"White Czechs" on the streets of Penza
Armored cars sent to Penza.
Well, it should start with the fact that he was still a student at the Penza Pedagogical Institute named after. V.G. Belinsky (where in 1972, I began to study at the Faculty of History and Philology, at the same time receiving the specialty teacher stories and English) I decided to do science, and I signed up to the scientific circle of Professor Vsevolod Feoktistovich Morozov, our then first doctor of science on the history of the CPSU, which several of our students gave to write a report on how the White Czechs seized Penza in May. At the same time, he told them to turn to the memories of still-living witnesses of those events.
The report was read, and even then I thought that obviously something in the information they collected about those events was not enough. The ends do not communicate! So, for example, from it showed that the composition with the Czechs, arrived at the station Penza-3, had no guns, they were all handed over to this. However, according to the recollections of an eyewitness, the Czechs fired cannons around the city, and one “core” hit the corner of a house on Sovetskaya Square. Further more: the whole center of Penza, which was stormed by the “White Czechs”, is located on a mountain, and from the station, where their trains stood, it is separated by a river. Yes, wooden bridges were led there, but there were machine guns on the bell tower of the cathedral and on the river bank. The Soviet troops that defended the city had artillery. And how did the Czechs, under artillery and machine-gun fire, manage to cross these two bridges and climb up the mountain? There and lightly to go hard, and then run under machine-gun fire with full display!
When offensive forces must be at the level of 6: 1, did the Czechs really have such an advantage? In general, our speaker at that conference was very difficult. When he began to say that “White-Czechs entered the city on bridges,” he was asked how this could be, because it’s absolutely clear that if every bridge is mounted on a machine gun, then the infantry cannot move through it. Moreover, the Bolsheviks had a lot of machine guns in Penza, if they were located both at the bell tower of the city cathedral and at the Council House in the same Cathedral Square, and in various other places in the city.
As for the Czechs, the order was read: “In each echelon, an armed company of 168 men, including non-commissioned officers, and one machine gun, for each 300 rifle, for the 1200 machine gun of charges, should be left for their own protection. All other rifles and machine guns, all guns must be handed over to the Russian government in the hands of a special commission in Penza, consisting of three representatives of the Czechoslovak army and three representatives of Soviet power ... ”[1]. So the gun body passed, even when he left the Ukraine to Russia. But neither the speaker, nor the co-rapporteurs, nor our professor Morozov himself answered the questions of various meticulous students at that time.
Participant of three wars
It turned out that either “ours” were in the full minority, or “could not fight”, or the “Czechs” had too much advantage and were brave to insanity! Or we didn’t know about all this ... However, the story of those events is best to start by finding out the reasons for this “rebellion” and its background, which is very instructive in its own way. But first of all, it should be said about who these same Czechs were and what they did in Russia in 1918 year. Briefly about them, you can say this: they are collaborators, the then ... "Vlasovites."
Already at the beginning of World War I, the Czechs and Slovaks who fought in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire deserted with whole regiments and surrendered to the Russians (well, they didn’t like the Austrians or the Hungarians - what can you do?), So that a whole corps (created 9 of October 1917 of the year) in 40 of thousands of soldiers, called upon to fight together with the Russian army for the independence of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, that is, against their state - the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. After the victory, they were promised the creation of an independent state, just as Hitler had promised the Cossacks republic to our Cossacks and, of course, they very willingly went to war for that. Czechoslovakians, naturally, considered themselves part of the troops of the Entente, and fought against the Germans and Austrians on the territory of Ukraine. When the Russian Empire ordered to live long, parts of the Czechoslovak Corps stood near Zhytomyr, then retreated to Kiev, and from there to Bakhmach.
And it was here that Soviet Russia signed the “Brest Peace” and became the actual ally of Germany, which transferred the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine to Rostov and the entire Black Sea fleet. In accordance with it, all the troops of the Entente (in Russia, where besides the Czechoslovakia, there were also English and Belgian armored divisions, and many other units) were to be urgently removed from the country, of which they were still quite recently. And although Pravda and the local newspapers wrote in March 1918 of the year that “50 000 Czechs went over to the side of the Soviet Republic” [2], in fact this was not the case!
They did not “go over” anywhere, but it was that the leaders of the Czechoslovak Corps, together with Joseph Stalin, at that time the People’s Commissar for Nationalities Affairs, signed an agreement according to which the corps was to leave for France through Vladivostok, and all its heavy weapons to pass.
Point of delivery weapons Penza was appointed, where the former allies were loaded into trains and sent to the Pacific via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Those who did not want to go to the Western Front here, in Penza, could enroll in a Czechoslovak regiment organized in the Red Army.
But then at the end of April 1918, the German side demanded that the trains with the Czechoslovaks be stopped. But they gave a "green street" to trains with captured Austrian and German soldiers, who began to urgently return to their homeland from camps in the territory of modern Kazakhstan. And it is clear that the German army, who fought on the Western front, needed reinforcements, and the appearance of 50-thousand Czechoslovaks at the front in France was not at all necessary. Well, the Bolsheviks had to "pay off debts." All the saying: you love to ride, love and sleigh to carry. On the Black Sea ships, those that were not sunk in Novorossiysk, the Kaiser flags were already flying, but what about the Czechoslovakians? And about them it was like this: that on May 14 in Chelyabinsk, Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war threw a piece of metal from a passing train and it “seemingly by chance” seriously wounded one Czech soldier. The Czechoslovakians stopped the train with the captured Hungarians, but found the culprit and ... by mob right away they were shot.
The local council did not clarify the matter, but arrested the ringleaders. Then, on May 17, the 3 and 6 regiments of the Czechoslovak Corps occupied Chelyabinsk and freed the arrested comrades. This time, the conflict between the Czechs and the Soviet authorities was resolved by the world. But on May 21, the Czechs intercepted a telegram sent for signature by Leon Trotsky, the people's commissar for military affairs, which ordered all the Czechoslovak units to immediately disband or, instead of sending them to France, turn them into a labor army! In response, the Czechoslovakians ... decided to go to Vladivostok in spite of everything on their own.
Trotsky did not like it when anyone else undermined his authority by failing to comply with his orders. Therefore, on May 25, he issued an order: to stop the Czechoslovak echelons by any available means, and to shoot any Czechoslovakian, with a weapon in his hand in the area of the highway, immediately.
Thus, it was the Soviet government first declared war on the corps. And he accepted the challenge, although he thereby became a participant in four wars at once - the war of the Entente with Germany and its allies, the civil war with those Czechs who remained loyal to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the “red Czechs” that were transferred to the Bolsheviks, and the civil war territory of Russia, and turned into one of the active participants in all these wars.
Newspaper pages show ...
Even today I cannot understand why, at that time, our professor Morozov did not send us to the city archive, so that we read about all these events in the Penza newspapers, because we then had to be satisfied with eyewitness memories and secondary sources. But when I could read all our newspapers, they found a lot of interesting things in them. For example, in the Bulletin of the “Penza News of Sov.” And in the newspaper “Molot”, in the section “On Events” it was directly stated that “there are many different reasons for the causes of the bloody events that have been played out in the city. interpretations ... "- and" must be clarified. " Then it was written that "the Czech echelons are the remnants of the Russian army ... who fell under the influence of their counter-revolutionary officers, that" trains with food ... were not missed at all by rapists "(from Siberia). Further, that in the morning of May 28, "Czechoslovak troops captured three armored cars, sent to the Soviet, thus starting military operations." “Already in the 1-2 hour, shots began to be heard and in some places machine guns began to chatter. And finally, the artillery rumbled ... "[3]. Then the newspaper gave a colorful description of the indiscriminate robbery that the Czechs committed in Penza (Who in the comments to the last article about the Czechs wanted to know about the robberies? Here you are!) And about the "cowardly" withdrawal of the rebels by rail. 83 corpses of Penzents were reported that were offered in the morgue of the city hospital for identification, and 23 corpses at the chapel in one of the city churches.
Attention was drawn to the fact that many Red Army men were killed by explosive bullets, which for some reason were abundant with the Czechs. That is, the Czechs in Penza also violated an international convention - that's how it is! The newspaper Izvestia of the Penza Council of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies "on 2 June 1918 of the year about the armed struggle against the Czechoslovakia was reported by the hour:" Penza 12 hours (May 28) was declared under siege. In the city, the working Red Guard took up arms. Trenches are digging and barricades are being built. 2 hours - our passages across the Penza River are busy and they are fired by rifle and machine-gun fire. 4 o'clock in the afternoon - began artillery shooting. 12 hours of the night - the shooting does not subside ... "[4] The newspaper could not write about what happened next, as only 2 of June came out, when the trains of the Czechoslovakians left Penza. That is, here and guns shot, and there were even armored cars, but here it was impossible to learn more about this either from newspapers or from other archive materials of the GAPO (State Archive of the Penza Region).
Penza. Ryazan-Ural railway station (Now Penza-3 station).
The same building. View from the train tracks.
A gift from fate
It is known from Soviet historical literature that in the open spaces of Russia the Czechoslovak Corps stretched along the entire Trans-Siberian Railway, and there were six groups in it - the Penza, Chelyabinsk, Novonikolaevskaya, Mariinskaya, Nizhneudinskaya and Vladivostok, which were sufficiently isolated from each other.
The Penza group was at the same time one of the largest and well-armed. It included the 1 Rifle Regiment named after Jan Hus, the 4 Rifle Regiment of Prokop Naked, the 1 Reserve Hussite Regiment and the 1 th Artillery Brigade of Jan ижižka from Trotsnov, who were able to retain part of the armed forces. However, it would be very difficult for them to storm the city on a hill, and so big as Penza, if there were no unknown circumstances here. And then the question naturally arises: what were these circumstances?
Czechs have trophy armored cars.
In Soviet times, they usually wrote that "the most powerful and dangerous group for the Bolsheviks was on the Serdobsk-Penza-Syzran railway line and had a total number of approximately 8 thousand fighters." But these 8 thousands were not exactly in Penza, so it can hardly be argued that the Czechoslovakians had a significant advantage in manpower. Consequently, it was not by the number of fighters that the Czechs defeated the Penza garrison. It was something else. But then what?
And here in the Czech magazine NRM I caught sight of a material about ... Czech armored vehicles that participated in the storming ... Penza! The editors of the magazine linked me to the Prague Diffrological Society (Society of Lovers of the History of Armored Vehicles), and from there they sent me information about those events from private archives of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as photos from the collection of B. Panush and another scheme by I. Vanek. All these materials were printed in the magazine “Tankomaster” [5], only there were no references to sources, because the materials sent to me in a typewritten form, and we did not publish references in it. And an unknown factor was found out. It turns out that the rebels Czechoslovakia were helped ... by the Bolsheviks themselves, who sent three armored cars to Penza to "crush the Czechs", who arrived by rail at Penza-3 station. They were sent to the Penza Council, because of the obvious embarrassment and by coincidence, all the armored cars fell into the hands of the Czechs. Moreover, the armored cars were brought to Penza ... the Chinese (!), And they did not really resist the Czechs, and transferred all three armored cars intact. And the most interesting thing was that they did not know about it only here in the USSR, and in socialist Czechoslovakia they knew this well, because the memoirs of S. Chechek, one of the commanders of the rebel corps, where all these details were given, were published in 1928 year! [6]
BA "Austin"
BA "Harford-Putilov"
Well, for the Czechoslovak armored cars, sent to their "pacification", became just a "gift of fate." The Grozny BA, for example, was a Harford-Putilov heavy cannon with an 76,2-mm cannon in a rotating turret in the rear of the hull and with three Maxim machine guns in the turret and in the sponsors. The Armstrong-Whitworth-Fiat BA, called Infernal, had two machine gun turrets with 7,62-mm machine guns, and a third, also with two machine guns, was assembled from parts of the Austin armored vehicles of the 1 and 2 series. One machine gun on it stood next to the driver, the other - in the tower. Moreover, on its tower even the Kornilov emblem was preserved, i.e. skull and Bones! And at that time it was a formidable force. It only remained to apply it correctly, which the Czechs did!
Lebedev Bridge was considered to be the most important in the city. For he connected the city center with the Ryazan-Ural railway station Penza III, with the river bank and the military camp, located behind the railway. But judge for yourself, is it possible for such a bridge to break through to infantry under the fire of at least one Maxim machine gun?
View of the same bridge from the Sands. Most likely, the festival of Water Blessing was photographed. As you can see, the bell towers, on which machine guns could be installed, were enough in the city then!
The main thing is to have a good plan.
It was these BAs that ultimately decided the fate of Penza, since it was simply unthinkable to storm it without their support. At that time, Penza-3 station (Uralsky railway station in 1918) was separated from the central part of the city by the Penza River and Starorechiy, the old Penza river bed, which was flooded during the flood that turned the village Peski opposite the station . When Staroreche dried out after the flood, a small stream flowed along it, above which a bridge was built (more like flimsy walkways with railings). The infantry could have passed through them, and through the Sands, along the Lebedevsky Bridge, to get into the city center. But the defenders of the city shot through the bridge from the embankment with machine-gun fire. Here, it was possible to pass only under the cover of an armored car, although it is not known how the Czechs dragged him through the Starorechenskiy brook.
View of the city from the east. In the foreground is the Starorechenskiy creek and the riverbed flooded during high water. Here, in theory, the rebellious Czechoslovakians were supposed to move to the Lebedevsky bridge.
“View of Penza from the Dragoon crossing at the end of Predtetskaya Street (now Bakunin). In 1914, the Red Bridge (now Bakuninsky) was built on that spot ”. There is such a photo on the Penza history website, and this signature was taken from there. However, in fact, it does not depict Penza. There was no such place in Penza at that time.
However, maybe they did not need it. After all, down the river was another solid bridge - Tatarsky, but it was impossible to take it by the forces of one infantry, as this and all other bridges were shot through with machine-gun fire, which, by the way, was reported by Penza Izvestia.
On May 29, the Czechs launched the armored car “Hellish” in front of their units, which was supposed to defiantly depict an attack on a bridge over the river in the area of Peskov. One-towered "Austin", armed with two machine guns, moved along Moskovskaya Street - the main street of Penza. Now it is pedestrian, because it is very cool, and in winter it is easy to ride on a sled. And she was paved with cobblestones, as the cobblestones are slippery, and here at Austin, when he was driving uphill, the motor suddenly went berserk. The clutch of brakes from the cobblestones was not enough, and the armored car crawled down, although the driver tried to start the engine with all his might, and the soldiers were pushing him from behind.
But then on luck attacking the armored car's engine earned, and the Austin slowly moved on. But already at the very top of Moskovskaya Street, he stopped again, as telegraph wires hung there across the street, and he got confused in them. But even this did not delay him very much, and around 11 hours of the morning he finally drove to the Cathedral Square and with the fire of his machine guns he silenced the Red machine guns in the Council building and at the cathedral bell tower. And then the infantry went on the attack, and before noon the Czechs had already completely controlled the city. Their trophies were a significant amount of weapons and ammunition and 1500 Red Army prisoners of war, which they did not shoot, but were released to their homes [7].
Armored car "Grozny", 1-th Czech regiment in Penza, 28.05.1918, "Harford" at 6 o'clock in the morning 29 May Czechs put on the railway platform (although it may well be that they even did not remove it from it!), and in support of units of the 4 regiment, they were sent west to the city of Serdobsk, where the 1 battalion of the 4 regiment was located, the link with which was interrupted.
Once on the spot, this “armored train” dispersed parts of the Serdobsky Soviet with the fire of its cannon, and then engaged in a battle with the approaching Reds armored train, and forced it to retreat. Thanks to this, the 1 Battalion was able to go to Penza. It should be noted that, apparently, this BA was on this platform until the end of the battles and traveled, since due to the large weight it was difficult to use it on the dirt roads of Russia. So in the confrontation of the Penza Bolsheviks with the Czechoslovakia everything was decided by the superiority of the latter in technology. The path home, the path to a new war!
After the Czechs left Penza, although the local rich offered them two million "royal" if they stay, they, using armored vehicles, first captured Samara, and then established contact with parts of the Chelyabinsk group of troops. But further to them the delegation of the Russian public often visited, asking them to stay. In addition, they were often confronted by units of the Reds from the Magyars who were recruited in the camps, with whom the Czechs had their own bills, so they decided to stay on the Volga and fight against them on the side of the Entente here.
And yes, indeed, this decision was very important, because in the end 40 thousand Czechoslovaks were simply blocked in the camps of prisoners of war in Siberia and Kazakhstan ... up to one million German and Austrian prisoners of war who did not enter the Western Front. That is why Atlanta valued the actions of the Czechoslovak Corps in Russia very highly and provided him with all kinds of support, although he, in general, fought and was not very active!
The first ship with hull soldiers and women and children who joined them sailed from Vladivostok in November 1919, and the last left Russia in May 1920. The Czechs agreed with the Soviet authorities that the corps units that were concentrated in Vladivostok remained neutral, but they did not disarm either. And now Trotsky had nothing against it.
Corps commander General Gaida tried to hand over a large number of small arms to the Koreans who fought against the Japanese, for which Koreans are grateful to the Czechs so far! Well, and three armored vehicles of unknown type from among the trophies captured in the battles with the Red Army, they were sold to the Chinese in Harbin. So in the end, collaborationism of captured Czechoslovak soldiers was crowned ... with complete success!
Monument to the victims of the White-Czech rebellion in the center of Penza.
Sources of
1. See more: Tsvetkov V. Zh. Legion of the Civil War. Independent Military Review No. 48 (122), December 18 1998.
2. Proceedings of the Penza Council of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies ”№36 (239). 2 March 1918 c. 1.
3. "About events". Ibid. C.1
4. Proceedings of the Penza Council of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies ”№36 (239). 2 March 1918 3105 (208), May 29 1918 C.2.
5. Suslavyachus L., Shpakovsky V. Rebellious armor. Tankmaster, №6, 2002. C.17-21.
6. Chechek S. From Penza to the Urals - The Will of the People (Prague), 1928, No. XXUMX-8. C.9-252.
7.L.G. Priceg. Czechoslovak Corps in 1918. Questions of history, No.5, 2012. C.96.
Fig. A. Shepsa.
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