red Terror” issued by the Council of People’s Commissars, which declared mass red terror against all enemies of the Revolution.

While Lenin was being treated, Sverdlov categorically refused to elect a temporary acting chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and personally performed his functions, working in Lenin's office and signing documents for him, and holding meetings of the Council of People's Commissars.

In addition, Sverdlov carried out a lot of international work: he prepared the 1st Congress of the Communist International, participated in the organization of congresses of the Communist Parties of Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.

Death

According to the official version, he fell ill with the Spanish flu while returning to Moscow from Kharkov (he left Kharkov on March 6, 1919). Returned to Moscow on March 8. It was reported that he was “seriously ill” on March 9. Died on March 16, 1919. On March 18, 1919 he was buried near the Kremlin wall.

Doctor of Legal Sciences Arkady Vaksberg, citing a source in RGASPI, wrote: “The exact cause of his death is unknown. At the same time, a rumor, apparently not without foundation, spread that in the city of Orel he was fatally beaten by workers because of his Jewish origin, but this fact was allegedly hidden so as not to “disgrace the revolution” and not to inflame even more anti-Semitic passions.” The historian Yu. G. Felshtinsky also mentioned similar rumors, even putting forward the hypothesis that Sverdlov could have been poisoned on Lenin’s orders.

Participation in the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly

Main article: All-Russian Constituent Assembly

A peaceful demonstration in support of the Constituent Assembly in Petrograd on January 5, 1918 ended up being shot by the Red Guard. The shooting took place at the corner of Nevsky and Liteiny prospects and in the area of Kirochnaya Street. The main column of up to 60 thousand people was dispersed, but other columns of demonstrators reached the Tauride Palace and were dispersed only after additional troops arrived. The dispersal of the demonstration was led by a special headquarters headed by V. I. Lenin, Ya. M. Sverdlov, N. I. Podvoisky, M. S. Uritsky, V. D. Bonch-Bruevich. According to various estimates, the death toll ranged from 7 to 100 people. The demonstrators mainly consisted of representatives of the intelligentsia, office workers and university students. At the same time, a significant number of workers took part in the demonstration. The demonstration was accompanied by Socialist Revolutionary warriors, who did not offer serious resistance to the Red Guards. According to the testimony of the former Socialist-Revolutionary V.K. Dzerul, “all the demonstrators, including the PC, walked without weapons, and there was even an order from the PC in the districts so that no one would take weapons with them.”

Participation in organizing the execution of the royal family

Main article: Execution of the royal family

In 1917, after the February Revolution, abdication and house arrest, the former Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his family, by decision of the Provisional Government, were exiled to Tobolsk, and subsequently transferred by the Bolsheviks to Yekaterinburg.

At the beginning of July 1918, the Ural military commissar Filipp Goloshchekin went to Moscow to resolve the issue of the future fate of the royal family. The execution of the entire family was not sanctioned by the Council of People's Commissars, since, according to one version, Moscow was notified of this later. In accordance with this decision, the Ural Council of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies, at its meeting on July 12, adopted a resolution on the execution. On July 16-17, 1918, the royal family was executed. Sverdlov was in Moscow at that time. However, L. D. Trotsky in his memoirs directly points to the participation of Ya. M. Sverdlov in the execution of the royal family. However, the reliability of L. D. Trotsky’s statements is disputed by a number of researchers.

Organization of the fight against the Cossacks

Main article: Decoration

On January 24, 1919, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), after discussing the 6th item on the agenda - “Circular Letter of the Central Committee on the attitude towards the Cossacks”, adopted a secret directive “To all responsible comrades working in the Cossack regions” with the resolution: “Accept the text of the circular letter. Invite the Commissariat of Agriculture to develop practical measures for the resettlement of the poor on a large scale to Cossack lands.". This directive, signed on January 29 by the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Ya. Sverdlov, marked the beginning of decossackization. According to the research of historians, the ideologist and compiler of this directive is I.V. Stalin (historian G. Magner), Y.M. Sverdlov (opinion of the historian R.A. Medvedev), or S.I. Syrtsov - Chairman of the Donburo (as stated by Dr. historical sciences L.I. Futoryansky, studying the problems of the Cossacks). According to other sources, this directive was also adopted at the insistence of L. D. Trotsky. In March 1919, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) revised the provisions of the directive, demanding a differentiated approach to various layers of the Cossacks.

Addresses in Petrograd

Lenin about Sverdlov

“Comrades, the first word at our congress,” said Lenin, opening the Eighth Party Congress, “should be dedicated to Comrade. To Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov... if for the entire party as a whole and for the entire Soviet Republic, Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov was the main organizer... then for the party congress he was much more valuable and closer... Here his absence will affect the entire course of our work, and the congress will feel his absence especially sharp."

Speech dedicated to the memory of Sverdlov: “In this era, at the very beginning of the 20th century, before us was Comrade. Sverdlov, as the most distinguished type of professional revolutionary...".

“We put into the grave,” Vladimir Ilyich said mournfully at the Kremlin wall on March 18, “the proletarian leader who did the most for the organization of the working class, for its victory.”

“Memory of Comrade. Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov... - said Lenin, - will serve not only as an eternal symbol of the revolutionary’s devotion to his cause, will serve not only as an example of a combination of practical sobriety and practical skill, complete connection with the masses, with the ability to guide them, - but will also serve as a guarantee of that more and more broad masses of proletarians, guided by these examples, will go forward and forward towards the complete victory of the world communist revolution.”

Sverdlov's articles

In Turukhansk (1913-1917) Sverdlov wrote works about the situation of exiles: “Tsarist exile for ten years (1906-1916)” and “Turukhansky revolt.” He wrote many essays, letters, in which his thoughts on philosophical and social problems, on issues of literature, culture, art. He did not have time to develop these thoughts into finished works. Based on his series of lectures on the history of the International and the tasks of the future of the International III, he prepared “Essays on the History of the International Labor Movement” for publication. Work on the book was interrupted by the February Revolution, and it was never possible to continue it.

He also wrote articles: “Essays on the Turukhansk region” (1915), “Mass exile (1906-1916)”, “Split in German Social Democracy”, “The Collapse of Capitalism”, “Essays on the History of the International Labor Movement”, variants articles “War and Siberia” (1916), “Events of July 3–6 in Petrograd”, “Letter to comrades about the raid on the editorial office of Pravda” (1917), “ Soviet authority in the village" (n/d), proclamation on behalf of the St. Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP (b) about the July events of 1917, appeal "To all workers and peasants, all working people, all councils, everyone, everyone, everyone!" (on the convening of the V Congress of Soviets) (1918).

Yakov Sverdlov about Stalin (March 12, 1914, from a letter to Paris to an unknown woman. State Archives of the Krasnoyarsk Territory):

...My friend [Stalin] and I disagree on many things.
He is a very lively person and, despite his forty years, has retained the ability to react vividly to a wide variety of phenomena. In many cases, he has new questions where there are no longer any for me. In this sense he is fresher than me. Don't think that I put him above myself. No, I’m bigger, he himself realizes that.
There is little debate about theoretical issues. And there is no particular interest in arguing with him, because I have a significant advantage... We argued, played a game of chess, I gave him checkmate, then parted ways because it was too late. And in the morning we will meet again, and so on every day: there are only two of us on Kureyka...

Image of Sverdlov

Leon Trotsky in his article “In Memory of Sverdlov” wrote:

Sverdlov was short, very thin, lean, dark-haired, with sharp features of a thin face. His strong, perhaps even powerful, voice might seem inconsistent with his physical makeup. To an even greater extent, this could be said about his character. But this could have been the impression only at first. And then the physical appearance merged with the spiritual, and this short, thin figure, with a calm, unyielding will and a strong, but not flexible voice, appeared as a complete image.

It’s okay,” Vladimir Ilyich sometimes said in some difficult case, “Sverdlov will tell them this in a Sverdlovsk bass voice, and the matter will be settled...

There was loving irony in these words.

In the first post-October period, the enemies called the communists, as is known, “leather people,” based on their clothes. I think that Sverdlov’s example played a big role in the introduction of the leather “uniform”. He himself, in any case, walked around in leather from head to toe, i.e. from boots to leather caps. From him, as from the central organizational figure, this clothing, which somehow corresponded to the character of the time, spread widely. Comrades who knew Sverdlov in the underground remember him differently. But in my memory the figure of Sverdlov remained dressed in black leather armor - under the blows of the first years of the civil war.

He was a born organizer and planner. Each political issue appeared before him primarily in its organizational specificity, as a question of the relationships between individuals and groups within the party organization and the relationship between the organization as a whole and the masses. He immediately and almost automatically substituted numerical values into algebraic formulas. In this way he provided the most important test of political formulas, since it was a question of revolutionary action.
Trotsky L. Around October (04/06/1924)

Memory of Sverdlov

IN Soviet time Sverdlov's name was immortalized in the names of geographical objects and enterprises. Almost every city in the country had streets named after him, some of which have now been renamed.

Ekaterinburg

From November 14, 1924 to September 6, 1991, the Ural regional center, the city of Yekaterinburg, was called Sverdlovsk. In 1991, the city was returned to its historical name - Ekaterinburg, but retained its name Sverdlovsk region. The central railway station of Yekaterinburg was called Sverdlovsk-Pasazhirsky until March 30, 2010, when it was renamed Yekaterinburg-Pasazhirsky. The monument to Ya. Sverdlov appeared in the city in 1927; it was installed in the city center, on Lenin Avenue between the buildings of the Ural state university and the Opera and Ballet Theater. In addition, the city has Sverdlova Street. The State Memorial Museum of Ya. M. Sverdlov was opened in the city.

Leningrad region

In the Vsevolozhsk region there is a village named after Sverdlov.

Novosibirsk

One of the central squares of Novosibirsk is named after Sverdlov.

Kharkiv

From March 1919 to 1996 in Kharkov, one of the main streets, Ekaterinoslavskaya, was named after Sverdlov. In 1996, by decision of the Kharkov City Council, Sverdlova Street was renamed Poltavsky Shlyakh Street. The Kharkov metro station on this street was also called Sverdlova Street, after the renaming of the street it began to be called Cold Mountain.

Sverdlovsk (Ukraine)

Sverdlovsk was the name given to a city formed in 1938 in the Voroshilovgrad region of Ukraine.

Moscow

In memory of Sverdlov in the capital Soviet Union The square near the Bolshoi Theater was named. A monument to Ya. M. Sverdlov was also erected here. In 1990, the square and the metro station that appeared on it in 1938 were renamed Teatralnaya. In 1991, after the demolition of the monument to Dzerzhinsky, the monument to Sverdlov was removed and moved to the Crimean embankment, as well as the bust of Sverdlov in the underground passage of the metro.

Moscow region

In the Shchelkovsky district of the Moscow Region there is the village of Sverdlovsky

Nizhny Novgorod

The main street of the city, Bolshaya Pokrovskaya - on which Yakov Mikhailovich was born in house No. 6 - bore the name of Sverdlov until the early 1990s.
In the park on the corner of Sverdlova (now Bolshaya Pokrovskaya) and Oktyabrskaya streets, near the Sverdlov Palace of Culture ( former building Noble Deputy Assembly), on November 5, 1957, a monument to Ya. M. Sverdlov was unveiled.
The Sverdlov Garden (formerly the Bishop's Garden) on Piskunov Street (formerly Malaya Pecherskaya).

Irkutsk

Sverdlovsk district of Irkutsk
Street in Irkutsk.

Oryol Region

Sverdlovsk district (Oryol region)

Minsk

Street in Minsk.

Ulan-Ude

Street in Ulan-Ude.

Petrozavodsk

Street in Petrozavodsk.

Interesting Facts

In 1994, in the former archives of the Politburo, a letter from Genrikh Yagoda to Stalin dated July 27, 1935 was discovered, in which Yagoda reported that Sverdlov’s personal safe had been discovered in the warehouse of the Kremlin commandant, which had not been opened in the 16 years that had passed since his death. There were gold coins of tsarist minting worth an astronomical amount (108,525 rubles), over seven hundred gold items with precious stones, many blank passports and completed passports in the name of Sverdlov himself and unknown persons, bonds of tsarist times, etc.

Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov - quotes

It is possible to cultivate sensitivity in a person, to awaken his energy, to a certain extent. But only under the condition of long-term exposure and education. Moreover, only personal influence can have great importance. The most important thing is to learn to love life as it is, with all the good and bad hidden in it.

One person never satisfies and cannot satisfy entirely, completely, without exception, the needs of another.

People are united not only by pleasures, but also by difficult experiences. Often the latter are even greater than the former. I consider the desire for the strength of personal relationships to be normal. I allow physical intimacy only as the completion of another kind of intimacy, not necessarily ideological, but certainly “spiritual,” so to speak.

Youth gives birth to many beautiful images, gives rise to strong impulses, etc. But youth is not measured in years alone. A person can be young at fifty years old and old at thirty.

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