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There are three problems with the October Revolution: its causes, the role of German money, and the scale and motives of the Red and White Terror. Terror "Red" and "White"

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Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation

Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education

AMUR STATE UNIVERSITY

(FSBEI HPE "AmSU")

Discipline: History

on the topic: Red and white terror

Blagoveshchensk 2012

Introduction

1. Civil war: causes and content

2. Red Terror during the Civil War

3. White terror during the Civil War

4. Comparative characteristics of the policies of White and Red terror

Conclusion

List of sources used

INTRODUCTION

The theme of this work, “Red and White Terror,” will always be relevant, as it contributes to an objective knowledge of the tragic history of Russia for the first time after the fateful revolutions for the country at the beginning of the twentieth century. This topic, one way or another, was considered in many studies of various types, starting from the first years of Soviet power, but these works were far from objective, and only in the 90s did works begin to appear in print that examined the events of the Civil War more objectively.

Violence and terror have always been indispensable companions of the centuries-old history of mankind. But in terms of the number of victims and the legalization of violence, the 20th century has no analogues. This century “owes” this, first of all, to the totalitarian regimes in Russia and Germany, the communist and national socialist governments. Russia has traditionally been one of the countries where the cost of human life was scanty and humanitarian rights were not respected.

Extremely radical socialists -- Bolsheviks Having seized power, proclaiming their immediate task to be the accomplishment of a world revolution in the shortest possible time and the creation of a kingdom of labor, they destroyed the semblance of a rule of law state, establishing revolutionary lawlessness. Never before in history have utopian ideas been introduced into the consciousness of people so cruelly, cynically and bloodily. The policy of violence and terror pursued in Russia Bolsheviks, changed the consciousness of the population.

1. CIVIL WAR: CAUSES AND CONTENT

The essence of civil wars, as a rule, is the struggle for power of political parties, leaders, clans, which carry people along with populist promises of a “better” arrangement for their lives, which most often turns into a national tragedy and irreparable losses. These wars arise in countries experiencing economic and political crises. In “prosperous” countries, this is unthinkable. Russia in the 20th century was a “dysfunctional” country; it was plagued by wars, revolutionary upheavals and repressions as a continuation of a permanent civil war. And most importantly - the economic turmoil of the population, the lack of provision and dissatisfaction of the masses of people with their financial and social situation. Drive a man into a corner and he will begin to storm the sky or lie down on the tracks. The feeling of the futility of existence is one of the components of rebellion against the powers that be. In the conditions of malnutrition and unemployment in 1917, a senseless war and government leapfrog, the calls of the Bolsheviks to take away the “loot” from the rich and distribute it to the disadvantaged were more successful than the promises of the Provisional Government to gradually, “legally”, carry out reforms to relieve social tension. The German Chancellor Bismarck was right when more than a hundred years ago he argued that the strength of revolutionaries does not lie in the ideas of their leaders, but in the promise to satisfy at least a small dose of moderate demands that were not promptly implemented by the existing government.

It is known that from 1918 to 1953, over thirty-five years of the 20th century, Russia lost at least a third of its population from wars, famine, disease and repression. During the Civil War, in four years (1918-1922) - thirteen million. Of these, approximately two million people left the country; the losses of the Reds and Whites on the battlefields were approximately the same. 1.5 million Russians became victims of terror, about 300 thousand of them were Jews killed during pogroms carried out by both whites and reds. The remaining seven and a half million civilians died from disease and starvation.

In 1918, state terror arose in Russia in the form of extrajudicial executions and concentration camps. Both the Reds and the Whites succeeded in this. Then violence became widespread, and the individual began to be reduced to the level of material necessary for social experimentation. Never in the history of Russia have such a huge number of people and in such a short period of time experienced such violations of elementary freedoms, becoming victims of tyranny and lawlessness. The intoxication of freedom and permissiveness of some turned into bloody sobering for others. Of course, in the 1930s, when the Reds ruled the country, the extermination of millions of Russians continued under “peaceful conditions,” that is, essentially nothing changed.

Having come to power, the Bolshevik leadership took responsibility for the fate of the people living in the country. The government cannot prevent natural disasters, but it is obliged to help the population overcome them.

The Bolsheviks won the civil war, but their opponents were defeated. But this did not bring either civil peace or stability in society. You can gain power with bayonets, but sitting on them is uncomfortable. With the help of violence, fear, social demagoguery, and organization, the Bolsheviks managed to rule for more than seven decades and create a powerful militarized empire with an impoverished population. They allowed themselves everything: to destroy dissidents, to create a huge Gulag, where among those imprisoned or executed were those who represented the winning party and their opponents, where 90% of the prisoners were workers and peasants. They took racial and anti-Semitic positions, deporting, exterminating and humiliating entire peoples. Such a regime could not last forever. And it collapsed overnight with the complete indifference of the people, just like the autocracy once did. Few people declared their desire to defend the Romanov empire; no one came out to defend the district party committees given the recent presence of millions of communists. The people remained silent during the death of the Tsarist and Bolshevik empires. The regimes one by one became obsolete. Of course, there were big differences between the empires, the main one of which was that in the Bolshevik Empire, private property, the rights and traditions of individuals and peoples were destroyed, people were turned into government employees, and fell into serfdom under a totalitarian form of government.

But even after the collapse of the last empire of the 20th century, flashes of civil war in Russia continue, although its beginning did not foretell such a dramatic outcome or such a temporary duration. After all, it all started quite simply: on January 6, 1918, the Bolsheviks dispersed the Constituent Assembly, which was first democratically elected in the country, and shot a demonstration of its defenders. It was after this that the explosion occurred.

2. RED TERROR DURING THE CIVIL WAR

A powerful ideological basis - the Marxist doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat - was a prerequisite for the future terror. The content of the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Russian version was modified in close connection with the political situation and the needs of the leading party. In fact, it was used to develop and justify this strategy and tactics, which were carried out by Lenin’s government, based on specific historical conditions.

The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was inextricably linked by its authors with revolutionary violence. In K. Marx’s work “The Civil War in France,” F. Engels defined the state as “a machine for the suppression of one class by another.” Without absolutizing violence as a form of political struggle, he nevertheless wrote: “...Violence is the instrument through which a social movement makes its way and breaks petrified, dead political forms. The use of violence by the proletariat was justified in a more comprehensive manner by K. Marx in the Synopsis of M. Bakunin’s book “Statehood and Anarchy”: “As long as other classes exist, especially the capitalist class, as long as the proletariat fights against it,” Marx wrote, “... it must use measures of violence, therefore government measures; if it itself still remains a class and the economic conditions on which the class struggle and the existence of classes are based have not yet disappeared, they must be forcibly eliminated or transformed, and the process of their transformation must be forcibly accelerated.

Here, in a concentrated, condensed form, the most general program for the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat is outlined, which then became a direct guide to action for the Leninist apparatus. This program apparently included: the elimination or transformation of other classes and the economic conditions supporting their existence; violence as a means of this elimination and transformation; government measures as a form of violence. The Bolsheviks could only consistently implement this plan, pursuing the idea that as the political situation became more complicated, the class struggle did not subside over time, but only intensified.

V.I. Lenin, quoting and developing the provisions of K. Marx and F. Engels, dwelt in detail on numerous issues related to the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The dictatorship of a class, in this case the dictatorship of the proletariat, is conceived by Lenin as a phenomenon incompatible with the democratic norms of society, for example, equality of citizens, legality, ensuring individual rights and similar “bourgeois” institutions and slogans. This position is expressed with particular clarity in his polemical work “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.”

Analyzing Kautsky’s work “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (1918), Lenin splits the terms “democracy”, “freedom”, “equality”, etc. on the opposites: proletarian or bourgeois democracy, freedom for workers or for exploiters, equality within the same class or for representatives of different classes. The first is accepted, the second is rejected. Each term thus acquires a class content and, accordingly, a positive or negative meaning. This situation essentially predetermined the entire further political and legal line of the Soviet government in relation to non-proletarian parties and sections of the population.

In this regard, the thesis that “the dictatorship of the proletariat is power based directly on violence and not bound by any laws” was very important. In practice, this meant discarding not only the old, tsarist laws, but also disregard for the own legal provisions of the Soviet period, issuing departmental regulations that contradicted them or ignored them.

In the first years of Soviet power, the need for revolutionary violence was linked mainly to the resistance of the exploiting classes. Gradually the range of classes and social strata against which the proletariat must use revolutionary violence became difficult to discern. These are not only landowners and capitalists, but also the rich part of the peasantry. “Against... the kulaks, as our notorious enemies,” Lenin declared in 1919, “we have only one weapon - violence.” The use of violence against bourgeois specialists used by the Soviet government in the interests of establishing the national economy was not excluded. “To use the entire apparatus of bourgeois, capitalist society - such a task requires not only victorious violence, it requires, moreover, organization, discipline ... in which the bourgeois specialist sees that he has no way out, that it is impossible to return to the old society.” Speaking about specialists, Lenin repeatedly emphasizes the need to combine violence with the organizational and economic activities of the state. However, violence remains the focus.

In the article “Greetings to the Hungarian Workers” (1919), Lenin already speaks of resistance to the revolutionary coup from “the huge mass of workers, including peasants, too clogged with petty-bourgeois habits and traditions.” This also applies to political parties. “If there are hesitations among the socialists who yesterday joined you, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or among the petty bourgeoisie,” he advises the Hungarians, “suppress the hesitations mercilessly. Shooting is the legal fate of a coward in war.” Violence was also directed against some proletarian strata. “Revolutionary violence,” writes Lenin, “cannot help but manifest itself in relation to the shaky, uncontrolled elements of the working masses themselves.”

Thus, the original idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, formulated by Marx as the task of a temporary transition period, is significantly distorted, loses its clear outlines, and turns into coercion in relation to any part of the people that does not agree with the policy being pursued or does not actively support it.

As to who carries out this dictatorship - the entire working class, its “advanced vanguard” - the party, or state bodies created specifically for this purpose, the position of the Bolsheviks has evolved on this issue. In Lenin's statements in the 1918-1920s, there are statements that the dictatorship is exercised by the entire working class (in particular, through the electoral system of soviets). But already in “Letter to workers and peasants regarding the victory over Kolchak” (1919). Lenin points out quite directly: “The dictatorship of the working class is carried out by the Bolshevik party, which since 1905 and earlier has merged with the entire revolutionary proletariat.” The logic of the Bolsheviks’ actions led to the fact that the function of violence, implemented under the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was quickly transferred to punitive, repressive bodies. Many statements by Lenin and his associates on issues related to the concept, goals and functions of the dictatorship of the proletariat predetermined both the theoretical and practical activities of the Bolsheviks in the area under consideration.

3. WHITE TERROR DURING THE CIVIL WAR

Currently, the thesis has become widespread that whites, more than reds, tried to adhere to legal norms when carrying out punitive actions. But the legal declarations and resolutions of the confronting parties did not protect the population of the country in those years from tyranny and terror. Neither the decisions of the VI All-Russian Extraordinary Congress of Soviets (November 1918), nor the resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on the abolition of the death penalty (January 1920), nor the instructions of the governments of the opposite side could prevent them. Both of them shot, took hostages, and practiced torture. The whites also had institutions - various counterintelligence agencies and military courts, propaganda organizations with intelligence tasks. Already the first acts of violence carried out by the one- and then two-party Soviet government (Bolsheviks and left Socialist Revolutionaries): the closure of newspapers that defended the ideas of February, and not October 1917, the outlawing of the Cadet Party, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the introduction of the right of extrajudicial struggle for power - caused the rejection of many.

The practice of white terror took place in territories captured by the white movement. There are two centers of the white movement: the south of Russia and the places where the Czechoslovak corps were located. The mutiny of the Czechoslovak corps swept through the territory of the east of Soviet Russia, from the Volga to the Pacific Ocean, and overthrew Soviet power everywhere. From the end to mid-September 1918, all of Siberia and the Far East were in the hands of the rebels. According to the general opinion of civil war researchers, terror under the rule of interventionists and “white regimes” nowhere reached such proportions and brutality as in “white” Siberia, including the Far East.

Lenin proceeded from the fact that “the benefit of the revolution, the benefit of the working class is the highest law”, that only he is the highest authority that determines “this benefit”, and therefore can resolve all issues, including the main one - the right to life and activity . The principle of expediency of means used to protect power was guided by Trotsky, Bukharin and others: “Proletarian coercion in all its forms, from executions to labor conscription, is a method of developing communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist era.”

The territories occupied by whites cannot be considered as isolated territories: there was a civil war, which means that the warring parties influenced each other. At the same time and interconnected with the red, white terror dominated the country.

Already in 1918, “terror of the environment” began to reign, when the symmetry of the parties’ actions became inevitably similar. This continued in 1919-1920, when both the Reds and the Whites simultaneously built their dictatorial states. None of the leaders of the warring parties avoided the use of terror against their opponents and civilians.

We often hear that no matter who won the Civil War, they would have done the same thing, because this was a historical necessity. That a white victory would mean the establishment of a military dictatorship (and here it’s hard to disagree), and maybe even something fascist - which is unlikely. Of course, as a result of the victory of the Whites in Russia, prosperity and prosperity would not have come in the air. However, this does not mean that the white mode would not be better than the red one.

First, conditions would have been different after the Civil War. There would be no total devastation: after all, White could only win in 1917-1918, and the main destruction happened in 1918-1920. Russia would have been among the victors of the First World War, and therefore its international status would have been qualitatively different. Historical continuity would be preserved, which is extremely important for socio-economic development.

Secondly, whites would not fight for world revolution, spending the country's resources on it; would not be satisfied with nationalization, surplus appropriation and collectivization; would not pursue a policy of sociocide aimed at eliminating entire social groups; they would not build an ideocratic state subordinated to the solution of abstract problems. A white victory would mean the absence of “negative selection,” as a result of which almost the entire “old regime” social elite was eradicated, and a new one was formed according to distorted criteria.

In other words, the need for emergency measures to reach the level of advanced countries would be several times less. White Russia, relying on a colossal resource base and possessing a serious industrial potential that still remained in 1918 from the empire, it could well have solved pressing socio-economic problems in twenty years. There would be no democracy, of course, but there would be no Gulag and the Comintern. The white path was not ideal, but it would be life-saving...

Having been defeated in the war, the whites did not lay down their arms. In exile, they form organizations aimed at continuing the struggle - the largest of them was the Russian All-Military Union (EMRO), created by Wrangel. They accept monarchism as a unifying idea, look for allies in other countries, try to carry out sabotage work in Soviet Russia... New defeats awaited them along this path: the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD acted more professionally, not shying away from provocations, and in search of allies, some of the whites agreed to cooperate with the Nazis, tainting themselves with collaboration.

Most likely, the main luck of the Bolsheviks was that they had two talented leaders - Lenin and Trotsky. A brilliant political strategist and brilliant tactician. But their appearance at the head of the Bolsheviks was by no means predetermined. The Bolsheviks were not at all doomed to success.

4. COMPARATIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POLICIES OF WHITE AND RED TERROR

Soviet explanations noted that the methods of both terrors were similar, but “decidedly diverged in their goals”: red terror directed against the exploiters, white - against the oppressed workers. Later, this formula acquired a broad interpretation and called the armed overthrow of Soviet power in a number of regions and the accompanying massacre of people as acts of white terror. This meant the presence of various forms of terror even before the summer of 1918, and the term “white terror” meant the punitive actions of all anti-Bolshevik forces of that time, and not just the white movement itself. The lack of clearly developed concepts and criteria leads to different interpretations.

Although manifestations of mass terror are the shooting of about 500 soldiers in the Moscow Kremlin (October 28, 1917), murders in Orenburg during the capture of the city by the Cossacks Dutova(November 1917), beatings of wounded Red Guards in January 1918 near Saratov, etc.

Dating of various types of terror should begin not with reprisals against famous public figures, not with decrees legitimizing ongoing lawlessness, but with the innocent victims of the opposing sides. They are forgotten, especially the defenseless sufferers of the Red Terror.

The terror was carried out by officers - participants in the general's ice campaign Kornilova; security officers who received the right of extrajudicial execution; revolutionary courts and tribunals; guided not by the law, but by political expediency. June 16, 1918 People's Commissar of Justice P. Stuchka canceled all previously issued circulars on revolutionary tribunals and stated that these institutions “are not bound by any restrictions in the choice of measures to combat counter-revolution, sabotage, etc..”

Granting the right to sign the most important acts of punitive policy not only to higher authorities, but also to lower ones indicated that these acts were not given paramount importance, and that terror was quickly becoming commonplace. The leadership of the Soviet Republic officially recognized the creation of an extra-legal state, where arbitrariness became the norm and terror became the most important tool for maintaining power.

Lawlessness was beneficial to the warring parties, as it allowed any actions with references to something similar from the enemy. Its origin is explained by the traditional cruelty of Russian history, the severity of the confrontation between revolutionaries and autocracy, and, finally, the fact that Lenin And Plekhanov did not see any sin in killing their ideological opponents, that “along with the poison of socialism, the Russian intelligentsia fully accepted the poison populism».

CONCLUSION

The pages of countless books, articles, memoirs, and published documents are devoted to the Red and White Terror in Russia during the Civil War. As a rule, all of these are “party” works; each side justified its actions. In the 1990s, the situation changed due to the collapse of the Soviet regime, the discovery of sources and the possibility of alternative research into the problem. Then, along with new publications of documents, historiographical generalizations and studies appeared, containing important materials on the problem of interest to us.

In recent years, researchers have sought to use a variety of documents, including those stored in previously closed archives of the former KGB; they have been able to express different, often polar, views on the problem of interest to us. The use of documents published and stored in many archives, historiographical achievements became the basis of this publication.

There are no exact estimates of the number of victims of the White and Red Terror. The figures given in the literature are contradictory; their sources and calculation methods are not reported.

It is the beginning of that great terror that the party-state dictatorship again unleashed with particular fury against its own people a decade and a half later. And no matter how the participants, eyewitnesses, historians describe the events of those years, the essence is the same - the Red and White Terror were the most barbaric method of struggle for power. Its results for the progress of the country and society are truly disastrous. Contemporaries realized this. But many still do not fully understand the fact that any terror is a crime against humanity, no matter what its motivation.

LIST OF SOURCES USED

red white terror civil war

1 Great Soviet Encyclopedia. In 30 volumes. T. 19, T. 22. - M.: publishing house "Soviet Encyclopedia". 2007.- 506 p.

2 Yu. S. Arkhipov, Ya. Z. Khaikin. LOGIC OF HISTORY AND PRACTICE OF MARXISM IN RUSSIA // Philosophical Studies, No. 3, 2007, pp. 47-57

3 Red terror through the eyes of eyewitnesses / compilation, preface, and commentary. d.i. n. S. V. Volkova. - 1st. - Moscow: Airi-press, 2009. - (White Russia). -- 3000 copies.

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...

The beginning of the “Red Terror” in Russia (1902-1911)

“In order not to leave room for omissions, let us now make a reservation that, in our personal opinion, terror is currently an inappropriate means of struggle...”
Lenin V.I. Draft of our program, 1899 //PSS. T. 4. P. 223.

In the second half of the 80s - 90s of the 19th century, Blanquist populist terrorist groups became more active in Russia, seemingly defeated after the regicide on March 1, 1881. They began to prepare assassination attempts on the son of Alexander II - Emperor Alexander III. In connection with the assassination attempt in 1887, Lenin's elder brother Alexander Ulyanov was executed. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, populist groups joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party (AKP, Socialist Revolutionaries).

In 1902-1911, the Combat Organization of the Social Revolutionaries became “the most effective terrorist formation of the early 20th century.” Its leaders during this period were Grigory Gershuni, Yevno Azef, Boris Savinkov. It is with their activities that the beginning of the revolutionary “Red Terror” can be historically linked.

Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin consecrated revolutionary terror in detail in his speech on February 11, 1909 in the State Duma “Concerning the Azef Case.” The Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire linked terror with the revolutionary movement and the activities of socialist revolutionaries, not social democrats. //Complete collection of speeches in the State Duma and State Council/.

Over 10 years, the Social Revolutionaries committed 263 terrorist attacks, as a result of which 2 ministers, 33 governor-general, governor and vice-governor, 16 mayors, 7 admirals and generals, and 26 police agents were killed. The activities of the “Combat Organization” became an example for smaller terrorist groups of populist parties.

Here is the social class characteristics of the participants in the revolutionary terror. In 1903-1906, the “Combat Organization of the AKP” included 64 people: 13 hereditary nobles, 3 honorary citizens, 5 from families of clergy, 10 from merchant families, 27 were of bourgeois origin and 6 were of peasant origin. As a rule, all of them were united by the university student environment.

According to the national characteristics, among the members of the “Combat Organization” 43 terrorists were Russians, 19 Jews and two Poles.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin sharply dissociated himself from the Narodniks and Socialist Revolutionaries. He insisted on distinguishing between terror as a component of war and terror as a criminal offense in peacetime, without a declaration of war.

“In principle, we have never renounced and cannot renounce terror. This is one of the military actions that can be quite suitable and even necessary at a certain moment of the battle, under a certain state of the army and under certain conditions. But the essence of the matter is precisely that terror is being put forward at the present time not as one of the operations of the active army, closely connected and consistent with the entire system of struggle, but as an independent means of a single attack, independent of any army. ...That is why we resolutely declare such a means of struggle under the given circumstances to be untimely, inappropriate, ...disorganizing not the government, but the revolutionary forces...”
Lenin V.I. Where to start? 1901 // PSS. T. 5. P. 7

The beginning of the “White Terror” in Russia (1905 - February 1917).

Extreme right-wing organizations in Russia, operating in 1905-1917, acted under the slogans of monarchism, great-power chauvinism and anti-Semitism. The first Black Hundred organization was the Russian Assembly, created in 1900. The leaders of the Black Hundred movement - Alexander Dubrovin, Vladimir Purishkevich, Nikolai Markov (Markov the Second), encouraged the creation of small armed organizations that dispersed rallies, demonstrations, and carried out pogroms in Jewish neighborhoods. This is how the monarchists created the appearance of popular support for the monarchy. Sometimes the Fighting Squad was called "White Guard".

The activities of the Black Hundreds were supported by Nicholas II. He was an honorary member of the Union of the Russian People party, which was distinguished by extreme nationalism.

Armed squads of the Black Hundreds operated legally in Arkhangelsk, Astrakhan, Yekaterinoslav, Kyiv, Chisinau, Moscow, Odessa, St. Petersburg, Tiflis, Yaroslavl and other cities.

Child victims of the Jewish pogrom in Yekaterinoslav

Propaganda leaflet election campaign elections to the State Duma of the Russian Empire of the third convocation of a single bloc: the Union of the Russian People and the Union on October 17.

There were no general principles for the creation of fighting squads, since the official creation of armed detachments by “patriotic parties” was prohibited; each of the departments of the “Union of the Russian People” acted at its own discretion. In Odessa, the fighting squad, according to the principle of the Cossack army, was divided into six “hundreds”, each of which, in turn, had an independent name (for example, “The Evil Hundred”, etc.). The vigilantes were led by the “mandatory ataman”, “esauls”, and “foremen”. They all took patriotic pseudonyms: Ermak, Minin, Platov, etc. //Stepanov S.A. Black Hundred terror of 1905-1907.

Publication of the Odessa branch of the Union of Russian People.

The authorities considered armed groups of “patriots” their support and in some cases used them to maintain order on the streets and in striking enterprises. The Black Hundred squads suffered serious losses in fierce clashes with militant groups of Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats at St. Petersburg enterprises during the First Russian Revolution. In 1907, 24 monarchists were killed in clashes //Stepanov S.A. Quote. op.

However, the Black Hundreds considered their main political opponents not socialists, but liberals. P. N. Milyukov was attacked by the Black Hundreds. On July 18, 1906, a member of the Central Committee of the Cadet Party, M. Ya. Herzenstein, was killed.

On March 14, 1907, a member of the “Union of the Russian People” Kazantsev organized the murder of cadet G. B. Yollos. Kazantsev gave the worker Fedorov a revolver and said that Yollos was betraying the revolutionaries. Having killed Yollos and then learned from newspapers about the falsity of the information given to him, Fedorov killed Kazantsev and fled abroad //Kazantsev / The fall of the tsarist regime. Interrogations and testimony. T. 7 / Index of names to volumes I-VII. / TO.

The hatred of the Black Hundreds towards them was determined by the fact that both of them were liberals, former deputies of the “rebellious” First State Duma and Jews.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Black Hundred organizations were banned.

The Black Hundreds went underground. During the Civil War, many prominent Black Hundred leaders joined the white movement, some to various nationalist organizations. The Bolshevik government saw Russian ethnic nationalism as a type of fascism. The remnants of the active members of the Black Hundred movement went into exile, and those who continued the struggle were destroyed.

Modern monarchists.

During perestroika and Gorbachev's glasnost, monarchist organizations returned to Russia, including the Union of the Russian People and the Black Hundreds. The restoration Congress of the Union of the Russian People took place in Moscow on November 21, 2005. The first chairman of the Union was the sculptor V. M. Klykov Websites of modern Black Hundred organizations: Official portal of the social-patriotic movement “Black Hundred”, Official regional portal of the OPD “Black Hundred” in St. Petersburg, Society “Union of the Russian People”, Newspaper “Orthodox” Rus", Publishing House "Russian Idea", Publishing House "Black Hundred".

Monarchists are active today in Crimea:

“The main thing is that we eradicate the “scoop” from ourselves and raise our children in the Russian, Orthodox, imperial spirit. And of course, our main work is propaganda. We remind Crimeans what their great-grandfathers were like, what values our glorious ancestors held in high esteem. So that they can see what they have become. And they made the proper conclusions. To make it easier to carry out our tasks, like-minded people united into monarchical organizations that sympathize with this idea. There are several of these in Crimea - some Cossack associations, branches of the Union of the Russian People and the Russian Imperial Union-Order (RISO), as well as ours, the very first monarchical, officially legalized organization on the peninsula - the “Union of Zealots of the Memory of Emperor Nicholas II.”
Monarchists in Crimea.

Who and how unleashed terror in Soviet Russia.

V.I. Lenin noted in September 1917 that Soviet power has popular support, and the internal opposition has no chance of starting a Civil War in Russia.

“...The alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks against the Cadets, against the bourgeoisie has not yet been tested. ...If there is an absolutely indisputable lesson of the revolution, absolutely proven by facts, it is only this: only an alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, exclusively the immediate transfer of all power to the Soviets would make a civil war in Russia impossible. For against such an alliance, against the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, any civil war started by the bourgeoisie is unthinkable...”

Lenin V.I. Russian revolution and civil war. They are afraid of civil war / “Worker's Path”. No. 12, 29 (16) September 1917 / PSS. T. 34 pp. 221-222).

On November 1, 1917, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted a resolution “On the terms of an agreement with other parties.” The program for the democratization of Russia and the creation of a “homogeneous socialist government”, a “government of the working people” was thwarted by the internal opposition, which was responsible for starting the Civil War.

But first let's pay attention to Lenin's public policy, which, ahead of its time, fully complied with today's international law:

"Homogeneous Socialist Government"(will be recognized by N. S. Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 and raised to the principle of international law - in relation to Yugoslavia and other countries of people's democracy);

Decree on Peace. He declared the goal of the new government to be the immediate conclusion by all warring peoples and their governments of a just democratic peace without annexations and indemnities, and the renunciation of secret diplomacy. Today, the peaceful resolution of interstate conflicts and the inviolability of state borders are the basic norms of international law. Most of all, the Entente countries and the United States, which were already preparing the Versailles agreements on a new division of spheres of influence in a world where there was no place for Russia, neither with the Tsar nor with the Communists, were not interested in this agreement.

Decree on land. He abolished private ownership of land and transferred it to the disposal of working rural communities. State farms were formed on the lands of landowners, which were to become highly technical, exemplary large farm-factories for the production of agricultural products.

At the beginning of the 20th century, half of Russia's arable land fund was owned by 30 thousand landowner families (70 million dessiatines); the second half - 10.5 million peasant farms (75 million dessiatines).

However, even in the peasant village, the land was concentrated in the hands of a handful of kulaks. 15% of the rich owned 47% of the peasant land fund.

A poor medieval village, horseless and landless, was completely ruined during the First World War by constant mobilizations of men and expropriations of horses and dairy cattle for the needs of the war. The only effective way out of the economic crisis was the socialization of the land, transferring it to the peasants.

Lenin and Stalin talk with peasants in their office in the Kremlin. Artist I. E. Grabar. 1938. State Historical Museum.

In the future, the technical modernization of agriculture will require the creation of large farms equipped with tractors and combines, and cars. But in this situation, the socialization of the land was the right economic and political decision. The peasant majority of the country's population supported the new government and moved away from revolutionary activities, immersed themselves in work, until the Civil War was unleashed, and the White Guards began to return the land to the old owners - the kulaks and landowners. The peasants again found themselves without work, without land in most of the country, where Kolchak’s troops and other white armies ruled.

Under the auspices of Great Britain and France, after the collapse of the Russian Empire, a group of limitrophe (border) states was created along the European borders of Soviet Russia, formed from the outskirts of the former Tsarist Russia, mainly from the western provinces (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Finland).

In central Europe, from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Czechoslovakia was created at Versailles, in the Balkans, from Serbia and Croatia, the Kingdom of Serbs and Croats (KSH, later Yugoslavia). Much work was carried out to separate Ukraine and Belarus and secede from Russia.

All these territories in the future will be used by Hitler as limitrophe states for Nazi propaganda and to create a “fifth column” in them. In the 90s, with the collapse of the USSR and the world system of socialism, the term “limitrophe” came to life again: the United States and NATO countries intensified their activities to create a belt of states with an anti-Russian orientation from the former Soviet republics and CMEA countries. Since the 1990s, the term has become widely used again in Western plans to dismember the Russian Federation.

Constitution of the RSFSR 1918

The Basic Law does not contain any legal provisions on the persecution of the church, priests, and religious citizens:

1. The church is separated from the state.

2. Within the Republic, it is prohibited to make any local laws or regulations that would restrict or restrict freedom of conscience, or establish any advantages or privileges on the basis of the religious affiliation of citizens.

3. Every citizen can profess any religion or none at all. All legal deprivations associated with the confession of any faith or non-profession of any faith are abolished.

Note. From all official acts, any indication of religious affiliation or non-religious affiliation of citizens is eliminated.

4. The actions of state and other public legal social institutions are not accompanied by any religious rites or ceremonies.

5. The free performance of religious rites is ensured insofar as they do not violate public order and are not accompanied by encroachments on the rights of citizens of the Soviet Republic.

Local authorities have the right to take all necessary measures to ensure public order and security in these cases.

6. No one can, citing their religious views, avoid fulfilling their civic duties.

Exceptions from this provision, subject to the condition of replacing one civil duty with another, are allowed in each individual case by decision of the people's court.

7. The religious oath or oath is canceled.

In necessary cases, only a solemn promise is given.

8. Civil status records are maintained exclusively by civil authorities: departments for registering marriages and births.

9. The school is separated from the church.

Teaching religious doctrines in all state and public, as well as private educational institutions where general education subjects are taught, is not permitted.

Citizens may teach and study religion privately.

10. All ecclesiastical and religious societies are subject to the general provisions on private societies and unions, and do not enjoy any benefits or subsidies either from the state or from its local autonomous and self-governing institutions.

11. Forced collection of fees and taxes in favor of church and religious societies, as well as measures of coercion or punishment on the part of these societies over their fellow members, are not permitted.

12. No church or religious societies have the right to own property. They do not have the rights of a legal entity.

13. All property of church and religious societies existing in Russia is declared national property.

Buildings and objects intended specifically for liturgical purposes are given, according to special regulations of local or central government authorities, for the free use of the respective religious societies.

Beginning of the confrontation

The Western trace in organizing provocations in the capital was quickly discovered. On December 6, 1917, Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich, at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, reported on the “combat groups” prepared to cause unrest in the capital:

Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich (1873-1955).
Manager of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR (1917-1920)
Bolshevik. Doctor of Historical Sciences

When interviewing the detained individual military ranks, it turned out that they were drunk and a special institute was organized from them to incite their brothers to drink, for which they paid 15 rubles a day; ... Petrograd was flooded with a flurry of drunken destruction. ...The destruction began with small fruit stores, and they were followed by the warehouses of Koehler and Petrov, and a large ready-made clothing store. In one half hour we received 11 notices of pogroms and barely had time to send military units to the sites...”

Suspicious persons distributed proclamations that looked like Bolshevik ones, with the headings: “Workers of all countries, unite!” and ending with: “Down with imperialism and its lackeys!”, “Long live workers' revolution and the world proletariat! In terms of content, these were provocative leaflets containing Black Hundred ideas. The leaflets incited soldiers, sailors, and workers to destroy wine warehouses and disrupt the normal life of the capital in every possible way.

“The detainees turned out to be employees of the reactionary newspaper Novaya Rus.” Under threat of execution, they said that they had been sent by the organization and gave us their addresses. When we went to the first address, we came across 20 thousand copies of this appeal... We moved on and arrested many people. ... It is clear that we are dealing with a conspiracy of counter-revolution on an all-Russian scale, organized extremely widely with large amounts of money, with the goal of strangling ... the revolution.”
Golinkov D. L. The collapse of the anti-Soviet underground in the USSR (1917-1925). M.: Politizdat, 1975. T. 1. P. 23.

In the first years of Soviet power, the danger came not from the Bolsheviks, but from anarchist gangs supported by the allies, the British ambassador Robert Bruce Lockhart argued in his memoirs:

Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart
(1887-1970), British diplomat,
secret agent, journalist, writer.

“Terror did not yet exist; it could not even be said that the population was afraid of the Bolsheviks.” “Life in St. Petersburg in those weeks had a rather unique character. ... Newspapers of the Bolshevik opponents were still published, and the policies of the Soviets were subjected to the most severe attacks in them ... In this early era of Bolshevism, the danger to bodily integrity and life came not from the ruling party, but from anarchist gangs. ...The allies are also largely to blame for the civil war. ...With our policies we contributed to the intensification of terror and bloodshed. ... Alekseev, Denikin, Kornilov, Wrangel tried with all their might to overthrow the Bolsheviks. ... For this purpose they, without support from abroad, were too weak, because in their own country they found support only in the officers, who were already very weakened in themselves.”
Storm over Russia. Confession of an English diplomat. - pp. 227-234.

From January to September 1918, Lockhart was the head of the special British mission to the Soviet government, then he was arrested. In October 1918, he was expelled from Soviet Russia for participating in the “conspiracy of the three ambassadors.” Robert Bruce Jr., his son, wrote that his father collected about 8,400,000 rubles from Russian capitalists through an English company, which were used to finance subversive activities against Soviet Russia. // “The ace of spies”, London, 1967. R. 74). Quote by: Golinkov D.L. The truth about the enemies of the people. M.: Algorithm, 2006.

At the beginning of World War II, Lockhart was one of the heads of the political intelligence department of the British Foreign Office (1939-1940) and director of the Political Warfare Committee, which was in charge of propaganda and intelligence issues (1941-1945).

Menshevik D.Yu. Dalin wrote in exile in 1922:

“The Soviet system existed, but without terror, the civil war gave impetus to its development. ...The Bolsheviks did not immediately embark on the path of terror; for six months the opposition press continued to publish, not only socialist, but also openly bourgeois. The first case of capital punishment took place only in May 1918. Everyone who wanted to speak at the meetings, with almost no risk of getting into the Cheka.”

On December 7 (20), 1917, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (VChK) was created under the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR. The Cheka was headed by Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky considered devotion to revolutionary ideals, honesty, restraint and politeness to be the necessary qualities of security officers.

Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinky (1877-1926) Chairman of the Cheka under the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR

"Invasion of armed men on private apartment and the deprivation of freedom of guilty people is an evil, which even now must be resorted to in order for good and truth to triumph. But we must always remember that this is evil, that our task is to use evil to eradicate the need to resort to this means in the future.
Therefore, let all those who are entrusted with carrying out a search, depriving a person of freedom and keeping them in prison, treat people arrested and searched with care, let them be much more polite with them than even with a loved one, remembering that a person deprived of freedom cannot defend himself and that he is in our power. Everyone must remember that he is a representative of Soviet power - workers and peasants, and that his every shout, rudeness, immodesty, impoliteness is a stain that falls on this power.”
"1. Weapons are only drawn if danger threatens. 2. Treatment of those arrested and their families must be the most polite; no moralizing or shouting is acceptable. 3. Responsibility for the search and behavior falls on everyone in the squad. 4. Threats with a revolver or any weapon whatsoever are unacceptable.
Those guilty of violating this instruction are subject to arrest for up to three months, removal from the commission and deportation from Moscow.”Draft instructions of the Cheka on the conduct of searches and arrests // Historical archive. 1958. No. 1. P. 5–6.

Western services, based on Socialist-Revolutionary-Anarchist elements, posed a serious threat to Russia, fanning chaos and banditry in the country in opposition to the creative policies of the new government.

The former Minister of War of the Provisional Government and Kolchakite A.I. Verkhovsky joined the Red Army in 1919. //“At a difficult pass”.

According to the official version, he switched sides to the “Reds” in 1922. In his memoirs, Verkhovsky wrote that he was an activist in the “Union for the Revival of Russia,” which had a military organization that trained personnel for anti-Soviet armed protests, which was financed by the “allies.”

Alexander Ivanovich Verkhovsky (1886-1938)

“In March 1918, I was personally invited by the Union for the Revival of Russia to join the military headquarters of the Union. The military headquarters was an organization that had the goal of organizing an uprising against Soviet power... The military headquarters had connections with the allied missions in Petrograd. General Suvorov was in charge of relations with the allied missions... Representatives of the allied missions were interested in my assessment of the situation from the point of view of the possibility of restoring... the front against Germany. I had conversations about this with General Nissel, a representative of the French mission. The military headquarters, through the cashier of the headquarters, Suvorov, received funds from the allied missions.”

In May 1918 he was arrested, but was soon released. After that he served in the Red Army. // /

Vasily Ivanovich Ignatiev (1874-1959)

The testimony of A. I. Verkhovsky is fully consistent with the memoirs of another figure in the Union for the Revival of Russia, V. I. Ignatiev (1874-1959, died in Chile).

In the first part of his memoirs, “Some Facts and Results of Four Years of the Civil War (1917-1921),” published in Moscow in 1922, he confirms that the source of the organization’s funds was “exclusively allied.” Ignatiev received the first amount from foreign sources from General A.V. Gerua, to whom General M.N. Suvorov sent him. From a conversation with Gerua, he learned that the general was instructed to send officers to the Murmansk region at the disposal of the English General F. Poole, and that funds were allocated to him for this task. Ignatiev received a certain amount from Gerua, then received money from one agent of the French mission - 30 thousand rubles.

A spy group was operating in Petrograd, headed by sanitary doctor V.P. Kovalevsky. She also sent officers, mainly guards, to the English General Bullet in Arkhangelsk via Vologda. The group advocated the establishment of a military dictatorship in Russia and was supported by British funds. The representative of this group, English agent Captain G. E. Chaplin, worked in Arkhangelsk under the name Thomson.

On December 13, 1918, Kovalevsky was shot on charges of creating a military organization associated with the British mission. On January 5, 1918, the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly was preparing a coup d'etat, which was prevented by the Cheka. The Constituent Assembly was dispersed. The English plan failed. Detailed information about the activities of the Socialist Revolutionaries in various committees “Saving the Motherland and Revolution”, “Defense of the Constituent Assembly” and others, disclosed by the Cheka, was given already in 1927 by Vera Vladimirova in her book “The Year of Service of the “Socialists” to the Capitalists. Essays on history, counter-revolution in 1918".

Today, in liberal literature, the prevention of the coup d'etat in early January 1918 and the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly is put forward as a justification for the undemocratic policies of the Bolsheviks, which led to the civil war. Dzerzhinsky was aware of the counter-revolutionary activities of the socialists, mainly the Socialist Revolutionaries; their connections with British services, about the flow of their funding from the Allies.

Venedikt Aleksandrovich Myakotin (1867, Gatchina - 1937, Prague)

Russian historian and politician V. A. Myakotin, one of the founders and leaders of the Union for the Revival of Russia, also published his memoirs in 1923 in Prague, “From the Recent Past. On the wrong side." According to his story, relations with the diplomatic representatives of the allies were carried out by members of the “Union for the Revival of Russia” specially authorized for this purpose. These connections were carried out through the French ambassador Noulens. Later, when the ambassadors left for Vologda, through the French consul Grenard. The French financed the “Union”, but Nulans directly stated that “the allies, in fact, do not need the assistance of Russian political organizations” and could well land their troops in Russia themselves. //Golinkov D. L. Secret operations of the Cheka

The civil war and "Red Terror" in Soviet Russia were provoked by British services, with the active support of British Prime Minister Lloyd George and US President Woodrow Wilson.

The US President personally supervised the work of agents to discredit Soviet power, and above all, the young government led by Lenin, both in the West and in Russia.

In October 1918, on the direct orders of Woodrow Wilson, Washington published "Sisson papers", allegedly proving that the Bolshevik leadership consisted of direct agents of Germany, controlled by directives of the German General Staff. The “documents” were allegedly purchased at the end of 1917 by the special envoy of the US President to Russia, Edgar Sisson, for $25,000.

The “documents” were fabricated by Polish journalist Ferdinand Ossendowski. They allowed the myth to spread throughout Europe about the leader of the Soviet state, Lenin, who allegedly “made a revolution with German money.”

Sisson's mission was "brilliant." He “obtained” 68 documents, some of which allegedly confirmed Lenin’s connection with the Germans and even the direct dependence of the Council of People’s Commissars on the Government of Kaiser Germany until the spring of 1918. More details about the forged documents can be found on the website of Academician Yu. K. Begunov.

Counterfeits continue to spread in modern Russia. Thus, in 2005, the documentary film “Secrets of Intelligence. Revolution in a suitcase."

Lenin:

“We are reproached for arresting people. Yes, we are arresting. ...We are reproached for using terror, but we do not use terror, such as was used by the French revolutionaries who guillotined unarmed people, and I hope we will not use it. And, I hope, we will not use it, since the power is behind us. When we arrested you, we said that we will let you go if you sign that you will not sabotage. And such a subscription is given.”

“Soviet terror” was a retaliatory, protective, and therefore fair measure against the armed campaign of the interventionists, against the actions of the White Guards, against the large-scale white terror planned by the aggressor states.

The mutiny of the Czechoslovak corps in support of the white movement in May 1918 had the goal of uniting the conspirators “to cut off the Siberian road, stop the supply of Siberian grain and starve the Soviet Republic”:

“The Ural bandit Dutov, the steppe colonel Ivanov, the Czechoslovaks, fugitive Russian officers, agents of Anglo-French imperialism, former landowners and Siberian kulaks united in one sacred alliance against the workers and peasants. If this union had won, rivers of people's blood would have been shed, and the power of the monarchy and the bourgeoisie would have been restored on Russian soil. ...In order...to wipe away bourgeois treason from the face of the earth and to ensure the Great Siberian Road from further...attacks, the Council of People's Commissars considers it necessary to take exceptional measures.”

Among them it was proposed:

“All Councils of Deputies are charged with vigilant supervision over the local bourgeoisie and harsh reprisals against conspirators... Conspiratorial officers, traitors, accomplices of Skoropadsky, Krasnov, Siberian Colonel Ivanov, must be mercilessly exterminated... Down with the traitor-rapists! Death to the enemies of the people!

One of the instigators of the uprising, Radola Gaida, commander of the Czechoslovak troops, with his guards

With the beginning of the Civil War and intervention, the “Red Terror” changed its character, and the Cheka began to use extrajudicial measures - execution on the spot. The Cheka became not only an agency for search and investigation, but also for direct reprisals against the most dangerous criminals. All previous revolutions enjoyed such a legal right to their defense: the English, American and French, during which the bourgeoisie asserted its power. And no one, neither England, nor the USA, nor France, now reproaches this.

On January 1, 1918, an attempt was made on Lenin. At about 19:30, the car in which Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova and the secretary of the Swiss Social Democratic Party Friedrich Platten were located was fired upon by terrorists on the Simeonovsky Bridge across the Fontanka.

The assassination attempt was never solved. In the same month, the Extraordinary Commission for the Protection of the City of Petrograd, headed by Kliment Efremovich Voroshilov, began to receive information about an impending new attempt on Lenin’s life, about surveillance of the apartments of senior officials, including Bonch-Bruevich.

In mid-January, the Cavalier of St. George Ya. N. Spiridonov came to Bonch-Bruevich and said that he had been instructed to track down and capture Lenin alive (or kill) and was promised 20 thousand rubles for this. It turned out that the terrorist acts were developed by members of the Petrograd Union of Knights of St. George. Lenin gave the order: “The matter must be stopped. Release. Send to the front."

On June 21, 1918, the revolutionary tribunal under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, in a public open meeting, pronounced the first death sentence.

On August 30, 1918, at the Mikhelson plant, a new attempt was made on Lenin, committed, according to the official version, by the Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan. The question of the organizers and participants in the assassination attempt, as well as the involvement of Fanny Kaplan, remains unclear to this day.

Lenin left for the plant without security, and there was no security at the plant itself. Immediately after the assassination attempt, the leader was unconscious; doctors discovered a dangerous wound in his neck under the jaw, blood had entered his lung. The second bullet hit him in the arm, and the third hit the woman who was talking to Lenin when the shooting began.

Moses Solomonovich Uritsky (1873-1918). Chairman of the Petrograd Cheka

On the morning of the same day, the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Uritsky, who was opposed to executions in general, was killed in Petrograd.

On September 2, 1918, Yakov Sverdlov, in an appeal to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, declared the Red Terror as a response to the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30 and the murder on the same day of the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, Uritsky (the decision was confirmed by a resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of September 5, 1918, signed by the People's Commissar of Justice D.I. Kursky, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs G.I. Petrovsky and SNK Affairs Manager V.D. Bonch-Bruevich).

Below we will examine in detail that the methods of the Red and White Terror differed.

The Red Terror was declared as one of the types of war against combat units of enemies of the revolution and interventionists, against especially dangerous terrorists, spies, saboteurs, participants in sabotage preparations, propagandists, criminals, and concealers. White terror was more reminiscent of genocide, which is usually used by foreign occupiers to instill terror in the peaceful indigenous population in order to warn them against resistance.

Siberian old-timers still remember the horrors of the White Terror. The Kolchakites were distinguished by their special bestial cruelty. They burned villages, raped, tortured and buried the local civilian population alive.

One of the characteristic examples of Kolchak’s genocide is the activity of Surov’s punitive detachment, which was sent to suppress the peasant uprising in the village of Ksenyevka.

Severity

Surov Vladimir Aleksandrovich was born in 1892, graduated from a four-year city school.

In October 1913, Surov was enlisted in the second-class state militia. In 1915, he was called up for mobilization, ending up in the 9th Siberian Rifle Reserve Battalion, and enrolled in the Irkutsk School of Warrant Officers. On April 1, 1916, he was promoted to warrant officer in the army infantry and assigned to the 4th Siberian reserve rifle brigade.

In June 1918, Surov was an assistant to the commander of the detachment A. T. Aldmanovich, who was engaged in clearing the southern districts of the Tomsk province from the Red Guards. In 1919, Captain Surov led a punitive detachment in the Chulym region. Later he was promoted to lieutenant colonel.

On May 4, 1919, at 15:00, Surov, at the head of a detachment of punitive forces, set out from the Cathedral Square of Tomsk along the Irkutsk Highway. Under his command were 32 officers, 46 sabers (cavalry) and 291 infantry riflemen with three machine guns. The detachment consisted of three shock groups, a team of foot scouts, hussars, as well as mounted and foot militia.

Punitive detachment of Surov

The very next day at 16:00 the first battle took place near Surov - near the village of Novo-Arkhangelskoye. The punitive forces made arrests and confiscated weapons in the village, then broke into the village of Latatsky.

On May 7, the Serbians occupied the villages of Klyuevsky and Kaibinsky, and at 7 p.m., after a two-hour battle, the village of Malo-Zhirovo, they seized documents of the rebels, which discussed the restoration of Soviet power in the territory covered by the peasant uprising and the mobilization of men born in 1897 into the “people's army.” .

On May 9, 1919, the punitive forces occupied Voronino-Pashnya, as well as the villages of Tikhomirovsky and Troitsky, without a fight.

On May 10, the Severians occupied the village of Novo-Kuskovo, 35 people - organizers and members of the Novo-Kuskovo Council of Deputies were executed. The detachment of the commander of the partisan detachment, member of the Tomsk Council Ivan Sergeevich Tolkunov (pseudonym Goncharov) retreated to the village of Ksenyevsky and the village of Kazanskoye.

Following them, the 2nd strike group was sent (each strike group had approximately 100 people) with a team of foot scouts, the 3rd strike group went to the villages of Kaynary, Novo-Pokrovsky (Kulary), Ivano-Bogoslovsky and Boroksky.

The punitive forces burned the villages of Kulyary and Tatar.

The Surovtsy defeated Ksenyevka, They burned the partisans' houses and killed their families. A lot of people were flogged.

From May 11 to 14, the Surtsy occupied the village of Kazanskoye and moved to the village of Chelbakovsky, where, according to intelligence data, there were 450 fighters of the partisan detachment. There was a battle with the use of grenades, bayonet strikes, and hand-to-hand combat.

The Reds, taking advantage of the wind blowing towards the punishers, lit the dry grass and created a smoke screen, which made it possible to regroup on the flanks. Meanwhile, the Surovites brought up reinforcements and machine guns and, after a 3.5-hour battle, drove back the partisans, who suffered huge losses in killed and wounded.

A Red detachment of 80-100 people managed to cross to the other side of Chulym.

12 May total torture residents were subjected to Kazanka and Chelbak village . 22 people were executed for “belonging to the revolutionary committee”; their property and houses were burned.

Surov reported to the command: “A bullet factory was discovered in Ksenyevskoye, 12 participants were court-martialed. The peasant Pleshkov, a former member of the executive committee of the Council of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Deputies of Tomsk, was arrested and shot.”

On May 15, the 1st strike group of the Sursky detachment moved to the village of Filimonovsky, the village of Mitrofanovskoye, the Karakolsky yurts, the village of Mikhailovsky, the village of Novikovsky and back through the village of Antonovsky, the village of Mitrofanovskoye and the village of Filimonovsky.

Arrests were made persons involved in Bolshevism. Surovtsy established contact with another punitive detachment under the command of Captain Orlov, operating in neighboring volosts.

On May 16, Surov received news that a partisan detachment of Pyotr Lubkov, numbering three hundred people, was moving to the area of the peasant uprising. In the village of Khaldeevo, Lubkovites attacked a transport with wounded White Guards from Surov’s detachment, and in the village of Vorono-Pashnya they fired at Orlov’s detachment.

On the night of May 17, Surov with two shock groups set out for the village of Tikhomirovsky, where the Lubkovites settled down to spend the night. The partisans were defeated in the battle, losing part of their convoy and prisoners.

Next, Surov crossed on the steamship "Ermak" to the opposite bank of Chulym to pursue the "small gangs". Having knocked down the rebel outposts, the Severians marched through 18 settlements for several days, including the villages of Sakhalinsky, Uzen, Makarovsky, Tsaritsynsky, Voznesensky, Lomovitsky, the village of Rozhdestvenskoye, the village of Sergeevo, the yurts of Burbina, Ezhi and others.

By the end of May 1919, the peasant uprising was suppressed. But the partisan detachment created by Goncharov during the days of the uprising continued to operate. Having united with Lubkov’s detachment, Goncharov’s detachment operated on the territory of the Tomsk and Mariinsky districts.

Pyotr Kuzmich Lubkov. Peasant of the village of Svyatoslavka, Malo-Peschanaya volost, Mariinsky district, Tomsk province. In May 1917, he returned from the front of the First World War as a Knight of St. George with the rank of senior non-commissioned officer. In October 1917, Svyatoslav peasants created a Council of Deputies in the village, which included Lubkov. In the spring of 1918, white punitive forces came to the village of Svyatoslavka and arrested Pyotr Lubkov and his brother Ignat, but they were able to escape and joined the partisan movement. In 1919, Lubkov joined the Red Army, participated in the battles for the liberation of Eastern Siberia, and worked in the Cheka. In September 1920, he rebelled against the surplus appropriation system and hid in the taiga. On June 23, 1921, it was liquidated as a result of a Cheka operation. http://svyatoslavka.ucoz.ru/in...

On June 24, Lubkov’s detachment attacked the Izhmorka station and the railway bridge over the Yaya River. The Czechoslovak detachment guarding them was defeated. The station's equipment was disabled, trophies were captured - rifles, cartridges, grenades, and many sets of uniforms. However, during the retreat, near the village of Chernaya Rechka the partisans were overtaken by the Whites.

The Lubkovites retreated to Mikhailovka, and Goncharov’s detachment approached here. The Whites attacked the combined forces of the partisans from Gagarino. Goncharov led his men to attack the bridge over the river.

On June 25, in the village of Mikhailovka, a large detachment of punitive forces surrounded a handful of brave men, led by Goncharov, who had rushed forward. In an unequal battle, 20 partisans died here, including the commander of the partisan detachment, member of the Tomsk Council, Ivan Sergeevich Tolkunov-Goncharov. V. Zvorykin became the commander of the detachment. Lubkov was seriously wounded in the battle.

The historical memory of the white punitive forces and the red partisans has been preserved in the form of monuments in the settlements of the Asinovsky district of the Tomsk region.

“Mass grave of partisans, underground fighters and victims of white terror.” Station square in the city of Asino, Tomsk region. On the pedestal there is the inscription “Eternal glory to the partisans of the Civil War.” https://kozyukova.jimdo.com/r...

Mass grave of partisans, supporters of Soviet power, who provided assistance to the partisans. With. Kazanka of the Tomsk region.http://memorials.tomsk.ru/news…
Mass grave of partisans who died in 1919 in the village. Novokuskovo, Tomsk region.

Head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs V.N. Pepelyaev, having learned about the actions of V.A. Surov and his detachment, telegraphed to the governor of the Tomsk province B.M. Mikhailovsky:

“I read your report with satisfaction... Please convey my gratitude to Captain Surov. Say hello and my gratitude to the police officers. Give generous benefits to those who suffered and distinguished themselves... I look forward to equally energetic actions in all directions.”

Surov with the remnants of Kolchak’s army retreated first to Transbaikalia, and then ended up in exile in China. In 1922, he volunteered for the Siberian Volunteer Squad, formed by General A. N. Pepelyaev. In 1924 he was arrested and shot.

From the decision of the trial of Surov:

“In early May 1919, Captain Surov received command of expeditionary punitive detachments, whose tasks included a merciless fight against the insurgent movement. From that time on, the dark days of harshness hung over the Tomsk province, especially over the Tomsk and Mariinsky districts. Surov’s cruelty and inhumanity knew no bounds: the strong and the weak, old men and women, women and children were subjected to torture, flogging, shooting and hanging.”

Interventionists

When talking about white terror, it is imperative to take into account: this is terror that was carried out as part of the intervention of foreign aggressors on the territory of young Soviet Russia.

On March 1, 1918, German troops overthrew Soviet power in Kyiv and moved towards Kharkov, Poltava, Yekaterinoslav, Nikolaev, Kherson and Odessa. The German occupiers created the government of General P.P. Skoropadsky and proclaimed him Hetman of Ukraine.

Skoropadsky's meeting with Hindenburg at the train station in the German city of Spa, September 1918.

On March 5, the Germans, under the command of Major General von der Goltz, invaded Finland, where they soon overthrew the Finnish Soviet government. On April 18, German troops invaded Crimea, and on April 30 they captured Sevastopol.

By mid-June, more than 15 thousand German troops with aviation and artillery were in Transcaucasia, including 10 thousand people in Poti and 5 thousand in Tiflis (Tbilisi). Turkish troops have been in Transcaucasia since mid-February.

On May 25, the Czechoslovak Corps, whose echelons were located between Penza and Vladivostok, advanced.

Entente landing in Arkhangelsk, August 1918

American intervention in Vladivostok. August 1918

Japanese occupation units in Vladivostok. 1918

Allied parade in Murmansk in honor of victory in the First World War. November 1918.

Unloading British tanks in Arkhangelsk

American interventionists guard the arrested "bolos" - that's what they called the Bolsheviks. Dvinskoy Bereznik, Vinogradovsky municipal district of the Arkhangelsk region.

A special form of intervention was Russian collaborationism under the guise of the white movement.

Kolchak with foreign allies

Don Ataman Pyotr Krasnov:

“The volunteer army is pure and infallible. But it’s me, the Don Ataman, who, with my dirty hands, takes German shells and cartridges, washes them in the waves of the quiet Don and hands them over clean to the Volunteer Army! The entire shame of this matter lies with me!”

General Krasnov during the Second World War (from March 30, 1944 - head of the Main Directorate of Cossack Troops (Hauptverwaltung der Kosakenheere) http://alternathistory.com/pop…

The real genocide of the inhabitants of the Far East was carried out by American interventionists.

So, for example, having captured the peasants I. Gonevchuk, S. Gorshkov, P. Oparin and Z. Murashko, the Americans buried alive them for connections with local partisans. And the wife of partisan E. Boychuk was dealt with as follows: pierced the body with bayonets and drowned in a garbage pit. The peasant Bochkarev was mutilated beyond recognition with bayonets and knives: “his nose, lips, ears were cut off, his jaw was knocked out, his face and eyes were stabbed with bayonets, his whole body was cut up.” At the station In Sviyagino, partisan N. Myasnikov was tortured in the same brutal way, who, according to an eyewitness, “first they cut off the ears, then the nose, arms, legs, cutting them into pieces alive».

Murdered Bolshevik

“In the spring of 1919, a punitive expedition of interventionists appeared in the village, carrying out reprisals against those who were suspected of sympathizing with the partisans,” testified A. Khortov, a resident of the village of Kharitonovka, Shkotovsky district. - Punishers arrested many peasants as hostages and demanded to hand over the partisans, threatening to shoot(...) The interventionist executioners also dealt savagely with the innocent peasant hostages. Among them was my elderly father, Philip Khortov. He was brought home bloodied. He was still alive for several days, and kept repeating: “Why were they tortured me, you damned beasts?!” The father died, leaving five orphans.

Caption under the photo: “Shooted Russian. At Post No. 1, on January 8, 1919, at 3 a.m., an enemy patrol of seven men attempted to approach the American post. The village of Vysoka Gora. Ust Padega. Vaga River Village of Visorka Gora, Ust Padenga, Vaga River Column, Russia. Jan. 8, 1919. (Official U.S. Army Signal Corps caption for photo 152821).

American soldiers appeared in our village several times and each time carried out arrests of residents, robberies, and murders. In the summer of 1919, American and Japanese punitive forces staged a public flogging with ramrods and whips peasant Pavel Kuzikov. An American non-commissioned officer stood nearby and, smiling, clicked his camera. Ivan Kravchuk and three other guys from Vladivostok were suspected of having connections with the partisans, they tortured me for several days. They knocked out their teeth, cut off their tongues».

“The interventionists surrounded Little Cape and opened fire on the village. Having learned that there were no partisans there, the Americans became bolder and burst into it, burned down the school. Brutally flog everyone whoever came their way. Peasant Cherevatov, like many others, had to be carried home, bloodied and unconscious. American infantrymen carried out brutal oppression in the villages of Knevichi, Krolevtsy and other settlements. In front of everyone, an American officer fired several bullets into the head wounded boy Vasily Shemyakin." //https://topwar.ru/14988-zverst…

US Army Colonel Morrow: " couldn't sleep without killing someone on this day (...) When our soldiers captured the Russians, they took them to the Andriyanovka station, where the wagons were unloaded, prisoners were brought to huge pits, where they were shot from machine guns».

Colonel Morrow's "most memorable" day was "when 1600 people were shot, delivered in 53 wagons."

In May 1918, a squadron of the Allied Entente forces entered Murmansk for intervention. The crew of the Olympia assigned people to the Anglo-French-American landing force that occupied the city. The Americans created a real Sonderkommando: they hunted the Bolsheviks.

The Japanese invaders were no less cruel than the American ones. In January 1919, the Japanese burned the village of Sokhatino, and in February the village of Ivanovka.

Reporter Yamauchi from the Japanese newspaper Urajio Nippo:

“The village of Ivanovka was surrounded. The 60-70 households that it consisted of were completely burned, and its inhabitants, including women and children (300 people in total) - captured. Some tried to take refuge in their homes. And then these houses were set on fire along with the people in them».

In the first days of April 1920 alone, the Japanese, suddenly violating the truce agreement, killed about 7 thousand people in Vladivostok, Spassk, Nikolsk-Ussuriysk and surrounding villages.

The interventionists mercilessly plundered all the occupied territories of Russia. They exported metal, coal, bread, machinery and equipment, engines and furs. Civilian ships and steam locomotives were stolen. From Ukraine alone, by October 1918, the Germans had exported 52 thousand tons of grain and fodder, 34 thousand tons of sugar, 45 million eggs, 53 thousand horses and 39 thousand heads of cattle.

In total, more than a million invaders visited Russia - 280 thousand Austro-German, 850 thousand British, American, French and Japanese. The Russian people, according to incomplete data, lost about 8 million killed, tortured in concentration camps, and died from wounds, hunger and epidemics. The country's material losses, according to experts, amounted to 50 billion gold rubles. //Based on materials from varjag_2007

Atrocities of the White Guards

Doctor of Historical Sciences Heinrich Ioffe in the magazine “Science and Life No. 12 for 2004” in an article about Denikin writes:

“In the territories liberated from the Reds there was a real revanchist Sabbath. The old masters returned and reigned arbitrariness, robberies, terrible Jewish pogroms…».

William Sydney Graves (1865-1940)

“There were terrible murders in Eastern Siberia, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks, as was usually thought. I won't be wrong if I say that For every person killed by the Bolsheviks, 100 people were killed by anti-Bolshevik elements».

Czechoslovak punitive forces literally wiped out entire towns and villages from the face of the earth. In Yeniseisk alone, for example, more than 700 people were shot for sympathizing with the Bolsheviks - almost a tenth of those living there. When suppressing the uprising of prisoners at the Alexander Transit Prison in September 1919, the Czechs shot the prisoners at point-blank range with machine guns and cannons. The massacre lasted three days. About 600 people died at the hands of the executioners.

Concentration camps were set up for those who opposed the occupation or sympathized with the Bolsheviks.

On August 23, 1918, on the island of Mudyug near the Northern Dvina in the Arkhangelsk region, Entente interventionists created a concentration camp for Bolsheviks and sympathizers.

Because of this, Mudyug received the nickname “Island of Death”. On June 2, 1919, the British handed over the concentration camp to the White Guards. By this time, out of 1,242 prisoners, 23 had been shot, 310 died from disease and mistreatment, and more than 150 people became disabled.

After the departure of the Anglo-French interventionists, power in the North of Russia passed into the hands of the White Guard general Yevgeny Miller. He not only continued, but also intensified repression and terror, trying to stop the rapidly developing process of Bolshevization of the population. Their most inhumane embodiment was the convict prison in Yokanga, which one of the prisoners described as the most brutal, sophisticated method of exterminating people with a slow, painful death:

“The dead lay on bunks along with the living, and the living were no better than the dead: dirty, covered with scabs, in torn rags, decomposing alive, they presented a nightmarish picture.”

Yokang Prison

Model of the Yokanga prison in the Murmansk Museum of Local Lore

By the time Iokanga was liberated from the whites, out of one and a half thousand prisoners, 576 people remained there, of whom 205 could no longer move.

A system of similar concentration camps was deployed by Admiral Kolchak in Siberia and the Far East. The Kolchak regime imprisoned 914,178 people who rejected the restoration of pre-revolutionary orders. Another 75 thousand people were in white Siberia. Kolchak drove more than 520 thousand prisoners into slave, almost unpaid labor in enterprises and agriculture.

Bodies of workers and peasants shot by Kolchak's men

When in the fall of 1918 the White Guards began to suffer defeat from the Red Army, barges and death trains with prisoners of prisons and concentration camps reached the Eastern Front, Siberia, and then the Far East.

When the death trains were in Primorye, they were visited by members of the American Red Cross. One of them, Bukeli, wrote in his diary:

Fracture

As stated above, Lenin was initially determined to release the enemies of the revolution on a signature with guarantees of non-participation in sabotage. This was due to the phenomenal success of the October Revolution, which in four months spread throughout Russia, thanks to the support of the Soviet power by the overwhelming majority of the common people. Lenin hoped that opponents would realize the irreversibility of the accomplished self-determination of the people and the change in the political system.

However, brutal white terror and intervention forced the Bolsheviks to change tactics.

Then many enemies of the revolution were released on parole. Among them were Pyotr Krasnov, Vladimir Marushevsky, Vasily Boldyrev, Vladimir Purishkevich, Alexey Nikitin, Kuzma Gvozdev, Semyon Maslov and others.

However, the counter-revolutionaries again launched an armed struggle, propaganda, sabotage, terrorist attacks, and entered into an alliance with the aggressors, which resulted in the death of several more million citizens for the country during the years of the Civil War and intervention. Then the Soviet leadership decided to change tactics, although we emphasize once again this measure was solely a response.

Red Terror

The Red Terror was aimed at those who purposefully acted against the authorities and was governed by certain principles: there had to be justification and public announcement of the reprisals.

Let us turn, following the main scientific principle, to historical documents:

If you carefully study the newspaper clippings of those years, we are always talking about enemy combat units: those who are waging a specific fight against the new state, participating in the white movement, or committing other counter-revolutionary crimes prohibited by law.

Let us also pay attention to the method of carrying out terror. This is, as a rule, a court-martial, that is, execution on the spot. Google, on the other hand, returns child victims and sadistic pictures when searching for “red terror.”

True, it is not clear on what basis photographs of dug up corpses and severed fingers on the bodies of old women are attributed to the Red Terror, that is, the actions of the security officers.

This may well be nothing more than evidence of the brutal chaos of those years. The old government collapsed in the country, and the new one still did not control everything. Forest bandits, nationalists, city gangs and looters were active. Millions of people returned from the war fronts demoralized. The emperor who declared war renounced his country, and the conspirators who accepted the renunciation treacherously destroyed the army right during the fighting outside their native lands.

As a result, Russia not only did not receive the Bosporus and Dardanelles promised by its allies, but also abandoned all the conquests of the soldiers of the First World War. Why did almost three million Russians die, and seven million were wounded or captured?

Many became marginalized, poverty and ruin reigned everywhere, and millions of uncontrolled weapons were walking around the country, the large-scale production of which was launched for the First World War.

Unlike Kolchak’s punishers, who burn villages, torture and kill local men, women, and children, the security officers look like real fighters for establishing order in the newly established state. We will not take on the role of judges here, but at least in the context of what is happening in the country, described in detail above, such a fight may seem justified.

Chekists-Red Guards of the railway junction of the station. Chrysostom 1919

Various cultural and educational societies sponsored by the Soros, MacArthur foundations, the US government and others have said a lot about the Red Terror.

Now let us give the floor to the official position of the Soviet government.

As we see, there is no talk of any “billions of victims of Bolshevism” that liberal human rights activists constantly talk about.

However, let us briefly look at how anti-Soviet fables are created, using one specific example.

There is such a site “Historical Memory”. Its focus can be judged from its description:

Many problems of modern Russian society that interest us are mentioned here: the supernatural interest in “victims of the regime”, and “reconciliation”, and the Yeltsin Center, and the Higher School of Economics.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin taught to see the interests of certain classes behind any activity:

“People have always been and will always be stupid victims of deception and self-deception in politics until they learn to look for the interests of certain classes behind any moral, religious, political, social phrases, statements, promises.”

//Lenin V.I. Three sources and three components of Marxism // Complete. collection op. – T. 23. – P. 47.

In this vein, the partners of the mentioned Internet portal are interesting.

Special thanks to oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov for his participation in the creation of the site.

Here is the typical content of this site:

There is a caption under the photo:

In August 1918, after the assassination attempt on Lenin and the murder of Uritsky, the Bolsheviks announced an action of retaliation in the country - the Red Terror. Rybinsk did not stand aside either. On September 4, 1918, in the newspaper “Izvestia of the Rybinsk Council of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Red Army Deputies” a menacing notice from the Rybinsk District Military Commissariat appeared: “Red bloody terror is declared to everyone who lives on capital, exploiting the labor of others!” The trial of traitors will be brief and merciless - within 24 hours there will be a verdict and execution!”

The Rybinsk district emergency commission drew up a “planned order” for executions. The mass executions continued for two days. Both single and mass executions were carried out. The families of Rybinsk merchants Polenovs, Durdins, Zherebtsovs, Sadovs and others were shot.

The mechanism for carrying out the Red Terror was as follows. The chairman of the Rybinsk district Cheka, P. Golyshkov, called his subordinates and gave the order to shoot specific individuals. A firing squad of 4-5 security officers was assembled. This group went to a specific address, a search was carried out and valuable property was confiscated. Then the owner of the house or several family members were taken out of the house under the pretext of sending them to the Cheka for interrogation. However, those arrested were not taken to the Cheka, but to a forest or barn and shot there. Some of the property of the murdered was divided among the members of the firing squad, and some was handed over to the Cheka. On the way from the place of execution to the Cheka, members of the firing squad entered the house of one of the security officers, where they drank to the point of severe alcoholic intoxication. The Red Army soldiers from the military registration and enlistment office, who also participated in the Red Terror campaign, acted in a similar way.

Here's what really happened.

Popenov was not on the execution lists examined by a local historian. Then the granddaughter of this merchant appeared, who explained literally the following:

The family of Leonty Lukich Popenov was indeed shot. But not the whole family, but those who were at home when the bandits arrived. The Popenovs' house was located on the left bank of the Volga (opposite Rybinsk). They were photographed near their home. By the way, it was preserved. There has been a clinic there since the 1930s.
So, the head of the family, who was in the city at that moment, as well as his two daughters, who were in Rybinsk (at classes), were lucky to avoid execution. In addition, she was lucky that her eldest daughter, who was in Kyiv in 1918, got married in January 1911. And one more son survived, because... he served in the army. The First World War and the Civil War ended for him in Serbia.
L.L. Popenov buried his wife and murdered children in the fence of the Church of the Iveron Mother of God, located not far from their home, also on the left bank of the Volga.
The execution of the family of L.L. Popenov took place for the purpose of a banal robbery.
L. L. Popenov himself lived to a ripe old age and died at the age of more than 90 years (in 1942), buried near Moscow.

In this situation, the Rybinsk security officers were credited with something that they did not do, and Popenov lived in Soviet Russia until a very old age, and no one executed him just because he was a merchant under the capitalist system.

This is how historical myths are created.

Instead of a conclusion

After the end of the Civil War, the Red Terror was curtailed.

Is it possible for the Soviet state to return to a new wave of terror? Lenin answered this question prophetically. The first People's Commissar of the USSR - to the last People's Commissar of the USSR I.V. Stalin:

“Terror was imposed on us by Entente terrorism, when world-powerful powers attacked us with their hordes, stopping at nothing. We could not have held out even for two days if these attempts by the officers and White Guards had not been responded to in a merciless manner, and this meant terror, but this was imposed on us by the terrorist methods of the Entente. And as soon as we won a decisive victory, even before the end of the war, immediately after the capture of Rostov, we abandoned the use of the death penalty...

And I think, hope and am confident that the All-Russian Central Executive Committee will unanimously confirm this measure of the Council of People's Commissars and resolve it in such a way that the use of the death penalty in Russia becomes impossible.

It goes without saying that any attempt by the Entente to resume the methods of war will force us to resume the previous terror. We know that we live in a time of predation, when kind words are not acted upon; This is what we had in mind, and as soon as the decisive struggle was over, we immediately began to abolish the measures that are applied indefinitely in all other powers.”

Report on the work of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars // Lenin V.I. PSS vol. 40. P. 101)

What remains for us is to study history well in order to clearly determine where good and evil are, and to preserve the values of the victory of the Great October Revolution, which our ancestors achieved with such difficulty and with such losses.

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There are three problems with the October Revolution: its causes, the role of German money, and the scale and motives of the Red and White Terror

This year marks the 95th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, as this event was called twenty years ago.

As the prominent American journalist John Reed wrote in his book “Ten Days That Shook the World,” published in 1919, “whatever others may think about Bolshevism, it is undeniable that the Russian Revolution is one of the greatest events in the history of mankind, and the rise Bolsheviks are a phenomenon of global significance."

And Alexander Solzhenitsyn believed that “The October Revolution is a myth created by victorious Bolshevism and completely adopted by the progressives of the West<…>There was nothing organic about the October Revolution for Russia; on the contrary, it broke its backbone. The Red Terror unleashed by its leaders, their readiness to drown Russia in blood is the first and clear proof of this.”

In modern Russia, too, there is still no unified attitude towards revolution. To this day, three problems excite public opinion most of all: the causes of the revolution, the role of so-called German money in it, the scale and motives of the Red and White Terror.

We decided to discuss them with the head of the Department of Contemporary History of Russia at St. Petersburg University, the author of several monographs and textbooks on the Contemporary and Economic History of Russia MikhailKhodyakov and associate professor of the same department, author of several works on the history of the Cheka and the Red Terror IlyaRatkovsky.

MichaelKhodyakov: The revolution was the result of a comprehensive, deep crisis that gripped Russia. The purchasing power of the ruble from 1914 to February 1917 fell to 26-27 kopecks. And by October it’s already up to 6-7 kopecks. External debt and dependence on foreign creditors have increased. War debts amounted to 7.25 billion rubles. Due to the incompatibility of the transport management system with military tasks and the inability of the government to establish it, a transport crisis occurred, primarily the railway one. Due to transport disruption and the occupation of large territories by the Germans, communications between regions were lost, and the country experienced an acute shortage of fuel and raw materials.

The crisis also affected the army. Infantry regiments lost several sets of privates and officers - only in a few the losses in killed and wounded were 300 percent, more often - 400-500 percent or more. By the fall of 1917, there were only about four percent of career officers who began serving before the war in the army, the remaining 96 were wartime officers. Army supply calculations compiled by the military department turned out to be underestimated. As a result, in the first two years of the war, the army lacked rifles, cartridges, guns, shells, communications equipment, and so on. Finally, the crisis hit the Russian elite. And so much so that, as Trotsky wrote, when the revolution began, “among the command staff there was no one who would stand up for their tsar. Everyone was in a hurry to board the ship of the revolution in the firm expectation of finding comfortable cabins there.”

— A what is was combat effectiveness army in 1917 year?

M.X.: A remarkable indicator of the army’s combat effectiveness is the creation of women’s death battalions. After all, they are needed in order to somehow encourage male soldiers to take up arms and continue to fight, maybe they will be ashamed. Denikin in his “Essays on the Russian Troubles” writes that when in the summer of 1917 the next offensive began at the front, in the southwest, where the Brusilov breakthrough had taken place a year earlier, women stood up and went on the attack, but men did not.

War Minister Polivanov admitted: “It’s hopeless in the theater of military operations. The retreat doesn't stop<...>Demoralization, surrender, desertion assume enormous proportions<...>A continuous picture of defeat and confusion.”

By 1916 there was no longer any desire to fight. Although by this time Russia began to produce more guns and other weapons than all the allies combined. But the war began with mischievous, jingoistic sentiments.

But after the defeats of 1915, everything changed. The tragedy of both the tsarist and the Provisional governments is that they were unable to understand the change in the mood of the people and the army and end the war. If the Provisional Government felt the “pulse of the people” and did not strive to bring the war to a victorious end, then it would probably have had a better chance of coping with the many difficulties that became an inevitable consequence of the collapse of the old order. The provisional government took too long to begin radical reforms. “Would there be a single fool in the world who would go to revolution,” Lenin later said, “if social reform had really begun?”

— Important role V decomposition Russian army And rear before February revolution played accusations V address empress And environment her And emperor V betrayal And aspiration To separate to the world. Case it came before executions colonel Myasoedova And resignation military minister Sukhomlinova. Can say, What subject German influence on events V Russia started more long ago before accusations Lenin V receiving German money. Only at first she touched yard And elite. How much at all were justified these suspicions And accusations?

M.X.: These accusations were part of the anti-German sentiment that became widespread at the beginning of the war and quickly escalated into pogroms - in Petrograd in the summer of 1914, and in Moscow in May 1915. The authorities reacted sluggishly to this, trying to let off steam in this way. Playing along with these sentiments, the tsarist government deported Germans during the First World War, in particular from Petrograd. But we are accustomed to associate deportations with the name of Stalin.

Anti-German sentiment affected many famous figures. Denikin wrote in his “Essays on Russian Troubles” about the rare roar of his native artillery, treacherously deprived of shells. That is, even the generals believed that there were not enough shells due to the fact that the Germans were everywhere in Russia. Although the problem was the unpreparedness of the industry. General Brusilov also believed that the inner German does not allow the Russian person to turn around. Before the war, he was appointed to Warsaw as an assistant to the commander of the troops, and to prove his statement, he lists in his memoirs the names of his fellow officers - all Germans.

As for German conspiracies, I think there were none in the classical sense of the word. Although it is known that the German leadership, using dynastic connections, through intermediaries, repeatedly turned to the Grand Dukes, as well as to Empress Alexandra Feodorovna with proposals for a separate peace. But, to Alexandra Feodorovna’s credit, she rejected all proposals.

— IN famous sense continuation theories German conspiracy become attacks on Lenin, accused V betrayal And V receiving German money. Let's get started With the notorious sealed carriage. In- first, This result behind the scenes collusion Lenin And Germans - or assistance Swiss socialists Russian? In- secondly, Why Lenin Not went, let's say through France? AND on what conditions took place moving?

M.X.: I explain many things by the impulsive character of the Bolshevik leader. I think he just took the fastest and shortest route. Lenin cared little about anyone’s opinion: what the Cadets would think, what someone else would think. Moreover, the Provisional Government was not at all eager to help opponents of the war return to Russia. But Lenin strove to go to Russia, he wanted to take part in the revolution as soon as possible, the rest did not interest him. Although he was immediately accused of having connections with the Germans, and even under the Provisional Government there was an attempt to arrange a trial of him and other Bolsheviks on charges of treason, but it all burst like a soap bubble.

Gennady Leontyevich Sobolev, a professor in our department and the author of several works devoted to the problem of relations between the Bolsheviks and the Germans, noted that “not only Lenin and his supporters returned from emigration in this way: three trains with political emigrants passed through Germany. These groups, consisting mainly of Social Democrats, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, were forced to take the route through Germany after it became clear that there really was no other route to Russia. On April 16, a telegram signed by Axelrod, Martov, Ryazanov, Lunacharsky, and Nathanson was published in Petrograd newspapers: “We state the absolute impossibility of returning to Russia through England.” Along with Lenin and Zinoviev, many prominent representatives of other political parties and movements arrived in the same way: Martov, Martynov, Ryazanov, Kon, Nathanson, Ustinov, Balabanova and others.”

The Menshevik leader Martov later very much regretted that he did not join Lenin, although it was he who was the author of the idea of travel through Germany. Martov arrived a month or two later, and it turned out that he had missed his game.

— But The main thing accusation retractable against Bolsheviks And personally against Lenin, - receiving money from Germans. How much on your sight, justified these accusations?

M.X.: The main sources of accusations against the Bolsheviks are the so-called documents of Sisson, an American journalist, head of the editorial office of the Democratic Publishing House of the Inter-Allied Propaganda Commission. In March 1918, these documents were sold to him for 25 thousand dollars by journalist Ferdinand Ossendowski. As it turned out later, Ossendovsky fabricated the documents. As Professor Sobolev notes, back in 1919 these documents were criticized in Germany, where a special brochure was published with a foreword by one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party, Scheidemann, who was then a member of the German government. The brochure proved that the German military institutions, on whose behalf the published documents allegedly came, never existed, their forms and seals were false, and the names of the officers whose signatures were on the documents did not appear on German lists.

The fact that the Sisson documents are an absolute forgery was proven in even more detail in 1956 by George Kennan, an American diplomat, political scientist and historian who worked for many years in the Soviet Union. In 1933, Kennan came to Moscow as an interpreter for William Bullitt, the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union. In 1946, he sends a telegram from Moscow in which he proves the impossibility of cooperation between the United States and the USSR and calls on the United States government to firmly oppose Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe. Then in July 1947, in the journal International Relations, he published an essay signed by a certain “X”, which outlined a containment strategy Soviet Union, soon realized American government in life. That is, he was an absolute anti-Soviet, and in this sense his testimony as a historian can be considered unbiased. According to Kennan, the documents were printed on the same typewriter, although they were allegedly created in different places and in different time, there is confusion with the old and new style. Professor Sobolev has already in our time added to the list of inaccuracies, contradictions and historical improbabilities. For example, the name “St. Petersburg Security Department” is incorrect: firstly, because it was officially called the “Department for the Protection of Public Safety and Order in the Capital,” and secondly, Petersburg had long been Petrograd at that time. It’s sad that some of us still take these documents at face value, publish them, and refer to them.

Of course, historical truth requires clarification of the issue of money. But money was not the reason for the October events. The same Kennan, in an article dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution, wrote that “the Bolsheviks won in 1917 thanks to their unity, discipline, strict secrecy, and skillful political leadership.” The Bolshevik Party, Kennan believed, was “the only political force that had courage, dexterity, discipline, purpose.”

Another thing is that at that moment the interests of Germany and the Bolsheviks converged. The Germans hoped, by withdrawing Russia from the war, to free their hands on the Western Front, and the Bolsheviks hoped to unleash a revolution throughout Europe, and to begin with, in Russia and Germany. And Lenin outplayed the Germans. The Germans were defeated, and a revolution took place in Germany, also thanks to the help of the Bolsheviks.

— At first revolution was leaking enough peacefully. Directly after October some That large-scale collisions Not was. But those Not less To mid 1918 of the year started Civil war, accompanied bursts monstrous cruelty, V in particular terror, which Bolsheviks announced measure By intimidation their opponents.

IlyaRatkovsky: When considering the repressive policies of all sides of the Civil War, I would not single out the Red Terror as a special phenomenon. The practice of terror as a social phenomenon, characteristic of all participants in the conflict, was caused by the state of society. Society was prepared for terror culturally, politically, historically. And through the prism of this society, terror as a general social phenomenon is decomposed into red, white, green, pink (SR), black (against the clergy), yellow (anti-Semitic). Society turned out to be ready for terror.

— IN how consisted this readiness And what are her causes?

M.X.: After the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, and in fact earlier, millions of soldiers returned home. During three years of a terrible war, their psyche was shaken, they became accustomed to cruelty and death. Human life was worth nothing to them. Maximilian Voloshin wrote that the war breathed into them “anger, greed, the dark intoxication of revelry.”

AND.R.: As for the Red Terror and the entire policy of repression in general, this was an important, although not the most important, means for the Reds to unite the rear and overcome anarchy in it. In addition, the threat of reprisals greatly contributed to the attraction of military experts to the Red Army.

Often terror was a reaction to demands coming to Moscow from the regions. The first executions were not carried out according to directives from Moscow, it was terror of local Soviet authorities. For example, Sverdlov’s well-known directive on decossackization in 1919 and the entire policy towards the Cossacks in general was largely a reaction to demands coming from the Don itself. The fact is that on the Don there were a lot of so-called non-residents - the rural, non-Cossack population. There were even more of them than Cossacks. Before the revolution, the Donskoy troops from other cities in the Region had limited rights. Five hundred thousand of them were generally deprived of the right to own land here. And as soon as Soviet power was established, nonresidents demanded land redistribution in accordance with the Decree on Land, which the Cossacks resolutely resisted. It was the non-resident “lower classes” who demanded de-Cossackization, and the Soviet “highest” were forced to choose who to support in this conflict - the Cossacks or the peasantry. A similar choice faced the Soviet government in Siberia, where there was also a conflict between the peasantry and the Cossacks.

The Red Terror was officially declared on September 5, 1918, after the murder of Uritsky and the assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30 of the same year. The Cheka takes control of the repressions, and systematicity is introduced into the practice of terror. As a result, the number of those repressed by the Bolsheviks even decreased compared to the week from August 30 to September 5. Another thing is that now among those executed there are significantly fewer random elements, the same criminals, and much more officers and representatives of the old regime in the broadest class sense.

By the time the official Red Terror was announced, examples of mass both White and Red Terror were observed in the South of Russia, and in the Volga region - Czechoslovakian Terror. So, on May 26, units of the Czechoslovak Corps captured Chelyabinsk and shot all members of the city council. And after the capture of Penza, 250 Czech Red Guards were shot.

— What's it like By- yours, quantity victims red terror? Different sources called from several thousand before several millions Human.

AND.R.: These are extremes. When we're talking about about several thousand, they refer to Latsis, he speaks of more than six thousand people, and when speaking about one and a half million, they refer to Melgunov. My calculations show that the number of victims of the Red and White Terror for the entire period of the Civil War from 1918 to 1921 is comparable and amounts to about 250-300 thousand people on each side. Of these, approximately 50 percent are victims of local self-government and lynching. In addition, 20-30 percent are criminals, as well as those executed for official crimes. Of course, this does not include victims of war, deprivation and famine.

— What way counted quantity victims terror?

AND.R.: If we are talking about the Red Terror, then based on the materials of the emergency commissions. In the fall of 1918, about eight thousand people were shot. There were also military executions, lynchings. The number of victims of the White terror is determined from press materials and documents from the authorities of the White movement responsible for the terror. Historian Gimpelson, using archival data, estimates the number of those executed by KOMUCH (Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly. - « Expert") in Kazan alone for one month in a thousand people. And there is also Samara, there is Lipyagi near Samara, where the Whites carried out mass executions of prisoners. When Krasnov captured Kalach, according to some estimates, about a thousand people were repressed there. And there is also the tragedy of Aleksandrov-Gai, Maikop, Slavgorod with their hundreds of people who died at the hands of opponents of Soviet power.

In 1919, the main terror developed in Ukraine. But this was the Ukrainian Red Terror, the result of the actions of the All-Ukrainian Extraordinary Commission, which was disbanded twice for its activities. There, in Ukraine, there were mass lynchings that had nothing to do with Moscow. At the end of the spring and summer of 1919, about 20 thousand people became victims of the All-Ukrainian Emergency Commission.

Although there is a lot of mythology here. A myth, for example, is Dora Yavlinskaya, to whom terrible atrocities were attributed in the Odessa Cheka. The Whites even made a film about her. But this image was created by white propaganda. In fact, Dora did not exist, just like the black Johnson, who allegedly commanded a detachment of Chinese in the Odessa Cheka, about whom they also wrote a lot.

When, say, they write about one and a half to two and a half thousand victims of the Red Terror in Kharkov, the source is data from OSVAG (Liberation Agency - the information and propaganda body of the Volunteer Army. - « Expert"), but they are not documented. Meanwhile, during their short stay in Kharkov, the whites shot 1,268 people. This figure was obtained by the St. Petersburg historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences Poltorak - he established the surname lists of the dead based on archive data.

In 1920, executions in Crimea stand out. Quite accurate data on the number of victims in the Yalta, Simferopol and Feodosia Cheka have now been established. These are the three largest Chekas, and in total there are less than eight thousand executed. But, obviously, there were executions at less significant points. That is, the final number of victims is 10-12 thousand people. Although the same Melgunov talks about 150 thousand, but this is fantastic.

Finally, the bulk of those repressed in 1921 were participants in the Kronstadt uprising, about three and a half thousand people. And in other regions there are about one and a half thousand.

— IN how difference red And white terror?

AND.R.: Unlike the Soviets, the White movement was not centralized, which greatly contributed to their defeat. Therefore, decisions on repressive policies were made by each of the leaders independently. For example, Kolchak’s principles of punitive policy included hostages, the execution of every tenth person, and the destruction of villages in case of resistance. But there are no Kolchak signatures on the documents. The decisions were made by officials who were responsible for internal policy.

Maybe the white terror, unlike the red one, was more impulsive: the city is engaged - a purge is carried out, then counterintelligence works, then the purge before leaving the city. The White Terror was largely irrational, while the Red Terror was practical. White terror rather disorganizes the rear than helps it. Let's say they suddenly arrest all the workers because they are afraid of them. Not everyone is shot, but the disorganization is obvious.

— You they said What terror played important role V attracting military experts V Red army, But it is known What was a lot of And volunteers. How much service military specialists was voluntary, A how much forced?

AND.R.: There are several extreme points of view. Denikin in “Essays on the Russian Time of Troubles,” highlighting among the officers the opportunists and those who showed themselves in 1917 as supporters of the democratization of the army, pointed out that many of them subsequently adapted to the Soviet regime. At the same time, the very living conditions during the Civil War often dictated a choice in favor of the Red Army, which guaranteed, however, with some reservations, security, material benefits in the form of high salaries and special rations, the opportunity to stay close to family, as well as career growth.

To a certain extent, another factor also played a role: the Red Army was presented as an organ of central government; white formations, with their complex territorial status, contradictory relations with foreign states and, ultimately, marginal character, the cult of pioneers, seemed a less successful option.

M.Kh.: According to historians, by December 1920, out of 131 thousand command personnel of the Red Army, former generals and officers made up 75 thousand, or 56 percent. Suffice it to say that 775 former generals served in the Red Army, among whom were Bonch-Bruevich, Verkhovsky, Zayonchkovsky, Svechin, Parsky, Klembovsky, and 1726 staff officers, that is, colonels and lieutenant colonels: Karbyshev, Shaposhnikov, Egorov, Vatsetis, Kamenev and others. Of course, not everyone commanded armies or fronts - the new government did not trust everyone and not right away. Some taught or studied military history. They tried to use someone, such as General Brusilov, given his extraordinary popularity in various strata of society. But I believe that most generals and officers served the new regime not out of fear, but out of conscience.

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PRIVATE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION OF HIGHER EDUCATION EASTERN ECONOMIC-LEGAL HUMANITIES ACADEMY (VEGU Academy) Direction of training 03/46/01 – History Focus (profile) – Historical political science Anastasia Olegovna Petrenko COURSE WORK Red and White Terror in the Civil War Head Beans Leva Natalya Mikhailovna UFA 2016

Contents Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………….…. 3 1. Theoretical basis for studying the current crisis situation in Russia during the revolutionary events of 1917. Consideration of the punitive actions of the two main warring parties of the Civil War: the “Reds” and the “Whites”....... ...........................................................................7 1.1. Revolutionary events of 1917. The collapse of the monarchical system in the Russian Empire and the activities of the Provisional Government. Seizure of power by the Bolsheviks……………...………………………………………………………......7 1.2. Red terror in Russia. Repressive measures against civilians by representatives of the Bolshevik Party and supporters of the Soviets…………………………….……………………………………………………………...... 11 1.3. White terror during the Civil War. Repressive policy of anti-Bolshevik forces……………………………………………………………..17 2. Analysis of repressive methods and organizational structures of terror of both warring parties…………………… ….................................................. ..................23 2.1.Analysis of terrorist methods aimed at intimidating and subjugating the population in the occupied territories ……………………………………………23 2.2 .Consideration of the activities of the punitive authorities of the Bolsheviks and white governments………………………………………………………………………..26 3. Consideration of the process of theoretical and practical study of the topic of terror Civil war in post-Soviet Russia. Teaching and studying the theme of terror 1917-1922. in history lessons at school…………..28 3.1. The process of studying the problem of terror of the Civil War in the conditions of today's Russian science………………………………………………………...28 3.2 .The process of studying the theme of terror during the Civil War of the 1917-1920s. in history lessons at school. Presentation of material to students……………………….32

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….34 References……………………………………………………… ………………………...37

Introduction Civil war is the most terrible form of military conflict between various political factions. There are no rights in a civil war. It is impossible to remove responsibility from one side of the conflict and place it entirely on the other, because all participants in this national drama are to blame. Their fault is that they allowed a fratricidal war to begin. The people who, as a result of the coup, took over power over a huge interethnic state and those who tried to regain power with the help of an internal military conflict are full-fledged culprits of the tragedy that the people of Russia experienced in the first quarter of the 20th century. From a purely scientific point of view, the civil war of 1917-1922. can be regarded as the natural finale of a collapsed empire, in which from the beginning of the 20th century. a systemic crisis was growing: the Russo-Japanese War, the revolutionary events of 1905, unfinished reforms, the First World War and what happened during it - the fall of the monarchy, the collapse of the country, the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. All this together led to a split in Russian society at many levels. The result of all this is a fierce internal fratricidal struggle of different political trends, accompanied by foreign intervention and the rampant behavior of numerous gangs. Just as the Civil War was the result of a destroyed empire, so terror becomes a constant companion of this terrible war. The relevance of this topic lies in the need for an objective and comprehensive study of the problem of the use of terror by the two largest military-political formations in the period from 1918-1922. red and white. Today, the most objective and informative of the narrative sources is the monograph of Professor A.L. Litvin "Red and White Terror in Russia 1918-1922." AT 3

In the modern historical, scientific, literary, journalistic and artistic space, a certain trend is emerging: the idealization of the White movement, its ordinary participants and leaders, and, as a contrast to it, the bloody Bolshevik regime, the terrible Red Terror. In the wake of the lifting of any ideological prohibitions and the amount of literature that appeared in the public domain, including emigrant literature, again, as many years ago, the “leaning” in one direction intensified, only the direction changed: whites are heroes. In this regard, the difficulty arises of an objective, comprehensive study of the problem associated with the study of the topic of terror of the Red and White movements. And this despite the amount of journalistic and memoir literature, historical research that is available today not only to a specialist, but also to any interested person. The purpose of this work is to systematize knowledge on the topic of red and white terror. In this regard, the following tasks were formulated: 1. Study of theoretical data on the history of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, the Civil War and the terrorist methods of the Red and White movements; 2. Comparison of repressive methods and law enforcement agencies of the Red and White movements, which pursued a policy of intimidation of civilians and repressive measures against opponents; 3. Consideration of the process of theoretical and practical study of the topic of terror that occurred during the Civil War in today's historical science; 4. Formation of a possible process for studying “Terror during the Civil War of 1917-1922” in history lessons at school. The object of this work is terror during the Civil War of 1917-1922. 4

The subject of the study is the existing problems in the study of terror applied to various categories of citizens, the two most numerous opposing formations of the Civil War of 1917-1922. Among the most famous historical and journalistic works we can highlight following works: S. P. Melgunov “Red Terror in Russia”, “How the Bolsheviks seized power”; N.N. Golovin “Russian counter-revolution in 1917 – 1918”; N.S. Kirmel “Special services of the White movement. 1918-1922. Counterintelligence", "Special services of the White movement. 19181922.Intelligence"; L.A. Yuzefovich “Winter road. General A. N. Pepelyaev and anarchist I. Ya. Strod in Yakutia. 1922-1923", "Autocrat of the Desert: Baron R. F. Ungern-Sternberg and the world in which he lived"; A.L. Litvin “Red and White Terror in Russia in 1918-1922”; V. P. Buldakov “Red Troubles. The nature and consequences of revolutionary violence”; S.V. Volkov “Red Terror in Petrograd”, “Red Terror in the South of Russia”, “Red Terror in Moscow”, “Red Terror through the Eyes of Eyewitnesses” (compiler); I.S. Ratkovsky “Red Terror and the activities of the Cheka in 1918”; V.Zh. Tsvetkov “General Alekseev”, “The formation of the Soviet political system. 1917–1941" (team of authors). Over the entire period of studying this issue in historical science, researchers have published many works. The above list of journalism is far from complete. Of the literature used in this work, the work of Professor A.L. most fully and objectively covers the topic of terror of the Civil War. Litvin "Red and White Terror in Russia". As mentioned above, today this is perhaps the most complete scientific work on this issue: Litvin, without taking sides, gives a large-scale picture of terror in the period from 1917 to 1922. Also worthy of attention is the work of the famous historian of the Russian Abroad S.P. Melgunov "Red Terror in Russia". From the title of the book it is clear which direction the author chose for research. Melgunov himself, who was 5

for a long time, in the position of a person arrested and sentenced to death, he could not harbor any positive feelings towards the Bolsheviks, but at the same time, his profession as a historian takes precedence over personal experiences, and he scrupulously and comprehensively studies the tragedy of the Red Terror, relying on the press of that time and the memories of eyewitnesses of the events. But, nevertheless, one cannot help but notice that the scientist’s attitude towards the “white terror” is rather lenient and, for the most part, justifiable. A valuable source for a researcher of this problem are those published not so long ago by Doctor of Historical Sciences S.V. Volkov, collections of memoirs of eyewitnesses and victims of the “Red Terror” in various regions of Russia. In the process of writing the course work, the works of such scientists as: A.L. were used. Litvin, S.P. Melgunov, I.S. Ratkovsky, G.V. Vernadsky, S.V. Volkov, A.N. Sakharov. The practical significance of this work lies in the fact that a systematized theoretical basis, as well as an analysis of terrorist methods and punitive authorities of the red and white formations, is possible for practical application in the process of studying this topic, both in higher educational institutions and in secondary schools in the classroom stories. The work consists of an introduction, 3 references. 6 sections, conclusion, list

1. The theoretical basis for studying the current crisis situation in Russia during the revolutionary events of 1917. Consideration of the punitive actions of the two main warring parties of the Civil War: “Red” and “White” 1.1. Revolutionary events of 1917. The collapse of the monarchical system in the Russian Empire and the activities of the Provisional government. Seizure of power by the Bolsheviks In 1917, Russia, like many European states, entered an exhausted, warring, unstable country. The World War strained all the forces of the state and society to the limit. Every day social and economic problems became more and more acute. On the eve of the February Revolution, as a result of which monarchical rule in Russia will end, it becomes clear that the war has created a crisis at all levels of society, which the ruling structure is not able to cope with. In February 1917, Russia lost legitimate power, and with it all institutions of power. Formally, the state continues to remain monarchical, but in fact it is already a republic. Revolutionary events broke out spontaneously, and the quick victory of the protesters came as a surprise to many political forces in the country. “Dual power” is being established in Russia. On February 27, in the midst of natural unrest, two opposing authorities were formed: the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, headed by Duma Chairman M.V. Rodzianko and the Provisional Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, representing the interests of workers. The Petrosoviet was headed by the Mensheviks N.S. Chkheidze, M.I. Skobelev and Socialist Revolutionary A.F. Kerensky. A few days later, namely on March 2, 1917, the Provisional Committee of the State Duma formed the Provisional Government 7, headed by

Prince G.E. Lvov, positioning itself as the government for the transitional period until the convening of the Constituent Assembly. Until this moment, real power belonged to the Petrograd Soviet, which in turn recognized the legitimacy of the Provisional Government. On the same day, March 2, an event occurred that affected the fate of the entire country: Nicholas II decides to abdicate the throne in favor of his brother Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, and after the latter’s abdication, power was transferred to the Provisional Government. So, more than 300 years of rule of the Romanov dynasty in Russia ended, and with it the monarchical system itself. With the change of supreme power, the problems bedeviling Russia, exhausted by the war, the food and economic crisis, did not end on their own. The political and national crisis is beginning to develop more and more actively, and unrest at the front is becoming more frequent. Throughout 1917, the issue of war stood at the center of all political demands and became a catalyst for the revolutionary process. In April 1917, V.I. returned from emigration. Lenin literally instantly joins the political struggle. In the “April Theses,” the leader of the Bolshevik Party sets before his supporters the task of transition from the bourgeois to the socialist revolution. In the spring and autumn of 1917, a growing national crisis was observed. The government headed by A.F. Kerensky is catastrophically quickly losing its popularity. This occurs against the backdrop of the disintegration of the army and the reluctance of soldiers to continue the war “to the bitter end”; Bolshevik coup attempts in July 1917; mutiny of General L.G. Kornilov on August 25, 1917, which also speaks of an attempt to seize power, but this time by the military. Attempts to illegally seize power by the Provisional Government were suppressed. At the beginning of autumn, on September 1, 1917, Russia was proclaimed a republic, but this could no longer strengthen the position of the government. 8

At the same time, the influence of the Bolsheviks as a political force began to grow. The slogans “All power to the Soviets!” are beginning to gain popularity among the people. The gradual Bolshevisation of the Soviets begins. On October 25, 1917, a new stage begins in the history of Russia - the socialist, Soviet period. Victory of the radical, revolutionary movement. A detailed analysis and description of the events that occurred on October 25, 1917 in Petrograd, and then in Moscow, is not within the scope of this work. At the same time, it is impossible not to dwell on the consideration of the revolutionary coup, since subsequent events: the Civil War and intervention, the repressive policies of the warring parties are a consequence of October 1917. So, after the summer crisis, the Bolsheviks are heading for an armed seizure of power. The preparations for the uprising were carried out by famous and active members of the Bolshevik Party F.E. Dzerzhinsky, Ya.M. Sverdlov, A.S. Bubnov, M.S. Uritsky, L.D. Trotsky. To lead military operations against the government of the Military Revolutionary Committee, a special troika consisting of N.I. Podvoisky, G.I. Chudnovsky and V.A. Antonova-Ovseenko Famous historian and political figure S.P. Melgunov, in his journalistic study “How the Bolsheviks Seized Power,” recreates the picture of October 25, 1917. in Petrograd and the subsequent armed clash in Moscow, which came as a surprise to the Bolsheviks and lasted more than a week, ended with the establishment of Soviet power. Some historians, including Doctor of Historical Sciences S.V. Volkov, assess the Moscow uprising as the beginning of the Civil War. After coming to power, the Bolsheviks developed active political activities. In the very first days, the main decrees prepared by V.I. were ratified. Lenin: about a world “without annexations and indemnities”, Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, Decree on Land. 9

In the first months after the revolution, the Bolsheviks began, as they say, to “tighten the screws” in the field of legal proceedings. In particular, a reform is being carried out, the purpose of which was the creation of a revolutionary tribunal (revolutionary tribunal), an emergency judicial body, which later became, along with the Cheka and local “chrekcheikas,” a body that carried out the Red Terror. Actually, immediately after the October Revolution and the seizure by the Bolsheviks, they began to impose their policy of coercion. 10 power

1.2. Red terror in Russia. Repressive measures against the civilian population by representatives of the Bolshevik Party and supporters of the Soviets. The Bolsheviks began to carry out punitive measures against civilians, persons declared class enemies, suspected of counter-revolutionary activities after the October Revolution, but the greatest scope of the “Red Terror” was witnessed in the period 1918 - 1922 On November 28, 1917, the Council of People's Commissars approved the prepared V.I. Lenin issued a decree on the arrest of the leaders of the civil war, which, according to the Bolsheviks, were representatives of the Cadet Party. After this, in particular, representatives of the Cadet Party F.F. were arrested. Kokoshkin and A.I. Shingarev, whose fate will be discussed below. At first, after the seizure of power, terror was carried out according to the expression of Professor S.V. Volkova is “quite chaotic.” Individual representatives of the “bourgeoisie” were arrested, both by order of the authorities and arbitrarily - on suspicion of “counter-revolution”, and were often killed on the way to places of detention. Thus, even before the campaign of terror began, on an “official” basis in Petrograd, representatives of the Romanov dynasty were arrested and then executed without trial or investigation: Nicholas II together with his family (in Yekaterinburg), Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich (in Perm ), Grand Duchess Elizabeth Konstantinovich, Fedorovna, Konstantin princes of imperial Konstantinovich blood: (junior), Ivan Igor Konstantinovich and Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley (in Alapaevsk). A similar fate befell famous politicians F.F. Kokoshkin and A.I. Shingarev, killed by guards at the Mariinsk prison hospital in January 11

1918 And on April 1, 1918, General P.K. was shot in Taganrog. Rannenkampf. The shocking murder in Petrograd in March 1918 of three Genglez brothers, sons of the director of the Gatchina Orphanage, also committed without any procedural norms, caused a public outcry. Extrajudicial executions of church representatives are known. Thus, one of the “victims of the revolution” was the clergyman P.I. Skipetrov, shot by the Red Guards in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. Against the background of all the known murders, the statement of one of the founders and leaders of the Cheka, Ya.Kh., looks absurd, not to say cynical. Peters that before the murder of M.S. Uritsky did not carry out capital punishment in Petrograd. Another famous and “prominent” figure of the Cheka, M.I. Latsis spoke about the terror carried out by the Bolsheviks in the following way: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class...” In Moscow, executions began at the end of 1917, at which time they began to gradually deal with the participants in the October battles, but these actions were not advertised. But already in the first half of 1918, reports of executions periodically began to appear in the press. The exact number of people executed in Moscow (as in any other cities, towns and villages) in the period from 1917-1920 is not known for certain. However, based on the information available to the researcher when studying this problem, we can conclude that, despite the fact that Moscow was one of the main centers of terror, the number of victims here is somewhat less than in Petrograd, Kronstadt, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Crimea and southern Russia. The first victims of the Red Terror on the very first day of the Decree were former tsarist ministers N.A., arrested and held in Butyrka prison. Maklakov, I.G. Shcheglovitov, A.N. Khvostov, director of the police department S.P. Beletsky, Archpriest John Vostogov and Bishop 12

Efrem (Kuznetsov). They were publicly shot as hostages in Petrovsky Park. The execution of the sentences of the Cheka took place in the already mentioned Petrovsky Park, on Khodynka, in the Khamovniki barracks, as well as in various city cemeteries. Somewhat later, the main place of executions became the territory of the Yauza hospital. The famous scientist-historian G.V. Vernadsky wrote about the Extraordinary Commission: “The Cheka acted ruthlessly and cruelly. One of the most common methods of its work was the taking of hostages from among the population who did not sympathize with the communists. In cases where anti-Bolshevik uprisings broke out - and especially when attempts were made on the lives of communist leaders - the hostages, who, as a rule, were not at all interested in politics and themselves did not show their dissatisfaction with the state authorities in any way, were shot without hesitation. If it was necessary to obtain some information or extract a confession from the victim, the Cheka employees did not disdain torture when they considered their use necessary...” In 1918, after the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion and a series of assassination attempts on the leaders of the revolution, V. Volodarsky, M.S. Uritsky, V.I. Lenin, the Cheka becomes the highest body in the fight against counter-revolution. On June 6, 1918, a decree reinstating the death penalty was published and local Chekas became organs of terror. On August 30, 1918, an attempt was made on V.I. Lenin in Moscow, and in the “cradle of the revolution” - Petrograd, on the same day, student Leonid Kannegiser, killed the chairman of the Petrograd Cheka M.S. Uritsky. After these events, the Bolsheviks officially proclaimed the decree of September 5, 1918 “On the Red Terror.” In addition to this resolution, the Council of People's Commissars also approves the creation of camps in order to protect the revolution from class enemies. Probably, the Bolsheviks simply decided to take advantage of the situation to create “official” conditions for carrying out their repressive policies. 13

In the first days of September, in most district and provincial cities, several dozen people were shot at a time, in Petrograd and the surrounding area - several hundred. Another evidence of those events of 1918 was left by G.V. Vernadsky in his work “Russian History”: “... in the winter of 1917-1918. The Cheka dealt with many victims, but the Red Terror reached its apogee only in the fall of 1918 after a series of attempts on the lives of the Bolshevik leaders...” The Council of People’s Commissars’ resolution on the Red Terror gave the right to tighten terrorist actions, spreading them to all social groups, making terror widespread. Thus, the nobility and Cossacks were subject to liquidation, other segments of the population were warned. Since the second half of 1918, terror has been openly promoted. Terror turns, as Melgunov puts it, “...into a bloody, unbridled massacre.” This is what L.B. said on December 31, 1919. Kamenev, future victim of Stalin's terror of the 30s. : “Our terror was forced, this is not the terror of the Cheka, but of the working class.” The amazing ability of the Bolsheviks to justify their most terrible actions. The practice of hostage-taking was actively spreading, which was carried out not only in Petrograd and Moscow, but also in the territory of Russia that was controlled by the Bolshevik authorities. Wives and children were arrested for relatives - officers who participated in the white movement S.P. Melgunov also talks about the execution of children from 8-14 years old, which was practiced by the Special Department of the Cheka under the leadership of M.S. Kedrova. S.P. Melgunov recalls: “I remember these nights in 1920 in Butyrka prison before the amnesty issued on the anniversary of the October Revolution. They didn’t have time to bring the naked corpses of those shot in the back of the head to the Kalitnikovskoye cemetery..." 14

Members of the Romanov dynasty would be arrested as hostages and then shot in January 1919: Grand Dukes Georgy Mikhailovich, Dmitry Konstantinovich, Nikolai Mikhailovich and Pavel Alexandrovich; as well as Major General of the Fleet A.N. Rykov. Another of the Romanovs, the prince of the imperial blood, Gabriel Konstantinovich, was held hostage in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Only thanks to the decisive actions of A.R.’s wife. Nesterovskaya, he safely escaped execution and entered the border. On January 24, 1919, the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR adopted a directive on carrying out “mass” terror against the Cossacks, best known as “decossackization.” The fate of Crimea after the departure of the army of General P.N. is also known. Wrangel and it would seem that with this the end of the Civil War. At that time, some of the military remained in Crimea, who did not leave the peninsula for one reason or another, and the civilian population also continued to live on the territory of Crimea. The part of the population that made up its elite was largely subjected to repression on the peninsula: the military, cultural and political intelligentsia. As usual, in such a case, the repressions were sanctioned from Moscow. The leaders of the punitive actions were the Chairman of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee Bela Kun, the Secretary of the Crimean Regional Committee of the RCP (b) R.S. Zemlyachka, heads of special departments of the Cheka, fronts and armies E.G. Evdokimov, V.N. Mantsev, K.Kh. Danishevsky, N.M. Bystrykh and others. After the occupation of Crimea by the Bolsheviks in 1920, there are known cases of extermination of disabled people and sick people who were taken to the place of execution from the Red Cross hospital. One of the witnesses to such arbitrariness was the working Bolshevik doctor S.V. Konstansov The Kharkov Cheka was also famous for its cruelty, where commandant S.A. carried out his “fair revolutionary trial”. Sayenko, who died safely in 1973, left behind a terrible memory. Viktor Smaznov, a participant in the Civil War, recalled his “activities”, 15

probably a Cossack (not known for certain), in the essay “In the Kharkov Emergency.” These memoirs, published in 1939 in the magazine “Free Cossacks”, were again presented to the public in the collection “Red Terror in the South of Russia” edited by S.V. Volkova. Despite all the above examples, those that remained unmentioned, extrajudicial killings in the revolutionary years, reliable statistics of victims of the Red Terror do not exist. The arbitrariness of all the warring parties to the conflict did not contribute to its creation. 16

1.3. White terror during the Civil War. Repressive policy of anti-Bolshevik forces Historian S.P. Melgunov, speaking about white terror, gave the following description of this phenomenon: “excesses based on unbridled power and revenge.” Comparing the two directions of terrorist policy during the Civil War, the researcher emphasizes that white terror did not come directly from the command bodies of white power, unlike the red terror. White terror, like any other manifestation of violence against people, regardless of their nationality or religion, cannot be justified by any necessity. When studying this topic, a problem arises due to the insufficient number of sources available to the researcher. There are many eyewitness memories of the Red Terror of the Bolsheviks, which, although they may sometimes be quite subjective, still give an idea of the current situation during the period of events described. Historians are trying to compare the “red” and “white” terror, to compare both of these criminal regimes. In the summer of 1918, armed anti-Soviet uprisings began in a number of Volga cities of Yaroslavl, Rybinsk and Murom. Having captured part of the city, the leaders of the rebellion began terrorizing Soviet party workers. The victims of the rebels were the commissioner of the military district S. M. Nakimson and the chairman of the executive committee of the city council D. S. Zakiym. 200 arrested were taken to the “death barge” stationed on the Volga. These events became the beginning of the “white” terror. Particularly notorious was the phenomenon of the Civil War called “Atamanshchina” - uncontrolled armed formations. In a broad sense, “atamanism” is interpreted as a synonym for “white Bolshevism”, i.e. autocracy, arbitrariness, abuse of power 17

In a narrower sense, “atamanism” means a type of white volunteer movement with the participation of the Cossacks. In 1918, detachments of esauls of the Siberian Cossack army B.V. Annenkov and I.N. operated in Siberia. Krasilnikova. In the Far East, two semi-partisan detachments played an important role: the Russian-foreign “Special Manchurian detachment” of the captain of the Transbaikal army G.M. Semenov and the “Special Cossack detachment” of the centurion of the Ussuri army I.P. Kalmykov. For a more precise conversation, it is worth explaining that in the full sense of the word, the detachments of these “atamans” were not any Cossack units. They did not have veche free Cossack traditions. The creators of these detachments, career officers, firmly maintained unity of command. The actions of these Cossack associations, which brutally dealt with not only supporters of the Soviets and the Bolshevik underground, but also terrorized the civilian population, remained in the history of Russia forever. B.V. “fought” in the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East. Annenkov (1890-1927), at the end of 1919 the commander of Kolchak’s separate Simirechensk army, hiding behind the motto: “We have no prohibitions!” God and Ataman Annenkov are with us, cut right and left!” His punitive detachments committed atrocities against the civilian population. In 1918, the Slavgorod-Chernodolsk outbreak broke out with the “Annenkovites”. The uprising was brutally suppressed. Thus, historian A. Litvin writes about this event: “On September 11, 1918, Annenkov’s “hussars” tortured and killed up to 500 people. Among them were 87 delegates of the peasant congress, who, by order of Annenkov, were hacked to death on the Slavgorod square in front of the people's house and buried in a hole there. The village of Cherny Dol, in which the headquarters of the rebels was located, was burned to the ground; even the wives and children of the peasants were shot, fought and hanged on poles. Girls from Slavgorod and its environs were brought to Annenkov’s train, which was located at the city station, raped, and then shot.” 18

Materials on this uprising will become the basis of the investigative case against B.V., which began in 1926. Annenkova. Annenkov was tried in 1927 in Semipalatinsk, and there, by court verdict, he was shot on August 12, 1927. Another famous Cossack ataman and participant in the White movement, A.I. Dutov also adhered to a tough repressive policy. On April 3, 1919, by this time commanding a separate Orenburg army, A.I. Dutov gives the order to resolutely shoot and take hostages for the slightest unreliability. A few months later, namely on May 9, 1918, after the Cossacks captured the village of Aleksandrov-Gaya by Ataman Dutov, 96 captured Red Army soldiers were buried alive. In total, 675 people were executed in the village by various methods. On May 27, 1918, a regime of terror was established in Chelyabinsk and Troitsk, and later on July 3 in Orenburg. One Orenburg prison held more than 6 thousand prisoners, of which about 500 were killed during interrogations. In Chelyabinsk, 9 thousand people were shot or taken to prisons in Siberia by the “Dutovites”. According to Soviet periodicals, in Troitsk, “Dutovites” shot about 700 people in the first weeks after the capture of the city. In Ilek they killed 400 people. Such mass executions were typical for Dutov’s Cossack troops. In August 1918, A.I. Dutov established the death penalty for resisting the authorities or deviation from military service. But perhaps the most famous of the Cossack atamans of the White movement was G.M. Semenov. “Semyonovshchina” is the largest and most politicized version of “Atamanism”. Semyonov actively laid claim to supreme power, and at the end of 1919, after numerous conflicts, he became the commander-in-chief of all rear troops of Kolchak’s army. Semyonov acted brutally in carrying out his plans. His punitive actions cannot be justified. Not only captured Red Army soldiers were punished, but also, as is typical for both opposing sides of this war, residents of settlements who were suspected of assisting the Bolsheviks or Red partisans. Many years after the events of the Civil War, in 1946, the 19th century began in the USSR.

the trial of the “Semenavtsy”, the main defendant in which will be Ataman G.M. himself. Semenov. During the investigation, he will openly talk about how, on his orders, people suspected of being loyal to the Soviets were shot, villages were burned, and civilians were robbed. Major General L.F., who once served under Semenov’s command. Vlasyevsky also pointed out that the military formations of Ataman Semenov terrorized the local population and brutally dealt with anyone suspected of assisting or sympathizing with the Bolsheviks. Separately, Vlasevsky noted the divisions of Baron Ugern and Tirbach. In 1918, Colonel M.A., captured near Belaya Glina, was killed. Zhebrak, the response to this murder was the order of the commander of the 3rd division of the Volunteer Army M. G. Drozdovsky to shoot about 1000 captured Red Army soldiers. Of no small importance is the activity of another famous leader of the White movement - Ataman P.N. Krasnov (1869 – 1947). This is what Candidate of History I.S. Ratkovsky writes in his book “Red Terror and the Activities of the Cheka in 1918”: “In the territories controlled by P.N. Krasnov, according to the Soviet press (for example, the Pravda newspaper) , the total number of victims in 1918 reached more than 30 thousand people. “I forbid arresting workers, but order them to be shot or hanged; I order all the arrested workers to be hanged on the main street and not removed for three days" - these inhuman words from the orders of the Krasnov captain of the Makeevsky district on November 10, 1918.” In addition to the Cossack atamans, other participants in the White movement also carried out repressive measures. So, 2 weeks after coming to power, the Supreme Ruler of Russia, Admiral A.V. On December 3, 1918, Kolchak (1874 - 1920) signed a decree on the widespread introduction of the death penalty. These actions can be interpreted as a severe necessity in the conditions of the Civil War, but at the same time, the victims of these decisions were often people innocent of what they were accused of 20

On April 5, 1919, the commander of the Western army, one of the leaders of the White movement, General M.V. Khanzhin (1871-1961) ordered all peasants to surrender their weapons, otherwise all those responsible would be shot, and their property and houses would be burned. Mass executions of prisoners of war were carried out with the consent of generals R. Gaida (1892-1948) and S.P. Rozanova (1869-1937) Another example of an inhumane order from the white high command. October 12, 1919 General K.N. Sakharov, the commander of the Western army, issues an order requiring the execution of every tenth hostage or resident, and in the event of a mass armed uprising against the army, the execution of all residents and the burning of the entire village to the ground. The repressive policy pursued by the government of General Denikin was similar to that pursued by Kolchak and other military dictators. The police located in the territory controlled by Denikin were called state guards. After the capture of Odessa, the Whites brutally dealt with the Bolsheviks. Actually, just like the Reds, they did not stand on ceremony with their political opponents and their associates when occupying this or that territory. Future leader of the EMRO and commander of the 1st Army Corps in Gollipoli A.P. Kutepov (1882-1930) was known for his tough character. Back in December 1919, during the occupation of Rostov-on-Don by the Whites, the general ordered prisoners of the local prison to be hanged from lamp posts along the main street. Later, already in evacuation, in Gallipoli, he will also brutally suppress any disobedience and decay in the units subordinate to him. The attitude towards prisoners of war was also cruel. The punitive policy of the whites was not much different from the actions of the reds. For example, both the Bolsheviks and the Whites practiced the use of so-called “Death Barges”. Floating prisons for which river vehicles were equipped, most often 21

total cargo barges. Cargo barges, used as floating prisons, were used in the punitive practice of both the Whites and the Reds. In 1918, two barges were installed on the Kama, which became the location for all the “extra” prisoners. In one of them, within a few days, out of 600 prisoners, 150 people were killed. There are known cases when a barge, during the retreat of the whites, was burned along with the people on it. Barges were also places of accommodation for prisoners in Siberia, during the period of power of the white governments. Such massive illegal reprisals against political opponents were typical during the Civil War, both red and white. 22

2. Analysis of repressive methods and organizational structures of terror of both warring parties 2.1. Analysis of terrorist methods aimed at intimidating and subjugating the population in the occupied territories. This paragraph will examine certain aspects of the terrorist policy of the Whites and Reds, such as: arrests, organization of prisons, hostage-taking, organization of concentration camps. For more visual examples of terrorist methods, those used in Table 1 are presented by the warring parties during the Civil War Table 1. Common force methods of the Bolsheviks and White Guards Red terror White terror Executions Hostages Torture Concentration camps Confiscation of property Expulsion from the country Executions Hostages Torture Concentration camps Confiscation of property - Judging by the historical sources available today (journalistic, historical works, memoirs, photographic documents), executions are becoming the most common method of eliminating a person. The practice included mass executions of the “class enemy,” imprisonment in concentration camps, and hostage-taking. The Cheka received the right to execute without trial, which it actively used. These methods of the Anti-Soviet camp were also practiced by white counterintelligence. did not lag behind with similar measures - all the same reprisals, dungeons, victims. 23

As mentioned above, the institution of hostages received its greatest development immediately after September 5, 1918, although even before that day, of course, the Bolsheviks arrested “class enemies”: “bourgeois”, intelligentsia, etc. Arrests took place, as a rule, at night, along with a search in the apartment of the person who was subject to arrest. So, in the memoirs of Princess A.R. Romanova (Nesterovskaya), the wife of the prince of imperial blood Gabriel Konstantinovich, is given a picture of a typical night visit of commissars for that time. In addition, the Bolsheviks also practiced raids, during which people from various segments of the population were arrested and taken hostage. The main places of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the detention of “Crosses” in and Petrograd transit - in addition to the prison (House of Pretrial Detention) on Shpalernaya 25 - were the arrest premises on Gorokhovaya, 2 (the Petrograd Provincial Cheka was located here), the Deryabinsky Barracks on Vasilyevsky Island were converted into prisons , as well as a prison hospital on Goloday Island. Physical torture was used in all institutions mentioned in this work. All this was aimed at humiliating human dignity and causing him bodily suffering and, as one can judge, such actions were not always carried out in order to find out the information of interest to investigators. Thus, the famous Kharkov security officer Sayenko gained a reputation as a sadist who used the most sophisticated torture during his interrogations. The security officer M.S. will go to the North to organize the first concentration camps and implement the policy of “red terror” in the Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Vyatka regions (provinces), as well as in Karelia. Kedrov. Near Kholmogory in 1921. a concentration camp will begin to operate, as well as in Ukhta, Vologda, Arkhangelsk. The memoirs of an eyewitness to 24 events, published by S.P., have been preserved.

Melgunov: “In Arkhangelsk, Kedrov, having gathered 1200 officers, put them on a barge near Kholmogory and then machine gun fire opened on them - up to 600 were killed!” . As for the practice of arrests of White governments in the territories they occupied, they often occurred on the basis of denunciations or organized search operations to identify communists, employees of Soviet institutions, and military experts of the Red Army, as happened in Arkhangelsk after the anti-Bolshevik coup and the occupation of the city by Allied troops. Those arrested were, as a rule, taken to Arkhangelsk prison. The punishment was execution or sent to hard labor in the Mudyug camp established in 1918. As can be seen from the above, the repressive policies of both the Whites and the Reds consisted of identical terrorist methods, the only exception being forced deportation from the country, which was used by the Bolsheviks. But again, this version of punishment was the exception rather than the rule. The most famous act of expulsion from Russia was the forced expulsion of members of the intelligentsia in 1922, initiated by Lenin. Representatives of the white government, during the Civil War, for natural reasons could not use this method. Another significant difference in the practice of terror was that the whites, unlike the reds, did not proclaim terror as their state policy and did not openly call for violent actions. 25

2.2. Consideration of the activities of the punitive authorities of the Bolsheviks and white governments. This chapter will examine the organizational structures pursuing the policy of terror. The Bolshevik Cheka and the White counterintelligence as the two main punitive bodies that left a terrible memory of themselves and the events of 1917-1922. among the people. At the end of 1917, on the initiative of F.E. Dzerzhinsky will create the Cheka institution, which over time in Russian history has become a symbol of terror, repression and ruined human destinies. So, many years later, historian G.V. recalled the “Punitive Sword of the Revolution”. Vernadsky: “The atrocities committed by the Cheka during that period were not random violations of the law... The official activities of the Cheka were directed against the bourgeoisie. However, in reality, the Cheka exterminated everyone it suspected of resisting the Soviet government. Its victims were not limited to representatives of the upper and middle classes, they included peasants, often workers...” Revolutionary tribunals (revolutionary tribunals) are emergency judicial bodies that existed in Soviet Russia in 1918 - 1923. Revolutionary tribunals, along with the Cheka and local emergency commissions, carried out the Red Terror. More than a dozen concentration camps were organized in Moscow, of which the following can be distinguished: Novospassky, Andronevsky, Ivanovsky, Rozhdestvensky, Znamensky, Andreevsky, Kozhukhovsky, Novo-Peskovsky, Pokrovsky, Ordynsky, Vladykinsky, etc. There is reason to believe that on the territories of these monasteries there were also executions. On December 7, 1917, on the initiative of F.E. Dzerzhinsky, who also became the first chairman, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VChK) was created to combat counter-revolution, profiteering, and sabotage. Popularly, this organization becomes known as “Emergency”, “Che-Ka” or as 26

gives another example by S.P. Melgunov deciphering the abbreviation: “VChK - Kaput to Every Man.” Initially, the Cheka was created as an investigative body; its repressive measures were limited to confiscation of property. Gradually, unlimited power is concentrated in the hands of the Cheka: the right to take hostages, conduct searches and investigations, pronounce sentences and carry them out. The Cheka becomes the main conductor of terror, but its implementation was supervised by the Bolshevik leadership. During the Civil War, the Cheka was led by Dzerzhinsky, Peters, and Ksenofontov. Diagram 1 shows the organizational structure of the terror of the white and red movements in 1917-1920. Scheme 1. Repressive authorities 1917-1920. Organizational structure of terror Red terror Cheka White terror Counterintelligence Revolutionary tribunals Military courts Increasingly, researchers place “white” counterintelligence on a par with the Bolshevik Che-KA, which also mercilessly pursued its repressive policy against many categories of citizens in the occupied territory. Counterintelligence carried out its duties on the basis of a whole range of sources: reports from its own agents; police agencies; observations, radio interception; information provided by individuals. 27

Obtaining information from allied counterintelligence services, which were, by and large, competitors. The main Bolshevik counterintelligence forces were underground, which were aimed at fighting a serious threat to the security of the White Guard regime. In this regard, the introduction of repressive measures, field trials, executions, and imprisonment begins. In January 1920 during interrogations in Irkutsk, Supreme Ruler Admiral A.V. Kolchak said that people were recruited to serve in counterintelligence “... completely unprepared for such work... and the grounds on which the actions of the counterintelligence bodies were carried out were completely arbitrary, not provided for by any rules...”. The actions of counterintelligence outraged many representatives of the generals, since this, for obvious reasons, negatively affected the reputation of all White governments as a whole. But, nevertheless, no one took real measures to regulate the activities of counterintelligence and the political service. In many respects, the question remains open: is white counterintelligence a “synonym” for the Cheka? Or is it a fundamentally different organization? Based on the above, then again the methods used in both the Cheka and counterintelligence are of the same type. It is unknown how developed the practice of physical pressure on those arrested was, but there is no doubt about its use, knowing in general the violent policy of various military formations of the White governments. 28

3. Consideration of the process of theoretical and practical study of the theme of terror of the Civil War in post-Soviet Russia. Teaching and studying the theme of terror 1917-1922. in history lessons at school 3.1. The process of studying the problem of terror of the Civil War in the conditions of today's Russian science The historical and historiographic study of the problems of the civil war in general and terror in particular, throughout the entire period of the Soviet Union, was very subjective and one-sided. Back in the 1920s, a very short time after the war, in domestic science, due to the predominance of ideological attitudes, researchers in their works began to address only the problem of “white” terror. For many years, the dominant position in historical science will be occupied by the dogma that “the red terror was a response to the white terror.” With the collapse of the USSR, the ideological attitudes of researchers and science in general also become a thing of the past. Domestic historiography began to study all previously “forbidden” topics: the October Revolution, the Red Terror during the Civil War, the famine of the early 30s. in a number of regions of the country, dispossession and deportation of the peoples of Russia, Stalinist terror, etc. In general, everything that was not subject to comprehensive and reliable research in the Soviet Union. In addition, archives are beginning to be opened, although even today specialists do not have access to all documents. Historians are also beginning to study and publish about the White movement and its leaders, who in Soviet historical science were represented only in one color scheme. More objective information also appears on the phenomenon of “white” terror of the Civil War. In domestic historical science in the Soviet Union, the main attention, as already mentioned, was paid to the problem of “white” terror, as a punitive policy of former tsarist generals. But at the same time, studying 29

social confrontation and terror during the Civil War, in addition to Soviet historians, was carried out by emigrant historians and foreign historians. Today, these studies are becoming available not only to researchers, but also to a wider audience. The most famous emigrant historian is Sergei Pavlovich Melgunov, who devoted his research work to collecting and systematizing information about the “red” terror of the Bolsheviks and related topics. In today's Russian historical science, the problems of the Civil War continue to be actively studied, and the punitive actions of various warring parties in this internal war are studied. It is worth noting that in addition to purely desk, archival and journalistic work, today in the system of studying the history of the Civil War and the accompanying terrorist policies, archaeological work related to the discovery of mass graves is also beginning to be practiced. Thus, for several years archaeological work was carried out on the territory of the Peter and Paul Fortress. This was due to the fact that the remains of victims of the “Red Terror” were discovered here. The first burials were discovered on Hare Island back in 1988 during repair work. Investigating the terrible finds, experts came to the conclusion that the human remains had lain in the ground for about 100 years. Almost 20 years later, in 2007, under similar circumstances, another burial was discovered between the Kronverkskaya embankment and the wall of the Golovkin Bastion. In addition to the remains, fragments of military uniforms from 1907 to 1916 were also found in this burial. There are no documents about the events that took place in the Peter and Paul Fortress in the period 1917-1919. A couple of years later, in 2009, human remains were again discovered near the wall of the Golovkin Bastion; after inspection, it became clear that there was a collective burial in this place. In addition to bone remains, fragments of clothing and 30 other items were also found in the grave.

finds. Military costume experts were brought in to work on this site. Researchers carried out long and painstaking work to identify those buried in a mass grave. The archives were examined to see if they contained any documents containing information about those arrested and executed during this period of time and in this place; The press of 1917-1919 was studied, in which execution lists could be published. Anthropological analyzes carried out separately for each of the found graves yielded their own results, for example, more accurate age categories of those killed. As a result of archaeological prospecting work on the territory of the Peter and Paul Fortress in 2009–2010. 7 burial sites of victims of the “Red Terror” of 1918-1919 were discovered and explored. – at least 110 people. Anthropological and age-sex analysis of the buried allowed us to draw the conclusion that the overwhelming number of those buried were men. Judging by the bones and fragments of women's clothing, we can tentatively talk about 56 women. More than half of the men are aged from 25-40 years, then 40-50 years old, a small group is aged from 18-20 and over 55 years. One teenager is under 18 years old. The case of the “Royal Family” also received public attention, in particular the identification of bone remains discovered separately from the general burial in Ganina Pit. The urgent question is whether these remains belong to Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria, who were shot in July 1918, apparently still remains open 31

3.2. The process of studying the theme of terror during the Civil War of the 1917-1920s. in history lessons at school. Presenting material to students During history lessons, the teacher will have to talk to students about a difficult, tragic period in the history of Russia. How can we do this in a more accessible form for a teenager to understand and perceive? When studying this topic, it is necessary to instill in the minds of children the axiom of non-acceptance of war and the use of force to resolve social, military, and political conflicts. Through the prism of the tragedy of the civil war as a people's misfortune, in which there are no winners or those who are right in their actions, students will have to draw a conclusion for themselves about the need to choose other, non-forceful ways to resolve political and social issues in modern society. With the help of various materials that the teacher has at his disposal: historical sources, works of art, photographic documents, eyewitness memories, it is necessary to recreate, as far as possible, a reliable picture of the events of that period. The most pressing question in this whole topic of the Civil War and terror is: who is to blame? It is impossible to give a definite answer to this question. All those who participated in this fratricidal war are guilty, they are guilty for allowing this to happen. Students must understand that the very posing of the question “who is to blame?” immoral, and the main value in the world is not any ideology, but human life. When studying this topic, full of terrible and difficult moments in which there was so much evil, injustice, violence, humiliation of human dignity, children develop a deep sense of empathy, heightened justice, denial of violence and rejection of evil. In achieving such a perception of all facets of the national tragedy of the Civil War, students will be helped by examples from artistic culture: literature, films, fine arts, etc. 32

To form a picture for teenagers of the events that took place almost 100 years ago, you can turn not only to historical works, but also to fiction telling about that period. So, you can read and analyze excerpts from such works as: “The Sun of the Dead” by I.S. Shmeleva, “Quiet Don” by M. A. Sholokhov, “Doctor Zhivago” by B.L. Pasternak, poetry by M. A. Voloshin, M.I. Tsvetaeva, “The White Guard” and “Running” by M.A. Bulgakov, “Cursed Days” by I.A. Bunin, etc. To immerse themselves in the era, students can be offered to work with the texts of Bolshevik decrees: “on the Red Terror,” “order on hostages,” “order No. 171 on the fight against “Antonovism,” etc.; as well as orders from representatives of the White movement. Read excerpts from journalism on the topic being studied: S.P. Melgunov, A.L. Litvin, I.S. Ratkovsky, etc. Viewing photographic documents will also contribute to immersion in the topic and atmosphere of the time. There are no “easy” and “simple” topics when studying the history of any country, including Russia. But topics related to violence, humiliation of human dignity, and mass repression of civilians are especially difficult to perceive. Students, during conversations in class, must come to the conclusion and realize that it is very easy to unleash such conflicts that turn into a national tragedy, which means it is necessary to make sure that this never happens again. 33

Conclusion Sometimes it seems that the Civil War is not over yet. From the battle fronts it moved into society, continuing to divide people into whites and reds, right and wrong, criminals and victims, winners and losers. Perhaps this is due to the fact that in Russia they still cannot remember all the victims of that terrible fratricidal war, which once and for all turned the history of the entire country upside down, killing and maiming some, and making others outcasts. The civil war is a national tragedy and the past must not be allowed to be forgotten, but at the same time, the echo of war must stop resounding in souls and thoughts with hatred towards the opposite side of the conflict. We must remember the most tragic moments of history, the reasons that led to the catastrophe of a person who was capable of such horrors so that it would never happen again. Many participants in the Civil War are known to history; as a rule, these are leaders of various warring parties and political trends. But at the same time, the names of people who suffered from terrorist tyranny, victims of the repressive policies of the Bolsheviks, the White government, Makhnovists, etc. are little known. The same applies to exact numbers - there are none, there are no statistics on those shot, hanged, or tortured in the Cheka and counterintelligence. drowned on barges, Today much is known about the execution of the Royal Family and the murders of other members of the House of Romanov, famous political figures and artists, clergy, military experts, scientists, but how many more human destinies and lives were lost in the whirlwind of one of the most terrible local conflicts in history unknown. For a productive dialogue, first of all, it is necessary to have reliable and objective information on the issues of both types of terror. 34

As has been mentioned more than once above, the problem of white terror is poorly reflected in the works of modern historians. While the Red Terror receives much more attention from modern researchers. Starting to become interested in the topic of the punitive policy of the whites, the first thing that comes into view is the works of Soviet authors, who, as we know, are overly ideological. After the collapse of the USSR, a “flow” of previously prohibited literature came to Russia, including journalistic studies by emigrant authors, including S.P. Melgunov, whose works have already been mentioned more than once in this work. One of the most famous books of the Russian diaspora was the book by investigator N.A., published in 1990 in Russia. Sokolov “The Murder of the Royal Family”, which is a description of the investigation into the execution of Nicholas II and his family in Yekaterinburg. To date, the most complete study of the problem of red and white terror during the Civil War is the work of A.L. Litvin “Red and White Terror in Russia 1918 – 1922”, also used to write this work. There is relatively little information or memories left about the repressive actions of representatives of the White governments, compared with what we have today from the literature about the Red Terror. Speaking about the material about the punitive policy of the Bolsheviks, it is especially worth noting a series of collections published under the editorship of the famous historian S.V. Volkova are the memoirs of eyewitnesses and participants in events, published at different periods of time outside of Russia, and today published under one cover. The Iris Press publishing house created the “White Russia” series, which includes books by famous representatives of the Russian emigration. The collections in question include memories of people who survived Cheka prisons, who lost relatives and friends during the years of terror in Petrograd, Moscow, and the south of Russia. It is possible that today these journalistic collections of memoirs are some of the most significant evidence of the Bolshevik terror that is available to the public. It is necessary to conduct research on the activities of Bely 35

movements in the occupied territories of Siberia, what is known today, as a rule, is of a generalized nature. Today's society is sharply divided, as it was many years ago, into reds and whites. Priority is given to the latter, forgetting (or not knowing) about exactly the same cruel activities against both prisoners and civilians as on the part of the Bolsheviks. The only difference is in the ideology of these movements. As can be seen from the text of the proposed work, the methods and organizational structures that carried out terror on both the one side and the other are identical. The differences can probably only be in the massive scale of such operations and the number of victims, although all available figures are mostly arbitrary, and it is most likely not necessary to find out reliable data. Neither the Reds nor the Whites kept statistics of their victims. Nobody needed evidence that so eloquently testified to these bloody regimes. The purpose of the presented work was to systematize knowledge on the topic of terror of the white and red movements during the Civil War. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to solve a number of previously formulated tasks. Thus, in conclusion of this work, we can say that, based on the sources available to the author, a theoretical framework on the topic “Red and White Terror during the Civil War” was systematized, which reveals aspects of the repressive policies of the Red and White movements. In addition, a comparative analysis of the methods and existing power structures of both warring sides was carried out. During this comparison, identity features emerged in the methods of violent politics and the importance of punitive authorities. The process of theoretical and practical study in today's historical science of the theme of terror of the Civil War was also considered, which is especially important in connection with the upcoming anniversaries of the events being studied. Most theoretical and practical studies 36

comes down to working in archives, digitizing and publishing materials on the issue being studied. The process of teaching this topic in an educational institution, in particular in high school, deserves special attention. The problem with terror is that this topic can be interpreted with different points vision, and it is very important that the material available to the teacher and received from various sources is taught to students from the most objective positions. Thus, while studying the history of the Civil War at Higher School, Research Institute; While studying archival documents, it is important not to lose sight of how the same topic is studied in today’s Russian schools. It is important to present information to young emerging personalities in a detailed, objective form, helping children independently draw conclusions, compare and analyze events that have occurred from the heights of past years. Disputes continue to rage in society about the burial of Lenin’s body; these debates are especially relevant against the backdrop of the possible burial of the remains of the bodies of Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria. Increasingly, the opinion is expressed that this will be another step towards reconciliation, farewell to the Civil War, which has not let go of people to this day. 37

LIST OF REFERENCES Monographs, textbooks, teaching aids 1. Vernadsky, G.V. Russian history: Textbook. allowance/G.V. Vernadsky - M.: Agraf, 1997. - 544 p. 2. Volkov, S.V. Red terror in Petrograd: Anthology / S.V. Volkov – M.: Iris – press, 2011. – 528 p. 3. Volkov, S.V. Red terror in Moscow: Anthology / S.V. Volkov – M.: Iris – press, 2013. – 496 p. 4. Volkov, S.V. Red Terror in the South of Russia: An Anthology / S.V. Volkov – M.: Iris – press, 2013. – 544 p. 5. Litvin, A.L. Red and White Terror in Russia 1918-1922: Monograph/A.L. Litvin – M.: Eksmo, 2004. – 448 p. 6. Melgunov, S.P. How the Bolsheviks seized power: Monograph / S. P. Melgunov - M.: Iris-press, 2014. – 656 p. 7. Melgunov, S.P. Red terror in Russia.: Monograph / S. P. Melgunov M.: Iris-press, 2008. –408 p. 8. Nesterova, M.B. Domestic history.: Textbook. allowance/ M.B. Nesterova - M.: Yurayt, 2013 - 415 p. 9. Ratkovsky, I.S. Red terror and the activities of the Cheka in 1918: Monograph/I.S. Ratkovsky - St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg State University, 2006 - 288 p. 10. Sakharov, A.N. History of Russia from ancient times to the present day: textbook. allowance in 2 volumes. T.2/ A.N. Sakharov – M.: Prospekt, 2008 – 720 p. Articles, scientific publications 11. Sorokin, A. K. “Red terror darkened great victory Soviet power..."/A.K. Sorokin // Rodina – 2016. - No. 816(8). 38

12. Timerbulatov, D.L. “Barges of Death” in Siberia during the Civil War (1918-1919) / D.L. Timerbulatov // Bulletin of Kemerovo University. – 2011. - No. 4. – P. 57-62 13. Shuldyakov, V.A. Atamanism as a phenomenon of the Civil War in the east of Russia / V.A. Shuldyakov // Bulletin of Novosibirsk State University. – 2006. -No. 1. – S. – 37-41 39

103. "Red Terror" and "White Terror"

Revolutions are not made with white gloves... Why be indignant that counter-revolutions are made with iron fists?

I.A. Bunin

The history of the White Movement we are considering is coming to an end, so it is worth taking a closer look at some of the factors accompanying the entire civil war. For example, the phenomenon of terror. As you know, it is usually divided into “red” and “white”. Let's touch on red first. Many examples of its implementation have already been given in other chapters, and it hardly makes sense to bring up specific facts again. They are too numerous, and listing them, even superficially, would take up too much space. Those interested can be recommended to refer to the book by S.P. Melgunov “Red Terror”, which was based on the materials of the Denikin commission to investigate Bolshevik atrocities. Let us qualitatively analyze how the phenomenon of “red terror” differed from the classic cruelties of paramilitary regimes and repressive campaigns in some other states. We can come to the conclusion that it differed in scope, direction and internal content, with the first and second directly following from the third.

Terror, which had been gradually spreading since the victory of Soviet power, was openly legalized and introduced into the system immediately after the establishment of one-party rule - in the summer of 1918, along with food surplus appropriation, a ban on commodity relations, committees of the poor, etc. And just as food appropriation was not a consequence of famine (on the contrary, it was often its cause), but part of Lenin’s unified plan for building communism, so the “red terror” was by no means a response to the “white” one. He, too, was an integral part of the new order created by the Bolsheviks. The peculiarity of the “Red Terror” is that it was not a punishment for any offenses. And not even a method of suppressing opponents - that was just one of its functions. It was not a means to achieve any specific goal, but at the same time it was an end. One of the foundations of the communist order under construction - and this foundation, in turn, was built and improved together with others components"new society". In the monstrous dystopia of the Leninist state, with the party leadership giving orders and the cogs-executors blindly implementing them, terror was supposed to perform the same functions that the death camps later performed in Nazi Germany: to destroy those parts of the population that do not fit into the scheme outlined Leader, and therefore are considered superfluous. Or at some stages they begin to interfere with the implementation of the overall plan

This was not yet the terror of the Stalinist camps, which used slave labor of people rejected by the regime. After all, according to Lenin’s original plan, the whole country was supposed to become such a camp, giving free labor on command and receiving a ration of bread in return. Therefore, people deemed unsuitable for such a scheme simply had to be exterminated. Hence the direction of terror. Since the right to think, make plans and draw conclusions in the new society was granted only to the party elite, it was the thinking part of the population that turned out to be superfluous and in the way. First of all, the intelligentsia, as well as the adjacent layers of citizens who have learned and are accustomed to think for themselves, for example, the cadre workers of Tula or Izhevsk, the most advanced and economic part of the peasantry, declared “kulaks.” Therefore, the “Red Terror” did not just carry out mass destruction of people - it sought to destroy the best. He suppressed everything cultural and progressive, killed the very soul of the people in order to replace it with a party propaganda surrogate. There was a kind of “zombification” of an entire people. Ideally, for such purposes, a permanent punitive apparatus should have “cut off” everything that rose in the slightest degree above the gray mass suitable for unconditional obedience.

Naturally, for such extensive tasks a very powerful repressive system was required. And it was created - multi-layered, covering the entire country with a network of terror: the Cheka, people's courts, the several types of tribunals listed earlier, army special departments. Plus the rights to repression granted to commanders and commissars, party and Soviet commissioners, food detachments and detachments, and local authorities. The basis of this entire complex apparatus was, of course, the Cheka. It was they who not only punished specific offenses, but also carried out a nationwide, centralized policy of terror.

We can only guess about the extent of the repressions and judge approximately, based on indirect data (and it is unlikely, given the Bolshevik carelessness, that any complete accounting of those destroyed was kept). Thus, the executioner-theorist Latsis in his book “Two Years of Struggle on the Internal Front” cited the figure of 8,389 people executed. with many caveats.

Firstly, this number refers only to 1918 and the first half of 1919, i.e. it does not take into account the summer of 1919, when many people were exterminated “in response” to the offensive of Denikin and Yudenich, when “executions according to the lists” began ", when, when the whites approached, hostages and prisoners were shot, drowned in barges, burned or exploded along with prisons (as, for example, in Kursk). The years 1920–1921, the years of the main reprisals against the defeated White Guards, members of their families and “accomplices,” are also not taken into account.

Secondly, the figures given refer only to the Cheka “in the manner of extrajudicial execution”; it does not include the actions of tribunals and other repressive bodies.

Thirdly, the number of those killed was given only for 20 central provinces, not including the front-line provinces, Ukraine, Don, Siberia, etc., where the security officers had the most significant “amount of work”

And fourthly, Latsis emphasized that these data are “far from complete.” Indeed, even with all the reservations, they look understated. In Petrograd alone and in just one campaign, after the assassination attempt on Lenin, 900 people were shot. However, casuistry is possible here, since in the “Lenin days” they were shot not “in the order of extrajudicial execution”, but “in the order of the Red Terror”.

A special feature of the “Red Terror” was that it was carried out centrally, according to the instructions of the government - either in massive waves throughout the state, or selectively in individual regions. For example, telegram No. 3348 to the Southern Front during Mamontov’s raid brought to the attention of divisions and regiments:

“The Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front orders, in a change to previous resolutions regarding the general policy of the Don region, to be guided by the following: to most mercilessly suppress the attempted rebellion in the rear, using in this suppression measures of mass destruction of the rebels.”

In the summer of 1920, during Wrangel’s offensive, Trotsky declared “red terror” in the Yekaterinoslav province. In previous chapters, numerous telegrams from Lenin with similar instructions were cited. Centralized instructions stipulated the categories of the population subject to extermination in a particular campaign, and sometimes even the type of execution. Thus, in a telegram to Penza dated August 11, 2018, Lenin ordered:

"...Hang (certainly hang, so that the people can see) at least 100 notorious kulaks, rich people, bloodsuckers... Find tougher people."

Another feature is the reinforcement of terror by class theory. The “bourgeois” or “kulak” was declared a subhuman, in all respects he acted as a kind of inferior being, “untouchable.” Therefore, from the point of view of communist morality, his destruction, in general, was not murder. Just like later, in Nazi Germany - the destruction of “racially inferior” peoples. Only in Russia it was not about the people, but about their class-inferior part. Therefore, from a “class” point of view, torture was considered completely acceptable. It has already been said that the question of their applicability was openly discussed in the press and was decided positively. The range of them already in civilian life was very diverse - torture with insomnia, light - car headlights in the face, a salty “diet” without water, hunger, cold, beatings, flogging, burning with a cigarette. In addition to “improvised” means, special ones were also used. Several sources, including a report by the Central Committee of the Russian Red Cross, talk about cabinets in which one could only stand upright (an option was to sit crouched) and in which prisoners were locked for long periods of time, sometimes cramming several people into a “single” cabinet. Savinkov and Solzhenitsyn, citing witnesses, mention a “cork chamber,” hermetically sealed and heated, where the prisoner suffered from lack of air and blood came out of the pores of the body. Taking into account the cultural composition of the victims, another kind of torture was also used, moral: placing men and women in a common cell with a single bucket, all kinds of mockery, humiliation and mockery. For example, long hours of kneeling were practiced for arrested women from cultural backgrounds. Option - in the nude. And one of the Kyiv security officers, according to the Red Cross report, on the contrary, drove the “bourgeois women” into tetanus by interrogating them in the presence of naked girls groveling before him - not prostitutes, but the same “bourgeois women” whom he had previously managed to break.

It is no coincidence that N. Teffi recognized the commissar, who terrified the entire district of Unecha, as a quiet and downtrodden dishwasher who had always volunteered to help the cook cut chickens. “No one asked - she went willingly and never let her pass.” The portraits of security officers and prison commandants drawn by eyewitnesses - sadists, cocaine addicts, half-insane alcoholics - are also not accidental. It was precisely these people who were needed by the new government and took positions that corresponded to their inclinations. And for massacres, according to the report of the 1st Kutepov Corps, they tried to attract the Chinese or Latvians, since ordinary Red Army soldiers, despite being given vodka and permission to profit from the clothes and shoes of the victims, often could not stand it and ran away.

If torture remained at the level of “amateur performance” and experiments carried out differently everywhere, then executions were unified and brought to a single methodology. Already in 1919–1920. they were carried out in the same way in Odessa, Kyiv, and Siberia. The victims were stripped naked, laid face down on the floor and shot in the back of the head. Such uniformity suggests centralized guidelines that take into account the regime of maximum “savings” and “convenience.” One cartridge per person, a guarantee against unwanted incidents at the last moment, again - it writhes less, does not cause inconvenience when falling, it stays the same as you put it in, pull it away and put the next one in. Only in mass cases did the form of murder differ - barges with pierced bottoms, rifle volleys or machine guns. However, even in these situations, the prescribed ritual was observed whenever possible. So, in 1919, before the surrender of Kiev, when in one fell swoop they threw many prisoners under the volleys of the Chinese (adding to them a party of civilian employees of the Cheka, clerical and intelligence officers, who apparently knew too much), even in the prevailing rush of those under firing squad who were waiting for their turn , do not forget to undress punctually. And during the period of massacres in Crimea, when whole crowds were driven under machine guns every night, the doomed were forced to undress while still in prison, so as not to have to drive vehicles to get their things. And in winter, in the wind and frost, columns of naked men and women were driven to the place of execution.

But, perhaps, this order was not explained by sadism and the desire to mock. It fit perfectly into the initial projects of the new society and was justified by the same iron logic of Lenin’s dystopia, which completely lost all moral and ethical “remnants” and left only the principles of naked rationalism to the new state. Therefore, the system that destroys unnecessary people was obliged to scrupulously preserve everything that could be useful, not disdaining dirty linen. It’s just that they didn’t cut hair onto mattresses, like Nazi followers, but in conditions of raging typhus it would have been unsafe. And the clothes and shoes of those executed (with the exception of those stolen by the direct perpetrators) were carefully accounted for and entered into the “asset” of the Cheka. By some accident or oversight, a curious document ended up in Lenin’s PSS, vol. 51, p. 19:

“An invoice to Vladimir Ilyich from the economic department of the IBSC for the goods sold and released to you...”

In it, signed by the head. The economic department of the Moscow Cheka lists the following items: boots - 1 pair, suit, suspenders, belt.

“Only for 1 thousand 417 rubles 75 kopecks.”

One inevitably wonders who owned the Lenin suits, coats and caps that were later exhibited in museums? Did they have time to cool down after the previous owner, when the leader pulled them on himself?

When, after the “red” terror, you turn to the “white” terror and begin to examine materials, the question inevitably arises - did it even exist? If we define “terror” by its Bolshevik appearance, as a centralized, mass phenomenon, part of the general policy and state system, then the answer will definitely be negative.

No, the White Guards were not “angels” at all. The civil war is a terrible, cruel war. There were reprisals against the enemy and violence. But when you touch on specific facts, it turns out that such cases are completely incomparable with the “Red Terror”, neither quantitatively nor qualitatively. I’ll make a reservation right away - everything said applies to the areas of operation of regular white armies, and not to the independent “atamanshchina”, where both sides destroyed each other approximately “as equals”. But the “atamanshchina” did not obey the orders of the supreme white power. On the contrary, atrocities were committed in defiance of these orders.

As for other areas, a general pattern can be noted: the overwhelming share of atrocities occurs in the “partisan” phase of the White Movement. For example, the beginning of the Kornilov campaign, when no prisoners were taken - and what could they do with if the Volunteer Army had neither a rear nor a shelter. But already during the retreat from Ekaterinodar in April 18, the situation began to change - even many prominent Bolsheviks were released on the condition that with their influence they would protect the non-transportable wounded left in the villages from reprisals. Of course, cases of extrajudicial executions were repeated later. But they were strictly prohibited by the command and were in the nature of spontaneous excesses. And they usually only treated commissars, security officers, communists and Soviet workers. Often “internationalists”, i.e. Germans, Hungarians, and Chinese, were not taken prisoner. Former officers who ended up serving in the Red Army were not favored either - they were treated as traitors. And regarding the bulk of prisoners, they became one of the main sources of replenishment of the white armies: the peasant will come or will not come after mobilization, and the prisoner will not go anywhere, especially if he was forcibly mobilized by the Reds. For comparison, on the red side, cases of massacres of prisoners were observed both in the 19th and in the 20th.

The main outbreaks of repression against the Reds and their sympathizers, known in fact, occurred during the anti-Bolshevik uprisings in the Kuban, Don, Ural, Volga region, taking on a particularly fierce character where social discord was complemented by ethnic discord (Cossacks against non-residents, Kyrgyz against peasants, etc. .). Again, we are dealing with a kind of “partisan” phase. With spontaneous explosions, when the reciprocal hatred of the population, driven by them to rebellion, spilled out on the Bolsheviks. But even during such outbreaks, the degree of red and white reprisals was by no means unambiguous. Remember Serafimovich's "Iron Stream". The Taman army, carving out villages on its way, sparing neither women nor children, in order to raise the fighting anger, is forced to turn off the path and make a detour of 20-30 miles to look at the five hanged Bolsheviks. More rigorous examples can be given. The Veshensky rebels almost immediately after their victory (after the genocide!) decided to cancel the executions. Or, say, in 1947, the trial of Shkuro, Krasnov, Sultan-Girey Klych and other White Guards who collaborated with Germany took place. Their activities during the civil war were also examined. So, in the materials of the trial published in Soviet literature, there is no mention of any massacres against the civilian population - even in 1918, when Shkuro led the rebels. Everywhere we talk only about “commanders and commissars,” and the victims are listed by name. The same applies to Sultan-Girey Klych, who commanded the Wild Division. But these were the acts of the most “brutal” white units that were being investigated!..

Around the same time, in the summer of 18th, A. Stetsenko, Furmanov’s wife, went to Yekaterinodar and arrived at the moment of its capture by the Whites. And she fell into the clutches of Denikin’s counterintelligence. The whole city knew that she was a communist, the daughter of a prominent Ekaterinodar Bolshevik who was shot by the Rada. And she arrived from the Soviet of Deputies... After making sure that she was not a spy, but simply came to visit her relatives, no crime was found and she was released. During the uprisings on the Volga and Siberia, prominent communists who managed to avoid the spontaneous wave of popular anger, as a rule, remained alive. Mention has already been made of the Red leaders in Samara, who were gradually exchanged or escaped from prison. The leader of the Vladivostok communists P. Nikiforov quietly sat in prison from June 1918 to January 1920 - both under the government of Derber, and under the Ufa Directory, and under Kolchak, and without much difficulty he led the local party organization from there. In 1919–1920 The Bolshevik Krasnoshchekoe, the future chairman of the government of the Far Eastern Republic, was also in Kolchak’s prison. And Mamontov’s Cossacks from the raid, hundreds of kilometers away, took with them the captured commissars and security officers for trial in Kharkov - and many of them later also remained alive.

On the Soviet side, terror was introduced centrally - up to direct instructions from the government on the scale and methods of repression. Among the whites, it manifested itself in the form of spontaneous excesses, which were suppressed and curbed in every possible way by the authorities as this “element” was organized. If in open Soviet literature, in Lenin's PSS, many documents have been preserved demanding merciless and wholesale reprisals, then you will not find excerpts from such orders and instructions for the white armies anywhere - despite the fact that many archives, headquarters and government ones, fell into the hands of the Reds enemy documents in “liberated” cities. There are simply no such orders. And Soviet historical literature is forced to make its statements about the “White Terror” either unfounded or relying on “terrible” documents, such as the telegram of the Stavropol governor dated 08/13/19, which demanded such punitive measures to fight the rebels as compiling lists of partisan families and evicting them outside the province (impressive atrocity compared to Lenin’s directives!). The order of the general is often cited as an example. Rozanov, who, with reference to Japanese methods, proposed “strict and cruel” measures to suppress the Yenisei uprising. They just keep silent about the fact that Rozanov was fired by Kolchak for this. And Wrangel, declaring Crimea a besieged fortress, threatened to mercilessly... expel opponents of the government behind the front line.

The main difference between the “red” and “white” terrors stems from the very essence of the struggle between the parties. Some imposed a hitherto unfamiliar regime of totalitarianism (and, according to the original plans, perhaps super-totalitarianism), others fought to restore law and order. Was the concept of “terror” compatible with law and order? Laws are the first thing that white commanders and governments tried to restore, having found liberated territory under their feet. For example, in the South, the pre-February wartime laws of the Russian Empire were in effect. In the north - the most lenient legislation of the Provisional Government. Even in the Yaroslavl uprising, one of the first orders of Colonel Perkhurov restored pre-October laws, legal proceedings and prosecutorial supervision.

Yes, the white authorities executed their enemies. But the executions were again personal, not general. By court verdict. And the death sentence, in accordance with the law, was subject to approval by a person no lower than the commander of the army. I wonder if the Soviet army commanders would have time left for direct duties if they were given all the verdicts in the areas occupied by their troops for approval? By the way, the same order existed with Petliura. If you don’t believe me, open Ostrovsky’s “How the Steel Was Tempered,” where the Petliuraites are discussing whether to impute several years to the arrested person, since the “chief ataman” will not approve the sentence of the minor.

The descriptions of white counterintelligence - with torture, dungeons and executions - usually look groundless. It was as if they were copied from the Cheka. Counterintelligence had many of the shortcomings mentioned earlier, but it did not have the right to execute or pardon. Its functions were limited to arrest and preliminary inquiry, after which the materials were transferred to the judicial investigative authorities. How would she carry out torture and torment without even having her own prisons? Those arrested were kept in citywide prisons or guardhouses. And how, after torture, would she present those arrested to the court, where, unlike amateur counterintelligence officers, there were professional lawyers who would immediately make a fuss about an obvious violation of the law? And besides, they didn’t like counterintelligence officers. Finally, when the whites abandoned the cities, the Soviet side for some reason did not document any “creepy dungeons”, unlike the whites, who repeatedly did this when the Bolsheviks abandoned the cities. However, everything is relative. In Yekaterinoslav, for example, the public and the legal profession expressed violent protest against the excesses of counterintelligence. They expressed that she kept the arrested for 2-3 days without interrogation or bringing charges. From the point of view of legality, such actions, of course, were outrages.

As for the courts that decided the fate of the accused communists, their approach, although strict, was far from unambiguous. Guilt was determined personally. So, in the spring of 19, several dozen people were caught red-handed in Dagestan, the entire underground revolutionary committee and the Bolshevik committee, at the last meeting, on the eve of the impending uprising. Five of them were executed. On April 22, 2020, in Simferopol, the entire meeting of the city party and Komsomol committees, also several dozen people, was arrested. Nine were sentenced to death. 4.06.20. in Yalta they took 14 underground workers. Six were shot.

In general, the literature on “white terror” is extensive. But usually he gets off with general phrases. About how the advancing Reds liberated prisons full of workers. Forgetting to clarify, these “workers” ended up in prison for their beliefs or for theft and banditry. Well, as soon as it came to specific facts, the accusations began to limp. Thus, the solid work of Yu. Polyakov, A. Shishkin and others, “The Anti-Soviet Intervention of 1917–1922 and Its Collapse,” gives as many as ... two examples of reprisals by landowner officers against peasants who plundered their estates. This is for the entire Kolchak front (let us also take into account the fact that such actions were officially prohibited by Kolchak, as well as by Denikin). A fact from a leaflet of the Ufa Bolshevik Committee about some lieutenant Gankevich, who shot two high school students for working in a Soviet institution, wandered from book to book. It does not say whether this Gankevich was mentally healthy and how the command treated him later. In the same way, the books repeat the example given by Furmanov in “Chapaev” - about drunken Cossacks who chopped up two red cooks who accidentally stopped by their location. Such rewriting of facts from each other seems to speak for itself - and not at all about their widespread nature. (By the way, the same Furmanov quite calmly describes how he himself ordered the execution of an officer simply because they found a letter from his fiancée, where she writes how bad life is under the Reds and asks to release them as soon as possible.)

It cannot be denied that there were also atrocities and lawlessness on the part of the whites. But they were carried out contrary to the general policy of the command. And they were not a mass campaign, but isolated cases, so the question remains open - are such facts subject to any generalization? Thus, the “green commander-in-chief” N. Voronovich told in his memoirs how Colonel Petrov’s punitive detachment, suppressing a peasant rebellion, shot 11 people in the village of Tretya Rota. But this execution was the only one. As Voronovich writes:

“What happened then in the village of Third Company, in its horror and monstrous cruelty, surpasses all the massacres committed before and since by volunteers...”

And this reprisal cost the Denikins a powerful uprising in the Sochi district... In Stavropol in 1920, when the front was already collapsing, the Cossacks, brutalized by defeat, vented their rage by killing about 60 people. political prisoners held in prison. The entire local public was outraged, and protests immediately followed at all levels of the city prosecutor Krasnov (who soon became the Minister of Justice in the Denikin government). But this case was also one of a kind. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who destroyed prisoners during the retreat, the Whites could not afford this, realizing that the Reds would take it out on the civilian population. On the contrary, as already mentioned, in a number of cases, for example, in Yekaterinodar, communist prisoners were released in order to prevent the atrocities of the Red Army entering the city.

B. Aleksandrovsky, who worked as a doctor in Gallipoli, in one of the camps of the defeated White Army, wrote:

“The prevailing belief among Wrangel’s officers was that the main mistake, one of the reasons for the defeat, was softness in the fight against Bolshevism.”

Indeed, the extent of the repressions can be judged from documents such as the appeal of the Crimean Regional Committee of the RCP (b) to workers, soldiers and peasants:

"Comrades! The blood of the innocently tortured nine of your representatives calls to you! To vengeance! To arms!"

Innocently tortured nine - Sevastopol underground city party committee, arrested on 02/04/20 during the preparation of the uprising and shot. I wonder what numbers the Whites would have to operate with if they had thought of issuing similar appeals about the work of the Cheka?

But the most eloquent example of a comparison of red and white repressions is given by a former gene. Danilov, who served at the headquarters of the 4th Soviet Army. In April 1921, the Bolsheviks decided to hold a solemn funeral for the victims of the “White Terror” in Simferopol. But no matter how much they searched, they found only 10 underground fighters, convicted by a military court and hanged. The figure seemed “unrespectable,” and the authorities took the first dead people they found from hospitals, bringing the number of coffins to 52, which were buried magnificently after a solemn procession and meeting. This happened at a time when the Reds themselves had already shot 20 thousand people in Simferopol...

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From the book "Red Terror" in Russia 1918 - 1923 author Melgunov Sergey Petrovich

Red Terror “In a country where personal freedom provides the opportunity for honest, ideological struggle... political murder, as a means of struggle, is a manifestation of despotism.” Exec. Committee Nar. Voli. I lived through the first five years of Bolshevik rule in Russia. When I left for

From the book Russian Revolution. Bolsheviks in the struggle for power. 1917-1918 author Pipes Richard Edgar

CHAPTER 10. RED TERROR Terror is mainly unnecessary cruelty committed by frightened people for the sake of their own peace of mind. From a letter from Engels to Marx1 Systematic state terror was not invented by the Bolsheviks: they resorted to it long before them

From the book Secret Operations of the Cheka author Golinkov David Lvovich

Red Terror On January 1, 1918, at about 19:30, the car in which V.I. Lenin, M.I. Ulyanova and the secretary of the Swiss Social Democratic Party F. Platten were returning from a meeting in the Mikhailovsky Manege was fired at on the Simeonovsky Bridge ( now the Belinsky Bridge)

author Simbirtsev Igor

Chapter 5 Was the “Red Terror” a response to the “White”? History and traditions are being destroyed, the struggle is becoming fiercer to the point of bestial anger. Soviet People's Commissar A.V.

From the book of the Cheka in Lenin's Russia. 1917–1922: At the dawn of the revolution author Simbirtsev Igor

What was the “White Terror” It is often the cruelty of the White counterintelligence that the Bolsheviks and their defenders justify their “Red Terror”. Although during the Civil War itself, and even in the 20s and 30s of the first decades of Soviet power, the ideologists of Bolshevism did not even defend such

From the book All Against All: The Unknown Civil War in the Southern Urals author Suvorov Dmitry Vladimirovich

Red terror in the Urals Now discussions about red terror have even become somewhat commonplace: they refer to it in all cases - just as before everyone blamed white terror. We still have a long way to go before we understand what the Red Terror is as a phenomenon in the history of the 20th century.

From the book The Emperor Who Knew His Fate. And Russia, which did not know... author Romanov Boris Semenovich

Red Terror The wave of revolutionary terror in Russia of the 20th century is usually counted from the murder in 1901 of the Minister of Public Education Nikolai Pavlovich Bogolepov (he was killed by a student expelled from Moscow University, the Socialist Revolutionary P. Karpovich). Total victims from 1901 to 1911

From the book The Black Book of Communism by Bartoszek Karel

3. Red Terror On August 3, 1918, the German ambassador in Moscow Karl Gelfreich reported to his government: “The Bolsheviks openly say that their days are numbered. Moscow was gripped by real panic... Incredible rumors are circulating around the city about “traitors” who have infiltrated

From the book Provincial “counter-revolution” [White movement and civil war in the Russian North] author Novikova Lyudmila Gennadievna

Local government and white terror White terror traditionally occupied a special place in red propaganda and later Soviet historiography, which believed that it was the widespread use of violence that allowed whites to keep power in their hands. It was argued that only through

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