Kronstadt uprising (1921). Kronstadt uprising ("mutiny") (1921) The requirements of the participants in the Kronstadt uprising of 1921 include

Kronstadt uprising of 1921

March 17, 2013 Exactly 92 years ago, the situation on the streets of Kronstadt was not at all the same as it is now. Sunday in the suburban area of ​​St. Petersburg does not promise anything unusual, everything goes according to the routine scenario of a quiet, peaceful, even somewhat patriarchal life. There is more activity in the streets than on weekdays. However, 92 years ago, 12-inch shells were exploding here, machine-gun bursts did not subside for a minute, volleys of rifles alternated with bayonet strikes. Thousands of people met in hand-to-hand combat, people fought with bitterness and frenzy. The rebellious Kronstadt did not give up without a fight. The fighting in the streets went on for more than a day and ended by the morning of March 18.

Who has won? The question seems strange, even in the shortest manual on national history of the 20th century it is quite clearly written that the rebels were driven out of Kotlin Island, and the power of the Bolsheviks was restored in the city and the naval base. However, years will pass and those who took the recalcitrant Kronstadt will themselves be destroyed by the power for which they fought not for life, but for death with confidence in their rightness. But so far it hasn't been obvious at all. specific task- to return Kronstadt - was carried out methodically and purposefully.

Walking through the streets and squares of Kronstadt, it is now difficult to imagine what we are going to tell our story about. The situation and conditions here have changed painfully, and people have not been the same at first glance for a long time. But this is only at first approximation. History tends to repeat itself, and what seemed like a matter of time long gone, suddenly becomes timely and urgent, as if written these days. The connection of times is felt in every detail, if you look closely.

preconditions for an uprising.

So, 1921. The young country of the Soviets emerges victorious from the Civil War. The economic situation could be called critical. Three years of war and foreign intervention undermined the Russian economy, which was undermined by the First World War. By the end of 1920 general level The volume of industrial production has decreased by almost 5 times compared with 1913. A critical situation has developed with the supply of fuel and raw materials. Many mines in Donbass were flooded and destroyed during the Civil War. The transport infrastructure was in complete disrepair. The delivery of food to the cities was at an extremely unsatisfactory level. The internal market collapsed due to the activities of food and barrage detachments.

At the beginning of 1921, the workers of Petrograd, employed in the smelting industry, received daily 800 gr. Of bread. Shock workers - 600. Other categories of workers from 400 to 200 grams. Part of the wages were given in kind, part of the products produced by the workers were exchanged for food. Families left the cities en masse. During the 3 years of the Civil War, the population of Petrograd decreased from 2.5 million to 750,000. Real hunger was felt in the cities. Often, part of the workers were removed from enterprises and sent to other parts of the country in order to get food. The sailors often did the same. There is evidence that food was sometimes stolen along the way. So, once a whole carload of meat went from Vologda to Petrograd, instead of Moscow, and only the intervention of the army prevented this theft. Naturally, in such a situation, the population of cities became dissatisfied with the existing situation.

But Russia was an agrarian country, and the peasants felt all the hardships of the war no less than the population of cities. The policy of war communism with the activities of food detachments primarily affected rural residents. A significant reduction in the area under crops was associated with the general ruin in the country, but the policy of requisitioning was the main blow to the peasantry. The land belonged to the peasants according to the decrees on land of October 26, 1917. By 1920, the land was divided among peasant families. The peasants got land and they just wanted to be left alone. But the war dragged on, and the food problem became at the forefront. As the peasant delegates said, "the land is ours, but the bread is yours." The activities of the food detachments were associated not with the Bolsheviks, but with the communists. Zinoviev, Trotsky and other party leaders, whose Jewish origins were associated with everything anti-people, were accused of having invented a new form of state farms, which again led to the enslavement of the peasants.

However, during the course of the war, the peasants were generally loyal to the Bolsheviks. Although sometimes there was resistance to the surplus, it was all explained by the struggle against the whites, who were perceived as a greater evil.

In November 1920, the armies of Wrangel left the Crimea, the Civil War, in general, ended, and a series of peasant uprisings against the Bolsheviks and the policies of war communism began in the country.

The winter of 1920-21 was a turning point. Almost 2 million soldiers were demobilized, the economy had to be put on a peaceful footing. Between November 1920 and March 1921 the number of peasant uprisings increased sharply. On the eve of the Kronstadt rebellion, more than 100 different peasant uprisings swept through the regions of the country - in the Volga region, in the Urals, in Siberia, peasant uprisings flared up again and again. Many sailors were peasants, and discontent from the villages quickly penetrated the naval crews.

Lenin understood the need to transfer the economy to a peaceful track and abandon the policy of war communism. As early as November 1920, this issue was raised, but detailed proposals were actually prepared on the eve of the rebellion.

The main cause of discontent in the country was, first of all, hunger and deprivation. There was no plan for the transition from war communism, and in peacetime military methods had the exact opposite effect. This was the impetus for the show.

A particularly difficult situation at the beginning of 1921 developed in large industrial centers, primarily in Moscow and Petrograd. The norms for issuing bread were reduced, some food rations were canceled, and there was a threat of starvation. In February 1921, during the crisis in Petrograd, strikes began. On January 22, 1921, a reduction in rations was announced. The cup of patience overflowed. Petrograd was in a particularly difficult situation. More than 60% of the factories were closed, in the face of a lack of fuel and food, rumors immediately appeared that the new government - the commissars did not need anything, which only fueled discontent.

The fuel crisis worsened. On February 11, 1921, 93 Petrograd enterprises were announced to be closed until March 1. Among them are such giants as Putilovskiy Zavod, Sestroretskiy, "Triangle" and others. About 27 thousand people were unemployed.

On February 21, a meeting was held at the Pipe Plant at Vasilyevsky Island. A resolution was adopted demanding a transition to democracy. In response to this, the executive committee of the Petrosoviet decided to close the plant and announce the re-registration of all employees and workers. The unrest of the workers began to develop into open riots. On the morning of February 24, about 300 workers from the Pipe Factory took to the streets. They were joined by workers from other factories and plants in Petrograd.

A crowd of up to 2,500 people gathered on Vasilyevsky Island. Not relying on the Red Army, the authorities sent red cadets to disperse it. The crowd was dispersed. In the afternoon, an emergency meeting of the bureau of the Petrograd Committee of the RCP (b) was held, which qualified the unrest at the plants and factories of the city as a rebellion. The next day, martial law was introduced in the city.

On the evening of February 27, an extended meeting of the plenum of the Petrograd Soviet opened, in which the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, M. I. Kalinin, who arrived from Moscow, took part. Commissar of the Baltic Fleet N.N. Kuzmin drew the attention of the audience to alarming signs in the mood among the sailors. The situation became more and more threatening. On February 28, a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) was held, at which the situation in Moscow and Petrograd was discussed. The first priority was the suppression of political opposition. The Cheka carried out arrests of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. Among those arrested in Petrograd was one of the leaders of the Menshevik Party, F.I. Dan.

Naturally, the unrest in Petrograd, the speeches in other cities and regions of the country had a serious impact on the mood of the sailors, soldiers and workers of Kronstadt. The sailors of Kronstadt, who were the main support of the Bolsheviks in the October days of 1917, were among the first to understand that the Soviet power was, in essence, replaced by the power of the party, and the ideals for which they fought turned out to be betrayed. By mid-February, the total number of ship crews, military sailors of coastal units, auxiliary units stationed in Kronstadt and in the forts, exceeded 26 thousand people.

The beginning of the uprising.

Delegations were sent there to clarify the situation in Petrograd. Returning, the delegates reported to the general meetings of their teams about the reasons for the unrest of the workers, as well as the sailors of the battleships "Gangut" and "Poltava", standing on the Neva. This happened on February 27, and the next day the sailors battleships"Petropavlovsk" and "Sevastopol" adopted a resolution, which was submitted for discussion by representatives of all ships and military units of the Baltic Fleet. This resolution was, in essence, an appeal to the government to respect the rights and freedoms proclaimed in October 1917. It did not contain calls for the overthrow of the government, but was directed against the omnipotence of one party.

On March 1, a rally was held on Anchor Square, which was attended by Kalinin, Kuzmin and Vasiliev, as well as about 15 thousand sailors and residents of the city. The authorities tried to calm the sailors and called for an end to the unrest, but they were booed. Petrichenko came to the podium, a resolution was read to him, which was adopted unanimously (except for Kalinin, Kuzmin and Vasiliev). The Communists, who also gathered on the square quite a few, voted for the resolution.

RESOLUTION OF THE TEAM MEETING OF THE 1st AND 2nd BRIGADS

After listening to the report of the representatives of the teams sent by the general meeting of the teams from the ships to the mountains. Petrograd to clarify matters in Petrograd, decided:

1) In view of the fact that the present soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants, to immediately hold re-elections of soviets by secret ballot, and before the elections to carry out free preliminary agitation of all workers and peasants.

2) Freedom of speech and press for workers and peasants, anarchists, left socialist parties.

3) Freedom of assembly and trade unions and peasant associations.

4) To convene no later than March 10, 1921, a non-party conference of workers, Red Army soldiers and sailors of the mountains. Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd province.

5) Release all political prisoners of the socialist parties, as well as all workers and peasants, Red Army soldiers and sailors imprisoned in connection with the workers' and peasants' movements.

6) Select a commission to review the cases of prisoners in prisons and concentration camps.

7) Abolish all political departments, since no party can enjoy privileges to propagate its ideas and receive funds from the state for this purpose. Instead, locally elected cultural and educational commissions should be established, for which funds should be allocated by the state.

8) Immediately remove all barrage detachments.

9) Equalize rations for all workers, with the exception of hazardous workshops.

10) To abolish communist combat detachments in all military units, as well as in factories and plants, various duties on the part of the communists, and if such duties or detachments are needed, then they can be appointed in military units from companies, and in factories and plants at the discretion of the workers.

11) Give the peasants the full right to act over their land as they wish, and also to have livestock, which they must support and manage on their own, i.e. without using hired labor.

12) We ask all military units, as well as fellow military cadets, to join our resolution.

13) We demand that all resolutions be widely announced in the press.

Unrest in Kronstadt. Requirements of sailors, soldiers and workers of the fortress 51

14) Appoint a traveling bureau for control.

15) Allow free handicraft production by one's own labor.

The resolution was adopted by the brigade meeting unanimously with 2 abstentions.

Education of the WRC.

The most important events of the beginning of the uprising took place in the building of the former Engineering School. March 2 at the House of Education in Kronstadt (former School of Engineering) brought together the representatives chosen for the delegates' meeting. It was opened by Stepan Petrichenko, a clerk from the battleship Petropavlovsk. The delegates elected a presidium of five non-partisans. The main issue at the meeting was the question of re-elections of the Kronstadt Soviet, especially since the powers of its former composition were already ending. Kuzmin was the first to speak. Indignation was caused by his words that the communists would not voluntarily give up power, and attempts to disarm them would lead to the fact that "there will be blood." He was supported by Vasiliev, who then spoke.

By a majority vote, the meeting expressed no confidence in Kuzmin and Vasiliev. Suddenly there was a message that the communists of the fortress were preparing to resist. A sailor rushed into the meeting shouting “half a day! the communists are heading towards the building to arrest the assembly.” In this regard, it was decided to urgently create a Provisional Revolutionary Committee (VRC) to maintain order in Kronstadt. The duties of the committee were assumed by the presidium and the chairman of the delegates' meeting, Petrichenko. The Committee also included his deputy Yakovenko, machine foreman Arkhipov, foreman of the electromechanical plant Tukin and head of the third labor school I. E. Oreshin.

The reaction of the authorities to the uprising.

The authorities declared the rebels "outlaws". Reprisals against the relatives of the leaders of the uprising followed. They were taken as hostages. Among the first to be arrested was the family of the former general Kozlovsky (chief of the fortress artillery).

Petrograd was declared under martial law, the authorities made every effort to isolate Kronstadt and prevent the uprising from spreading to the mainland. It was possible to do this.

However, the beginning of unrest in the fortress was accompanied by the collapse of the Bolshevik cells in the military and civilian organizations of Kronstadt. As of January 1921, they numbered 2,680 members and candidate members of the RCP(b). In the VRK, in the revolutionary troika, in the editorial office of Izvestiya VRK (public organ of the rebels), both individual and collective statements about leaving the party began to arrive. Many asked that their statements be published in the newspaper. The organization of the battleship "Petropavlovsk" almost completely left the party. A lot of applications were received from the workers of the industrial enterprises of the city serving the fleet. Withdrawal from the party continued until the last assault on Kronstadt, when it was already clear to everyone that the besieged were doomed. In total, during the Kronstadt events, about 900 people left the RCP (b). Most of them joined the party during the civil war. But there were also those who connected their lives with the party in the October days of 1917. On March 2, the Provisional Bureau of the Kronstadt organization of the RCP was organized, consisting of Ya. I. Ilyin, F. Kh. Pervushin and A. S. Kabanov, which called on the communists of Kronstadt to cooperate with the Military Revolutionary Committee.

The news of the events in Kronstadt provoked a sharp reaction from the Soviet leadership. The delegation of Kronstadters, which arrived in Petrograd to explain the demands of the sailors, soldiers and workers of the fortress, was arrested.

On March 4, the Labor and Defense Council approved the text of the government message. The movement in Kronstadt was declared a "mutiny" organized by the French counterintelligence and the former tsarist general Kozlovsky, and the resolution adopted by the Kronstadters was "Black Hundred-Socialist-Revolutionary."

On the afternoon of March 5, 1921, Commander-in-Chief S. S. Kamenev, the commander of the Western Front M. N. Tukhachevsky and other senior officials of the RVSR arrived in Petrograd. Trotsky was personally present and gave the order to liquidate the rebellion. At the same time, an important operational order was issued on measures to eliminate the Kronstadt rebellion. Its main points were as follows:

"one. Restore the 7th Army, subordinating it directly to the High Command. 2. Temporary command of the 7th Army is to be assigned to Comrade Tukhachevsky, leaving him in the post of commander. 3. Temporary Army Commander 7 T. Tukhachevsky to subordinate in all respects all the troops of the Petrograd district, the commander of the troops of the Petrograd district and the commander of the Baltic fleet. 4. Simultaneously appoint the commander of the troops of the Petrograd district, comrade Avrov, the commandant of the Petrofortified District. Further, the order ordered to invite the Kronstadt rebels to surrender, and otherwise open hostilities. The order came into force on March 5 at 17:00. 45 min.

Kronstadt was given an ultimatum demanding to surrender, to which the rebels refused. Military experts offered to support the uprising in Oranienbaum and contribute to its spread to the mainland, but the Military Revolutionary Committee firmly stood on the position of not being the first to use force. They naively believed that an uprising would break out in Petrograd and other parts of the country, sweeping away the power of the communists.

The first assault on Kronstadt.

Meanwhile, on March 8, the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b) opened in Moscow. It was on this date that the assault on Kronstadt was scheduled. Trotsky and Tukhachevsky wanted to come to the congress as winners, but the conceived performance failed. Trotsky believed that with the first shots the rebels would surrender and therefore hurried the start of the military operation.

The troops were drawn to Kronstadt and on March 7, the Northern combat group (headed by E. S. Kazansky), concentrated in the Sestroretsk area, numbered 3763 people (of which the detachment of Petrograd cadets was the most combat-ready unit - 1195 fighters). The southern group (headed by A.I. Sedyakin) consisted of 9853 people. The artillery force consisted of 27 field artillery batteries: 18 in the sector of the Southern Group and 9 in the sector of the Northern Group; however, these were predominantly light guns, unsuitable for combating the concrete forts and rebel ships of the line; there were only three batteries of heavy guns, but their caliber also did not exceed six inches. On the afternoon of March 8, Soviet air reconnaissance reported that the shells lay near the fortress with a large undershoot, and “no damage was found in the city itself and on the two battleships standing in the harbor.”

The Soviet forces, which launched an offensive on March 8, were thrown back from the walls of the fortress without loss for the rebels. Having suffered serious losses, the Red Army retreated. Some battalions surrendered. The attack failed.

Preparing for the decisive battle.

The next 10 days passed in an atmosphere of gathering forces. Both the Red Army and the rebels were preparing for a decisive battle. However, to gather forces to suppress the rebellion was not at all an easy task. It was necessary to overcome not only technical difficulties in the work of transport and a catastrophic shortage of uniforms, but also open sabotage by some groups of troops.

So the area of ​​Art. From March 10, the 27th Omsk Rifle Division was concentrated in Ligovo , sent from the Western Front to reinforce the Soviet troops near Kronstadt. The division had 1,115 officers, 13,059 infantrymen, 488 cavalrymen, as well as 319 machine guns and 42 guns. The personnel of the division had good combat training and glorious military traditions: the division successfully fought against Kolchak and White Poles. However, near Kronstadt, before entering the battle, the commanders and political workers of the 27th division met with complex problems of an ideological nature. The division commander, V. Putna, noted that the units were leaving from Gomel in a combat mood, but he emphasized that the political staff was understaffed and did not correspond to the staffing table, and most importantly, it turned out to be insufficiently prepared to work in such difficult conditions.

In fact, the soldiers simply refused to go into battle, citing fear of ice, lack of supplies, but more often - agreement with the demand of the rebels.

About 300 delegates were sent from the Tenth Congress to raise awareness and carry out political work in the units of the Red Army. They were joined by communists from other areas, aimed at raising the consciousness of the Red Army. The group was headed by K. E. Voroshilov, a member of the Presidium of the Tenth Congress. Among the delegates who left for Kronstadt, there were many military specialists - commanders and commissars, active participants in the civil war: Ya. F. Fabricius, I. F. Fedko, P. I. Baranov, V. P. Zatonsky, A. S. Bubnov , I. S. Konev and many others. The delegates left Moscow for Petrograd in several special trains by rail on the night of March 11th.

Leaflets were scattered over Kronstadt with the following content: “Kronstadters! Your "Provisional Revolutionary Committee" asserts: "There is a struggle going on in Kronstadt for the power of the Soviets." Many of you think that the great cause of the revolution is being continued in Kronstadt. But your real leaders are those who conduct business secretly, who, out of cunning, do not yet express their real goal. Oh, they know very well what they are doing, they perfectly understand the meaning of the ongoing events and soberly calculate when it will be possible to take the next step along the path of restoring the power of the bourgeoisie ...

Think about what you are doing. Learn to distinguish between words and deeds, because if you do not learn, then the coming weeks will teach you this, and you will quickly see how the living words about Soviet power of your leaders are very quickly replaced by an open struggle against Soviet power, open White Guards. But then it will be too late.

Now your actions are open whiteguardism, covered for the time being by empty words about Soviet power without communists. Empty, because during the hard struggle of the working people for self-liberation, without the Communist Party, there can be no Soviet power ...

The White Guards applaud you and hate us; choose quickly - with whom you are, with the Whites against us or with us against the Whites ...

Time does not wait. Hurry up"

In party propaganda, special emphasis was placed on explaining the fundamental decisions of the Tenth Congress on the abolition of food distribution and other economic measures designed to alleviate the situation of the peasantry and improve the material situation of the working people. At the same time, a stern and decisive rebuff was given to all attempts at hostile agitation. The verdicts of the revolutionary tribunals against instigators and provocateurs, cowards and deserters were widely publicized among the personnel of the Red Army units stationed near Kronstadt. The decisions of the Tenth Congress in many respects corresponded to the economic requirements of the rebels, but the communists were not going to share political power.

At this time, the Kronstadt Military Revolutionary Committee was gathering forces for the last battle. The resources of the city were at their limit, although Izvestia VRK published several times reports that "the food situation in the city can be considered quite satisfactory." Nevertheless, the norms for issuing cards were constantly decreasing, while the Red Army soldiers and Petrograd workers were given an increased norm. Subsequently, already in Finland, the sailors bitterly recalled that the St. Petersburg workers had betrayed them for half a pound of meat.

Well, on the northern and southern shores of the Gulf of Finland, work was underway to prepare for the final suppression of the rebellion. It was necessary to hurry, because. in a few weeks the ice would melt and ships with food, fuel and medicines would arrive in Kronstadt. The Russian emigration put a lot of effort into organizing the supply of Kronstadt on the ice, but these attempts, in general, were thwarted. The Red Cross was able to transport a small batch of flour from Finland, but this was not a mass phenomenon and did not change the situation. better situation with food in the city.

However, special lightweight portable bridges were designed for the Soviet troops in order to force open holes that could form on the ice of the bay from shell explosions. In total, it was possible to prepare 800 sledges and 1000 walkways in the South group, and 115 sledges and 500 walkways in the North group.

However, the situation with uniforms was catastrophically bad. There were not enough warm clothes, underwear, overcoats. So, for example, in the 499th Infantry Regiment, 25% of the Red Army men wore felt boots during the thaw, and 50% wore bast shoes. The uniforms of the relatively fresh and combat-ready 27th Omsk Rifle Division were in extremely poor condition. But the fighting forces of the Red Army grew every day. According to the summary of the operational department of the headquarters of the 7th Army, as of 9th of March, the number of Soviet rifle troops was as follows. Northern combat group: total fighters and commanders - 3285 (including 105 cavalrymen), 27 machine guns, 34 guns. Southern group: the total number of fighters - 7615 people (including 103 cavalrymen), 94 machine guns, 103 guns, there were also armored trains, but the document does not contain details on this. A brigade of cadets was also stationed here, the number of which is determined in the document inconsistently; approximately it was 3,500 fighters and commanders, including 146 cavalrymen; the brigade had 189 machine guns and 122 guns and 3 armored trains were attached.

Fortress assault:

By the day of the decisive assault, March 17, the Soviet command managed to assemble the following forces: the 11th and 27th rifle divisions, the 187th brigade of the 56th rifle division, communist special forces, red cadets of 16 military schools, as well as a number of other small units and numerous artillery . There is no exact data on the number. According to the calculations of A. S. Pukhov, the total number of soldiers of the 7th Army was 24 thousand with 433 machine guns and 159 guns, and together with the rear and auxiliary units, the Soviet troops concentrated for the assault on Kronstadt amounted to about 45 thousand people.

It was ordered to move through the ice field exclusively in marching columns, subject to complete silence and order, it was possible to disperse into a chain (even in the event of enemy fire) only in exceptional cases by order of the commander; it was specifically stipulated that "in the city with the rebels, do not enter into any conversations, arrest and send to the rear." As an example of a specific implementation of the general combat mission, one should cite an excerpt from the order of the commander of the 167th rifle brigade, given on the eve of the assault on the evening of March 16: “The brigade headquarters should establish telephone communication across the ice with units and the headquarters of the consolidated division, duplicating it with a live chain and messengers. During actions and movement on ice, observe silence, use movement in columns or reserve formations to the last opportunity. The columns should have in their heads shock groups in white coats, equipped with walkways, overturning, assault ladders; have machine guns on skids. When attacking, remember one cry: “Forward!”. There can be no retreat. Do not enter into negotiations with the rebels in the city. Organize proper nutrition parts with ammunition from the Oranienbaum coast. Orderlies with a stretcher to follow the units.

The night of March 17 was dark, moonless, which made it easier for the Soviet troops. In the northern combat sector, since the evening, the cannonade from both sides was silent, so the Soviet units went on the offensive in complete silence; on the contrary, in the southern section from 1 to 4 o'clock. at night, the red artillery fired intensely, trying to strike at the two most powerful forts of Kronstadt - "Konstantin" and "Milyutin"; after several successful hits from heavy shells, both rebellious forts were forced into silence.

The forward units of the attacking infantry descended onto the ice in complete darkness at about 2 am, followed by second-echelon troops and reserves at various intervals. In the Southern battle group, the 32nd and 187th rifle brigades were in the first wave of the offensive. The rebels noticed the attacking Soviet units rather late: the fighters of the 32nd brigade managed to approach the city without a shot, the 187th brigade, advancing to the left, was noticed and fired upon earlier. The Red Army soldiers deployed in chains and began to overcome the wire barriers. The first took the blow of the enemy at 4 o'clock. 30 min. 537th regiment under the command of I. V. Tyulenev. The rebels opened intense fire from rifles, machine guns and light guns on the forward lines of the attackers. At the same time, their heavy batteries opened fire on the Soviet units of the second line moving on the ice, as well as on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland.

At 5 o'clock. 30 min. a green rocket flew up into the sky - a signal that the attackers broke into the city. At the same time, the fighters of the special purpose regiment, which was part of the 187th brigade, distinguished themselves. Under enemy fire, the regiment marched at a fast pace straight to the Petrograd pier - to the center of Kronstadt; one and a half hundred paces before the target, the regiment commander Burnavsky and commissar Bogdanov stepped out ahead of the chains and led them on the attack at a run. Only a hundred paces were passed, and the attackers lay down under heavy fire. However, this allowed the reserve units to approach, and when the rebels were forced to transfer fire to them.

The street battle that began within the boundaries of Kronstadt took on an exceptionally heavy and protracted character. The shore of the bay and the city streets were entangled with barbed wire fences, the spaces between the houses turned out to be blocked from logs, firewood, building debris, etc. The rebels fired from rifles and machine guns from short distances, inflicting noticeable losses on the attackers. They used, as a rule, windows and attics of stone buildings, hiding behind various structures and hiding in cellars.

Nevertheless, a fierce battle in the city gradually brought success to the Soviet troops. Heavy and bloody battles unfolded in particular in the area of ​​the Petrograd Gates and the Petrogradskaya Street adjacent to them. The rebels here repeatedly launched counterattacks, but each time they were forced to retreat deep into the city. By 14 o'clock. On March 17, units of the 167th brigade cut off the rebellious ships that were in the harbor from the port. It was a major success for the Soviet troops. In order to prevent a possible sortie from the side of the teams of the rebel battleships, the combat guards of the Soviet troops were posted along the coastline, but clearly insufficient in number (this, apparently, explains the fact that some activists of the rebels later managed to escape from the ships under the cover of darkness). It seemed that victory was already close, but the rebels launched fierce counterattacks. In the area of ​​Anchor Square, the head units of the Soviet troops - the 187th and 32nd brigades - came under cross attack and were forced to retreat. The mutinous artillery fired intensely at the advancing units of the second echelon, which were forced to move in bright sunlight. Fortunately, many shells did not explode or, falling at a sharp angle, ricocheted without breaking through the ice. However, Soviet reserves suffered losses while crossing the bay.

In the afternoon, the 80th brigade came to the aid of the vanguard units, with it the commander of the consolidated division P.E. Dybenko and the commissar of the Southern Group K.E. Voroshilov came to the very center of the battle. The rebels withdrew into the city. Here began a fierce protracted battle. The Soviet units suffered losses, because in street battles the superiority was on the side of the rebels, who knew the topography of the city well; often their groups through cellars and attics went to the rear of the Red Army. At the same time, the Northern Group was also forced to slow down their advance and move to the left, in the direction of the main attack; as a result, the road to Finland could not be cut.

Fierce mutual counterattacks continued in the city for a long time. Around noon, the Soviet units were forced to retreat from the city center to the pier. At this moment, one of the most spectacular episodes of the Battle of Kronstadt took place. The Soviet command threw into battle one of the last reserves - the cavalry regiment of the 27th division. The cavalry attacked the sea fortress on the ice.

P. E. Dybenko described this turning point of the battle as follows:

“By 5 p.m. on March 17, one third of the city was in our hands. But, as it turned out, at that time the rebellious headquarters decided to hold out on the strongholds of the city until dark and at night attack the Red Army soldiers, exhausted by the daily battle, cut them out and take Kronstadt again ... But the rebels failed to carry out this insidious plan. At 8 pm on March 17, the Red troops launched a decisive offensive, supported by artillery that had arrived on the ice. The cavalry regiment galloping over the ice to support the units located in the city produced considerable confusion on the rebels. By 11 p.m., all the strongholds were occupied by the red units, and the rebels began to surrender in whole batches.

By evening, the battle had taken a sharp turn. The rebels could not stand the tension of the battle and began to retreat. Together with them, among the first to leave the city, most of the members of the "revolutionary committee" headed by Petrichenko and the officers - leaders of the rebellion. The crews of both battleships flew white flags. However, the battles with separate groups of the enemy continued all night and subsided only in the morning of the next day. March 18 at 12 noon 10 minutes. Finally, the last order for the Kronstadt operation was given:

"one. The Kronstadt fortress has been cleared of rebels. 2. Comrade was appointed military commandant of Kronstadt. Dybenko. 3. The supreme command of the troops of the fortress and the coastal oburon is transferred by the comrade group to Comrade Sedyakin until the order of the commander-7.

Results.

Thus the uprising was put down.

Soviet troops captured 2444 rebels, including three members of the "revolutionary committee" - Valka, Perepelkin, Pavlov. Some of the active leaders of the rebellion, mostly former officers, were already a few days later directly in Kronstadt tried by a military tribunal and shot by its verdict. At the same time, the total losses of the Red Army are estimated at 10,000 people (although the official figures are several times less), some of them are buried in a mass grave on Anchor Square in Kronstadt.

In fact, the introduction of the NEP, the abolition of barrage detachments and requisitioning, the permission of small-scale handicraft production, and other changes were the embodiment of the economic program of the rebels. But no political progress followed, the power of the Soviet bureaucracy and the communists only strengthened, eventually leading to the sole rule of I.V. Stalin.

March, 25 1921 held a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet. The delegates stood to honor the memory of the fallen. Then Nikolai Nikolaevich Kuzmin, a fearless commissar who remained faithful to his duty to the end, was greeted with thunderous applause and delivered a great speech. On the same day, a civil memorial service was held in the St. George's Hall of the Winter Palace in honor of the fallen Red Army soldiers, and then the funeral procession headed across the entire Nevsky Prospekt to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, where the victims of the battles near Kronstadt were buried. In the Petrograd Military District alone, 487 commanders and Red Army soldiers were awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

Most of the Kronstadters were placed in the forts of the former Russian fortress of Ino (Petrichenko was also located here), the rest were in camps near Vyborg, in Terioki and other places. The camps were guarded by Finnish soldiers.

The fate of the participants in the uprising was tragic. Of the 8,000 who fled to Finland, many returned, where they ended up in concentration camps. Stepan Petrichenko himself lived in Finland, collaborated with Soviet intelligence, was arrested by the Finns in 1941 and extradited to the USSR in 1944. In the Soviet Union, he was sentenced to 10 years in camps and died in Vladimir in 1947 during the transfer.

General Alexander Nikolaevich Kozlovsky changed many professions over the years of his life in a foreign land: he was a teacher of physics and natural science, a road worker, a foreman at a mechanical plant, a mechanic in a garage. He died in 1940 in Helsinki, his family remained hostage, his sons and wife were sentenced to corrective labor and prison terms, and one of his sons committed suicide.

More is known about the commanders of the Red Army, but their fate turned out to be sad. L. Trotsky, as you know, was deprived of Soviet citizenship and expelled from the country. Early on the morning of August 20, 1940, NKVD agent Ramon Mercader assassinated Trotsky in Mexico.

Chairman of the Petrosoviet Zinoviev Grigory. Evseevich On August 24, 1936, Zinoviev was sentenced to capital punishment in the case of the Anti-Soviet United Trotskyist-Zinoviev Center. Shot on August 25, 1936 in Moscow.

Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the former commander of the 27th Omsk Division V. Putna were shot in Moscow in the basement of the building of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on June 11, 1937.

Who has won?

It is difficult to give an answer.

The idea and the course of the country's development won, as the Bolsheviks understood and did.

The text of the work is placed without images and formulas.
Full version work is available in the "Files of work" tab in PDF format

Introduction

The events of October 1917 opened a new era in the history of mankind. These events stirred up gigantic masses of the people. The cities and villages of the vast country seemed to seethe and seethe with the frantic energy of the awakened people.

A civil war broke out, which took on an unusually bitter and protracted character. By the end of 1920, the civil war was over. Wrangel's troops were defeated. On November 15, the red flag was raised over the Sevastopol Bay. A new period has begun in the life of our country.

In history, there is often confusion in information and facts. Some are distorted, others disappear and are lost forever. More often than not, this is the fault of the government. Something is considered obsolete and unnecessary, and something is simply not profitable to save. The Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 is one of the most striking examples of this. Almost all information about these events has disappeared. By the end of the 40s, all witnesses of those events were exterminated.

Starting work on the project, I considered many different points of view, read documents and essays, and nowhere is there an unambiguous point of view on these events of 1921, there is always an understatement. Therefore, at the beginning of the work, I set myself the question that became the goal of my work: what gave rise to the armed uprising of the sailors of the Kronstadt fortress against Soviet power, was it a counter-revolutionary rebellion or an expression of people’s satisfaction with the power of the “Bolsheviks” headed by V.I. Lenin ? The answer to this question will not be so easy and simple, given that over the past years, most authors have considered it their duty to at least embellish, and sometimes distort the facts. Trying to evaluate the events that lie so far in the time period from the moment where we live, I will have to try to give an objective assessment of the articles and documents that I have at my disposal. Such an assessment of these events may not guarantee the veracity and reliability of the events in question, but it will help to consider some versions of the events of those days, and will help to draw your own conclusions about the events in question. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to perform the following tasks:

1. Get acquainted in detail with the events of the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921.

2. Consider points of view:

"Bolsheviks";

instigators;

Historians of different periods;

Formulate your own point of view and answer the question posed by the topic;

3. Summarize the facts found and conclude whether the hypothesis of my work is correct.

Hypothesis: The Kronstadt mutiny of the Baltic Fleet was the apogee of popular dissatisfaction with the policy of the Bolsheviks.

The object of the research is the uprising against the Soviet power in the fortress of Kronstadt in 1921, its causes, course, opposing sides, outcome and consequences. As well as the points of view of contemporaries of the uprising, Soviet and modern Russian historians.

I used in my work the materials that I found in the journals that are stored in the home library and those that were given to me by the head, as well as monographs found in the city library. In addition, I used materials from some Internet sites. I used an article by V. Voinov, "Kronstadt: rebellion or uprising?" published in the journal "Science and Life" in 1991, which tells about the course of the uprising; article by Shishkina I. Kronstadt rebellion of 1921: “an unknown revolution”?, which was published in the Zvezda magazine in 1988 and tells about the versions of these events. In the second half of the 80s and the first half of the 90s, with the beginning of “perestroika” in our country, such unknown pages of history were just beginning to be opened, so I also turned to articles from other magazines, such as Voprosy istorii for 1994 and the Military -historical magazine for 1991, which published articles: "The Kronstadt tragedy of 1921" and "Who provoked the Kronstadt rebellion?" The first simply describes the events that occurred, the second puts forward versions about the causes of these events. In addition, I got acquainted and used in my work the materials of the Central State Archive of the Military - Marine taken from the site of this archive (www.rgavmf.ru).

98 years ago, on March 18, 1921, the Kronstadt rebellion was suppressed, which began under the slogan "For Soviets without Communists!". This was the first anti-Bolshevik uprising since the end of the Civil War. The teams of the battleships Sevastopol and Petropavlovsk demanded re-elections of the Soviets, the abolition of commissars, freedom of activity for the socialist parties and free trade. It would seem, why now in 2017, turn to the events of almost a century ago? But I believe that it is necessary to study such "forgotten" events of our history, as they can teach us to evaluate the present from different positions. Events such as the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 will always be relevant for the citizens of Russia, as they form an integral part of our historical memory, our historical heritage.

In my work, I will try to understand, consider different points of view, compare facts and hypotheses and draw conclusions. Of course, professional historians are also thinking about the issue that is the goal of my work, and it would be very presumptuous for me to compete with them, in addition, the volume is too small. research project for a comprehensive review of these events. But still, in my work I will try to understand, consider different points of view, compare facts and hypotheses and draw my own conclusions based on these facts.

Chapter 1. The Kronstadt uprising of 1921

1. Causes of the Kronstadt uprising of 1921

Consider the economic and political situation in the country on the eve of the rebellion in Kronstadt.

The main part of the industrial potential of Russia was put out of action, economic ties were broken, there was not enough raw materials and fuel. The country produced only 2% of the pre-war amount of pig iron, 3% of sugar, 5-6% of cotton fabrics, etc.

The industrial crisis gave rise to social collisions: unemployment, dispersal and declassification of the ruling class - the proletariat. Russia remained a petty-bourgeois country, 85% of its social structure fell to the share of the peasantry, exhausted by wars, revolutions, and food requisitioning. Life for the overwhelming majority of the population has turned into a continuous struggle for survival. [№4.С.321-323]

In late 1920 - early 1921, armed uprisings swept Western Siberia, Tambov, Voronezh provinces, the Middle Volga region, Don, Kuban. A large number of anti-Bolshevik peasant formations operated in Ukraine. In Central Asia, the creation of armed detachments of nationalists was increasingly unfolding. By the spring of 1921, uprisings were blazing throughout the country. [№10.S.23]

Having traced the geography of the anti-Bolshevik uprisings in 1918-1921, I saw that almost all regions of the country rebelled, but not at the same time. Some areas were suppressed earlier, in others the protest broke through only at the end of the civil war. The resourcefulness of their policy, the principle of "divide and rule" also allowed the Bolsheviks to maintain dominance. Lenin demanded the use of airplanes and armored cars against the peasant "bands". In the Tambov region, participants in the unrest were poisoned with suffocating gases.

Lenin said about this period: "... in 1921, after we had overcome the most important stage of the civil war, and overcome it victoriously, we stumbled upon a big - I believe, the biggest - internal political crisis of Soviet Russia. This internal crisis revealed discontent not only of a significant part of the peasantry, but also of the workers. This was the first and, I hope, the last time in the history of Soviet Russia, when large masses of the peasantry, not consciously, but instinctively, in their mood, were against us. [No.6.S.14]

One of the most important events of the popular anti-communist movement was the Kronstadt uprising (in Soviet literature- Kronstadt rebellion). It also broke out in one of the main centers of the past "revolutionary".

With the growth of the movement in Petrograd, discontent quickly grew in Kronstadt, a military fortress, whose garrison numbered almost 27,000 people. The movement here began with a meeting of the teams of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol on February 28, 1921. The sailors supported the demands of the Petrograd workers and, following the model of 1917, elected the Military Revolutionary Committee. It was headed by sailor Stepan Petrichenko. The main demands of the “rebels” were: “The Soviets must become non-partisan and represent the working people; Down with the carefree life of the bureaucracy, down with the bayonets and bullets of the oprichniki, the serfdom of the commissar-power and government trade unions! The fact of the Kronstadt uprising was hidden by the Bolsheviks for three days, and when it was no longer possible to remain silent, it was declared a rebellion by one staff general (Kozlovsky), allegedly prepared by French counterintelligence. The Bolsheviks suggested that with the help of Kronstadt "the White Guards and the Black Hundreds want to stifle the revolution." [#11.S.15]

1. The course of the uprising

The total number of ship crews, military sailors of coastal units, as well as ground forces stationed in Kronstadt and on the forts, was 13 February 1921 26887 people - 1455 commanders, the rest are privates. [#15.S.31]

They were worried about the news from home, mainly from the village - no food, no manufacture, no essentials. Especially many complaints about this situation came from sailors to the Bureau of Complaints of the Political Department of the Baltic Fleet in the winter of 1921.

On the afternoon of March 1, a rally was held on the anchor square of Kronstadt, which gathered about 16 thousand people. The leaders of the Kronstadt naval base hoped that during the meeting they would be able to change the mood of the sailors and soldiers of the garrison. They tried to convince the audience to give up their political demands. However, the participants by a majority of votes supported the resolution of the battleships "Petropavlovsk" and "Sevastopol". [№5.S.34]

Petrichenko: “While making the October Revolution in 1917, the workers of Russia hoped to achieve their complete emancipation and placed their hopes on the Communist Party, which promised a lot. What did the Communist Party, headed by Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and others, give in 3.5 years? In three and a half years of their existence, the communists did not give emancipation, but the complete enslavement of a person's personality. Instead of police-gendarmerie monarchism, they received every minute fear of falling into the dungeons of the state of emergency, which many times surpassed the gendarmerie department of the tsarist regime in its horrors.

The demands of the Kronstadters, in the resolution adopted on March 1, posed a serious threat not to the Soviets, but to the Bolsheviks' monopoly on political power. This resolution was, in essence, an appeal to the government to respect the rights and freedoms proclaimed by the Bolsheviks in October 1917.

The news of the events in Kronstadt provoked a sharp reaction from the Soviet leadership. The delegation of Kronstadters, which arrived in Petrograd to explain the demands of the sailors, soldiers and workers of the fortress, was arrested. On March 4, the Labor and Defense Council approved the text of the government report on the events in Kronstadt, published on March 2 in the newspapers. The movement in Kronstadt was declared a "mutiny" organized by the French counterintelligence and the former tsarist general Kozlovsky, and the resolution adopted by the Kronstadters was "Black Hundred-Socialist-Revolutionary." [No.14.S.7]

On March 3, Petrograd and the Petrograd province were declared under a state of siege. This measure is more directed against the anti-Bolshevik demonstrations of the St. Petersburg workers than against the Kronstadt sailors.

The Kronstadters sought open and transparent negotiations with the authorities, but the position of the latter from the very beginning of the events was unequivocal: no negotiations or compromises, the rebels must be severely punished. Parliamentarians who were sent by the rebels were arrested. The proposal to exchange representatives of Kronstadt and Petrograd remained unanswered. A broad propaganda campaign was launched in the press, distorting the essence of the events taking place, in every possible way propagating the idea that the uprising was the work of tsarist generals, officers and Black Hundreds. Calls were made to "disarm a handful of bandits" who had settled in Kronstadt.

On March 4, in connection with direct threats from the authorities to crack down on the Kronstadters by force, the Military Revolutionary Committee turned to military specialists - staff officers - with a request to help organize the defense of the fortress. On March 5, an agreement was reached. Military experts suggested that, without waiting for the assault on the fortress, they themselves go on the offensive. They insisted on the capture of Oranienbaum, Sestroetsk in order to expand the base of the uprising. However, all proposals to be the first to start hostilities were resolutely refused by the Military Revolutionary Committee. offered, without waiting for the storming of the fortress, to go on the offensive themselves. They insisted on the capture of Oranienbaum, Sestroetsk in order to expand the base of the uprising. However, all proposals to be the first to start hostilities were resolutely refused by the Military Revolutionary Committee.

On March 5, an order is issued on operational measures to eliminate the "mutiny". The 7th Army was restored, under the command of Tukhachevsky, who was ordered 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.

Meanwhile, unrest in military units intensified. The Red Army soldiers refused to storm Kronstadt. It was decided to start sending "unreliable" sailors to serve in other areas of the country, away from Kronstadt. Until March 12, 6 echelons with sailors were sent. [No.13.S.88-94]

In order to force the military units to advance, the Soviet command had to resort not only to agitation, but also to threats. A powerful repressive mechanism is being created, designed to change the mood of the Red Army. Unreliable units were disarmed and sent to the rear, the instigators were shot. Sentences to capital punishment "for refusing to carry out a combat mission", "for desertion" followed one after another. They were carried out immediately. For moral intimidation, they were shot in public.

On the night of March 17, after an intensive artillery shelling of the fortress, its new assault began. When it became clear that further resistance was useless and would lead to nothing except additional victims, at the suggestion of the fortress defense headquarters, the defenders decided to leave Kronstadt. The government of Finland was asked if it could accept the garrison of the fortress. After receiving a positive response, a retreat to the Finnish coast began, provided by specially formed cover detachments. About 8 thousand people went to Finland, including the entire headquarters of the fortress, 12 out of 15 members of the "revolutionary committee" and many of the most active participants in the rebellion. Of the members of the Revolutionary Committee, only Perepelkin, Vershinin and Valk were detained.

By the morning of March 18, the fortress was in the hands of the Red Army. The authorities concealed the number of dead, missing, and wounded.[#5.C.7]

1. The results of the uprising and its consequences

The massacre of the Kronstadt garrison began. The very stay in the fortress during the uprising was considered a crime. All sailors and Red Army men went through the tribunal. The sailors of the battleships "Petropavlovsk" and "Sevastopol" were dealt with especially cruelly. Even being on them was enough to be shot.

By the summer of 1921, 10,001 people passed through the tribunal: 2,103 were sentenced to death, 6,447 were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, and 1,451, although they were released, the charges were not removed from them.

In the spring of 1922, a mass eviction of the inhabitants of Kronstadt began. On February 1, the evacuation commission began its work. Until April 1, 1923, it registered 2,756 people, of which 2,048 were “crown rebels” and members of their families, and 516 were not connected with the fortress by their activities. The first batch of 315 people was sent in March 1922. In total, during the indicated time, 2514 people were deported, of which 1963 - as "crown rebels" and members of their families, 388 - as not connected with the fortress.[№7.С.91] Chapter 2

2.1. The point of view of the "Bolsheviks"

Lenin, in his speech at the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b), said: “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. 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.

This explains the position of the Bolsheviks, but at the same time shows that the deep contradictions that arose between the people, even very pro-Bolshevik-minded during the October Revolution, are not made public even at the party congress, although they are understood by V.I. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders.

The most thoughtful of them understood that something was wrong in the relations between the Party and the people. Here is Alexandra Kollontai's speech : “I would say frankly that, despite all our personal attitude towards Vladimir Ilyich, we cannot but say that few people were satisfied with his report ... We expected that in the party environment Vladimir Ilyich would reveal, show the whole essence, say what measures The Central Committee accepts that these events should not be repeated. Vladimir Ilyich evaded the question of Kronstadt and the question of St. Petersburg and Moscow. [No.11.S. 101-106] Lenin deliberately downplayed the significance of the uprising. In an interview with The New York Times, he said: “Believe me, only two governments are possible in Russia: the tsarist or the Soviet. The uprising in Kronstadt is indeed a completely insignificant incident, which poses a much lesser threat to the Soviet government than the Irish troops to the British Empire. sailors who gave power to Lenin and Trotsky. And then the party sends its generals to suppress it. Here are Trotsky, and Tukhachevsky, and Yakir, and Fedko, and Voroshilov with Khmelnitsky, Sedyakin, Kazansky, Putna, Fabricius. But some red commanders are not enough. And then the party sends delegates to its Tenth Congress and big party members. Here and Kalinin, and Bubnov, and Zatonsky. The Consolidated Division is being formed... At the head of the Consolidated Division, Comrade Dybenko, who had fled from the battlefield and was expelled from the party for cowardice, was appointed. On March 10, Tukhachevsky informs Lenin: "If the matter boiled down to an uprising of sailors, it would be easier, but it is worse than all that the workers in Petrograd are definitely not reliable." For the sake of suppressing the uprising, the Bolsheviks were ready for anything. There was a real fratricide, thousands of sailors fled across the ice to the Finnish border. The Soviets in Kronstadt were dispersed, instead of them the military commandant and the "revolutionary troika" began to manage all affairs. The rebel ships have been given new names. So, "Petropavlovsk" became "Marat", and "Sevastopol" - "Paris Commune". Finally, in order to put an end to the “Kronstadt Veche” case, the victors also punished Anchor Square, where the rebels gathered, by renaming it Revolution Square. [#15.S.31]

2.2. The point of view of the "instigators"

The point of view of the "instigators" of the uprising is most clearly shown by their appeal to the people. From the 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 proved 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 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 entire people, of all the 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 to the Council. 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. [#14.S.18] Is there anything to add to the position of the "instigators"? In my opinion, everything here is very clear and does not require explanation. Only despair and hopelessness raised these people to fight with those. Whom they elevated to the pinnacle of power, for the sake of whose ideas they destroyed their former state and hoped to build a new and just one in its place.

2.3. The point of view of Soviet and modern Russian historians

The first work that opens the bibliography of this topic is a special issue of the Red Army magazine "Military Knowledge", which appeared less than six months after the capture of the rebellious fortress. Small in volume, but very informative articles by M. N. Tukhachevsky, P. E. Dybenko and other participants in the assault provided extensive factual material, both documentary and memoirs. The named collection has not lost its value up to the present time. It should be specially emphasized that the military specialists of the Red Army immediately appreciated how important it was to study the experience of the unique offensive operation near Kronstadt. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, several more small books and articles appeared in scientific periodicals about the Kronstadt rebellion. In the post-war period, right up to the beginning of the 1960s, the study of the Kronstadt rebellion was practically not continued. The only exception was the book by I. Rotin, which appeared in the late 50s. The assault on the rebellious fortress is one of the most interesting pages in the annals of the Red Army - in connection with the accepted periodization of the history of the USSR, it went beyond the chronological framework of the civil war, and even in the most complete edition in our historiography on this topic - the five-volume "History of the Civil War in the USSR" - there is no mention of the battles near Kronstadt. This, of course, is a gap in the historiography of the civil war in the USSR. [№6.S.324] And those few and fragmentary information that are found in Soviet historiography unambiguously call the events of February - March 1921 an anti-Soviet counter-revolutionary uprising, quite rightly suppressed by the Soviet government, since it was directed against the people's power and the workers' and peasants' party . [No. 10.S. 47]. The fact that the truth about the Kronstadt rebellion was hidden in Soviet times is understandable, but it is not very much in demand by New Russia either. I failed to find a coherent assessment of this event by modern authors. Is that in the book of N. Starikov "Russian Troubles of the XX century" the Kronstadt rebellion is also mentioned in passing ...

Chapter 3. Conclusions: The Kronstadt uprising of 1921: a counter-revolutionary rebellion or discontent of the people?

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."

The Kronstadt sailors of the Baltic Fleet were the vanguard and strike force Bolsheviks: they participated in the October Revolution, suppressed the uprising of the junkers of military schools in Petrograd, stormed the Moscow Kremlin and established Soviet power in various cities of Russia. the country was devastated, 20% of the country's population was starving, in some regions there was even cannibalism. Based on the studied sources and literature, I made an unambiguous conclusion for myself: the Kronstadt uprising of 1921 cannot be called a counter-revolutionary rebellion, it was definitely the highest point of people's dissatisfaction with the then-existing power of the "Bolsheviks", their policy of "war communism" and the surplus appropriation, which led to to the monstrous impoverishment of the population. The Kronstadt uprising, together with the actions of workers and peasants in other parts of the country, testified to a deep economic and social crisis, the failure of the policy of "war communism". It became clear to the Bolsheviks that in order to save power, it was necessary to introduce a new domestic policy aimed at satisfying the demands of the bulk of the population - the peasantry. Few people know the truth about the Kronstadt uprising, although the very fact that the rebellion against the Bolsheviks was raised by their own guards - the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, should have attracted attention. In the end, these were the same people who had previously taken the Winter Palace and arrested the Provisional Government, then, with weapons in their hands, established Bolshevik power in Moscow and dispersed the Constituent Assembly, and then, as commissars, pursued the party line on all fronts of the civil war . Until 1921, Leon Trotsky called the Kronstadt sailors "the pride and glory of the Russian revolution."

Conclusion

For many decades, the Kronstadt events were interpreted as a rebellion prepared by the White Guards, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and anarchists, who relied on the active support of the imperialists. It was alleged that the actions of the Kronstadters were aimed at overthrowing the Soviet regime, that the sailors of individual ships and part of the garrison in the fortress took part in the mutiny. As for the leaders of the party and the state, they allegedly did everything to avoid bloodshed, and only after appeals to the soldiers and sailors of the fortress with a proposal to abandon their demands remained unanswered, it was decided to use violence. The fortress was taken by storm. At the same time, the victors remained extremely humane towards the vanquished. The events, documents and articles we have considered allow us to give a different view of the Kronstadt events. The Soviet leadership was aware of the nature of the Kronstadt movement, its goals, its leaders, that neither the Socialist-Revolutionaries, nor the Mensheviks, nor the imperialists took any active part in it. However, objective information was carefully concealed from the population and instead a falsified version was offered that the Kronstadt events were the work of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, White Guards and international imperialism, although the Cheka could not find any data on this. Much more important in the demands of the Kronstadters was the call for the liquidation of the monopoly power of the Bolsheviks. The punitive action against Kronstadt was supposed to show that any political reforms would not affect the foundations of this monopoly. The party leadership understood the need for concessions, including the replacement of surplus appropriation with a tax in kind, and permission for trade. It was these questions that were the main demand of the Kronstadters. There seemed to be a basis for negotiations. However, the Soviet government rejected this possibility. If the X Congress of the RCP(b) opened on March 6, that is, on the day appointed earlier, the turn in economic policy announced at it could change the situation in Kronstadt, affect the mood of the sailors: they were waiting for Lenin's speech at the congress. Then, perhaps, an assault would not have been needed. However, the Kremlin did not want such a development of events. Kronstadt also became a tool for Lenin, with the help of which he gave credibility to the demands to eliminate all internal party struggle to ensure the unity of the RCP(b) and the observance of strict internal party discipline. A few months after the Kronstadt events, he would say: “It is now necessary to teach this public a lesson so that for several decades they will not even dare to think about any resistance” [No. 9. S. 57]

List of used literature

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2. Voroshilov K.E. From the history of the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion. // Military History Journal, No. 3, 1961.

3. The Civil War in the USSR (in 2 vols.) / call. authors, ed. N. N. Azovtsev. Volume 2. M., Military Publishing, 1986.

4. The Kronstadt tragedy of 1921 // Questions of history. - 1994 . №4-7

5. The Kronstadt tragedy of 1921: documents (in 2 vols.) / comp. I. I. Kudryavtsev. Volume I. M., ROSSPEN, 1999.

6. Kronstadt 1921. Documents. / Russia XX century. M., 1997

7. Kronstadt rebellion. Chronos - Internet encyclopedia;

8. Kuznetsov M. Rebellious general to the slaughter. // "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" dated 08/01/1997.

9. Safonov V.N. Who provoked the Kronstadt rebellion? // Military history magazine. - 1991. - No. 7.

10. Semanov S. N. Kronstadt rebellion. M., 2003.

11. Soviet military encyclopedia. T. 4.

12. Trifonov N., Souvenirov O. The defeat of the counter-revolutionary Kronstadt rebellion // Military History Journal, No. 3, 1971.

13. Shishkina I. Kronstadt rebellion of 1921: "an unknown revolution"? // Star. 1988. - No. 6.

Encyclopedia "Civil War and Military Intervention in the USSR" (2nd ed.) / editorial board, ch. ed. S. S. Khromov. M.: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1987.

Internet resources:

www.bibliotekar.ru

www.erudition.ru

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What is the Kronstadt rebellion? This is an armed uprising of sailors of the Baltic Fleet stationed in the fortress of Kronstadt. The sailors came out against the power of the Bolsheviks, and their confrontation lasted from March 1 to March 18, 1921. The uprising was brutally suppressed by units of the Red Army. The arrested rebels were tried. 2103 people were sentenced to death. At the same time, 8 thousand rebels managed to escape. They left Russia and went to Finland. What were the prerequisites and the course of this rebellion?

Background of the Kronstadt rebellion

By the end of 1920, the Civil War in most of Russia was over. At the same time, industry and agriculture lay in ruins. The policy of military communism raged in the country, under which grain and flour were taken from the peasants by force. This provoked mass uprisings of the rural population in different provinces. It acquired the greatest strength in the Tambov province.

In the cities, the situation was no better. The general decline in industrial production gave rise to total unemployment. Who could, fled to the village, hoping for a better lot. Production workers received food rations, but they were extremely small. Many speculators appeared in the city markets. And it was because of them that people somehow survived.

During war communism, the food situation was very difficult. People took to the streets demanding more food rations.

The difficult situation with food gave rise to a strike of workers in Petrograd on February 24, 1921. And the next day, the authorities introduced martial law in the city. In doing so, they arrested several hundred of the most active workers. After that, food rations were increased, to which canned meat was added. This calmed down the inhabitants of Petrograd for some time. But nearby was Kronstadt.

It was a powerful military fortress with many artificial islands and forts guarding the mouth of the Neva. It was not even a fortress, but a whole military city, which was the base of the Baltic Fleet. It was inhabited by sailors and civilians. At any military base there are always large food supplies. However, by the end of 1919, all food supplies from Kronstadt were taken out.

And so its population turned out to be on common ground with the inhabitants of the capital. Food was brought into the fortress. But it was bad with them everywhere, and military base was no exception. As a result, discontent began to grow among the sailors, and it was aggravated by unrest in Petrograd. On February 26, the inhabitants of Kronstadt sent a delegation to the city. She was authorized to find out the political and economic situation in the capital.

Returning, the delegates said that the situation in the city is extremely tense. Everywhere military patrols, factories are on strike and surrounded by troops. All this information excited people. On February 28, a meeting was held at which demands were made for re-elections of the Soviets. This body of people's power at that time was a fiction. It was run by the Bolsheviks, controlled by the commissars.

On March 1, 1921, general discontent and unrest resulted in a rally of many thousands on Anchor Square. The main slogan on it was - "Soviets without communists." The chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin urgently arrived at the rally.

His task was to defuse the situation, smooth out the intensity of passions, and calm people down. However, the speech of one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party was interrupted by indignant cries. Kalinin was unequivocally advised to get out. Then he declared that he would return, but not alone, but with the proletarians, who would ruthlessly destroy this center of counter-revolution. After that, Mikhail Ivanovich left the square amid whistling and hooting.

The protesters adopted a resolution, which included the following points(not shown in full):

1. To hold re-elections of the Soviets with preliminary free agitation of the workers and peasants.

2. Freedom of speech and press for peasants, workers, anarchists and leftist socialist parties.

3. To convene, no later than March 10, a non-Party conference of workers, Red Army men and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd province.

4. Abolish the Political Departments, since no party can use privileges to propagate their ideas and receive funds for this from the state treasury.

5. Abolish combat communist detachments in military units, factories and plants. And if such detachments are needed, then form them in military units from personnel, and in factories and plants at the discretion of the workers.

6. Give the peasants the right to land without using hired labor.

7. We ask all military units and military cadets to join our Resolution.

The resolution was adopted by the brigade meeting unanimously with 2 abstentions. It was announced at a citywide rally in the presence of 16,000 citizens and adopted unanimously.

Kronstadt rebellion

The day after the rally, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee (VRC) was formed. His headquarters was located on the battleship "Petropavlovsk". This ship stood next to other warships in the harbor of Kronstadt. All of them were frozen into the ice and, as combat units, did not represent anything from themselves in such conditions. The ships had heavy-duty guns. But from such guns it is good to shoot at long distances at enemy warships with thick armor. And shooting at infantry is like firing cannons at sparrows.

The ships also had guns of small, medium caliber, machine guns. But during the years of the Civil War, most of the cartridges and shells were taken from the inactive ships and forts of Kronstadt. There were also not enough rifles, since a sailor was not supposed to have a rifle. On military ships, it is intended only for the guard. Thus, the beginning of the Kronstadt rebellion did not have a serious military base. But the sailors did not plan to lead fighting. They only fought for their rights and tried to resolve all issues peacefully.

An ice-bound warship in Kronstadt Bay

The head of the VRC was Stepan Maksimovich Petrichenko. He served as a senior clerk on the battleship "Petropavlovsk", and having become the head of the committee, he did not show any special organizational talents. But he managed to organize the release of the newspaper Izvestiya VRK. The headquarters also took under guard all the strategic objects of the city, forts and ships. The latter had radio stations, and they broadcast messages about the uprising in Kronstadt and the Resolution adopted at the meeting.

The rebellious sailors called their rebellion the third revolution directed against the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks. Agitators were sent to Petrograd, but most of them were arrested. Thus, the Bolshevik authorities made it clear that there would be no negotiations or concessions to the rebels. In response, they created a defense headquarters, which included specialists from the tsarist army and navy.

Trotsky telegraphed from Petrograd to Kronstadt on March 4. He demanded immediate surrender. In response to this, a meeting was held in the fortress, at which the rebels decided to resist. Armed units with a total strength of up to 15 thousand people were created. At the same time, there were defectors. At least 500 people left the rebellious city before the outbreak of hostilities.

For the Bolsheviks, the Kronstadt rebellion turned into a serious test. The uprising had to be urgently suppressed, since it could become a detonator, all of Russia could blaze. Therefore, all available command personnel and Red Army soldiers loyal to the regime were urgently pulled to the rebellious city. But they were not enough, and then the party sent delegates to the Tenth Congress of the RCP (b), which was to begin in Petrograd on March 8, to suppress the rebellion. Trotsky promised orders to all these people.

Novice writers were also pulled up to the fortress, assuring them that they would all be made classics. They also threw in the suppression of the Kremlin cadets of machine-gun courses and formed the Consolidated Division. In the latter, they gathered those communists who at one time were guilty of something, got drunk, and were stealing. Many of them were expelled from the party, and now they were given a chance to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the Soviet authorities. The division was headed by Pavel Dybenko.

By March 7, all these units entered the 7th Army under the command of Tukhachevsky. It numbered 17.5 thousand fighters. The main striking force was considered the Consolidated Division, consisting of 4 brigades. The Omsk 27th Rifle Division also moved towards Kronstadt. In 1919, she took Omsk, freeing it from the Kolchakites, and now she had to help clear the rebellious fortress from counter-revolutionaries.

Looking ahead, it should be said that there were 2 assaults on Kronstadt. The first assault began on the evening of March 7, 1921. By order of Tukhachevsky, artillery fire was opened on the forts of the fortress. It was mainly fought from the Krasnaya Gorka fort, which remained loyal to the Soviet regime. In response, guns from the battleship "Sevastopol" hit. The artillery duel continued all evening, but this "exchange of courtesies" did not cause any serious losses among the warring parties.

In the early morning of March 8, the troops of the 7th Army stormed Kronstadt. However, this attack was repulsed, and some advancing units went over to the side of the rebellious sailors or refused to carry out the order to advance. At the same time, the shelling of the forts continued. The Bolsheviks even used aviation, which dropped bombs on ships frozen in ice. But all this did not help. By the end of the day, it became clear to the attackers that the assault, which went down in history as the first, had failed.

Red Army soldiers of the 7th Army storm Kronstadt

The Bolsheviks prepared much more thoroughly for the second assault. The Kronstadt rebellion became more and more popular with the people every day, and therefore the second failure could result in hundreds of similar rebellions throughout the country. Additional troops were pulled into the area of ​​Kotlin Island and the strength of the 7th Army increased to 42 thousand people.

The military units were diluted with police officers, criminal investigation officers, communists, Chekists and deputies of the X Congress. All this was supposed to increase the morale and fighting spirit of ordinary Red Army soldiers, who were not very eager to fight against their own. Additional artillery pieces and machine guns arrived from distant garrisons.

The second assault on the rebellious Kronstadt began at 3 am on March 17. This time the attackers acted more harmoniously and in an organized manner. They began to storm the forts and take them one by one. Some fortifications held out for several hours, and some surrendered immediately. There was a shortage of ammunition among the defenders. Where there was very little ammunition, the rebellious sailors did not even resist, but left on the ice in Finland.

The flagship battleship "Petropavlovsk" was subjected to an air raid. The members of the Military Revolutionary Committee were forced to leave the ship. Some of them led the defense in the city itself, where the Red Army broke after the fall of the forts, while others, led by Petrichenko, went to Finland. Street fighting continued until the early morning of 18 March. And only by 7 o'clock in the morning the resistance of the rebellious sailors in the city ceased.

The Kronstadters who remained on the ships at first decided to blow up all the floating facilities so that the Bolsheviks would not get them. However, the leaders had already left the ships and gone to Finland, so disagreements began between the sailors. On some ships, the rebels were disarmed, arrested, and the arrested communists were released from the holds. After that, the courts began to radio one after another that Soviet power had been restored. The last to surrender was the battleship Petropavlovsk. This ended the Kronstadt rebellion.

In total, the 7th Army lost 532 men killed and 3,305 wounded. Of these, 15 people turned out to be delegates to the 10th Congress. Of the rebels, 1 thousand people died and 2.5 thousand were injured. About 3 thousand surrendered, and 8 thousand went to Finland. These data are not entirely accurate, since different sources give different numbers of dead and wounded. There is even an opinion that the 7th Army lost about 10 thousand people wounded and killed.

Conclusion

Was the Kronstadt rebellion a senseless meat grinder or did it have some political significance? It became that moment of truth, which finally showed the Bolsheviks all the futility and perniciousness of the policy of war communism. After the rebellion, the leaders of the Bolshevik party worked the instinct of self-preservation.

Lenin, Trotsky and Voroshilov with deputies of the 10th Congress of the RCP(b), who took part in the suppression of the rebellion in Kronstadt. Lenin in the center, Trotsky to his left, Voroshilov behind Lenin

We must pay tribute to Lenin. He had an extremely quirky mind that quickly adapted to changing situations. Therefore, after the suppression of the rebellion, Vladimir Ilyich announced the beginning of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Thus, the Bolsheviks killed 2 birds with one stone. They brought down political tensions and stabilized a collapsing economy. Some experts consider the NEP the most successful economic project Soviet era. And he was indebted in many ways to the Kronstadt rebellion, which shook the foundations of Soviet power.

anti-Bolshevik uprising in the main base of the Baltic Fleet, the fortress city of Kronstadt,
where the ship's crews were located,
coastal units and auxiliary units of sailors with a total number of over 26 thousand people.
The uprising, held under the slogan "Power to the Soviets, not parties!",
immediately became the center of attention of the Bolshevik leadership.

1921. Stepan Petrichenko (indicated by the arrow) among the participants in the uprising

At the end of the Civil War, the situation in Russia deteriorated sharply. A significant part of the peasantry and workers not only openly protested against the Bolshevik monopoly on political power, but also made attempts to eliminate it by force of arms. The outrage was caused by the arbitrariness of the Bolsheviks under the slogan of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, but in fact - the dictatorship of the party.

In late 1920 - early 1921, armed uprisings of peasants engulfed Western Siberia, Tambov, Voronezh provinces, the Middle Volga region, Don, Kuban, Ukraine, Central Asia. The situation in the cities became more and more explosive. There was a shortage of food, many plants and factories were closed due to a lack of fuel and raw materials, workers found themselves on the street.

Unrest in Petrograd, speeches in other regions of the country had a serious impact on the mood of the sailors, soldiers and workers of Kronstadt. The sailors of Kronstadt, who were the main support of the Bolsheviks in the October days of 1917, were among the first to understand that the Soviet power was, in essence, replaced by the power of the party, and the ideals for which they fought turned out to be betrayed.

On February 28, the sailors of the battleships "Petropavlovsk" and "Sevastopol" adopted a resolution, which was submitted for discussion by representatives of all ships and military units of the Baltic Fleet. The resolution, in essence, was a demand to respect the rights and freedoms proclaimed in October 1917. It did not contain calls for the overthrow of the government, but was directed against the omnipotence of the Communist Party.

Warships "Petropalvlovsk" and "Sevastopol" in the port of Kronstadt

The Kronstadters demanded the liquidation of the "autocracy of the communists."

On the afternoon of March 1, a rally was held on Anchor Square in Kronstadt, which gathered about 16,000 people. Its participants overwhelmingly supported the resolution of the sailors of the battleships Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol.

Immediately after the rally, a meeting of the party committee of the communists of the fortress took place, at which the question of the possibility of armed suppression of supporters of the adopted resolution was discussed.

On March 2, a delegate assembly of representatives gathered at the House of Education in Kronstadt. The main issue at the meeting was the question of re-elections of the Kronstadt Soviet. By a majority vote, the meeting expressed no confidence in the communists, urging them to voluntarily relinquish power.

Suddenly there was a message that the communists of the fortress were preparing to resist. In this regard, it was decided to urgently create a Provisional Revolutionary Committee (VRC) to maintain order in Kronstadt, headed by the presidium elected at the meeting in the amount of 5 people and the chairman of the delegate assembly, the head of the VRC of the Kronstadt uprising - the senior clerk from the battleship "Petropavlovsk" Stepan Maksimovich Petrichenko (1892 - 1947).

Power in Kronstadt passed into the hands of the Revolutionary Committee without a single shot being fired. This was facilitated by the collapse of the Bolshevik cells of the military and civilian organizations of Kronstadt. The exit from the party continued until the last assault on the fortress, when it was already clear that the besieged were doomed.
The Revolutionary Committee took upon itself the preparation of elections to the Soviet by secret ballot, granting the right to participate in them and conduct free agitation to all political forces of a socialist orientation.

The news of the events in Kronstadt provoked a sharp reaction from the Soviet leadership. The delegation of Kronstadters, which arrived in Petrograd to explain the demands of the sailors, soldiers and workers of the fortress, was arrested.

On March 4, the Labor and Defense Council approved the text of the government message. The Kronstadt movement was declared a "mutiny" organized by the French counterintelligence and the former tsarist general Kozlovsky (who commanded the artillery of the fortress), the resolution adopted by the Kronstadters was "Black Hundred-Socialist-Revolutionary."

On March 3, Petrograd and the province were declared under a state of siege. This measure was directed rather against possible demonstrations by the St. Petersburg workers than against the Kronstadt sailors.

The authorities were preparing to suppress the uprising by force of arms. On the morning of March 3, an order was sent to all units, to the ships of the Baltic Fleet, in which all commissars were ordered to be on the ground; gathering in the presence of strangers was prohibited; all those seen in agitation against the Soviet regime were proposed to be arrested. The authorities took measures to isolate Kronstadt from the outside world, blocking access to Petrograd for sailors and the Red Army soldiers of the fortress.

On March 5, an order was issued on operational measures to eliminate the "mutiny". The 7th Army was restored under the command of M.N. Tukhachevsky, who was ordered 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.

The hope for a quick defeat of the uprising on the opening day of the Tenth Congress did not come true. Having suffered heavy losses, the punitive troops retreated to their original lines. One of the reasons for this failure lay in the mood of the Red Army; it came to direct disobedience and speeches in support of Kronstadt. The unrest in the military units intensified, the Red Army refused to storm the fortress, calls were made to "beat the communists."

The authorities were afraid that the uprising would spread to the entire Baltic Fleet. To force the military units to advance, the command had to resort to repression and threats. Unreliable units were disarmed and sent to the rear, and those who were considered the instigators were publicly shot.

On the night of March 16, after an intensive artillery shelling of the fortress, its new assault began. When it became clear that further resistance was useless, at the suggestion of the fortress defense headquarters, the defenders decided to leave Kronstadt for Finland. After a positive response from Finland, a withdrawal to the Finnish coast began. About 8 thousand people managed to cross the border, and almost all members of the Kronstadt Military Revolutionary Committee and the defense headquarters.

The Red Army attacks Kronstadt on the ice of the Gulf of Finland

By the morning of March 18, the fortress was in the hands of the Bolsheviks. The massacre of the Kronstadt garrison began. The very stay in the fortress during the uprising was considered a crime. Several dozen open trials have taken place. The sailors of the battleships "Sevastopol" and "Petropavlovsk" were dealt with especially cruelly.

By the summer of 1921, 2,103 people had been sentenced to death by firing squad and 6,459 people to various terms of punishment. In addition, in the spring of 1922, a mass eviction of the inhabitants of Kronstadt began.

The Soviet leadership was informed about the nature of the Kronstadt movement, its goals, leaders, that neither the Socialist-Revolutionaries, nor the Mensheviks, nor foreign forces took part in it. However, objective information was carefully concealed from the population, and instead a falsified version was offered that the Kronstadt events were supposedly the work of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, White Guards and international imperialism. The authorities expected to confirm the official version with facts in the course of a large-scale public trial of the "rebels". It was assumed that, along with the leaders of the uprising, persons associated with Western intelligence and representatives of opposition parties would testify. The main defendants were to be the chairman of the Military Revolutionary Committee, Petrichenko, and General Kozlovsky. However, the main figures of the process could not be arrested, and the process never took place.

The surviving participants in the Kronstadt events were repeatedly repressed later.

In the 1990s, their conviction was deemed unfounded and they were rehabilitated.

Kronstadt. Eternal flame

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 regions Kamyshlovsky 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. Also, they are outdated. methodological, and the estimates expressed 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 the 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 the ritual reasoning gleaned from the pages " short course 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 driving force The West Siberian rebellion was considered by the local kulaks and the remnants of Kolchak. 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 bulk, it was a bunch of deserters and forcibly mobilized or temporarily succumbed to the bait of kulak agitation peasants. 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, given by the author single examples they 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. AT 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 at the end of the 1950s had access to and was familiar with almost all the key documents of the rebels, party-Soviet, military, Chekist and Revolutionary Tribunal organs, stored in the former Central State Archive 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 rather 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 was the initiator of 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 insurrectionary 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 period of 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, studies of Soviet and foreign historians. However, even this small circle of sources and literature, Frenkin could not 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 the uprising and incomparably more difficult for 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 than that, in the early 1990s, public interest in the history of this dramatic event began to be satisfied by people who were professionally poorly prepared to solve 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 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, based on a limited amount of material, moreover, as a rule, of a random nature, are not without declarativeness and predetermined nature.

Undoubtedly, more could be 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 latest publication gives the impression of a work consisting of mechanically combined fragments written at different times, from different methodological positions, and even as if 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 a doctoral student of Uralsky state university V. V. Moskovkina, published in the journal Questions of History. 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 this 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 student 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, methods social psychology and historical local history. 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, refuting the allegations of security officers 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 probably the most precise definition 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 "Gustomes" 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 character, and they sounded 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 by 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 vast territory 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 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 foci arose at about the same time and independently of each other in different areas of the Ishim, Yalutorovsk, Tyumen, Tara and Tyukalinsky counties. 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 called. 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 new point vision. 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” »; " Command staff 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. Tretyakov’s assessment coincides with 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.

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 surplus appraisal." 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. V.V. Moskovkin depicted the forced actions of disparate insurgent detachments, leaving from under the blows of the Red troops from the center of the rebellion to the periphery, 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 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.

Analysis of Russian historiography of the 1990s allows us to state that the publications of this decade in best case laid only 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, moreover, it did not solve the problem. comprehensive research themes. 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 deployment, as well as 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. Pishchike, 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

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6. [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.
7. 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 competition degree candidate 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.
8. 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.
9. See: Civil war and intervention in the USSR. Encyclopedia. M., 1983, pp. 214–215.
10. 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 the events, numbering about a thousand pages of text, and also containing numerous, including unique, documentary applications.
11. Pomerantsev P. West Siberian uprising of 1921, p.40.
12. 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).
13. Bogdanov M. The defeat of the West Siberian kulak-SR rebellion of 1921, p.30.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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).
17. 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.
18. Bogdanov M. The defeat of the West Siberian kulak-SR rebellion of 1921, pp. 29–31.
19. 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.
20. 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.
21. 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”.
22. Bogdanov M. The defeat of the West Siberian kulak-SR rebellion of 1921, p.40.
23. Ibid., p.70, 102.
24. Ibid., p.37.
25. Ibid., pp. 36–37, 96.
26. Turhansky P.(memories). Peasant uprising in Western Siberia in 1921 // Siberian archive. Prague, 1929, 2, p.69;
27. Ibid., p.71.
28. “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.”
29. Ibid., p.71.
30. Frankin M. The tragedy of peasant uprisings in Russia (1918–1921). Jerusalem, 1987.
31. Ibid., pp. 122, 125.
32. Ibid., p.127.
33. Ibid., pp.126–127.
34. 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.
35. 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.
36. Kronstadt 1921. Documents about the events in Kronstadt in the spring of 1921. M., 1997; and etc.
37. 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
38. 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.
39. 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.
40. Ermakov I. I. Food detachments in the Tyumen province (1920–1921) // History of the peasantry of the Urals and Siberia during the civil war.
41. 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.
42. Kuryshev I.V. Peasants' War// The land of Siberia, the Far East. Omsk, 1993, 5–6, 7;
43. 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.
44. Petrova V.P. The uprising of 1921 in the Tyumen province // History of the peasantry of the Urals and Siberia during the civil war.
45. I. F. Plotnikov Peasant uprising in the Urals and Western Siberia in 1921 // Chronicle of the Ural villages. Yekaterinburg, 1995.
46. Proskuryakova N. L. Strokes to the biography of the commander of the Ishim rebel army Grigory Atamanov // "Slovtsovsky Readings - 97".
47. 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.
48. 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.
49. 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.
50. 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.
51. 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.
52. Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily ... Tyumen, 1994.
53. Shangin M. No cross, no stone. Novel. Omsk, 1997.
54. 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.
55. 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).

56. 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).
57. 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)—to control the Soviet troops (p. 60), just as no “powerful defensive lines”(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.

58. 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.”

59. But Moskovkin's assertions that in a matter of days control over the Tyumen province are especially striking in their peremptory and irresponsible. from the side Soviet authorities“has been lost” or that the insurgents’ slogan “For advice without communists” was “carried out with extreme cruelty” (p. 57).
60. Bolshakov V.P. Prologue of the peasant uprising of 1921 in the Tyumen province, p.9.
61. Shishkin V.I. On the question of the role of the Siberian Peasants' Union in the preparation of the West Siberian rebellion of 1921
62. 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.
63. Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily… p.23.
64. Ibid., p.33.
65. There.
66. Pyanova O. A. Military organization of the Omsk Committee of the Siberian Peasant Union, pp. 207, 210.
67. Ibid., pp. 207, 209.
68. Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily... pp. 44–45, 47, 65–66, 68, 70–71.
69. 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).
70. Lagunov K. And the snow is falling heavily… p.55.
71. Ibid., p.71.
72. Shishkin V.I. On the issue of a new concept of the history of the West Siberian uprising of 1921
73. 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.
74. Shishkin V.I. On the issue of a new concept of the history of the West Siberian uprising of 1921
75. Moskovkin V.V. Peasant uprising in Western Siberia in 1921, pp. 51, 53, 63.
76. Ibid, p. 52.
77. modern historians, this point of view was supported by N. G. Tretyakov and V. V. Moskovkin.
78. 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.
79. Civil war and military intervention in the USSR, p.215; Essays on the history of the Tyumen region, p.104.
80. 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.
81. 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.
82. Moskovkin V.V.
83. 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.
84. Tretyakov N. G. The composition of the governing bodies of the West Siberian uprising of 1921
85. Proskuryakova N. L. Strokes to the biography of the commander of the Ishim rebel army Grigory Atamanov.
86. 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
87. 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.
88. Tretyakov N. G. West Siberian uprising of 1921. Abstract, p.20; Moskovkin V.V. Peasant uprising in Western Siberia in 1921, p.63.
89. Lagunov K. Ya. And the snow is falling heavily... pp. 155, 160.
90. Tretyakov N. G. From the history of the liquidation of the West Siberian peasant uprising of 1921 (red banditry).
91. Lagunov K. Ya. And the snow is falling heavily... pp. 101, 164.
92. Tretyakov N. G. West Siberian uprising of 1921. Abstract, p.20.
93. Moskovkin V.V. Peasant uprising in Western Siberia in 1921, p.59.
94. 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.
95. Ibid., p.59.
96. Ibid., p.46.
97. 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.
98. 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.
99. 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.
100. 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.
101. 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.
102. Tretyakov N. G. Mass sources on the number of participants in the West Siberian uprising of 1921 // West Siberian peasant uprising of 1921.
103. 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.
104. 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.
105. For advice without communists. Peasant uprising in the Tyumen province (1921). Collection of documents. Novosibirsk, 2000; Siberian Vendee. Vol.2 (1920–1921). Documentation. M., 2001.

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