Professional revolutionary Rozaliya Zemlyachka
In this article, we'll discuss the famous Rozalia Zemlyachka (Zalkind, Berlin, Samoylova), the daughter of a Jewish merchant of the first guild. She studied medicine in Lyon but became deputy chair of the USSR Council of People's Commissars and the first woman to be awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Modern Wikipedia literally suggests frightening children with her name, but how well-founded is such a sinister reputation? The heroine of today's article is a pure passionary from the cohort of "ardent revolutionaries" fanatically devoted to the ideas of communism. This fanaticism contains both her strengths and weaknesses. The Bolshevik Kostitsyn, who knew Rozalia Zemlyachka well from her time in exile, wrote:
Her virtues are well known. Her impossible character is also well known.
She was demanding and cruel—to herself and to others. Yet she never went beyond the brutality of the civil war—the merciless, even irrational, cruelty that characterized both the Whites and the Reds. However, unexpectedly, due to her brief stay in Crimea, liberated from Wrangel's troops, she became almost the main symbol of revolutionary terror. Fair enough? Hardly. After all, in reality, the repressions in Crimea were carried out not by the Zemlyachka Regional Committee of the RCPb, but by the Crimean Revolutionary Committee and the Special Departments of the Army. fleet.
And, perhaps, one can agree with A. I. Kolpakidi (author of many works on stories special services), who called Rozaliya Zemlyachka the most slandered person in history, on whom more slander has been poured than on Lenin and Stalin combined.
Let's try to understand the fate of this extraordinary woman.
The origin and early life of the heroine of the article
20-year-old Rosalia Zalkind, photo of 1896.
Rozalia's father, Samuil Markovich Zalkind, was a first-guild merchant. Among other assets, he owned a large apartment building in Kyiv and a haberdashery store, considered the city's finest. The question inevitably arises: how corrupt did the regime of the last emperor have to be for the children of this wealthy man to become revolutionaries? His son, Leonid, was a member of the Narodnaya Volya (Narodnaya Volya), his daughter, Maria, a member of the RSDLP (since 1901), and his daughter, Rozalia, born in 1876, initially joined the Socialist Revolutionaries. To be on the safe side, her father sent her to Switzerland for "recovery."
Let's digress a bit to note: the daughter of a wealthy merchant, who was denied everything, grew up a very modest girl, unfashionable, and favored classic-cut dresses in dark shades. One day in Moscow, the Okhrana, through an agent provocateur, "presented" her with a fashionable hat and a beautiful scarf. Rozaliya never wore them, and the police tried in vain to stop young women in similar outfits on the street. By 1905, the Okhrana was already aware of the young revolutionary's preferences—and, after being arrested in Moscow, she calmly left the pretrial detention center wearing a bright and fashionable dress brought by her comrades—and no one recognized her. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
In 1897, Rozalia Zalkind enrolled in the medical faculty of the University of Lyon. But just a year later, Rozalia dropped out and returned to Kyiv, where she became a member of the local Socialist Revolutionary organization. Her sister, Maria, however, earned a medical degree.
Rosalia and Maria Zalkind, photo 1899
The article's subject led revolutionary agitation among workers and personally embroidered a red banner for the May Day demonstration in the apartment of midwife Sishinskaya. However, almost the entire group, including Rozaliya, was arrested, and she spent several months in prison while the investigation was ongoing. She was eventually released under police supervision. During this time, she met Shmul Berlin, who became her first husband. He was not a Socialist Revolutionary, but a member of the RSDLP, and under his influence, she changed her party affiliation. Thus, Rozaliya Zemlyachka's pre-revolutionary party "service" was extensive, and she joined the cohort of "old party members" (there were no more than 5 of them).
The article's heroine and her fiancé's freedom was short-lived—just a few months: they were arrested and sent into exile in Verkholensk, Siberia, where they married in February 1901. There, the article's heroine met another exile, Leiba Bronstein, who would become world-famous as Leon Trotsky. He gave her a referral to Lenin's close associate, Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, who was in charge of printing and distributing the newspaper Iskra. Rozaliya's husband refused to flee with her, as he did not want to go underground. He became completely disheartened and, deeply depressed, soon committed suicide. Rozaliya, meanwhile, became an underground agent for Iskra, working in Odessa and then in Yekaterinoslav. Here's one of the police "descriptions" from that time:
The teacher, Zinaida Ilyinichna Trelina, who is subject to arrest, has disappeared. Description: slightly above average height, brunette, thin face, pale, wears pince-nez, white lenses in a steel frame, hair tied in a bun, gray eyes.
This young woman soon became a trusted liaison between party leaders abroad and the Russian RSDLP cells. She first met Lenin in 1903—as she herself wrote, either in Zurich or Bern. However, it appears to have occurred in Munich. She later wrote memoirs of her meetings with the leader.
How to become a Demon of the Revolution?
Wikipedia literally says the following about Rozalia Zemlyachka:
She became known under the nickname "Demon" as one of the organizers of the Red Terror in Crimea.
This is too much even for the mentally retarded authors of this publication. In fact, the article's heroine received the nickname "Demon" in Odessa in 1901, but not for any excessive fanaticism, cruelty, or "bloodthirstiness." In fact, she simply used a volume of Lermontov's poem of the same name ("an oriental tale") as a code book.
But if a girl came across a book with Turgenev’s story “Mumu,” she would become, scary to say, Gerasim.
By the way, take a look at what Rosalia Berlin, nicknamed "The Demon," looked like in photographs from the 1900s:
"It's scary, downright creepy," isn't it?
The article's subject changed her party pseudonym several times. From 1905 to 1908, she was "Osipov," from 1911 to 1915, "Valeria," and from 1915 to 1917, "Aunt Anya." It was this last pseudonym that was the most famous; she appeared under it in all Soviet textbooks. Then she was slandered in a pseudo-historical "investigation" published during the perestroika period in Ogonyok. Its author relied on émigré White Guard sources, rife with factual errors and deliberate "fakes," and on the outright lies of a literary Vlasovite with the telling surname Solzhenitsyn, who called Zemlyachka "the fury of the Red Terror." They recalled the article's subject's very first, now almost forgotten, party pseudonym and deliberately linked it to events in Crimea in late 1920 and early 1921. A falsification of the purest kind.
But let us return to the pre-revolutionary activities of Rozaliya Zemlyachka.
Professional revolutionary
The article's heroine's active activities attracted the attention of the authorities, but literally on the eve of her new arrest, she managed to leave for Geneva.
Her party career also advanced: in 1903, Rozaliya became a delegate to the Second Congress of the RSDLP (in Brussels), was co-opted to the party's Central Committee, and in 1904, joined the so-called "Bureau of Majority Committees." She also participated in the Third Congress of the RSDLP, held in London in 1905. Returning to Moscow, she became one of the leaders of the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP, working specifically in the "military cell." She took part in the December military uprising of 1905, after the suppression of which she was arrested again and spent a year and a half in solitary confinement in the Lithuanian Castle. There, she developed scurvy and developed signs of rheumatism. She wrote to her family:
My legs hurt, they ache, I can jump up and down at night from the pain. I can't stand on my feet; they swell up and become like logs. I wake up with a disgusting sensation in my mouth – my mouth is full of blood.
But at the end of the letter:
The way out is to start a merciless fight for what is most precious to me in life.
What can you say here – the highest level of passionarity.
After her release, she carried out party work in various cities, becoming secretary of the Baku organization of the RSDLP in 1909. In 1910, she was forced to leave the country again, and virtually nothing is known about this period of her life. Reliable information about her emerges after her return to Russia: in 1915-1916, we find her as a member of the underground Moscow Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP.
Incidentally, it should be noted that the article's heroine spoke out against Lenin twice. In 1918, she was a fierce opponent of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty. In 1919, she joined the so-called "military opposition" and opposed the recruitment of tsarist officers—"military specialists"—into the Red Army. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
1917 year
In February 1917, the article's heroine became secretary of the now legal—and now underground—Moscow Committee of the RSDLP(b). She was elected a delegate to the 7th (April) All-Russian Conference and the 6th Congress of the RSDLP(b).
On October 25 (November 7), 1917, at a session of the Moscow Soviet, the Bolsheviks proposed the creation of a coalition Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), which would "provide every possible support to the Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies." 394 people voted for this proposal, 106 voted against, and 23 abstained. The MRC included Bolsheviks A. Lomov, V. Smirnov, G. Usievich, and N. Muralov, Mensheviks M. Nikolaev and M. Teitelbaum, and Social Democrat and amalgamator I. Konstantinov (on October 31, only the Bolsheviks remained).
In turn, the City Duma created a Committee for Public Safety (CPS), headed by the Socialist Revolutionary V. Rudnev and the commander of the Moscow Military District, Colonel K. Ryabtsev (also a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party).
Note: there are no supporters of the old regime among the actors. Moreover, no one objects to the dissolution of the Provisional Government—the "provisionalists" are terribly unpopular, they have already demonstrated their worthlessness to everyone, and no one wants to speak out in their defense. Two groups of revolutionaries are arguing—the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats. What is the essence of their disagreement? The Bolsheviks demand that power be transferred to the soviets. The Socialist Revolutionaries object, saying that the Constituent Assembly will convene very soon, and it will decide everything. Since the Socialist Revolutionaries won the elections, they should be understood as follows: we will solve everything (and the rest will just sit on the sidelines).
What were the forces of the parties?
The Moscow garrison consisted of approximately 20 soldiers, approximately 5 of whom supported the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), while the rest remained neutral. The KOB included cadets from the Aleksandrovsky and Alekseevsky military schools, a number of students, as well as some officers and Cossacks. The total number of opponents of the MRC reached 15. Incidentally, it was then that the first "White Guard" emerged: that was the name of Colonel L. Treskin's detachment, which took control of Nikitsky Gate Square.
The situation escalated sharply on October 27, when a detachment of soldiers, supporters of the Military Revolutionary Committee, who were unfamiliar with Moscow, advanced from the southern outskirts toward the Soviet building and reached the City Duma directly—and encountered patrols of military cadets near Red Square. Attacking them unexpectedly, the cadets killed 70 people. The next day, the cadets blockaded the Kremlin and managed to convince the commandant (Lieutenant O. Berzin) that the Committee for Public Security had won and was now in control of all of Moscow. The gates were opened, and then a monstrous incident occurred, which we know about, in particular, from the account of the commander. artillery Kremlin warehouse of Major General Kaigorodov:
The cadets occupied the Kremlin, placed two machine guns and a vehicle at the Trinity Gate, and began driving soldiers out of the 56th Infantry Reserve Regiment's barracks depot, using rifle butts and threats to force them to do so. The 500 soldiers in the depot were lined up without a fight. weapons In front of the arsenal gates. Several cadets were making their calculations. At that moment, several shots rang out from somewhere, then the cadets opened fire with machine guns and weapons from the Trinity Gate. The unarmed soldiers of the depot, lined up, fell as if mown down, screams and shouts rang out, everyone rushed back to the arsenal gates, but only a narrow gate was open, in front of which a pile of dead bodies had formed: the wounded, the trampled, and the healthy, trying to climb over the gate. After about five minutes, the fire ceased. The remaining wounded groaned, and mutilated corpses lay scattered about.
Thus, the military actions were started by the opponents of the Bolsheviks; it was they who attempted to seize power in Moscow and shed the first blood.
Juncker in the Kremlin
Armed workers were ready to defend the Military Revolutionary Committee (train cars containing 40 rifles were discovered on the railroad tracks). However, local party leaders hesitated, and proposals to negotiate were made. The decisive moment came with the appearance of the article's heroine at a meeting of the Military Revolutionary Committee: she threatened to shoot P. Smidovich, who advocated compromise, and called for an assault on the Kremlin, declaring that all members of the Military Revolutionary Committee would be arrested if they refused. She herself took command of the militias of the Rogozhsko-Simonovsky district of Moscow. Naturally, she did not personally fire the weapons, but rather provided general leadership.
R. Zemlyachka among former underground fighters in the Rogozhsko-Simonovsky district. Photograph from 1923.
The offensive against the rebels began on October 29, but a truce was announced on October 30, and the rebels surrendered on November 2.
Revolutionary troops on Nikolskaya Street. November 2, 1917.
The terms of the capitulation were extremely lenient: the Committee of Public Safety and the White Guard detachment were disbanded, their officers retaining their weapons, and the cadets who had executed the soldiers simply returned to their schools. Everyone received guarantees of freedom and security on the condition that they cease fighting against Soviet power. What do you think happened next? That's right, many of the officers and cadets who had given their "word of honor" immediately left for the Don and soon began the civil war, embarking on the First Kuban ("Ice") March on Yekaterinodar under the command of L. Kornilov.
Rozaliya Zemlyachka on the Southern Front
In late 1918, the article's heroine was assigned to the active army. Initially, she served as a commissar in one of the brigades, and later became head of the political departments of the 8th and 13th Armies on the Southern Front. Here's how Soviet writer Lev Ovalov (future editor-in-chief of the magazines Vokrug Sveta and Molodaya Gvardiya, author of novels about the much-maligned Major Pronin) recalls his first meeting with this woman:
It was a time of fierce fighting for Orel, the Red Army was going on the offensive against Denikin. I had just joined the Komsomol, and the volost party organization sent me on an assignment to the political department of the Thirteenth Army. I waited for the head of the army's political department to appear, and then he did. It was an unforgettable experience! The head of the political department turned out to be a woman in a leather jacket and chrome-plated boots... Before the revolution, I had seen stern, learned women—teachers, doctors, art historians—and here before me was one of them. The head of the political department was informed about me. She turned around, although I still had the feeling that some invisible force had placed me in front of her. She turned and... raised a lorgnette to her nearsighted eyes. Yes, a lorgnette! The first word I heard from her lips was "shoot." The topic was this: an elderly father was hiding his deserter son, and both had just been brought before a tribunal. Zemlyachka was consulted on what to do with them. Deserters were the scourge of the army in those days; they couldn't be given any leniency, and Zemlyachka couldn't, had no right to, show any leniency... Much water had flowed under the bridge since that meeting until I realized that this trait of her character was not called cruelty, but firmness.
In 1920, the article's heroine married for a second time. This marriage lasted only a few months, but she bore this husband's surname for the rest of her life. So, according to documents, she is not Zemlyachka, but Rozaliya Samoylova.
In the next article we will continue and finish the story about Rozalia Zemlyachka.
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