Who are you, Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis?
It is no secret that at the beginning of the war, the command staff of the Red Army showed itself not in the best way, to put it mildly. Just like in Finnish, our generals made mistakes in calculating their own and enemy's forces, with the directions of attacks, thoughtlessly following orders, or, on the contrary, sabotaging them. Not all and not always, of course, but the fact is the fact - those who led the Red Army in 1941, by 1945 were at best on the sidelines. For a war, this is a normal phenomenon - it carries out the most terrible, but at the same time the most effective selection of personnel. Voroshilov, Budyonny, Timoshenko, Pavlov, Kirponos and many others did not pass this selection. Someone died, someone was prosecuted and shot, and someone, after terrible military disasters, was pushed further away, to tertiary areas.
Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis did not pass this selection, but unlike Pavlov, who became an innocent victim of the regime, from Khrushchev, who became the Head of the USSR, from Timoshenko, who lived in satiety and peace, Mekhlis appears before us as a kind of devil who shot the poor Red Army soldiers in batches, undoubtedly smart and talented generals, so to speak, our Hindenburgs, and in general, as one newspaper put it, the shadow of Stalin and his punitive ax.
In fact, everything is not entirely true, or rather not at all. Mekhlis was a man of his era, and his era began in 1889 in Odessa, in the family of a bookbinder. It was a turbulent time, and for the Jews it was twice as turbulent. The Pale of Settlement, prohibitions on education and professions were in effect, preserving the narrow world of communities, from where young people were eager for freedom for a new life. Our hero was no exception, who received a fairly good education - an unfinished commercial school and work as a clerk and teacher. Of course, like many young men of that time, politics, joining the socialist party "Poalei Zion", participation in Jewish self-defense and arrest for possession weapons... In 1911 - the army, where Lev Mehlis got into the artillery, fought in the First World War. Some biographers write about the officer rank, some do not, Mekhlis himself said about himself, without going into details:
“In 1911 I was taken to the service and assigned to the artillery. I spent the entire imperialist war at the front. Since 1915, I have participated in the work of underground socialist circles. I joined the party in 1918, but actually became a communist three years earlier under the influence of older comrades who opened my eyes. "
Whatever it was, it is difficult to call a person a coward and a fool, and the revolution, and the war, and then the Civil war, where the commissar of the 46th rifle division was wounded:
“Mekhlis is a brave man, capable of inspiring inspiration during a battle, strives to the dangerous places of the front. But as a politician he has no political tact and does not know his rights and responsibilities. "
With tact, Lev Zakharovich was bad all his life, but with courage, as in the battle at Genichensk, where he led the fighters into the attack, everything is fine. Mehlis himself was just a fan of discipline, about which he personally wrote:
"The more the discipline is shaken, the more arbitrary measures one has to resort to to impose it, which do not always give positive results."
And as a fan of a personal example for the fighters:
“The army commissar of the 1st rank put the editorial staff on a truck - a former Leningrad taxi, gave several soldiers to guard:“ Break through ”. And they broke through the still fragile ice of the lake. And Mekhlis himself, together with the division commander, led its way out of the encirclement ... Seeing that ours could not bring down the Finnish barrier by the road, Mekhlis placed the soldiers in a chain, got into the tank himself and, moving forward, opened fire from a cannon and a machine gun. The soldiers followed. The enemy was shot down from his position. "
Doesn't sound like a tyrant and opportunist, does it? During the Great Patriotic War, Mekhlis did not change his habits:
“In one of his mouths he found the order to attack. He, without hesitation, stood at the head of the company and led it along. None of those around him managed to dissuade Mehlis from taking this step. It was very difficult to argue with Lev Zakharovich ... "
And he did not change until his death, when already on his deathbed he was thinking about the matter:
“I am perfectly aware that I am already standing with one foot in the grave and that the day is not far off when the other foot will also be there. I'm not afraid of death. As a materialist, I am aware of its inevitability, but what is the use of being afraid of the inevitable? I am afraid of another, that I will die without completing my work, the last important work of my life. "
At the same time, his career was not as simple and impetuous as is commonly thought. In 1920, after being wounded, he met Stalin and became his assistant. Iosif Vissarionovich himself was then not a strong and large size, and only one of the assistants ... From 1926 to 1930, Mehlis studied, studied seriously and efficiently, eventually becoming a red professor. And only in 1930 his career began - he became the editor of the newspaper "Pravda", the main newspaper of the country. He will work there until 1937.
Repression
Much has been written about how Mehlis massacred those who disliked Stalin; less is said about the fact that Lev Zakharovich almost repressed Joseph Vissarionovich. After the suicide of his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, it was Mehlis who conducted the investigation, interrogating the murder suspect, Stalin, several times. According to the recollections, he spent it seriously, without fools, remember Khrushchev:
"He was truly the most honest man, but somewhat crazy, which was expressed in his mania to see enemies and pests everywhere."
And so he participated, of course, even the names of the victims were preserved. Here in Saratov, he ordered the arrest of three perpetrators of pollution of the Volga River with oil products from a local refinery, where an unsettled technical process was launched, causing an environmental disaster; in Leningrad at Lenenergo, the leadership went on trial, which ignored the regular death of workers due to violations of labor protection; in Belarus, the chief was shot just because of the contamination of grain intended for processing into flour, of course, on a wholesale scale. Or brigade commander Vinogradov - led the division into an encirclement and fled to the rear, shot in front of the formation of those who remained from the division. There was also politics - Mehlis massively expelled political workers from the army after he became the head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army. How much the dispersal of openly snickering professional talkers influenced the army - judge for yourself. For the rest, he did not have the same height in order to influence processes and make decisions based on faces.
Rather, Lev Zakharovich is Stalin's personal inspector, who was thrown all his life where a master's eye is needed. First the media, then the army, then the Finnish war, in 1940 - state control, on the eve of the war - again the Political Administration of the Red Army, 1942 - the Crimean Front and demotion to corps commissars, then the PMC of the fronts, and after the war - the Minister of State Control until 1949, when he was overtaken by a stroke and a heart attack at the same time. Lev Zakharovich died on February 11, 1953, less than a month before the death of his boss, whom he respected simply infinitely:
“Everyone knows Comrade Stalin as the closest comrade-in-arms and brilliant successor of Lenin's cause. But few are able to fully comprehend the size of Stalin's contribution to the construction of the Soviet state and world socialism. "
Why he was not loved
And where do you like an auditor, especially an honest and incorruptible one? Especially one who cuts the truth-uterus, not embarrassed by conventions? Whom they listen to, and who is quick to kill? It was he who wrote the devastating report on the Western Front, and he characterized the unflattering Crimean front. And who will love for this:
“As a result of the criminal cowardice of Lieutenant Colonels Svetlichny and Glushkov, on the night of July 20 of this year, units of the 134th Rifle Division, which were surrounded, lost: about 2000 personnel (fled from the 1st and 2nd detachments), some of them got captured by the enemy; two artillery battalions, two regimental artillery batteries, a lot of artillery shells, more than 10 machine guns, about 100 horses and weapons were left to the Germans. "
At the same time, to say that Mekhlis was a kind of ideal, of course, also does not work out - always noticing and noticing shortcomings, he did not always know how to correct them, and the disaster in Crimea is an example of this. Lev Zakharovich was sent there as a representative of the Headquarters, and he, criticizing a lot and rightly, did not correct, but worsened the general situation, and did not prepare the troops for defense. For which he paid harshly, despite the fact that the main fault was still with General Kozlov, who, as a commander, was obliged to take action, and to report disagreements with a representative of the Headquarters to Moscow.
The person who replaced him at the post of Head of the Political Administration expressed himself well about our hero:
“Mekhlis is a strict, demanding, sometimes even harsh party leader. They say a lot about him. Not everyone likes exactingness. "
I will add from myself - not only to taste, but not everyone is capable, it is always difficult with such leaders, they demand from "a" to "z", they do not have an understanding that something may not go according to plan, but they and will not absolve themselves of responsibility and will not substitute a subordinate.
Mekhlis was also demanding of himself, his wife spent the whole war as a doctor in a military field hospital, and his son fought. And the Crimean failure, which he considered his own, was justified by work for wear and tear, work that brought him to disability and death. And then those whom he controlled came to power ... And a legend appeared about a tyrant and a psychopath who killed thousands of people, disrupted front operations, an unprincipled opportunist, a coward and an intriguer, Stalin's six. It's so nice to kick the Dead Lion ... And it's even more pleasant to add a note of anti-Semitism today, claiming that Mehlis was killed / removed by Stalin, and this despite the fact that for the last three years half of his body has not really worked after a severe stroke.
And for me, Lev Zakharovich was a fanatic - a fanatic of the idea that in those years captured the minds of millions. He lived for her sake, did everything for her, eradicating any outrages and qualifying them as counter-revolution, for her sake he died, burning himself to the end. And the judges of such people are clearly not contemporaries who suffered from his honesty, but descendants, moreover, distant ones, when the passions of that era finally subside.
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