Repression like a general. Admiral A

Why in modern Russia are they trying to get rid of Kolchak, who drowned Siberia in Russian blood, with propaganda series and films, monuments. creating the image of the “savior of the country” is a separate issue. But after considering the facts of the terror perpetrated by the admiral and his henchmen, it sounds more and more clearly. And it’s not at all clear how it is possible on one land, watered with the blood of thousands of Kolchak’s victims, where there are monuments to them, to erect monuments to their executioner? In the top photo is a monument to the victims of the Kulomzin uprising against the Kolchak dictatorship. What kind of “new tradition” is this, instead of comprehending and determining the place in history of a very controversial figure, and glorifying him so deceitfully and categorically in propaganda? Is it not for these “merits” to the people?

The “glorious” path of the struggle for the “homeland” began with the fact that Kolchak, breaking the oath of the Russian Empire, was the first in the Black Sea Fleet to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government. Having learned about the October Revolution, he handed the British ambassador a request for admission into the British army. Doesn't it by any chance remind you of modern events with jackaling around embassies? The ambassador, after consultations with London, handed Kolchak a direction to the Mesopotamian front. On the way there, in Singapore, he was overtaken by a telegram from the Russian envoy to China, Nikolai Kudashev, inviting him to Manchuria to form Russian military units.

So, by August 1918, the armed forces of the RSFSR were completely or almost completely opposed by foreign troops, with the support of “patriots such as Kolchak, Krasnov, Kornilov, Wrangel, etc. Well, you can’t say this more eloquently than Russia’s “sworn friend”:

“It would be a mistake to think that during this entire year we fought on the fronts for the cause of Russians hostile to the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, the Russian White Guards fought for OUR cause,” Winston Churchill later wrote.

And so the goals and objectives were defined by Kolchak and his foreign masters and he set about implementing them, moreover, using very specific methods. Below is a selection of facts and evidence, as they say without comment:

Kolchak's order:

"A civil war must of necessity be merciless. I order the commanders to shoot all captured communists. Now we are relying on the bayonet."

And these instructions from Kolchak were zealously fleshed out by his assistants. Here are fragments from the order of the governor of the Yenisei and part of the Irkutsk provinces, Lieutenant General S.N. Rozanova:

"To the heads of military detachments operating in the area of ​​the uprising:

1. When occupying villages previously captured by robbers, demand the extradition of their leaders and leaders; if this does not happen, and there is reliable information about the availability of such, shoot the tenth.

2. Villages whose population encounters government troops with weapons are to be burned; the adult male population should be shot without exception; property, horses, carts, bread and so on to be taken away in favor of the treasury."
< ... >
6. Take hostages from among the population; in the event of actions by fellow villagers directed against government troops, shoot the hostages mercilessly"

In 1918, the “supreme ruler” Kolchak created 40 concentration camps. Ishim, Atbasar, Irkutsk, Tomsk, Omsk, Shkotovo, Blagoveshchensk, Tyukalinsk...

In December 1918, the Kolchak government adopted a special resolution on the widespread introduction of the death penalty. The police were enforcing this resolution. In addition, there were special punitive detachments under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Insulting Kolchak “in words” was declared the most serious crime, punishable by imprisonment.

As follows from the memoirs, Kolchak himself more than once expressed the opinion that “the civil war should be merciless.” The head of the Ural region, Postnikov, who refused to fulfill his duties, characterized the Kolchak regime as follows:

“dictatorship of military power, execution without trial, flogging even of women, arrests based on denunciations, persecution based on slander, horrors - in the Red Army camps, 178 out of 1,600 people died in a week. “Apparently, they are all doomed to extinction.”

Headquarters captain Frolov of the dragoon squadron of Kappel’s corps spoke about his “exploits”:

“Having hung several hundred people on the gates of Kustanai, shot a little, we spread to the village, the villages of Zharovka and Kargalinsk were cut to pieces, where for sympathy for Bolshevism they had to shoot all the men from 18 to 55 years of age, after which they let the “rooster” go.”

As military failures progressed, Kolchak's generals became increasingly cruel. On October 12, 1919, one of them issued an order to shoot every tenth hostage, and in the event of a mass armed uprising against the army - all residents and burn the village to the ground. Litvin’s book cites a letter from Perm workers dated November 15, 1919:

“We waited for Kolchak like the day of Christ, but we waited like the most predatory beast.”

Kolchak, as an intelligent commander-in-chief, preferred not to torture, but to flog, and not to go overboard with the death penalty, but simply to shoot. Soviet printed sources claim that during Kolchak’s stay in the Yekaterinburg province, the White Guards tortured and shot over 25 thousand people and flogged about 200 thousand.

The Chekists began investigative case No. 37751 against Ataman Boris Annenkov in May 1926. He was 36 years old at the time. He said about himself that he was from the nobility, graduated from the Odessa Cadet Corps and the Moscow Alexander Military School. He did not recognize the October Revolution; the Cossack centurion at the front decided not to comply with the Soviet decree on demobilization and, at the head of a “partisan” detachment, appeared in Omsk in 1918. In Kolchak's army he commanded a brigade and became a major general. After the defeat of the Semirechensk army with 4 thousand soldiers, he left for China.

The four-volume investigative file accusing Annenkov and his former chief of staff N.A. Denisov contains thousands of testimonies from plundered peasants, relatives of those killed at the hands of bandits who acted under the motto:

“We have no restrictions! God and Ataman Annenkov are with us, cut right and left!”

The indictment described many facts of the atrocities of Annenkov and his gang. At the beginning of September 1918, the peasants of the Slavgorod district cleared the city of the guards of the Siberian regionalists. Annenkov’s “hussars” were sent to pacify. On September 11, massacres began in the city: on that day up to 500 people were tortured and killed. The hopes of the delegates to the Peasant Congress are that

“No one will dare to touch the people’s representatives, they have not justified themselves. Annenkov ordered all the arrested delegates of the peasant congress (87 people) to be chopped up in the square opposite the people’s house and buried here in a hole.”

The village of Cherny Dol, where the headquarters of the rebels was located, was burned to the ground. Peasants, their wives and children were shot, beaten and hanged on poles. Young girls from the city and nearby villages were brought to the Annenkov train stationed at the Slavgorod station, raped, then taken out of the cars and shot. A participant in the Slavgorod peasant uprising, Blokhin testified: the Annenkovites executed in a terrible way - they tore out eyes, tongues, removed stripes on the back, buried the living in the ground, tied them to horse tails. In Semipalatinsk, the ataman threatened to shoot every fifth person if he was not paid an indemnity.

Annenkov and Denisov were tried in Semipalatinsk, and there, by court verdict, they were shot on August 12, 1927.

I have already quoted the words of the commander of the American intervention forces in Siberia, General W. Graves:

“There were terrible murders in Eastern Siberia, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks, as was usually thought. I will not be mistaken if I say that in Eastern Siberia, for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, 100 people were killed by anti-Bolshevik elements.”

The general spoke, in particular, about the brutal massacre of the Kolchakites in November 1918 in Omsk with members of the Constituent Assembly...

Now is the time to look into the face of white terror, from which the adherents of glasnost and truth from “Ogonyok”, “Moskovskie Novosti”, “Literaturnaya Gazeta”, etc. have slyly turned away. No, we will not follow the dubious example of D. A. Volkogonov and Yu. Feofanov , who called in the Reds as “accusers”... General Denikin and half-cadet Melgunov. Let the whites themselves testify to the actions of the whites. There is a considerable amount of this evidence. Let's reveal just a few of them.

When Admiral Kolchak established himself on the throne, his guardsmen arranged not only the Bolsheviks, but also the Socialist-Revolutionary-Menshevik leaders of the directory such a bloodbath, which the survivors recalled with shudder for many years. One of them, a member of the Central Committee of the Right Socialist Revolutionary Party D.F. Rakov, managed to smuggle a letter from prison abroad, which the Socialist Revolutionary center in Paris published in 1920 in the form of a brochure entitled “In the dungeons of Kolchak. Voice from Siberia.”

What did this voice tell the world community?

“Omsk,” Rakov testified, “simply froze in horror. While the wives of the murdered comrades searched day and night for their corpses in the Siberian snows, I continued my painful sitting, not knowing what horror was happening behind the walls of the guardhouse. There were an infinite number of people killed, in any case, no less than 2,500 people.

Entire cartloads of corpses were transported around the city, just as lamb and pork carcasses are transported in winter. The victims were mainly soldiers of the local garrison and workers...” (p. 16-17).

And here are the scenes of Kolchak’s massacres, sketched, so to speak, from life:

“The murder itself presents a picture so wild and terrible that it is difficult to talk about it even for people who have seen many horrors both in the past and in the present. The unfortunates were stripped and left in only their underwear: the killers obviously needed their clothes. They beat them with all types of weapons, with the exception of artillery: they beat them with rifle butts, stabbed them with bayonets, chopped them with sabers, and shot at them with rifles and revolvers. Not only the performers were present at the execution, but also spectators. In front of this public, N. Fomin (Socialist Revolutionary – P.G.) was inflicted 13 wounds, of which only 2 were gunshot wounds. While he was still alive, they tried to cut off his hands with sabers, but the sabers, apparently, were blunt, resulting in deep wounds on the shoulders and under the armpits. It’s hard, hard for me now to describe how our comrades were tortured, mocked, and tortured” (pp. 20-21).

“The prison is designed for 250 people, and in my time there were more than a thousand there... The main population of the prison are Bolshevik commissars of all kinds and types, Red Guards, soldiers, officers - all behind the front-line court-martial, all people awaiting death sentences. The atmosphere is extremely tense. The soldiers arrested for participating in the Bolshevik uprising on December 22 made a very depressing impression. These are all young Siberian peasant boys who have nothing to do with the Bolsheviks or Bolshevism. The prison environment and the proximity of imminent death turned them into walking dead people with dark, sallow faces. This whole mass is still waiting for salvation from new Bolshevik uprisings.”

Not only prisons, but all of Siberia was filled with the horrors of massacres. Kolchak sent punitive general Rozanov against the partisans of the Yenisei province.

“Something indescribable has begun,” Rakov reports. - Rozanov announced that for every killed soldier of his detachment, ten people from the Bolsheviks in prison, who were all declared hostages, would be steadily shot. Despite allied protests, 49 hostages were shot in the Krasnoyarsk prison alone. Along with the Bolsheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries were also shot... Rozanov carried out the pacification in the “Japanese” way. The village captured from the Bolsheviks was plundered, the population was either evaporated en masse or shot: neither the elderly nor the women were spared. The villages most suspicious of Bolshevism were simply burned. Naturally, when Rozanov’s detachments approached, at least the male population scattered throughout the taiga, unwittingly replenishing the rebel detachments” (P. 41).

Excavation of the grave of mass graves of victims of Kolchak repressions of March 1919, Tomsk

The same scenes of Dante's Inferno took place throughout Siberia and the Far East, where the fire of guerrilla warfare burned in response to the terror of Kolchak's followers.

But maybe the Socialist Revolutionary witness Rakov, who experienced all the “delights” of Kolchakism, was too emotional and said too much? No, I didn’t say anything. Let's look through the diary of Baron A. Budberg - Kolchak's Minister of War, after all. What did the baron tell about, writing not for publication, but, so to speak, confessing to himself? The Kolchak regime appears from the pages of the diary without makeup. Observing this very power, the baron is indignant:

“Even a reasonable and impartial rightist... will disgustedly recoil from any cooperation here, because nothing can force one to sympathize with this filth; here, even nothing can be changed, because the monstrously growing meanness, cowardice, ambition, greed and other delights rise up against the sincere idea of ​​order and law.” And one more thing: “The old regime is blooming in full bloom in its most vile manifestations...”.

Lenin was right when he wrote that the Kolchaks and Denikins carried on their bayonets a power that was “worse than the tsar’s.”

Baron Budberg invites all those who specialize in exposing Soviet “chekas” to look into Kolchak’s counterintelligence.

“Here counterintelligence is a huge institution, warming whole crowds of self-interested people, adventurers and the dregs of the late secret police, insignificant in terms of productive work, but thoroughly imbued with the worst traditions of the former guards, detectives and gendarmes. All this is hidden behind the loftiest slogans of the struggle for the salvation of the homeland, and under this cover debauchery, violence, embezzlement of government funds and the wildest tyranny reign.”

Readers probably have not forgotten that this is evidence from Kolchak’s Minister of War and that we are talking about the sharpest weapon of white terror.

The baron also frankly spoke about the fact that the Ural and Siberian peasants, driven into Kolchak’s army under pain of death and reprisals, do not want to serve this regime. They want the restoration of the power that gave them the land and much more. Is this what explained those dozens of truly heroic uprisings in Kolchak’s rear and the no less heroic actions of partisan armies from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean with a total number of up to 200 thousand people plus millions of their supporters? No, these hundreds of thousands and millions who went to death and torture did not consider their war against the terrorist regime senseless. But the former head of the Institute of Military History thinks so. It turns out strange, doesn't it?

Now about what fell to the lot of the long-suffering people who found themselves in “Kolchakia”. In Budberg's diary we read:

“The Kalmyk saviors (we are talking about the detachments of the Ussuri Cossack ataman Kalmykov. - P.G.) show Nikolsk and Khabarovsk what the new regime is; there are arrests and executions everywhere, plus, of course, the abundant annexation of cash equivalents into the vast pockets of the saviors. The Allies and the Japanese know all this, but no measures are taken. They tell such monstrous things about the exploits of the Kalmyk people that you don’t want to believe them” (vol. XIII, p. 258). For example: “The degenerates who came from the detachments boast that during punitive expeditions they handed over the Bolsheviks to the Chinese to be killed, having first cut the tendons under the knees of the prisoners (“so as not to run away”); they also boast that they buried the Bolsheviks alive, with the bottom of the pit lined with entrails released from those being buried (“to make it easier to lie down”)” (p. 250).

This is what Ataman Kalmykov, the “younger brother” of the Transbaikal Ataman Semenov, did. What did the “big brother” do? Here is the frank confession of the commander of American troops in Siberia, General V. Grevs:

“The actions of these (Semyonovsky - P.G.) Cossacks and other Kolchak commanders, carried out under the auspices of foreign troops, were the richest soil that could be prepared for Bolshevism; the cruelties were of such a kind that they will undoubtedly be remembered and retold among the Russian people 50 years after their accomplishment"

But here is the “handiwork” of the interventionists and White Guards in digital terms for the Yekaterinburg province alone (according to the official report):

“The Kolchak authorities shot at least 25 thousand. In the Kizel mines alone, at least 8 thousand were shot and buried alive; in the Tagil and Nadezhdinsky districts, about 10 thousand were shot and tortured; in Yekaterinburg and other districts there are at least 8 thousand. About 10% of the two million population were killed. Whipping men, women and children.”

If we consider that “Kolchakia” included 11 more provinces and regions, it is difficult to even imagine the scale of the bloody orgy that took place in the east of the country.

This is the portrait of the Kolchakism, drawn by its creators or witnesses. But Kolchak and those who directed him wanted to establish such “orders” throughout Russia. A white horse was already standing ready in Omsk, on which the “supreme ruler” planned to ride into Moscow under the ringing of bells.

This is it, in the testimonies of participants and eyewitnesses. the admiral's "glorious" path into historical oblivion. But the truth cannot be one-sided; there could not be a response to such horrors of the Whites, in this case Kolchak’s terror, from the Reds. Of course, in response, the Red Terror was launched, how “bloody” it was than the White Terror, General of the Intervention Army W. Graves spoke above. But the difference in the historical outcome of these tragic events for the two warring sides is diametrically opposed.

Despite the full support of the White Guard movement by its Western partners, it did not find mass support among the population, which is not surprising from the above facts. The White Guards, having Western support, having a lot of funds from robbery and expropriations, having a semblance of a quasi-state entity, where did they direct all the funds? Why can’t you find evidence anywhere about the creative projects of the White Guards, aimed at at least some kind of future desired by the people? Because, apart from the desire for undivided power, there was no project behind them, only to rule and flog, rule and shoot, and rule, rule, rule. And where are the people? His future? Right in the ground or like slaves in mines and factories.

What about the Bolsheviks? From the first days, they directed all the pitiful funds received in the form of taxes, without any external support, not being sure that they would retain power and the country, where? In the fight against illiteracy and in the electric power industry, in the two foundations of future industrialization and the transformation of unsystematic agriculture into the agricultural industry. And against the backdrop of the White Guard's boundless horror in the village, this historical photo from the early 20s is a monument to the genius of the decisions made by Lenin.

From an article by Sergei Balmasov.

Recently, extraordinary excitement has been recorded in Russian society around the figure of one of the leaders of the White movement, Admiral Alexander Kolchak, in whose honor a memorial plaque was erected in St. Petersburg, and even monuments were erected in Irkutsk and Omsk.
It is noteworthy that admirers of the figure of the admiral remember him exclusively as a fearless polar explorer, and especially exalted fans give him almost credit for the terror that Kolchak carried out against the Reds in Siberia.
At the same time, Kolchak’s fans often reproach the Reds for allegedly “dispersing the Constituent Assembly” in January 1918. But if the Bolsheviks simply dispersed the Assembly, the White Guards followed this up by shooting a number of its members who had nothing to do with the Bolsheviks .

On the night of December 22-23, 1918, a Bolshevik uprising took place in Omsk, controlled by the Kolchakites. This may seem incredible, but it was carried out in the heart of white Siberia, filled with White Guards and troops of the “allies” (primarily Czechoslovak, Serbian and British).
The rebels planned to seize key facilities in Omsk, weapons warehouses, a prison and prisoner of war camps with a simultaneous strike. After this, they hoped to disrupt the railway communication, on which the supply of the White Guard troops at the front critically depended.
The command of the 5th Red Army, which was in close coordination with the underground in Omsk, was supposed to take advantage of these successes and launch a counteroffensive. However, literally on the eve of the uprising, white counterintelligence managed to arrest the leadership of one of the four city headquarters that led the uprising. The Bolshevik leaders, believing that the Whites already knew all their plans, hastened to cancel the order to march.
Only two of the four headquarters of the uprising were able to inform about this. Despite the expected success, submitting to strict party discipline, the rebels turned back at the very last moment.

But the other two districts did not have time to warn. The fighting squads, consisting of workers and loaders, together with the propagandized soldiers of the Omsk garrison and the railway guards, easily captured the outskirts of Omsk - Kulomzino, where the Siberian Cossack hundred and a battalion of Czechoslovak troops were disarmed.
Then the rebels took the strategically important railway bridge across the Irtysh. The Bolsheviks also operated successfully in another Omsk region. Two companies of soldiers who rebelled there took possession of several objects, including the city prison.
In addition to the Bolsheviks, there were also previously arrested representatives of the Committee of the Constituent Assembly, who were part of the anti-Soviet government of KOMUCH, which fought against the Bolsheviks on the Volga in the summer - autumn of 1918.
These were mainly Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. However, their relationship with their allies in the struggle did not work out. And in November - December 1918, representatives of the Committee of the Constituent Assembly, despite their loyal attitude to the power of Admiral Kolchak, were arrested without any charges and transported to the Omsk prison.
The Omsk Bolsheviks, who captured the prison on December 22-23, took the members of the Constituent Assembly out of their cells. They did not want to leave prison, apparently fearing provocation, but they were kicked out of there by force.

On December 23, 1918, by order of the head of the Omsk garrison, Major General V.V. Brzhezovsky, calls were posted around the city for the prisoners of the city prison released by the Bolsheviks to return to their cells. Defectors were threatened with a court-martial, which meant imminent execution. As a result, almost all the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, including members of the Constituent Assembly, returned to prison voluntarily and... were executed.
Thus, in his report No. 1722 dated December 30, 1918, the prosecutor of the Omsk Judicial Chamber A.A. Korshunov informs the Minister of Justice of the Kolchak government S.S. Starynkevich: “On December 26, on the opposite bank from the city of the Irtysh River, several corpses of those executed were found, among which those taken from prison for presentation to a military court were identified - Fomin Nil Valerianovich, a prominent representative of the Socialist Revolutionaries, a member of the Constituent Assembly, Bruderer and Barsov (also members of the Constituent Assembly meetings)".

According to anatomical examination, these people were beaten and tortured before being executed. For example, 13 wounds were found on the body of Fomin alone, including saber and bayonet wounds. Based on their nature, doctors concluded that the killers were trying to cut off his fingers and hands.
According to further investigation, “of the persons taken away from prison at the request of the military authorities, Bruderer, Barsov, Devyatov, Kirienko and Mayevsky were delivered by the commandant of Omsk, and Sarov was delivered by the police of the 5th precinct of Omsk.”
He further continues: “According to A.A. Korshunov, the documents for the extradition of the prisoners from prison were issued by Major General V.D. Ivanov, the chairman of the military court, from where they never returned. According to Korshunov, “this attitude was delivered adjutant on duty to commandant Cherchenko and lieutenant of Krasilnikov’s detachment Bartashevsky.”
The first group of people taken from prison - Bachurin, Winter, E. Mayevsky (Maisky, aka Gutovsky, then a well-known Menshevik in Russia, editor of the Chelyabinsk newspaper "Power of the People"), Rudenko, Fateev and Zharov - were taken to a military court. ..

Of all the prisoners, only the prisoners of the first group were tried in a military court, with the exception of Rudenko, who was not taken there (he was shot by a convoy while trying to escape along the road) and was already replaced at the trial by Markov, who also escaped from prison.
Of these prisoners, Bachurin, Zharov and Fateev were sentenced to death, Mayevsky to indefinite penal servitude, and in relation to Winter and Markov, the military court sent the case for further investigation... However, all the defendants, except Winter, were shot . Thus, three of this group were shot in accordance with the verdict, and two - Maisky and Markov - contrary to it."
According to prosecutor A.A. Korshunov, the main suspicions in the case of the murder of Mayevsky fell on Lieutenant Cherchenko (adjutant of Commandant Lobov), who “knew Mayevsky well, as he received him after his arrest in Chelyabinsk. In addition, the same Cherchenko arrested Mayevsky on the morning of December 22 after the release of the latter by the Bolsheviks and took him to the commandant's office.
According to Cherchenko’s testimony, he also knew that Mayevsky was the editor of a newspaper that incited readers against the officers, and that during the rebellion some officers ... could not take into account the court verdict and shoot Mayevsky and Loktev as Bolsheviks.”
The last group of people taken from prison: Fomin, Bruderer, Markovsky, Barsov, Sarov, Loktev, Lissau (all members of the Constituent Assembly) and von Meck (Mark Nikolaevich, a former officer of the Wild Native Division, who allegedly ended up in prison by mistake) were taken to the premises military court, when the court had already closed the session."

Then the following happened: Lieutenant Bartashevsky, who delivered the arrested, ordered the convicts to be taken out of the courthouse in order to return them to prison. Those arrested, despite the ban from the head of the convoy, continued to communicate with each other.
“Lieutenant Bartashevsky,” it follows from the document, “fearing that the arrested would conspire to escape, and also due to the small number of the convoy, decided to carry out the sentence of the court, leading the arrested to the Irtysh River... Moreover, when panic arose among the escorted, they were shot not only those sentenced to death, but also the rest of those arrested.”
This episode clearly characterizes the fighting spirit of Kolchak’s military, who were afraid of unarmed people, many of whom were elderly and, even if they wanted to, could not resist them physically.
During the further investigation, the prosecutor of the Omsk Judicial Chamber A.A. Korshunov managed to find out that, “according to the normal procedure for conducting cases in a military court, at the end of it, the chairman of the court should have ordered the convoy to take the convicts back to prison. From the testimony of its clerk, Lieutenant Vedernikov, it can be concluded that the chairman did not give such an order to anyone ".
It is worth talking specifically about the procedure of the court-martial itself. Korshunov points out that “in relation to the trial of the above-mentioned six prisoners, the following circumstance should be noted: in the proceedings of the military court, first of all, there is no testimony to the court; then in the same proceedings there are acts of inquiry only about one Markov, while regarding the others convicted with There is no material for five people in the court proceedings."
So it is completely unclear by virtue of what order the court began to hear the case, what exactly the defendants were accused of and what this accusation, which is written in the verdict, is based on.

As prosecutor Korshunov writes, “according to Vedernikov, the staff officer for assignments at the headquarters of the garrison chief, Lieutenant Colonel Sokolov, informed him that he, Vedernikov, had been appointed clerk of the military court, saying: “The arrested people will be brought to you, and you will judge them. When Vedernikov objected that it is impossible to judge without an order to bring them to trial, Sokolov already strictly repeated: “You have been told that the arrested will be brought to you for trial.”
Kolchak himself, in his order No. 81, December 22, 1918, thanked the participants in the suppression of the uprising and announced their reward and, among other things, said: “Everyone who took part in the riots or was involved in them should be brought before a military court...”

In other words, the Supreme Ruler actually sanctioned the reprisal of all persons disliked by the White Guards. This directive allowed those forcibly expelled from prison by the Bolsheviks to be considered involved in the riots, deal with them, and at the same time be protected from further persecution by the order of Kolchak himself.
By the way, White Guard sources indicate that in those days Kolchak suffered from pneumonia and was bedridden. That did not stop him from giving the order for executions.
Later, at four o’clock in the morning, Captain Rubtsov (the head of the non-commissioned officer school) arrived at the prison with a team of 30 people and verbally demanded the surrender of the prisoners Devyatrov (then well-known Socialist-Revolutionary in Russia, a member of the Constituent Assembly) and Kiriyenko (a major Menshevik figure, the Ural regional commissar , subordinate to the Ural anti-Soviet government). Rubtsov based his demand on the personal order of the Supreme Ruler.

At this time, a party of 44 arrestees arrived at the prison from military control (counterintelligence) under guard. By order of Rubtsov, this party was taken away. He remained in prison until the officer informed him that “his order had been carried out.”
Further, according to Korshunov, “the prisoners Kirienko and Devyatov were taken by the head of the non-commissioned officer school Rubtsov under the following circumstances: he ordered his subordinates - Lieutenant Yadryshnikov, Second Lieutenant Kononov and Ensign Bobykin to take 30 soldiers and go to prison, where they should receive 44 Bolsheviks , members of the "Soviet Department" detained the night before, and shoot them.
The investigation established that the mentioned 44 members of the Bolshevik organization were sent to prison on the night of December 23 by the head of military control at the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief (VGK), Colonel Zlobin, as persons subject to a court-martial (which, again, actually did not take place).
They were sent with a package containing a transmittal paper from the Military Control at the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command (intended for the head of the prison). In response to this, Rubtsov, introducing himself as the head of the prison, accepted the package (that is, having committed a crime - an actual forgery).
Some time after 44 prisoners were taken from prison along with Kiriyenko and Devyatov, the officers subordinate to Rubtsov returned and reported that they had carried out his orders.”

The uncoordinated uprising was suppressed by the end of December 23, 1918. Particularly bloody events occurred in the Kulomzino area. After holding out under artillery and machine gun fire for almost a day, on the evening of December 23, the remnants of the rebels, armed with light small arms, were captured. Even earlier, the uprising in Omsk itself was suppressed.
The troops of the “allies” - the Czechoslovaks and the British - played a huge role in this. Thus, British Colonel John Ward, having heard shooting in the city, took his battalion out into the street and personally took Kolchak’s residence under guard, not entrusting this matter to the Serbs guarding him. This largely forced the hesitant soldiers of the Omsk garrison to refrain from speaking out.
According to official data alone, military courts then sentenced 170 people to death, although, according to British Colonel Ward, there were “thousands” of victims. It was in such a situation that prominent Russian politicians were killed “on the quiet,” the most famous of whom was the Socialist-Revolutionary Nil Fomin.
Supreme Ruler Kolchak understood the background of what happened: “... it was an act directed against me, committed by such circles that began to accuse me of entering into an agreement with socialist groups. I believed that this was done to discredit my power before foreigners and before those circles that shortly before expressed support and promised help to me.”

To investigate this story, a special Extraordinary Investigative Commission was created, headed by Senator A.K. Viskovaty, whose members managed to find and interrogate almost all ordinary performers. However, in reality they were never able to obtain testimony from any of the senior commanders.
Kolchak himself attributed the inability of civilian lawyers to cope with armed criminals in uniform, who were also vested with power, as a shortcoming of the Russian judicial system. However, no punishment followed for the perpetrators of extrajudicial executions.
Despite the fact that all the threads of organizing massacres led to the commander of the Siberian Army P.P. Ivanov-Rinov, as Kolchak’s ministers of justice S.S. openly spoke about. Starynkevich and food I.I. Serebrennikov, he got away with only a transfer from Omsk to the post of commander of the Amur Military District.

According to their version, General Ivanov-Rinov, being dissatisfied with the appearance of Kolchak in Siberia, who relegated him to a secondary role, could take advantage of the situation to simultaneously destroy people he disliked and denigrate the admiral himself.
Be that as it may, Kolchak did not keep him in disgrace for long, and just six months later, in May 1919, Ivanov-Rinov reappeared in Omsk, where he later began responsible work - preparing a counteroffensive against the Red troops and forming the Siberian Cossack Corps.
Subsequently, during the January interrogations of Kolchak by the Investigative Commission of the Political Center, the admiral denied responsibility for what happened, citing “ignorance.” But when he was asked about the perpetrators of the murders (Bartashevsky, Rubtsov and Cherchenko), Kolchak was forced to admit that Colonel Kuznetsov, who carried out the investigation, reported to him that they acted on his behalf.

Be that as it may, they did not bear any responsibility for such a blatant abuse of power. For example, Rubtsov for a long time continued to remain in the position of head of the Omsk non-commissioned officer school and shoot persons objectionable and dangerous to the Kolchak regime. Among them in March - April 1919 were the organizers of the December uprising in Omsk A.E. Neibut, A.A. Maslennikov and P.A. Vavilov.
However, almost all the officers involved in the Omsk executions suffered retribution. One of the first to pay was Major General V.V. Brzhezovsky: in September 1919 he was killed in Semipalatinsk by mutinous soldiers.

On February 7, 1920, Kolchak was shot. And General Ivanov-Rinov, 10 years after the Omsk events, returned from emigration to the USSR, and then, according to some sources, he himself came under repression.
The reprisal against the members of the Constituent Assembly (that is, the legitimate elected body that at the beginning of 1918 was supposed to determine the future of the country) from the point of view of the “allies” themselves made it almost impossible for them to further politically recognize the Kolchak government.
In their minds, Kolchak found himself stained to the elbows with the blood of parliamentarians and could no longer lay claim to the role of a unifier of forces that would enjoy the authority, respect and trust of the “allies.” It was after this that the strict “watershed” finally passed between the White movement and the “allies,” which the White Guards themselves and historians of the White movement subsequently complained about as a “betrayal.”

We came to power to hang, but we had to hang to come to power

The flow of articles and notes about the “good Tsar-Father”, the noble white movement and the red murderer ghouls opposing them does not diminish. I'm not going to advocate for one side or the other. I'll just give you the facts. Just bare facts taken from open sources, and nothing more. Tsar Nicholas II, who abdicated the throne, was arrested on March 2, 1917 by General Mikhail Alekseev, his chief of staff. The Tsarina and the family of Nicholas II were arrested on March 7 by General Lavr Kornilov, commander of the Petrograd Military District. Yes, yes, those same future heroes-founders of the white movement...

Lenin's government, which assumed responsibility for the country in November 17, invited the Romanov family to go to relatives in London, but the English royal family DENIED them permission to move to England.

The overthrow of the Tsar was welcomed by all of Russia. “Even Nicholas’s close relatives put red bows on their chests,” writes historian Heinrich Ioffe. Grand Duke Mikhail, to whom Nicholas intended to transfer the crown, renounced the throne. The Russian Orthodox Church, having committed perjury to the church oath of allegiance, welcomed the news of the Tsar’s abdication.

Russian officers. 57% of him was supported by the white movement, of which 14 thousand later went over to the reds. 43% (75 thousand people) immediately went for the Reds, that is, ultimately, more than half of the officers supported Soviet power.

It was not for nothing that the first few months after the October Uprising in Petrograd and Moscow were called the “triumphal march of Soviet power.” Of the 84 provincial and other large cities, it was established in only 15 as a result of armed struggle. “At the end of November, in all the cities of the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia, the power of the Provisional Government no longer existed. It passed almost without any resistance into the hands of the Bolsheviks, Soviets were formed everywhere,” testifies Major General Ivan Akulinin in his memoirs “The Orenburg Cossack Army in the Fight against the Bolsheviks 1917-1920.” “Just at this time,” he writes further, “combat units - regiments and batteries - began to arrive in the Army from the Austro-Hungarian and Caucasian fronts, but it turned out to be completely impossible to count on their help: they didn’t even want to hear about the armed struggle with the Bolsheviks "

Russian officers were divided in their sympathies...

How, under such circumstances, did Soviet Russia suddenly find itself surrounded by fronts? Here's how: from the end of February to the beginning of March 1918, the imperialist powers of both coalitions fighting in the world war began a large-scale armed invasion of our territory.

On February 18, 1918, German and Austro-Hungarian troops (about 50 divisions) went on the offensive from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In two weeks they occupied vast spaces.

On March 3, 1918, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was signed, but the Germans did not stop. Taking advantage of the agreement with the Central Rada (by that time already firmly established in Germany), they continued their offensive in Ukraine, overthrew Soviet power in Kiev on March 1 and moved further in the eastern and southern directions to Kharkov, Poltava, Yekaterinoslav, Nikolaev, Kherson and Odessa .

On March 5, German troops under the command of Major General von der Goltz invaded Finland, where they soon overthrew the Finnish Soviet government. On April 18, German troops invaded Crimea, and on April 30 they captured Sevastopol.

By mid-June, more than 15 thousand German troops with aviation and artillery were in Transcaucasia, including 10 thousand people in Poti and 5 thousand in Tiflis (Tbilisi).

Turkish troops have been operating in Transcaucasia since mid-February.

On March 9, 1918, English troops entered Murmansk under the pretext of... the need to protect military equipment warehouses from the Germans.

On April 5, Japanese troops landed in Vladivostok, but under the pretext of... protecting Japanese citizens “from banditry” in this city.

May 25 – performance of the Czechoslovak Corps, whose echelons were located between Penza and Vladivostok.

It is necessary to take into account that the “whites” (generals Alekseev, Kornilov, Anton Denikin, Pyotr Wrangel, Admiral Alexander Kolchak), who played their role in the overthrow of the Tsar, renounced the oath to the Russian Empire, but did not accept the new government, starting the struggle for their own rule in Russia.

Entente landing in Arkhangelsk, August 1918

In the south of Russia, where the “Russian Liberation Forces” operated mainly, the situation was veiled by the Russian form of the “White Movement”. Ataman of the “Don Army” Pyotr Krasnov, when they pointed out the “German orientation” to him and set Denikin’s “volunteers” as an example, replied: “Yes, yes, gentlemen! The volunteer army is pure and infallible.

But it’s me, the Don Ataman, who, with my dirty hands, takes German shells and cartridges, washes them in the waves of the quiet Don and hands them over clean to the Volunteer Army! The entire shame of this matter lies with me!”

Kolchak Alexander Vasilyevich, the much-loved “romantic hero” of the modern “intelligentsia”. Kolchak, breaking his oath to the Russian Empire, was the first in the Black Sea Fleet to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government. Having learned about the October Revolution, he handed the British ambassador a request for admission into the British army. The ambassador, after consultations with London, handed Kolchak a direction to the Mesopotamian front. On the way there, in Singapore, he was overtaken by a telegram from the Russian envoy to China, Nikolai Kudashev, inviting him to Manchuria to form Russian military units.

Murdered Bolshevik

So, by August 1918, the armed forces of the RSFSR were completely or almost completely opposed by foreign troops. “It would be a mistake to think that during this entire year we fought on the fronts for the cause of Russians hostile to the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, the Russian White Guards fought for OUR cause,” Winston Churchill later wrote.

White liberators or murderers and robbers? Doctor of Historical Sciences Heinrich Ioffe in the magazine “Science and Life” No. 12 for 2004 - and this magazine has managed to be noted in recent years for its ardent anti-Sovietism - in an article about Denikin writes: “In the territories liberated from the Reds, a real revanchist Sabbath was going on. The old masters were returning, arbitrariness, robberies, and terrible Jewish pogroms reigned..."

There are legends about the atrocities of Kolchak's troops. The number of those killed and tortured in Kolchak’s dungeons was impossible to count. About 25 thousand people were shot in the Yekaterinburg province alone.
“Terrible murders were committed in Eastern Siberia, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks, as was usually thought. I will not be mistaken if I say,” American General William Sidney Greves, an eyewitness to those events, later admitted, “that for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were 100 people killed by anti-Bolshevik elements."

General Kornilov clearly expressed the “ideology” of the Whites on this issue:
“We came to power in order to hang, but we had to hang in order to come to power”...

Americans and Scots guard captured Red Army soldiers in Bereznik

The “allies” of the white movement - the British, French and other Japanese - exported everything: metal, coal, grain, machinery and equipment, engines and furs. Civilian ships and steam locomotives were stolen. From Ukraine alone, by October 1918, the Germans had exported 52 thousand tons of grain and fodder, 34 thousand tons of sugar, 45 million eggs, 53 thousand horses and 39 thousand heads of cattle. There was a large-scale plunder of Russia.

And read about the atrocities (no less bloody and massive - no one argues) of the Red Army and the Chekists in the works of the democratic press. This text is intended solely to dispel the illusions of those who admire the romance and nobility of the “white knights of Russia.” There was dirt, blood and suffering. Wars and revolutions cannot bring anything else...

“White Terror in Russia” is the title of the book by the famous historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences Pavel Golub. The documents and materials collected in it leave no stone unturned against the fictions and myths widely circulating in the media and publications on historical topics.

There was everything: from demonstrations of force of the interventionists to the execution of Red Army soldiers by the Czechs

Let's start with statements about the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Bolsheviks, who, they say, destroyed their political opponents at the slightest opportunity. In fact, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party began to take a firm and uncompromising attitude towards them as they became convinced from their own bitter experience of the need for decisive measures. And at first there was a certain gullibility and even carelessness. After all, in just four months, October triumphantly marched from edge to edge of a huge country, which became possible thanks to the support of the Soviet power by the overwhelming majority of the people. Hence the hope that its opponents themselves will realize the obvious. Many leaders of the counter-revolution, as can be seen from documentary materials - generals Krasnov, Vladimir Marushevsky, Vasily Boldyrev, prominent political figure Vladimir Purishkevich, ministers of the Provisional Government Alexei Nikitin, Kuzma Gvozdev, Semyon Maslov, and many others - were released on fair terms. word, although their hostility to the new government was beyond doubt.

These gentlemen broke their word by taking an active part in the armed struggle, in organizing provocations and sabotage against their people. The generosity shown towards the obvious enemies of Soviet power resulted in thousands and thousands of additional victims, suffering and torment of hundreds of thousands of people who supported revolutionary changes. And then the leaders of the Russian communists made the inevitable conclusions - they knew how to learn from their mistakes...

Tomsk residents carry the bodies of executed participants in the anti-Kolchak uprising

Having come to power, the Bolsheviks did not at all ban the activities of their political opponents. They were not arrested, they were allowed to publish their own newspapers and magazines, hold rallies and marches, etc. The People's Socialists, Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks continued their legal activities in the bodies of the new government, starting with local Soviets and ending with the Central Executive Committee. And again, only after the transition of these parties to open armed struggle against the new system were their factions expelled from the Soviets by decree of the Central Executive Committee of June 14, 1918. But even after this, opposition parties continued to operate legally. Only those organizations or individuals who were convicted of specific subversive actions were subject to punishment.

Excavation of the grave in which the victims of Kolchak’s repressions of March 1919 were buried, Tomsk, 1920

As shown in the book, the initiators of the civil war were the White Guards, representing the interests of the overthrown exploiting classes. And the impetus for it, as one of the leaders of the white movement, Denikin, admitted, was the rebellion of the Czechoslovak corps, largely caused and supported by Western “friends” of Russia. Without the help of these “friends,” the leaders of the White Czechs, and then the White Guard generals, would never have achieved serious success. And the interventionists themselves actively participated both in operations against the Red Army and in terror against the insurgent people.

Victims of Kolchak in Novosibirsk, 1919

The “civilized” Czechoslovak punitive forces dealt with their “Slavic brothers” with fire and the bayonet, literally wiping out entire towns and villages from the face of the earth. In Yeniseisk alone, for example, more than 700 people were shot for sympathizing with the Bolsheviks - almost a tenth of those living there. When suppressing the uprising of prisoners of the Alexander Transit Prison in September 1919, the Czechs shot them point-blank with machine guns and cannons. The massacre lasted three days, about 600 people died at the hands of the executioners. And there are a great many such examples.

Bolsheviks killed by the Czechs near Vladivostok

By the way, foreign interventionists actively contributed to the establishment of new concentration camps on Russian territory for those who opposed the occupation or sympathized with the Bolsheviks. The Provisional Government began to create concentration camps. This is an indisputable fact, which the exposers of the “bloody atrocities” of the communists are also silent about. When French and English troops landed in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, one of their leaders, General Poole, on behalf of the allies, solemnly promised the northerners to ensure “the triumph of law and justice” in the occupied territory. However, almost immediately after these words, a concentration camp was organized on the island of Mudyug, captured by the interventionists. Here are the testimonies of those who happened to be there: “Several people died every night, and their corpses remained in the barracks until the morning. And in the morning a French sergeant appeared and gloatingly asked: “How many Bolsheviks are kaput today?” Of those imprisoned on Mudyug, more than 50 percent lost their lives, many went crazy...”

An American interventionist poses near the corpse of a murdered Bolshevik

After the departure of the Anglo-French interventionists, power in the North of Russia passed into the hands of the White Guard general Yevgeny Miller. He not only continued, but also intensified repression and terror, trying to stop the rapidly developing process of “Bolshevisation of the masses.” Their most inhumane embodiment was the convict prison in Yokanga, which one of the prisoners described as “the most brutal, sophisticated method of exterminating people with a slow, painful death.” Here are excerpts from the memoirs of those who miraculously managed to survive in this hell: “The dead lay on bunks along with the living, and the living were no better than the dead: dirty, covered with scabs, in torn rags, decomposing alive, they presented a nightmare picture.”

Red Army prisoner at work, Arkhangelsk, 1919

By the time Iokanga was liberated from the whites, out of one and a half thousand prisoners, 576 people remained there, of whom 205 could no longer move.

A system of such concentration camps, as shown in the book, was deployed in Siberia and the Far East by Admiral Kolchak, perhaps the most cruel of all the White Guard rulers. They were created both on the basis of prisons and in those prisoner of war camps that were built by the Provisional Government. The regime drove almost a million (914,178) people who rejected the restoration of pre-revolutionary orders into more than 40 concentration camps. To this we must add about 75 thousand people languishing in white Siberia. The regime deported more than 520 thousand prisoners to slave, almost unpaid labor in enterprises and agriculture.

However, neither in Solzhenitsyn’s “GULAG Archipelago”, nor in the writings of his followers Alexander Yakovlev, Dmitry Volkogonov and others, there is not a word about this monstrous archipelago. Although the same Solzhenitsyn begins his “Archipelago” with the civil war, depicting the “Red Terror”. A classic example of lying by simple omission!

American Bolshevik hunters

In the anti-Soviet literature about the civil war, a lot is written with anguish about the “barges of death,” which, they say, were used by the Bolsheviks to deal with White Guard officers. Pavel Golub’s book provides facts and documents indicating that “barges” and “death trains” began to be actively and massively used by the White Guards. When in the fall of 1918 they began to suffer defeat from the Red Army on the eastern front, “barges” and “death trains” with prisoners of prisons and concentration camps reached Siberia and then the Far East.

Horror and death - that’s what the White Guard generals brought to the people who rejected the pre-revolutionary regime. And this is by no means a journalistic exaggeration. Kolchak himself frankly wrote about the “vertical of control” he created: “The activities of the chiefs of district police, special forces, all kinds of commandants, and heads of individual detachments are a complete crime.” It would be good to think about these words for those who today admire the “patriotism” and “dedication” of the white movement, which supposedly, in contrast to the Red Army, defended the interests of “Great Russia”.

Captured Red Army soldiers in Arkhangelsk

Well, as for the “red terror”, its size was completely incomparable with the white one, and it was mainly retaliatory in nature. Even General Grevs, commander of the 10,000-strong American corps in Siberia, admitted this.

And this happened not only in Eastern Siberia. This was the case throughout Russia.
However, the frank confessions of the American general do not at all absolve him of guilt for participating in reprisals against people who rejected the pre-revolutionary order. Terror against him was carried out by the joint efforts of foreign interventionists and white armies.

In total, there were more than a million interventionists on Russian territory - 280 thousand Austro-German bayonets and about 850 thousand British, American, French and Japanese. The joint attempt of the White Guard armies and their foreign allies to commit a Russian “Thermidor” cost the Russian people, even according to incomplete data, very dearly: about 8 million were killed, tortured in concentration camps, died from wounds, hunger and epidemics. The country’s material losses, according to experts, amounted to an astronomical figure - 50 billion gold rubles...

In emigrant and foreign Sovietological literature, Kolchak’s regime and actions are clearly romanticized. S.P. Melgunov saw in Kolchak’s tragedy not only his personal drama of the collapse of hopes and broken illusions, but also the tragedy of a country whose time for revival “has not yet come.” He believed that Kolchak's death marked the end of the state-organized anti-Bolshevik struggle in Siberia. Many Sovietologists call Kolchak a “sufferer” for Russia. R. Pipes writes about Kolchak this way: “...his political and social orientation was deeply liberal. Kolchak gave solemn pledges to respect the will of the Russian people, expressed through free elections. He also pursued progressive social policies and enjoyed strong support from peasants and workers."

Among Soviet historians and publicists, a more liberal assessment of what happened and the leaders of the white movement has recently appeared, a desire to move away from denigrating the activities of the whites, and not to believe that they all sought only to restore pre-revolutionary Russia. The authors saw in the white regimes an alternative to the path paved by the Bolsheviks. And in Kolchak - a disinterested man who did not have any personal wealth, the pride of the Russian fleet, a man whose one year of participation in the anti-Soviet struggle, according to Soviet historians, crossed out all his previous merits. Despite the desire of some historians to note a certain “democratism” of the Kolchak government at certain stages of his reign, they are unanimous in assessing the identity of the punitive processes, the terror carried out by both the Reds and the Whites. In April 2002, a memorial plaque was unveiled in the Naval Corps building in St. Petersburg in honor of its graduate, Kolchak. However, in November 2001, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation refused to rehabilitate Kolchak, because he “did not stop the terror against the civilian population carried out by his counterintelligence.”

Approximately the same assessments in Soviet and foreign historiography of the role of General Denikin and the regime he created in the vast territory of southern Russia in 1919.

Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872–1947) from an officer family, graduated from the General Staff Academy, participated in the First World War, in 1917 - commander of the troops of the Western and Southwestern Fronts, lieutenant general. Since January 1919 - Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of southern Russia. The regime he established in the North Caucasus, Don, Ukraine, and part of Russia is characterized in the Soviet encyclopedia on the civil war as “a military dictatorship of the bourgeois-landowner counter-revolution.” Denikin himself called the policy he pursued a tactic of “undecidedness,” which, in his opinion, was supposed to unite all anti-Bolshevik forces. Such a position, he wrote, made it possible “to maintain a bad peace and go along the same road, albeit at odds, looking suspiciously at each other, enmity and melting in the heart - some for the republic, others for the monarchy.”

In the 1920s, Soviet historians wrote about Denikin somewhat differently, characterizing him as a politician who sought to find “some kind of middle line between extreme reaction and “liberalism,” and in his views “approached right-wing Octobrism.” Later, his regime began to be viewed more straightforwardly: Denikin's rule was an unlimited dictatorship. The first publication of “Essays on the Russian Time of Troubles” in Denikin’s homeland caused new assessments of both his work and military-political activities. L. M. Spirin, in the preface to one of the journal publications “Essays,” called Denikin a nobleman with a “semi-cadet, semi-monarchical attitude,” a man devoted to Russia. Analyzing Denikin’s work, Spirin summarized that he pursued a policy with the ultimate goal of overthrowing Bolshevik rule with the help of the army, “dictatorship in the person of the commander-in-chief,” restoring the forces of “state and social peace,” creating conditions “for the construction of the land by the conciliar will of the people,” “ establishing order,” “defending the faith,” creating a society in which there will be “no class privileges, but “unity with the people.”

Kolchak and Denikin are professional military men who loved the country in their own way and were ready to serve it as they imagined its present and future. Why was the experience of their regimes, especially for the peasants, so difficult that they rebelled en masse, and in Siberia, where there were no landowners and the peasants were not threatened with their return? It is now known that out of approximately 400 thousand Reds who acted behind white lines during the Civil War, 150 thousand were in Siberia and among them there were about 4-5% of those who were then called wealthy, or kulaks. In this regard, White’s loss on the “internal front” was obvious. Both whites and reds at that time simultaneously built similar state formations, where the implementation of a given idea prevailed over the value of human life, despite many declarative statements of the authorities.

G. K. Gins, manager of the affairs of the Kolchak government, published the book “Siberia, Allies and Kolchak” in 1921 in Harbin. He testified that the admiral hated the “Kerenskyism” and, out of hatred for it, “allowed the opposite extreme: excessive “militaryism,” which Kolchak more than once told him that “the civil war must be merciless.” Gins cited as evidence of the atrocities of the military authorities a memorandum from the head of the Ural Territory, engineer Postnikov, who resigned in April 1919. Postnikov refused to fulfill his duties and listed 13 points why he did this. The engineer wrote: “I cannot lead a hungry region, kept in hidden peace by bayonets... Dictatorship of military power... illegality of actions, execution without trial, flogging even of women, death of those arrested “while escaping,” arrests based on denunciations, transfer of civil cases to military authorities, persecution according to slander... - the head of the region can only be a witness to what is happening. I don’t know of a single case of bringing to justice a military man guilty of the above, and civilians are sent to prison for one slander.” Postnikov painted a difficult picture: “There is typhus in the provinces, especially in Irbit. There are horrors in the Red Army camps: 178 out of 1600 died in a week... Apparently, they are all doomed to extinction.”

During interrogation, Kolchak refused everything related to the White Terror and pleaded ignorance. He heard “for the first time” that in the Omsk counterintelligence one of the communists was brutally tortured, pulled out on a rack, etc., demanding recognition that he was a member of the party committee; I didn’t know that hostages were shot for killing one of the officials, that villages were burned when weapons were discovered in the peasants. He admitted only isolated cases. He was told that in one village the noses and ears of the peasants were cut off. Kolchak admitted that this was possible, “this is usually done in war and in struggle.”

“Having hung several hundred people on the gates of Kustanai, shot a little, we spread to the village ... - said the commander of the dragoon squadron, Kappel’s corps, Captain Frolov, - the villages of Zharovka and Kargalinsk were cut to pieces, where for sympathy for Bolshevism they had to shoot all the men from 18 - until the age of 55, after which the “rooster” is allowed to grow. After making sure that all that was left of Kargalinsk was ashes, we went to church... It was Holy Thursday. On the second day of Easter, Captain Kasimov’s squadron entered the rich village of Borovoe. There was a festive mood on the streets. The men hung white flags and came out with bread and salt. Having constipated several women, having shot two or three dozen men following a denunciation, Kasimov was about to leave Borovoye, but his “excessive softness” was corrected by the adjutants of the detachment chief, lieutenants Umov and Zybin. On their order, rifle fire was opened in the village and part of the village was put on fire... These two lieutenants became famous for their exceptional cruelty, and their names will not soon be forgotten by the Kustanai district.”

“A year ago,” Budberg wrote in his diary on August 4, 1919, “the population saw us as deliverers from the harsh captivity of the commissars, but now they hate us just as much as they hated the commissars, if not more; and, what’s even worse than hatred, it no longer believes us, it doesn’t expect anything good from us... The boys think,” he continued, “that if they killed and tortured several hundreds and thousands of Bolsheviks and put to death a certain number of commissars, then they did a great deed.” , dealt a decisive blow to Bolshevism and brought closer the restoration of the old order of things... The boys do not understand that if they indiscriminately and restrainedly rape, flog, rob, torture and kill, then by this they instill such hatred towards the power they represent that the Bolsheviks can only rejoice in the presence such diligent, valuable and beneficial employees for them.” Life has failed, ideals have been destroyed, Budberg concluded; It’s impossible to live like this, such a government must be overthrown, violence, bullying, and humiliation must be fought.

Recently they have again begun to write about Kolchak’s Izhevsk Division, the main contingent of which were workers. This division was one of the most combat-ready, and it was allowed to fight under the red banner and “Varshavyanka”. It was them who Trotsky ordered to destroy everyone indiscriminately: after all, from the point of view of the Bolsheviks it looked “ridiculous” - the workers’ division was fighting against the power of the party of the proletariat. Instead of condemnation by Soviet historians of the actions of the Izhevsk workers who joined the ranks of Kolchak’s army, notes of sympathy for them have now appeared in historical literature. Let’s just try to briefly answer one question: did this division participate in punitive actions, was it, due to “its class consciousness,” more loyal to the population than other Kolchakites? This can be seen in the next episode. On the night of July 1–2, 1919, partisans attacked the division guard at the railway bridge, wounding two soldiers. The commander of the Izhevsk division, General V. M. Molchanov (1886–1975) ordered: “When attacking the guards and damaging the railway. d. carry out circular arrests of the entire male population over the age of 17 years. If there is a delay in extraditing the attackers, shoot everyone without mercy as accomplices-concealers... Immediately open fire from all guns and destroy the barracks part of the village as retaliation for the attack on the night of July 2 on the guard of unknown persons hiding in the barracks part.” The Izhevsk residents opened fire from cannons, killing the working families of the Kusinsky plant who lived in the barracks. It was not for nothing that Izhevsk residents were called varnaki (convicts, robbers).

The established system of unbridled terror was one of the most characteristic features and foundations of military dictatorships. The class background of the performers did not matter. There are many specific examples of mercilessness or, conversely, some kind of mercy.

“Execution” was one of the most popular words in the vocabulary of the Civil War. This word was immortalized by General Kornilov, who in the summer of 1917 introduced the death penalty and courts-martial at the front; many generals used it as a talisman, establishing discipline in their assigned units or robbing the population. Trotsky addressed him pathetically more than once, believing that it was impossible to create an army without repression...

Both Lenin's Council of People's Commissars and Kolchak's government first declared themselves temporary until the decision of the Constituent Assembly, and then quickly usurped executive and legislative functions. Both of them claimed to become all-Russian and unite their supporters. The difference in the implementation of punitive policies was the proclamation by the Bolsheviks of a “revolutionary sense of justice”, and by the Kolchakites - a “legal system”. But, perhaps, in recognizing arbitrariness and rejecting legal jurisprudence, the Bolsheviks were more frank and did not disguise their actions. Both the Reds and the Whites, when forming and operating punitive bodies, used the experience of the tsarist police, secret police and gendarmerie, with the only difference being that the former refused the services of former police officers and tried them, the latter recruited them to serve. Although, due to the small salary (a policeman received 425 rubles, a typist in the Kolchak department - 675 rubles), and the dangerous service, former police officers were not eager to join the militia of the supreme ruler. In a review of the activities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the government of V.N. Pepelyaev (October 1919), it was noted that persons with police experience “in most cases avoid serving in the police, since it is currently extremely dangerous and does not represent those material benefits that can be obtained even with the most primitive labor."

Two weeks after coming to power, on December 3, 1918, Kolchak signed a decree on the widespread introduction of the death penalty. Shooting or hanging were declared for “an attack on the life, health, freedom or general inviolability of the supreme ruler or for the forcible deprivation of power from him or the council of ministers”, for “an attack on the overthrow or change of the currently existing state system.” Anyone guilty of insulting the supreme ruler in words, in writing or in the press was punished by imprisonment.

A few days after the November coup, a council of the supreme ruler was formed, in which the post of Minister of Internal Affairs was taken by cadet A. N. Hattenberger. In response to his proposal to fellow party member V.N. Pepelyaev (1884–1920) to choose a place of service, he chose the department of police and state security. He was characterized by “a blind hatred of the Bolsheviks... This hatred could only be rivaled by his contempt for the masses, whom he considered it possible to easily dispose of through violence.” At the beginning of 1919, Pepelyaev became Minister of Internal Affairs. Under him, special forces of up to 1,200 people began to be formed under the Ministry of Internal Affairs in each province, and state security was created to prevent and suppress state crimes. The minister liquidated all organizations of national self-government in Siberia, inviting those who wanted to do this to be flogged.

Army commanders, commanders of individual detachments, and governors often acted independently. On April 5, 1919, the commander of the Western army, General M. V. Khanzhin (1871–1961), ordered all peasants to surrender their weapons, otherwise the perpetrators would be shot and their property and houses burned; On April 22, 1919, the commandant of Kustanai proposed flogging to death the women who sheltered the Bolsheviks. The governor of the Yenisei province, Troitsky, in March 1919 proposed to tighten punitive practices, not to comply with the laws, and to be guided by expediency. In July 1919, the manager of the special department of the police department was presented with lists of Soviet workers of Simbirsk (53 people) who were subject to execution if the city was occupied. The Kolchakites failed to capture Simbirsk, and in Bugulma, more than half of the 54 people arrested were shot. Lawlessness in relation to the population was intensified by the actions of detachments not controlled by the government, which secretly encouraged their punitive functions. During interrogation, Kolchak said that spontaneously created military detachments assumed police functions and created counterintelligence themselves. Then “arbitrary arrests and murders became commonplace.” Kolchak had the impression that such counterintelligence “was created on the model of those that existed in Siberia under Soviet rule.” To combat lawlessness, the Siberian government, “according to revolutionary tradition,” appointed commissars-plenipotentiaries to the front commanders. But they were powerless in the face of such autocratic generals as R. Gaida (1892–1948), who carried out mass executions of prisoners of war. Or General S. N. Rozanov (1869–1937). Kolchak’s minister Sukin wrote about him: “Carrying out his punitive tasks, Rozanov acted with terror, revealing extreme personal cruelty... shootings and executions were merciless. Along the Siberian railway, in those places where the rebels interrupted the railway track with their attacks, he hung the corpses of the executed instigators on telegraph poles for the sake of understanding. Passing express trains observed this picture, to which everyone treated with philosophical indifference. Entire villages were burned to the ground."

In mid-1919, intelligence bodies were created in Kolchak’s armies with the task of promoting “raising the spirit” of the troops and the population and an irreconcilable attitude towards the Bolsheviks. As military failures progressed, Kolchak's generals became increasingly cruel. On October 12, 1919, General K.V. Sakharov (1881–1941), commander of the Western Army, issued an order requiring the execution of every tenth hostage or resident, and in the event of a mass armed uprising against the army, the execution of all residents and the burning of the village to the ground. Kolchak's informants and propagandists presented acts of repression as measures necessary to establish “law and order.” In fact, this was a justification for the same arbitrariness and lawlessness of the authorities, the same thing that the Reds did. The regime of terror caused retaliatory actions from peasants who became partisans and destabilized the regime.

Memoirs of participants and eyewitnesses of the civil war in Siberia testified to the criminal terrorist activities of many Kolchak generals, especially atamans G. M. Semenov and I. M. Kalmykov. American General V. Graves recalled: “The soldiers of Semenov and Kalmykov, being under the protection of Japanese troops, flooded the country like wild animals, killing and robbing the people, while the Japanese, if they wanted, could have stopped these killings at any time. If at that time they asked what all these brutal murders were about, they usually received the answer that those killed were Bolsheviks, and this explanation, obviously, satisfied everyone. Events in Eastern Siberia were usually presented in the darkest colors and human life there was not worth a penny.

Horrible murders were committed in Eastern Siberia, but they were not carried out by the Bolsheviks, as was usually thought. I will not be mistaken if I say that in Eastern Siberia for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were a hundred people killed by anti-Bolshevik elements.” Graves doubted whether it was possible to point out any country in the world during the last fifty years where murder could be committed with such ease and with the least fear of responsibility as in Siberia during the reign of Admiral Kolchak. Concluding his memoirs, Graves noted that the interventionists and White Guards were doomed to defeat, since “the number of Bolsheviks in Siberia by the time of Kolchak had increased many times in comparison with their number at the time of our arrival.”

In the memories of those who survived the years of the civil war, detachments of various atamans who preferred to act on behalf of the regular armies left especially bad memories. In the Urals, Siberia and the Far East these were B.V. Annenkov (1890–1927), at the end of 1919 the commander of Kolchak’s separate Semirechensk army; A. I. Dutov (1879–1921), commander of the Orenburg army; G. M. Semenov (1890–1946), at the end of 1919 - commander in chief of all rear troops of Kolchak’s army; and other, smaller atamans, despite the general ranks granted to them by Kolchak: I. M. Kalmykov (?-1920), I. N. Krasilnikov (1880-?).

The Chekists began investigative case No. 37751 against Ataman Boris Annenkov in May 1926. He was 36 years old at the time. He said about himself that he was from the nobility, graduated from the Odessa Cadet Corps and the Moscow Alexander Military School. He did not recognize the October Revolution, a Cossack centurion at the front, decided not to comply with the Soviet decree on demobilization and, at the head of a “partisan” detachment, appeared in Omsk in 1918. In Kolchak's army he commanded a brigade and became a major general. After the defeat of the Semirechensk army with 4 thousand soldiers, he left for China.

The four-volume investigative file accusing Annenkov and his former chief of staff N.A. Denisov contains thousands of testimonies from plundered peasants, relatives of those killed at the hands of bandits who acted under the motto: “We have no prohibitions! God and Ataman Annenkov are with us, cut right and left!”

The indictment described many facts of the atrocities of Annenkov and his gang. At the beginning of September 1918, the peasants of the Slavgorod district cleared the city of the guards of the Siberian regionalists. Annenkov’s “hussars” were sent to pacify. On September 11, massacres began in the city: on that day up to 500 people were tortured and killed. The hopes of the delegates of the peasant congress that “no one would dare to touch the people’s representatives were not justified. Annenkov ordered all the arrested delegates of the peasant congress (87 people) to be chopped up in the square opposite the people’s house and buried here in a hole.” The village of Cherny Dol, where the headquarters of the rebels was located, was burned to the ground. Peasants, their wives and children were shot, beaten and hanged on poles. Young girls from the city and nearby villages were brought to the Annenkov train stationed at the Slavgorod station, raped, then taken out of the cars and shot. Blokhin, a participant in the Slavgorod peasant uprising, testified: the Annenkovites executed in a terrible way - they tore out eyes, tongues, removed stripes on the back, buried the living in the ground, tied them to horse tails. In Semipalatinsk, the ataman threatened to shoot every fifth person if he was not paid an indemnity.

Annenkov and Denisov were tried in Semipalatinsk, and there, by court verdict, they were shot on August 12, 1927.

Orenburg Cossack ataman Dutov was a colonel and participant in the First World War. He supported the Samara Komuch. But his repressive orders were not gentle. On August 4, 1918, he established the death penalty for the slightest resistance to the authorities and even for evading military service. On April 3, 1919, already commanding a separate Orenburg army, Dutov ordered to decisively shoot and take hostages for the slightest unreliability. Dutov received emergency powers from the Komuchevites to restore “order” in the region, even before Kolchak came to power. He immediately recognized the supreme command of the admiral and subordinated his army, his will and the execution of orders to him.

Ataman Semenov was tried in 1946. He was arrested by Smersh counterintelligence officers in Mukden on August 26, 1945, when Soviet troops entered the city. At the very first interrogation, Grigory Semenov stated that he was a Cossack, born in 1890, an esul in the tsarist army and a lieutenant general in the Kolchak army, since January 1920 - Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of Eastern Siberia, that he had been an opponent of Soviet power all his adult life.

Back in the fall of 1917, he wanted to arrest Lenin and the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet in Petrograd, with the help of two cadet schools, and behead the revolutionary movement. He met with M. A. Muravyov, the head of the defense of Petrograd, the commander of the troops participating in the suppression of the Kerensky-Krasnov rebellion, and invited him to occupy the building of the Tauride Palace with a company of cadets, arrest all members of the Council and immediately shoot them, in order to present the city garrison with a fait accompli . But Muravyov, Semenov later wrote, “did not have enough determination to play the role of the Russian Bonaparte, for which he certainly prepared himself from the very beginning of the revolution.”

Semyonov admitted that during the civil war he waged a merciless struggle against the Bolsheviks and everyone who sympathized with them. “I sent punitive detachments to the regions of Transbaikalia to deal with the population who supported the Bolsheviks and destroyed the partisans,” he said. Semyonov reported numerous cases of executions of those who were for the Soviets. During interrogation on August 13, 1945, Semenov’s associate, former Major General L.F. Vlasyevsky, said: “Ataman Semenov’s White Cossack formations brought a lot of misfortune to the population. They shot people suspected of something, burned villages, robbed residents who were seen in any actions or even disloyal attitude towards Semyonov’s troops. The divisions of Baron Ungern and General Thierbach, who had their own counterintelligence services, especially distinguished themselves in this. But the greatest atrocities were still committed by punitive detachments of military foremen Casanova and Filshin, centurion Chistokhin and others, who were subordinate to Semenov’s headquarters.” In one of the letters from former Siberian partisans sent to the trial of Semyonov, it was noted: “We remember the nightmarish revelry of the White Guard-Semyonov and interventionist gangs, the Chita, Makoveyevsky, Daurian dungeons organized by them, where thousands of ours died at the hands of these executioners without trial. the best people. We also cannot forget the Tatar Pad, where they brought whole trains of suicide bombers from among the Red Guards and Red partisans, shot them with machine guns, and accidentally killed the survivors in the most brutal way.” Former partisans demanded from the court the most severe sentence for Semenov on behalf of “orphans, fathers, mothers, wives who died at the hands of these executioners.”

At the trial, Semyonov found it difficult to answer the question of where, when and how many people were executed on his orders.

“Prosecutor: What specific measures did you take against the population?

Semyonov: Compulsory measures.

Prosecutor: Were executions used?

Semyonov: They were used.

Prosecutor: Hanged?

Semyonov: They shot.

Prosecutor: Were you shot a lot?

Semyonov: I cannot say now how many were shot, since I was not always directly present at the executions.

Prosecutor: Much or little?

Semyonov: Yes, a lot.

Prosecutor: Did you use other forms of repression?

Semyonov: They burned villages if the population resisted us.”

It turned out that Semyonov personally endorsed death sentences and supervised torture in dungeons, where up to 6.5 thousand people were tortured. Both former partisans and the Semyonovites themselves spoke about the executions and torture of peasants, captured Red Army soldiers, Bolsheviks and Jews.

During interrogation on August 16, 1946, Semenov stated that in Chita in 1920 he seized two wagons with gold worth 44 million rubles. Of these, 22 million were received by the Japanese, 11 million were spent on the needs of the army, and some were captured by the Chinese.

On August 26–30, 1946, under the chairmanship of V.V. Ulrikh, Semenov and his associates were tried: A.P. Baksheev - deputy ataman, creator of punitive squads in the villages; L.F. Vlasyevsky - head of the office, head of Semyonovskaya counterintelligence; B. N. Shepunov - punitive officer; I. A. Mikhailov - Minister of Finance in the Kolchak government; K.V. Rodzaevsky - head of the Russian fascist union; N. A. Ukhtomsky - a journalist who praised the activities of the ataman; L.P. Okhotin - punitive officer. The court sentenced Semenov to death by hanging; Rodzaevsky, Baksheev, Vlasevsky, Shepunov and Mikhailov - to be shot; Ukhtomsky and Okhotin - to hard labor. Then, on August 30, the sentence was carried out.

They were different people who, by the will of fate, ended up on the same sentence list. Son of the Narodnaya Volya Mikhailov. “I did not sympathize with the Soviet government,” he said during interrogation, “I consider it a spokesman for the interests of only one working class, and not all working people.” Prince Ukhtomsky, son of the chairman of the Simbirsk zemstvo government, lawyer and journalist. In exile, he listened to lectures by Bulgakov and Berdyaev, interviewed Kerensky, Prince Lvov, etc. And the head of the Russian fascist union, Rodzaevsky, who called for the establishment of a “new order” in Russia, the extermination and deportation of Jews, etc. Semenov at one time supported him and even on March 23, 1933, he sent a letter to Hitler: “I express the hope that the hour is not far when the nationalists of Germany and Russia will stretch out their hands to each other... I send you and your government... my heartfelt bow and best wishes...” Therefore, attempts to somehow rehabilitate Semenov, presenting him as a tragic figure in Russian history can only be accepted in terms of understanding the civil war itself as a national tragedy. Semyonov was one of many executioners of his people, whose punitive actions cannot be justified by any “best intentions.” He was cruel in carrying out his plans and imposing by force moral principles and ideology that seemed true to him. “We waited for Kolchak as the day of Christ, but we waited as the most predatory beast,” wrote Perm workers on November 15, 1919. Kolchak declared himself a supporter of democracy. But the prime minister of his government, P.V. Vologodsky, wrote in his diary that at that time the military ruled, who “did not take into account the government and did such things that the hair on our heads stood on end.” Indeed, the order of the Kolchak government allowed the military to pass death sentences themselves, which intensified the punitive forces. This has increased extrajudicial killings and lynchings. The investigation, prosecutor's office and courts were too politicized to make objective decisions.

The repressive policy pursued by the government of General Denikin was similar to that pursued by Kolchak and other military dictatorships. The police, in the territory subordinate to Denikin, were called state guards. Its number reached almost 78 thousand people by September 1919. (Note that Denikin’s active army then had about 110 thousand bayonets and sabers.) Denikin, like Kolchak, in his books in every possible way denied his participation in any repressive measures. “We - both I and the military leaders,” he wrote, “gave orders to combat violence, robberies, fleecing prisoners, etc. But these laws and orders sometimes met stubborn resistance from the environment, which did not accept their spirit, their blatant necessity " He accused counterintelligence, which covers the territory of the south of the country with a dense network, of being “sometimes hotbeds of provocation and organized robbery.”

First, confirmation of what Denikin wrote about. “Having occupied Odessa, the volunteers first of all began to brutally reprisal the Bolsheviks. Each officer considered himself to have the right to arrest whomever he wanted and deal with him at his own discretion.” There were many self-proclaimed intelligence agencies who were engaged in extortion, looting, bribery, etc. This is the testimony of one of her former bosses. An eyewitness, a Novorossiysk journalist, continues: what was happening in the dungeons of the city’s counterintelligence was reminiscent of “the darkest times of the Middle Ages.” Denikin's orders were not carried out. The cruelty was such that even the front-line soldiers “blushed.” “I remember one officer from Shkuro’s detachment, from the so-called “Wolf Hundred”, distinguished by monstrous ferocity, told me the details of the victory over Makhno’s gangs, which, it seems, captured Mariupol, even choked when he named the number of shot, already unarmed opponents: four thousand! » Counterintelligence developed its activities to the point of limitless, wild arbitrariness, witnesses of those days said.

Other Denikin authorities acted in the same spirit. Yekaterinoslav Governor Shchetinin ordered the arrested peasants to be shot with machine guns. Kutepov ordered the hanging of prisoners in city prisons from lampposts along the central street of Rostov in December 1919. There were terrible legends about the robberies of the Cossacks in occupied Tsaritsyn and Tambov.

The main principle of supporters of white and red terror is intimidation by means of rapid action. It was frankly expressed by Don General S.V. Denisov (1878–1957): “It was difficult for the authorities... There was no need to show mercy... Every order was, if not a punishment, then a warning about it... Persons caught collaborating with the Bolsheviks were to be treated without any mercy exterminate. Temporarily it was necessary to profess the rule: “It is better to punish ten innocent people than to acquit one guilty one.” Only firmness and cruelty could give the necessary and quick results.” The whites found moral justification for their cruelty in the red terror, the reds in the white. The principle of tribal blood feud absorbed common sense and was encouraged and propagated by the authorities. The first thing Denikin’s troops did when they entered Kharkov was to dig up the graves of those shot by the security officers. The corpses were put on display and became the basis for the execution and lynching of Soviet employees.

On July 30, 1919, Denikin signed a resolution of a special meeting with the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the South of Russia on the activities of judicial investigative commissions. On the basis of this resolution, Soviet workers were sentenced to death and confiscation of property, while sympathizers of the commissars were sentenced to various terms of hard labor. The attitude towards prisoners of war was cruel, with both sides dealing mercilessly. Later, Denikin admitted that violence and robbery were inherent in the Reds, Whites, and Greens. They “filled the cup of suffering of the people with new tears and blood, confusing in their minds all the “colors” of the military-political spectrum and more than once erasing the lines that separated the image of the savior from the enemy.” He wrote this later, after the end of the civil war, comprehending what he had done and his own defeat. And then, when the general had thousands of armies under his command, he had no doubt about the importance of a brutal punitive policy as a tool for achieving power. Although in his memoirs Denikin recognized “Russian liberalism” as his worldview, “without any party dogmatism,” this did not stop him from advocating for a “united and indivisible Russia” and being merciless towards those in whom he saw a threat to the empire - separatists and nationalists. Hence his conflicts with representatives of independent Ukraine, Kuban autonomists, etc.

Denikin recalled that counterintelligence followed the troops. Counterintelligence departments were created not only by military units, but also by governors. Counterintelligence services, as he admitted, were “hotbeds of provocation and organized robbery.” He reported on the enormous role of propaganda - the Information Agency (Osvaga), created at the end of 1918. Its main figures were cadets N. E. Paramonov, K. N. Sokolov and others. Osvag set the task of “the constant eradication of the evil seeds sown by Bolshevik teachings in the immature minds of the broad masses” and the destruction of “the citadel built by the Bolsheviks in the brains of the population.”

Osvag published newspapers and magazines, and by the fall of 1919 it had more than 10 thousand full-time employees and hundreds of local branches. Workers from the propaganda department also spied on “everyone,” right up to Denikin, and compiled secret dossiers on individuals and parties.

Typical documents are Osvag's reports. Called to glorify the white army, the department's employees had to not forget the realities. On May 8, 1919, during the period of Denikin’s successes, Osvag reported that “the masses are completely indifferent to future state building, striving only to end the civil war and to equalize all segments of the population in relation to their rights.” The report noted that the relationship between residents and military units is “tensely hostile.” The soldiers take away horses, cattle, carts, get drunk and riot. May 10: “The success of our agitation is largely harmed by the bad behavior of military officials,” who rob and brutally deal with the population. It was supposed to notify about the investigation of illegal actions, pay compensation to those robbed, etc. May 20: the robbery leads to the fact that the peasants of the areas where the Volunteer Army was, “who are not at all sympathetic to the“ commune ”, are still waiting for the Bolsheviks as a lesser evil, in compared with the “Cossack” volunteers.”

First of all, for propaganda purposes, on April 4, 1919, the “Special Commission to Investigate the Atrocities of the Bolsheviks” was created, which was tasked with “identifying in the face of the entire cultural world the destructive activities of organized Bolshevism.” The commission was headed by Denikin, and after his resignation - by Wrangel. The publication of the documents was intended not so much for the Russian average, but to create anti-Bolshevik public opinion in the Entente countries and in emigration circles.

The punitive policy of the Whites was not much different from similar actions of the Reds. Cadet N. N. Astrov, who was directly involved in the development of the internal policy of the Denikin government, admitted: “Violence, flogging, robbery, drunkenness, vile behavior of local authorities, impunity for obvious criminals and traitors, wretched, mediocre people, cowards and debauchees in the localities, people who brought with them to the localities old vices, old inability, laziness and self-confidence.” Those historians are right who admit that the foundations of the future state structure of the country and its internal policy developed, for example, by Denikin’s legal scholars, had almost no practical significance.

Denikin's biographer D.V. Lekhovich wrote that one of the reasons for the failures of the white movement in southern Russia was that the general failed to prevent cruelty and violence. But the Reds carried out the same terror and managed to win. Probably, the point is in the goals and consistency of the policies pursued, and not in the methods of its implementation, which often looked identical. General V.Z. May-Maevsky explained to Wrangel that officers and soldiers should not be ascetics, that is, they could rob the population. To the Baron's bewilderment: what difference under these conditions will there be between us and the Bolsheviks? - the general replied: “Well, the Bolsheviks are winning.”

All of Denikin's armies did not avoid active participation in the robberies of the population, participation in Jewish pogroms, and extrajudicial executions. Vivid evidence of this is the diary of A. A. von Lampe, a participant in Denikin’s epic. On July 20, 1919, he recorded that whites from the Volunteer Army raped peasant girls and robbed peasants. November 13, 1919: “...Several Bolshevik nests were liquidated, stockpiles of weapons were found, 150 communists were caught and liquidated by verdict of a military court.” On December 15, Lampe reported on the order of the commander of the Kiev group of white troops, who publicly refused to thank “the Tertsy who were in September in the area of ​​the White Church - Fastov, who covered themselves with indelible shame with their pogroms, robberies, violence and showed themselves to be vile cowards... 2) to the Volgan detachment... who disgraced himself by violating the word solemnly given to me to stop systematic robberies and violence against civilians... 3) The Ossetian regiment, which turned into a gang of single robbers...". About similar things - in private letters: “Denikin’s gangs are terribly committing atrocities against the residents remaining in the rear, and especially against workers and peasants. First, they beat with ramrods or cut off parts of a person’s body, such as an ear, nose, gouge out his eyes, or cut out a cross on his back or chest” (Kursk, August 14, 1919). “I never imagined that Denikin’s army was engaged in robbery. Not only soldiers, but also officers robbed. If I could imagine how white victors behave, I would undoubtedly hide my underwear and clothes, otherwise there would be nothing left” (Eagle, November 17, 1919).

During Denikin's reign, Black Hundred-monarchist organizations with pogrom programs became widespread. Based on numerous facts about Jewish pogroms, it was calculated: under Denikin there were at least 226 of them. Historians wrote about the general’s anti-Semitic policy, although he himself did not admit this later. Keane wrote that under Denikin, Jews were not allowed into the army or government service; Fedyuk - about anti-Semitism as a persistent element of the ideology of the Russian White Guards; N.I. Shtif named the facts of pogroms in Ukraine. “Where the Volunteer Army set foot, everywhere the peaceful Jewish population became the subject of cruel reprisals, unheard-of violence and abuse... Thousands of Jews died, victims of the Volunteer Army, gray-bearded “communists” caught in the synagogue with the volumes of the Talmud, “communist” babies in cradles along with their mothers and grandmothers. The percentage of tortured very old people, women and children in any list is striking.” Among the reasons for the anti-Semitic sentiments of the white officers, the authors name the presence of Jews among the Bolshevik leadership and betrayal of the Allies in the First World War.

The Frenchman Bernal Lecache was one of the defenders of the artisan Schwarzbard, who killed S. Petlyura in Paris in 1926 out of revenge for numerous Jewish pogroms in Ukraine in 1918–1920. In order to collect testimonies from victims, Lekash traveled to a number of cities and towns in Ukraine in August - October 1926 and upon his return published a book, published with a foreword by R. Rolland. According to Lekash’s calculations, during the civil war in Ukraine there were 1,295 Jewish pogroms, and all of them (let’s add pogroms in Belarus and Russia, committed by both whites and reds) resulted in 306 thousand deaths.

Lekash did not explain the reasons for what happened. He cited witness statements, photographs of the dead, funerals, and documents. In Uman, bandits who replaced each other in March, April and May 1919 robbed, raped, and killed. “The pogrom on May 13 and 15 took on an unprecedented scale,” he wrote from the words of eyewitnesses. - They shoot continuously, in houses and on the streets. The Furers have eleven family members: first they kill the old people; women were thrown to the ground and their heads were crushed with stones, and the genitals of children and men were cut off. Of the eleven people, nine were killed. The next day, 28 Jews and Jewish women are caught and taken to the commandant’s office. There they are beaten and taken to the square, already covered with corpses and covered in blood. In turn, they are shot not without denying themselves the pleasure of “playing ball” with their heads. Afterwards, when searching for and dismantling the corpses, they can only be identified by their clothes.” Why such cruelty and callousness? It is impossible to give a logical answer. That is probably why Rolland wrote in the introduction to the book: “The most terrible thing - the only terrible thing - are the thousands of unknown people who tormented and tormented the unfortunate victims, bringing them to the highest degree of suffering. These people... Who knows how many of them meet us, encounter us in everyday life..."

The 20th century became a time of national catastrophe for Jews; only 6 million Jews became victims of fascism. The Holocaust (the extermination of a people, of Jews simply because they are Jews) was maturing gradually. The past has shown that public opinion defended the individual (the French officer Jew Dreyfus; in Russia - M. Beilis, accused of various “Jewish sins”), but did not defend the mass extermination of people, which was the Russian Holocaust that occurred during the civil war.

On March 27, 1920, Denikin left Novorossiysk on the destroyer Captain Saken. By that time, the regime he created had suffered military and political defeat. Shortly before leaving, he signed an order transferring command of the essentially destroyed army to General Pyotr Wrangel. Baron, General P. N. Wrangel (1878–1928), was a participant in the Russian-Japanese and World Wars, commanded armies under Denikin. He became the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the South of Russia at a time when only the territory of Crimea remained at his disposal. The Baron understood that the Crimean province alone could not defeat the other 49. But, while in Crimea, he prepared large-scale programs to attract the population to his side: agrarian, labor, national.

In his later published memoirs, Wrangel told how in January 1918 he was arrested and almost shot in Yalta by revolutionary sailors. Then he offered his services to Denikin and began to command a cavalry division. He wrote about the looting of the Cossacks Shkuro and V.L. Pokrovsky (1889–1922). And he tried to justify the cruelty by the conditions of the war. Because “it was difficult, almost impossible, to eradicate in the Cossacks, completely robbed and ruined by the Reds, the desire to take away the stolen property and return everything lost... The Reds mercilessly shot our prisoners, finished off the wounded, took hostages, raped, robbed and burned the villages. Our units, for our part... gave no quarter to the enemy. They did not take prisoners... Having a shortage of everything... the units involuntarily looked at the booty of war as their own property. Fighting this... was almost impossible.” He also wrote about what he wanted, but was never able to prevent the execution of wounded and captured Red Army soldiers.

Wrangel, having become the new military dictator, decided, taking into account Denikin’s failures, to pursue “left-wing policies with right hands.” Under him, the influence of the cadets on the development of domestic policy decreased, and that of former tsarist dignitaries increased. The government of the South of Russia (Prime Minister - A.V. Krivoshein) in its declarations invited the peoples of Russia to “determine the form of government by free expression of will”; for peasants - the Law on Land, according to which part of the landowners' lands (in estates over 600 dessiatines) could become the property of the peasantry with the purchase of land at 5 times the value of the harvest in installments for 25 years; workers were guaranteed state protection of their interests from enterprise owners. The political goal was defined as follows: “The liberation of the Russian people from the yoke of communists, vagabonds and convicts who completely ruined Holy Rus'.”

Wrangel considered one of the main reasons for the collapse of Denikin’s armies to be the lack of responsibility for the implementation of laws. Therefore, he strengthened prosecutorial supervision and created special military judicial commissions at military units. They were subject to consideration of cases of murder, robbery, robbery, theft, unauthorized and illegal requisition. Criminal and state crimes were punishable by execution or imprisonment. In his memoirs, Wrangel tried to show himself as a champion of law and order. However, the reality was often different. And the task of violent suppression of dissidents and submission to the authorities through terror remained unchanged. As well as the harsh measures proposed by the warring parties. On April 29, 1920, Wrangel ordered “to mercilessly shoot all commissars and communists taken prisoner.” Trotsky, in response, proposed issuing an order “for the wholesale extermination of all members of Wrangel’s command staff who were captured with weapons in their hands.” Frunze, then commander of the troops of the Southern Front, found this measure inappropriate, since among Wrangel’s commanders there were many Red defectors, and they easily surrendered without the threat of execution.

A. A. Valentinov, an eyewitness and participant in Wrangel’s Crimean epic, published a diary in 1922. He wrote down on June 2, 1920, that because of the robberies, the population called the Dobrarmiya “robber army.” Entry on August 24: “After lunch I learned interesting details from the biography of Prince. M. - Adjutant General. D. He is famous for the fact that last year he managed to hang 168 Jews within two hours. He takes revenge for his relatives, who were all massacred or shot on the orders of some Jewish commissar. A vivid example for reasoning on the topic of the need for civil war.” The former chairman of the Taurida provincial zemstvo government, V. Obolensky, came to the conclusion that under Wrangel, “mass arrests were still made not only of the guilty, but also of the innocent, and simplified military justice continued to deal with the guilty and innocent.” He reported that the former policeman General E.K. Klimovich, invited by Krivosheev, was full of anger, hatred and personal vindictiveness, and for Obolensky there was no doubt that in police work in Crimea “everything will remain the same.” His story is filled with indignation at the cruelties of that time. “One morning,” he recalled, “children going to schools and gymnasiums saw terrible dead people hanging from the lanterns of Simferopol with their tongues sticking out... Simferopol had never seen this before during the entire civil war. Even the Bolsheviks carried out their bloody deeds without such proof. It turned out that it was General Kutepov who ordered this way to terrorize the Simferopol Bolsheviks.” Obolensky emphasized that Wrangel always took the side of the military in pursuing punitive policies. He was echoed by journalist G. Rakovsky, close to Wrangel: “The prisons in Crimea, as before and now, were two-thirds overcrowded with people accused of political crimes. In large part, these were military personnel arrested for careless expressions and a critical attitude towards the main command. For months, in appalling conditions, without interrogations and often without charges, political officers languished in prisons, awaiting a decision on their fate... “I do not deny that three-quarters of them consisted of a criminal element” - this was his review of the Crimean counterintelligence in a conversation with me Wrangel... If you read only Wrangel’s orders, then you might really think that justice and truth reigned in the Crimean courts. But this was only on paper... The main role in Crimea... was played by military courts... People were shot and shot... Even more were shot without trial. General Kutepov directly said that “there is no point in starting a judicial rigmarole, shooting and... that’s all.”

General Ya. A. Slashchov (1885–1929), one of the leaders of the Volunteer Army, became famous for his particular cruelty during the military dictatorship of Wrangel. From December 1919, he commanded the army corps defending Crimea. I established my own regime there. “One can, of course, imagine what a heavy atmosphere of lawlessness and tyranny was shrouded in Crimea at that time. Slashchov reveled in his power... literally tormented the unfortunate and downtrodden population of the peninsula. There were no guarantees of personal integrity. Slashchov jurisdiction... came down to executions. Woe was to those to whom Slashchov’s counterintelligence paid attention,” wrote Rakovsky.

After the defeat, Slashchov fled to Turkey. There, by order of Wrangel, a commission was created to investigate the Slashchov-Krymsky case. He was tried for helping the Bolsheviks with his policy of terror. The highest ranks of the White Army, members of the commission, decided to demote Slashchov to the rank and file and dismiss him from the army. In 1921, Slashchov returned to Russia. This was facilitated by the representative of the Cheka, Ya. P. Tenenbaum, who persuaded the general to return. The decision to return a group of Wrangel’s officers to Russia was discussed at a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) in early October 1921. Lenin abstained from voting. Trotsky conveyed his opinion to Lenin in a note: “The Commander-in-Chief considers Slashchov a nonentity. I'm not sure if this review is correct. But it is indisputable that among us Slashchov will only be a “restless uselessness.”

Upon his return, Slashchov wrote his memoirs in which he stated: “I look at the death penalty as intimidating the living so that they do not interfere with work.” He accused counterintelligence of lawlessness, robbery and murder, but said about himself that he had never approved a single secret death sentence with his signature. May be. But he signed execution orders all the time. D. Furmanov, who helped Slashchov write his memoirs and edited them, noted in the preface how, by order of the general, 18 people were shot in Voznesensk, and 61 in Nikolaev. In Sevastopol, on March 22, 1920, the case of the “ten” “about the alleged uprising” was heard in court. The military court acquitted the five. Having learned about this, Slashchov rushed to the city, took the acquitted people with him at night and shot them in Dzhankoy. Responding to a request about this, he said: “Ten scoundrels were shot by the verdict of a military court... I just returned from the front and I believe that the only reason we have only Crimea left in Russia is that I rarely shoot the scoundrels in question.” . Furmanov believed that Slashchov the executioner is the living embodiment of the old army, “the sharpest, the most genuine.”

Returning to Moscow, Slashchov publicly repented, was granted amnesty and began working at the Higher Tactical Rifle School of the Red Army. He asked the GPU authorities to provide security for himself and his family. In response, F. E. Dzerzhinsky wrote: “We cannot give currency or valuables to provide for his family. We also cannot issue him a certificate of personal immunity. General Slashchov is well known to the population for his atrocities. And we don’t need to keep him under guard.” On January 11, 1929, Slashchov was killed in his Moscow apartment by a student of the Shot course, L.L. Kolenberg, who said that he committed the murder in revenge for his brother, executed on the orders of Slashchov in Crimea, and the Jewish pogroms.

The former party archive of the Crimean OK CPSU contains many documents - evidence of the atrocities and terror of the White Guards. Here are some of them: on the night of March 17, 1919, 25 political prisoners were shot in Simferopol; On April 2, 1919, in Sevastopol, counterintelligence killed 10–15 people every day; in April 1920, in the Simferopol prison alone there were about 500 prisoners, etc.

It is unlikely that the punitive actions of Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel were any different from similar actions of generals Yudenich near Petrograd or Miller in the north of the country. All terrorism has many similarities. As I. A. Bunin wrote in his diary entry on April 17, 1919: “Revolutions are not made with white gloves... Why be indignant that counter-revolutions are made with iron fists,” and especially cursed the punitive policies of the Bolsheviks. The similarity was primarily in the fact that all military dictators were military generals. N. N. Yudenich (1862–1933) - infantry general, participant in the Russian-Japanese and World Wars, in 1917 - commander-in-chief of the troops of the Caucasian Front. On June 10, 1919, Kolchak appointed him commander-in-chief of the White troops in northwestern Russia; he emigrated in 1920. E. K. Miller (1867–1937) - lieutenant general, participant in the war with Germany, in May 1919 Kolchak appointed commander-in-chief of the white troops of the Northern region, since February 1920 - emigrant.

There were governments under dictator generals. In October 1919, the Minister of Justice of the Yudenich government, Lieutenant Colonel E. Kedrin, compiled a report on the establishment of the State Commission to Combat Bolshevism. He considered it necessary to investigate not individual “crimes,” but “to cover the destructive activities of the Bolsheviks as a whole.” According to the minister, everyone should have been punished, since “experience has shown that leaving the most insignificant participants in a crime without reprisals leads to the need, over time, to deal with them as the main culprits of another homogeneous crime.” The report proposed studying Bolshevism as a “social disease”, and then developing practical measures “for the real fight against Bolshevism not only within Russia, but throughout the whole world.” This report remained an armchair undertaking, indicating that the Yudenich government considered the Bolsheviks its main enemy. The realities were harsher and crueler.

In May 1919, detachments of General S. N. Bulak-Balakhovich (1883–1940) appeared in Pskov, and immediately people in the city began to publicly hang people, and not only Bolsheviks. V. Gorn, an eyewitness, wrote: “People were hanged during the entire time the “whites” ruled the Pskov region. For a long time, Balakhovich himself was in charge of this procedure, reaching almost the point of sadism in mocking the doomed victim. He forced the executed person to make a noose for himself and hang himself, and when the person began to suffer greatly in the noose and dangle his legs, he ordered the soldiers to pull him down by his legs.” Gorn reported that similar terrible morals existed in Yamburg and other places where Yudenich’s troops were stationed. He admitted that in the field of internal policy the northwestern government was “completely powerless” and that it was not possible to punish a single executioner officer. N. N. Ivanov saw the robbery of the population as one of the reasons for the defeat of Yudenich.

General Miller was no less cruel. It was he who signed the order on June 26, 1919 regarding the Bolshevik hostages who were shot for an attempt on the life of an officer, knowing in advance that among the several hundred arrested there were not so many Bolsheviks. It was he who introduced overtime work at enterprises, severely punishing “sabotage.” By order of the general, from August 30, 1919, not only Bolshevik propagandists were arrested, but also members of their families, property and land plots were confiscated. By order of Miller, a convict prison for political criminals was created in Yohang, unsuitable for human habitation. Soon, out of 1,200 prisoners, 23 were shot for disobedience, 310 died of scurvy and typhus, and after eight months no more than a hundred healthy prisoners remained there. A member of the government under Miller, B.F. Sokolov, later came to the disappointing conclusion in his memoirs that military dictatorships headed by generals, and not strategically thinking politicians, could not win the civil war in Russia. “The example of the Bolsheviks,” he wrote, “showed that a Russian general is good when his role is limited to execution. They can only be, but no more than, the right hand of a dictator - the latter can by no means be a Russian general.”

All white dictator-generals had an anti-Bolshevik program, they all acted under the same motto: “With the Russian people, but against the Bolshevik regime.” And they were defeated by a stronger dictatorship, which managed to achieve more in the organization of the army, and in an equally merciless attitude towards the population, and in the political perspective of intoxicating the masses, which more clearly defined the mental rejection by society of outdated social relations. Politicians took advantage of this desire for something new more effectively than generals. The Soviet and all anti-Bolshevik governments during the Civil War were characterized by a tendency to administer, to solve complex issues by force, and everywhere the level of legal protection for citizens was very low. The leaders of the white movement, more than the representatives of the red ones at that time, spoke about the creation of a rule of law state, but these statements, as a rule, remained declarative. The law enforcement practices of white governments were unsuccessful. At first, the arrival of the whites aroused sympathy among the population, but soon the attitude towards them became hostile and hostile. This was the result primarily of the punitive policies of the white governments and military.

Such are the times, such are the heroes. The phrase is already quite hackneyed, but has not lost its relevance. With the change in the socio-political system in Russia, new ideals are being imposed on our society. Fighting against Soviet consciousness in the minds of citizens, the government is trying in every possible way to denigrate the values ​​of a socialist society.

One of the tools is an attempt to present as new heroes and role models those historical figures who were not at all popular in society and were staunch enemies of the Soviet regime.

This series of articles will be dedicated to these individuals, as well as their “services” to the fatherland. Let's start with the figure of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, the favorite of the current government. A true patriot and hero of his fatherland - that’s how he was portrayed in the movie “Admiral”. Still, Admiral Kolchak hero or enemy of Russia? Let's try to figure it out.

To answer the question posed above, it is necessary to take a closer look at specific facts from the life and work of this “hero” of the “white movement,” the “Supreme Ruler of Russia.”

Kolchak Alexander Vasilievich(1873-1920), one of the main organizers of the counter-revolutionary movement in the Civil War in Siberia, the Urals and the Far East. In 1916-1917 Commanded the Black Sea Fleet, admiral.

In 1918-1920 A. V. Kolchak- “The Supreme Ruler of the Russian State”, who was actively supported by the Entente. The Kolchak regime was liquidated by the Red Army with the support of partisans in 1920. By resolution of the Irkutsk Military Revolutionary Committee, Kolchak was shot (Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1975).

Such individuals are held in high esteem by the bourgeois authorities. The leadership of the Irkutsk region decided to contribute to the process of “humanizing” one of the main executioners of Russia during the Civil War, and in November 2004 a monument was erected to the rebellious admiral. And currently, in one of the cells of the pre-trial detention center in Irkutsk, a museum is being created to perpetuate his memory. Local leaders even organized a tourist route along Kolchaksky places.

Essentially, the decision of the Irkutsk authorities is highly immoral. Why? First of all because Kolchak to this day he has not been officially rehabilitated. In February 1998, the military prosecutor of the Trans-Baikal Military District refused to recognize the admiral Kolchak victim of political repression. The basis for the refusal was the available evidence that, with the knowledge Kolchak The military counterintelligence controlled by him carried out mass executions of the civilian population, Red Army soldiers and their sympathizers. Government Kolchak encouraged the military with monetary rewards for the number of “heads” they destroyed. Counterintelligence shot people even for having calloused hands. Since you are a worker, that means you are for the Reds, which means you are subject to execution. Thus, Kolchak as having committed crimes against peace and humanity is not subject to rehabilitation.

Current defenders Kolchak They praise him as an outstanding polar explorer and naval commander. The future admiral also took part in the Russo-Japanese War. (True, he didn’t win any special laurels there, but he was captured by the Japanese). In 1916 Kolchak appointed commander of the Black Sea Fleet with the rank of vice admiral.

Nobody takes these merits away from him. What happened, happened. But the fact is that all your previous merits Kolchak crossed out himself, becoming a puppet of the Entente in 1918. Having received the position of “supreme ruler of Russia” from the hands of Western moneybags, the white admiral with an iron hand began to restore order in the territory entrusted to him, so much so that Siberia was washed with blood. Thousands of Red Army soldiers hanged, shot, tortured in prisons, ruined village women, murdered children and burned villages - this is the calling card of the Omsk executioner who supposedly “gave all of himself to Russia.”

In a short reign Kolchak in Siberia, during the punitive operations of the White Guard troops and their allies, over 40 thousand civilians were hanged, shot and burned alive and about 100 thousand were thrown into prison. In those days it was atrocities Kolchak's guardsmen contributed to the fact that quite wealthy Siberian peasants took the side of Soviet power, rendering Kolchak fierce resistance, although at first the Bolsheviks were not successful in Siberia.

A. Aldan-Semyonov’s book “Red and White” contains a dialogue between the Minister of Internal Affairs and the “supreme ruler”. V. N. Pepelyaev reports Kolchak on the results of the investigation into peasant unrest in Cannes district:

“Your Excellency, on the Angara the punishers are hanging people completely senselessly, Ataman Krasilnikov is especially crazy.

- What is he doing?

— You declared an amnesty for the partisans. One hundred and thirty men came home from the taiga. Krasilnikov immediately hanged them all as Bolsheviks.

- This cannot be.

- Sorry, Your Excellency, but...

- What else is Krasilnikov doing?

“He shoots priests, village elders, gendarmes who served us honestly. “This priest has not changed yet, but he can change, therefore it is better to hang the priest.” But other atamans are no better. Annenkov, Kalmykov, Semenov, Baron Ungern. I can show you documents about monstrous torture...

-No need…".

Kolchak chose not to notice the atrocities of his guardsmen, none of whom were punished. None of them even received a reprimand. It is natural that Kolchak's The atamans, taking advantage of the connivance of their leader, committed such outrages against the civilian population that made the hair of an ordinary person stand on end.

***

In 1919, the power of the leader of the operatic “Siberian Government”, called the “Supreme Ruler of Russia”, relied exclusively on the troops of the Western allies in the form of a motley Anglo-French-American-Japanese coalition. I received from them Kolchak“humanitarian” assistance, for which he generously paid with Russian gold, which he stole from the workers’ and peasants’ state.

The fact that Kolchak is a puppet of the money bags of the West was known to the people from the very beginning. It is no coincidence that they said about him then: “The uniform is English, the shoulder straps are French, the tobacco is Japanese - the ruler of Omsk.”

Kolchak's life changed dramatically in February 1917. It was during this period of time that his true essence and poverty of spirit were fully revealed. However, judge for yourself.

The seemingly convinced monarchist, who took the oath to the king, betrayed this king as soon as he saw that the throne was shaking under him. Together with other generals and admirals, he signed a letter demanding the resignation of the tsar, and upon learning about the revolution, he threw the golden dirk into the sea, but immediately took the oath of office to the Provisional Government.

But the Provisional Government was either unable or unwilling to offer the ambitious admiral a decent position. At the request of the indignant sailors, he had to be removed from command of the Black Sea Fleet. Then the Provisional Government, at the request of the United States, on June 28, 1917, sent him to the United States as a mine specialist.

Arriving in the USA, Kolchak began to conduct secret negotiations with representatives of the US and British governments about his transfer to serve in their armed forces or the navy.

The financial sharks of England decided that he would be extremely useful to them in Russia as the leader of the armed struggle against Soviet power. According to the official proposal of the British government Kolchak arrived in the Far East and in the spring-summer of 1918 began to be promoted by the British to the post of leader of the anti-Soviet front.

The British who bought and recruited Kolchak, believed that he would be the most “respectable contender for power” and had a real chance of becoming the “supreme ruler of Russia”, with whom they could deal if the entire anti-Soviet campaign was successful.

In October 1918 Kolchak was sent by the British to Omsk as the Minister of War of the Directory (the democratic government of Siberia and the Urals). Having dealt with the local authorities, Kolchak declared himself the “Supreme Ruler of Russia” with the support of the Entente.

TV and the media called the Bolsheviks’ dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, which refused to recognize the decrees of Soviet power, a crime. But then the majority of deputies did not submit to the Bolshevik government. Anti-Soviet deputies organized the Committee of Participants of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), seized power with the support of the Czechoslovak Corps in the Volga region and the Urals, declared the creation of an independent republic and started a war with Soviet power. The organizers of Komuch, i.e., the deputies of the Constituent Assembly, were shot without trial by order of Kolchak. If Lenin, who gave the order to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, is called a usurper and a criminal, then what do you want to call A. Kolchak who gave the order to shoot these deputies?

The Entente gave Kolchak 1,200 guns, a million rifles, thousands of machine guns, ammunition, airplanes, armored cars, and uniforms for hundreds of thousands of people. Kolchak paid off with the third part of Russia's gold reserves, where the rest of the gold and values ​​are still unknown.

Kolchak generously thanked the interventionists. He gave the Lena River basin to the Americans as a concession, to the Japanese - the mineral deposits of Transbaikalia, to the British - the Northern Sea Route and the ores of Altai (and this is not counting the gold reserves). The British plundered Russia from all sides. In Arkhangelsk, furs were taken from warehouses and even dogs - Siberian huskies - were taken out.

How many tears have been shed by today's liberal Westerners over the sale of masterpieces from the Hermitage and other Russian museums in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century for the starving Volga region and the needs of the industrialization of the USSR! But none of them ever remembered Russia’s gold reserves, which Kolchak used to fight Bolshevism. Moreover, it is considered "merit" Kolchak, his contribution to the liberation of Russia from the yoke of Bolshevism.

Side by side with Kolchak his friends the White Czechs were rampaging in Siberia. The trains carried out a huge amount of gold and silver items, jewelry, paintings, carpets, furs and even purebred trotters... ["Tankograd". No. 24. 2008].

Power Kolchak lasted two years and left a terrible memory of itself in Siberia, the Urals and the Volga region, Pokamye, Vyatka and other places. And when today ordinary people, zombified by television, begin to admire Kolchak as a talented polar explorer, an experienced naval commander, a brave and highly educated person with an intelligent and expressive look, they forget about what the same Kolchak did when he became the “supreme ruler of Russia.”

A. Kolchak stands out among the leaders of the white movement in that he was defeated not so much by the Red Army, but by the general indignation of the population of Siberia! How hard Kolchak had to try so that in just two years the Siberians would hate him so much!

And there was something to hate for. In V. Zazubrin’s book “Two Worlds,” published in 1921, all the horrors of the Kolchak era are presented by a person who experienced them on his own skin. In words, Kolchak promised people a heavenly life: “My main goal is... the establishment of law and order, so that the people can... choose their own form of government and realize the ideas of freedom...”.

But this is what he did not in words, but in deeds.

“...The village of Medvezhye. All the peasants were gathered in the square for a prayer service. Machine guns are aimed at the crowd. The bells are ringing. The priest reads prayers and many years to Kolchak...

Then the same priest gives the officer a long list of peasants - “Bolsheviks”. Near the church fence, 49 people who were shot are writhing in agony. All the other men and women of this village were flogged with ramrods and whips, all the girls were raped.

...Wild orgies of officers, where peasant women are dragged; gallows, where children were hanged along with adults. The Czechs, Poles, French, Romanians, and Japanese are rampaging and raging. The feast of the winners is in full swing.

Gentlemen officers are driving Russian cattle, Russian draft animals back into the barn.”

***

The army rolled like a tornado of fire Kolchak across Siberia and the Urals in 1918. A huge danger loomed over the young Soviet Republic. All its forces were gathered into a fist and thrown into the fight against Kolchak, although at the same time Denikin was rushing to Moscow from the south, and Yudenich from the north. If they had managed to combine their forces and hit Moscow together, the Soviet government would have had a very hard time. But this did not happen for many reasons, including because each of the leaders of the white movement sought to appropriate all the glory of the winner.

The Bolshevik government took advantage of the ambition of the white leaders and went on the offensive. It began on the Eastern Front in the spring of 1919 with the attack of the Southern Group of Forces by M.V. Frunze. And before this, the famous raid of partisan detachments under the command of the Kashirin brothers, who were part of the group of troops of the member of the Revolutionary Military Council V.K. Blucher, was carried out in the Southern Urals, behind the rear of the whites.

In the summer of 1919, the Southern Group of Forces under the command of M.V. Frunze began an unstoppable advance to the east with battles and in June approached Ufa. The legendary 25th division of V.I. Chapaev especially distinguished itself in these battles.

After the capture of Ufa and Perm, the road to Zlatoust and Chelyabinsk opened. It was here that the fate of the revolution was decided. V.I. Lenin sent a telegram to the Eastern Front: “If we do not conquer the Urals before winter, then, I believe, the death of the revolution is inevitable.”

Army Kolchak rolled to the east, practically no longer offering serious resistance to the Red Army. Demoralized, panicked, armed crowds of whites rolled uncontrollably toward Omsk. They were tormented by Siberian partisans from the rear and from the front.

On November 14, 1919, the Reds took Omsk, capturing 30 thousand prisoners and many trophies. But the bank vaults where Russia's gold reserves were kept were empty. Kolchak took his remains - 21,442 pounds of gold - with him.

Let's hope that this historical figure will not be rehabilitated, and the truth about Kolchak's crimes and betrayal will not drown in the lies of bourgeois propaganda. Otherwise, this can be regarded as a real slap in the soul of Russian citizens and their history.

Other materials on the topic:

43 comments

Alexander 26.05.2011 08:22

The very existence of the current rotten government, under which this bastard was pulled out of musty chests, is already a spit in the soul of the victorious people in two bloody wars

Sergey-1 26.05.2011 09:40

Kolchak? Don't ask much from the puppet.

Vasily, Gorky 26.05.2011 11:19

Yes, at least Vlasov will be rehabilitated.
“There will be a holiday on our street too” - STALIN

Nikolay 26.05.2011 13:47

It is not surprising that so much attention was paid to the PR of this bourgeois film. It’s amazing how you can make a hero out of such a non-human!

Nikolai Alexandrovich 26.05.2011 15:04

The glorification of Kolchak is a link in a long chain of falsifications of history, with the aim of discrediting Soviet power, denigrating the victories and achievements of a powerful state, and forming a negative perception of it among young people. Only the lazy one, one of the newborn democrats, will not openly “kick” and “bite” the destroyed state. Well, the most sophisticated ones do this gradually, not intrusively, in order to change the assessments of the past among the adult population, who often have access to only one - three television channels and, at best, one newspaper. But they were the most reading country!

Visited 26.05.2011 20:51

No matter how the current locomotives running ahead (the ruling elite of Irkutsk) praise their own in spirit and aspirations (for profit), the fact will remain a fact. The overwhelming majority of the people then stood up for justice. In the most difficult conditions, hordes of invaders defeated 15 states of “civilized” Europe. And it did what it did. It’s sad, of course, that the people of Irkutsk allowed this masterpiece unworthy of the city to be created. Actually, just like the people of Saratov did not oppose the installation of Stolypin. In truth, they do not know what they are doing.

Nick 27.05.2011 10:29

In Omsk they are also going to immortalize, erect a monument

Anti-communist 29.05.2011 01:37

It’s interesting to read both the article about Kolchak and the comments to it. Everything is in the communist style: lump together facts and fiction about enemies, hide the crimes of the communists, and then publish laudatory comments. Russia will not rise from its knees as long as the communists and their heirs remain in power here.

Alexei 29.05.2011 02:43

Yes, Mr. Anti-Communist, you would be happy if you read this in the article: “On November 14, 1919, the Reds took Omsk, capturing 30 thousand prisoners and shot them all, the meat was loaded into sealed wagons and sent to Moscow and Petrograd, where Stalin fried This meat shish kebab fed Lenin and Krupskaya!”:))

N.T. 29.05.2011 04:31

Well, the Anti-Communist is just... curious that Russia still won’t rise from its knees...

hyde 17.06.2011 20:09

The article does not carry any informational load. There is a mixture of facts and fiction, legends and simple rumors that existed among the people or that arose over time. There is no reliance on documents, except for quoting Kolchak and Pepelyaev, the origin of which is also very doubtful.

The point is not whether Admiral Kolchak is a hero or an anti-hero. The fact is that any statement requires facts to back it up. For example, this phrase:
“Kolchak took his remains - 21,442 pounds of gold with him.”
Where, excuse me, did you take it? To Irkutsk? He didn’t even make it to Irkutsk - his “allies” gave him away on the way. So where did he take the gold with him? Did he organize a treasury in prison? The facts that Kolchak plundered the royal treasury are doubtful. After the execution of the admiral, no foreign accounts were found (which many people love to talk about now), nor “houses and estates in Europe.” Read the protocol for the inventory of property located in the carriage. The only valuable items were orders and a few pieces of jewelry that belonged to Anna Timireva. And his family lived in poverty for a long time.

I am not writing this to make the admiral look like a hero. Let everyone form their own opinion about this person. There’s just no need to mix facts and fiction, and then introduce it to the people.

Pinocchio 21.07.2011 13:09

I recently read a novel about Kolchak, “The Admiral’s Hour” (author: Mark Yudalevich). I recommend to all!

From the author's preface:
“This novel recreates the times of the Kolchak era in Siberia. For many decades, Russian admiral Alexander Kolchak was portrayed in print as a bloody executioner and an unscrupulous servant of foreigners, a puppet in their hands. Based on archival materials and stories from contemporaries, I sought to show Kolchak as a tragic figure. Alexander Vasilyevich was not a politician and was unable to understand the situation of those years, much less master it. But subjectively he was a brave and honest man. It is impossible to cross out his merits as a polar explorer and naval commander, a hero of the Russian-Japanese and the First World Wars. You can’t be like those people who just recently accused anyone who said even one kind word about Kolchak of idealizing this man, and now they are zealously demanding that monuments to him be erected in Omsk and Irkutsk...”
(Mark Yudalevich. Admiral's hour)

phoebus 21.07.2011 23:25

By the way, I agree with this preface.

Human 09.08.2011 23:08

It is very strange to read about the executioner Kolchak, after 70 years of the Gulag and everything that we know about the Soviet regime, that selected human material was destroyed. Is Kolchak to blame for this too? The personality is definitely extraordinary! And time will put everything in place.

Citizen 20.09.2011 00:44

"selected human material."
Well, here it is - the rhetoric of anti-communists. Their people are material... Well, that’s exactly what Kolchak was thinking when he sold out to the Entente and fought against his country. Well, I paid for it. That's where he belongs, the freak.

Irenka 20.09.2011 20:36

So, does the existence of the Gulag automatically make Kolchak an angel in the flesh? Nonsense…
And it would also be worth thinking about where Russia would slide if the Whites managed to somehow miraculously gain the upper hand? Well, let's leave aside the fact that Russia would probably have been cut in half, but do you think that it would have happened without repression?

Irenka 20.09.2011 20:38

And this sickening film about him is not only outrageously opportunistic, worse than any Soviet popular print, but also absolutely devoid of artistic merit, like all new Russian cinema. Why fill the screen with such rubbish is completely incomprehensible.

phoebus 24.09.2011 17:28

Yes, Kolchak was not sold to anyone. This nonsense was spread even under Stalin, and you’ll never get rid of it. That is, since we are talking about history, putting aside ideology for now, we are talking OBJECTIVELY, then there is no evidence, except, of course, party archives, which have little trust.

a-r 04.10.2011 12:55

Kolchak is a controversial figure. But honor and praise to him for the fact that he was one of the few who sought to pull Russia out of the basements of the Cheka.

Zubkov Vladislav 21.12.2011 14:40

Why are you people! I spent 3 years studying a historical figure like Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak. Don't listen to anyone or anything! After Kolchak’s death, the ideology in the country changed and history was now written by the Bolsheviks! Kolchak is a noble man! And I have never been involved in bloodthirsty incidents! And those who think badly about him simply closed their eyes!!! Think again and don't lose your head!!! for KOLCHAK and his ideology!!!

Evgeniy Zabroda, historian 21.12.2011 14:48

I will study history not for 3 years, but throughout my life. And I read a lot of literature about Kolchak. Everything that is written in the article is absolutely true. Kolchak is a traitor who sold himself to the West.

Sergey s. 08.01.2012 14:48

Only bastards and subhumans can erect monuments to this executioner! I read the diaries of his advisers assigned to the Entente, my hair stood on end! They tied people up in pairs and put them on the rails under an armored train, if they managed to roll off the rails, that means they were lucky, no, their arms, legs and heads were in different directions, that’s how the officers had fun!….Who are we making Heroes! Okay, A. Chapman, she’s a harmless slut, but an EXECUTIONER! It's scary to live in such a state!

your name 02.02.2012 16:54

Admiral kalchak))) bug!

your name 24.02.2012 17:14

That's right, demolish monuments to Lenin, Peter the Great, Stalin, Alexander 2.

Ivan 24.02.2012 17:21

Count the communists!! for White Russia

Ivan 24.02.2012 17:24

Mr. Zabroda, old wives' tales are not part of history.

Valentina 02.04.2012 05:31

It was a civil war, the enemy beat the enemy, but did the communists slaughter less peaceful people during this war? And in the years 20-40, who carried out outrages without trial and executions? History has shown that the communist system is no less rotten than those they criticize. Why judge some executioners and praise others? Lenin Stalin, funny fellow communists!

Human 06.02.2013 04:04

At least three times less. But in fact, six times. The Denikin commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks set the figure at six thousand people. Can Denikin be called objective and disinterested? I kind of doubt it. Should I remind you how much, for example, one ataman Krasnov killed? Why, look at Deniin himself.

Anna 11.02.2013 15:49

The Admiral is a GREAT man who did not spare his life in the name of his Fatherland. If at least one of the “comrades” who spoke out here had read real archival documents and studied the facts, they would not have written such nonsense, which would simply make a more or less educated historian laugh. It's time to teach history from documents, not from Soviet textbooks.
In principle, I don’t consider the article worthy of comment; I would like to ask the person in what state of mind he wrote it.

Athlete 09/21/2013 06:03

The entire white movement is a reaction to the rebellion of the Bolsheviks/Jews\ in the capital, to their banditous dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, which was convened following the results of free democratic elections, where the Bolsheviks suffered a crushing defeat. The white movement had no other goals other than defending the results and goals of the February Revolution. Kolchak was an active participant in this democratic white movement.

che 03.02.2014 20:17

Kolchak was so outraged by the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly that he decided to shoot it. Kolchak defended the values ​​of the February Revolution so much that, at numerous requests from the sailors, he was recalled abroad. Where is the logic, sportsman? In general, it is now fashionable to glorify people who mercilessly fought not with the Bolsheviks, but with the working Russian people. Nicholas 2 (on January 9, 1905 alone, more than one thousand peaceful demonstrators were killed, among whom were women and children) Stolypin, who was associated by his contemporaries with a tie and a carriage (he carried out merciless terror on rebellious peasants, who were hanged on rafts and floated down the river) , Kolchak (methods of fighting civilians are comparable to fascist ones)

Victor Dorozhkin 18.11.2014 03:18

That’s right, Lieutenant Zanin and his punitive detachment ran the show in our village and hanged the hard working peasants, while the rest managed to go to Shchetinkin

Lotos 07.10.2015 02:21

You read about the fate of generals and admirals and you are amazed at all the great and wonderful ones) And who drove the peasants into a bestial state, who did not protect the soldiers for the people.

Gennady Stupnitsky 08.04.2016 06:59

About the king of the most terrible cruelty

Time will not smooth out the edges of this abyss -
Remember the people on the Chitinka River
About the king of the most terrible cruelty
Everyone's favorite Kolchak now.

The memory remembers what the Kolchakites did.
(Let the crosses dry up on the graves)
How all of Siberia shook with executions,
How the poles were passed along the backs.

He was considered a great friend in America
I was also very much in love with England.
I can already see how they are fighting in hysterics
New whites of troubled times.

I don't understand where you made your choice
In kindergarten or maybe at the cinema?
Everyone around them began to be called white
Grandfathers were red for a long time.

Chapai 05.05.2017 22:10

How many people resemble Grandfather Shchukar!

Sergey 04.07.2017 18:16

At a meeting in Paris on December 23, 1917, the Entente Plan was adopted and promulgated by US President Woodrow Wilson on the eve of 1918. The plan provided for the division of Russia into spheres of influence and was called the “Conditions of the Convention.”
It was after the adoption of this plan that Kolchak (namely with a small letter), as a colonel of the British army, was sent to Siberia to implement it.
A. Kolchak in letters to A. Timireva:
"December 30, 1917 I am accepted into the service of His Majesty the King of England"
“Singapore, March 16. (1918) Met with an order from the British government to immediately return to China to work in Manchuria and Siberia. It found that it was preferable to use me there with the Allies and Russia over Mesopotamia.”
I wonder why the interventionists were in the camp of the noble “patriots”? Why did the whites fight the foreign scum shoulder to shoulder for the destruction of Russia? Did the “vile” Bolsheviks save our statehood?

Sergey 04.07.2017 18:27

The communists saved our country twice - in 1917 and in 1941. Twice they rebuilt the economy from scratch. We overcame hunger and devastation twice. They stood up against the whole world twice and still remained quite rich, without sliding to the level of third countries! (Until 1944, the United States also helped the Nazis with materials and equipment, just like us under Lend-Lease, through private companies). We preserved our identity, our culture, twice.
What did the liberals do? compare the period from 1922 to 1941 and the period from 1985 (Gorbochev came to power) to this day? Is there anything to be proud of?

Sergey 04.07.2017 18:44

Kolchak (white movement), Vlasov (service to the Third Reich) and Yeltsin (drunkard) have one flag.
Kolchak (white movement), Vlasov (service to the Third Reich) and Yeltsin are liberals and “democrats”.
Kolchak (white movement), Vlasov (service to the Third Reich) and Yeltsin (drunkard) have one task - to dismember the Russian Empire, and, as the successor of the USSR.
Yeltsin succeeded... now we clearly see the “zones of influence” (Georgia, Chechnya... now Ukraine)... Isn’t that enough for you? So who is Kolchak? for me he is an executioner and a traitor, just like Vlasov, like Bandera...

Abdurahman 29.09.2017 21:35

Kolchak is a corrupt skin, an exiled Cossack, he should have been brought to justice and then there wouldn’t be this disagreement now, Kolchak deserved the death penalty, period.

VILORA73 03.07.2018 18:29

Sergei, after the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the country was threatened with anarchy and anarchy. The great powers, in this dangerous case for Russia, gathered and decided to divide the country into spheres of influence and not at all to conquer it. This is the true meaning of the so-called Entente, slandered by the Bolsheviks.