Battle of Yakutia
The bloody civil war in Russia ended with the creation of 30 December 1922, the new state - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But a month later, on the lands of the now Soviet Far East, the first began again, but, alas, not the last fighting in stories neophyte state. The final battles of the Civil War, associated with the elimination of the last center of anti-Bolshevik resistance in the territory of the USSR, unfolded in Yakutia and on the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk in a giant triangle - Okhotsk - Ayan - Yakutsk. The hostilities that lasted until 17 on June 1923 and received White’s name as the Yakut campaign, and the Bolsheviks' pepelievschiny, took place in the extremely harsh conditions of the Extreme North, where individual endurance and courage, discipline, high morale of the fighters decided everything ... and personal quality commanders. These distant events of the 1923 year, which could form the basis of an exciting “isterna”, are associated with the name of the Russian white general Anatoly Nikolaevich Pepelyaev ..."Siberian Suvorov"
Pepelyaev’s life and destiny are still awaiting a comprehensive study in the future. Here is his brief biography. Born in Tomsk on July 15 1891, in the family of a hereditary nobleman, lieutenant-general of the tsarist army Nikolai Pepelyaev. His brothers, besides the eldest, went through military training. And the elder brother Victor was a State Duma deputy from the Cadet Party, and after 1917, he was the Chairman of the Council of Ministers in Kolchak’s government. In general, the Pepeliaevs were noticeable not only in Siberia, but also in the capital. Anatoly first graduated from the Omsk Cadet Corps, and after him the Pavlovsk Military School in St. Petersburg and with the rank of second lieutenant continued to serve in his native Tomsk, in the machine gun command of the 42 Siberian Infantry Regiment. It is not surprising that not only his service was connected with Siberia, but also his family life. Here he married, his firstborn was born here - the son Vsevolod.
With the beginning of the First World War, Pepeliaev, naturally, went to the front as the commander of the cavalry intelligence of his regiment. On the front, he distinguished himself more than once, for which he was awarded seven orders, including the Order of St. George of the 4 degree and the St. George weapons. His popularity was so great that in the hot year of 1917, the Council of soldier deputies of the battalion, which by that time was already commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Pepelyaev, re-elected him as their commander.
After the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty in March 1918, Pepeliaev moved to his native Tomsk, where in May of the same year, with the support of Czech Czechs, he led an uprising against the Bolsheviks, and the power of the Siberian government of Peter the Great of Vologda was established in Tomsk. In June, Pepelyaev, on behalf of this government, formed the 1 Central Siberian Rifle Corps from officers' volunteer corps, which participated in the liberation of Krasnoyarsk, Verkhneudinsk and Chita. Then his corps in Transbaikalia joined the Cossacks Ataman Semenov. As a result, Transsib was completely cleared of the Bolsheviks. And now Pepelyaev is a colonel.
At the same time, his political views became more pronounced. He delayed the introduction of his epaulettes to his troops, earned a reputation as a social commander, although he did not belong to the SR party, but in many respects shared their views. In fact, Pepeliaev was a Siberian oblast, one of the evidence of this is the adoption of the white-green flag, the unofficial flag of Siberia.
Late autumn 1918, already in the rank of Major General (and this is 27 years!) Pepeliaev fought in the Urals with his corps. Here he scored a brilliant victory, taking Perm’s 24 by the forces of his corps, capturing about 20 thousand Red Army men, who were all released on their orders to their homes. The liberation of Perm coincided with the anniversary of the capture of Ismail by Suvorov. And the Pepelians called their commander “Siberian Suvorov”. Slava Pepeliaeva expanded. In January 1919, Admiral Kolchak himself made Pepeliaev as lieutenant-general and appointed him commander of the Northern Group of the Siberian Army, which launched an offensive against Vyatka to join General Miller's troops. Pepelyaevtsy even put down a song about their commander:
... For your favorite leader
To Vyatka way we will break,
Let's turn the enemy hordes into corpses.
We are a mighty army
And the enemy does not hold back
Pepeliaevskoy Northern Group.
But Pepelyaev was not only thinking about military victories, by this time he, a convinced anti-Bolshevik, is becoming more and more clearly aware that only by military and repressive measures of the Civil War cannot be won. He repeatedly appealed to Admiral Kolchak with a request to convene a “Zemsky Sobor” to resolve questions about the democratic structure of Siberia. On this basis, but not only, Pepelyaev had a conflict with the supreme ruler of Siberia. It was possible to settle differences only with the help of Victor Pepeliaev’s brother, who held the post of Prime Minister in the government of Kolchak. Although the sharply negative attitude of Pepelyaev to Kolchak did not disappear anywhere.
In 1919, luck turned away from Kolchak, the Red Army was successfully advancing. 1-I Siberian army under the command of Lieutenant-General Pepelyaev was withdrawn to replenish the region of Tomsk, where the brothers Pepelyaev discussed the need to offset Kolchak. But at the last moment refused such a turn of events.
Meanwhile, the situation at the front was constantly deteriorating. At the end of 1919, Pepeliaev’s army was crushed. Pepelyaev traveled east with his family, but fell ill with typhus on the way, had to stay in Verkhneudinsk, where after recovering he formed 1920 in March from the remnants of his 1 Siberian Army Special Siberian partisan detachment. He fought in Transbaikalia in the Sretensk area with the red partisans. It reached the news of the shooting of Kolchak and his brother in Irkutsk 7 February 1920. This meant the end of Kolchak and the end of resistance at that moment.
In April, 1920, Pepeliaev goes to Harbin, where he creates a "Military Union" of former Siberian comrades. But one has to earn a living by driving cab drivers, carpenters, porters into artels. Especially since his second son Laurus was born in Harbin in 1922 year. Then the “Siberian Suvorov” actually refused to actively fight the Bolsheviks ...
Uprising in Yakutia
By 1921, a small area of Primorye remained under the control of the White Guard, in a specially created buffer zone - the Far Eastern Republic (abbreviated as DVR). The policy of military communism, the surplus, according to which practically all products were taken from the peasants, led to armed insurrections in the countryside - in the Tambov, Saratov, Voronezh and other provinces.
In the fall of 1921, a rebellion broke out in distant Yakutia. The population of the vast region (about 250 thousand people, of whom 10% are Russian), where hunters and cattle-breeders mostly lived, had personal weapons, met with hostility from the events of Soviet power restored in Yakutia in December 1919.
KGB cleansing, labor mobilization, surplus, deprivation of the voting rights of the Yakut intelligentsia forced the inhabitants of Yakutia to take up arms. In September, a formed white squad (1921 people) led by Kornet Mikhail Korobeinikov made a speech in the Maysky area of 200, and in October a small detachment of Esaula Bochkarev landed here, sent here from Primorye. The uprising began to grow, covering by March 1922, the Yakut, Kamchatka, Kolyma, Olekminsky and Vilyuisky districts. The rebels in the village of Churapcha formed a government - the Provisional Yakut Regional People’s Administration, headed by the Social Revolutionary Party Peter Kulikovsky, an associate of Boris Savinkov. After the murder of the Moscow mayor, Kulikovsky was in the settlement in Yakutia.
Began polls extermination of the Communists and co-workers. 6 February 1922, near the village of Tektyur, along with 50 Red Army soldiers killed the commander of the troops of Soviet Yakutia, a well-known partisan anarchist Nestor Kalandarishvili. March 23 united groups of rebels led by Korobeinikov captured Yakutsk, which was under siege from October. But the regular units of the Red Army, detachments of the Cheka and Chon, commanded by N. Baykalov, when the float began on the Lena, managed to pass through it on 11 ships with 10 guns and 30 machine guns and beat off Yakutsk in July.
To pacify the villages of the Red Army shot every fifth resident. 27 April 1922, the Bolsheviks announced the formation of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. As a result, many Yakuts and Tunguses laid down arms, others hid in the taiga, and the remnants of Korobeinikov’s army retreated to Okhotsk and Nelkan. But the Yakut uprising was far from being crushed ...Back at the beginning of 1922, participants in the Yakut uprising led by Kulikovsky and Yefimov, a Yakut by nationality, arrived in Vladivostok. They appealed for help to the Amur government, Spiridon Merkulov, lacked ammunition and officer command personnel. They were able to attract General Pepeliaev on their side by the fact that the Yakut population allegedly supported them. "Siberian Suvorov" in July 1922 of the year, arriving in Vladivostok, proceeded to the formation of the detachment. It was, in fact, a private expedition organized by the “Council of authorized Siberian organizations”.
After the landing on the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, it was planned to take Yakutsk, uniting the forces of the rebels, to capture Irkutsk, to form the Provisional Siberian Government there and to prepare for the elections to the Constituent Assembly. Considering the moods of the Yakuts and Siberians in general, Pepelyaev decided not to act under the white-blue-red Russian flag, but the white-green Siberian flag of the Siberian autonomy that existed in the 1918 year.
The detachment, called the “Tatar Strait Police”, received 1,4 thousand guns of different types, 2 machine guns, 175 thousand cartridges and 9800 hand grenades. Warm clothing was received in Vladivostok, partly purchased by representatives of the Yakut government. The 1 th Siberian rifle regiment under the command of Major-General Yevgeny Vishnevsky became the core of the detachment. A lot of Siberian volunteers began to enter the squadron: officers and shooters. From Primorye, the squad included the 493 man, from Harbin - 227. Three battalions of archers were formed, a separate cavalry division, a separate battery, a separate engineer platoon and an instructor company. Colonels and lieutenant colonels, as young as their commander, commanded battalions and companies.
29 August 1922, the first echelon of the squad as part of the 553 man sailed from Vladivostok. Sending the second tier of Major General Vishnevsky expected 21 September.
Siberian volunteer squad
On the morning of September 6, 1922, in the port of Ayan, the first volunteers under Pepeliaev landed on the Sea of Okhotsk from the gunboat boat Battery and the Defender ship. Here they were met by about two hundred Yakut partisans; Korobeinik and the lieutenant Ryazan commanded them. The next day, a meeting was held, at which Kulikovsky, the Yakutsk Oblast Governor, and other Yakut public figures assured Pepelyaev that the defeated anti-Soviet movement could easily be re-created, since many more partisan units are in the taiga, and it would be enough to start fighting as they were en masse support volunteers. In confirmation of this, Yakut merchants donated around 300 deer a gift to the squad. Pepelyaev was appointed commander of all the White Army troops instead of Korobeinikov, and his partisans joined the detachment, forming the third battalion. The squad itself was called the 1 of the Siberian Volunteer Corps. In the squad the appeal was introduced “brother”: “brother colonel”, “brother captain”.
The first strike, “Siberian Suvorov,” decided to strike unexpectedly in the Nelkan tract, on the Maya River, where the expeditionary detachment of the Special Detachment Unit under the command of the Chekist Ivan Karpel with a supply of food and weapons and two barges stood as a garrison.
Speaking September 10 on autumn off-road, over the swamps and unfrozen rivers, the squad for 19 days passed more than 240 km, overcoming the deserted and impassable Dzhukdzhursky ridge. But on September 29, the detachment of Karpel, warned by three deserters from the squad, apparently recruited as early as Vladivostok, plunged along with food on barges in a panic and sailed down May. Only 14 horses and 120 winchesters, 50 rifles and 50 thousand cartridges for them, which became partisan in the spring, became trophies of the squad.
The harsh Far Eastern realities were unexpected. Pepelyaev found out that the locals are not at all as friendly as he was reported to. The Korobeynikov and Bochkarev detachments operating in the coastal area were engaged in looting the Yakuts and Tunguses.
Unable to seize food and barges, cut off from Ayan by an autumn thaw, the squad was trapped. Hunger began, the volunteers ate all the horses, dogs, and ravens shot, and some even cooked skin torn from the door. Only after arriving in Ayan 1 of October on the steamer Tomsk of the second echelon brigade (187 people) under the command of General Vishnevsky and creating the first convoy with foodstuffs on the coast of the rear area, which broke through to the Pepelians only on November 19 (!). Pepelyaev decided to wait for movement in the reindeer begins in December in order to advance on Yakutsk. The general addressed the Yakuts and Tungus with an appeal: “We came not to impose our will, our power. We will not impose either a monarchy or a republic. God will help, defend the area, and then the population itself will say who it wants ...
I would only wish to concentrate the disposal of all military forces squad. The idea of movement, leadership and food should be taken by you, local people ... ”.
Relying on the help of the local population, in two months the squad organized transport for themselves, supplies of supplies and warm clothes. Each volunteer was supposed to get a hat, a hood, a fur coat, a cloth shirt and trousers, two changes of warm underwear, and warm footwomen.
A small digression. In October 2012 of the year, Pepeliaev's glasses were transferred to the exposition of the Grodekovsky Museum in Khabarovsk, with which he paid the local craftswoman for high fur boots - ichigi.
The reconnaissance team led by Colonel Khudoyarova established contacts with the partisan detachments of Artemyev, Sysolyatin, Alekseeva, Volkov and others. The partisans learned about the dislocation of the Red Army units: in Yakutsk an artillery division, a squad of military units, an equestrian division of the GPU and a commando command squadron were holding squadrons and command teams under the command’s commands. , a detachment of red partisans Efim Kurashev with 2 guns and several machine guns in the village of Churapcha, a detachment of Ivan Strod and a supply base in the village of Petropavlovsk, a detachment of Nikolai Sutorikhin in the Amga settlement. Through this settlement, which occupied a central position, the connection between the units of the Red Army scattered throughout Yakutia was carried out. It was here that Pepelyaev decided to deliver a sudden blow, from which it was planned to launch an offensive against Yakutsk, along with the Okhotsk detachment of Major General Rakitin."Ice Siege"
As always, "Siberian Suvorov" acted decisively and boldly. The commanders of the Red Army in Yakutia did not expect a strike in the area, which is still known as the cold pole, where the frost reached minus 50 degrees. Moving from December 26 following General Rakitin’s avant-garde battalion, the squad occupied the villages of Ust-Mayu and Ust-Mil. 22 January 1923 of the year for the capture of the heavily fortified settlement Amgi was sent from Ust-Mil by a detachment of Colonel Reinhardt with a force of up to 400 fighters with two machine guns. The detachment traveled more than six days in more than 200 km and on the night of February 2 stormed Amgu from three sides with the support of the partisan detachment of Colonel Surov.
Sudden and bold attack to his full height with rifles at the ready decided the outcome of the battle. The squadron, having lost a 22 man killed, captured 13 machine guns, 150 rifles, a lot of ammunition, grenades and 60 man prisoners. February 7 arrived here and General Pepeliaev himself. The fall of Amgi now opened the way for him to Yakutsk, where martial law was declared, hastily erected fortifications and where the rest of the red forces urgently erected. It would seem that another blow to the capital of Yakutia ... But, as often happens in war, the courage and bravery of some stumbled over the courage and fortitude of others.
On February 12, a garrison with a wagon train in the 150 depot came to the aid of the red Yakutsk. Pepelyaev. Despite the fact that Strod lost killed and wounded 14 people. Yes, all the bulls and horses, he managed to strengthen with three hundred Red Army men in two abandoned yurts for cattle on the outskirts of the Yakut village of Sasyl-Sysyy-Lys'ya Nora in 1 km north of Amga.
The "ice siege", which lasted 18 days, played a key role in the Yakut campaign. By the evening of February 14, Pepeliaev himself arrived in Lysya Nora along with the 1, 2 and 4 battalions, the cavalry division and the partisan Artemiev army, which surrounded the village. The next day, parliamentarians went to the Red Army soldiers demanding surrender while assuring the preservation of life. But being wounded, Strod rejected the ultimatum, suggesting that the Pepelayevts themselves lay down their arms. He ordered to raise the red flag, and the Red Army men sang the "Internationale."
Pepelyaev, knowing from the intercepted report about Strod's injury, about the lack of red ammunition and medicines, still expected the Red Army soldiers to surrender and continued negotiations with them until the 18 number ... And the Red Army men managed to strengthen their kisyak impenetrable for bullets and built his weapons. Early in the morning of February 15, the Pepelayans launched an assault, but Strod's detachment repulsed it with machine-gun fire. Having lost more than 150 people killed and wounded, however, Pepelyaev decided not to lift the siege, forcing the Reds to surrender because of the inevitable famine. All pieces of whites were thrown against Strod. Pepelyaev did not want to keep such a large detachment in his rear, leaving only 120 people in Amga.
There was another assault attack, but Strod, using machine guns and a large number of lightning missiles, again repelled her. Then, on the orders of Pepelyaev in all the surrounding villages, all large mirrors were seized and transported to the Lizya Nora by carts. He planned to blind the enemy with a reflected "bunny" from the missiles to throw forward. But clear moonlit nights thwarted his original plan. They did not help to cover the attackers, and so on. "Yakut Tanks"- a sleigh with frozen manure in 5–6 rows. The "tanks" were too heavy, and the horses that dragged them were a good target.
In the end, it was decided to bring the siege trenches as close as possible to the yurts, to prepare a large number of grenades with ramrods from berdanok, February 26 to start another “grenade assault”.
By this time, the Strode squad had lost 63 people. killed and 96 wounded, no food left, the fighters ate only meat from the corpses of horses, which served simultaneously as parapet. There was no water either, they ate snow. Still, the red squad withstood the 18-day siege until 3 in March 1923, pulled back Pepeliaev’s main forces, preventing him from deploying an attack on Yakutsk. On the contrary, as a result of the “ice siege”, the commander of the Soviet units of Baikal got a breather for his counter-offensive, and Ivan Strod was awarded the second order of the Red Banner of the RSFSR in 1924.
Okhotsk-Ayan expedition
Already during the "ice siege" the squad began to receive information that did not inspire optimism. First, the Red Army occupied Vladivostok in October 1922, and in December, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The first rumors about the creation of the USSR. Secondly, it turned out that since the moment of the declaration of the Yakut ASSR, the sympathies of the Yakut intelligentsia had passed to the Bolsheviks. After the amnesty was announced for the rebels from their number, the Yakut people's revolutionary volunteer detachments (Yaknarrevdot) were formed to fight the brigade. And thirdly, the red commander of Baikal, having formed a strong grouping of troops consisting of units of the 226 and 230 regiments of the Red Army, units of the ChON, OGPU and Yaknarrevdot, together with the Kurashov squad launched a counter-offensive on Amginsky 21 direction in February 1923. All this could not affect the fighting spirit of the squad.
Early in the morning of March 2, under the cover of thick fog, more than 600 Red Army men with the support of two guns went to the assault of Amga. The 150 volunteer garrison desperately resisted, but by noon it was all over. The entire operational correspondence of the squad headquarters, the main provisional and quartermaster warehouse, the hospital with 70 wounded volunteers and 80 captive officers became the trophies of the Bolsheviks. At the same time, all the captured Red Army soldiers were released. The entire leadership of the Civil Administration, headed by Kulikovsky, who committed suicide, was captured.
This defeat forced General Pepeliaev to lift 3 in March on the siege of Amga and retreat to 8 on April in Nelkan, and on 1 in May on the coast in Ayan. Rakitin's detachment went to Okhotsk during this time. Part of the Red Army did not dare to repeat the transition "Siberian Suvorov" and turned back. These fighting cost a squad more than 370 people. killed, wounded and captured.
The defeat of the squad made Pepeliaev abandon the dead-end fratricidal path, as evidenced by the entry in his diary: “Russia now needs social peace, friendly cooperation of all classes and the tribes and peoples inhabiting it. The leaders of the movement should strive to withdraw the wrathful hand of the insurgent people from the same Russian people, only deceived by the communists.
Not anger, revenge and reprisals, but oblivion of past offenses should be borne by the true popular movement. ”
The scattered remnants of the squad remained the last formation of the White Guard in the territory of the newly formed USSR. The evacuation of the squad abroad was possible only by sea with the opening of navigation on the Sea of Okhotsk on a foreign or “white” ship. Major General Vishnevsky was sent to Okhotsk to collect from the Yakut merchants fur and gold worth 250 thousand rubles, necessary for the freight of the vessel. To the commander of the Siberian flotilla Rear Admiral George Stark sent a courier to Shanghai asking him to send a ship to evacuate the squad. At the same time, not wanting to be trapped again, General Pepelyaev ordered the construction of fishing longboats - Kungasas, so that in the summer they could go to Sakhalin, which was then occupied by Japan, through clear water.
But the courier was intercepted by an OGPU detachment on the Soviet-Chinese border and the commander of the 5 army, Jerome Uborevich, became aware of the planned evacuation. The Okhotsk-Ayan expedition of the Red Army was organized to crush the remnants of General Pepeliaev's troops. The expedition was led by Uborevich’s deputy on special assignments, “master of surprise strikes,” painted by Stepan Vostretsov. Moreover, the need to seize pepelievsky gold and furs was specifically stipulated.
On April 26, an expeditionary detachment of the 5 Army (800 Red Army men from the 2 Regiment of the Nerchinsk Regiment) sailed from Vladivostok on two armed ships, Stavropol and Indigirka. Throughout May, the ships, overcoming the difficult ice situation of the Sea of Okhotsk, practically stood obstructed by ice, and only at the end of May they moved to the north-west. As soon as the sea was cleared of ice, a landing force landed from ships in 30 km west of Okhotsk and on the morning of June 5 seized the city, losing only 6 people killed and 16 wounded. 78 volunteer officers were captured, and the commander of the Okhotsk detachment, Major General Rakitin, shot himself.
And although the volunteers knew from the intercepted radio talks about the approach of the red ships, the blow caught them off guard. They were preparing to reflect the landing right in the ports, but they did not expect attacks from land, and all the more so early arrival of ships (their approach was expected only on July 1). Sending prisoners and wounded on the Stavropol to Vladivostok, Vostrets 14 on June landed troops (476 people) at the mouth of the river Aldoma in 80 km west of Ayan. Doing 25-kilometer crossings a day on the road and hills, the detachment quietly approached the city. Early in the morning of June 17, taking advantage of the morning fog, the carelessness and the total apathy of the volunteers, the Red Army men leaked into the city, surrounded houses, dugouts and tents without firing a shot. Pepelyaev addressed his squad for the last time: “All Soviet Russia is united, the regular army has arrived, with which we have been taken prisoner. I hope that you will fulfill my last request and, not once looked death in your eyes, in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, lay down your arms. I am ready to stand trial and thank God that everything did without shedding brotherly blood. ”
In all, 356 people were taken prisoner, mainly officers, who 24 June sailed along with Vostretsov's expeditionary force to Indigirka in Vladivostok. Several dozen volunteers led by Major General Vishnevsky were rescued by Japanese fishermen. Subsequently, he wrote a book about this “The Argonauts of the White Dream”. The other part dispersed through the Yakut taiga and took part in anti-Soviet uprisings more than once (Tungus uprising of 1924 – 1925, uprising of confederalists of 1927 – 1928).For many years 15
That is how many years of life were released to the "Siberian Suvorov" after his surrender. It would seem that his whole way of fighting the Bolsheviks guaranteed his execution, but ... Of the ordinary volunteers who participated in the campaign, he was released about 200. 162 people were subjected to administrative exile, 78 people led by Pepelyaev were brought to justice by the military tribunal of the 5 Army in Chita. Pepelyaev himself and his closest associates, including 26, were sentenced to death, replaced by ten years in prison, with pre-trial detention. He served his sentence in the Yaroslavl political isolator, where he mastered the profession of cabinetmaker and studied English.
In the 1933 year, the sentence ended, but Pepelyaev was added one more year of his sentence up to three times. In August, 1936 was released, but without the right to reside in a number of cities and localities indicated by the NKVD. He settled in Voronezh, where he became a carpenter, and later was an assistant to the chief of the Voronezhtorg Horse Depot. But in August, 1937, he was arrested again, there was a massive campaign in the country to eradicate the remnants of "hostile classes." Pepelyaev was taken to Novosibirsk, he was accused of "counter-revolutionary Cadet-monarchist activity." Troika of the NKVD in the Novosibirsk region sentenced him to death, and on January 14 the 1938 th sentence was carried out. His opponent, Ivan Strod, by evil twist of fate, was shot in February 1938 of the year. The Soviet government repressed his wife and both sons when in August 1945, the Red Army occupied Harbin. In 1989, Pepeliaev was rehabilitated posthumously. In Tomsk, at the Baktin cemetery, in 2011, a monument to the youngest and most popular in Siberia, General of the Civil War Anatoly Pepelyaev and his father, the governor-general of Tomsk Nikolai Pepelyaev, was solemnly opened.
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