White terror in Russia. Who started the civil war

100 years ago, on August 31 (September 13), 1917, an unsuccessful attempt at a military coup led by the Supreme Commander armed forces Russia, General L. G. Kornilov.

background

In the summer of 1917, Russia was in a deep political, socio-economic and military crisis. The Februaryists-Westernizers destroyed the autocracy and consistently destroyed the main bonds holding back the huge building of the empire, trying to make Russia a part of European civilization and lead it along the Western path of development. However, the pro-Western bourgeoisie, Western Freemasons, who seized power in Russia, only exacerbated all the contradictions that had accumulated in Russia for centuries, and caused the beginning of historical turmoil. This is a special mechanism inherent in Russian civilization, which is launched during the peak of social contradictions, social injustice, when the interests of civilization and the people diverge as much as possible from the interests of the “elite”. The Februaryists wanted to introduce the Western development matrix in Russia, but such a direct “recoding of Russian civilization turned out to be impossible.

Thus, the pro-Western bourgeois-liberal Provisional Government was unable to solve the main tasks facing Russia. Land (peasant), worker, national, economic and other problems only worsened. The breakaway of the national outskirts began. Because of the mass amnesty and the collapse of the law and order system, a real criminal revolution began. V countryside the peasants burned the landowners' estates, divided the land themselves - a real peasant war began. The summer offensive of the Russian army ("Kerensky's offensive") ended in complete failure. The army disintegrated, the soldiers did not want to fight. Radical forces, including anarchists and Bolsheviks, became more active in the capital.

Clashes over the key issue of Russia's participation in the First World War led to another shock - the July crisis, which put an end to the dual power of the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet. Under the conditions of the complex and chaotic situation in the country, the right-wing bourgeois forces began to search more and more persistently for a strong personality capable of putting an end to "anarchy". The right wing of the Februaryists believed that the revolution had been completed, that the autocracy had been destroyed, which prevented the bourgeoisie from taking all power into their own hands and setting up a bourgeois republic, where all power belonged to the owners - landowners, capitalists, and the bourgeoisie. Now stability is needed, "the West will help" to solve the main problems. But Pandora's box was open, the turmoil was just beginning.

Schism among the Februaryists

After the defeat of the Bolsheviks and anarchists during the uprising, a struggle broke out between the two camps of the Februaryists - moderate socialists and liberals. The Cadets and other liberal forces relied on the commander-in-chief, General Kornilov. Formed on July 26 (August 6), the II coalition government chaired by A.F. Kerensky tried to pursue a policy of maneuvering between the main political forces of the country, which, however, caused discontent in both camps. In order to finally free himself from the control of the Soviets, to make a favorable impression on the conservative forces and to ensure wide support for his government, criticized from both left and right, Kerensky accelerated the formation of new state institutions.

On August 12-15 (25-28) the State Conference was held in Moscow. At the State Conference, a kind of review of political forces was held, where each direction could present its program. But it was not planned to make any decisions at the meeting. The provisional government did not want to limit its power to representative bodies, but only to consolidate the turn to "order" that had begun to emerge after the July crisis. About 2,500 people were invited to the State Meeting: deputies of the State Duma of all convocations, representatives of the Soviets of Peasants' Deputies, Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, city dumas, the army and navy, cooperatives, commercial and industrial circles and banks, trade unions, zemstvos, organizations of the intelligentsia, national organizations , clergy and others. The Bolsheviks were expelled from the meeting.

The meeting was opened with a pompous speech by Kerensky himself, who declared: “In a great and terrible hour, when a new free great Russia is born and created in torment and great trials, the Provisional Government has not called you here for mutual strife, citizens of a great country that has now thrown off forever chains of slavery, violence and arbitrariness. Kerensky called on everyone to rally around the Provisional Government and declared that "and no matter what and whoever presents me with ultimatums, I will be able to subordinate it to the will of the supreme power and to me, its supreme head." Kerensky attacked threats from the left and right: “This is anarchy from the left, this Bolshevism, whatever it is called, we, in Russian democracy, imbued with the spirit of love for the state and the ideas of freedom, will find its enemy. But once again I say: any attempt of Bolshevism inside out, any attempt to take advantage of the weakening of discipline, it will find its limit in me. Enough collapse, now "everything will be put in place, everyone will know their rights and obligations ...".

The main intrigue of the State Conference was the speech of Kornilov, who was already perceived as the second political center in the country. In 1917, Kornilov made a rapid career, going from the commander of an army corps to actually the second person in the state. In a little over a month as Commander-in-Chief (Kornilov replaced Brusilov after the crushing failure of the summer offensive of the Russian army), he managed to somewhat restore the combat capability of the demoralized army with tough measures. His actions found wide support among the officers and Cossacks, among the nobility, representatives of the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. On August 13 (26), the general solemnly arrived in Moscow to take part in the State Conference. Kornilov was greeted as a hero. Fyodor Rodichev, a member of the Central Committee of the Cadets, said: "Come, leader, and save Russia." The St. George soldiers threw bouquets at Kornilov's feet. Then they picked him up and carried him to the car. Arriving in Moscow, Kornilov met with right-wing leaders (the "Black Hundreds"-rightists had already been completely defeated, now the Cadets had become "rightists"), as well as with financial magnates.

On August 14 (27) Kornilov spoke at the State Conference. Kornilov's ascent to the podium was accompanied by a scandal. The right side of the hall greeted Kornilov with a standing ovation and rose from their seats. And the representatives of the Soviets, including the soldiers, did not stand up. Thus, the camp of the Februaryist revolutionaries, who destroyed the autocracy and "old Russia", finally split. The “Right”, proteges of the bourgeois class, wanted “order” (destroying all the foundations of the old order!) and a “strong hand” that would calm the country. They wanted stability, the creation of a "European" Russia, where power and money belong to the bourgeoisie, capitalists and landowners, but "democracy" formally exists. It is clear that it was possible to “calm down” Russia, in which the unrest began, only with blood. Therefore, they staked on the generals devoted to the bourgeoisie. The other part of the Februaryists, the left wing, wanted to continue the reforms until the complete "liberation" of Russia, fulfilling the "order" of the masters of the West. At the head of this group was the freemason Kerensky and his like-minded people. They thought of completely “rebuilding” Russia, bringing it to collapse, with the separation of the national outskirts, the appearance of troops of “Western partners” in key, strategic points of the empire, the total robbery of national wealth, etc.

The ideas of establishing a strict regime in Russian society have been circulating since April 1917. “The country was looking for a name,” General Anton Denikin, close to Kornilov, recalled in his book Essays on Russian Troubles. - Initially, vague hopes, not yet embodied in any concrete form, both among the officers and among the liberal democrats, in particular the C.D. [Constitutional Democrats] of the party, were connected with the name of General Alekseev. ... Later, perhaps at the same time, many organizations made certain proposals to Admiral Kolchak during his stay in Petrograd. ... But when General Kornilov was appointed Supreme Commander, all searches ceased. The country - some with hope, others with hostile suspicion - named the name of the dictator.

Speaking at the State Conference in Moscow, Kornilov called the legislative measures taken after the overthrow of the monarchy the main reason for the collapse of the army. The general and circles close to him had already prepared a program of transformations in the country: it included measures to restore the disciplinary power of commanders in the army and navy, limit the rights of soldiers' committees; a ban on rallies in the army and strikes at military factories; the transfer to martial law of all railways, factories and mines that worked for the needs of the front; extension of the law on the death penalty to the rear. At the head of the country it was supposed to put the Council of People's Defense, whose chairman was to be Kornilov, and his deputy - Kerensky.

Ideas similar to Kornilov were put forward by the ataman of the Donskoy army, Alexei Kaledin, who reduced them to six points of demands for the restoration of order: 1) the army should be out of politics, a complete ban on rallies, meetings with their party struggle and strife; 2) All councils and committees must be abolished, except for regimental, company, hundred and battery ones, with their rights and duties strictly limited to the area of economic routines; 3) The declaration of the rights of the soldier must be revised and supplemented by the declaration of his duties; 4) Discipline in the army must be raised and strengthened by the most decisive measures; 5) The rear and the front are a single entity that ensures the combat effectiveness of the army, and all measures necessary to strengthen discipline at the front must be applied in the rear; 6) The disciplinary rights of the commanding persons must be restored, the leaders of the army must be given full power.

Supporters carry in their arms General Lavr Kornilov, who arrived in Moscow for the State Conference

General situation

Meanwhile, the situation in the country and on its borders was heating up. At the end of July 1917, the Austro-German troops, which went on the counteroffensive, occupied a significant part of Galicia and Western Ukraine, recapturing almost all the territories they had lost in 1916 as a result of the Brusilov breakthrough. All the heroic efforts of the Russian army, the blood of many thousands of people were in vain. The front stabilized along the line of the cities of Brody - Zborov and the Seret River. "Kerensky's offensive" ended in a crushing failure. The Russian army could no longer advance. “The unbearable overstrain of the forces of the sick organism of the old army, demanded by this offensive, had one main result - the acceleration of the further disintegration of the entire Russian front. Attempts to organize an offensive on the Northern and Western fronts did not lead to anything, ”said the military historian, General A. Zayonchkovsky. Heavy fighting went on with varying success on the Romanian front.

The process of collapse old Russia. In Finland, during the July uprising in Petrograd, the Seim adopted an act on the independence of the Grand Duchy from Russia in internal affairs, and on limiting the competence of the Provisional Government to questions of military and foreign policy. After the suppression of the rebellion, the Finnish independence law was rejected by the Provisional Government. In Riga, the local council of workers' deputies passed a resolution on the creation of a "united and indivisible autonomous Latvia" in areas with a predominantly Latvian population. True, half of these regions had been occupied by the German army for more than two years.

On August 14 (27), 1917, Kazan experienced one of the largest man-made disasters in Russia - an explosion at a gunpowder factory, the fire from which spread to other enterprises, including weapons and oil refineries, and residential areas. The fire in the city blazed for about 10 days. As a result, huge reserves for the front were destroyed. As the investigation found out, the cause of the disaster was not sabotage, but the usual slovenliness - a soldier's cigarette butt. It all started with a cigarette butt carelessly thrown by a sentry at the Porokhovaya railway station. It set fire to the grass, then scattered boards. The watchmen tried to put out the fire, but could not. Then the fire spread to boxes of ammunition, explosions began, which set fire to the nearest railway depot and oil storage on the banks of the Kazanka River. The fire then spread through the industrial area to the military depots, which caused more explosions, and as a result, the fire spread to a gunpowder factory located to the side. A terrible fire, accompanied by explosions, lasted for several days, tens of thousands of residents fled the city in panic. The number of victims for such a large-scale disaster turned out, fortunately, to be small: 21 people died or died of wounds, 172 (including 30 children) were injured. However, the material losses were colossal: a large batch of machine guns was destroyed - 12 thousand million shells, about 30 thousand tons of oil. 152 buildings were destroyed or burned out completely, 390 - partially.

On August 19-24 (September 1-6), 1917, the Russian army was defeated during the Riga operation. Parts of the 8th German Army tried to break through the front in a narrow sector in the Riga region in order to encircle and destroy the main forces of the Russian 12th Army. For the Russian command, the enemy offensive was not unexpected - from the beginning of August, air reconnaissance reported on the transfer of fresh reserves and artillery by the enemy, which was also confirmed by defectors. However, no countermeasures could be taken at the Russian headquarters. There is an opinion that Kornilov deliberately allowed the Germans to develop the offensive, since at that time he was preparing his speech. By deliberately surrendering Riga, he wanted to cause panic in Petrograd (they were already preparing the evacuation of the government to Moscow), put pressure on the government and create a pretext for a rebellion.

However, there were also objective prerequisites for the defeat of the Russian army. Most of the troops of the 12th Army, which covered Riga, were decomposed by left-wing propaganda, and the soldiers openly refused to obey their commanders, spending most of their time in rallies and meetings. The Executive Committee of the Soldiers' Deputies had no influence on the soldiers. In order to somehow rectify the situation, the commander of the 12th Army, General Dmitry Parsky, even declared himself a Social Revolutionary, but this did not help much either. The military historian Zayonchkovsky described it this way general condition troops near Riga in those days: “Replenishments from the rear did not arrive, older people were fired home for field work; Ukrainians went to Ukraine; the number of ranks in the companies was small. The commanding staff lost influence on the mass of soldiers. The headquarters were sitting in the rear. It is clear that the decomposed troops did not even think about fierce resistance to the enemy.

So, when the German troops began forcing the Western Dvina in the defense zone of the 186th division, almost all of its soldiers abandoned their positions and fled. As a result, the Germans built pontoon bridges without interference and began crossing. Having received a report about the Germans forcing the Western Dvina, the army commander, General Parsky, fearing encirclement, ordered to leave Riga. Stubborn resistance was offered only by the 2nd Latvian rifle brigade staffed by local residents. Although the Latvian riflemen were not alien to revolutionary ideas, they maintained iron discipline in their units, and fought especially fiercely, as they defended their homes. However, after all the neighboring Russian troops withdrew, the Latvian brigade was also forced to retreat to avoid encirclement. On August 21, German troops occupied Riga. On the same day, the Stavka ordered the 12th Army to retreat. The retreat was poorly organized and proceeded in disorder. Often the troops fled, abandoning artillery and carts. The Germans pursued the retreating troops rather weakly, only German aviation actively pursued the columns of the retreating troops, inflicting sensitive blows on concentrations of troops and refugees. At the same time, the 12th Army had significant reserves prepared for counterattacks, but due to poor command and unwillingness of the soldiers to fight, they could not be used.

It is interesting that during the Riga operation, the commander of the German 8th Army, General Oskar von Gutier, for the first time applied the new offensive tactics he developed, which was later named after him. The infantry units went on the attack after a very short but strong artillery preparation, during which, among other things, the enemy positions were fired upon with smoke and gas shells, temporarily “blinding” the defenders. At the same time, special assault groups went ahead, which, avoiding frontal attacks, penetrated deep into the defense, occupying and destroying headquarters, communication centers and firing points. This tactic was so successful that until the end of the war it was used everywhere by both sides.

By September 24 (August) 6, 1917, Russian troops stopped their retreat and took up defensive positions at the Wenden position. The defeat was hard. German troops captured the Riga area, strengthening their positions in the Baltic and threatening Petrograd. True, the Germans failed to completely destroy the 12th Russian army. Russian troops lost up to 25 thousand people, of which up to 15 thousand were captured and missing. Heavy losses were in the material part: the Germans captured 273 guns (of which 190 were light and 83 heavy), 256 machine guns, 185 bombers, 48 mortars, as well as a significant number of other military equipment. The losses of the German army amounted to about 4-5 thousand people killed, wounded, captured and missing.

We went to power in order to hang, but we had to hang in order to come to power

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

The government of Lenin, which assumed responsibility for the country in November-17, offered the Romanov family to go to relatives - to London, but the English royal family REFUSED them permission to move to England.

The overthrow of the tsar was welcomed by all of Russia. " Even close relatives of Nikolai put red bows on their chests., - writes the historian Heinrich Joffe. Grand Duke Mikhail, to whom Nicholas intended to transfer the crown, refused the throne. The Russian Orthodox Church, having committed perjury against the Church's oath of allegiance, welcomed the news of the abdication of the tsar.

Russian officer. 57% of it was supported by the white movement, of which 14 thousand later switched to the red ones. 43% (75 thousand people) - immediately went for the Reds, that is, in the end - more than half of the officers supported the Soviet government.

The first few months after the October uprising in Petrograd and Moscow were not in vain called "the triumphal procession of Soviet power." Out of 84 provincial and other large cities, it was established only in 15 as a result of armed struggle. “At the end of November, in all the cities of the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia, the power of the Provisional Government no longer existed. It passed almost without any resistance into the hands of the Bolsheviks, Soviets were formed everywhere, ”Major General Ivan Akulinin testifies in his memoirs“ Orenburg Cossack Army in the fight against the Bolsheviks 1917-1920. “Just at that time,” he writes further, “combat units — regiments and batteries — began to arrive in the Army from the Austro-Hungarian and Caucasian fronts, but it turned out to be absolutely impossible to count on their help: they didn’t even want to hear about the armed struggle against the Bolsheviks ".

Russian officers were divided in their sympathies ...

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

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

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

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

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

Turkish troops operated in Transcaucasia with mid February.

March 9, 1918 the English landing entered Murmansk under the pretext ... of the need to protect military equipment depots from the Germans.

5th of April Japanese troops landed in Vladivostok, but already under the pretext ... of protecting Japanese citizens "from banditry" in this city.

May 25- performance of the Czechoslovak corps, the echelons of which were located between Penza and Vladivostok.

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

Entente landing in Arkhangelsk, August 1918

In the south of Russia, where the "Russian Liberation Forces" were mainly active, the situation was veiled by the Russian form of the "White Movement". Ataman of the "Don Troops" Pyotr Krasnov, when he was pointed out to the "German orientation" and set as an example of Denikin's "volunteers", replied: "Yes, yes, gentlemen! The volunteer army is pure and infallible.

But it's me, the Don ataman, with my dirty hands I take German shells and cartridges, wash them in the waves of the quiet Don and pass them clean to the Volunteer Army! The whole shame of this case lies with me!

Kolchak Alexander Vasilievich, so beloved "romantic hero" of the modern "intelligentsia". Kolchak, violating the oath of the Russian Empire, was the first in the Black Sea Fleet to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government. Learning about October revolution, handed over to the British ambassador a request for admission to the British army. The ambassador, after consultations with London, handed Kolchak a direction to the Mesopotamian front. On the way there, in Singapore, he was overtaken by a telegram from the Russian envoy to China, Nikolai Kudashev, inviting him to Manchuria to form Russian military units.

Killed Bolshevik

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

White liberators or murderers and robbers? Doctor of Historical Sciences Heinrich Ioffe in the journal "Science and Life" No. 12 for 2004 - and this journal has managed to be noted in recent years by ardent anti-Sovietism - writes in an article about Denikin: arbitrariness, robberies, terrible Jewish pogroms reigned ... ".

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

The "ideology" of the Whites in this matter was clearly expressed by General Kornilov:
“We went to power in order to hang, but it was necessary to hang in order to come to power” ...

Americans and Scots guard captured Red Army soldiers in Bereznik

The "allies" of the white movement - the British, French and other Japanese - exported everything: metal, coal, bread, machine tools and equipment, engines and furs. They stole civilian ships and steam locomotives. Until October 1918, the Germans exported from Ukraine alone 52,000 tons of grain and fodder, 34,000 tons of sugar, 45 million eggs, 53,000 horses and 39,000 head of cattle. There was a large-scale plunder of Russia.

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

"White Terror in Russia" is the title of a book by the famous historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences Pavel Golub. The documents and materials collected in it, stone on stone, do not leave the fabrications and myths widely circulating in the media and publications on the historical theme.

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

Let's start with statements about the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Bolsheviks, who, they say, destroyed their political opponents at the slightest opportunity. In fact, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party became firm and implacable towards them as they learned the hard way that decisive action was necessary. And at the beginning there was a certain gullibility and even carelessness. After all, in just four months, October triumphantly marched from region to region of a huge country, which became possible thanks to the support of the power of the Soviets by the overwhelming majority of the people. Hence the hope that its opponents themselves will realize the obvious. Many leaders of the counter-revolution, as can be seen from documentary materials - Generals Krasnov, Vladimir Marushevsky, Vasily Boldyrev, prominent politician Vladimir Purishkevich, ministers of the Provisional Government Alexei Nikitin, Kuzma Gvozdev, Semyon Maslov, and many others - were released on parole. word, although their hostility to the new government was not in doubt.

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

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

Having come to power, the Bolsheviks by no means banned the activities of their political opponents. They were not subjected to arrests, they were allowed to publish their own newspapers and magazines, hold rallies and marches, etc. The People's Socialists, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks continued their legal activities in the bodies of the new government, starting with the local Soviets and ending with the Central Executive Committee. And again, only after the transition of these parties to an open armed struggle against the new system, their factions were expelled from the Soviets by a decree of the Central Executive Committee of June 14, 1918. But even after that, the opposition parties continued to operate legally. Only those organizations or individuals who were caught in specific subversive actions were subjected to punishment.

Excavations of the grave in which the victims of the Kolchak repressions of March 1919 were buried, Tomsk, 1920

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

Kolchak's victims in Novosibirsk, 1919

The "civilized" Czechoslovak punishers dealt with their "Slav brothers" with fire and bayonet, literally erasing entire towns and villages from the face of the earth. In Yeniseisk alone, for example, more than 700 people were shot for sympathy for the Bolsheviks - almost a tenth of those who lived there. During the suppression of the uprising of the prisoners of the Alexander transit prison in September 1919, the Czechs shot them point-blank from machine guns and cannons. The massacre lasted three days, about 600 people died at the hands of the executioners. And there are many such examples.

Bolsheviks killed by the Czechs near Vladivostok

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

American invader posing near the corpse of a murdered Bolshevik

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

A Red Army prisoner at work, Arkhangelsk, 1919

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

The system of such concentration camps, as shown in the book, was deployed in Siberia and the Far East by Admiral Kolchak - perhaps the most cruel of all the White Guard rulers. They were created both on the basis of prisons and in those prisoner of war camps that were built by the Provisional Government. In more than 40 concentration camps, the regime drove almost a million (914,178) people who rejected the restoration of the pre-revolutionary order. To this must be added about 75 thousand more people languishing in white Siberia. More than 520,000 prisoners were taken by the regime into slave, almost unpaid labor in factories and agriculture.

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

American Bolshevik hunters

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

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

Captured Red Army soldiers in Arkhangelsk

Well, as for the “Red Terror”, its dimensions were completely incomparable with the White Terror, and it was mostly of a reciprocal nature. This was recognized even by General Grevs, commander of the 10,000-strong American corps in Siberia.

And this was not only in Eastern Siberia. This was the case throughout Russia.
However, frank confessions American general by no means relieve him of guilt for participating in the massacres of the people who rejected the pre-revolutionary order. Terror against him was carried out by the joint efforts of foreign interventionists and white armies.

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

Unlike Marxism, counter-revolution always opposed conspiratorial activity to the laws of historical development..

Anti-Soviet propaganda, which does not stop even for a single hour in our country, has long adopted the thesis about the conspiratorial and anti-patriotic character of the Bolshevik Party and the October Revolution. On the TV screen and in other media, the voices of Narochnitskaya and others do not stop, persistently introducing into the public consciousness the idea that, if it were not for the actions of a small group of Bolshevik conspirators who received untold sums of money from Germany, then the Soviet period in our national history would not It was.

Apart from the fact that these claims are based on fakes that have long been refuted, they blatantly distort the essence of Bolshevik theory and practice, which proceeded from the principles of Marxist teaching.

The founders of Marxism taught that revolutions are an objective consequence of deep contradictions in social development and the intensification of the class struggle. Developing the Marxist doctrine of revolution, V. I. Lenin emphasized that the revolutionary situation is a combination of objective reasons: the crisis of the “tops”, the aggravation of the plight of the “bottoms”, a significant increase in the activity of the masses.

At the same time, Lenin pointed out that a revolution occurs only in those conditions when these objective reasons are joined by "the ability of the revolutionary class to carry out revolutionary mass actions strong enough to break (or break) the old government." Marxism-Leninism resolutely rejected the doctrines and movements proceeding from the possibility of making revolutions through conspiracies contrary to the objective conditions of social development. (Blanquism, anarchism). Only relying on the scientific theory of revolution, Lenin and his associates were able to carry out the world's first socialist revolution.

Unlike the communists, their enemies sought to act contrary to the course of historical development, trying to stop it, or reverse it with the help of conspiracies, relying on individual representatives of the ruling classes and the huge funds at their disposal. The counter-revolution has always opposed conspiratorial activity to the laws of historical development. This activity was particularly intensified during the preparations for and during the First World War, which became the result of a chain of grandiose conspiracies by the imperialist powers against the peoples of the world. The failure of the adventurist plans emanating from the quick victorious marches to Paris, Berlin, Constantinople and St. Petersburg, and the growing popular resistance to the imperialist policy only increased the efforts of the secret intelligence services of the warring powers, aimed at continuing the bloody slaughter.

Now in our media not accepted to condemn the inhuman and predatory nature of the First World War, the predatory and adventurous policy of its main participants, the anti-people nature of the worldwide slaughter, in which hundreds of millions of people on the planet were involved. On the contrary, the activities of the Bolsheviks, which turned out to be one of the few political parties in the world that remained loyal to proletarian internationalism and the anti-imperialist struggle, are called treacherous, claiming that Lenin and his supporters stabbed Russia in the back at a moment when she was two steps away from victory.

At the same time, using the monopoly of the media, the ruling class modern Russia and his lawyers are trying to hide facts that have long been widely known throughout the world. These facts indicate that the conspiracies to bleed Russia were not spun by the Bolsheviks, but by their ideological opponents with the direct support of foreign intelligence services. These facts testify that, with the participation of the ruling circles of Russia, the Western powers planned to use the peoples of Russia as a free source of cannon fodder and turn its wealth and its territory into objects of plunder.

In order to verify this, it is enough to refer to known facts, including those set out in the memoirs and other works of the famous English writer William Somerset Maugham, who during the First World War successfully served as a British intelligence officer.

The conspiracy organized by British intelligence and preparations for the Civil War in Russia

In his autobiography, W. S. Maugham recalled his first and last trip to Russia in 1917:

“I was sent as a private agent, who, if necessary, could be disavowed. My instructions demanded that I make contact with forces hostile to the government and prepare a plan that would keep Russia from withdrawing from the war. Until the end of his life, Maugham was convinced that "there was a certain possibility of success if I had been sent six months earlier." According to the writer, for the implementation of the task, he had at his disposal "unlimited funds." Maugham was accompanied by "four dedicated Czechs who were to act as liaison officers between me and Professor Masaryk (the future president of Czechoslovakia. Approx. Aut.), who had under his command something about sixty thousand of his compatriots in various parts of Russia."

It is known that during the battles of the First World War in Russia there were 200 thousand captured Czechs and Slovaks who were soldiers and officers of the Austro-Hungarian army. After the February Revolution, the Czechoslovak National Council, established in Paris in 1915, headed by Professor Tomas Masaryk, decided to organize a corps, or legion, in Russia. It was assumed that it would include Czechs and Slovaks who permanently lived in Russia, as well as those who were taken into Russian captivity.

In June 1917, Masaryk, having arrived in Russia, began to form two divisions of the corps, which soon included over 60 thousand people. The corps was located in the Left-bank Ukraine. First, it was decided to send this corps to France, where there were already many military units from Russia. But then, in the leadership of the Czechoslovak National Council, they began to talk about the fact that the corps could become a "military-police force" to restore order in Russia. Who put forward this proposal, and what exactly it consisted of, is still not really clear. The fact is that the events in which the soldiers and officers of the Czechoslovak corps were involved were an intricate chain of foreign policy intrigues. Separate links of this chain were forged in the leading imperialist powers of the world.

Although England and France were Russia's allies in the "cordial agreement" or Entente bloc, they did not feel "cordial" closeness to her. Both powers sought to use Russia to their advantage and at the same time did a lot to harm their ally. Each of these countries did not want the strengthening of Russia during the world war. As the English historian A. J. P. Taylor noted, France in every possible way opposed the plans to expand Russian positions at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, and "the British ... had their own problems with Russia in the Near and Middle East."

Neither France nor England wanted a strong Russia, and therefore in London they welcomed the overthrow of the autocracy, seeing in this event evidence of Russia's weakening. British Foreign Secretary Balfour commented on the news of the revolution in Russia: “If a completely independent Poland can be created ... then it will be possible to completely cut Russia off from the West. Russia will cease to be a factor in Western political life, or almost cease to be so.

Despite the fact that Russia was an ally of the Entente countries, the Western powers were in no hurry to help the Russian army, which took the first blow and actually saved France from defeat in the fall of 1914. Lloyd George later admitted:

“If the French, for their part, had allocated at least a modest part of their stocks of guns and shells, then the Russian armies, instead of being a simple target for Krupp guns, would in turn become a formidable factor in defense and attack ... While the Russian armies were marching to be slaughtered under the blows of excellent German artillery and were not able to offer any resistance due to the lack of rifles and shells, the French hoarded shells as if they were gold.

The rise of anti-war sentiment in Russia in 1917 worried London. Desiring to continue to drive Russian soldiers "to the slaughter", the British government began to prepare a secret conspiracy to prevent Russia from withdrawing from the war. The "military-police" mission that the Czechoslovak corps was supposed to carry out did not mean establishing control over the observance of order on the streets of Russian cities, but the implementation of a coup d'état in the interests of Great Britain.

The Czechoslovak Corps was not the only organized force involved in the execution of London's plans. Maugham mentions his constant contacts with the leader of the SR terrorists, the murderer of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Russia V. K. Pleve and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, Boris Savinkov. The merciless terrorist made a lasting impression on Maugham - "one of the most amazing people I have ever met." Together with Savinkov, other Right Socialist-Revolutionaries - his like-minded people - also participated in organizing the conspiracy. Since Savinkov was Deputy Minister of War of the Provisional Government and Commissar of the Southwestern Front, he became close to Alekseev when he replaced Kornilov after his arrest as Chief of the General Staff. Therefore, Maugham was able to involve the military in the conspiracy, who then led the Volunteer Army.

It is quite possible that the actions of military and political organizations, if they acted simultaneously and in concert, under a single command, could change the nature of events or, at least, seriously affect their course. One of the reasons for the failure of the conspiracy was the rapid loss of control over Russia in 1917, which was in no small measure facilitated by the haughty arrogance of the head of the Provisional Government.

When Maugham arrived from Vladivostok to Petrograd, the situation in the country was critical.

“Things in Russia worsened, - wrote Maugham. - Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government, was eaten up by vanity and fired any minister who, as it seemed to him, was a threat to his position. He made endless speeches. Food shortages became more and more threatening, winter was approaching, and there was no fuel. Kerensky made speeches. The underground Bolsheviks became active, Lenin was hiding in Petrograd, it was said that Kerensky knew where he was, but he did not dare to arrest him. He made speeches."

England decided to overthrow the vain talker and establish in Russia the "firm power" she needed to continue the war against Germany. In carrying out this vision Maugham was not a simple performer, but an enterprising organizer and inspirer of a political conspiracy. After portraying himself in an autobiographical account of the scout Ashenden, Maugham wrote:

“Plans were being made. Measures were taken. Ashenden argued, persuaded, promised. He had to overcome the hesitation of one and fight the fatalism of the other. He had to determine who was decisive and who was arrogant, who was sincere and who was weak-willed. He had to restrain his irritation during Russian verbosity, he had to be patient with people who wanted to talk about everything except the case itself; he had to listen sympathetically to pompous and boastful speeches. He had to beware of betrayal. He had to indulge the vanity of fools and shy away from the greed of the greedy and conceited. Time was running out."

By the end of October 1917, Maugham had completed his work of building a powerful underground organization. He sent a coded plan for a coup d'état to London. Maugham argued that "the plan was accepted and he was promised all the necessary means". However, the great scout got into time trouble.

To a large extent, this was due to the fact that the ruling circles of Russia showed a pathological inability to act quickly even in the name of self-preservation. Maugham wrote: "Endless chatter where action was required, hesitation, apathy, when apathy led to destruction, grandiloquent declarations, insincerity and formal attitude to the matter, which made me disgusted with Russia and the Russians." The “disgust” for those in power, transferred to the country and the people, prevented Maugham from seeing the main reasons for the internal weakness of the tops - their deep conflict with the people, their inability to express their interests and act in the name of the people.

The activity of Maugham, the ruthlessness of the terrorist and writer Savinkov, the businesslike determination of the leaders of the Czechoslovak corps and other participants in the conspiracy were not enough. They were opposed by the organization of the Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin. According to Maugham, at the end of October 1917

“The rumors became more and more ominous, but the real activity of the Bolsheviks became even more frightening. Kerensky darted back and forth like a frightened hen. And then the thunder came. On the night of November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks revolted... Kerensky's ministers were arrested."

The very next day after the victory of the October Revolution, the writer was warned that the Bolsheviks were looking for a secret resident of Great Britain. ( As early as September 14, I. V. Stalin, in his article “Foreigners and the Kornilov Conspiracy,” drew attention to the active participation of British subjects in conspiratorial activities in Russia.) Having sent an encrypted telegram, the leader of the conspiracy urgently left Russia. Britain has sent a special battlecruiser to smuggle its super spy out of Scandinavia.

However, Maugham's flight did not mean the defeat of the complex and extensive network of conspiracy, which he carefully created. The links of Maugham's conspiracy became time bombs planted under the Soviet Republic. The scale of the secret activities of British intelligence in Russia in 1917 was so great that even the belated statements of some organizations participating in the conspiracy almost proved fatal to the Soviet government. Despite the fact that by May 1918 the Czechoslovak corps was able to act not in central Russia, but beyond the Urals, 45, not 60,000 people took part in its rebellion, and the already established bodies of Soviet power, units of the Red Army and forces The Cheka, the Czechoslovak corps immediately took control of the major cities located along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and soon took control of a significant part of Siberia, the Urals and the Volga region, and even tried to capture the central part of Russia. The uprising of the Czechoslovak corps, conceived by British intelligence in the middle of 1917, became a signal for the start of the Civil War of 1918-1920.

The Czechoslovak Corps was not the only organized force involved in the execution of London's plans. The rebellion led by Boris Savinkov, one of the participants in the Maugham conspiracy, in Yaroslavl and other cities of the Upper Volga region (July 6-21, 1918) became one of the most powerful counter-revolutionary actions of the Civil War: the rebels held power for 16 days, exterminating many supporters of Soviet power.

Later, many wondered why Savinkov had mutinied in Yaroslavl, Rybinsk, Rostov, Vladimir, Murom, where the forces of the right SRs were small, and not, say, in Kaluga, where they had a powerful organization. It is obvious that the action of the Right SRs assumed the imminent arrival of interventionist forces from the north, which by this time had landed on the Kola Peninsula and were about to take Arkhangelsk. It is also known that during the rebellion Savinkov maintained ties with the Czechoslovak corps. Even before the start of the rebellion, money was delivered to the members of the "Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom" in the north by Masaryk's closest assistant I. Kletsanda.

The forces involved in the course of the Yaroslavl rebellion were only a part of what Savinkov and his henchmen had at their disposal. The Union for the Defense of the Motherland, headed by Savinkov, united many thousands of military units, divided into groups of 5-6 militants for conspiracy. These formations were preserved in Moscow, Kazan, Kostroma, Kaluga and other cities. Even after the defeat of the Yaroslavl rebellion, Savinkov's organization retained its combat effectiveness for a long time.

The course of the Yaroslavl rebellion showed not only the existence of organizational ties between the Savinkovites and the Czechoslovaks, but also with the "White Guard", who spoke at the end of 1917 in the south of the country. After the rebellion in Yaroslavl, in his order to the city, the rebellious Colonel Perkhurov reported that he was acting “on the basis of the authority given by the commander-in-chief of the Volunteer Army, which is under the supreme command of General Alekseev.” The civil war, for which the Russian media are foaming at the mouth, blames the Bolsheviks, was prepared and unleashed as a result of collusion between the counter-revolutionary forces of Russia and foreign secret services and in favor of the anti-people, anti-national interests of the imperialist powers.

Copy of someone else's materials

We went to power in order to hang, but we had to hang in order to come to power (Kornilov)

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

Russian officer. 57% of it was supported by the white movement, of which 14 thousand later switched to the red ones. 43% (75 thousand people) - immediately went for the Reds, that is, in the final analysis - more than half of the officers supported the Soviet government.

“Just at that time,” he writes further, “combat units began to arrive in the Army from the Austro-Hungarian and Caucasian fronts - regiments and batteries, but it turned out to be completely impossible to count on their help: they didn’t even want to hear about the armed struggle against the Bolsheviks ".

Russian officers were divided in their sympathies ...

How, under such circumstances, did Soviet Russia suddenly find itself in the ring of fronts?

And here's how: from the end of February - the beginning of March 1918, the imperialist powers of both coalitions fighting in the world war began a large-scale armed invasion of our territory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It should be taken into account that the “whites” (generals Alekseev, Kornilov, Anton Denikin, Pyotr Wrangel, Admiral Alexander Kolchak), who played their part in the overthrow of the tsar, renounced the oath of the Russian Empire, but did not accept the new government, starting a struggle for their own rule in Russia.

Entente landing in Arkhangelsk, August 1918

But it's me, the Don ataman, with my dirty hands taking German shells and cartridges, washing them in the waves of the quiet Don and handing them clean to the Volunteer Army! The whole shame of this case lies with me!

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

Killed Bolshevik

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

White liberators or murderers and robbers? Doctor of Historical Sciences Heinrich Ioffe in the journal "Science and Life" No. 12 for 2004 - and this journal has managed to be noted in recent years by ardent anti-Sovietism - writes in an article about Denikin: arbitrariness, robberies, terrible Jewish pogroms reigned ... ".

There are legends about the atrocities of Kolchak's troops. The number of those killed and tortured in Kolchak's dungeons could not be counted. Only in the Yekaterinburg province, about 25 thousand people were shot.
“Great murders were committed in Eastern Siberia, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks, as is commonly thought. I won’t be mistaken if I say, - American General William Sidney Graves, an eyewitness of those events, later admitted, - that for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were 100 people killed by anti-Bolshevik elements.

The "ideology" of the Whites in this matter was clearly expressed by General Kornilov:
“We went to power in order to hang, but it was necessary to hang in order to come to power” ...

Americans and Scots guard captured Red Army soldiers in Bereznik.

"White Terror in Russia" - this is the name of the book of the famous historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences Pavel Golub. The documents and materials collected in it, stone on stone, do not leave the fabrications and myths widely circulating in the media and publications on the historical theme.

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

Hence the hope that its opponents themselves will realize the obvious. Many leaders of the counter-revolution, as can be seen from documentary materials - Generals Krasnov, Vladimir Marushevsky, Vasily Boldyrev, a prominent political figure Vladimir Purishkevich, ministers of the Provisional Government Alexei Nikitin, Kuzma Gvozdev, Semyon Maslov, and many others - were released on parole. word, although their hostility to the new government was not in doubt.

However, almost immediately after these words, a concentration camp was organized on the island of Mudyug captured by the invaders. Here are the testimonies of those who happened to be there: “Several people died every night, and their corpses remained in the barracks until the morning. And in the morning a French sergeant appeared and gloatingly asked: "How many Bolsheviks are kaput today?" Of those imprisoned on the Mudyug, more than 50 percent lost their lives, many went crazy ... ".

American invader posing near the corpse of a murdered Bolshevik

Here are excerpts from the memoirs of those who miraculously managed to survive in this hell: “The dead lay on the planks together with the living, and the living were no better than the dead: dirty, covered with scabs, in torn rags, decomposing alive, they represented a nightmarish picture.”

A Red Army prisoner at work, Arkhangelsk, 1919

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

In the anti-Soviet literature on the civil war, much and with anguish is written about the "barges of death", which, they say, were used by the Bolsheviks to massacre the White Guard officers. Pavel Golub's book cites facts and documents showing that "barges" and "death trains" began to be actively and massively used precisely by the White Guards. When in the fall of 1918 on the eastern front they began to suffer defeat from the Red Army, "barges" and "death trains" with prisoners of prisons and concentration camps were pulled to Siberia, and then to the Far East.

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

Captured Red Army soldiers in Arkhangelsk

Well, as for the "Red Terror", its dimensions were completely incomparable with the White Terror, and it was mostly of a reciprocal nature. This was recognized even by General Grevs, commander of the 10,000-strong American corps in Siberia.

And this was not only in Eastern Siberia. This was the case throughout Russia.
However, the frank confessions of the American general by no means relieve him of guilt for participating in the massacres of the people who rejected the pre-revolutionary order. Terror against him was carried out by the joint efforts of foreign interventionists and white armies.

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

Who and when unleashed the Civil War?

The answer to these two questions is obvious to everyone - both communists and liberals. The first argue that after the Great October Socialist Revolution and the “triumphant march of Soviet power”, the Whites and the interventionists started the Civil War, but the time of its beginning varies from the end of 1917 (the Kaledin rebellion) to June 1918 (the Czechoslovak rebellion). Liberals, on the other hand, are of the opinion that the Bolsheviks staged the Civil War, but the dates of its start are left the same.

Everything is clear and understandable to both of them, but to me alone it is not. Let's figure it out. Fast forward to early December 1916 on the shores of Lake Geneva. A short, stocky 46-year-old man walks there, accompanied by two companions - his wife Nadia and the party lord Inessa. What is he thinking about? How to arrange a civil war in Russia? Yes, two years ago he put forward the slogan "to turn the imperialist war into a civil one," but what has been done in that time? Alas, nothing, everything was limited to chatter in a narrow circle of Social Democrats.

Moreover, a number of historians claim that at the end of 1916, Vladimir Ulyanov was in a depressed state and even argued that the current generation of revolutionaries could not wait for the collapse of the tsarist autocracy. And there were plenty of reasons for that. World War greatly hampered the actions of the Bolsheviks. Hundreds of their functionaries in Russia were sent to Siberia or shot by court-martial. The actions of the Russian and foreign counterintelligence agencies made it extremely difficult to communicate both inside and outside the country. The war scattered the future Soviet leaders all over the world - some in Switzerland, some in the USA, some "in the depths of the Siberian ores", and in December 1916 - February 1917 there were no influential Bolsheviks in Petrograd.

By 1917, the Bolshevik organizations that survived the police pogroms were extremely few in number, but they were saturated to the limit with agents of the Okhrana. Before the revolution, a member of the Central Committee and the editor of Pravda, M.E., worked for the Okhrana. Chernomazov (salary 200 rubles per month), member of the Central Committee and head of the Bolshevik faction in IV State Duma R.V. Malinovsky (500 rubles). Members of district committees and students of the Leninist school in Longjumeau received less - 100, 75 and 50 rubles. The Soviet of Workers' Deputies formed after the February Revolution consisted of more than thirty Okhrana informers, one of whom was the chairman, three were his deputies, two were editors of Izvestia of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies, etc.

Where is Ulyanov thinking about organizing a civil war! Meanwhile, in December 1916, shock units specially created for the civil war in Russia were marching all over Europe. Already in February 1915, a scout camp was opened in Germany, initially for only 200 people. There, young Finnish guys learned military science, military intelligence and guerrilla warfare. Studying at the courses was not in vain: under Mannerheim, 165 graduates became officers, 25 of them became generals, forming the backbone of the Finnish army, police, special services and the guard. And by February 1917, thousands of Finnish rangers were under arms in Germany.

Germans and Austrians formed Polish legions, German submarines landed groups of separatists on the coast of the Caucasus. I emphasize, not saboteurs to blow up a bridge or a military warehouse, but future “field commanders”.
Already in August 1914, the nationalists founded the Zagalna Ukrainian Rada in Lvov, which was headed by Kost Levitsky, a member of the Austrian Reichstag. 28 thousand wide Ukrainians expressed a desire to kill the "evil Muscovites." However, only 2.5 thousand people joined the Ukrainian Legion. Later, the legionnaires were renamed "Ukrainian Sich Riflemen".

Let us note that neither the Finnish, nor the Polish, nor the Ukrainian parts of Berlin and Vienna threw battles into the fire, they say, let them die, and not full-fledged German soldiers. They were trained for the civil war in Russia.
Well, all right, Germany and Austria-Hungary were Russia's opponents in the war, and the Russians themselves formed Czechoslovak units in the same way.

And why did France, an ally of Russia, begin to form Polish units at home? Alas, Paris and London, no less than Berlin and Vienna, dreamed of the dismemberment of Russia, which could be carried out in only one way - civil war.

And so the February Revolution took place in Petrograd. Whether we like it or not, but it turned out to be a Masonic coup, as a result of which the Masonic Provisional Government came to power. And as a witness we will call ... Lenin. Why, he never once used the word "Masons"! So what. So after all, the Masons themselves did not call their associates (accomplices) Masons, but always expressed themselves somehow allegorically.

So this is what the leader wrote: “This eight-day revolution was, if I may say so metaphorically, “played out” exactly after a dozen major and minor rehearsals; The "actors" knew each other, their roles, their places, their environment inside and out, through and through, to the point of any significant shade of political directions and methods of action. Replace the word "actors" with "brothers" - and everything will fall into place.

According to Freemason N.N. Berberova, the first composition of the Provisional Government (March-April 1917) included ten "brothers" and one "profane". Freemasons called "profane" people close to them, who, however, were not formally included in the lodges. Such a "layman" in the first composition of the Provisional Government turned out to be Cadet P.N. Milyukov, appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Berberova writes that the composition of the future government was presented to the "Supreme Council of the Peoples of Russia" already in 1915.

Berberova, without undue modesty, cites statistics: “If out of the eleven ministers of the Provisional Government of the first composition, ten turned out to be Freemasons, brothers of Russian lodges, then in the last composition, the“ third coalition ”(the so-called Directory), in September-October, when Minister of War Verkhovsky left, everyone was a Freemason except Kartashov - those who sat out the night of October 25-26 in the Winter Palace and were arrested and put in a fortress, and those who were "on the run."

Freemasons seized power in Petrograd relatively easily, forming the Provisional Government, and commissars of the Provisional Government were sent to the places of governors. But, alas, the Freemasons did not have any political, military or economic more or less satisfactory program.

In the summer of 1917, only individual army units and ships retained relative combat capability and were able to conduct active operations. The rest of the mass of troops did not want to fight and practically did not obey the commanders, both the old and those appointed by the Provisional Government.

The provisional government could not solve the agrarian question. Immediately give land to the peasants? Freemason ministers were afraid to offend the landowners. Send punitive detachments to the village with fire and sword to restore order? It is also impossible - there are no units capable of fulfilling this order. The only way out is to promise that, they say, at the end of the year we will convene the Constituent Assembly, which will decide the issue of land. But it is necessary to sow in the spring. And who will sow, harrow, etc., when it is not known who will get the harvest in the fall?

In March-June 1917, 2944 peasant uprisings took place in European Russia alone. By the autumn of 1917, 105 landlord estates were captured and destroyed in the Tambov province, 30 in the Oryol province, etc. The scope of peasant uprisings was greater than during the times of Razin and Pugachev, but historians call those peasant uprisings peasant wars, and in March - October 1917 in Russia, there seemed to be no civil war.

The main thing is that since March 1917, separatists have raised their heads throughout the Russian Empire. By October 1917, several hundred thousand servicemen of "illegal armed groups" created by separatists in Finland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Bessarabia, Crimea (Tatars), in the Caucasus and in Central Asia. These formations (armies) were subordinated exclusively to the powerful state formations of the separatists.

I note that not only the self-appointed leaders of the "foreigners" wanted to secede from Russia, but also the top of the Cossacks in the Kuban, the "regionals" (left-liberal bourgeoisie) in Siberia, etc. At first they spoke only about the federal structure of Russia, and then directly about separation from the center, both Soviet and White Guard.

It is important to note that the separatists of all stripes claimed not only the lands inhabited by their peoples, but also vast regions dominated by people of other nationalities. So, the Poles demanded the revival of the Commonwealth "from May to May", that is, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Finns claimed the Kola Peninsula, the Arkhangelsk and Vologda provinces, as well as the whole of Karelia. The territorial claims of the separatists were repeatedly blocked. So, Poles, Ukrainians and Romanians claimed Odessa. It is clear that without a major civil war, it was impossible to resolve these territorial disputes.

Suppose for a second that the Bolsheviks in mid-October 1917 decided to abandon the seizure of power, and their leaders would have gone back to Switzerland, the USA, Siberian exile, etc. Would the leaders of the separatists have abandoned their plans and disbanded their gangs? Would the German command have refused to strike at the collapsed Russian army and would not have colluded with the Baltic and Ukrainian nationalists?

In the spring and summer of 1918, a German invasion would inevitably take place. The Allies would also land in the North and Far East of Russia. The sluggish civil war would turn into an all-out civil war, but without the participation of the Bolsheviks.
The question arises - would the Provisional Government headed by Kerensky, who did not represent anyone, manage to win this war? The answer is unequivocal - no! And who would win? And I don’t want to think about it, but I refer those who are interested to the authors of numerous “fantasies” who will tell us what would happen if Hitler seized England, took Moscow, and so on and so forth ...

So it was the October Revolution and the subsequent dictatorship of the Bolsheviks that saved Russia from the disintegration that had been planned as far back as 1915 in the ministerial offices of London and Paris.

Was the Bolshevik dictatorship bloody? Yes, there was, but her opponents would have staged an even bloodier bath if they could. “If they say about the sovereign that he is kind, his reign failed,” - this was not said by Lenin, but by Bonaparte.

We went to power in order to hang, but we had to hang in order to come to power

The overthrow of the tsar was welcomed by all of Russia. " Even close relatives of Nikolai put red bows on their chests., - writes historian Heinrich Joffe. Grand Duke Mikhail, to whom Nicholas intended to transfer the crown, refused the throne. The Russian Orthodox Church, having committed perjury against the Church's oath of allegiance, welcomed the news of the abdication of the tsar.

The first few months after the October uprising in Petrograd and Moscow were not in vain called "the triumphal procession of Soviet power." Out of 84 provincial and other large cities, it was established only in 15 as a result of armed struggle. “At the end of November, in all the cities of the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia, the power of the Provisional Government no longer existed. It passed almost without any resistance into the hands of the Bolsheviks, Soviets were formed everywhere, ”Major General Ivan Akulinin testifies in his memoirs“ The Orenburg Cossack Host in the Fight against the Bolsheviks 1917-1920. “Just at that time,” he writes further, “combat units began to arrive in the Army from the Austro-Hungarian and Caucasian fronts - regiments and batteries, but it turned out to be completely impossible to count on their help: they didn’t even want to hear about the armed struggle against the Bolsheviks ".

Russian officers were divided in their sympathies ...

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

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

Turkish troops operated in Transcaucasia with mid February.

March 9, 1918 the English landing entered Murmansk under the pretext ... of the need to protect military equipment depots from the Germans.

5th of April Japanese troops landed in Vladivostok, but already under the pretext ... of protecting Japanese citizens "from banditry" in this city.

May 25- performance of the Czechoslovak corps, the echelons of which were located between Penza and Vladivostok.

Entente landing in Arkhangelsk, August 1918

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

Killed Bolshevik

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

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

The "ideology" of the Whites in this matter was clearly expressed by General Kornilov:
“We went to power in order to hang, but it was necessary to hang in order to come to power” ...

Americans and Scots guard captured Red Army soldiers in Bereznik

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

Let's start with statements about the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Bolsheviks, who, they say, destroyed their political opponents at the slightest opportunity. In fact, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party became firm and implacable towards them as they learned the hard way that decisive action was necessary. And at the beginning there was a certain gullibility and even carelessness. After all, in just four months, October triumphantly marched from region to region of a huge country, which became possible thanks to the support of the power of the Soviets by the overwhelming majority of the people. Hence the hope that its opponents themselves will realize the obvious. Many leaders of the counter-revolution, as can be seen from documentary materials - Generals Krasnov, Vladimir Marushevsky, Vasily Boldyrev, a prominent political figure Vladimir Purishkevich, ministers of the Provisional Government Alexei Nikitin, Kuzma Gvozdev, Semyon Maslov, and many others - were released on parole. word, although their hostility to the new government was not in doubt.

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

Excavations of the grave in which the victims of the Kolchak repressions of March 1919 were buried, Tomsk, 1920

Kolchak's victims in Novosibirsk, 1919

Bolsheviks killed by the Czechs near Vladivostok

American invader posing near the corpse of a murdered Bolshevik

A Red Army prisoner at work, Arkhangelsk, 1919

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

American Bolshevik hunters

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

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

Captured Red Army soldiers in Arkhangelsk