Unknown war. The difficulties of the winter and spring of 1919
I. Vladimirov. "Interrogation in the Committee of the Poor" However, this is the name of the picture. And what is depicted on it, most likely, is the “troika” court, which was introduced in 1919
Listen, worker,
The war has begun
Quit your business
Get ready for the hike.
We will go boldly into battle
For the power of the Soviets
And as one we will die
In the fight for it!
Folk words and music
The war has begun
Quit your business
Get ready for the hike.
We will go boldly into battle
For the power of the Soviets
And as one we will die
In the fight for it!
Folk words and music
Unknown Wars. We continue the series of articles devoted to newspaper materials of the Civil War in Russia. It was interrupted for quite objective reasons - it was cold in the archive, and it was not very pleasant to work. But now it’s warm there, and work on the newspapers will continue. Our previous material, not counting the article “Colors of War,” was devoted to the events of the autumn of 1918 and the beginning of the “Red Terror,” which was a response to the assassination attempt on V.I. Lenin and the murder of Uritsky in Petrograd.
But then the 19th year came. Before us is another file of the Izvestia newspaper. We open it and turn to the yellowed, faded pages, which often tear right in your hands. And what do we see in them? A subjective, and sometimes very subjective reflection of completely objective events. Moreover, the selection of newspaper materials itself is also subjective. How could it be otherwise, because then we would have to place the entire newspaper here, which would be simply unthinkable. And, nevertheless, the general tone of the materials, their information content and the manner of presenting messages are visible quite clearly. Let's turn to the publications of Izvestia and see what they wrote about in the winter and spring of 1919.
And even poems were published there. Poems glorifying the death of the old and the emerging new. So A. Blok was not at all alone in his work at that time!
A very interesting article about the stratification of the village. In some ways it echoes the work of V.I. Lenin “The Development of Capitalism in Russia”. The only pity is that it does not provide at least approximate data on the ratio of kulaks, middle peasants and poor peasants in the countryside. The article calls for careful treatment of the middle peasants, against whom arbitrariness is allowed. So to speak: “separate the lambs from the goats.” And this, of course, was the right approach to the matter. The only question was: “Who are the judges?”
Events abroad
Here is a very interesting material - L. Reisner whitewashes his lover. Well, yes, that same fiery revolutionary, intimate friend of Inessa Armand, who immediately after the revolution occupied an entire palace, wrapped herself in expensive furs, had servants and took a bath of five types of champagne. When her party comrades reprimanded her that this was supposedly unbecoming, she replied: “Didn’t we make the revolution for ourselves?!”
Details of the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg
As we remember, the minutes of the meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of September 2, 1918 prescribed:
“Shoot all counter-revolutionaries. Give district committees the right to execute on their own... Set up small concentration camps in the districts... Take measures to prevent corpses from falling into unwanted hands...”
Responsible comrades in the Cheka and in the regional Chekas were ordered to be present at the executions, to see everything with their own eyes and at the same time to worry that if something happened, they would not be spared in the same way. As a result, people in Russia began to be shot according to orders issued from above, guided by the principle: “If there was a person, there would be a reason to spank him!” In St. Petersburg, for example, an order was issued to shoot 500 “former” people. But the faithful son of the CPSU (b), the head of the St. Petersburg security officers, Gleb Bokiy, exceeded it by 800 people, shooting 900 people in St. Petersburg itself and another 400 in Kronstadt.
“A priest, an officer, a banker, a manufacturer, a monk, a merchant’s son - it’s all the same. No mercy",
- the Pravda newspaper wrote in those days, calling for total terror against the forces of counter-revolution.
Dzerzhinsky's comrade-in-arms, Latvian Martin Latsis, also wrote in Izvestia in August 1918 about the abolition of all previous rules of warfare:
“Killing all those wounded in battles against you is the law of civil war.”
Comrade Zinoviev spoke even more specifically in September of the same year at the party conference of the Petrograd Bolsheviks:
“We must lead ninety of the hundred million people who make up the population of the Soviet Republic. The rest of us have nothing to say. They need to be eliminated."
“The first question,” Latsis echoed, “that you must ask the arrested person is what class he belongs to, what origin, education or profession he is. These questions should decide his fate. This is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.”
It is clear that the true guilt of anyone was of least interest to all these “figures”, and lists of those arrested and executed were now regularly published in newspapers for the edification of everyone else!
And here’s what’s interesting: already on January 5, in Pravda, Bukharin wrote that it was necessary to reform the Cheka, because if things continue like this, the Chekas will begin to invent work for themselves, that is, degenerate!
Well, in the “Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee” on January 30, 1918, the same Martin Latsis, by the way, a member of the board of the All-Russian Cheka, admitted that this organization requires a personnel purge and unification with the regular police, and that they together submit to local executive committees. That's how it is! And after all, the district Chekas had already been liquidated! And why? Yes, because there very often there was real arbitrariness going on in relation to the best and most educated part of the Russian population.
Here it is, this article by Latsis. And what’s not in it. And what is work in the Cheka "had a destructive effect on the fragile characters of young communists", and what is needed "new people”, which from the closed district Chekas will move to the provincial ones... And, they say, it is necessary to give less menial work to the security officers, which is precisely why the Revolutionary Tribunals are needed. In general, he wrote a lot of things
However, the most surprising thing about this article is that it is quite close in meaning to the letter of P. A. Kropotkin, the leader and theorist of anarchism, who, right at the height of the Red Terror, wrote to Lenin, asking for a personal meeting. Referring to the experience of the Great French Revolution, he made the following statement against the dominance of the Cheka:
“The Russian people have a large reserve of creative and constructive forces. And as soon as these forces began to establish life on new, socialist principles amid the terrible devastation brought about by war and revolution, the duties of police investigation, assigned to it by terror, began their corrupting, pernicious work, paralyzing all construction and putting forward people completely incapable of it. The police cannot be the builder of a new life, and yet it is now becoming a sovereign power in every town and village. Where does this lead Russia? To the most malicious reaction..."
It is interesting that P. A. Kropotkin personally met with Lenin at least twice, and not just met, but accused him of creating a new bureaucracy, unleashing a Civil War and “Red Terror” against all dissidents. Again, Kropotkin’s letters to Lenin were then hidden in state archives without access throughout the entire existence of the USSR and were discovered and published by historians only in the 1990s. In one of them, addressing the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Ulyanov-Lenin, Kropotkin wrote:
“To rush into the Red Terror, and even more so to take hostages <...> is unworthy of the socialist revolutionary party and shameful for its leaders <...> To open the era of Red Terror means to admit the powerlessness of the revolution, to go further along the path it [terror] has planned, means admitting your imminent death <...> The police cannot be the builder of a new life. Meanwhile, it [the police] is now becoming the supreme authority in every city and village. Where does this lead Russia? To the most malicious reaction!”
With his intercession, P. A. Kropotkin saved many innocent people from executions and imprisonment, in particular, the famous historian S. P. Melgunov and lawyer P. A. Palchinsky. By the way, Lenin personally ordered the Cheka-GPU authorities not to “touch the old man.” Living his last years in Dmitrov, Kropotkin was under constant surveillance by security officers.
And here about the bandits. Criminals acting together with the White Guards, and about conscientious workers from whom the Cheka received the necessary information...
But in addition to the open and hidden enemies of people, the young Soviet state also had such an enemy as typhus. Its epidemic has spread to almost all parts of the country. And naturally, Izvestia paid a lot of attention to this problem.
And again typhus...
Another very interesting material. About Father Makhno!
The revolution required not only leaders, but also national heroes. And as soon as such a candidate was outlined somewhere, the press immediately began to praise it to the skies. Moreover, “his main force was, of course, the communists”! But did he send wagons with bread to Moscow and Petrograd? Sent! So, he was a great guy, and not in words, but in deeds!
Again about Makhno
Continuation of the article about Makhno
The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries still do not know peace...
"Learn military science properly" - V.I. Lenin called, and here is an article on military training
The Third Communist International was created. “And you, Vasily Ivanovich, for which International? For the Second or for the Third? - “Which one is Lenin wearing?!” (Dialogue from the film “Chapaev”)
But in God-saved Penza, fists began to move again. We organized a demonstration...
The security officers also took bribes. And for this they were shot!
Death of Sverdlov
Three courts. “There are no trained personnel, so let’s take workers!”
But what was happening at that time in the camp of the counter-revolution...
Finally, the Soviet revolution in Bavaria!
And a new threat: Kolchak has risen in the East!
Well, what happened in the country in the summer and autumn of 1919, and what the Izvestia newspaper wrote about it, will be discussed in our next article.
To be continued ...
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