The demand of the participants in the Kronstadt uprising of 1921. Start in science
The Red Army soldiers of Kronstadt, the largest naval base of the Baltic Fleet, which was called the "key to Petrograd", rose up against the policy of "war communism" with weapons in their hands.
On February 28, 1921, the crew of the battleship "Petropavlovsk" adopted a resolution calling for a "third revolution" that would drive out the usurpers and put an end to the regime of commissars." A revolutionary committee was elected, headed by S.M. Petrichenko (clerk from Petropavlovsk). On March 1, 1921, a citywide rally was convened on Anchor Square, at which resolutions were adopted demanding: “For Soviets without communists!”, “Power to the Soviets, not parties!”, “Down with the surplus appraisal!”, “ You give freedom of trade!”. On the night of March 1-2, the Revolutionary Committee arrested the leaders of the Kronstadt Soviet and about 600 communists, including N.N. Kuzmin.
In the hands of the rebels (about 27 thousand sailors and soldiers) there were 2 battleships, up to 140 coastal defense guns, over 100 machine guns. On March 3, the Revolutionary Committee created the “Defence Headquarters”, which included the former captain E.N. Solovyanov, commander of the artillery of the fortress, former general D, R. Kozlovsky, former lieutenant colonel B.A. Arkannikov.
The Bolsheviks took urgent and brutal measures to put an end to the Kronstadt rebellion. A state of siege was introduced in Petrograd. An ultimatum was sent to the Kronstadters, in which those who were ready to surrender were promised to save their lives. Army units were sent to the walls of the fortress. However, the attack on Kronstadt launched on March 8 ended in failure. On the night of March 16-17, the 7th Army (45 thousand people) under the command of M.N. moved on the already thin ice of the Gulf of Finland to storm the fortress. Tukhachevsky. The delegates of the Tenth Congress of the RCP (b), sent from Moscow, also took part in the offensive. By the morning of March 18, the performance in Kronstadt was suppressed.
APPEAL OF THE POPULATION OF THE FORTRESS AND KRONSTADT
Comrades and citizens! Our country is going through a difficult moment. Hunger, cold, economic ruin have been holding us in an iron grip for three years now. The Communist Party, ruling the country, broke away from the masses and was unable to bring it out of the state of general ruin. It did not take into account the unrest which had recently taken place in Petrograd and Moscow, and which pointed quite clearly to the fact that the Party had lost the confidence of the working masses. Nor did they take into account the demands made by the workers. She considers them the intrigues of the counter-revolution. She is deeply mistaken.
These unrest, these demands are the voice of the entire people, of all working people. All the workers, sailors and Red Army men at the present moment clearly see that only by joint efforts, by the common will of the working people, can bread, firewood, coal be provided to the country, to clothe the barefooted and undressed, and to lead the republic out of the impasse. This will of all working people, Red Army soldiers and sailors was definitely carried out at the garrison meeting in our city on Tuesday, March 1. At this meeting, a resolution was unanimously adopted by the ship crews of the 1st and 2nd brigades. Among the decisions taken was the decision to immediately re-election the Council. To hold these elections on more just grounds, namely, in such a way that the working people find true representation in the Soviet, that the Soviet be an active, energetic body.
March 2 this year Delegates from all naval, Red Army and workers' organizations gathered in the House of Education. At this meeting, it was proposed to work out the foundations for new elections in order to then begin peaceful work on the reorganization of the Soviet system. But in view of the fact that there were reasons to fear reprisals, and also due to the threatening speeches of the authorities, the assembly decided to form a Provisional Revolutionary Committee, to which they would transfer all powers to manage the city and fortress.
The Provisional Committee has a stay on the battleship "Petropavlovsk".
Comrades and citizens! The Provisional Committee is concerned that not a single drop of blood be shed. He took extraordinary measures to organize a revolutionary order in the city, fortress and forts.
Comrades and citizens! Don't interrupt work. Workers! Stay at the benches, sailors and Red Army men in your units and on the forts. All Soviet workers and institutions to continue their work. The Provisional Revolutionary Committee calls on all workers' organizations, all workshops, all trade unions, all military and naval units and individual citizens to give it all possible support and assistance. It is the task of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, through friendly and common efforts, to organize in the city and fortress the conditions for correct and fair elections to the new Soviet.
And so, comrades, to order, to tranquility, to endurance, to new, honest socialist construction for the benefit of all working people.
Chairman of the Temporary Revolutionary Committee Petrichenko
LENIN: MORE DANGEROUS THAN DENIKIN, YUDENICH AND KOLCHAK TOGETHER
Two weeks before the Kronstadt events, the Paris newspapers had already printed that there was an uprising in Kronstadt. It is absolutely clear that here the work of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and White Guards abroad, and at the same time, this movement has been reduced to petty-bourgeois counter-revolution, to petty-bourgeois anarchist elements. This is already something new. This circumstance, linked to all crises, must be politically taken into account very carefully and analyzed in great detail. Here the petty-bourgeois, anarchist element manifested itself, with slogans of free trade and always directed against the dictatorship of the proletariat. And this mood affected the proletariat very broadly. It affected the enterprises of Moscow, it affected the enterprises in a number of places in the province. This petty-bourgeois counter-revolution is undoubtedly more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak put together, because we are dealing with a country where the proletariat is a minority, we are dealing with a country in which ruin has been found on peasant property, and besides, we we also have such a thing as the demobilization of the army, which provided an insurgent element in incredible numbers. No matter how small or small at first, how to say it, the shift in power that the Kronstadt sailors and workers put forward - they wanted to correct the Bolsheviks in terms of freedom of trade - it would seem, a small shift, as if the slogans were the same: " Soviet power”, with a slight change, or only corrected, - but in fact the non-party elements served here only as a bandwagon, a step, a bridge along which the White Guards appeared. This is politically inevitable. We have seen petty-bourgeois, anarchist elements in the Russian revolution, we have been fighting them for decades. Since February 1917 we have seen these petty-bourgeois elements in action, during the great revolution, and we have seen the attempts of the petty-bourgeois parties to declare that they differ little from the Bolsheviks in their program, but only carry it out by different methods. We know from the experience not only of the October Revolution, we know this from the experience of the outskirts, various parts that were part of the former Russian Empire, where representatives of another government came to replace the Soviet government. Let's remember the democratic committee in Samara! All of them came with the slogans of equality, freedom, constituent assembly, and not once, but many times, they turned out to be a simple stepping stone, a bridge for the transition to White Guard power.
From Lenin's speech at the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b)
LENIN: A COMPLETELY MINOR INCIDENT
Believe me, only two governments are possible in Russia: tsarist or Soviet. In Kronstadt, some madmen and traitors spoke of a Constituent Assembly. But how can a person with a sound mind even allow the idea of a Constituent Assembly, given the abnormal state in which Russia finds itself. The Constituent Assembly at the present time would be an assembly of bears led by the tsarist generals by the nose rings. The uprising in Kronstadt is really a completely insignificant incident, which poses a far lesser threat to Soviet power than the Irish troops to the British Empire.
In America, the Bolsheviks are thought to be a small group of malevolent people tyrannically dominating a large number of educated people who could form a fine government if the Soviet regime were to be abolished. This opinion is completely false. No one can replace the Bolsheviks, except for the generals and bureaucrats, who have long since shown their incompetence. If the importance of the uprising in Kronstadt is exaggerated and supported abroad, it is because the world has been divided into two camps: capitalist abroad and communist Russia.
Brief recording of the conversation with the correspondent of the American newspaper "The New York Herald"
Section 6
Russia and the world in the XX-XXI centuries.
♦ After the February Revolution of 1917, the central authority became:
BUT. Committee of the State Duma;
B. Provisional government;
IN. Directory;
G. Council of People's Commissars.
♦ The provisional government in March 1917 was headed by:
BUT. Guchkov A.I.
B. Rodzianko M.N.
IN. Lvov G.E.
G. Kerensky A.F.
♦ The authority in Petrograd, in which the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had a majority in March-August 1917, was called:
BUT. Council;
B. Provisional government;
IN. Constituent Assembly;
G. State Duma.
♦ Indicate the correct chronological sequence of events in 1917:
BUT. abdication of Nicholas II
B. July crisis of the Provisional Government
IN. Kornilov rebellion.
♦ According to the Bolsheviks, Soviet power in 1917 is a form ...
BUT. dictatorship of the proletariat;
B. local government;
IN. public state;
G. parliamentary republic.
♦ One of the main tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat...
BUT. freedom of enterprise;
B. granting civil liberties;
IN. the suppression of the exploiting classes;
G. granting equal political rights;
D. creation of conditions for the development of private property.
♦
1
. decree banning the Kadet party after the Bolsheviks came to power
2
. transfer of the capital to Moscow
3
. convening a Constituent Assembly
Answer options:
BUT. January 1918
B. October 1917
IN. March 1918
♦ Indicate the correct correspondence between the date and the event of the first years of Soviet power:
1.
Brest Peace
2.
adoption of the "Decree on peace"
3.
convening a Constituent Assembly
Answer options:
BUT. March 1918
B. October 1917
IN. January 1918
♦ Indicate the correct correspondence between the date and the event of the first years of Soviet power:
1.
creation of combos
2.
dispersal of the Constituent Assembly
3.
decree banning the Kadet party after the Bolsheviks came to power
Answer options:
BUT. January 1918
B. October 1917
IN. June 1918
♦ The transfer of state ownership of land, industrial enterprises, banks, transport, etc., carried out in Soviet Russia in 1917-1918, is called
BUT. nationalization
B. privatization
IN. socialization
G. inventory
♦ The Constituent Assembly was convened and dissolved:
BUT. in January 1917
B. in October 1917
IN.. in January 1918
G. in October 1918
♦ Read an excerpt from the memoirs of a contemporary and indicate what event it is associated with.
“A tall, broad-shouldered Dybenko enters ... the room with a quick and firm step ... Choking with laughter, he tells in a sonorous and booming bass ... that the sailor Zheleznyakov had just approached the chairman's chair, put his wide palm on the shoulder of Chernov, who was numb with surprise, and in an imperious tone declared him: “The guard is tired. I propose to adjourn the meeting and go home."
BUT. overthrow of the Provisional Government
B. dissolution of the Constituent Assembly
IN. banning the activity of the cadet party
G. the closure of the editorial office of the newspaper "New Life"
♦ At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in October 1917, it was decided to
BUT. dissolution of the Constituent Assembly,
B the proclamation of Soviet power,
IN. execution of the royal family
G. declaration of independence of Finland
♦ The transfer of state ownership of land, industrial enterprises, banks, etc., carried out in Soviet Russia in 1917-18. called
BUT. inventory,
B privatization,
IN. socialization
G. nationalization,
♦ Match the name and position of the first members of the Soviet government:
1
. A. Lunacharsky
2
. L. Bronstein (Trotsky)
3.
I. Dzhugashvili (Stalin)
Answer options:
BUT. people's commissar of education
B. People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs
IN. People's Commissar for Nationalities
♦ Establish a correspondence between the events of 1917 - 1918. and architectural structures:
1
). Winter Palace
2
). Tauride Palace
3
). Smolny Palace
Answer options:
BUT. the place where the II Congress of Soviets met
B. seat of the Constituent Assembly
IN. object of assault of the revolutionary forces
♦ Decrees during the years of the October Revolution and the Civil War were called:
BUT. instructions from the leaders of the Entente countries to the leaders of the White movement;
B. legislative acts of the Soviet state;
IN. decrees of the commanders-in-chief of the white armies;
G. normative acts of the Constituent Assembly.
♦ The food dictatorship introduced by the Bolsheviks in May 1918 assumed ...
BUT. permission to buy and sell land;
B. liquidation of landownership;
IN. the triumphal procession of Soviet power;
G. completion of the socialist revolution in the countryside;
D. the obligations of the peasants to hand over grain at fixed prices, leaving themselves the necessary minimum.
♦ The policy of "war communism" assumed - ...
BUT. universal labor service;
B. rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat;
IN. the introduction of a tax in kind;
G. refusal of accounting and control by the state;
D. free development of commodity-money relations.
♦ One of the features of the policy of "war communism" was (a) ...
BUT. permission for small and medium enterprises
B. nationalization of banks
IN. introduction of universal labor service
G. creation of farms in the countryside
♦ The policy of "war communism" was carried out:
BUT. in 1917–1918
B. from spring-summer 1918 to March 1921
IN. in 1921–1922
G. in 1921–1924
♦ Bodies in the countryside, created in June 1918 in order to implement the policy of food dictatorship, were called:
BUT. food orders;
B. workers' committees;
IN. factory committees;
G. combos.
♦ Specify the event of the period of the civil war:
BUT. mutiny of the Czechoslovak corps
B. Lena shooting at the gold mines
IN. establishment of dual power
G. creation of the Council of People's Commissars (SNK).
♦ Evidence of the political crisis of Soviet power in the spring of 1921 is
BUT. White Czech rebellion;
B. Kronstadt rebellion and peasant uprisings;
IN. Dispersal of the Constituent Assembly;
G. Uprising on the battleship Potemkin.
The requirements of the participants in the Kronstadt uprising of 1921 include
BUT. restoration of the monarchy
B. liquidation of surplus appropriation and food orders
IN. repeal of the decrees on the nationalization of large-scale industry
G. introduction of a foreign trade monopoly
♦ What caused the turn of the Bolsheviks to the policy of the NEP:
BUT. the socio-political crisis of the spring of 1921 and the threat of loss of power;
B. the political doctrine of Bolshevism;
IN. wide promotion of the advantages of the market, commodity-money relations among party members;
G. the end of the Civil War.
♦ The New Economic Policy was preceded by:
BUT. policy of "war communism"
B. collectivization
IN. industrialization
G. formation of the USSR.
♦ The New Economic Policy (NEP) called for...
BUT. curtailment of cooperation;
B. replacement of the surplus with the tax in kind;
IN. organization of peasants into collective farms;
G. introduction of surplus.
♦ New economic policy:
BUT. banned retail trade;
B. corresponded to the interests of the peasants;
IN. caused universal approval in all organizations of the RCP (b);
G. prohibited the creation of joint ventures with foreign companies.
BUT. permission for private trade in manufactured products
B. nationalization of all industry
IN. abolition of currency
G. introduction of a food dictatorship.
♦ The New Economic Policy measure was (choose one):
BUT. restoration of money circulation
B. ban on private trade in manufactured products
IN. curtailment of commodity-money relations
G. militarization of labor.
♦ The New Economic Policy measure was (choose one):
BUT. creation of monopoly associations
B. leasing of medium and small enterprises
IN. introduction of universal conscription
G. card distribution system.
♦ The New Economic Policy was carried out in:
BUT. 1918 - 1921
B. 1921 - 1928
IN. 1921 - 1925
G. 1921–1936
♦ Fill in the missing word in the Soviet-era saying: "Communism– this is Soviet power plus ... the whole country":
BUT. gasification;
B. cinematography;
IN. district heating;
G. electrification.
♦ Match the term with its definition:
1.
decree
2.
mandate
3.
worker control
Answer options:
BUT. convention convention document
B. enterprise management body in the first years of Soviet power
IN. the name of the legislative acts of the government.
♦ In August 1922, 160 opposition-minded prominent scientists and cultural figures were expelled from the country. Among them were:
BUT. Berdyaev N.A., Bulgakov S.N.
B. Lossky N.O., Prokopovich S.N.
IN. Sorokin P.A., Frank S.L.
G. all right.
♦ One of the opposition directions during the internal party struggle of the 1920s. called:
BUT. Stalinism;
B. Trotskyism;
IN. Leninism;
G. ezhovshchina.
♦ The First Congress of Soviets of the USSR adopted the Declaration and Treaty on the Formation of the USSR in ... year:
BUT. 1918
B. 1920
IN. 1921
G. 1922.
♦ Stalin I.V. aspired to...
BUT. establishment of sole power;
B. the revival of the Leninist principles of party building;
IN. building a civil society;
G. establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
♦ The policy of "eliminating the kulaks as a class" was carried out in the years ...
BUT. civil war
B. policies of war communism
IN. new economic policy
G. collectivization.
♦ The collectivization of agriculture is over...
BUT. permission for private ownership of land
B. a sharp rise in the living standards of the peasantry
IN. liquidation of the individual peasant economy
G. transition to farming.
♦ The collectivization of agriculture led to...
BUT. reduction in grain and livestock production
B. a sharp rise in the living standards of the peasantry
IN. permission for private ownership of land
G. introduction of market relations in agriculture.
♦ Forced industrialization is over...
BUT. a sharp rise in the standard of living of the population
B. overcoming technical and economic backwardness
IN. transition to a new economic policy
G. economic liberalization.
♦ On the consequences of state policy in the field of culture in the USSR in the 1930s. applies to:
BUT. liberation of culture from ideological control;
B. elimination of censorship restrictions;
IN. encouraging a variety of artistic styles and forms;
G. the establishment of socialist realism as the official artistic method in art.
♦ The socio-political life of the USSR in the 1930s was characterized by (-en) ...
BUT. the triumph of law;
B. the subordination of the economy to politics;
IN. free departure of Soviet citizens abroad;
G. deprivation of the party congress of legislative functions.
♦ Match the names of the high-profile trials fabricated in the 1930s and the repressed persons
1.
"Anti-Soviet United Trotskyist-Zinoviev Center"
2.
"Anti-Soviet Right-Trotsky Bloc"
3.
"Purge of the Army"
Answer options:
BUT. V. Blucher, J. Gamarnik, M. Tukhachevsky
B. G. Zinoviev, L. Kamenev
IN. N. Bukharin, N. Krestinsky, A. Rykov.
♦ Totalitarianism is characterized by:
BUT. all-encompassing control in all spheres of public and private life of citizens;
B. the presence of a multi-party system;
IN. minimizing the activities of the opposition;
G. recognition of the principles of democracy.
♦ The International Organization for Cooperation of Peoples in Strengthening Peace and Security, which existed in the pre-war period, was called ...
BUT. Comintern
B. Warsaw Pact Organization (WTO)
IN. The League of nations
G. Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA)
♦ The Soviet Union in 1934 joined the international organization - ...
BUT. United Nations
B. Comintern
IN. Cooperative Society for Trade with England (ARCOS)
G. League of Nations
BUT. Soviet-German non-aggression pact
B. an agreement with France on mutual assistance in the event of a military attack by a third party ...
IN. treaty of friendship and mutual assistance with Poland
G. trade agreement with the United States
♦ The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was concluded:
♦ How aggressive were the actions of the USSR in 1939-1940. during…
BUT. "bands of diplomatic recognition"
B. General Franco's rebellion in Spain
IN. Soviet-Finnish war.
G. World War II.
♦ World War II has begun...
♦ The highest body of state power during the Great Patriotic War was A. State Defense Committee
B. Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR
IN. Council of People's Commissars
G. Headquarters of the Supreme High Command
♦ Battles of the initial period of the Great Patriotic War:
BUT. Moscow battle, Smolensk battle;
B. the battle on the Oryol-Kursk Bulge, the liberation of Kyiv;
IN. operation "Bagration", the liberation of Bulgaria;
G. Vistula-Oder operation, East Prussian operation.
♦ Battles related to the period of a radical change during the Great Patriotic War:
BUT. defense of Sevastopol, defense of Odessa;
B. Crimean operation, Kharkov operation;
IN. Battle of Stalingrad, battle on the Oryol-Kursk Bulge;
G. Vistula-Oder operation, operation "Bagration".
♦ A radical change in the Great Patriotic War occurred in (during) ...
BUT. second half of 1941
B. second half of 1943
IN. first half of 1942
G. second half of 1944
♦ Match dates and events
1.
Beginning of World War II
2.
Battle of Stalingrad
3.
Counteroffensive near Moscow
Answer options:
♦ At the Yalta Conference, the issue of (about) ...
BUT. the beginning of the Belarusian operation ahead of schedule
B. opening a second front
IN. dissolution of the Comintern
G. reparations
♦ By decision of the Crimean Conference in 1945, the USSR annexed territories from Japan
BUT. South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands
B. Primorye and Ussuri Territory
IN. Liaodong Peninsula and Port Arthur
G. Aleutian Islands.
♦ The meeting of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in February 1945, which finally determined the face of the post-war world, took place in:
BUT. Vienna;
B. Hague;
IN. Tehran;
G. Yalta.
♦ Match the date and location of the conference
1.
Tehran
2.
Yalta
3.
Potsdam
Answer options:
♦ The last of those preparing on the initiative of I.V. Stalin's political processes became (became):
BUT. "Leningrad case";
B. "doctors' case";
IN. "the case of the military";
G. "Process 46".
♦ The struggle in the post-war period against "cow-worship before the West" was called the campaign against ...
BUT. personality cult
B. cosmopolitanism
IN. Trotskyist-Zinoviev bloc
G. "anti-party group".
♦ After World War II, the USSR carried out a policy towards the socialist countries ...
BUT. liquidation of the colonial past
B. pressure to join the USSR
IN. imposition of the Stalinist model of socialism
G. connection to the Marshall Plan.
♦ The foreign policy of the USSR in the late 1940s. characterized:
BUT. normalization of relations with Yugoslavia;
B. disagreements with Western countries and the division of the world into two systems;
IN. adoption of the Peace Program;
G. development of the concept of peaceful coexistence with the West.
♦ The Cold War is...
BUT. one of the military operations during the Second World War;
B. a period of unfavorable relations between the USSR and the People's Republic of China;
IN. an attempt by Western powers to isolate the USSR after the Brest peace;
G. the system of relations established between the socialist and capitalist countries after the Second World War.
♦ What was one of the reasons for the transition of the USSR and Western countries from allied relations to the Cold War?
BUT. Soviet refusal to reduce the army after the end of World War II
B. the divergence of interests of the former allies in the struggle for increasing influence in the world
IN. creation of the Warsaw Pact
G. start of the Korean War.
♦ One of the causes of the Cold War was (a) ...
BUT. the desire to create a single military-political organization
B. dissatisfaction of the former allies with the decisions of the Potsdam Conference
IN. the struggle of the USSR for the accomplishment of the world revolution
G. superpower struggle for spheres of influence
B. confrontation between the Entente and the Triple Alliance
IN. creation of an anti-Hitler coalition
G. dissolution of the Comintern
♦ The Cold War refers to...
BUT. collapse of the USSR
B. Creation of the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO)
IN. Russia's transition to "shock therapy"
G. beginning of the thaw.
♦ The Cold War refers to...
BUT. collapse of the anti-Hitler coalition
B. creation of the Triple Alliance
IN. A. Hitler's coming to power in 1933
G. Yalta Conference of the Big Three in 1945
♦ The Cold War refers to...
BUT. formation of the world socialist system
B. expulsion of the USSR from the League of Nations
IN. execution of the Anti-Comintern Pact
G. creation of an anti-Hitler coalition.
♦ Read an extract from the memories of a participant in the described events and indicate the period when the described events took place.
“The feeling of insecurity intensified especially after Hiroshima and Nagasaki... For everyone who realized the realities of the new atomic era, the creation of their own atomic weapons, the restoration of balance has become a categorical imperative...
To solve this problem, a whole archipelago of institutions was created throughout the country... Thousands of highly qualified scientists, designers, engineers, and production organizers who survived the war and repressions gathered here.”
BUT.1941 - 1944
B.1945 - 1953
IN. 1953 - 1964
G. 1965 - 1985
BUT. civil jet flight
B. start-up of a nuclear power plant
IN. launching of the nuclear icebreaker "Lenin"
G. first manned flight into space.
♦ The period of "thaw" refers to ...
BUT. debunking the cult of personality at the XX Congress of the CPSU
B. the defeat of the Trotskyist-Zinoviev bloc
IN. formation of the anti-Hitler coalition
G. creation of the atomic bomb in the USSR.
♦ Set the correspondence between the date and the event of the "thaw" period:
1.
XX Congress of the CPSU
2.
proclamation of a course towards building communism
3.
offset N.S. Khrushchev from party and government posts
Answer options:
BUT. February 1956
B. October 1961
IN. October 1964
♦ In 1955, a military-political bloc of socialist states was created - ...
BUT. CMEA
B. EEC
IN. ATS
G. NATO
♦ The Warsaw Pact Organization was established in _____.
BUT. 1949
B. 1955
IN. 1953
G. 1947
♦ The prevention of the nuclear cataclysm of 1962 is connected with the names ...
BUT. Khrushcheva N.S. and Kennedy J.
B. Gorbacheva M.S. and Bush J.
IN. Brezhneva L.I. and Nixon R.
G. Stalin I.V. and Churchill W.
♦ Soviet constitutions were adopted in:
BUT. in 1918
B. in 1924
IN. in 1936 and 1977
G. all right.
♦ The two main political contradictions of social development and the causes of "stagnation" were ...
BUT. lack of democratic elections
B. the existence of a command and control system
IN. real expansion of democracy
G. efficiency of the Soviet bureaucratic system
♦ The two main political contradictions of social development and the causes of "stagnation" were…
BUT. the leading role of the CPSU
B. full freedom of democracy
IN. party-nomenklatura bureaucratization of the country
G. equality of all forms of ownership
♦ Citizens who do not share the official ideology, who oppose the actions of the authorities, were called in the USSR ...
BUT. "oppositionists"
B. "cosmopolitans"
IN."dissidents"
G."Shadows".
♦ What features characterized the social and political life of the USSR in the 1970s - mid-1980s?
BUT. downsizing of the party-state apparatus
B. strengthening the fight against dissent
IN. resumption of criticism of the cult of personality I.V. Stalin
G. stability of the internal political situation
D. holding alternative elections
E. strengthening the role of party nomenclature
Specify the correct answer.
1 . AVD
2 .BGE
3 . IOP
4 WHERE
♦ Read an excerpt from the speech of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU at a meeting of the Politburo and indicate his name.
“... At a meeting of the Politburo, we determined the line for the settlement of the Afghan issue. The goal we set was to speed up the withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan and at the same time ensure a friendly Afghanistan… But there is no progress in any of these areas… We must act more actively… to carry out the withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan.”
BUT. N.S. Khrushchev
B. L.I. Brezhnev
IN. Yu.V. Andropov
G. M.S. Gorbachev
♦ Gorbachev M.S. was the last General Secretary of the party:
BUT. VKP(b)
B. CPSU
IN. CPRF
G. RSDLP.
BUT. 1987;
B. 1990;
IN. 1991;
1921 the end of a bloody civil war. The armies of the White Guards and interventionists are almost completely defeated, the young Soviet state of workers and peasants is gradually strengthening and recovering from the agrarian heritage of tsarist power and military devastation. But the internal contradictions fomented by counter-revolutionary forces do not leave the country either. And one of the most frequently recalled outcomes of such contradictions, which occurred during the period of the establishment of Soviet power throughout Russia, is the counter-revolutionary Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921.
To begin with, consider the main causes and nature of the rebellion that occurred. In the bourgeois environment, it is customary to present the Kronstadtsers as a kind of heroes of the struggle against the "dictatorship of the Bolsheviks", and with a handout from the bourgeoisie, this heroic halo of the sailors of the Baltic Fleet is picked up by all kinds of "left" movements of an anti-Soviet orientation, in particular, anarchists, exposing this as almost a new revolution, bearing anti-state character. But how was it in reality?
With the outbreak of the civil war, the workers' and peasants' government was forced to switch to an emergency policy of the so-called "war communism", part of which was the food requisitions held in the villages. Initially, the peasantry tolerated this, accepting it as a temporary evil, but as the Civil War dragged on for a long three years, the contradictions between the city and the petty-bourgeois countryside, the contradictions between (in this case) consumer-workers and producers-peasants, grew more and more, which led to the emergence of all kinds of peasant gangs of a counter-revolutionary nature: Makhnovist gangs, "green rebels" and others. It was not a struggle "for", but an exclusively "against" proletarian dictatorship. Enraged petty proprietorship, dissatisfied with the expropriation of its property for wartime needs, attacked the Workers' and Peasants' Government as the source of all troubles in their minds, disguising their frankly counter-revolutionary essence under beautiful slogans. And one could still justify the uprising by the famine that followed the surplus appraisal, but breaking these unfounded conjectures, we will quote L.D. Trotsky, who left a note on this issue:
Demoralization on the basis of hunger and speculation in general terribly intensified towards the end of the civil war. The so-called "sacking" took on the character of a social disaster that threatened to stifle the revolution. It was in Kronstadt, where the garrison did nothing and lived on everything ready, that demoralization reached especially great proportions. When the hungry Peter had a particularly hard time, the Politburo more than once discussed the question of whether to make an "internal loan" from Kronstadt, where there were still old stocks of all sorts of goods. But the delegates of the St. Petersburg workers answered: "You won't get anything from them kindly. They speculate in cloth, coal, bread. In Kronstadt, every bastard has now raised its head."
Such was the real situation, without sugary idealizations in hindsight.
It must be added that in the Baltic Fleet, as "volunteers", those from the Latvian and Estonian sailors who were afraid to get to the front and were going to move to their new bourgeois fatherlands: Latvia and Estonia were arranged as "volunteers". These elements were fundamentally hostile to the Soviet regime and fully displayed their counter-revolutionary essence during the days of the Kronstadt revolt. Along with this, many thousands of Latvian workers, mainly former farm laborers, showed unparalleled heroism on all fronts of the civil war. Consequently, neither Latvians nor "Kronstadters" can be painted in the same color. One must be able to make social and political distinctions.
In this way, during the hungry years, the rebels themselves did not provide assistance to the hungry Peter, and when the accumulated seemed little, they bared their teeth, also demanding from the worker-peasant government "to disarm and disband the political departments", thereby generally openly showing their counter-revolutionary essence. And the very slogan of the rebels “power to the Soviets, not parties” cannot leave any doubts about the true, hostile dictatorship of the proletariat of the essence of the rebellion, since it was difficult not to understand that the elimination of the leadership of the Bolsheviks over the Soviets would very quickly destroy the Soviets themselves. Like the demand for free trade by the rebels, this threatened the basic principles of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and as a result, the rebellion itself threatened to nip it in the bud.
Thus, the causes and the counter-revolutionary nature of the rebellion became clear to us. Not the romantic spirit of the anarchist struggle against the state and not the famine were the reasons for the dissatisfaction of the rebels with the policy of war communism, but only the threat that what they had accumulated would "leak".
At the end of February, a wave of strikes and rebellious moods swept through Kronstadt, putting the factories and factories to work. By taking decisive action, according to the report of the Deputy Chairman of the Petrograd Gubchek Ozolin, mentioned in the negotiations with Petrograd, the Cheka managed to arrest "the entire head of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks." Also, Ozolin tells Yagoda: “In total, up to 300 people were arrested, the remaining 200 are active workers and from the intelligentsia. According to the investigation, the Mensheviks play a prominent role in the ongoing events.. The role of the latter in fomenting protest moods is, in principle, beyond any doubt. It is worth emphasizing that during the years of the Civil War, the Mensheviks almost openly advocated the restoration of capitalism, which is why their participation in the Kronstadt rebellion gives the latter a pronounced counter-revolutionary connotation even more, regardless of any slogans of the rebels.
Dreadnought "Petropavlovsk"
In the following days, the situation began to heat up more and more. Fermentation and confusion began in some of the reserve regiments, which so far could be calmed down. February 28, 1921 a meeting of the teams of the battleships "Sevastopol" and "Petropavlovsk" was held at which the rebels adopted a resolution with demands worthy of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks: to hold re-elections of the Soviets without the Communists, to abolish the commissars and political departments, to provide freedom of activity to all socialist parties and to allow free trade. And already on March 1, a 15,000-strong rally took place on Anchor Square in Kronstadt under the slogan “Power to the Soviets, not to the parties!”. Everyone was waiting for the arrival at the rally of the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, who arrived on the melted ice of the bay. Dolutsky in "Materials for the study of the history of the USSR (1921 - 1941)" writes: “The brethren greeted Mikhail Ivanovich with applause - he was not afraid, he arrived. The All-Russian headman knew where he had arrived - yesterday, at a general meeting, the teams of the battleship Petropavlovsk adopted a resolution for re-elections to the Soviets, but without the Communists, for freedom of trade. The resolution was supported by the crew of the second battleship - "Sevastopol" - and the entire garrison of the fortress. And here is Kalinin in the seething Kronstadt. One - without security, guides, took only his wife!
But the sailors (who until recently demanded freedom of speech) did not allow Mikhail Ivanovich to finish, just as they did not give the Baltic Fleet Commissioner Kuzmin, who arrived at the rally to speak, an opportunity to speak. "End the old songs, give me some bread!" the rebels shouted, preventing Kalinin from continuing. Here, however, it should be noted that there was just enough bread for the Kronstadters, the Red Navy ration for the winter of 1921 (the data is given in the same source by Dolutsky) was in a day: 1.5 - 2 pounds of bread (1 pound \u003d 400 g), a quarter pound of meat, a quarter pound of fish, a quarter - cereals, 60 - 80 gr. Sahara. The St. Petersburg worker was content with half the ration, and in Moscow, for the hardest physical labor, workers received 225 grams per day. bread, 7 gr. meat or fish and 10 gr. sugar, which once again confirms the thesis about the exclusively anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary nature of the rebellion.
Kalinin tried to reason with the crowd: "Your sons will be ashamed of you! They will never forgive you today, this hour, when you voluntarily betrayed the working class!". But the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee was no longer listened to. Kalinin left, and on the night of March 1-2, the rebels arrested the leaders of the Kronstadt Soviet and about 600 communists, including the commissar of the Baltic Fleet Kuzmin. The first-class fortress that covered the approaches to Petrograd ended up in the hands of the rebels. On March 2, the rebels made an attempt to start negotiations with the authorities, but the latter's position on what was happening was simple: before any negotiations begin, the rebels must lay down their arms. Without fulfilling these requirements, all parliamentarians sent to the Bolsheviks from the rebels were arrested. On March 3, a defense headquarters was created in the Kronstadt fortress, headed by the former captain Solovyanin. The former General of the Red Army Kozlovsky, Rear Admiral Dmitriev and an officer of the General Staff of the tsarist army Arkannikov were appointed military specialists of the headquarters.
The Bolsheviks did not pull any further, and on March 4 the rebels were given an ultimatum demanding to immediately lay down their arms. On the same day, a meeting of the delegates' meeting was held in the fortress, which was attended by 202 people, at which this issue was raised. The decision was made to defend. At the suggestion of Petrichenko, the leader of the rebellion (not at all Kozlovsky, as the Bolsheviks then believed and as some sources now mention), the composition of the VRC - the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, created by the rebels on March 2, was increased from 5 to 15 people. The total number of the garrison of the Kronstadt fortress was 26 thousand people, however, not all personnel took part in the counter-revolutionary action, in particular, 450 people who refused to join the rebellion were arrested and locked in the hold of the battleship Petropavlovsk. In addition to them, the party school and part of the communist sailors went ashore with weapons in their hands, there were also defectors (in total, more than 400 people left the fortress before the assault).
Semanov writes: "At the very first news of the beginning of the Kronstadt armed mutiny, the Central Committee of the Party and the Soviet government took the most decisive measures to eliminate it as soon as possible."
V. I. Lenin took an active part in their development and implementation. On March 2, 1921, the Council of Labor and Defense of the RSFSR adopted a special resolution in connection with the rebellion. The next day, signed by Lenin, it was published. The resolution ordered:
“1) Former General Kozlovsky and his associates should be outlawed.
2) The city of Petrograd and the province of Petrograd shall be declared under a state of siege.
3) Transfer all power in the Petrograd fortified region to the Petrograd Defense Committee.
But it is clear that military operations against the rebels could not be limited to the forces of the Petrograd garrison alone, requiring the transfer of military units from other parts of the country.
“Foreseeing the possibility of inconsistency in actions between the local Petrograd leadership and the army command,” Semanov writes further, “The STO of the RSFSR, chaired by Lenin, decided on March 3: The Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, which exercises its leadership in accordance with the established procedure.
So, throughout the struggle against the rebels, the government supported the St. Petersburg workers, the Bolsheviks and the Petrograd Defense Committee. The available military and material forces were thrown to help the defenders of the city from the rebels.
The party also had to make considerable efforts for counter-propaganda measures. The matter was also complicated by the fact that Kronstadt was traditionally considered the "capital" of the Baltic Fleet. And especially the authority of the oldest naval fortress in Russia increased after October, when the bulk of the sailors of the Baltic Fleet became the vanguard of the socialist revolution. And of course, in its propaganda, the rebellious self-proclaimed revolutionary committee tried in every possible way to use this fact, posing as the successor to the deeds of the revolutionary Baltic sailors, therefore, even before the armed suppression of the rebellion, party organizations began a major explanatory campaign among the sailors of the Baltic Fleet. Meetings and rallies were held on ships and in military units, fleet veterans made appeals to ordinary sailors and soldiers, urging them to change their minds and go over to the side of the worker-peasant Soviet power.
Measures were also taken to counter-propaganda influence on the sailors who were accidentally involved in the rebellion by the Kronstadt ringleaders. Semanov writes: “In the propaganda materials, the counter-revolutionary essence of the “revolutionary committee” was emphasized in every possible way, it was proved that its actual leaders were former officers, disguised White Guards. On March 4, the appeal of the Petrograd Defense Committee was published: “They got through. To the deceived Kronstadters". It said:
“Now you see where the scoundrels led us. Got through. From behind the backs of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, the bared teeth of the former tsarist generals have already peeked out ... All these generals Kozlovskys, Burskers, all these scoundrels Petrichenko and Tukin, at the last minute, of course, will run away to the White Guards in Finland. And you, deceived ordinary sailors and Red Army soldiers, where will you go? If you are promised that they will feed you in Finland, you are being deceived. Haven't you heard how the former Wrangelites were taken to Constantinople and how they died there by the thousands, like flies, from hunger and disease? The same fate awaits you, if you do not come to your senses immediately... Whoever surrenders immediately, his guilt will be forgiven. Surrender immediately!"
According to the testimony of the same Semanov, in the first days of March, a general mobilization of universal education was carried out. By March 4, there were 1,376 communists and 572 Komsomol members in units of this kind. The trade unions did not stand aside either, having formed their detachment of 400 people. These forces were used so far only for the internal defense of the city, but at the same time they became the reserve of the regular Red Army units that surrounded the rebellious Kronstadt. Party, trade union, Komsomol mobilizations, as well as the call for general education, were carried out in an organized and fast manner, demonstrating the complete readiness of the Petrograd communists to repulse the insurgents.
The trade unions played their own and no small role in the mobilization of the working masses of Petrograd. Trade unions, according to Pukhov, were a great force: they had 269,000 members in the city and about 37,000 more in the province.
March 4 The Council of Trade Unions appealed to the population of the city. "Again, gold epaulettes appeared at the approaches of Red Petrograd." This is how the call of the council began, implying General Kozlovsky and other leaders of the rebellion with a "royal" past. Further, the appeal recalled the troubled days of 1919, when the White Guards stood literally under the walls of the city. “What saved Red Petrograd from Yudenich? The close solidarity of the St. Petersburg workers and all honest working people. The appeal recalled the decisive events of the civil war, to respond with close rallying to the provocations of the anti-Soviet forces.
Armed detachments of Komsomol members were created in all districts of Petrograd. And the slogan of the revolutionary troika: “Not a single communist should stay at home” turned out to be one hundred percent fulfilled.
On March 5, 1921, by order of the Revolutionary Military Council No. 28, the 7th Army was restored under the command of Tukhachevsky, who was instructed to prepare an operational plan for the assault and "suppress the uprising in Kronstadt as soon as possible." The assault on the fortress was scheduled for March 8. It was on this day, after several postponements, that the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b) was to open. But this was not a mere coincidence, but a thoughtful step taken with a certain political calculation.
The tight deadlines for preparing the operation were also due to the fact that the opening of the Gulf of Finland could greatly complicate the assault and capture of the fortress. On March 7, the forces of the 7th Army numbered almost 18,000 Red Army soldiers: almost 4,000 soldiers in the Northern Group, about ten in the Southern, and another 4,000 in reserve. The main striking force was the combined division under the command of Dybenko, which included the 32nd, 167th and 187th brigades of the Red Army. At the same time, the advance to Kronstadt and the 27th Omsk Rifle Division began.
At 18:00 March 7 the shelling of the Kronstadt forts with course batteries began. At dawn on the 8th, on the day of the opening of the X Congress of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), the soldiers of the Red Army stormed Kronstadt on the ice of the Gulf of Finland. However, it was not possible to take the fortress: the assault was repulsed and the troops returned to their original positions with losses.
The unsuccessful battle, as Voroshilov later recalled, undermined the morale of some parts of the army: “the political and moral state of individual units was alarming,” as a result of which two regiments of the 27th Omsk Rifle Division (235th Minsk and 237th Nevelsky) refused to participate in battle and were disarmed.
According to the Soviet military encyclopedia, as of March 12, the rebel forces numbered 18 thousand soldiers and sailors, more than a hundred guns and over a hundred machine guns, as a result of which the number of troops preparing for the second assault on the fortress was also increased to 24 thousand bayonets , 159 guns and 433 machine guns, and the units themselves were divided into two operational units: the southern group, under the command of Sidyakin, advancing from the south, from the Oranienbaum region and the northern, under the leadership of Kazansky, advancing on Kronstadt from the north along the ice of the bay, from the coastline from Sestroretsk to Cape Lisiy Nos.
The preparation was carried out carefully: a detachment of employees of the Petrograd provincial police was sent to the active units for reinforcement (of which 182 fighters took part in the assault - employees of the Leningrad Criminal Investigation Department), about 300 delegates of the X Party Congress, 1114 communists and three regiments of cadets of several military schools. Reconnaissance was carried out, white camouflage suits, boards and lattice walkways were prepared to overcome unreliable sections of the ice surface.
Assault on the fortress was launched on the night of March 16, 1921, before the start of the battle, the Red Army forces managed to quietly occupy Fort No. 7, which turned out to be empty, but Fort No. 6 put up a long and fierce resistance. Fort No. 5 surrendered immediately after the artillery shelling began, but before the assault group approached it. The garrison itself, it is worth noting, did not offer any resistance, the cadets from the assault group were greeted with exclamations of “Comrades, do not shoot, we are also for Soviet power”, from which we can conclude that not all participants in the rebellion were eager to continue participating in it.
But the neighboring fort number 4 held out for several hours and during the assault the attackers suffered heavy losses. In the course of heavy fighting, it was also possible to capture forts No. 1 and No. 2, Milyutin and Pavel, however, as Voroshilov later recalled, the defenders left the Rif battery and the Shanets battery before the assault began and went to Finland on the ice of the bay who willingly accepted them.
After capturing all the forts, the Red Army broke into the fortress, where fierce street fighting began with the rebels, but by 5 o'clock in the morning on March 18, the resistance of the Kronstadters was broken, after which the headquarters of the rebels, located in one of the gun towers of Petropavlovsk, decided to destroy the battleships together with the prisoners who were in the holds and break through to Finland. They ordered to lay several pounds of explosives under the gun turrets, but this order caused outrage. On the Sevastopol, the old sailors disarmed and arrested the rebels, after which they released the communists from the hold and radioed that Soviet power had been restored on the ship. Some time later, after the start of the artillery shelling, Petropavlovsk also surrendered, which most of the rebels had already left.
On the deck of the battleship "Petropavlovsk" after the suppression of the rebellion. In the foreground is a hole from a large-caliber projectile.
According to the Soviet military encyclopedia, the attackers lost 527 people killed and 3285 wounded. During the assault, over a thousand rebels were killed, over 2 thousand were “wounded and captured with weapons in their hands”, more than two thousand surrendered and about eight thousand went into Finland.
The counter-revolutionary rebellion in Kronstadt was suppressed. Life in the city gradually improved, but the victims were considerable.
The forts of Kronstadt, the port and buildings of the fortress city, the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol were damaged. Great material resources were expended. Such is the price for a senseless rebellion raised by a handful of counter-revolutionaries who managed by demagogy and lies to drag sailors and soldiers along, half-starved and tired. Among the captured rebels were three members of the so-called temporary revolutionary committee. Some of the immediate leaders of the rebellion, who did not have time to escape to Finland, were handed over to the court and, according to his sentence, were shot.
Life in Petrograd returned to normal rather quickly. Already on March 21, V. I. Lenin sent a telephone message to the Petrograd Soviet about the immediate lifting of the state of siege in the city, and even earlier Tukhachevsky was recalled to Moscow, and D. N. Avrov again became the commander of the troops of the Petrograd Military District. On his orders, the Northern and Southern groups of troops were disbanded. On April 10, 1921, the 27th Omsk Rifle Division, which had done so much to defeat the rebellion, was transferred to the Zavolzhsky Military District at the direction of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. March 22 in Moscow? Vladimir Ilyich received the delegates of the Tenth Congress, who returned after the fighting near Kronstadt. He told them about the results of the congress, talked with them about the battles with the rebels, and then, at the request of the delegates, took pictures with them.
As for the fate of the rebels who fled to Finland, they were met rather coldly. The correspondent of Latest News on March 20, 1921, dispassionately described the following expressive scene: “The Finnish border guard disarms the sailors and soldiers, first forcing them to return and pick up abandoned machine guns and rifles on the ice. More than 10 thousand guns have been picked up. The leaders of the rebellion were placed in the former Russian fortress of Ino, and the rest were distributed to camps near Vyborg and in Terioki. At first, a stir broke out around the leaders of the rebellion, they were interviewed, they were interested in, and, albeit minor, but figures of the Russian emigration. However, they were soon forgotten about, and the responsibility for their existence was placed on the Red Cross.
All this most accurately emphasizes the idea of V. I. Lenin that in the period of fierce class struggle there is no and cannot be a third force, it either merges with one of the opposing factions fighting among themselves, or it is dispersed and perishes.
Lenin himself returned to the lessons of Kronstadt more than once in his notes, and in a letter to the Petrograd workers he formulated one of the most important conclusions of the “Kronstadt lesson”:
“The workers and peasants began to understand after the Kronstadt events better than before that any transfer of power in Russia [from the Bolsheviks to the “non-Party”] is to the benefit of the White Guards; It was not without reason that Milyukov and all the intelligent leaders of the bourgeoisie hailed the Kronstadt slogan "Soviets without Bolsheviks."
And he put an end to this sad story a month later, writing the following:
“The mass of workers and peasants need an immediate improvement in their condition. By placing new forces, including non-Party people, in useful work, we will achieve this. The tax in kind and a number of related activities will help this. In this way we will cut the economic root of the inevitable fluctuations of the small producer. And we will fight ruthlessly against political vacillations that are useful only to Miliukov. There are many who hesitate. We're few. The vacillators are separated. We are united. Those who waver are not economically independent. The proletariat is economically independent. Those who waver do not know what they want: they want it, and they inject themselves, and Milyukov does not order it. And we know what we want.
And that's why we will win."
Literature:
1) Voroshilov K.E.: From the history of the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, “Military Historical Journal. 1961. No. 3.S. 15-35.
2) Pukhov A.S.: The Kronstadt rebellion in 1921. The Civil War in essays. [L.], 1931, p. 93.
3) Semanov S.N.: Elimination of the anti-Soviet Kronstadt rebellion.
4) Trotsky L.D.: "The hype around Kronstadt"
Printed counterpart: Shishkin V.I. West Siberian rebellion of 1921: the historiography of the issue. // Civil war in the east of Russia. Problems of History.: Bakhrushin Readings 2001; Interuniversity. Sat. scientific tr. / Ed. V. I. Shishkin; Novosib. state un-t. Novosibirsk, 2001 C. 137–175
The civil war in Russia went through several stages, differing from each other in scale, composition of leaders and ordinary participants in the opposing forces, goals and objectives, forms and methods, intensity and intermediate results of the struggle. One of the distinguishing features of the final phase of the civil war, dating from the end of 1920-1922, was a sharp increase in the size and, accordingly, the role of armed rebellions in anti-communist resistance. The largest of them, both in terms of the number of participants and territorially, was the West Siberian uprising.
Starting at the end of January 1921 in the north-eastern region of the Ishim district of the Tyumen province, the uprising in a short time covered most of the volosts of the Ishim, Yalutorovsk, Tobolsk, Tyumen, Berezovsky and Surgut districts of the Tyumen province, Tara, Tyukalinsky, Petropavlovsk and Kokchetav districts of the Omsk lips., Kurgan district of the Chelyabinsk province., Eastern districts of Kamyshlov and Shadrinsk districts of the Yekaterinburg province. In addition, it affected five northern volosts of the Turin district of the Tyumen province, responded with unrest in the Atbasar and Akmola districts of the Omsk province. In the spring of 1921, rebel detachments operated over a vast territory from Obdorsk (now Salekhard) in the north to Karkaralinsk in the south, from Tugulym station in the west to Surgut in the east.
Memoirists and historians defined the number of participants in the West Siberian rebellion in different ways. In the literature, you can find figures from 30 to 150 thousand people. But even if we focus on the smaller of them, then in this case the number of West Siberian rebels exceeded the number of Tambov (“Antonovites”) and Kronstadt rebels. In other words, it can be argued that the West Siberian uprising was the largest anti-government uprising during the entire period of communist rule in Russia.
The strength of the West Siberian rebels and the danger they posed to the communist regime in Russia can be judged by the fact that in February 1921 the rebels paralyzed traffic along both lines of the Trans-Siberian Railway for three weeks, and during the period of greatest activity they seized such county centers like Petropavlovsk, Tobolsk, Kokchetav, Berezov, Surgut and Karkaralinsk fought for Ishim, threatened Kurgan and Yalutorovsk.
In turn, the total number of fighters and commanders of the regular units of the Red Army and irregular communist formations who took part in the suppression of the West Siberian rebellion was approaching the size of the Soviet field army. The fighting that took place in February-April 1921 on the territory covered by this uprising, in terms of scale and military-political results, can be quite equated to a major army operation during the civil war.
To date, there is a fairly significant layer of memoirs and research literature - both special and related in subject matter, in which the history of the West Siberian rebellion is reflected. This literature was created at different times, distinguished by the political and ideological conditions of scientific activity, from various methodological positions. As a result, not only do not coinciding, but even directly opposite points of view appeared in the publications. All this encourages historiographic self-reflection in order to identify and separate grains of true knowledge from everything else that inevitably accompanies the research process, identify new promising areas of work, formulate urgent tasks and optimal ways to solve them.
Unfortunately, the existing historiographical publications on this topic do not meet these requirements for many reasons. The first three of them, published about a quarter of a century ago, do not cover the main body of specialized literature that has appeared in the last decade. In addition, they are methodologically outdated, and the assessments made in them require significant adjustments. As for the historiographical publications of I. V. Skipina, they represent a "sample" of scientific dishonesty and professional incompetence. This article aims to fill the identified gap.
Despite the scale and all-Russian significance of the West Siberian rebellion, Soviet historiography did not attribute it - in contrast to the "Makhnovshchina" in Ukraine, "Antonovshchina" in the Tambov province. or the events in Kronstadt - among the priority problems of the civil war. On the contrary, the West Siberian uprising has been studied extremely poorly and fragmentarily. In terms of the number of special publications, it was clearly inferior to such typologically identical, but not so large-scale phenomena, such as the Ukrainian “Makhnovshchina” or the Tambov “Antonovshchina”. It is easy to verify the validity of this statement by analyzing, first of all, the number and nature of memoirs and research publications devoted to the West Siberian uprising.
By the beginning of the 1990s, their number was only about two dozen titles of various genres and volumes (mostly abstracts and small articles), published mainly in three stages: 1920s - early 1930s, early 1950s - mid 1970s 's and the period of perestroika. The most significant of them, both in terms of volume and the number of problems considered, in terms of the source base used, in terms of the completeness of the description of specific events, were small monographs by M. A. Bogdanov and K. Ya. Lagunov.
It is also noteworthy that for almost three quarters of a century only one documentary publication on a private issue appeared about the West Siberian uprising, despite the presence of a huge corpus of well-preserved archival sources.
True, the West Siberian rebellion was, in one way or another, incidentally covered in a significant number of books and articles devoted to related issues and made both in the regional and in the all-Russian territorial framework. However, most of the authors of these publications (except for V.K. Grigoriev, V.I. Shishkin and Yu.A. Shchetinov) did not work independently with key sources on the research topic, but based their judgments mainly on the publications of their predecessors, supplemented by archival or newspaper data of random character, playing an illustrative role.
The latter circumstance predetermined the paucity of new empirical information in these works, the abundance of factual errors and, as a consequence, the secondary nature of most of the assessments expressed in them. This makes it possible to exclude these publications from the subject of historiographical analysis practically without prejudice to the case. Although it should be noted that they played a significant role in the translation and consolidation of the prevailing ideas.
The structure of the research problems of the history of the West Siberian rebellion in Soviet historiography for a long time remained poorly developed and differentiated. Until the early 1990s, memoirists and historians limited themselves to covering a very narrow range of issues, and rarely any of them was analyzed specifically. In most cases, the authors presented their understanding of a particular problem in the general context of describing the rebellion as a whole or its individual centers (for example, in the Ishim, Kurgan or Petropavlovsk districts, in the Tobolsk north or in the Narym Territory). This approach did not contribute to the formulation of new scientific problems and, accordingly, the development of the concept of the phenomenon under study.
The main attention of memoirists and researchers was concentrated on highlighting the socio-political causes of the uprising, the composition of its leaders and participants, the class character and political orientation of the insurrectionary movement, the course of hostilities on both sides and the immediate results of the rebellion. Moreover, the emphasis was clearly placed on the coverage of the military side of the event, while many problems that reveal the socio-political and ideological content of the uprising were not considered at all or were mentioned in passing. For example, the demographic, moral, psychological aspects of the event, questions about the relationship between the rebels and the local population, about the participation and role of the Cheka, revolutionary and military revolutionary tribunals in suppressing the uprising, about the long-term consequences of the rebellion, remained completely out of sight of historians. Soviet historians have never worked at the level of personalities, without which one cannot count on either a complete reconstruction of the picture of such an event, or, even more so, on the depth of its comprehension. The factual material introduced by researchers into scientific circulation, which is the main value of any historical work, occupied a subordinate place in the texts, clearly inferior in volume to ritual reasoning gleaned from the pages of the “Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks” and numerous propaganda publications duplicating it.
Despite the disagreements on certain issues that existed among memoirists and researchers, by the early 1960s, a rather harmonious and consistent concept had developed in Soviet historiography that explained the origin, dynamics and results of the West Siberian uprising. In expanded form, it sounded in the monograph by M. A. Bogdanov, and in compressed form - in a special article published in the encyclopedia "Civil War and Intervention in the USSR" .
Soviet memoirists and historians saw the main reasons for the West Siberian rebellion in the weakness of the local organs of the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, the prosperity of the Siberian peasantry and the high proportion of the kulaks in its composition, the organizational and political activities of the counter-revolutionary forces that allegedly created the underground Siberian Peasant Union, as well as in retreats from the class principle and violations of revolutionary legality during the surplus appraisal. Moreover, memoirists and researchers, starting with the secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) E. M. Yaroslavsky and the head of the plenipotentiary representation of the Cheka in Siberia, I. P. Pavlunovsky, almost always assigned the decisive role to the ideological, political and organizational activities of the Siberian Peasant Union, which they called the brainchild of the party Socialist-Revolutionaries.
Note that, as a rule, these same factors, with the exception of the last two, were indicated by Soviet historians when explaining the causes of other uprisings that took place in Siberia in 1920–1922. Thus, the specificity of the West Siberian rebellion of 1921 was not sufficiently revealed, which contradicted the principle of historicism. Specific empirical material, which memoirists and researchers referred to when proving the existence on the territory of the Tyumen province. and adjacent districts of the cells of the Siberian Peasant Union and the leading role of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in it, was exceptionally narrow, had mainly Chekist origin and was absolutely not subjected to verification for factual authenticity, but was perceived uncritically. As a result of such an attitude towards sources, unreliable data on the presence in the territory of the Tyumen province were introduced into scientific circulation. underground White Guard organizations cornet S. G. Lobanov in Tyumen and S. Dolganev in Tobolsk, liquidated by the Chekists in the initial period of the uprising.
Regarding the causes of the West Siberian rebellion, there were serious disagreements among Soviet memoirists and researchers in the interpretation of only two issues. The first of these is the role of the Siberian Peasants' Union. Back in the early 1920s, P. E. Pomerantsev formulated a special position on this matter. A professional historian and communist who worked during the Civil War years, first as an employee of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 5th Army, and then as head of the historical and information department of the headquarters of the assistant to the Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces of the republic for Siberia, Pomerantsev had access to almost all military operational information, with the exception of part of the KGB , and very well represented the background and course of the rebellion. Based on the sources at his disposal, Pomerantsev came to the conclusion that the Siberian Peasant Union did not have any significant impact on the emergence of the West Siberian uprising, since it itself was in its infancy. According to Pomerantsev, the Union was not a mass peasant organization, since the peasantry remained only "the object of its provocation."
Another issue that has caused controversy among historians is the origins and nature of the political discontent of the Siberian peasants on the eve of the rebellion. Pomerantsev considered the uprisings of 1920 and early 1921 in Siberia an anarchist protest of the entire peasantry against the policy of war communism. IP Pavlunovsky saw in the West Siberian rebellion a manifestation of a new, petty-bourgeois type of counter-revolution that arose after the defeat of the main armed forces of the White Guards. M. Ya. Belyashov, M. A. Bogdanov, V. K. Grigoriev and Yu. A. Shchetinov associated the emergence of discontent among the local peasantry solely with deviations from the class principle and violations of revolutionary legality during the surplus appraisal. A number of other researchers pointed out reasons of a deeper and more general order. For example, Yu. A. Polyakov and I. Ya. Trifonov called the crisis of the policy of war communism the main one, and V. I. Shishkin also called the dissatisfaction of the entire peasantry with the Soviet government as the bearer of this policy.
On the issue of the social composition of the participants in the West Siberian rebellion in Soviet historiography, there was a wide range of opinions: from “purely peasant” (P. E. Pomerantsev, P. I. Pavlunovsky) to “purely White Guard-kulak” (K. Kheifets, P. Sidorov, I. T. Belimov), and between them - various combinations of the above socio-political forces. Such significant discrepancies in assessments were a reflection of a number of factors: poor knowledge by most memoirists and historians of the actual side of events, the low level of professional training of some, a strict orientation to the dogmatic guidelines formulated in the Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and others. It is significant that even Lenin's assessment of the petty-bourgeois elements as the main danger to the dictatorship of the proletariat after the liquidation of the main White Guard fronts was not accepted by the majority of researchers. In fact, having taken the position of the "Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks", they were covertly opposing Lenin's point of view.
Most Soviet memoirists and historians considered the local kulaks and the remnants of Kolchak to be the driving force behind the West Siberian rebellion. As for the working peasantry, most of the authors recognized its partial participation in the uprising, but explained it exclusively by incidental circumstances: coercion by the insurgent leadership, the economic dependence of the poor on the kulaks, or the political unconsciousness of the poor and middle peasants. Let us cite as an example the opinion of M. A. Bogdanov, which was quite typical. “The backbone of the ‘army’ of the rebels,” argued Bogdanov, “was made up of the local kulaks. Command positions were filled by Kolchak officers. In the main mass, it was a bunch of deserters and peasants forcibly mobilized or temporarily succumbed to the bait of kulak agitation. True, the material that memoirists and historians used to prove this point of view was scanty in volume, mostly local in scale and peripheral in place. He did not convince the reader of the correctness of such conclusions.
Soviet historiography, as a rule, qualified the West Siberian rebellion as White Guard-kulak or SR-kulak in leadership and character, anti-Soviet in political orientation. All these statements were poorly substantiated by factual data. The proof of the White Guard (-SR)-kulak essence of the West Siberian uprising was carried out using a simple trick, when the analysis of specific facts was replaced by arguments about the objective role that ordinary rebels supposedly played as allies of the kulaks and the White Guards. The fact that the rebels had the slogan “For Soviets without Communists” was recognized in principle, but initially, in explaining this phenomenon, Soviet historians obediently followed in the wake of Lenin's assessments. They considered the promotion of this slogan a tactical maneuver by the leaders of the rebellion, who thus sought to hide the true restorationist intentions, and they assessed it as a “provocative formula”, and qualified the councils created by the rebels as “organs covering the counter-revolution” .
Only in the articles of V. I. Shishkin on the question of the social nature of the West Siberian and a number of other uprisings at the beginning of 1921 was a different point of view stated. They argued that these rebellions had a “massive peasant character”, and the promotion of the slogan “For Soviets without Communists” by the rebels was associated with the crisis of the entire Soviet political system that erupted at the turn of 1920–1921. However, these provisions were expressed by Shishkin in the most general form, were not supported by factual material and did not find development in the subsequent works of the author.
In the publications of I. P. Pavlunovsky, P. E. Pomerantsev, and M. A. Bogdanov, questions of the political and military organization of the rebels, relations in the insurgent environment, and the political and military organization of the rebels were discussed. All these authors believed that the rebels were militarily organized, for which, according to Pomerantsev and Bogdanov, they resorted to the help of military specialists from among the members of the Siberian Peasant Union, but did not have a single political organization. In explaining the latter circumstance, the views of Pavlunovskii, Pomerantsev, and Bogdanov diverged. Pavlunovsky argued that this was prevented by the organs of the Cheka, which in late 1920 - early 1921 defeated the Siberian Peasant Union. Pomerantsev believed that this happened mainly because the rebels did not accept the program of the Siberian Peasant Union, and Bogdanov explained this situation with the successful operations of the Cheka and the actions of the Red Army troops, which did not allow the rebels to create a single governing body.
Relatively much attention in the writings of Soviet memoirists and historians was given to the description of the external side of the military events. They identified the main centers of the rebellion and approximately determined the number of rebels in these areas, named some of the leaders of the uprising by name, gave information about the Red Army units that took part in the suppression of the rebellion, named the main military operations of the Soviet troops, and cited the losses of the parties in a number of battles. Soviet literature consistently held the idea that the rebels were well organized and armed. In particular, Bogdanov claimed that “the entire rebellion area was divided into 4 fronts”, that former tsarist and Kolchak officers led the headquarters, commanded the fronts and armies, that almost half of the ordinary rebels were armed with rifles. In an article by M. Ya. Belyashov, who in 1921 was secretary of the Makushinsky district committee of the RCP (b), this picture was supplemented by information that did not correspond to reality about the presence of a certain Colonel Svatosh in regular radio communication with the White Guard conspiratorial center in Arkhangelsk, and through him - “with Anglo-American imperialists".
However, the approach to covering even issues of a military-combat nature in Soviet historiography was biased. The actions of the rebels were portrayed in it exclusively negatively and qualified as political and criminal banditry, for which, as a rule, not scientific vocabulary was used. The authors concentrated their attention mainly on the terror of the rebels against the communists and Soviet activists, the looting of the sacking points and collective farms, the destruction of the railway line and communications. As for the "red" side, its actions were covered and interpreted exclusively in a positive way. The heroic behavior of the communists and Red Army soldiers in battles, their humanity in relation to the civilian population and captured rebels were shown.
The attitude of civilians to the uprising and the relationship of the rebels with the local population were portrayed in the same one-sided and declarative manner in Soviet literature. For example, M. A. Bogdanov argued that the uprising aroused “deep indignation” among the majority of the working peasantry and was condemned by them from the very beginning. Moreover, Bogdanov declared that the bulk of the working peasantry "took an active part in the liquidation of the kulak-SR rebellion." However, the isolated examples given by the author spoke not in favor, but against his point of view.
In the works of Soviet historians, much attention was paid to the coverage of the activities of the communists in organizing the defeat of the rebellion, they emphasized the important role played in the liquidation of the insurgent movement by political measures taken by the communist party and the Soviet government. Among the latter, decisive importance was given unconditionally to the decisions of the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b) to replace the apportionment with a tax in kind, which was called the main means that contributed to the normalization of the political situation in the West Siberian countryside. Moreover, the turning point in the mood of that part of the middle peasantry that took part in the rebellion was dated as early as March 1921. However, both theses sounded exclusively declarative, since the memoirists and historians practically did not cover the real processes that took place in the countryside in the summer and autumn of 1921, concluding a presentation of the events of the liberation from the rebels of Surgut, Berezov and Obdorsk.
Soviet historiography recognized the West Siberian rebellion as the largest counter-revolutionary armed uprising of the early 1920s, which had a broad social base in the form of a powerful Siberian kulaks and the remnants of Kolchakism. Historians saw its main significance in the danger created by a three-week break in the railway communication between central Russia and the Trans-Urals, which, in turn, led to the deprivation of the Soviet authorities of the opportunity to receive bread from Siberia, which was then, along with the North Caucasus, the main source of food. On this basis, M. A. Bogdanov even argued that the West Siberian uprising posed a much greater threat to the Soviet government than "Antonovshchina", "Sapozhkovshchina" or "Makhnovshchina". True, this thesis provoked an objection from I. Ya. Trifonov and did not receive the support of other researchers.
At the same time, in Soviet literature, attention was completely groundlessly focused on the fact that the West Siberian rebellion was one of the links in the chain of other anti-communist armed uprisings that hit various regions of the Soviet republic. Bogdanov even wrote about the possibility of using the West Siberian uprising for “armed intervention by the imperialist powers” in one case, and the possibility of “interference by foreign imperialists with the aim of plundering the North and providing assistance to the rebels with weapons and ammunition through the Gulf of Ob” in another. Moreover, in the latter case, Bogdanov uncritically reproduced the position of the chairman of the Tyumen gubchek, P. I. Studitov, who was sharply criticized in March 1921 by the central military leadership as absolutely groundless.
When analyzing the results of the rebellion, Soviet historians limited themselves to pointing out the human and material losses of supporters of the communist government, the destruction of the rural party-Soviet apparatus, the reduction in the absolute number and proportion of prosperous kulak elements in the local peasantry. The question of the casualties suffered by the rebels and the civilian population, the policy of the authorities towards the participants in the uprising, the fate of the surviving participants in the rebellion and their families, as well as the population supporting the rebels, was not even raised in the literature.
Consequently, it can be argued that in Soviet historiography there was a rather simple and to a large extent standard sociological scheme that explained the origin, nature and results of the West Siberian rebellion from Marxist class positions. It was based on a limited number of sources that reflected this event only from the point of view of the communist authorities, and fit well into the context of the Soviet historiography of the civil war in Russia. But it lacked the main thing: the truth of life in all its richness and inconsistency. And especially, of course, there was a lack of people with their interests, actions, moods, doubts, expectations, fears and hopes, which create the unique flavor of any historical event.
Explaining the presence of large gaps in Soviet historiography and tendentious interpretations of many problems of Russian history, modern researchers, as a rule, were inclined to see the primary and main reason for such a depressing situation in the inaccessibility of the necessary sources and only then - in individual scientific qualifications, methodological blindness, in the presence of external and internal censorship.
Apparently, there is no general correct answer to this question. Rather, on the contrary: in each case it should be and will be different. In this case, of interest is our analysis of archival use sheets filled out by M. A. Bogdanov, the chief Soviet researcher of the West Siberian rebellion. This analysis indicates that the historian in the late 1950s had access to and was familiar with almost all the key documents of the rebels, party-Soviet, military, Chekist and revolutionary tribunal bodies, stored in the former Central State Archive of the Soviet Army (now the Russian State military archive), in the archives of Novosibirsk, Omsk and Tyumen. Consequently, the primary barrier that Bogdanov was unable to overcome was the intellectual limitations posed by the Marxist-Leninist methodology with its class approach, and not at all the lack of sources. As a result, the factual material available to the researcher, which quite well reflected the richness of vital connections, contradictions and collisions, was not perceived by him in its entirety. Bogdanov partly simply ignored him, partly drove him into the Procrustean bed of the class scheme.
As for foreign literature, the history of the West Siberian rebellion was covered in it sparingly. Perhaps only two works deserve attention. The first of them is the small-scale memoirs of a certain P. Turkhansky, who during the uprising was imprisoned in the Tyumen Gubchek and as a source of information used the rumors that circulated abundantly then and after his suppression.
Turkhansky argued that it was difficult to answer the question of who initiated the uprising, since "the peasants behaved very cautiously, and not a single gubchek foresaw what was being prepared." Nevertheless, the memoirist was inclined to believe that the rebellion arose spontaneously and spread rapidly, almost in one day engulfing the entire former Tobolsk province. He believed that almost the entire rural population rebelled voluntarily, and front-line soldiers led the rebels. “In the leadership of the uprising,” according to Turkhansky, “officers did not take part”27. However, he mentioned the disclosure by the Chekists of an officer conspiracy in Tyumen, in which employees of the local gubchek were involved. The memoirist believed that the rebels did not have a single leading center. In Turkhansky's article, only one body of insurgent power, established in Tobolsk, was specifically named. But both the name of such (Provisional Northern Siberian Government) and the period of its existence (3–4 months) were indicated incorrectly.
Describing the mood and behavior of the rebels, Turkhansky limited himself to pointing out the anti-communist terror unleashed by them in the countryside and anti-Jewish pogroms, to the widespread replacement of the volost executive committees of the soviets in the area controlled by the rebels with pre-revolutionary volost boards. He noted the transition to the side of the rebels of a number of Red Army units, including those with artillery guns, and drew attention to the distrust of the defectors on the part of the rebels, arguing that the latter killed all the Red Army soldiers who went over to them, except for those who had pectoral crosses. Turkhansky wrote that the "red" side unleashed cruel terror against the rebels, shooting every fifth person, including children and women. The memoirist dated the liquidation of the rebellion in the spring of 1921, explaining it by the fact that "with the onset of spring, the peasants were drawn to the land."
The second is a monograph by M. S. Frenkin, dedicated to peasant uprisings in Soviet Russia during the Civil War. Its author did not have access to archives and newspapers located in the USSR, but was based solely on published sources, memoirs, and studies of Soviet and foreign historians. However, even this small circle of sources and literature Frenkin was unable to critically analyze, correctly structure and generalize. As a result, his book turned out to be richly filled with errors of a factual and conceptual nature.
We will name only the main one. In fact, M. S. Frenkin assigned a key role at all stages of the West Siberian uprising - from its inception to defeat - to the activities of the Siberian Peasant Union. The historian considered the work of this Union to be the decisive cause of the rebellion, arguing that a particularly wide network of Union cells was created in the Tyumen, Altai and Omsk provinces, as well as in the Kurgan district of the Chelyabinsk province. The researcher wrote that the Siberian Peasant Union introduced "a certain organizational principle into the peasant movement throughout this colossal territory", "played a major organizational role in carrying out the West Siberian uprising". In the "immaturity" and erroneous tactics of the Siberian Peasant Union, Frenkin saw one of the main reasons for the defeat of the West Siberian rebels. He stated that the Union was "late with the uprising, at a time when (so in the text. - V. Sh.) the prerequisites for it were already ripe in February 1920, when the prevailing political situation was more favorable for an uprising and incomparably more difficult for the Soviet government. Meanwhile, as is well known even from KGB publications, in February 1920 there was no Siberian Peasant Union.
Frenkin believed that, despite the military and organizational successes of the West Siberian rebels, their defeat was predetermined. The researcher argued his position with the current military-political situation and the huge preponderance of forces in the Soviet government. “They rebelled too late,” the historian wrote, “when the Bolsheviks victoriously ended the civil war in the fight against the main enemy, had a huge army and managed to crush the Kronstadt uprising in March 1921.” .
Perestroika and glasnost provoked public interest in the history of the West Siberian rebellion, made it easier for historians to access previously classified sources on the topic of research, and allowed them to speak out without regard to communist censorship. However, the study of the West Siberian rebellion still lagged behind the study of the "Makhnovshchina", "Antonovshchina" and the Kronstadt uprising. Worse, in the early 1990s, public interest in the history of this dramatic event began to be satisfied by people who were professionally ill-prepared for solving such a complex task, who had never studied the West Siberian uprising, who did not know not only new, but also old sources on this subject. topic. As a result, theses, newspaper and magazine articles by S. Novikov, V. A. Shuldyakov and A. A. Shtyrbul appeared, repeating the main provisions of the communist concept set forth earlier in the publications of T. D. Korushin, I. T. Belimov and M. A Bogdanov, but presented as a new word in historical science.
Nevertheless, the turn of the 1980s-1990s was marked by the first fruitful attempts to rethink individual episodes of the West Siberian uprising. This process began with the publications of K. Ya. Lagunov and A. A. Petrushin, written using a number of sources stored in the archives of the Federal Security Service for the Tyumen Region, as well as a documentary publication by T. B. Mitropolskaya and O. V. Pavlovich. In these works, new factual material about the events of the eve and the beginning of the rebellion in the Tyumen province was introduced into scientific circulation. and in the Kokchetav district of the Omsk province., Partial adjustments were made to the existing concept of the West Siberian rebellion.
It is fundamentally important that in the works of K. Ya. Lagunov and A. A. Petrushin it was for the first time openly stated that the case of the underground organization of S. G. Lobanov in Tyumen was nothing more than a KGB falsification carried out in order to transfer responsibility for the emergence of a large-scale rebellion against the counter-revolution and thereby at least partially justify itself before the central authorities. As a result, the researchers questioned the fundamental conclusion of Soviet historiography - the existence of a counter-revolutionary underground as the most important cause of the West Siberian uprising.
Large new factual material characterizing the political situation in the Tyumen province. autumn - winter 1920, was brought by K. Ya. Lagunov. In his publications, for the first time, a picture of the violence perpetrated by food workers in the Tyumen village is given. Lagunov introduced into scientific circulation numerous testimonies of peasants, rural communists and Soviet workers, who claimed that in terms of criminal acts and cruelty of behavior, the envoys of the city in the countryside surpassed everything that one and a half to two years ago Kolchak's punishers did here. Unfortunately, this large array of unique sources was introduced by Lagunov without reference to the place of their storage, which makes it difficult to verify this material for the factual reliability and objectivity of its interpretation by the researcher.
Judging by the number of publications, we can conclude that the study of the West Siberian rebellion noticeably intensified in the 1990s. During this time, articles and abstracts by O. A. Belyavskaya, V. P. Bolshakov, I. I. Ermakov, I. V. Kuryshev, F. G. Kutsan, V. V. Moskovkina, V. P. Petrova, I. F. Plotnikova, N. L. Proskuryakova, O. A. Pyanova, Yu. . In 1996, a special scientific conference dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the West Siberian uprising was held in Tyumen, the abstracts of the speeches of the participants were published. In the next novel by the Omsk writer Mikhail Shangin, the West Siberian rebellion became the subject of artistic research. Information about the uprising of 1921 was reflected in the "Essays on the history of the Tyumen region" and the monograph by V. V. Moskovkin.
However, the number of named publications should not be misleading or set in a major way. The main type of scientific production was still small-format publications: theses and short articles. The quality is no better. A significant part of the theses was written outside the problematic approach and is of an overview nature, which indicates at least a superficial knowledge of the subject of research by the authors of the publications, a lack of understanding of its versatility and complexity. One gets the impression that most of the authors of such works were eager to join the actual topic as soon as possible, rather than really deepen their understanding. Perhaps the most striking example of publications of this kind can be called the theses of V. B. Shepeleva, who argued pointlessly on three pages about the causes of the rebellion. An indicator of the depth of understanding by the author of the events that took place is that the uprising of 1921 received a triple name in Shepeleva's theses: Petropavlovsk-Ishim, West Siberian and West Siberian-North Kazakhstan.
In addition, the post-Soviet historiography of the West Siberian rebellion of the early 1990s was seriously affected by yet another political and ideological disease - this time the virus of anti-communism. A vivid example of frankly opportunistic crafts was the article by I. V. Kuryshev and the theses of I. F. Plotnikov, who managed not to report a single new fact, but instead branded the Communists and burned incense to the peasant rebels. MS Shangin's voluminous novel sins with exactly the same undisguised tendentiousness. The theses of V. P. Bolshakov, M. A. Ilder and V. V. Moskovkin are not without declarativeness and predetermined nature, based on material limited in volume, moreover, as a rule, of a random nature.
Undoubtedly, more could have been expected from the new, expanded version of the book by K. Ya. Lagunov, published in 1994, when the author had the opportunity to express himself without regard to censorship. However, Lagunov's most recent publication gives the impression of a work consisting of mechanically combined fragments written at different times, from different methodological positions, and even seemingly by different people. It pays a rich tribute not only to artificially posed problems, but also to far-fetched ideas formed by Soviet historiography back in the pre-perestroika period. The quality and reliability of the last publication of K. Ya. Lagunov is sharply reduced by the abundance of author's conjectures and tendentious interpretations of the factual material, numerous internal contradictions and factual errors, the lack of a scientific reference apparatus, which does not allow checking the cited sources and the data presented.
But a particularly strange, to put it mildly, impression is made by a recent article by doctoral student of the Ural State University V. V. Moskovkin, published in the journal Voprosy istorii. Its author, who claimed to generalize the uprising of the peasants of Western Siberia, demonstrated a gross violation of ethical norms in relation to the works of his predecessors (however, recently in Russian historiography these violations have taken on such proportions that they will soon, apparently, become the norm). As evidenced by the analysis of the content of Moskovkin's article, he is simply not familiar with most of the publications on the research topic. As a consequence of such an attitude to historiography, the article by V. V. Moskovkin lacks a “set” of problems necessary to reveal the topic under study. Moskovkin formally ignores most of the works of such colleagues as M. A. Bogdanov, K. Ya. Lagunov, and N. G. Tretyakov, but borrows their factual material and conclusions widely, without making appropriate references to the publications of his predecessors.
In addition, the author knows the source base very poorly. The situation was aggravated by Moskovkin's depressing confidence in everything he found in the few archival texts he read. Because of this, there is a serious doubt that the doctoral candidate has an idea about such an elementary research procedure as criticism of sources. As a result, extremely important issues in the history of the uprising (for example, the mood and behavior of the rebels) are covered by the author on the basis of communist and KGB propaganda "horror stories", while the rebels' own materials are not used. To top it all off, Moskovkin's article is replete with factual inaccuracies, contradictions and completely unsubstantiated statements, indicating that its author knows little and even worse understands the subject of his research. These are just some of the “minuses” of post-Soviet historiography.
But it is impossible not to see significant progress in the study of the topic. For example, an unconditional step forward was the appearance in the 1990s of about a dozen publications made in a "problematic way" and clearly focused on solving specific research problems. A simple list of titles of articles and abstracts by O. A. Belyavskaya, F. G. Kutsan, N. L. Proskuryakova, Yu. expansion of research problems.
To explain the events under study, historians less and less began to turn to the dogmatized Marxist-Leninist methodology with its partisanship and class approach. Instead, scientific objectivism and genuine historicism, the methods of social psychology and historical local history are increasingly being used. At the same time, it is difficult to agree with V.P. Bolshakov, who claims that the Russian religious philosophy of the “Silver Age” can serve as a methodological key to understanding the phenomenon of the West Siberian rebellion. Unfortunately, V.P. Bolshakov did not specify his proposal. In our opinion, it is more correct to follow the path of using interdisciplinary research methods, more actively using approaches developed in political science, historical sociology, cultural studies and personality psychology.
In the best publications of the 1990s, one can clearly see an orientation towards solving two closely related research tasks: firstly, a critical analysis of the key provisions of Soviet historiography, and secondly, the search for new answers to the central questions of the topic. This work is being carried out on a wider source base than before, including with the involvement of documents from the organs of the Cheka, revolutionary and military revolutionary tribunals, military authorities, which were previously kept in secret storage or access to which was limited.
It is quite natural that in the 1990s much attention of historians was attracted by the initial question - about the genesis of the West Siberian uprising: its socio-economic and political conditions, all-Russian and local reasons, both favorable and hindering circumstances.
In the publications of K. Ya. Lagunov, A. A. Petrushin, N. G. Tretyakov and V. I. Shishkin, there was a lot of evidence of the groundlessness of the statements of the Chekists, and after them Soviet memoirists and historians about the decisive role of counter-revolutionary conspiracies in Tyumen, Ishim and Tobolsk in the preparation of the rebellion, convincing documentary evidence is presented that refutes the allegations of the Chekists about the presence in the Tyumen province. a network of cells of the Siberian Peasant Union, which allegedly carried out counter-revolutionary work there. Thus, one of the key conclusions of Soviet historiography, which assigned a decisive role in the preparation of the rebellion to the Siberian Peasant Union and other underground organizations, was subjected to justified criticism as contradicting the facts.
However, this thesis cannot be considered completely overcome. For example, a strong "imprint" of Soviet historiography on this issue can be easily traced in all Lagunov's publications, including his last book. It is paradoxical, but true: the researcher, who did not hide his initial anti-communist methodological positions, his sympathy for the peasant rebels and antipathy towards the communist regime, when covering the issue of the role of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Siberian Peasant Union in the preparation of the West Siberian rebellion, did not was able to independently develop an objective scientific position. With great surprise, it turns out how the author, uncritically using sources of Chekist origin, depicts the creation, plans and activities of an underground network of cells of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and the Siberian Peasant Union in the Tyumen province. .
Here is how, for example, Lagunov sets out the intentions of the counter-revolutionary underground: “To propagandize and raise prosperous, masterful Siberian peasants against Soviet power, cut the Trans-Siberian Railway with their hands, tear Siberia away from Russia, turning it into an anti-Bolshevik foothold, provided with people, raw materials, food, and then under help from the American and Japanese imperialists to jump from it to revolutionary St. Petersburg—that was the idea the conspirators were hatching. Such statements raise quite legitimate questions about what documents this idea was presented in, where these documents are stored, and why did Lagunov not cite any of them in order to prove his point of view?
Rather confusing judgments are contained in Lagunov's book on the question of the results of the practical activities of the counter-revolutionary underground. In one case, oddly enough, he openly sided with V.I. Lenin, whom in his works he does not name other than the main culprit of all peasant troubles. It is well known that V. I. Lenin tried to lay part of the blame for the uprisings that swept across Russia in the spring of 1921 on the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, declaring that they “help the vacillating petty-bourgeois elements recoil from the Bolsheviks, make a“ shift of power ”... Such people help rebellions..." Lenin's hint came to Lagunov "to the court." "That's right - help the rebellions"! he literally exclaims. “This is perhaps the most accurate definition of the role of the Socialist-Revolutionaries in the peasant uprising of 1921.”
In another place, Lagunov argued something completely different, stating that "The Peasant Union played the prelude of the 1921 uprising like clockwork." But both of these judgments "hang" in the air due to the lack of reliable supporting facts in the book. Nevertheless, Lagunov repeated the interpretations of a number of problems that were given by Soviet historiography and were nothing more than a direct reflection of the KGB falsification. The latter clearly demonstrates how difficult it is for researchers to break through the multi-layered and dense veil of lies that some sources of communist origin contain.
The publication of OA Pyanova leaves an ambiguous impression. The undoubted merit of the author must be recognized as the introduction into scientific circulation of important information about people who were arrested in February - March 1921 and then repressed by the Omsk Gubchek as members of the military organization of the Omsk Committee of the Siberian Peasant Union (in Chekist documents it is called by the name of the one who was considered her the head of N. P. Gustomesov "Gustomesovskaya" White Guard-officer underground organization). On the basis of the identified sources, Pyanova concluded that this organization cannot be considered either an officer-White Guard in its composition or playing a leading role in relation to the peasant uprisings of early 1921.
At the same time, Pyanova made a serious mistake, considering the testimony given by Gustomesov and his accomplices to the Omsk Chekists during interrogations as reliable. As a result, Pyanova acknowledged the existence of a “gustomesovskaya” underground organization, believing that it was at the initial stage of creation, was not numerous and had little time to really do. Meanwhile, the personal composition of the “Gustomesovskaya” organization, in which, as Pyanova herself found out, the Omsk Chekists included two youths, two students and two women (one with two, the second with six children), should have suggested that in reality no underground organization existed.
This hypothesis is also supported by the fact that several “members” of the “Gustomesovskaya organization” did not plead guilty, but were shot, and subsequently rehabilitated as unreasonably repressed. As for the confessions of Gustomesov and several of his accomplices, they should not mislead researchers. Such testimonies were trivial self-incriminations, the technique of obtaining which the Omsk Chekists by that time mastered to perfection.
In the last publication of K. Ya. Lagunov, an attempt was made to understand another important problem - the reasons why the Tyumen provincial leadership pursued such a tough policy in the food issue and did not stop the arbitrariness of food workers. The researcher found a number of circumstances that, in his opinion, shed light on this problem: political adventurism and leftist overshoots of some Tyumen leaders (the perception of the Siberian village as entirely kulak), the careerism of others, their general spiritual underdevelopment and political lack of culture. True, all these judgments are too general, and they were made without "binding" to specific names and facts. Lagunov qualified the actions of the food workers themselves as aggravating the political situation in the countryside to the extreme, preparing fertile ground for the uprising and even provoking it.
It should be noted that the theme of the provocation of the West Siberian rebellion in Lagunov's last book is a refrain, and, as it were, in two aspects and on two levels: one is the policy of the central and local authorities, the other is the criminal actions of food workers. But the degree of reliability of these two storylines in Lagunov is different. The theme of provocation as an objective and unintentional result of the actions of food processors, especially in the Ishim district, sounds quite reasonable and convincing, although here, too, there are obvious overexposures. But this topic appears exclusively as an invention of the author when Lagunov begins to consider it at the level of the policy of the provincial leadership, and even more so at the level of party and government policy.
To illustrate, here are just two quotations. “What happened in the villages of the Tyumen province in 1920–21 is only a small part of the large-scale, all-Union organized and conducted by the Bolsheviks (as the author says. — V. Sh.) campaigns to stifle the peasantry, turning it into a submissive, uncomplaining estate, ”- such is one of the central conclusions of Lagunov.
Even more categorical is another conclusion, concluding in its essence. The author claims that in the Tyumen province, "a deliberate incitement of the Siberian peasant against the Soviet government" was carried out, that there was a "conscious provocation of an uprising" . However, any data that can confirm the author's position is not given in Lagunov's book.
As for the theses about the weakness of the local bodies of the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, about the prosperity of the peasantry and the high percentage of the kulaks in its composition as the causes of the West Siberian rebellion, in the publications of the 1990s, the opinion was expressed that these factors did not affect the concept of Soviet historiography at all. work", since they were common to all of Western Siberia and the Trans-Urals. The reference to these reasons does not explain why the uprising engulfed some areas of the West Siberian or Ural region, but did not occur in others. For example, why didn’t the rebellion break out in Altai province, the peasantry of which was more prosperous than the Tyumen, where there really was a fairly wide network of cells of the Siberian Peasant Union and where in the spring of 1921 the party-Soviet leadership of Siberia expected, but did not wait for a powerful anti-communist uprisings.
In the articles of N. G. Tretyakov and V. I. Shishkin, a completely different list and structure of the main reasons that caused the West Siberian rebellion, compared to those available in Soviet historiography, are proposed. This is the dissatisfaction of the population with the policy of the central and local, primarily provincial, authorities (surplus appropriations, mobilizations and labor duties), which did not take into account the real interests and objective capabilities of the peasantry, as well as indignation at the methods of implementing this policy, abuses and crimes of employees of the food authorities. As a direct reason, they indicate the announcement in mid-January 1921 of a seed allocation and attempts to carry it out in most of the Tyumen province. and in the Kurgan district, as well as the export of bread taken on account of the allotment from internal bulk points to the railway line for the purpose of subsequent shipment to central Russia. These conclusions are based on an analysis of reliable factual material, but at the same time they contradict individual sources of communist origin, which are distinguished by frank predestination and tendentiousness.
At the same time, post-Soviet publications of the 1990s note that when analyzing the causes of the West Siberian rebellion, one should by no means forget about purely political factors that had a deep origin and character. In particular, it is indicated that in the territory covered by the uprising, there were initially groups of the population that were opponents of the Soviet regime in principle and its communist variety as well. A particularly significant proportion of Siberians minded in this way was among the Cossacks, who were deprived by the communist regime of their traditional social status and their usual meaning of existence. Only in this way can one explain the high activity of participation in the rebellion of the Cossacks of the Petropavlovsk and Kokchetav districts, for whom the surplus was not as burdensome as for the Ishim peasants, especially if we take into account that the Cossacks sabotaged its implementation.
Opponents of the Communist Party and Soviet power were also in other social strata: among the peasantry, among the intelligentsia, office workers, former merchants and entrepreneurs. In the general mass of the population, their number was small. But it must be borne in mind that they were more resolute than other categories of the population, aimed at fighting the dictatorship of the proletariat and enjoyed authority among local residents due to their literacy, independence, diligence, economic success, etc.
Researchers of the 1990s, opposing previous Soviet historiography, believed that the West Siberian uprising was predominantly spontaneous. This general formulation is confirmed by reliable sources and raises no objections, but needs to be supplemented by a description of the spread of the insurgent movement across the territory of Western Siberia and the Trans-Urals. Unfortunately, a simplified view of the dynamics and mechanism of development of the West Siberian uprising has appeared in the latest literature. So, V.V. Moskovkin claims that people “without hesitation took up arms, barely hearing about the overthrow of the hated government from their neighbors”, writes “about a single impulse”, in which tens of thousands of peasants allegedly rose to fight against the communist regime. “Thus,” concludes Moskovkin, “the peasant uprising almost instantly spread to the vast territory of Western Siberia. The military units could not hold back the powerful onslaught of the rebels within the borders of the Ishim district only because it was supported by the overwhelming majority of the Trans-Ural peasants.
This picture is far from reality in many respects. First of all, it is wrong because the bulk of the peasants and Cossacks did not support the rebels, although many sympathized with them. Someone did not have the courage, someone considered resistance pointless, someone harbored the illusion that the local authorities were arbitrarily in spite of the top authorities. Moreover, part of the population (communists, Soviet workers, police officers, collective farmers) even took part in the suppression of the rebellion. But there was no "unified impulse" in the peasantry and the Cossacks. In fact, there were different attitudes and different behaviors of different people.
N. G. Tretyakov, and after him Moskovkin, supported the point of view of Soviet historiography about the Ishim district as a kind of epicenter of the uprising, from which it then spread to other territories, as well as the idea of the northern part of the Ishim district - the modern Abatsky district - as the initial rebellion point. In fact, as numerous sources testify, the West Siberian rebellion began not in one, but in several places. Its first outbreaks arose at about the same time and independently of each other in different districts of the Ishim, Yalutorovsk, Tyumen, Tara and Tyukalin districts. Among them, the Abatsky district stood out only in that the peasants who rebelled in it immediately entered into an armed conflict with the food detachments and detachments of the internal service troops (VNUS) located there, who guarded the bulk points and were engaged in escorting food cargoes, and at first even achieved success. As a result, information about the uprising in the Abatsky district immediately came through the military line to the county and provincial centers, as a result of which an erroneous impression was created about this area as the primary source of the rebellion.
In other areas, where there were no food detachments or units of the VNUS troops, for some time there was an accumulation of rebel forces, and their conflict with the local authorities became known not immediately and not in full. The latter does not mean at all that there was no influence of the rebels of the Abat region on the adjacent territories. It actually was, for example, on the nearby volosts of Tobolsk and Tara counties, but was not decisive in relation to all other regions.
In Soviet and post-Soviet literature, estimates of the total number of West Siberian rebels have been repeatedly cited, and recently the figure of one hundred thousand people has been increasingly mentioned. However, this figure cannot be considered scientifically substantiated. It is literally taken "from the ceiling." The first special attempt to understand this issue was made by Tretyakov, who came to the conclusion that the number of the eight largest rebel groups that existed in the second half of February - March 1921 was at least 40 thousand people. In our opinion, this figure is clearly underestimated, since N. G. Tretyakov, firstly, did not use all and not the most reliable sources, and secondly, he did not take into account the number of rebels throughout the rebel territory during the entire time of the uprising.
However, Moskovkin managed to thoroughly confuse this, in principle, a simple question that requires the search for additional reliable sources. On the one hand, the researcher, as it were, agreed with the estimates of his predecessors about the hundred thousandth number of rebels, on the other hand, in the final part of his article, he stated that “almost the entire peasantry of the Trans-Urals took part in the rebellion.” If we accept Moskovkin's last statement on faith, then the number of participants in the uprising should be increased by at least an order of magnitude. But the most important thing is that then new questions arise: who fought the rebels and why did a rebellion of this magnitude fail?!
In a fundamentally different way than in the studies of the Soviet period, the publications of the 1990s define the composition of the rebels. They emphasize the predominance among the rebels of peasants of all social strata without exception, the active participation of the Cossacks, the presence of representatives of the intelligentsia and employees. Most often, these statements are simply declared without attempts to study the real situation using sources. The only exception is the manuscript of Tretyakov's dissertation, which contains a large amount of factual material substantiating a new point of view. Despite the external similarity of this conclusion with what I. P. Pavlunovsky and P. E. Pomerantsev wrote about the West Siberian rebellion in the early 1920s, they are fundamentally different in their interpretation of the motives for which the Siberian peasants revolted. Tretyakov regards the rebellion as a defensive reaction of the population to state arbitrariness and violence.
Different points of view are expressed in the publications of the 1990s on the issue of the insurgent leadership. For example, in the book by K. Ya. Lagunov, the idea of a deep evolution, which over time was undergone by the leading cadres of the rebels and even the entire movement as a whole, is consistently carried out. On its pages, you can often find such or close to these statements: “As it grew in breadth and depth, the movement more and more definitely took on an SR coloring, more and more white officers, merchants, village rich, handicraftsmen became at the head of detachments, headquarters, “soviets” »; “The command staff of the rebels gradually acquired a white color, filled with former lower officers of the tsarist and Kolchak armies (ensigns, warrant officers, sergeants)”; “The West Siberian uprising, which arose spontaneously as a peasant revolt against the lawlessness and violence of the Bolsheviks, later became really Socialist-Revolutionary in its ideological essence, turned out to be a link in the chain of anti-Soviet uprisings supported by this party in the crisis years of 1920-1921” . In these conclusions, not supported by specific factual material, one can trace Lagunov's complete dependence on sources of communist and Chekist origin, his inability to critically analyze the available information. It’s even somewhat inconvenient to comment on Lagunov’s enrollment of sergeants among the “white” officers, especially if we recall the saying about ensigns that was widely used among officers, which even called into question their belonging to the Russian officer corps.
N. G. Tretyakov came to a different conclusion based on the study of specific material. Unlike Lagunov, Tretyakov believes that the ranks of the rebels, as a rule, were led by local initiative people who enjoyed the trust and authority of the local population, who had military knowledge, combat experience or social work skills, and their social status did not play a decisive role. The opinion of N. L. Proskuryakova, who studied the biography of G. D. Atamanov, one of the main leaders of the rebels in the Ishim district, coincides with Tretyakov’s assessment.
Based on the analysis of policy documents and slogans of the rebels in the literature of the 1990s, it was concluded that they lacked unity of views on the social and political structure of Russia. At the same time, the publications provide convincing evidence that the rebels from different regions were united by their rejection of the communist regime. On this basis, the opinion was expressed that the primary and main characteristic of the West Siberian uprising should be its anti-communist orientation. As for the positive component of the socio-political moods, views and practical behavior of the insurgents, it was most fully reflected in the slogan "For Soviets without Communists", although there were other political attitudes in the insurgent environment. However, their full spectrum and correlation have not yet been revealed in the literature. Nevertheless, one must agree with N. G. Tretyakov, who came to the conclusion that the slogan “For Soviets without Communists” “reflected the true political aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the rebellious peasants, linking their hopes for a better life with the Soviets, freed from the dictates of communist organizations » .
N. G. Tretyakov, who was supported by V. V. Moskovkin, questioned the thesis of Soviet historiography about the decisive influence of the decisions of the X Congress of the RCP (b) on the political situation in the West Siberian village, on the mood and behavior of the rebels. Mutually exclusive judgments on this issue are contained in the book of K. Ya. Lagunov. First, he claims that the transition to the tax in kind "did not change the Bolshevik methods of dealing with the peasant," then he writes that the defeat of the rebels "greatly contributed to the decision of the 10th Party Congress to abolish the food requisition." In principle, Tretyakov's hypothesis seems to be correct, but so far poorly substantiated by factual material. To prove it, a special study of the forms and methods of the struggle of the communist authorities against the insurrectionary movement in the spring and autumn of 1921 is necessary, which has not yet been done in the literature.
The only exception is the theses of Tretyakov himself, devoted to such an important plot as the violation of revolutionary legality by the “red” side during the liquidation of the West Siberian rebellion. The researcher made a fundamentally important conclusion that these violations took on a wide scale and even the local party and Soviet leadership qualified as manifestations of "red banditry".
Some new interpretations have appeared in modern literature on the nature and significance of the West Siberian uprising. For example, Lagunov, taking the famous Pushkin definition of "Pugachevism" as a rebellion "senseless and merciless" as the basis for his assessment, added two new epithets to it: "bloody" and "hopeless." The basis for qualifying the West Siberian uprising as hopeless was the unsatisfactory, according to Lagunov, the military-combat state of the insurgent movement, because of which it was doomed to inevitable defeat, and was interpreted as a senseless rebellion for the reason that "blood and torment, and the tears of many thousands did not save the Siberian peasant from serfdom.
Tretyakov approached the same issues in a different coordinate system. The researcher put the West Siberian uprising on a par with the “Antonovshchina” and the Kronstadt uprising politically and came to the conclusion that it “played a decisive role in the decision at the X Congress of the RCP (b) to abolish one of the main links in the system of“ war communism "- food apportionment" .
With the position of N. G. Tretyakov, without mentioning the author of this hypothesis, V. V. Moskovkin agreed. In his opinion, the uprising in Western Siberia was "one of the strongest factors that forced the Leninist leadership within one month to come to the realization of the need to revise the most important principles of the policy of" war communism "and begin the transition to the NEP" . However, if in relation to the “Antonovshchina” and Kronstadt such a conclusion has documentary evidence, then N. G. Tretyakov and V. V. Moskovkin do not brought, and they have not yet been found in archival sources. Everything was limited to another "bare" declaration, not related to historical research.
Moreover, in his last article, V.V. Moskovkin began to intensively develop the plot about the potential military danger of the West Siberian uprising for the communist regime on the scale of the whole of Russia. To this end, he painted a large-scale picture, which, however, has nothing to do with the true events. Forced actions of disparate insurgent detachments, leaving from under the blows of the red troops from the center of the rebellion to the periphery, V.V. Moskovkin portrayed as meaningful and purposeful intentions (it is not clear, however, whose, since the insurgents of Western Siberia had no unified leadership) to give the movement hardly not all-Russian character. He argued that the rebels sought to "transfer the uprising to the whole of Siberia and the Urals", that "their detachments advanced hundreds of kilometers deep into the Tomsk province", in the north-west "penetrated into the Arkhangelsk province, in the south into the Kazakh steppes" . According to V.V. Moskovkin, the events beyond the Urals “threatened the separation of Siberia from the rest of Russia, the opening of the eastern front and a new round of large-scale civil war.”
But even such strategic prospects for the imagination of V. V. Moskovkin were not the limit! The Kronstadt, Tambov and West Siberian uprisings, the historian believes, represented "in the event of their merger, a mortal threat to the power of the RCP (b)" . True, in a fever, the author only forgot to explain to the readers an important detail - how could such a “merger” take place?
Of course, a geopolitical analysis of the role of the West Siberian rebellion is necessary, but it should not be based on idle speculation and not with the help of the author's unbridled imagination, but be based on factual material and take into account the military-political realities of that time. In fact, the geographical remoteness of the West Siberian uprising from the vital centers of Soviet Russia had its "minuses" and "pluses". On the one hand, the uprising, despite the large number of its participants and territorial scope, did not pose a direct military threat to the capitals and the main proletarian regions (unlike the "Antonovshchina" and even more so from Kronstadt). But, on the other hand, it was precisely because of the remoteness of the West Siberian rebellion from the "red" center that it was more difficult to eliminate it.
However, the main phenomenon of the West Siberian uprising, contrary to the opinion of V.V. Moskovkin, was completely different: not at all in its direct military danger to the communist regime, but in an indirect, indirect threat, which consisted in the denial of Siberian bread to the center. It was thanks to this combination of objective circumstances that a unique situation developed, which can be formulated as follows: in February-March 1921, the question of the fate of state power was largely determined by the outcome of the armed struggle not in the center of the country, as almost always happened in the history of Russia, but in a remote province , in the vastness of Western Siberia.
An analysis of Russian historiography of the 1990s allows us to assert that the publications of this decade, at best, laid the foundation for a truly scientific concept of the history of the West Siberian rebellion. Their publication was not marked by the introduction into scientific circulation of a volume of information sufficient to turn the historiographic situation, and even more so, it did not solve the problem of a comprehensive study of the topic. Most of the works of the 1990s were written mainly within the narrow territorial boundaries of the Tyumen province. and mainly on the materials of the Tyumen archives. Even in the special dissertation of N. G. Tretyakov, which must be called the most profound and detailed work of the 1990s, the richest sources of the central archives of Russia, Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk are not used at all. If the study of “Antonovism” and the Kronstadt rebellion was crowned with the achievement of a qualitatively new state of historiography both at the factual and conceptual levels, then there was no such breakthrough in the study of the West Siberian uprising in the 1990s.
Moreover, as the content of the last book by K. Ya. Lagunov and the publications of V. V. Moskovkin testifies, in explaining a number of central issues in the history of the West Siberian rebellion, historians either continue to remain captive to the myths that were composed by the Chekists and replicated by Soviet historians, or create new myths, just as far from scientific views.
The last two years have been marked by a noticeable intensification of research interest in the history of the West Siberian uprising. During this time, the memoirs of the former head of the 2nd Northern Detachment of Soviet troops I.F. Sudnikovich, who took part in the suppression of the rebellion in the Ob north, articles and theses by I.V. Kuryshev, V.N. Menshikov, V.P. Petrova, A. A. Petrushin, N. G. Tretyakov, V. I. Shishkin.
These publications are unequal in their significance. For example, the articles by V.P. Petrova are of a generalizing essay character. They do not contain the formulation and solution of new scientific problems; they do not contain new factual data, which is to some extent justified by the genre of publications. But these articles lack the key plots and supporting facts necessary for any work of a generalizing nature. Moreover, in the publications of V.P. Petrova there are a number of factual errors and unsubstantiated statements. As a result, the topic stated in the articles did not receive any complete and convincing coverage.
The theses of V. N. Menshikov, A. A. Petrushin, and V. I. Shishkin are devoted to relatively particular subjects. So, V. I. Shishkin analyzed the materials of the archival and investigative case on the Tyumen “conspiracy of cornet Lobanov” stored in the FSB department for the Tyumen region. Based on an analysis of the available documents, he came to the conclusion that the “conspiracy of the cornet Lobanov” was an open provocation of local Chekists, whose goal was to explain the peasant uprising in the province by the intrigues of the counter-revolutionary underground.
V. N. Menshikov made an attempt to characterize the head of the Siberian rebel front in the south of the Ishim district, V. A. Rodin. It is based on a minimum of documents found in the personal file of teacher Rodin, stored in the Ishim branch of the state archive of the Tyumen region. The researcher's assessment of Rodin as a person who had an "independent and proud character", who was sensitive to injustice on the part of the authorities, who was sharp and unrestrained, seems close to the truth. Such an assessment is mainly confirmed by the information contained in the documents published by us, which are of insurgent origin. But it is incomplete.
A short list of the main areas of activity of the authorities created by the rebels in Surgut and Tobolsk is contained in the theses of A. A. Petrushin. Unfortunately, the author mostly limited himself to quoting sources without resorting to their analysis.
Publications by I. V. Kuryshev and N. G. Tretyakov are devoted to the most important issues of the West Siberian uprising. N. G. Tretyakov gave a more complete and detailed picture of the location and the number of rebels in February-March 1921 than in the 1994 theses. , exceeded 40 thousand people.
The task of analyzing the appearance and behavior of the rebels was undertaken by IV Kuryshev. But the author could not cope with such a complex topic. The factual material cited in the article is presented haphazardly, and the conclusions are neither novel nor convincing.
A notable event in the study of the West Siberian uprising was a special scientific conference held in May 2001 in Ishim, dedicated to the 80th anniversary of this tragic event. Of the thirty published speeches, two thirds in one way or another relate to the stated issues of the conference. Of great interest are the theses of A. S. Ivanenko about the Tyumen provincial food commissar G. S. Indenbaum, N. L. Proskuryakova about the commanders of the rebel detachment N. S. Grigoriev, I. L. Sikachenko and P. S. Shevchenko, N. N Skarednova about the commander of the Golyshmanovsky detachment CHON. G. G. Pischike, I. F. Firsova on the position of the employees of the Ishim district police on the eve and during the rebellion, V. A. Shuldyakov on the participation of the Cossacks in the uprising. Thanks to the publication of these theses, interesting factual material was introduced into scientific circulation, revealing little-studied issues of the topic. It is especially important that the researchers turned to the study of the biographies of people who found themselves on opposite sides of the front line during the rebellion. True, the level of theoretical comprehension of the considered issues turned out to be low.
The most important contribution to the development of the topic was the publication in 2000-2001. two special documentary collections. In the first of them, the rebellious events are covered within the borders of the Tyumen province, in the second - on the scale of the entire rebel territory. Together, both collections contain about 1,400 documents extracted mainly from central and local archives, including the Tyumen Region Directorate of the Federal Security Service.
These documents cover a wide range of issues that give an idea of the key events of the West Siberian uprising: the policy of the Soviet government in the countryside in the autumn of 1920 - in the winter of 1921; the mood and reaction of the population to this policy; the dynamics and geography of the rebellion; organizational arrangements and behavior of the insurgents; the relationship between the rebels and the population; the activities of the Soviet authorities to suppress the rebellion, including the participation of the organs of the Cheka and revolutionary tribunals; combat actions of the parties; the ratio of political, military and punitive measures used by the Soviet government to eliminate the rebellion. The materials published in the collections show the immediate results and long-term consequences of the West Siberian uprising, including repressions against its participants during the 1920s and 1930s. Of particular interest are the documents of the insurgent side and the materials of the punitive organs of the Soviet government: provincial emergency commissions, district politburos, revolutionary and military revolutionary tribunals.
The corpus of sources introduced into scientific circulation is fundamental for the analysis of the phenomenon of the West Siberian uprising. It provides the key to understanding the true causes, driving forces, nature and tragic ending of the rebellion. I would like to hope that the documents published in the collections will become the foundation, based on which researchers will go further and deeper in the study of the West Siberian uprising of 1921, will create its full-scale and objective picture.
NOTES
- Basmanov V.I. Kulak-Socialist-Revolutionary rebellion of 1921 in the Tyumen province (on the historiography of the issue) // Uch. app. Tyumen state. university. Tyumen, 1976, v.34; Historiography of the peasantry of Soviet Siberia. Novosibirsk, 1976; Shishkin V.I. Soviet historiography of the 20s - early 30s about the struggle against the armed counter-revolution in Siberia after the defeat of Kolchak // Questions of the historiography of socialist construction in Siberia. Novosibirsk, 1976; Skipina I. V. The history of the peasant uprising of 1921 in Western Siberia in the studies of the 20s. // Tyumen historical collection. Tyumen, 2000, issue 4; She is. Historians on the role of food workers in the events of 1921 in the Tyumen province // State power and the Russian (Siberian) peasantry during the years of revolution and civil war. Ishim, 2001.
- Pomerantsev P. West Siberian uprising of 1921 // Red Army of Siberia. Novonikolaevsk, 1922, 2; Heifetz K. White banditry. Soviets without communists (the history of the Narym-Surgut banditry) // Past Siberia. Tomsk, 1923, 2; Sidorov P. Kurgan uprising in January 1921 (according to personal recollections) // Proletarian Revolution. M., 1926, 6; Chernyshev V. Protection of Petropavlovsk // Krasnaya Nov. M., 1932, book. 2.
- Belyashov M. Ya. The defeat of the kulak rebellion in the Trans-Urals in 1921 // On the land of Kurgan. Kurgan, 1953, 3; He is. The defeat of the kulak rebellion in 1921 // Siberian expanses. Tyumen, 1958, 2; Budarin M. E. The defeat of the Socialist-Revolutionary-Kulak uprising of 1921 // Notebook of an agitator of the Omsk Regional Committee of the CPSU. Omsk, 1957, 2; Belimov I. T. The defeat of the Surgut kulak rebellion in 1921 // Uch. app. Tyumen state. ped. institute. Tyumen, 1958, v.5, issue 2; Bogdanov M. A. The defeat of the Ishim-Peter and Paul rebellion of 1921 // Uch. app. Ishim State ped. institute. Tyumen, 1959, v.13. issue 4; He is. The defeat of the kulak-SR rebellion in the Petropavlovsk-Kokchetav region in 1921 // Reports and messages on the history of Siberia and the Far East. Tomsk, 1960; He is. To the question of the socio-economic consequences of the West Siberian kulak-SR rebellion of 1921 // Uch. app. Tyumen state. ped. institute. Tyumen, 1962, v.15, issue 3; Anistratenko V.P. Measures of the party organizations of the Urals to eliminate the kulak revolt of 1921 // From the history of the party organizations of the Urals. Sverdlovsk, 1971.
- Lagunov K. Twenty first. Chronicle of the Siberian rebellion // Ural. Sverdlovsk, 1989, 5 - 6; Shuldyakov V. A. Some questions of the history of the West Siberian uprising of 1921 // History and society in the panorama of centuries. Materials of the All-Union Baikal Historical School (July 19–24, 1990). Irkutsk, 1990, part 2; He is. The tragedy of the 21st year // Irtysh. Omsk, 1991, 1; Petrushin A. A. New in the study of the history of the West Siberian rebellion of 1921 // History of Soviet Russia: new facts, judgments. (Abstracts of reports and reports of the republican scientific conference. Tyumen, May 11–12, 1991). Tyumen, 1991, part 2; Fominykh A.V. Intelligentsia and employees of the Tyumen province during the West Siberian rebellion of 1921 // Intelligentsia in the system of social class structure and relations of Soviet society. Kemerovo, 1991, issue 2.
- Bogdanov M. The defeat of the West Siberian kulak-SR rebellion of 1921 Tyumen, 1961; Lagunov K. Twenty first. Chronicle of the West Siberian peasant uprising. Sverdlovsk, 1991.
- [Mitropolskaya T. B., Pavlovich O. V.] From the history of the Ishim-Peter and Paul uprising (publication of the report of a member of the Kokchetav district committee of the RCP (b) F. V. Voronov dated March 31, 1921) // Party life of Kazakhstan, 1991, 10.
- Yaroslavsky E. About the peasant union // Bulletin of agitation and propaganda. M., 1921, 11–12; Pavlunovskiy I. Siberian Peasant Union // Siberian Lights. Novonikolaevsk, 1922, 2; He is. Review of the bandit movement in Siberia from December 1920 to January 1922 Novonikolaevsk, 1922; Pomerantsev P. The Red Army of Siberia on the home front. (The fight against uprisings in the rear for 1920–22) // Red Army of Siberia. Novonikolaevsk, 1923, 3–4; Warriors N. , Lebedev I. fiery years. Red Army in Siberia. Novosibirsk, 1927; Korushin T. D. Days of Revolution and Soviet Construction in the Ishim District (1917–1926). Ishim, 1926; He is. 10 years of Soviet power in the Ishim district. Ishim, 1927; Ivanov I. A. The struggle for the establishment of Soviet power in the north of the Ob (1917–1921). Khanty-Mansiysk, 1957; Beloglazov I.I. From the history of the extraordinary commissions of Siberia (February 1918 - February 1922). M., 1960; Essays on the history of the party organization of the Tyumen region. Tyumen, 1965; Nikolaev P.F. Soviet Militia of Siberia (1917–1922). Omsk, 1967; A. G. Zapadovnikova Siberian peasantry in the course of the struggle against the kulak counter-revolution in 1920–1922. // The Soviet peasantry is an active participant in the struggle for socialism and communism. Barnaul, 1969; She is. Struggle against kulak counter-revolution in Western Siberia during the period of transition from civil war to peaceful socialist construction (1920–1922). Abstract of the dissertation for the degree of candidate of historical sciences. Novosibirsk, 1969; Abramenko I. A. Communist formations - special purpose units (CHON) of Western Siberia (1920–1924). Tomsk, 1973; Budarin M. E. Were about Chekists. Omsk, 1976; He is. Chekists. Omsk, 1987; Peasantry of Siberia in the period of building socialism (1917–1937). Novosibirsk, 1983; Grigoriev V.K. The defeat of the petty-bourgeois counter-revolution in Kazakhstan (1920–1921). Alma-Ata, 1984; Metelsky N. N. Village of the Urals in the conditions of "war communism" (1919-1921). Sverdlovsk, 1991.
- Trifonov I. Ya. Classes and the class struggle in the USSR at the beginning of the NEP (1921–1923). Part 1. Fight against the armed kulak counter-revolution. L., 1964; Polyakov Yu. A. The transition to the NEP and the Soviet peasantry. M., 1967; Kukushkin Yu.S. Rural Soviets and the class struggle in the countryside (1921–1932). M., 1968; Golinkov D. L. The collapse of the anti-Soviet underground in the USSR. M., 1975 (as well as all subsequent editions); Barikhnovsky G.F. The ideological and political collapse of the white emigration and the defeat of the internal counter-revolution (1921–1924). L., 1978; Mukhachev Yu. A. Ideological and political bankruptcy of the plans of bourgeois restoration in the USSR. M., 1982; Shchetinov Yu. A. The collapse of the petty-bourgeois counter-revolution in Soviet Russia (late 1920-1921). M., 1984.
- See: Civil war and intervention in the USSR. Encyclopedia. M., 1983, pp. 214–215.
- This is convincingly evidenced by the fact that the Russian State Military Archive has preserved a manuscript about the West Siberian uprising written by P. E. Pomerantsev in the wake of events, numbering about a thousand pages of text, and also containing numerous, including unique, documentary applications.
- Pomerantsev P. West Siberian uprising of 1921, p.40.
- P. Pomerantsev believed that it was in the truly peasant setting of the West Siberian rebellion that “its main public interest and drama lie” (see: Pomerantsev P. West Siberian uprising of 1921, p. 42).
- Bogdanov M. The defeat of the West Siberian kulak-SR rebellion of 1921, p.30.
- Pomerantsev P. West Siberian uprising of 1921, pp. 37–39; Bogdanov M. The defeat of the West Siberian kulak-SR rebellion of 1921, p.31.
- Shishkin V.I. Soviets of Siberia at the end of 1920 - beginning of 1921 // Essays on the socio-economic and cultural life of Siberia. Novosibirsk, 1972, part 2; He is. On the social nature of anti-Soviet armed uprisings in the Siberian village (late 1919 - early 1921) // Questions of the history of the socio-economic and cultural life of Siberia. Novosibirsk, 1976.
- I. P. Pavlunovsky argued that “the rebellious peasantry was organized and had only military leadership. Politically, however, it was unorganized and dispersed - there was no large and authoritative organization at the head of the insurgent peasantry. (Cm.: Pavlunovskiy I. Review of the bandit movement in Siberia from December 1920 to January 1922, p. 23).
- Pomerantsev P. West Siberian uprising of 1921, pp. 40–41; Bogdanov M. The defeat of the West Siberian kulak-SR rebellion of 1921, pp. 26–27, 34–35.
- Bogdanov M. The defeat of the West Siberian kulak-SR rebellion of 1921, pp. 29–31.
- Indeed, among the leaders of the Tobolsk rebels there was a man named Svatosh. Bogumil Vladislavovich Svatosh was a process engineer by education, spoke several foreign languages, and from November 1920 he worked in Tobolsk as the head of the department of the lower Ob-Irtysh regional fisheries administration. He never served in the White Army, did not have the rank of colonel and, accordingly, was not an adjutant to General R. Gaida. Apparently, during the rebellion, he arbitrarily appropriated the rank of colonel and the position of Gaida's adjutant. The Tyumen security officers knew perfectly well that Svatosh was not who he claimed to be, but they gladly supported this version, since it "worked" for their concept of the White Guard-officer leadership of the rebellion. Then this version was widely picked up by Soviet memoirists and historians, who uncritically followed the sources.
- In an article published in 1958, M. Ya. Belyashov cited this information with reference to the Tobolsk branch of the State Archives of the Tyumen Region. The verification carried out by K. Ya. Lagunov showed that there is no such information in the archival file referred to by M. Ya. Belyashov. (Cm.: Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily ... Tyumen, 1994, p. 96). A similar situation was revealed when we checked most of the information given in the article by I. T. Belimov. It turned out that in the state archive of the Novosibirsk region there is not and never was the fund from which, as I. T. Belimov claimed, he drew the bulk of the factual data used in his article.
- As a result of this approach of Soviet historians to assessing the activities of the communists, the former employee of the Riga police and the well-known criminal T. D. Senkin, the drunkard and debaucher V. A. Danilov, the careerist and petty tyrant G. S. Indenbaum got into the “fighters for the people’s happiness”.
- Bogdanov M. The defeat of the West Siberian kulak-SR rebellion of 1921, p.40.
- Ibid., p.70, 102.
- Ibid., p.37.
- Ibid., pp. 36–37, 96.
- Turhansky P.(memories). Peasant uprising in Western Siberia in 1921 // Siberian archive. Prague, 1929, 2, p.69;
- Ibid., p.71.
- “In every village, in every village,” wrote P. Turkhansky, “the peasants began to beat the communists: they killed their wives, children, relatives; they chopped with axes, chopped off their arms and legs, opened their bellies. The food workers were dealt with especially cruelly.”
- Ibid., p.71.
- Frankin M. The tragedy of peasant uprisings in Russia (1918–1921). Jerusalem, 1987.
- Ibid., pp. 122, 125.
- Ibid., p.127.
- Ibid., pp.126–127.
- Verstiuk V. Brigade commander Nestor Makhno. Kharkov, 1990; Komin V.V. Makhno: myths and reality. M., 1990; Semanov S. Makhno as he is. M., 1991; Nestor Ivanovich Makhno. Memoirs, materials, documents. Kyiv, 1991; Golovanov V. Ya. Carts from the south. Artistic study of the Makhnovist movement. M. - Zaporozhye. 1997; Telitsyn V. Nestor Makhno. Historical chronicle. M. - Smolensk, 1998; Shubin A.V. Makhno and the Makhnovist movement. M., 1998; Akhinko V. M. Nestor Makhno. M., 2000.
- Soboleva A. A. Peasant uprising in the Tambov province (1920–1922). Bibliographic index. Tambov, 1994; Peasant uprising in the Tambov province in 1919-1921. "Antonovshchina". Documents and materials. Tambov, 1994; and etc.
- Kronstadt 1921. Documents about the events in Kronstadt in the spring of 1921. M., 1997; and etc.
- Shuldyakov V. A. Some questions of the history of the West Siberian uprising of 1921; He is. Riot // Siberian newspaper (Novosibirsk), 1991, 1; He is. The tragedy of the 21st year; Shtyrbul A. An event that could not have happened // Omskaya Pravda (Omsk), February 2 and 7, 1991; Novikov S. A rebellion that might not have happened // Evening Omsk (Omsk), February 12, 1991
- Belyavskaya O. A. On the moral and psychological qualities of the communists who fought against the rebels in the Tyumen north in February - March 1921 // History of the peasantry of the Urals and Siberia during the civil war. Abstracts of the All-Russian scientific conference dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the West Siberian peasant uprising of 1921. Tyumen, 1996.
- Bolshakov V.P. The uprising of the peasants of the Tyumen province in 1921 // Abstracts of reports and messages of the scientific-practical conference "Slovtsovsky Readings - 95". Tyumen, 1996; He is. Prologue of the peasant uprising of 1921 in the Tyumen province // History of the peasantry of the Urals and Siberia during the civil war.
- Ermakov I. I. Food detachments in the Tyumen province (1920–1921) // History of the peasantry of the Urals and Siberia during the civil war.
- Kutsan F. G. Law enforcement agencies of the city of Tobolsk during the period of the West Siberian peasant uprising // Tyumen historical collection. Tyumen, 1999, issue 3.
- Kuryshev I.V. Peasant War // Siberian Land, Far East. Omsk, 1993, 5–6, 7;
- Moskovkin V.V."Voice of the People's Army" - the newspaper of the insurgent peasants // History of the peasantry of the Urals and Siberia during the civil war; Moskovkin V.V. , Ilder M. A. Principles of organizing power of the West Siberian peasants who rebelled in 1921 // Abstracts of reports and messages of the scientific-practical conference "Slovtsovsky Readings - 96". Tyumen, 1997; Moskovkin V.V. The uprising of the West Siberian peasants and the transition to the New Economic Policy // "Slovtsovsky Readings - 97". Abstracts of reports and messages of the scientific-practical conference. Tyumen, 1997; He is. The uprising of the peasants in Western Siberia in 1921 // Questions of history, 1998, 6.
- Petrova V.P. The uprising of 1921 in the Tyumen province // History of the peasantry of the Urals and Siberia during the civil war.
- I. F. Plotnikov Peasant uprising in the Urals and Western Siberia in 1921 // Chronicle of the Ural villages. Yekaterinburg, 1995.
- Proskuryakova N. L. Strokes to the biography of the commander of the Ishim rebel army Grigory Atamanov // "Slovtsovsky Readings - 97".
- Pyanova O. A. Military organization of the Omsk Committee of the "Siberian Peasants' Union" // Proceedings of the Omsk State Museum of History and Local Lore. Omsk, 1999, 7.
- Rassamahin Yu.K. Anti-Bolshevik uprising in the Surgut Ob region: a chronicle of events // Aleksandrovskaya Land. Collection of popular science essays for the 75th anniversary of the formation of the Aleksandrovsky district. Tomsk, 1999.
- Tretyakov N. G. On the question of the emergence of the West Siberian uprising of 1921 // The role of Siberia in the history of Russia. Bakhrushin Readings 1993 Novosibirsk, 1993; He is. On the political mood of the peasantry in the territory covered by the West Siberian uprising of 1921 // History of Soviet Russia: new ideas, judgments. Abstracts of the reports of the second republican scientific conference. Tyumen, 1993, part 1; He is. The number of participants in the West Siberian uprising of 1921 // Proceedings of the XXXII International Student Conference "Student and Scientific and Technical Progress". Novosibirsk, 1994, section "History"; He is. The composition of the governing bodies of the West Siberian uprising of 1921 // Humanities in Siberia. Series: Domestic history. Novosibirsk, 1994, 2; He is. West Siberian uprising of 1921. Abstract of the dissertation for the degree of candidate of historical sciences. Novosibirsk, 1994; He is. On the question of the political orientation of the West Siberian uprising of 1921 (the attitude of the rebels to the Soviets) // History of the peasantry of the Urals and Siberia during the civil war; He is. On the history of the peasant uprising of 1921 in the Tobolsk north // Abstracts of reports and messages of the scientific-practical conference "Slovtsovsky Readings - 96"; He is. Once again about the social nature of the West Siberian uprising of 1921 // "Slovtsovsky Readings - 97"; He is. From the history of the liquidation of the West Siberian peasant uprising of 1921 (red banditry) // Totalitarianism in Russia (USSR) 1917–1991: opposition, repression. Materials of scientific-practical conferences. Perm, 1998.
- Shepeleva V. B. West Siberian (Peter and Paul-Ishim) peasant uprising as an episode of the common historical fate of Russia and Kazakhstan // Stepnoy Krai: the zone of interaction between the Russian and Kazakh peoples (XVIII–XX centuries). International scientific conference dedicated to the 175th anniversary of the Omsk region. Abstracts of reports and communications. Omsk, 1998.
- Shishkin V.I. On the characteristics of the socio-political moods and views of the participants in the West Siberian rebellion of 1921 // Humanitarian sciences in Siberia. Series: Domestic history. Novosibirsk, 1996, 2; He is. To the question of the role of the Siberian Peasants' Union in the preparation of the West Siberian rebellion of 1921 // Siberia at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. Novosibirsk, 1997; He is. // Humanities in Siberia. Series: Domestic history. Novosibirsk, 1997, 2; He is. To the question of the causes of the West Siberian uprising of 1921 // Siberian village: history, current state, development prospects. Omsk, 1998; He is. West Siberian rebellion of 1921: circumstances and causes of occurrence // Socio-cultural development of Siberia in the 17th–20th centuries. Bakhrushin Readings 1996 Novosibirsk, 1998; He is. West Siberian rebellion of 1921: some problems of study // Ural in the past and present. Proceedings of the Scientific Conference (February 24–25, 1998). Yekaterinburg, 1998, part 1; He is. "Break into the board - hand over the layout!". Soviet food policy in the Ishim district of the Tyumen province (September 1920 - January 1921) // Humanities in Siberia. Series: Domestic history. Novosibirsk, 1999, 2.
- Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily ... Tyumen, 1994.
- Shangin M. No cross, no stone. Novel. Omsk, 1997.
- Essays on the history of the Tyumen region. Tyumen, 1994; Moskovkin V.V. Confrontation of political forces in the Urals and Western Siberia during the revolution and civil war (1917–1921). Tyumen, 1999.
- M. S. Shangin's book can hardly be called a work of art, since half of its 480-page text consists of lengthy quotations copied from various sources stored in the 1818 fund ("Collection of documents on the history of the West Siberian rebellion of 1921") of the state archive Omsk region. Moreover, the sources are reproduced by Shangin completely thoughtlessly with all the numerous mechanical and factual errors contained in them. All these documents are poorly connected with the actual "artistic" part of the book.
The novel was written by Shangin with undisguised antipathy towards all communists encountered on its pages. As for the objectivity and reliability of the author's position, it can be judged at least by this fact. In order to give the events of greater significance, M.S. Shangin arbitrarily "removes" from the post of chairman of the Siberian Food Committee the well-known food worker Pyotr Kirillovich Koganovich, and instead of him "appoints" an even more famous communist leader - Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich, who, however, had nothing to do with neither to Siberia, nor even to the emergence of the West Siberian rebellion. (See: Shangin M. No cross, no stone., p.60).
- Here is one of the examples of "understanding" by V.P. Bolshakov of the problems he studied. The author quoted in the theses a fragment from the speech of the Tyumen Provincial Commissar G.S. Indenbaum on September 2, 1920 at a meeting of party and Soviet activists, in which Indenbaum proposed militarizing the food authorities of the province "with all the ensuing consequences." "To militarize" means nothing more than to introduce army orders, military discipline, and nothing more in the food organs. Bolshakov, however, interpreted the demand for militarization of the food apparatus quite differently. “It was essentially a declaration of open war on the civilian population of the province,” he says. “The provocative nature of this proposal is obvious.” (See: Bolshakov V.P. The uprising of the peasants of the Tyumen province in 1921, p.76).
- In order not to be unfounded, I will cite only some elementary factual errors made by V. V. Moskovkin, which are easily verified and established from sources and literature.
So, Moskovkin claims that out of 110 million poods of bread (correctly - forage) assigned to Siberia according to the apportionment of 1920/1921, to the Tyumen province. accounted for 6.5 million poods (p. 47). In fact, at that time in terms of food Tyumen province. was not part of Siberia, and the amount of bread-forage, assigned according to the allocation of the center for the Tyumen province, was not included in the all-Siberian allocation (by the way, V.P. Petrova repeats a similar mistake from publication to publication).
The village of Staro-Travnoye in the Larikhinsky volost was erroneously called Staropravny, and Novo-Loktinskoye in the Uktuz volost was called Povolkinsky (p. 50).
The author argues that by mid-February 1921, under the pressure of the rebels, units of the Red Army were retreating, “leaving the cities”, that the uprising engulfed “the entire Kurgan district” (p. 51). In fact, the rebels captured the first two cities - Kokchetav and Tobolsk a week later, and in the Kurgan district the rebellion covered only the northeastern part and there was no "encirclement" of Kurgan, which allegedly had to be broken through (p. 52).
Martial law in Kurgan Uyezd was not introduced on February 4 (p. 51), but by Decree 8 of the Presidium of the Chelyabinsk Provincial Executive Committee of Soviets of February 11 and Order No. 8 of the Kurgan Uyezd Executive Committee of Soviets of February 12, 1921.
The decision to shoot 24 hostages was taken by the communist authorities of the Kurgan district not in mid-February, as can be understood from the text of Moskovkin's article (p. 52), but on March 1, 1921.
The city of Petropavlovsk changed hands not three times (p. 52), but only twice. Here, the rebels captured not 8 guns, but only two, one of which was damaged. In fact, the rebels took 8 guns and several machine guns at the station. Ozernaya.
The rebels made no attempts to capture the county towns of Akmolinsk and Atbasar (p. 52).
The village of Yudino (also known as Voznesenskoye) was located in Ishim, and not in the Petropavlovsk district (p. 56).
According to the "case of S. G. Lobanov" in Tyumen, not 39, but 38 people were arrested, 17 of whom were sentenced to death not by an emergency troika, but by an expanded meeting of the collegium of the Tyumen provincial committee with the participation of the secretary of the provincial committee of the RCP (b) S. P. Aggeev and Chairman of the Provincial Executive Committee of Soviets S. A. Novoselov. This sentence was carried out not on March 4 (p. 58), but on March 2, 1921.
In February 1921, the Soviet authorities did not impose martial law on the territory of the Trans-Urals (pp. 59-60). This was done only within a few counties.
There were no three sections - Northern (Ishimsky), Southern (Petropavlovsky) and Western (Kamyshlovsko-Shadrinsky) - for the control of Soviet troops (p. 60), just as "powerful defensive lines" were not created by the rebels (p. 60-61 ) in the area of Golyshmanovo and Yarkovo.
The list of errors can be continued. In this case, we do not present a large number of completely absurd judgments and statements of Moskovkin, which are the result of the author's interpretation of the sources and his peculiar understanding - more precisely, misunderstanding - of the events that took place.
- As for the internal contradictions present in Moskovkin's article, I will cite only one of them, but perhaps the most significant.
On page 54, Moskovkin claims that “Soviet institutions were abolished and pre-Bolshevik institutions were restored” on the territory liberated by the rebels, and literally on the next, page 55, he writes that the rebels “preserved the soviets as organs of power. Thus, the slogan “For Soviets Without Communists” was put into practice.”
- But Moskovkin's assertions that in a matter of days control over the Tyumen province are especially striking in their peremptory and irresponsible. on the part of the Soviet authorities “was lost” or that the insurgents’ slogan “For Soviets without Communists” was “implemented with extreme cruelty” (p. 57).
- Bolshakov V.P. Prologue of the peasant uprising of 1921 in the Tyumen province, p.9.
- Shishkin V.I. On the question of the role of the Siberian Peasants' Union in the preparation of the West Siberian rebellion of 1921
- And all this K. Ya. Lagunov writes, based on information from the Tyumen gubchek, despite the fact that from time to time insight seems to come to him. And then, in the text of the book, one can come across such curious remarks by the author: “If you believe the reports and reports of the GubChK”; “The author accepted (sic! — V. Sh.) information of the gubChK on faith ... "; “Local party workers at that time testified to the presence in the villages of underground Socialist-Revolutionary cells and circles conducting anti-Soviet propaganda, but none of those who claimed this (including the Gubernia Cheka and the Gubernia Committee) indicated neither villages, nor surnames, nor dates. Deprived of such a factual basis, these assurances lose the force of a document, hang in the air…”, “Unfortunately, I have not found a single concrete example of such actions”, etc. (See: Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily ... p.23, 26, 32, 34). I consider it necessary to emphasize that such confessions at the same time do K. Ya. Lagunov credit by characterizing him as a conscientious researcher.
- Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily… p.23.
- Ibid., p.33.
- There.
- Pyanova O. A. Military organization of the Omsk Committee of the Siberian Peasant Union, pp. 207, 210.
- Ibid., pp. 207, 209.
- Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily... pp. 44–45, 47, 65–66, 68, 70–71.
- For example, the following statement by K. Ya. Lagunov, in which reality and fiction are closely intertwined, is not entirely correct: “If we could put together all of them (production workers. — V. Sh.) criminal actions, to name the numbers of innocently shot, arrested, raped, robbed, humiliated and insulted peasants, it would turn out to be a deafening accusatory document, testifying to the desire of the provincial party organization to use the surplus appropriation as a lever to bend and break the transverse Siberian peasant. (See: Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily ... p. 45).
- Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily… p.55.
- Ibid., p.71.
- Shishkin V.I. On the issue of a new concept of the history of the West Siberian uprising of 1921
- Tretyakov N. G. On the issue of the emergence of the West Siberian uprising of 1921; Shishkin V. I. To the question of the causes of the West Siberian uprising of 1921; He is. West Siberian rebellion of 1921: circumstances and causes of occurrence.
- Shishkin V.I. On the issue of a new concept of the history of the West Siberian uprising of 1921
- Moskovkin V.V. Peasant uprising in Western Siberia in 1921, pp. 51, 53, 63.
- Ibid, p. 52.
- modern historians, this point of view was supported by N. G. Tretyakov and V. V. Moskovkin.
- This conclusion coincides with the opinion of K. Ya. Lagunov, who asserts that “there is evidence that the first spark of the movement appeared in the “foreign” Tukuz and Karagai volosts of the Tobolsk district.” (See: Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily ... p. 80). In the book by K. Ya. Lagunov, the Karagay volost is erroneously called Karachay.
- Civil war and military intervention in the USSR, p.215; Essays on the history of the Tyumen region, p.104.
- Tretyakov N. G. The number of participants in the West Siberian uprising of 1921 (source analysis); He is. West Siberian uprising of 1921. Abstract, p. 17.
- N. G. Tretyakov did not use the most important reconnaissance and operational and analytical documents of the military authorities, the funds of which are stored in the RGVA, the most important of which is the fund of the "Headquarters of the Assistant Commander-in-Chief of all the Armed Forces of the Republic in Siberia", but worked only with part of the reconnaissance and operational reports and reports deposited in local archives.
- Moskovkin V.V.
- Cm.: Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily… pp.99–100, 108. Note that K. Ya. Lagunov bases his conclusions on data relating to only one very specific Tobolsk insurgent region, where the townspeople and urban intelligentsia were most involved in the insurrectionary leadership. Many of the characteristics that K. Ya. Lagunov gave in his book to the Tobolsk insurgent leaders are exceptionally tendentious and completely untrue.
- Tretyakov N. G. The composition of the governing bodies of the West Siberian uprising of 1921
- Proskuryakova N. L. Strokes to the biography of the commander of the Ishim rebel army Grigory Atamanov.
- Tretyakov N. G. On the political mood of the peasantry in the territory covered by the West Siberian uprising of 1921; He is. On the question of the political orientation of the West Siberian uprising of 1921 (the attitude of the rebels towards the Soviets); He is. Once again about the social nature of the West Siberian uprising of 1921; Shishkin V.I. On the characteristics of the socio-political moods and views of the participants in the West Siberian rebellion of 1921
- Tretyakov N. G. On the question of the political orientation of the West Siberian uprising of 1921 (the attitude of the rebels towards the Soviets), p.66.
- Tretyakov N. G. West Siberian uprising of 1921. Abstract, p.20; Moskovkin V.V. Peasant uprising in Western Siberia in 1921, p.63.
- Lagunov K. Ya. And the snow is falling heavily... pp. 155, 160.
- Tretyakov N. G. From the history of the liquidation of the West Siberian peasant uprising of 1921 (red banditry).
- Lagunov K. Ya. And the snow is falling heavily... pp. 101, 164.
- Tretyakov N. G. West Siberian uprising of 1921. Abstract, p.20.
- Moskovkin V.V. Peasant uprising in Western Siberia in 1921, p.59.
- Ibid., p.57. One can only be surprised that V.V. Moskovkin forgot about the retreat of the rebel division under the command of S.G. Tokarev beyond the Chinese border and, on this basis, did not try to give the West Siberian rebellion an international scale.
- Ibid., p.59.
- Ibid., p.46.
- Sudnikovich A. N. From the memoirs of the head of the Obdorsk military garrison I.F. Sudnikovich // West Siberian peasant uprising of 1921. Materials of History Day (February 15, 2001). Tyumen, 2001.
- Petrova V.P. Peasant uprising in the Tyumen province in 1921 // Tyumen historical collection. Tyumen, 2000, issue 4; She is. What the history of the Siberian uprising teaches // West Siberian peasant uprising of 1921.
- Shishkin V.I. Tyumen "conspiracy of Cornet Lobanov" (February 1921) // History of White Siberia. Abstracts of the 4th Scientific Conference (February 6–7, 2001). Kemerovo, 2001.
- Menshikov V.N. Teacher V. A. Rodin: on the characteristics of one of the leaders of the peasant uprising of 1921 // Western Siberia: problems of history and historiography. Abstracts of reports and reports of the regional scientific conference (Nizhnevartovsk, November 28–29, 2000). Nizhnevartovsk, 2000.
- Petrushin A. A. Peculiarities of authorities created in the territory controlled by the rebels (on the example of the Surgut Committee of Public Security and the Tobolsk Peasant-City Council) // West Siberian Peasant Uprising of 1921.
- Tretyakov N. G. Mass sources on the number of participants in the West Siberian uprising of 1921 // West Siberian peasant uprising of 1921.
- Kuryshev I.V. Peasant uprising of 1921 in the Ishim district: the appearance and behavior of the participants (the experience of sociological and psychological characteristics) // Korkina Sloboda. Historical and local history almanac. Ishim, 2001, no. 3.
- Ivanenko A.S. Food Commissar G. S. Indenbaum // State power and the Russian (Siberian) peasantry during the years of the revolution and civil war; Proskuryakova N. L. The fate of the commanders of the rebel detachment in the north of the Ishim district // Ibid.; Skarednova N. N. Strokes to the biography of the commander of the Golyshmanovsky detachment CHON Pishchik G. G. // Ibid.; Firsov I.F. Ishim militia during the West Siberian peasant uprising of 1921 // Ibid.; Shuldyakov V. A. Cossacks in the West Siberian uprising of 1921 // Ibid.
- For advice without communists. Peasant uprising in the Tyumen province (1921). Collection of documents. Novosibirsk, 2000; Siberian Vendee. Vol.2 (1920–1921). The documents. M., 2001.
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95 years ago, Trotsky and Tukhachevsky drowned in blood the uprising of the Baltic sailors who stood up for the St. Petersburg workers
March 18, 1921 forever became a black date in the history of Russia. Three and a half years after the proletarian revolution, which proclaimed Freedom, Labour, Equality, Brotherhood as the main values of the new state, the Bolsheviks, with cruelty unprecedented under the tsarist regime, dealt with one of the first actions of the working people for their social rights.
Kronstadt, who dared to demand re-elections of the soviets - "due to the fact that real soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants" - was covered in blood. As a result of a punitive expedition led by Trotsky and Tukhachevsky, more than a thousand military sailors were killed, and 2103 people were shot without trial by special tribunals. What was the fault of the Kronstadters before their "native Soviet government"?
Hatred for snickering bureaucracy
Not so long ago, all archival materials related to the “case of the Kronstadt rebellion” were declassified. And although most of them were collected by the victorious side, an unbiased researcher will easily understand that the protest moods in Kronstadt have aggravated to a large extent due to the outright nobility and rudeness of the party bureaucracy that has been snickering.
In 1921, the economic situation in the country was very difficult. The difficulties are understandable - the national economy has been destroyed by the civil war and Western intervention. But the way the Bolsheviks began to fight them outraged most of the workers and peasants who had given so much for the dream of a welfare state. Instead of "partnerships", the authorities began to create the so-called Labor armies, which became a new form of militarization and enslavement.
The transfer of workers and employees to the position of mobilized was supplemented by the use of the Red Army in the economy, which was forced to participate in the restoration of transport, fuel extraction, loading and unloading and other activities. The policy of war communism reached a climax in agriculture, when the surplus requisitioning discouraged the peasant from the minimum desire to grow crops, which would be completely taken away anyway. Villages were dying, cities were emptying.
For example, the population of Petrograd decreased from 2 million 400 thousand people at the end of 1917 to 500 thousand people by 1921. The number of workers at industrial enterprises during the same period decreased from 300,000 to 80,000. Such a phenomenon as labor desertion gained gigantic proportions. The IX Congress of the RCP (b) in April 1920 was even forced to call for the creation of penal work teams from the captured deserters or to imprison them in concentration camps. But this practice only exacerbated social contradictions. The workers and peasants more and more often had a reason for discontent: what were they fighting for?! If in 1917 a worker received 18 rubles a month from the "damned" tsarist regime, then in 1921 - only 21 kopecks. At the same time, the cost of bread increased several thousand times - up to 2625 rubles per 400 grams by 1921. True, the workers received rations: 400 grams of bread per day for a worker and 50 grams for a member of the intelligentsia. But in 1921, the number of such lucky ones dropped sharply: in St. Petersburg alone, 93 enterprises were closed, 30 thousand workers out of the 80 thousand that were available at that time were unemployed, which means that they were doomed, along with their families, to starvation.
And nearby, the new “red bureaucracy” lived well and cheerfully, having invented special rations and special rations, as modern bureaucrats now call it, awards for effective management. The sailors were especially outraged by the behavior of their "proletarian" Commander of the Baltic Fleet Fyodor Raskolnikov(real name Ilyin) and his young wife Larisa Reisner, who became the head of the cultural enlightenment of the Baltic Fleet. “We are building a new state. People need us,” she declared frankly. “Our activity is creative, and therefore it would be hypocritical to deny yourself what always goes to people in power.”
Poet Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky recalled that when he came to Larisa Reisner in the apartment of the former naval minister Grigorovich, which she occupied, he was amazed by the abundance of objects and utensils - carpets, paintings, exotic fabrics, bronze Buddhas, majolica dishes, English books, bottles of French perfume. And the hostess herself was dressed in a dressing gown, stitched with heavy gold threads. The couple did not deny themselves anything - a car from the imperial garage, a wardrobe from the Mariinsky Theater, a whole staff of servants.
The permissiveness of the authorities especially excited the workers and military personnel. At the end of February 1921, the largest plants and factories in Petrograd went on strike. The workers demanded not only bread and firewood, but also free elections to the Soviets. Demonstrations, by order of the then St. Petersburg leader Zinoviev, were immediately dispersed, but rumors about the events reached Kronstadt. The sailors sent delegates to Petrograd, who were amazed by what they saw - factories and plants were surrounded by troops, activists were arrested.
On February 28, 1921, at a meeting of the battleship brigade in Kronstadt, the sailors spoke in defense of the Petrograd workers. The crews demanded freedom of labor and trade, freedom of speech and press, free elections to the Soviets. Instead of the dictatorship of the communists - democracy, instead of appointed commissars - court committees. The terror of the Cheka - stop. Let the communists remember who made the revolution, who gave them power. Now it's time to return power to the people.
"Silent" rebels
To maintain order in Kronstadt and organize the defense of the fortress, a Provisional Revolutionary Committee (VRC) was created, headed by sailor Petrichenko, in addition to which the committee included his deputy Yakovenko, Arkhipov (machine foreman), Tukin (master of the electromechanical plant) and Oreshin (head of the labor school).
From the appeal of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee (VRK) of Kronstadt: “Comrades and citizens! Our country is going through a difficult moment. Hunger, cold, economic ruin has been holding us in an iron grip for three years now. The Communist Party, ruling the country, broke away from the masses and proved unable to lead it out of the state of general ruin. It did not take into account the unrest that had recently taken place in Petrograd and Moscow, and which showed quite clearly that the Party had lost the confidence of the working masses. Nor did they take into account the demands made by the workers. She considers them the intrigues of the counter-revolution. She is deeply mistaken. These unrest, these demands are the voice of the whole people, of all working people.
However, the VRC did not go further than this, hoping that the support of "the whole people" would solve all the problems by itself. Kronstadt officers joined the uprising and advised to immediately attack Oranienbaum and Petrograd, capture the Krasnaya Gorka fort and the Sestroretsk area. But neither the members of the Revolutionary Committee nor the ordinary rebels were going to leave Kronstadt, where they felt safe behind the armor of battleships and the concrete of the forts. Their passive position subsequently led to a quick defeat.
"Gift" to the Tenth Congress
At first, the position of Petrograd was almost hopeless. The city is in turmoil. The small garrison is demoralized. There is nothing to storm Kronstadt with. The chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, Lev Trotsky, and the "winner of Kolchak" Mikhail Tukhachevsky urgently arrived in Petrograd. To storm Kronstadt, the 7th Army, which defeated Yudenich, was immediately restored. Its number is brought up to 45 thousand people. A well-functioning propaganda machine begins to work in full force.
Tukhachevsky, 1927
On March 3, Petrograd and the province were declared under a state of siege. The uprising is announced as a conspiracy of unfinished tsarist generals. Appointed chief rebel General Kozlovsky- chief of artillery of Kronstadt. Hundreds of relatives of the Kronstadters became hostages of the Cheka. Only from the family of General Kozlovsky, 27 people were seized, including his wife, five children, distant relatives and acquaintances. Almost all received camp terms.
General Kozlovsky
The rations were urgently increased for the workers of Petrograd, and the unrest in the city subsided.
On March 5, Mikhail Tukhachevsky is instructed to “suppress the uprising in Kronstadt as soon as possible by the opening of the Tenth Congress of the CPSU (b).” The 7th Army was reinforced with armored trains and air detachments. Not trusting the local regiments, Trotsky called in the proven 27th division from Gomel, setting the date for the assault - March 7th.
Exactly on that day, artillery shelling of Kronstadt began, and on March 8, units of the Red Army launched an assault. The advancing Red Army soldiers were driven into the attack by barrage detachments, but they did not help either - having met the fire of the Kronstadt guns, the troops turned back. One battalion immediately went over to the side of the rebels. But in the area of Zavodskaya Harbor, a small detachment of Reds managed to break through. They reached the Petrovsky Gates, but were immediately surrounded and taken prisoner. The first Kronstadt assault failed.
Panic broke out among the partymen. Hatred for them swept the whole country. The uprising is blazing not only in Kronstadt - peasant and Cossack revolts are blowing up the Volga region, Siberia, Ukraine, and the North Caucasus. The rebels smash the food detachments, the hated Bolshevik appointees are expelled or shot. Workers are on strike even in Moscow. At this time, Kronstadt becomes the center of a new Russian revolution.
Bloody Assault
On March 8, Lenin made a closed report at the congress about the failure in Kronstadt, calling the rebellion a threat that in many ways surpassed the actions of both Yudenich and Kornilov combined. The leader suggested that some of the delegates be sent directly to Kronstadt. Of the 1135 people who came to the congress in Moscow, 279 party workers headed by K. Voroshilov and I. Konev left for battle formations on Kotlin Island. Also, a number of provincial committees of Central Russia sent their delegates and volunteers to Kronstadt.
But in the political sense, the action of the Kronstadters had already brought important changes. At the Tenth Congress, Lenin announced the New Economic Policy - free trade and small-scale private production were allowed, the surplus appropriation was replaced by a tax in kind, but the Bolsheviks were not going to share power with anyone.
From all over the country, military echelons were drawn to Petrograd. But two regiments of the Omsk Rifle Division rebelled: “We don’t want to fight against our sailor brothers!” The Red Army soldiers left their positions and rushed along the highway to Peterhof.
Red cadets from 16 Petrograd military universities were sent to suppress the rebellion. The fugitives were surrounded and forced to lay down their arms. To restore order, special departments in the troops were strengthened by Petrograd Chekists. Special departments of the Southern Group of Forces worked tirelessly - unreliable units were disarmed, hundreds of Red Army soldiers were arrested. On March 14, 1921, 40 other Red Army soldiers were shot in front of the line to intimidate them, and on March 15, another 33. The rest were lined up and forced to shout “Give Kronstadt!”
On March 16, the Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks ended in Moscow, Tukhachevsky's artillery began artillery preparation. When it finally got dark, the shelling stopped, and at 2 o'clock in the morning the infantry moved in marching columns across the ice of the bay in complete silence. Following the first echelon, the second echelon followed with a regular interval, then the third, reserve.
The Kronstadt garrison was desperately defending itself - the streets were crossed with barbed wire and barricades. Aimed fire was fired from the attics, and when the chains of the Red Army came close, the machine guns in the basements came to life. Often the rebels launched counterattacks. By five o'clock in the evening on March 17, the attackers were driven out of the city. And then the last reserve of the assault was thrown across the ice - the cavalry, which chopped into cabbage the sailors drunk with the specter of victory. On March 18, the rebellious fortress fell.
The Red troops entered Kronstadt as an enemy city. That same night, without trial, 400 people were shot, and in the morning revolutionary tribunals began to work. The former Baltic sailor Dybenko became the commandant of the fortress. During his "reign" 2103 people were shot, and six and a half thousand were sent to camps. For this, he received his first military award - the Order of the Red Banner. And a few years later he was shot by the same authorities for ties with Trotsky and Tukhachevsky.
Features of the uprising
In fact, only a part of the sailors raised the rebellion; later, the garrisons of several forts and individual inhabitants from the city joined the rebels. There was no unity of sentiment, if the entire garrison had supported the rebels, it would have been much more difficult to suppress the uprising in the most powerful fortress and more blood would have been shed. The sailors of the Revolutionary Committee did not trust the garrisons of the forts, so over 900 people were sent to the Rif fort, 400 to Totleben and Obruchev each. Commandant of the Totleben fort Georgy Langemak, future chief engineer of the RNII and one of the "fathers" "Katyusha", categorically refused to obey the Revolutionary Committee, for which he was arrested and sentenced to death.
The demands of the rebels were pure nonsense and could not be met in the conditions of the just ended Civil War and Intervention. Let's say the slogan "Soviets without Communists": The Communists made up almost the entire State Apparatus, the backbone of the Red Army (400 thousand out of 5.5 million people), the command staff of the Red Army for 66% of the graduates of the courses of painters from workers and peasants, appropriately processed by communist propaganda. Without this corps of managers, Russia would again sink into the abyss of a new Civil War and the Intervention of fragments of the white movement would begin (only in Turkey, the 60,000-strong Russian army of Baron Wrangel was stationed, consisting of experienced fighters who had nothing to lose). The young states, Poland, Finland, Estonia, were located along the borders, which were not averse to chop off the still light brown land. They would have been supported by Russia's "allies" in the Entente.
Who will take power, who will lead the country and how, where to get food, etc. - it is impossible to find answers in the naive and irresponsible resolutions and demands of the rebels.
On the deck of the battleship "Petropavlovsk" after the suppression of the rebellion. In the foreground is a hole from a large-caliber projectile.
The rebels were mediocre commanders, militarily, and did not use all the possibilities for defense (probably, thank God - otherwise much more blood would have been shed). So, Major General Kozlovsky, commander of the Kronstadt artillery, and a number of other military experts immediately suggested that the Revolutionary Committee attack the Red Army units on both sides of the bay, in particular, capture the Krasnaya Gorka fort and the Sestroretsk area. But neither the members of the Revolutionary Committee nor the ordinary rebels were going to leave Kronstadt, where they felt safe behind the armor of battleships and the concrete of the forts. Their passive position led to a quick defeat.
During the fighting, the powerful artillery of the battleships and forts controlled by the rebels was not used to its full potential and did not inflict any special losses on the Bolsheviks.
The military leadership of the Red Army, Tukhachevsky, also did not act satisfactorily. If the rebels were led by experienced commanders, the assault on the Fortress would have failed, and the attackers would have washed themselves in blood.
Both sides did not hesitate to lie. The rebels published the first issue of Izvestia of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee, where the main "news" was that "There is a general uprising in Petrograd." In fact, unrest in the factories in Petrograd subsided, some ships stationed in Petrograd, and part of the garrison hesitated and took a neutral position. The vast majority of soldiers and sailors supported the government.
Zinoviev, on the other hand, lied that White Guard and British agents penetrated Kronstadt, throwing gold left and right, and General Kozlovsky raised a rebellion.
- The "heroic" leadership of the Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee, headed by Petrichenko, realizing that the jokes were over, as early as 5 o'clock in the morning on March 17, left by car across the ice of the bay to Finland. Following them rushed a crowd of ordinary sailors and soldiers.
The result was the weakening of the positions of Trotsky-Bronstein: the beginning of the New Economic Policy automatically pushed Trotsky's positions into the background and completely discredited his plans for the militarization of the country's economy. March 1921 marked a turning point in our history. The restoration of statehood and the economy began, an attempt to plunge Russia into a new Time of Troubles was stopped.
Rehabilitation
In 1994, all participants in the Kronstadt uprising were rehabilitated, and a monument was erected to them on the Anchor Square of the fortress city.