Another honest person. Raimond Pauls: the main killers were Latvians, not Russians
The maestro responded to the accusations that he "sold himself to the Russians" and is a traitor to the Latvian people.Outstanding Latvian composer Raymond Pauls was stunned by local nationalists, saying that the main “killers” in 1917-1918 were not Russians, but Latvians. So he commented to the newspaper Neatkarīgā accusations that he "sold himself to the Russians" and is a traitor to the Latvian people.
“I learned a little about what happened in 1917 and 1918,” said the maestro. - Who were the main killers? Our compatriots. What did they do in Ukraine? Who formed the whole KGB apparatus? Mostly ours and the Jews, although they were later eliminated themselves. Who defended that revolution? And who served in the protection of the Kremlin? Latvian arrows.
Therefore, it is better to keep silent about these matters. it storyand nothing can be done about it. What sense to raise it, it is better not to do it. We ourselves have done all the crap, we have climbed everywhere, ”said Pauls.
“Do not look for the executioner, but look for the Latvian”
“Soviet power rests on Jewish brains, Latvian bayonets and Russian fools!” - such a saying existed in Russia during the revolution. Then there was a simple phrase for the common people: “Do not look for the executioner, but look for the Latvian.” Blogger Alexander Dobrovolsky wrote about this recently in his “Live Journal”.
At first they were called the “Iron Guard of October,” the author writes. Then the old fanfare fell silent in confusion. "Suddenly" it was found that the account of the Latvian riflemen hundreds of thousands of innocent victims. They marked the beginning of the Bolshevik dictatorship, and then regularly drowned the country in blood.
By the end of 1916, the total number of these shooters reached 39 thousand, of which they created a separate Latvian rifle division. The vast majority of its fighters were in the past workers or farm laborers, had not a penny, but dreamed of a "bright future." This is what the Bolsheviks played. The success was complete.
“As for the Latvian riflemen, it was they who corrupted the whole army and now lead it behind them,” General Lukirsky, the general of the Northern Front, reported to 1917 in the autumn of another general, Dukhonin, at Headquarters. And on October 25 at the 2-th All-Russian Congress of Soviets, among other documents, the following was announced: "We, the delegates of the Latvian Riflemen, together with other delegates ... voted for the first decrees of the Soviet government, for Lenin ...".
In the days of the October Revolution, the author continues, the Latvian regiments prevented the sending of counter-revolutionary troops from the Northern Front to Petrograd. “The Latvian regiments were the first and almost without exception transferred to the Socialist Red Army, selflessly and courageously fulfilling their revolutionary duty of the proletarian army both on the internal and external fronts of the RSFSR,” wrote P. Stuchka in 1919 of the year.
On November 19, one of the Latvian regiments, whose fighters were distinguished by "exemplary discipline and proletarian consciousness", was summoned to the capital to strengthen the revolutionary garrison. Reference "soldiers of the revolution" were useful, for example, to disperse the Constituent Assembly in early January 1918 of the year, which initiated the Bolshevik dictatorship in the country. 250 more “most-most” people were assigned to a special combined detachment under the command of former Second Lieutenant Jan Peterson, who was entrusted with guarding the “cradle of the revolution” - the Smolny Palace. It was these shooters who guarded the lettered train that transported Lenin and members of the government of Soviet Russia to a new capital - to Moscow. And there the squad of Peterson, which was later transformed into a separate regiment, took the Kremlin under protection, where the country's leaders lived and worked.
The rest of the Latvian Guard also needed a young Soviet Union. Some were used as military professionals, others found a place in the punitive organs, the author writes.
... From the resolution of the Red Guard squad meeting at the Executive Committee of the Latvian United Sections of the Moscow Organization of the RSDLP (November 1917): “The Red Guard squad ... finds that ... freeing junkers from arrest, the Military Revolutionary Committee, at the same time enables them to stand up again against the revolutionary people. We, the Latvian riflemen and workers - members of the Red Guard, categorically demand that all the arrested junkers and other bourgeois bastards be brought before the imperious revolutionary court ... "
The Chekist authorities to a large extent also consisted of "countrymen". And the first among them is recalled, of course, J. Peters - Deputy Chairman of the Cheka. Here are just a few quotes from his public speeches relating to the 1918-1919 years: “I declare that any attempt by the Russian bourgeoisie to once again raise its head will meet with such resistance and such reprisal, before which everything that is understood by red terror will turn pale ...” "... The anti-infectious vaccine was made - that is, the red terror ... This vaccine was made all over Russia ...", Peters wrote about the shooting of hundreds of hostages after the assassination attempt on Lenin and the murder of Uritzky in 1918.
After the Red Army units knocked out the Denikinists from Rostov-on-Don, the correspondent of the Revolutionary Russia newspaper wrote: “The emergency headed by Peters earned it. Very often, Peters himself was present at the executions of local Cossacks ... The Red Army men say that his son, a boy 8-9, always runs after Peters, and constantly sticks to him: “Dad, let me!” ... He did not lag behind his colleague - a landowner and another prominent security officer - the head of the All-Ukrainian Cheka (by the way, the “organs” in Kiev were almost half of Latvians) - Latsis. This comrade in his “class approach” surpassed almost all the other “knights of the revolution”: “We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look at the investigation of materials or evidence that the accused acted by deed or word against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should offer him is: what is his background, upbringing, education or profession. These questions should determine the fate of the accused ... ”.
Punitive measures performed by the Latvian revolutionary troops were particularly brutal. Their first big "expedition" - to the Don, where the uprising of the "Cossack Contra", led by General Kaledin, broke out - took place at the end of 1917. After the capture of Rostov, the shooters, along with other red troops, established a “revolutionary order” in the city. At the same time, all men and even teenagers were shot, suspected of sympathizing with the “officer”. Almost at the same time, in early January 1918 of the year, in Belarus “enemies of Soviet power” were arrested and executed without trial one of the Latvian regiments sent there to eliminate the insurrection of the Polish Corps of General Y. Dovbor-Musnitsky.
According to the statistics cited by S. Melgunov, a researcher of the history of the “red terror”, only in 20 provinces of Central Russia in 1918 were 245 registered major counter-revolutionary speeches, in the suppression of which the Latvian arrows were used. And the Latvian division created in April of the 1918-th commanded by I. Vatsetis turned into a sort of all-Russian special forces - its units took part in the defeat of almost all major anti-Bolshevik actions.
Then the "October October Iron Guard" was sent to restore order in Murom, Rybinsk, Kaluga, Saratov, Nizhny Novgorod ... It turned out that they were also engaged in "prevention". In 1919, a punitive train with a detachment of Latvians and sailors daily cruised the railway line between Cherepovets and Vologda. “The train stopped at some station,” recalled an eyewitness, “and the detachment, on its own discretion or denunciation, began to search, requisition, arrest and executions ...” In the official language this was called “the visiting session of the Special Department of the Cheka”.
A lot of “labor” turned out to be for Latvian riflemen during numerous peasant riots in the Tambov region. From a memorandum to the Council of People's Commissars prepared at the end of 1919 by a group of daredevils: “The Soviet government moved dozens of punitive detachments to the places ... In all the volosts there was indiscriminate whipping of the peasants. On the square of Spassk, 10 people were publicly shot along with a priest ... Some villages were almost destroyed by artillery. Every tenth house was burned in Pichayevsky district ... ".
Order of the Tambov Cheka (September 1920 of the Year): “To carry out the merciless“ red terror ”to the families of the rebels ... To arrest everyone from the 18 age in such families, regardless of gender, and if the gangsters continue to shoot, shoot them ... ". An account of the "enemies of the revolution" killed in the villages of Tambovshchina and the hostages went to hundreds and thousands of people. And in Shatsk district, red punitive gunmen shot down a crowd of believers. The locals staged a procession, trying to protect themselves from the Spanish epidemic, with the help of the honored icon of the Mother of God, but, seeing the “counter” in this action, arrested both the priest and the icon. When the peasants - women, children, old people - moved to save their shrine, they mowed down in cold blood with machine guns.
A terrible memory of themselves left Latvian arrows in the Crimea. The division under the command of Jan Lacis bravely forced the Sivash, for which she received an “exclusive” name - the 15-I of the Red Banner Sivash. And when General Wrangel's troops were driven out of Tavrida, the Latvians, along with other Red Army units and KGB units, began to "clean up" the peninsula from "every White Guard scum." “The Crimea is a bottle from which not a single counterrevolutionary will jump out!” Was their slogan of those days. And he was brought to life, not sparing his own strength and other people's lives. All the unreliable, all those who could not convince of their proletarian origin, were awaited by a cruel reprisal. People were shot, drowned in the sea, dropped from cliffs. In Sevastopol, all the trees, all the lampposts in the center of the city were “decorated” with the corpses of hung “enemies of the Soviet government” - among them engineers, high school students, doctors ... No wonder that after such “events” the Crimea was called “All-Russian cemetery”: the peninsula was executed more than 100 thousand people.
Perhaps the loudest “pacifying action” in which detachments of Latvian riflemen participated was the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising. On the very first day after the storming of the fortress city, on the ice in front of its forts, rebel soldiers and sailors were shot near 300. In the following days, nearly a half thousand more were killed. The total number of those executed reached two and a half thousand.
Did the Soviet country remember its Latvian heroes? Of these, few have become widely known — in addition to the already mentioned leaders of the Cheka, the names of several “red shooters” who have become major military leaders — Eidemann, Berzin, Stutsk — have been preserved in books and reference books ...
A sad future awaited the “Iron Guard of October”: during the times of Stalin’s repression, many of these people died. However, some of the shooters managed to return home. There, in bourgeois Latvia 1920-1930-s, they considered their “lost sons” criminals. They were tried and sent to prison. But at least not shot! And when this Baltic state was attached to the Union, official propaganda again began to call Latvian shooters heroes. A monument was even erected in their honor. It still stands in the center of Riga. Here are just a museum located nearby, changed its "political orientation." Previously, he was devoted to the history of the red Latvian riflemen, and now has become a Museum of the occupation - the Soviet and fascist.
Such a neighborhood looks rather strange, the author of the publication notes. Maybe then it would be worthwhile to rename the monument itself and call it a monument to the Latvian occupation? ..
"Latvians do not deserve freedom"
The Latvian society itself - moreover, which is characteristic, incl. the Latvians themselves - meanwhile, begins to slowly see the light after 20 years of “independence” and 5 years of Latvia’s membership in the European Union.
“Latvians did not deserve freedom,” a well-known political figure in the country, director of the Riga basketball school Guntis Shenhof, said in an interview with the Latvian edition of Vesti Today. His family, by the way, the Soviet government once sent to Siberia.
“Our Titanic, called Latvia, is inexorably sinking,” he says. “This catastrophe is the result of the so-called independence ruling throughout 20 years, especially the last 10 years, when nonprofessionalism, political impotence and greed of those in power most clearly manifested themselves. Latvia is literally stolen. And stolen by those who are desperately rushing for power today. I don't think so alone - many Latvians come to this conclusion. ”
The teacher and athlete with years of experience, the founder of the European Youth Basketball League Guntis Schönhof is not shy about expressions, the newspaper writes. And he admits that more and more often his sensible compatriots come to the conclusion that, apparently, the Latvian nation does not deserve a normal life. And does not deserve its state either.
Recently, Guntis Schönhof visited the evening of fellow students, graduates of the forestry faculty of the Latvian Academy of Agricultural Sciences 1979. He says the general mood at the meeting - the collapse of illusions and complete confusion. Some classmates in recent years have lost their jobs, someone went bankrupt, many have children, seeing a complete lack of prospects, are leaving for a better share in other countries. As a result, they came to an unequivocal conclusion - the country, shaken by corrosion, is heading for the abyss, and only a miracle can save it.
“Latvia has long had no independence,” says Schönhof. - We are on our knees both in front of Brussels and in front of the IMF - he has already crushed us with these billion-dollar loans. What is there for the secret protocol, nobody knows! Most likely, the state has long been sold with giblets, and the people still out of inertia think that it is independent. We must be victims of some kind of scheme ... ”.
“It seems to me,” explains Schönhof, “we have fallen victim to a plan to clear the territory of the local population. Geographically, we are in a good place: why not populate this land with crowds of refugees and migrants, whom Europe is no longer able to accept? The time will come when the Latvian radicals will with affection recall the Russians, whom they have long dreamed of squeezing out of here. Because people of another religion and skin color will come to their place, they will not declare to them: “Get out to your homeland!” There will be explosions and terrorist attacks. Fortunately for Latvia, Russians still react to insults, mostly speaking in their media or quietly leaving. And you could, by the way, beat windows, burn cars. In France, such radicals as ours would have long been torn to pieces. ”
“How to deal with non-citizens who make up about 20 percent of the population?” The correspondent wonders. “It’s time for us, the representatives of the indigenous nation,” says Schönhof, “to show goodwill and take the first step towards non-citizens, giving them the right to directly participate in the elections. Stop mocking the elderly, requiring them to take an exam on the knowledge of the state language. And born in Latvia - automatically grant citizenship! It’s enough to live by the recurrences of the past, to attack each other on sick blisters, to provoke each other - it’s time to really unite society and solve urgent problems together! ”
“Nevertheless, Latvia prefers to speak with Russia in the language of ultimatums, trying to bill her for occupation, Russification and the difficult legacy of the Soviet regime ...,” said the correspondent.
“And if Russia, as the successor of the USSR, will file a counterclaim to Latvia? - retorts Schönhof. - For example, will calculate the role of the Latvian riflemen, whose bayonets conquered the October revolution and destroyed the Russian Empire? How many of our security officers were outraged throughout Russia, filling it with blood! And if we recall the Soviet era, how much everything was built here — we still ride along these bridges and highways. Moscow has invested money in Latvia, and Brussels gives it with one hand and takes it with the other, and with interest as well. ”
“It’s enough to live by occupation and deportations,” says Schönhof. - Latvians themselves actively participated in those events. It is regrettable to admit, but with gusto they handed over theirs - from complexes and envy. Our family was also sent to Siberia. Recently, I decided to pick up archival documents, I wanted to find out from which submission we deserved such a fate. It turned out his father's brother "took care." Under Ulmanis, we lived prosperously, and he, taking advantage of the situation, inherited all of our land and homes. Thank God, the grandmother and mother did not live to see this truth ... "
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