Grigory Semenov. From a Tsarist Army Ensign to a Self-Proclaimed Ataman of the Civil War
G. Semenov on a lithograph from 1918
Ataman Semenov is one of the undisputed anti-heroes of the Civil War and the entire Russian storiesMajor General William Sidney Graves, who commanded the U.S. Army Expeditionary Force in Siberia from 1918 to 1920, in his book "America's Siberian Adventure" directly called Kolchak's army a "retreating band." And about Ataman Grigory Semyonov, he wrote the following:
Semyonov organized what were known as "kill stations" and openly boasted that he could not sleep peacefully unless he had killed at least someone during the day.
Later, the investigation established that at just one of these "killing stations"—in Adrianovka—3,000 people were executed. And in the prison in the city of Troitskosavsk, over 1500 people were killed (481 of them executed in just two days—January 1 and 5, 1920).
Meanwhile, at the Council of self-proclaimed “atamans” of the Transbaikal Cossacks, which took place on February 16, 2013, in Chita, the issue of “preparing for the rehabilitation of Ataman G. M. Semenov” was considered.
After Yeltsin came to power, a clear and still persistent trend toward whitewashing and even glorifying traitors, executioners, and sadists emerged. One recalls the deceitful film about Kolchak and the monument to this bloody admiral, which, by some terrible misunderstanding, still stands in Irkutsk. And this despite the fact that in 1999, the Transbaikal Military Court declared Kolchak "a man who committed crimes against peace and humanity and is not subject to rehabilitation," a ruling upheld by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation in November 2001.
Monuments to the "literary Vlasovite" and incompetent graphomaniac Solzhenitsyn still stand in Moscow, Vladivostok, and Kislovodsk, and a museum center named after him operates in Ryazan. Two "Yeltsin Centers"—in Yekaterinburg and Moscow—continue their destructive, anti-state, and Russophobic activities. Therefore, it is crucial for us all to remember not only the worthy figures but also the antiheroes—otherwise, during the next "perestroika," anti-Soviet elements and fifth columnist liberals will destroy not the Soviet Union, but the Russian Federation.
The origin and youth of the future ataman
Grigory Mikhailovich Semyonov was born on September 13 (26), 1890, in the so-called "karaul" (settlement) of Kuranzha, which belonged to the Durulguevskaya stanitsa of the Transbaikal Cossack Host (currently a village in the Transbaikal Territory). His father was Russian, his mother was Buryat, from a Christian but Old Believer family. The children, in addition to Russian, also spoke Mongolian and Buryat. Grigory Semyonov later learned English, not very well, but did speak Japanese and Chinese.
The family had many children, but was not poor. Their son, Grigory, was initially sent to a two-year school in the village of Mogoytuy, then passed the six-year exams of a classical gymnasium as an external student. In 1908, he entered the Orenburg Military School, where the troop sergeant major A. Dutov, the future lieutenant general and troop ataman of the Orenburg Cossack Host, was then working as an assistant inspector.
In 1911, Grigory completed his training and received the rank of cornet (since 1884, a 12th-class rank in the Table of Ranks, equivalent to lieutenant, cornet, midshipman, and provincial secretary). He was assigned to the 1st Verkhneudinsk Regiment of the Transbaikal Cossack Host, stationed in Troitskosavsk (Kyakhta), on the border with Khalkha (northern Mongolia). The regiment regularly provided a platoon to escort Russian missions to Urga and Beijing.
Semenov, as we recall, knew Mongolian and was therefore assigned to the Russian consulate in Ugra. He managed to establish good relations with the 8th Bogd Gegeen, Ngawang Lobsang Choekyi Nyima Tenzin Wangchuk (the head of Mongolia's Buddhists), who, after Mongolia declared independence in December 1911, was declared the Great Khan (Bogd Khan)—the last in Mongolian history.
Bogdo Gegen VIII in a photograph from the 1910s.
Semyonov took part in the coup d'état without permission, incurring the wrath of the Russian authorities. He was recalled from Ugra and sent to serve first in the 2nd Transbaikal Battery. In April 1913, he was transferred to the 1st Chita Regiment, and in late December, to the 1st Nerchinsk Regiment, later commanded by Baron Pyotr Wrangel. One of Semyonov's fellow soldiers was another famous baron, Robert Nikolaus Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, who became famous during the civil war for his ideas about restoring Genghis Khan's Mongol empire, stretching from Lake Baikal to the Pacific Ocean.
It was Ungern who, in February 1921, restored the Bogd Khan, who had been ousted in 1919, to the throne. However, on November 1 of that year, he was forced to sign the "Oath Treaty" between the People's Revolutionary Government of Mongolia, which stipulated that he would remain the head of the Buddhist Sangha and also the "ceremonial monarch." After his death in June 1923, the monarchy in Mongolia was abolished.
G. Semenov during World War I
At the end of September 1914, the Ussuri Brigade, which included the 1st Nerchinsk Regiment, was transferred to Warsaw. In November of that year, Semenov managed to recapture the banner of his brigade (or, according to other sources, regiment) captured by the Germans; without it, the unit would have been disbanded. The Prussian hussars then launched a surprise attack on the headquarters, but on the way back, they encountered Semenov's fifty-man company returning from reconnaissance. The reward was the Order of St. George, 4th Class. Semenov's Cossacks then recaptured a large supply train from the Germans, which had nearly been captured; two lieutenant colonels were among the prisoners. In December 1914, Semenov, at the head of a Cossack patrol, was the first to break into the city of Mlawa, but it was only two years later that he received the Order of St. George for this episode. weapon.
In July 1915, G. Semenov was appointed regimental adjutant, and just at that time, P. Wrangel became commander of the 1st Nerchinsk Regiment. This is how he later recalled him:
Semyonov, a natural-born Transbaikal Cossack, a stocky, dark-haired man, was the regimental adjutant when I took over the regiment. He served in this capacity for about four months before being appointed squadron commander. Brisk and intelligent, with a characteristic Cossack shrewdness, an excellent drill sergeant, and courageous, especially in the eyes of his superiors, he managed to make himself quite popular among both Cossacks and officers. His downsides were a significant penchant for intrigue and an unscrupulousness in the means he used to achieve his goals. Though intelligent and dexterous, Semyonov lacked both education (he barely graduated from military academy) and a broad outlook, and I could never understand how he could have subsequently risen to the forefront of the civil war.
In 1915, Semyonov took part in five raids behind German lines, and in early 1916 he was appointed commander of the 6th Sotnia. Since his regiment was transferred to the Southwestern Front, it participated in the Brusilov Offensive. In December, he requested a transfer to the 3rd Verkhneudinsk Regiment, which was then stationed in Persia. Here, in 1917, he fought against pro-Ottoman forces and rose to the rank of Yesaul.
G. Semenov after the February Revolution
Until now, we've seen Semyonov as a good and honest soldier. Everything began to change after the February Revolution. At that time, he found himself in Bessarabia and was elected to the corps committee of soldiers' deputies. He traveled to Petrograd, where he approached Kerensky with a proposal to form a separate Mongol-Buryat cavalry regiment, which he intended to lead to the front in order to "awaken the conscience of the Russian soldier, who would be reproached by these foreigners fighting for the Russian cause." And in June 1917, he was indeed appointed commissar of the Provisional Government for the formation of volunteer units from Mongols and Buryats in the Transbaikal region. He himself wrote about his stay in Petrograd:
Having witnessed the anarchy and activity of Bolshevik agitators in the capital, and having attended several meetings of the Petrograd Soviet, he proposed to Colonel Muravyov, who was forming volunteer units, that a company of cadets arrest the members of the Petrograd Soviet as agents of an enemy country, immediately try them by court martial, and immediately carry out the sentences. Then, if necessary, arrest the Provisional Government and "in the name of the people, ask the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, Cavalry General Brusilov, to assume dictatorship over the country."
Muravyov reported the plan to Brusilov, but he refused to implement it.
In 1945, the arrested Semenov told investigators:
My active work against Soviet power began in 1917, when the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies were being organized in Petrograd. Being in Petrograd at the time and taking into account the current situation, I intended, with the help of two military schools, to organize a coup, occupy the Tauride Palace, arrest Lenin and the members of the Petrograd Soviet, and immediately execute them, thereby decapitating the Bolshevik movement and confronting the revolutionary garrison of Petrograd with a fait accompli.
Return to Transbaikalia
After the October Revolution, Semyonov's first wife, Zinaida (née Manstein), who gave birth to his son Vyacheslav in 1915, went to Paris. She would die only in 1945, but this did not prevent Semyonov from marrying again in Siberia. His second wife was Elena Viktorovna Tersitskaya, a priest's daughter, who gave birth to three daughters and one son. One of the daughters survived until 1982 and was murdered in Chelyabinsk; the crime remains unsolved.
But let's return to G.M. Semenov, who, having arrived in Verkhneudinsk (now Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia), began recruiting volunteers for the Special Mongol-Buryat Cavalry Regiment. However, he also accepted Russians. It soon became clear that Semenov's condition for acceptance into the unit was the rejection of all democratic reforms. Upon learning of the impending arrest, Semenov and the men he had recruited fled to Dauria station, where he continued to build his unit. The first episode of brutality occurred during this time: in the first half of December, the Bolshevik Arkus, who had been executed, had his stomach ripped open, and his body was then burned after being doused with kerosene. Soon, such executions would be carried out on living people. Two days after Arkus's execution, an entire train car containing the mutilated bodies of supporters of the new government was sent to Chita.
On December 18, 1917, at Manchuria Station, Semyonov liquidated the local city council and disarmed the regular army units stationed there, which by then had completely lost their combat effectiveness. The extent of their disintegration can be judged by the fact that Baron Ungern, who had joined Semyonov, with a single Cossack, easily managed to disarm two companies of soldiers.
Baron Ungern in 1918
After this, Semyonov, at the head of a detachment of 550 men, attempted to establish his authority in Dauria (eastern Transbaikal). This should come as no surprise, as Siberia was extremely sparsely populated, and all the more or less large settlements were located along the Trans-Siberian Railway. In Semyonov's own words, the front at that time was merely "a narrow strip of railroad track." Under such conditions, even a thousand well-armed and motivated fighters, especially in the absence of firm local authority, constituted a considerable force.
This time, Semyonov was quickly driven out of Dauria by Sergei Lazo, who, in addition to the mining workers, also commanded captured Czech and Slovak legionnaires who had defected to the Reds. Incidentally, Semyonov once said:
If I had several officers like Lazo, I would not have known defeat!
Monument to Lazo in Partizansk, Primorsky Krai
On March 1, 1918, Semyonov was forced to retreat to Manchuria. There, he continued to build the Special Manchurian Detachment, increasing its strength to three thousand by early April 1918. It included Captain Okumura's Japanese detachment (540 soldiers and 28 officers with 15 guns), two Chinese infantry regiments, 300 former Serbian prisoners of war (from those living in Austria-Hungary), two officer companies, three cavalry regiments consisting of four hundred men, and four armored trains. Esaul Semyonov unexpectedly found himself commanding not only senior officers of the Tsarist army but even generals. He escaped this precarious situation by declaring himself ataman of the Special Manchurian Detachment. And then - as a marching ataman of the Ussuri, Amur, Transbaikal, Ural and Siberian Cossack troops.
A similar situation often arose among the Reds. Thus, former ensign Sergei Lazo's chief of staff was Lieutenant General and Baltic German Baron Alexander Taube, who had been awarded the St. George Cross in 1915 and was a holder of seven Tsarist orders and the Order of Noble Bukhara.
Thus, during the Civil War, some very interesting Baltic aristocrats fought on opposite sides of the front: the “Black Baron” Wrangel, the “Mad Baron” Ungern, and the “Red Baron” Taube.
Coat of arms of the baronial family von Taube
The German-Swedish Taube family has been known since the 13th century. One of its members, Johann Taube, was captured by the Russians during the Livonian War in 1560 and entered the service of Ivan the Terrible in 1567, becoming one of his closest advisers on Livonian affairs. After the failure of the siege of Reval, which he advised, and fearing the Tsar's wrath, he fled to the Polish King Sigismund Augustus along with another Livonian, Elert Kruse. The report he compiled for the Duke of Courland on Russian affairs is a valuable historical document.
It is curious, by the way, that a representative of another Russian branch of the Taube family (not the Pavlovsk, but the Gatchina one) – Mikhail Ferdinandovich Taube (1855–1924) – became one of the theorists of neo-Slavophilism, one of the founders of the Lomonosov Society of the Russian Language, chairman of the St. Petersburg Temperance Society and the author of the famous poem “Black Hundreds”:
Whoever is firmly Orthodox in faith,
In whom there is no doubt for a moment,
That the Russian Tsar is autocratic,
Unlimited and great, -
That natural Black Hundreder,
He is devoted to his homeland forever.
In that is the original spirit, the spirit of the people,
He is a Russian man at heart.
In whom there is no doubt for a moment,
That the Russian Tsar is autocratic,
Unlimited and great, -
That natural Black Hundreder,
He is devoted to his homeland forever.
In that is the original spirit, the spirit of the people,
He is a Russian man at heart.
After the revolution, he remained in Russia, lectured at the Petrograd Brotherhood of Saint Sophia, organized the "Resurrection" circle of Orthodox intelligentsia, was not repressed, and died in Petrograd in 1924.
But let's return to the "Siberian Red General" Alexander Taube: he fought in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, and after being seriously wounded in 1915, he took over as chief of staff of the Omsk Military District. In this 1917 photograph, we see members of the Omsk Military District Committee and senior officers of the military district. A. Taube is seated on the right:
After the October Revolution, A. Taube became chief of staff of all Red Army armed forces in Siberia. He was sent to Moscow, where he was supposed to meet with Lenin and inform him of the state of affairs in Siberia and Transbaikalia. However, en route on September 2, 1918, in the Irkutsk village of Bodaibo, Taube was recognized and detained by the White Army. He categorically refused the post of commander of Kolchak's Siberian Army and any cooperation with the command of the Czechoslovak Corps, declaring:
My gray hair and bruised legs do not allow me to go in my declining years to the camp of the interventionists and enemies of working Russia.
He was sentenced to death by firing squad, but in January 1919 he died of typhus in a solitary confinement cell in a Yekaterinburg prison.
His younger brother, railway engineer Sergei Taube, worked for the benefit of our country for many years and was awarded the title of “Honored Railwayman of the USSR.”
In the next article, we'll continue the story of Ataman Grigory Semyonov, discussing his participation in the civil war in Siberia, his emigration, and his continued collaboration with the Japanese. We'll also explore the bloody ataman's just retribution and inglorious death.
Information