White emigration is a tragedy that deprived the Motherland of hundreds of thousands of citizens. This is the pride and shame of Russia. The October uprising of 1917 and the bloody Civil War that followed it is an unprecedented catastrophe of global significance. The way of life that had developed over centuries was broken, and hundreds of thousands of people had to leave Russia. The emigration of an entire armed army was unprecedented in world history.

Russian Empire early 20th century

The beginning of the turbulent twentieth century, filled with new discoveries and breakthroughs, took the Russian monarchy by surprise, ruling the country using archaic methods from the times of serfdom. The consequence of the decline of the social and administrative system, as well as the complete moral degradation of the ruling noble elite, was a shameful and mediocre loss. Russo-Japanese War 1904-05 And also, as a consequence, the First Russian Revolution of 1905-07, which the monarchical state called the Russian Empire managed to suppress without eliminating the causes of its occurrence.

However, proper conclusions were never drawn. The Russian Empire remained an industrially weak, agrarian country, with a predominantly rural, illiterate population. At the outbreak of the World War (1914-18), the Russian Empire showed its complete inconsistency and unpreparedness.

The administrative management system simply collapsed, creating a revolutionary situation in the warring country, which initially led to bourgeois revolution in February 1917, and subsequently to the proletarian Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia, which caused the greatest upheavals not only in the territory former Empire, but also the whole world. Some time later, the first wave of emigration, which began in February, intensified; officers went to the Don, where the formation of the White movement began.

Russian Civil War (1918-1922)

The history of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century says that immediately after the victory of the Bolsheviks in 1917, forces began to form, behind which stood staunch opponents of Soviet power. Ideological differences were so strong that it came to a full-scale war between supporters new government– “red” and its opponents – “white”.

And if in 1917 the struggle was scattered, spontaneous in nature, then in 1918 the formation of full-fledged armed forces began - the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (RKKA), in which the main driving force there was a working class, and the White Army, which was based mainly on pro-manarchist officers, the Cossacks and, at the first stage, the peasantry, which later took the side of the Bolsheviks

The White Guard, despite the economic and direct military support of the Entente countries, was disorganized in ideological terms, since it consisted of politically heterogeneous groups, which, moreover, were constantly intriguing and at enmity with each other. The ideas of restoring the monarchy did not find support among the majority of the Russian population.

On the contrary, the Red Army, although technically inferior to the White Army, was welded together by iron discipline and ideology. Its leaders knew exactly what they wanted and went towards achieving their goals, despite any obstacles. In addition, the ideas of the Bolsheviks were simple and understandable (“factories for the workers!”, “land for the peasants!”) were much better perceived by the majority of the population.

Therefore, despite the colossal exertion of forces, the White movement was defeated and, as a consequence of this defeat, a phenomenon arose that was later called the “Great Exodus” - this is the Russian emigration, which brought selected genetic material, hundreds of thousands of workers, representatives of the highest culture, its color. But Russia did not become impoverished in talents; after the “bloodletting” in the form of the Great Exodus, it gave the world great scientists, generals, world writers, famous composers and poets.

Stages of emigration

The first emigrants, the so-called first wave, the most prudent and wealthy, moved from Russia in the first months of 1917; this part took away considerable capital in precious metals, jewelry, and currency. They were able to get a good job, having the funds to obtain the necessary documents, permits, and finding comfortable housing.

All these capitalists and “great” princes did not come into contact with poverty, none of them took part in the Civil War, did not shed blood, did not starve, and abroad they plotted intrigues against each other and arranged endless squabbling over the “virtual” Throne of Russia Empire, not realizing that after the Great October Revolution there could be no throne in Russia.

The motley “political emigrants” have also settled down very well in the West: Mensheviks, nationalists, Cadets, Bundists, Socialist-Revolutionaries and others. But by 1919 the exodus had become widespread, increasingly resembling a stampede.

The second wave of emigration included white officers fleeing persecution by the Bolsheviks. They all did not lose hope of returning soon. It was the military that formed the main backbone of the Russian emigration in Europe. Historically, this white emigration is divided into stages:

• First. Associated with the departure of the Russian White Army from Novorossiysk in 1920, along with its General Staff and Commander-in-Chief - A.I. Denikin.
• Second. Evacuation from Crimea of ​​Wrangel P.N. together with the army in November 1920
• Third. Evacuation of the troops of Admiral V.V. Kolchak from the Far East in 1922.

The total number of emigrants from Russia is, according to various sources, from 1.4 to 2 million. A significant part of this number of emigrants were military personnel. These were mostly officers, Cossacks. During the so-called First Wave alone, about 250,000 people left Russia; they hoped for a quick fall of Soviet power and expected to return quickly.

White emigration, its composition

The composition of emigrants from Russia was heterogeneous. In addition to the military, who made up the majority, representatives of various classes and strata attended it. Overnight the following became emigrants:

• Prisoners of war from the First World War in European camps.
• Russian officials who are on duty outside of Russia are employees of embassies and various representative offices of Russia, who for various reasons did not want to go into the service of Soviet power.
• Representatives of the nobility.
• Civil servants.
• The bourgeoisie, clergy, intelligentsia and other citizens of Russia who did not accept Soviet power.

The majority of civilian emigrants from the above categories, except prisoners of war, left the country with their entire families. These victims of the White emigration did not offer armed resistance to Soviet power. These were simply confused people, frightened by the revolution. Taking this into account, the Soviet government declared an amnesty on November 3, 1921. It affected the rank and file of the White Guards and citizens who had not stained themselves with the fight against the Bolsheviks. About 800,000 people returned to their homeland.

Russian emigration (military)

The huge mass of refugees required solutions to basic issues regarding the placement of people. Baron Wrangel established the so-called “Emigration Council” back in May 1920. Some time later it was renamed the Council for the Resettlement of Russian Refugees. Civilian refugees were resettled near Constantinople, in Bulgaria and on the Princes' Islands.

War refugee camps were located in Gallipoli, Chataldzha and Lemnos (Kuban Cossacks). By the end of 1920, the file cabinet of the Main Registration Office already contained 190,000 data with addresses. There were 50,000-60,000 military people, and 130,000-150,000 non-military people.

Gallipoli seat

The glory of the White emigration was brought by the most famous military camp, where the 1st Corps of General A. Kutepov, who fled from the Crimea, was located in Gallipoli, where they showed the whole world an example of the fortitude and masculinity of the Russian officers. This is a source of pride for our compatriots. Unfortunately, brought up in unforgiveness, hatred of their people, unable to understand them, it was they who formed the backbone of Hitler’s Russian Corps.

In total, it housed more than 25,000 people, 363 officials, 143 doctors and health workers, as well as 1,445 women, 244 minors and 90 military students - boys aged 10 to 12 years.

The life of the emigrants was unbearable. The living conditions were terrible. Half-naked, often with nothing to their name, people lived in uninhabitable barracks. Due to overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, widespread illnesses began. During the first time in the camp, more than 250 people died from wounds and illnesses. In addition to physical torture, people also suffered mental suffering. Demoralization and moral decay of the army began.

A. Kutepov was well aware that this would lead to disaster and the death of the people for whom he was responsible. He knew that discipline and constant employment could save them. Only this can save people from moral degradation. Most military personnel viewed military training with hope. Parades were held here, concerts and sports competitions were organized, and newspapers were published.

Military schools were organized for young men, 1,400 cadets studied there, there was a theater studio, choreographic clubs, a fencing school, and two theaters. The children studied in a gymnasium organized by refugee teachers and went to kindergarten. Services were held in 8 churches. There were 3 guardhouses for violators of discipline. Allied delegations visiting the camp did not leave indifferent appearance and the bearing of the Russian military. The history of the White emigration did not know such examples.

In August 1921, the issue of removing emigrants was resolved; they began to be transported to Serbia and Bulgaria. It lasted until December, the last “inmates” were placed in the city itself. The remaining “Gallipoli prisoners” were taken out in 1923.

Russian emigration in the Balkans

The representative of the Russian army, Baron Wrangel, in the spring of 1921 addressed the ruling circles of the Slavic countries of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria with a letter. It contained a request for permission to station the army on the territory of these states. A favorable response was given to this, containing a promise to provide material assistance for the maintenance of the army at the expense of the treasury, with the monthly allocation of a small salary and rations to the officers, subject to the fulfillment of work contracts. In the summer, the planned removal of military personnel from Turkey began.

09/01/1924 happened significant event in the history of the emigrant movement - the “Russian All-Military Union” was founded. Its purpose was to unite and unite all military units, formed military societies and unions.

This emigrant association became the successor to the White Army. But, unfortunately, this organization stained itself by collaborating with the Nazis during WWII. It was from the EMRO personnel that the Russian Corps was formed, which fought together with the Germans against partisan movement Tito and the Red Army. Once again, the Russians went against the Russians.

The Cossacks were also evacuated to the Balkans from Turkey and settled in the same way as in Russia - in villages ruled by village atamans. The “United Council of Don, Kuban and Terek” was created, along with it the “Cossack Union”, to which all the villages were subordinated.

Most of the villages are located in Yugoslavia. Famous and initially numerous was the Belgrade village. Initially, more than 200 people lived in it. At the beginning of the 30s, only about 80 people remained in it. Little by little, all the villages located in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia transferred to the EMRO, under the command of General Markov.

Russian emigration in Europe

Most of the white emigrants concentrated in the West - in Europe. They were located in France, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Germany. According to the League of Nations, in 1926, 755 thousand refugees from Russia were registered. Most of them were in France - 400,000, Germany - more than 200,000. In Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Latvia there were 30,000-40,000 people each.

Paris, Berlin, Belgrade and Sofia were considered centers of Russian emigration. There is a simple explanation for this - in these countries there was an urgent need for labor to restore what was destroyed during the First World War.

Russians in Paris numbered more than 200 thousand people, with Berlin in second place. But due to the economic crisis of 1925 and the Nazis’ rise to power, the number of emigrants from Russia in Berlin decreased greatly.

Berlin was replaced by Prague, which became the center of Russian emigration. Paris occupied the most important place in the life of Russian foreign societies; the so-called elite and intelligentsia, as well as political figures of various stripes - emigrants of the First Wave and Don Cossacks. In connection with the outbreak of World War II, a considerable part of emigrants from Russia who settled in Europe moved to New World– USA, Canada and Latin America.

Russians in China

Before the Revolution, the number of the Russian colony in Manchuria was more than 200,000 people, and by the end of 1920 it was no less than 280,000. In September 1920, the status of extraterritoriality for Russian citizens in China was abolished, all Russians living there, including refugees , moved to the unenviable position of stateless emigrants in a foreign state. Emigration to Far East, also went in three streams:

• First. The beginning of mass emigration in the Far East is recorded at the beginning of 1920 - this is the time of the fall of the Omsk Directory and the evacuation of the Russian army.
• Second. It began in the fall of 1920 after the defeat of the so-called “Army of the Russian Eastern Outskirts,” commanded by Ataman Semenov. She crossed the Chinese border in full force. The regular formations alone numbered 20,000 people, they were disarmed by the Chinese and interned in Qiqihar camps, and then they were transported to the Grodekovo region, located in the south of Primorye.
• Third. The end of 1922, the time of establishment of Soviet power in Primorye. Only a few thousand people left by sea, heading mainly to Manchuria and Korea. They were not allowed into China and the Chinese Eastern Railway.

At the same time, in China, namely in Xinjiang, there was another large (5.5 thousand) colony of Russians, consisting of Bakich Cossacks and White Army officers who fled to these places after the defeat in the Urals and Semirechye.

The total number of Russian colonies in Manchuria and China in 1923, when the war had already ended, was approximately 400,000 people. Of these, at least 100,000 received Soviet passports and repatriated to the RSFSR (thanks to the amnesty announced in November 1921 for ordinary participants in the white movement).

In the 20s, there was a significant re-emigration, sometimes several tens of thousands of people a year, to other countries, including the USA, Australia, and South America.

The first wave of Russian emigrants who left Russia after the October Revolution had the most tragic fate. Now the fourth generation of their descendants lives, which has largely lost ties with their historical homeland.

Unknown continent

The Russian emigration of the first post-revolutionary war, also called the White one, is an epochal phenomenon, unparalleled in history not only in its scale, but also in its contribution to world culture. Literature, music, ballet, painting, like many scientific achievements of the 20th century, are unthinkable without Russian emigrants of the first wave.

This was the last emigration exodus, when more than just citizens ended up abroad Russian Empire, but bearers of Russian identity without subsequent “Soviet” impurities. Subsequently, they created and inhabited a continent that is not on any map of the world - its name is “Russian Abroad”.

The main direction of white emigration is the countries Western Europe with centers in Prague, Berlin, Paris, Sofia, Belgrade. A significant part settled in Chinese Harbin - by 1924 there were up to 100 thousand Russian emigrants here. As Archbishop Nathanael (Lvov) wrote, “Harbin was an exceptional phenomenon at that time. Built by the Russians on Chinese territory, it remained a typical Russian provincial town for another 25 years after the revolution.”

According to estimates by the American Red Cross, on November 1, 1920, the total number of emigrants from Russia was 1 million 194 thousand people. The League of Nations provides data as of August 1921 - 1.4 million refugees. Historian Vladimir Kabuzan estimates the number of people who emigrated from Russia in the period from 1918 to 1924 to be at least 5 million people.

Short-term separation

The first wave of emigrants did not expect to spend their entire lives in exile. They expected that the Soviet regime would collapse and they would be able to see their homeland again. Such sentiments explain their opposition to assimilation and their intention to limit their lives to the confines of an emigrant colony.

Publicist and emigrant of the first won Sergei Rafalsky wrote about this: “Somehow that brilliant era when emigration still smelled of dust, gunpowder and blood of the Don steppes, and its elite could imagine replacing it at any call at midnight, was somehow erased in foreign memory.” usurpers" and the full complement of the Council of Ministers, and the necessary quorum of the Legislative Chambers, and the General Staff, and the Corps of Gendarmes, and the Detective Department, and the Chamber of Commerce, and Holy Synod, and the Governing Senate, not to mention the professors and representatives of the arts, especially literature.”

In the first wave of emigration, in addition to large quantity The cultural elite of Russian pre-revolutionary society had a significant share of the military. According to the League of Nations, about a quarter of all post-revolutionary emigrants belonged to the white armies that left Russia at different times from different fronts.

Europe

In 1926, according to the League of Nations Refugee Service, 958.5 thousand Russian refugees were officially registered in Europe. Of these, about 200 thousand were received by France, about 300 thousand by the Republic of Turkey. Yugoslavia, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Greece each had approximately 30-40 thousand emigrants.

In the first years, Constantinople played the role of a transshipment base for Russian emigration, but over time its functions were transferred to other centers - Paris, Berlin, Belgrade and Sofia. Thus, according to some data, in 1921 the Russian population of Berlin reached 200 thousand people - it was they who were primarily affected by the economic crisis, and by 1925 no more than 30 thousand people remained there.

Prague and Paris are gradually emerging as the main centers of Russian emigration; in particular, the latter is rightly considered the cultural capital of the first wave of emigration. The Don Military Association, whose chairman was one of the leaders of the white movement, Venedikt Romanov, played a special place among Parisian emigrants. After the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933, and especially during World War II, the outflow of Russian emigrants from Europe to the United States sharply increased.

China

On the eve of the revolution, the number of Russian diaspora in Manchuria reached 200 thousand people, after the start of emigration it increased by another 80 thousand. Throughout the entire period of the Civil War in the Far East (1918-1922), in connection with mobilization, the active movement of the Russian population of Manchuria began.

After the defeat of the white movement, emigration to Northern China increased sharply. By 1923, the number of Russians here was estimated at approximately 400 thousand people. Of this number, about 100 thousand received Soviet passports, many of them decided to repatriate to the RSFSR. The amnesty announced to ordinary members of the White Guard formations played a role here.

The period of the 1920s was marked by active re-emigration of Russians from China to other countries. This especially affected young people heading to study at US universities. South America, Europe and Australia.

Stateless persons

On December 15, 1921, the RSFSR adopted a decree according to which many categories of former subjects of the Russian Empire were deprived of the rights to Russian citizenship, including those who had stayed abroad continuously for more than 5 years and had not received foreign passports or relevant certificates in a timely manner from Soviet missions.

So many Russian emigrants found themselves stateless. But their rights continued to be protected by the former Russian embassies and consulates as the corresponding states recognized the RSFSR and then the USSR.

A number of issues concerning Russian emigrants could only be resolved at the international level. To this end, the League of Nations decided to introduce the post of High Commissioner for Russian Refugees. It was the famous Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen. In 1922, special “Nansen” passports appeared, which were issued to Russian emigrants.

Until the end of the 20th century, emigrants and their children remained in different countries living with “Nansen” passports. Thus, the elder of the Russian community in Tunisia, Anastasia Aleksandrovna Shirinskaya-Manstein, received a new Russian passport only in 1997.

“I was waiting for Russian citizenship. I didn't want anything Soviet. Then I waited for the passport to have a double-headed eagle - the embassy offered it with the coat of arms of the international, I waited with the eagle. I’m such a stubborn old woman,” admitted Anastasia Alexandrovna.

The fate of emigration

Many figures of Russian culture and science met the proletarian revolution in the prime of their lives. Hundreds of scientists, writers, philosophers, musicians, and artists ended up abroad, who could have been the flower of the Soviet nation, but due to circumstances revealed their talent only in emigration.

But the overwhelming majority of emigrants were forced to find work as drivers, waiters, dishwashers, auxiliary workers, and musicians in small restaurants, nevertheless continuing to consider themselves bearers of the great Russian culture.

The paths of Russian emigration were different. Some initially did not accept Soviet power, others were forcibly expelled abroad. The ideological conflict essentially split the Russian emigration. This became especially acute during the Second World War. Part of the Russian diaspora believed that in order to fight fascism it was worth entering into an alliance with the communists, while others refused to support both totalitarian regimes. But there were also those who were ready to fight against the hated Soviets on the side of the fascists.

White emigrants from Nice addressed the representatives of the USSR with a petition:
“We deeply mourned that at the moment treacherous attack Germany to our homeland were
physically deprived of the opportunity to be in the ranks of the valiant Red Army. But we
helped our Motherland by working underground.” And in France, according to the calculations of the emigrants themselves, every tenth representative of the Resistance Movement was Russian.

Dissolving in a foreign environment

The first wave of Russian emigration, having experienced a peak in the first 10 years after the revolution, began to decline in the 1930s, and by the 1940s it completely disappeared. Many descendants of the first wave of emigrants have long forgotten about their ancestral home, but the traditions of preserving Russian culture that were once laid are largely alive to this day.

A descendant of a noble family, Count Andrei Musin-Pushkin, sadly stated: “Emigration was doomed to disappearance or assimilation. The old people died, the young gradually disappeared into the local environment, turning into French, Americans, Germans, Italians... Sometimes it seems that only beautiful, sonorous surnames and titles remain from the past: counts, princes, Naryshkins, Sheremetyevs, Romanovs, Musins-Pushkins.” .

Thus, at the transit points of the first wave of Russian emigration, no one was left alive. The last was Anastasia Shirinskaya-Manstein, who died in Bizerte, Tunisia, in 2009.

The situation with the Russian language, which at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries found itself in an ambiguous position in the Russian diaspora, was also difficult. Natalya Bashmakova, a professor of Russian literature living in Finland, a descendant of emigrants who fled St. Petersburg in 1918, notes that in some families the Russian language lives even in the fourth generation, in others it died many decades ago.

“The problem of languages ​​is sad for me personally,” says the scientist, “because I emotionally feel Russian better, but I’m not always sure of using certain expressions; Swedish sits deep in me, but, of course, I’ve forgotten it now. Emotionally, it is closer to me than Finnish.”

Today in Adelaide, Australia, there live many descendants of the first wave of emigrants who left Russia because of the Bolsheviks. They still have Russian surnames and even Russian names, but their native language is already English. Their homeland is Australia, they do not consider themselves emigrants and have little interest in Russia.

Most of those who have Russian roots currently live in Germany - about 3.7 million people, in the USA - 3 million, in France - 500 thousand, in Argentina - 300 thousand, in Australia - 67 thousand Several waves of emigration from Russia mixed here. But, as surveys have shown, the descendants of the first wave of emigrants feel the least connection with the homeland of their ancestors.

1. First wave.
2. Second wave.
3. Third wave.
4. The fate of Shmelev.

The poet has no biography, he only has destiny. And his fate is the fate of his homeland.
A. A. Blok

The literature of Russian diaspora is the literature of Russian emigrants who, by the will of fate, did not have the opportunity to create in their homeland. As a phenomenon, Russian literature abroad arose after the October Revolution. Three periods - waves of Russian emigration - were stages of expulsion or flight of writers abroad.

Chronologically they are confined to important historical events in Russia. The first wave of emigration lasted from 1918 to 1938, from the First World War and the Civil War to the beginning of the Second World War. It was widespread and forced - about four million people left the USSR. These were not only people who left abroad after the revolution: Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and anarchists emigrated after the events of 1905. After the defeat of the volunteer army in 1920, the White Guards tried to escape in emigration. V. V. Nabokov, I. S. Shmelev, I. A. Bunin, M. I. Tsvetaeva, D. S. Merezhkovsky, Z. N. Gippius, V. F. Khodasevich, B. K. Zaitsev went abroad and many others. Some still hoped that in Bolshevik Russia it would be possible to engage in creativity as before, but reality showed that this was impossible. Russian literature existed abroad, just as Russia continued to live in the hearts of those who left it and in their works.

At the end of World War II, a second wave of emigration began, also forced. In less than ten years, from 1939 to 1947, ten million people left Russia, among them writers such as I. P. Elagin, D. I. Klenovsky, G. P. Klimov, N. V. Narokov, B. N. Shiryaev.

The third wave is the time of Khrushchev's “thaw”. This emigration was voluntary. From 1948 to 1990, just over a million people left their homeland. If earlier the reasons that prompted emigration were political, then the third emigration was guided mainly by economic reasons. Those who left were mainly representatives of the creative intelligentsia - A. I. Solzhenitsyn, I. A. Brodsky, S. D. Dovlatov, G. N. Vladimov, S. A. Sokolov, Yu. V. Mamleev, E. V. Limonov, Yu Aleshkovsky, I. M. Guberman, A. A. Galich, N. M. Korzhavin, Yu. M. Kublanovsky, V. P. Nekrasov, A. D. Sinyavsky, D. I. Rubina. Many, for example A.I. Solzhenitsyn, V.P. Aksenov, V.E. Maksimov, V.N. Voinovich, were deprived of Soviet citizenship. They leave for the USA, France, Germany. It should be noted that the representatives of the third wave were not filled with such aching nostalgia as those who emigrated earlier. Their homeland sent them away, calling them parasites, criminals and slanderers. They had a different mentality - they were considered victims of the regime and were accepted, providing citizenship, patronage and material support.

The literary work of representatives of the first wave of emigration has enormous cultural value. I want to dwell in more detail on the fate of I. S. Shmelev. “Shmelev is perhaps the most profound writer of the Russian post-revolutionary emigration, and not only of the emigration... a writer of enormous spiritual power, Christian purity and lightness of soul. His “Summer of the Lord”, “Phygoty”, “The Inexhaustible Chalice” and other creations are not even just Russian literary classics, they seem to be marked and illuminated by the Spirit of God,” the writer V. G. Rasputin highly appreciated Shmelev’s work .

Emigration changed the life and work of the writer, who worked very fruitfully until 1917, becoming famous throughout the world as the author of the story “The Man from the Restaurant.” Terrible events preceded his departure - he lost his only son. In 1915, Shmelev went to the front - this alone came as a shock to his parents. But ideologically they were of the opinion that the son should fulfill his duty to his homeland. After the revolution, the Shmelev family moved to Alushta, where there was hunger and poverty. In 1920, Shmelev, who fell ill with tuberculosis in the army and was undergoing treatment, was arrested by B. Kun’s security officers. Three months later he was shot despite the amnesty. Having learned about this, Shmelev does not return to Russia from Berlin, where he is caught by this tragic news, and then moves to Paris.

In his works, the writer recreates terrible, in their authenticity, pictures of what is happening in Russia: terror, lawlessness, famine. It’s scary to consider such a country as our homeland. Shmelev considers everyone who remained in Russia to be holy martyrs. The life of the emigrants was no less terrible: many lived in poverty, but if they didn’t live, they survived. In his journalism, Shmelev constantly raised this problem, calling on his compatriots to help each other. In addition to hopeless grief, the writer’s family was also weighed down by pressing questions - where to live, how to earn a living. He, a deeply religious person who observed Orthodox fasts and holidays even in a foreign land, began to collaborate in the Orthodox patriotic magazine “Russian Bell”, while caring for others, Ivan Sergeevich did not know how to think about himself, did not know how to ask, to ingratiate himself, therefore he was often deprived of the most necessary of things. In exile, he writes stories, pamphlets, novels, and the best work he wrote in exile is considered “The Summer of the Lord” (1933). This work recreates the way of life and spiritual atmosphere of a pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodox family. In writing the book, he is driven by “love for his native ashes, love for his father’s tombs” - these lines of A. S. Pushkin are taken as an epigraph. “The Summer of the Lord” is a counterweight to the Sun of the Dead,” about what was alive in Russia.

“Maybe this book will be “The Sun of the Living” - that’s for me, of course. In the past, all of us, in Russia, had a lot of LIVING and truly bright things that may have been lost forever. But it WAS. The life-giving, manifestation of the Spirit is Alive, which, killed by its death, must truly trample upon death. It lived - and lives - like a sprout in a thorn, waiting...” - these words belong to the author himself. Shmelev recreates the image of the past, true, imperishable Russia through her faith - he describes the annual circle of worship, church services, holidays through the perception of the boy. He sees the soul of his homeland in Orthodoxy. The life of believers, according to the author, should become a guideline for raising children in the spirit of Russian culture. It is noteworthy that at the beginning of his book he set the holiday of Lent and spoke about repentance.

In 1936, a new blow overtook the writer - the death of his wife. Shmelev, blaming himself for the fact that his wife cared too much about him, goes to the Pskov-Pechersky Monastery. The Summer of the Lord was completed there, two years before the writer’s death. Shmelev was buried in the Russian cemetery in Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois, and fifty years later the writer’s ashes were transported to Moscow and buried in the Donskoy Monastery, next to the grave of his father.

A quarter of you will perish from famine, pestilence and sword.
V. Bryusov. The horse is pale (1903).

ADDRESS TO READERS.
First of all, it is necessary to clarify that from the end of 1917 to the autumn of 1922, the country was ruled by two leaders: Lenin, and then immediately Stalin. Tales written during the Brezhnev years about a certain period of rule by a friendly or not very friendly Politburo, which lasted almost until the congress of the victors, have nothing in common with history.
“Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, concentrated immense power in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be able to use this power carefully enough,” Lenin writes with horror on December 24, 1922. PSS, vol. 45, p. 345. Stalin held this post for only 8 months, but this time was enough for the politically experienced Ilyich to understand what had happened...
In the preface to the Trotsky Archive (4 volumes) there is a significant remark: “In 1924-1925, Trotsky was actually completely alone, finding himself without like-minded people.”
I thank all readers who wished to help me with criticism or information that supplemented the facts presented. Please indicate the exact sources from which the data was obtained, indicating the author, title of the work, year and place of publication, and pages on which the specific quotation is located. Sincerely - the author.

“Accounting and control are the main things required for the proper functioning of a communist society.” Lenin V.I. PSS, vol. 36, p. 266.

Russia's losses as a result of 4 years of the First World War and 3 years of civil war amounted to more than 40 billion gold rubles, which exceeded 25% of the country's total pre-war wealth. More than 20 million people died and became disabled. Industrial production in 1920 decreased by 7 times compared to 1913. Agricultural production was only two-thirds of pre-war levels. The crop failure that affected many grain-producing regions in the summer of 1920 further aggravated the food crisis in the country. The difficult situation in industry and agriculture was deepened by the collapse of transport. Thousands of kilometers of railway tracks were destroyed. More than half of the locomotives and about a quarter of the carriages were faulty. Kovkel I.I., Yarmusik E.S. History of Belarus from ancient times to our time. - Minsk, 2000, p. 340.

Researchers Soviet history they know that there is not a single national statistics in the world that is as false as the official statistics of the population of the USSR.
History teaches that Civil War more destructive and deadly than war with any enemy. It leaves behind widespread poverty, hunger and destruction.
But the last reliable censuses and records of the population of Russia end in 1913-1917.
After these years, complete falsification begins. Neither the population census in 1920, nor the census in 1926, much less the “rejected” census of 1937 and then the “accepted” census of 1939 are reliable.

We know that on January 1, 1911, the population of Russia was 163.9 million souls (together with Finland 167 million).
As historian L. Semennikova believes, “according to statistical data, in 1913 the country’s population was about 174,100 thousand people (165 peoples were included in its composition).” Science and Life, 1996, No. 12, p. 8.

TSB (3rd ed.) the total population of the Russian Empire before the First World War is 180.6 million people.
In 1914 it increased to 182 million souls. According to statistics at the end of 1916, 186 million people lived in Russia, that is, the increase over 16 years of the 20th century was 60 million. Kovalevsky P. Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. - Moscow, 1990, No. 11, p. 164.

At the beginning of 1917, a number of researchers raised the final figure of the country's population to 190 million. But after 1917 and until the 1959 census, no one knew for sure, except for the elected “rulers,” how many inhabitants there were on the territory of the state.

The extent of violence, maulings and murders, and losses of its inhabitants are also hidden. Demographers only guess about them and estimate them approximately. And the Russians are silent! How could it be otherwise: printed works and evidence revealing this massacre are unknown to them. What is known from school textbooks, for the most part, is not facts, but fiction of propaganda.

One of the most confusing is the question of the number of people who left the country during the years of the revolution and civil war. The exact number of fugitives is unknown.
Ivan Bunin: “I was not one of those who was taken by surprise by it, for whom its size and atrocities were a surprise, but still the reality exceeded all my expectations: no one who did not see it will understand what the Russian revolution soon turned into. This spectacle was sheer horror for anyone who had not lost the image and likeness of God, and from Russia, after Lenin seized power, hundreds of thousands of people who had the slightest opportunity to escape fled" (I. Bunin. "Cursed Days").

The newspaper of the right-wing Social Revolutionaries “Volya Rossii”, which had a good information network, cited such data. On November 1, 1920, there were about 2 million emigrants from the territory of the former Russian Empire in Europe. In Poland - one million, in Germany - 560 thousand, in France - 175 thousand, in Austria and Constantinople - 50 thousand each, in Italy and Serbia - 20 thousand each. In November, another 150 thousand people arrived from Crimea. Subsequently, emigrants from Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe were drawn to France, and many to both Americas.

The question of the number of emigrants from Russia cannot be resolved on the basis of sources located only in the USSR. At the same time, in the 20-30s, the issue was considered in a number of foreign works based on foreign data.

At the same time, we note that in the 1920s, extremely contradictory data on the number of emigration compiled by charitable organizations and institutions appeared in foreign emigrant publications. This information is sometimes mentioned in modern literature.

In the book by Hans von Rimschi, the number of emigrants is determined (based on data from the American Red Cross) at 2,935 thousand people. This figure included several hundred thousand Poles who repatriated to Poland and registered as refugees with the American Red Cross, a significant number of Russian prisoners of war still in 1920-1921. in Germany (Rimscha Hans Von. Der russische Biirgerkrieg und die russische Emigration 1917-1921. Jena, Fromann, 1924, s.50-51).

Data from the League of Nations for August 1921 determine the number of emigrants at 1,444 thousand (including 650 thousand in Poland, 300 thousand in Germany, 250 thousand in France, 50 thousand in Yugoslavia, 31 thousand in Greece, 30 thousand in Bulgaria). It is believed that the number of Russians in Germany reached its highest point in 1922-1923 - 600 thousand in the entire country, of which 360 thousand in Berlin.

F. Lorimer, considering the data on emigrants, joins E. Kulischer’s written calculations, which determined the number of emigrants from Russia at approximately 1.5 million, and together with repatriates and other migrants - about 2 million (Kulischer E. Europe on the Move: War and popular changes. 1917-1947. N. Y., 1948, p. 54).

By December 1924, there were about 600 thousand Russian emigrants in Germany alone, up to 40 thousand in Bulgaria, about 400 thousand in France, and more than 100 thousand in Manchuria. True, not all of them were emigrants in the strict sense of the word: many served on the Chinese Eastern Railway even before the revolution.

Russian emigrants also settled in Great Britain, Turkey, Greece, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Egypt, Kenya, Afghanistan, Australia, and in total 25 countries, not counting the countries of America, primarily the USA, Argentina and Canada.

But if we turn to domestic literature, we will find that estimates of the total number of emigrants sometimes differ by two to three times.

IN AND. Lenin wrote in 1921 that there were from 1.5 to 2 million Russian emigrants abroad at that time (Lenin V.I. PSS, vol. 43, p. 49, 126; vol. 44, p. 5, 39, although in one case he named the figure 700 thousand people - vol. 43, p. 138).

V.V. Comin, arguing that there were 1.5-2 million people in the white emigration, relied on information from the Geneva mission of the Russian Red Cross Society and the Russian Literary Society in Damascus. Komin V.V. The political and ideological collapse of the Russian petty-bourgeois counter-revolution abroad. Kalinin, 1977, part 1, pp. 30, 32.

L.M. Spirin, stating that the number of Russian emigration was 1.5 million, used data from the refugee section of the International Labor Office (late 20s). According to these data, the number of registered emigrants was 919 thousand. Spirin L.M. Classes and parties in the Russian Civil War 1917-1920. - M., 1968, p. 382-383.

S.N. Semanov gives the figure of 1 million 875 thousand emigrants in Europe alone as of November 1, 1920 - Semanov S.N. Liquidation of the anti-Soviet Kronstadt rebellion in 1921. M., 1973, p. 123.

Data on eastern emigration - to Harbin, Shanghai - are not taken into account by these historians. Southern emigration is also not taken into account - to Persia, Afghanistan, India, although quite numerous Russian colonies existed in these countries

On the other hand, clearly understated information was given by J. Simpson (Simpson Sir John Hope. The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey. L., Oxford University Press, 1939), determining the number of emigrants from Russia on January 1, 1922 at 718 thousand in Europe and the Middle East and 145 thousand in the Far East. These data include only officially registered (received so-called Nansen passports) emigrants.

G. Barikhnovsky believed that there were less than 1 million emigrants. Barikhnovsky G.F. The ideological and political collapse of the white emigration and the defeat of the internal counter-revolution. L., 1978, pp. 15-16.

According to I. Trifonov, the number of repatriated people in 1921-1931. exceeded 180 thousand. Trifonov I.Ya. Elimination of the exploiting classes in the USSR. M., 1975, p. 178. Moreover, the author, citing Lenin’s data about 1.5-2 million emigrants, in relation to the 20-30s, calls the figure 860 thousand. Ibid., pp. 168-169.

In total, about 2.5% of the population, or about 3.5 million people, probably left the country.

On January 6, 1922, the newspaper Vossische Zeitung, respected among the intelligentsia, published in Berlin, brought the problem of refugees to the German public for discussion.
The article “The New Great Migration of Peoples” said: “The Great War caused a movement among the peoples of Europe and Asia, which may be the beginning of a great historical process example of the great migration of peoples. A special role is played by Russian emigration, of which there are no similar examples in modern history. Moreover, in this emigration we're talking about about a whole complex of political, economic, social and cultural problems and it is impossible to resolve them in general phrases, nor by momentary measures... For Europe, the need has become ripe to consider Russian emigration not as a temporary incident... But it is precisely the common destinies that this war created for the vanquished that prompts us to think, beyond immediate hardships, about future opportunities for cooperation.”

Looking at what was happening in Russia, the emigration saw: any opposition in the country was being destroyed. Immediately (in 1918) the Bolsheviks closed all opposition (including socialist) newspapers. Censorship is introduced.
In April 1918, the anarchist party was defeated, and in July 1918, the Bolsheviks broke off relations with their only allies in the revolution - the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the party of the peasantry. In February 1921, arrests of Mensheviks began, and in 1922, a trial of the leaders of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party took place.
This is how a regime of military dictatorship of one party emerged, directed against 90% of the country's population. Dictatorship was understood, of course, as “violence not limited by law.” Stalin I.V. Speech at Sverdlovsk University June 9, 1925

The emigration was dumbfounded and drew conclusions that only yesterday seemed impossible to them.

Paradoxical as it may sound, Bolshevism is the third phenomenon of Russian great power, Russian imperialism - the first was the Muscovite kingdom, the second was the Peter the Great's empire. Bolshevism is for a strong centralized state. The will to social truth was combined with the will to state power, and the second will turned out to be stronger. Bolshevism entered Russian life as in highest degree militarized force. But the old Russian state was always militarized. The problem of power was the main one for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. And they created a police state, very similar in methods of administration to the old Russian state... The Soviet state became the same as any despotic state, it acts by the same means, violence and lies. Berdyaev N. A. Origins and meaning of Russian communism.
Even the old Slavophil dream of moving the capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow, to the Kremlin, was realized by red communism. A communist revolution in one country inevitably leads to nationalism and nationalist politics. Berdyaev N. A.

Therefore, when assessing the size of emigration, it is necessary to take into account: a considerable part of the White Guards who left their homeland later returned to Soviet Russia.

In State and Revolution, Ilyich promised: “...the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of yesterday’s wage slaves is so comparatively easy, simple and natural than the suppression of uprisings of slaves, serfs, and wage workers, that it will cost humanity much less” (Lenin V.I. PSS, vol. 33, p. 90).

The leader even ventured to estimate the total “cost” of the world revolution - half a million, a million people (PSS, vol. 37, p. 60).

Fragmentary information about population losses for individual specific regions can be found here and there. It is known, for example, that Moscow, in which 1,580 thousand people lived by the beginning of 1917, in 1917-1920. lost almost half of the inhabitants (49.1%) - this is said in the article about the capital in 5 volumes. ITU, 1st ed. (M., 1927, column 389).

Due to the flow of workers to the front and to the countryside, with the typhus epidemic and general economic devastation, Moscow in 1918-1921. lost almost half of its population: in February 1917 there were 2,044 thousand people in Moscow, and in 1920 - 1,028 thousand people. In 1919, the mortality rate increased especially, but from 1922 the population decline in the capital began to decrease, and its numbers increased rapidly. TSB, 1st ed. t.40, M., 1938, p.355.

These are the data on the dynamics of the city’s population cited by the author of the article in the review collection about Soviet Moscow, which was published in 1920.
“According to November 20, 1915, there were already 1,983,716 inhabitants in Moscow, and the following year the capital crossed the second million. On February 1, 1917, just on the eve of the revolution, 2,017,173 people lived in Moscow, and in the modern territory of the capital (including some suburban areas annexed in May and June 1917) the number of Moscow residents reached 2,043,594.
According to the census in August 1920, 1,028,218 inhabitants were counted in Moscow. In other words, since the census on April 21, 1918, the population decline in Moscow amounted to 687,804 people, or 40.1%. This population decline is unprecedented in European history. Only St. Petersburg has surpassed Moscow in terms of its degree of depopulation. Since February 1, 1917, when the population of Moscow reached its maximum, the number of residents of the capital fell by 1,015,000 people or almost half (more precisely, by 49.6%).
Meanwhile, the population of St. Petersburg (within the city government) in 1917 reached, according to the calculations of the city statistical bureau, 2,440,000 people. According to the census of August 28, 1920, there were only 706,800 people in St. Petersburg, so since the revolution, the number of inhabitants of St. Petersburg has decreased by 1,733,200 people, or by 71%. In other words, the population of St. Petersburg was declining almost twice as fast as Moscow.” Red Moscow, M., 1920.

But the final figures do not provide an exact answer to the question: how much did the country’s population decrease from 1914 to 1922?
Yes and why - too.

The country silently listened as Alexander Vertinsky cursed it:
- I don’t know why and who needs this,
Who sent them to death with an unshaking hand,
Only so merciless, so evil and unnecessary
They were lowered into eternal rest...

Immediately after the war, sociologist Pitirim Sorokin reflected on the sad statistics in Prague:
- Russian state entered the war with a population of 176 million subjects.
In 1920, the RSFSR, together with all the union Soviet republics, including Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, etc., had only 129 million people.
In six years, the Russian state lost 47 million citizens. This is the first payment for the sins of war and revolution.
Anyone who understands the importance of population size for the fate of the state and society, this figure says a lot...
This decrease of 47 million is explained by the separation from Russia of a number of regions that became independent states.
Now the question is: what is the situation with the population of the territory that makes up the modern RSFSR and the republics allied with it?
Has it decreased or increased?
The following numbers give the answer.
According to the 1920 census, the population of 47 provinces of European Russia and Ukraine has decreased since 1914 by 11,504,473 people, or 13% (from 85,000,370 to 73,495,897).
The population of all Soviet republics decreased by 21 million, which is 154 million, a loss of 13.6%.
War and revolution devoured not only all those born, for nevertheless a certain number continued to be born. It cannot be said that the appetite of these persons was moderate and their stomach was modest.
Even if they provided a number of real values, it would be difficult to recognize the price of such “conquests” as cheap.
But on top of that they absorbed 21 million victims.
Of the 21 million, the following falls on direct victims of the world war:
killed and dead from wounds and diseases - 1,000,000 people,
missing and captured (most of whom returned) 3,911,000 people. (in official data, the missing and captured are not separated from each other, so I give the general figure), plus 3,748,000 wounded, in total for direct casualties of the war - no more than 2-2.5 million. The number of direct victims was hardly less victims of the civil war.
As a result, we can accept the number of direct victims of war and revolution as close to 5 million. The remaining 16 million are due to their indirect victims: increased mortality and falling birth rates. Sorokin P.A. The current state of Russia. (Prague, 1922).

“Cruel time! As historians now testify, 14-18 million people died during the civil war, of which only 900 thousand were killed at the fronts. The rest became victims of typhoid, Spanish flu, other diseases, and then the White and Red Terror. “War communism” was partly caused by the horrors of the civil war, partly by the delusions of an entire generation of revolutionaries. Direct confiscation of food from peasants without any compensation, rations for workers - from 250 grams to half a kilo of black bread, forced labor, executions and prison for market transactions, a huge army of homeless children who lost their parents, hunger, savagery in many places of the country - this was the harsh price to pay for the most radical of all revolutions that have ever shaken the peoples of the earth! Burlatsky F. Leaders and advisers. M., 1990, p. 70.

In 1929, former major general and minister of war of the Provisional Government, and at that time teacher at the Military Academy of the Red Army Headquarters A.I. Verkhovsky published a detailed article in Ogonyok about the threat of intervention.

His demographic calculations deserve special attention.

“Dry columns of numbers given in statistical tables usually pass by ordinary attention,” he writes. - But if you look closely at them, what terrible numbers there are sometimes!
The Publishing House of the Communist Academy published compiled by B.A. Gukhman “Basic issues of the USSR economy in tables and diagrams.”
Table 1 shows the dynamics of the population of the USSR. It shows that on January 1, 1914, 139 million people lived in the territory now occupied by our Union. By January 1, 1917, the table estimates that the population was 141 million. Meanwhile, population growth before the war was approximately 1.5% per year, which gives an increase of 2 million people per year. Consequently, from 1914 to 1917 the population should have increased by 6 million and reached not 141, but 145 million.
We see that 4 million is not enough. These are victims of the world war. Of these, we consider 1.5 million to be killed and missing, and 2.5 million should be attributed to the decrease in the birth rate.
The next figure in the table refers to August 1, 1922, i.e. covers 5 years of civil war and its immediate consequences. If population development had proceeded normally, then in 5 years its growth would have been about 10 million, and, therefore, the USSR in 1922 should have had 151 million.
Meanwhile, in 1922 the population was 131 million people, i.e. 10 million less than in 1917. The Civil War cost us another 20 million people, i.e. 5 times more than World War" Verkhovsky A. Intervention is not acceptable. Ogonyok, 1929, No. 29, p. 11.

The total human losses suffered by the country during the World War and Civil War and intervention (1914-1920) exceeded 20 million people. - History of the USSR. The era of socialism. M., 1974, p. 71.

The total population losses in the civil war at the fronts and in the rear from hunger, disease and terror of the White Guards amounted to 8 million people. TSB, 3rd ed. The losses of the Communist Party at the fronts amounted to over 50 thousand people. TSB, 3rd ed.

There were also illnesses.
At the end of 1918 - beginning of 1919. The worldwide influenza pandemic (called the “Spanish flu”) affected about 300 million people and claimed up to 40 million lives in 10 months. Then a second, although less strong, wave arose. The malignancy of this pandemic can be judged by the number of deaths. In India, about 5 million people died from it, in the United States in 2 months - about 450 thousand, in Italy - about 270 thousand people; In total, this epidemic claimed about 20 million victims, and the number of diseases also amounted to hundreds of millions.

Then the third wave came. Probably 0.75 billion people got sick with the Spanish flu in 3 years. The Earth's population at that time was 1.9 billion. Losses from the Spanish Flu exceeded the mortality rate of the 1st World War on all its fronts combined. Up to 100 million people died in the world at that time. The “Spanish flu” supposedly existed in two forms: in elderly patients, it was usually expressed in severe pneumonia, death occurred after 1.5-2 weeks. But there were few such patients. More often, for some unknown reason, young people from 20 to 40 years old died from the Spanish flu... Mostly people under the age of 40 died from cardiac arrest, this happened two to three days after the onset of the disease.

At first, young Soviet Russia was lucky: the first wave of the “Spanish disease” did not touch it. But at the end of the summer of 1918, epidemic flu came from Galicia to Ukraine. In Kyiv alone, 700 thousand cases were recorded. Then the epidemic through Oryol and Voronezh province began to spread to the east, in the Volga region, and to the northwest - to both capitals.
Doctor V. Glinchikov, who at that time worked at the Petropavlovsk Hospital in Petrograd, noted that in the first days of the epidemic, of the 149 people brought to them with the “Spanish flu,” 119 people died. In the city as a whole, the mortality rate from influenza complications reached 54%.

During the epidemic, over 2.5 million cases of the Spanish flu were registered in Russia. The clinical manifestations of the Spanish flu have been well described and studied. There were clinical manifestations completely atypical for influenza, characteristic of brain lesions. In particular, “hiccupping” or “sneezing” encephalitis, sometimes occurring even without a typical influenza fever. These painful diseases are damage to certain areas of the brain when a person hiccups or sneezes continuously for quite a long time, day and night. Some died from this. There were other monosymptomatic forms of the disease. Their nature has not yet been determined.

In 1918, simultaneous epidemics of plague and cholera suddenly began in the country.

In addition, in 1918-1922. In Russia there are also several epidemics of unprecedented forms of typhus. During these years, more than 7.5 million cases of typhus alone were registered. Probably more than 700 thousand people died from it. But it was impossible to count all the sick.

1919. “Due to the extreme overcrowding of Moscow prisons and prison hospitals, typhus took on an epidemic character there.” Anatoly Mariengof. My age.
A contemporary wrote: “Entire carriages are dying of typhus. Not a single doctor. No medications. Whole families are delirious. There are corpses along the road. There are piles of corpses at the stations.”
It was typhus, and not the Red Army, that destroyed Kolchak’s troops. “When our troops,” wrote People’s Commissar of Health N.A. Semashko, - entered the Urals and Turkestan, a huge avalanche of epidemic diseases (typhoid of all three types) moved towards our army from Kolchak’s and Dutov’s troops. Suffice it to mention that of the 60,000-strong enemy army that came over to our side in the very first days after the defeat of Kolchak and Dutov, 80% were infected with typhus. Typhus on the Eastern Front, relapsing fever, mainly on the South-Eastern Front, rushed towards us in a stormy stream. And even typhoid fever, this sure sign of the lack of basic sanitary measures - at least vaccinations, spread in a wide wave throughout the Dutov army and spread to us "...
In captured Omsk, the capital of Kolchak, the Red Army found 15 thousand abandoned sick enemies. Calling the epidemic “the inheritance of the whites,” the victors waged a fight on two fronts, the main one being against typhus.
The situation was catastrophic. In Omsk, 500 people fell ill every day and 150 died. The epidemic swept through the Refugee Shelter, the post office, the orphanage, and workers' dormitories; the sick lay piled up on bunks and on rotten mattresses on the floor.
Kolchak's armies, retreating to the east under the onslaught of Tukhachevsky's troops, took everything with them, including prisoners, and among them there were many typhus patients. At first they were driven in stages along the railway, then they were put on trains and taken to Transbaikalia. People died in trains. The corpses were thrown out of the cars, drawing a dotted line of rotting bodies along the rails.
So by 1919, all of Siberia was infected. Tukhachevsky recalled that the road from Omsk to Krasnoyarsk was a kingdom of typhus.
Winter 1919–1920 The epidemic in Novonikolaevsk, the capital of typhus, led to the death of tens of thousands of people (an exact count of victims was not kept). The city's population was halved. At the Krivoshchekovo station there were 3 stacks of 500 corpses each. Another 20 carriages containing the dead were nearby.
“All the houses were occupied by Chekatif, and the city was dictatorial by Chekatrup, who built two crematoria and dug miles of deep trenches for burying corpses,” according to the CCT report, see: GANO. F.R-1133. Op. 1. D. 431v. L. 150.).
In total, during the days of the epidemic, 28 military and 15 civilian medical institutions functioned in the city. Chaos reigned. Historian E. Kosyakova writes: “At the beginning of January 1920, in the overcrowded Eighth Novonikolaevsk Hospital, patients lay on beds, in the aisles, and under the beds. In the infirmaries, contrary to sanitary requirements, double bunks were installed. Typhoid patients, therapeutic patients and the wounded were housed in one room, which in fact was not a place of treatment, but a source of typhoid infection.
The strange thing was that this disease affected not only Siberia, but also the North. In 1921-1922 Of the 3 thousand population of Murmansk, 1,560 people suffered from typhus. Cases of smallpox, Spanish flu and scurvy were recorded.

In 1921-1922 and in the Crimea there were epidemics of typhoid and - in noticeable proportions - cholera, there were outbreaks of plague, smallpox, scarlet fever and dysentery. According to the People's Commissariat of Health, in the Yekaterinburg province at the beginning of January 1922, 2 thousand patients with typhus were recorded, mainly at train stations. A typhus epidemic was also observed in Moscow. There, as of January 12, 1922, there were 1,500 patients with relapsing fever and 600 patients with typhus. Pravda, No. 8, January 12, 1922, p.2.

In the same year, 1921, an epidemic of tropical malaria began, which also affected the northern regions. The mortality rate reached 80%!
The causes of these sudden severe epidemics are still unknown. At first they thought that malaria and typhus came to Russia from the Turkish front. But the malaria epidemic in its usual form cannot persist in those regions where it is colder than +16 degrees Celsius; How it penetrated into the Arkhangelsk province, the Caucasus and Siberia is not clear. To this day it is not clear where the cholera bacilli came from in Siberian rivers - in those regions that were almost not populated. However, hypotheses were expressed that during these years bacteriological weapons were used against Russia for the first time.

Indeed, after the landing of British and American troops in Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, in Crimea and Novorossiysk, in Primorye and the Caucasus, outbreaks of these unknown epidemics immediately began.
It turns out that during the First World War, in the town of Porton Down near Salisbury (Wiltshire), a top-secret center, the Royal Engineers Experimental Station, was created, where physiologists, pathologists and meteorologists from the best universities in Britain carried out experiments on people.
During the existence of this secret complex, more than 20 thousand people became participants in thousands of tests of pathogens of plague and anthrax, other deadly diseases, as well as poisonous gases.
At first, experiments were conducted on animals. But since in experiments on animals it is difficult to find out exactly how the effects of chemicals on human organs and tissues occur, in 1917 a special laboratory appeared in Porton Down, intended for experiments on humans.
Later it was reorganized into Microbiological research center. The CCU was located at Harvard Hospital in west Salisbury. The subjects (mostly soldiers) agreed to the experiments voluntarily, but almost no one knew what risks they were taking. A tragic story“Veterans of Porton” were told by British historian Ulf Schmidt in the book “Secret Science: A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments”.
In addition to Porton Down, the author also reports on the activities of the Edgewood Arsenal, organized in 1916, special unit chemical forces US Armed Forces.

The black plague, as if returning from the Middle Ages, caused particular fear among doctors. Mikhel D.V. The fight against plague in the South-East of Russia (1917–1925). - On Sat. History of science and technology. 2006, No. 5, p. 58–67.

In 1921, Novonikolaevsk experienced a wave of cholera epidemic, which came along with the flow of refugees from starving areas.

In 1922, despite the consequences of the famine, the rampant infectious epidemics in the country decreased. Thus, at the end of 1921, more than 5.5 million people in Soviet Russia suffered from typhus, typhoid and relapsing fever.
The main centers of typhus were the Volga region, Ukraine, Tambov province and the Urals, where the destructive epidemic struck, first of all, the Ufa and Yekaterinburg provinces.

But already in the spring of 1922, the number of patients dropped to 100 thousand people, although the turning point in the fight against typhus came only a year later. Thus, in Ukraine, the number of typhus diseases and deaths from it in 1923 decreased by 7 times. In total, in the USSR the number of diseases per year decreased by 30 times. Volga region.

The fight against typhus, cholera and malaria continued until the mid-1920s. American Sovietologist Robert Gates believes that Russia during Lenin's reign lost 10 million people from terror and civil war. (Washington Post, 4/30/1989).

Stalin's defenders zealously dispute these data, inventing fake statistics. Here, for example, is what the chairman of the CIPF Gennady Zyuganov writes: “In 1917, the population of Russia within its current borders was 91 million people. By 1926, when the first Soviet population census was carried out, its population in the RSFSR (that is, again in the territory of present-day Russia) had grown to 92.7 million people. And this despite the fact that only 5 years earlier the destructive and bloody Civil War ended.” Zyuganov G.A. Stalin and modernity. http://www.politpros.com/library/9/223.

Where did he get these numbers from, from which statistical collections exactly, the main communist of Russia does not stutter, hoping that they will believe him without evidence.
Communists have always exploited the naivety of others.
What really happened?

Vladimir Shubkin’s article “Difficult Farewell” (New World, No. 4, 1989) is devoted to the loss of population during the times of Lenin and Stalin. According to Shubkin, during Lenin’s reign from the autumn of 1917 to 1922, Russia’s demographic losses amounted to almost 13 million people, from which emigrants must be subtracted (1.5-2 million people).
The author, referring to the study by Yu.A. Polyakova, indicates that the total human losses from 1917 to 1922, taking into account failed births and emigration, amount to about 25 million people (Academician S. Strumilin estimated losses from 1917 to 1920 at 21 million).
During the years of collectivization and famine (1932-1933), the human losses of the USSR, according to V. Shubkin’s calculations, amounted to 10-13 million people.

If we continue with arithmetic, then during the First World War, in more than four years, the Russian Empire lost 20 - 8 = 12 million people.
It turns out that Russia’s average annual losses during the First World War amounted to 2.7 million people.
Apparently, this includes civilian casualties.

However, these figures are also disputed.
In 1919-1920, the publication of a 65-volume list of killed, wounded and missing lower ranks of the Russian army in 1914-1918 was completed. Its preparation began back in 1916 by employees of the General Staff of the Russian Empire. Based on this work, the Soviet historian reports: “During 3.5 years of war, the losses of the Russian army amounted to 68,994 generals and officers, 5,243,799 soldiers. This includes the killed, wounded and missing.” Beskrovny L.G. The Russian Army and Navy at the beginning of the 20th century. Essays on military-economic potential. M., 1986. P.17.

In addition, we must take into account those who were captured. At the end of the war, 2,385,441 Russian prisoners were registered in Germany, 1,503,412 in Austria-Hungary, 19,795 in Turkey and 2,452 in Bulgaria, for a total of 3,911,100. Proceedings of the Commission to survey the sanitary consequences of the war of 1914-1920. Vol. 1. P. 169.
Thus, the total human losses of Russia should be 9,223,893 soldiers and officers.

But from here we must subtract 1,709,938 wounded who returned to duty from field hospitals. As a result, minus this contingent, the number of killed, died from wounds, seriously wounded and prisoners will be 7,513,955 people.
All figures are given according to information from 1919. In 1920, work on the lists of losses, including clarifying the number of prisoners of war and missing in action, made it possible to revise the total military losses and determine them at 7,326,515 people. Proceedings of the Survey Commission... P. 170.

The unprecedented scale of the 1st World War indeed led to a huge number of prisoners of war. But the question of the number of military personnel of the Russian army who were in enemy captivity is still debatable.
Thus, the encyclopedia “The Great October Socialist Revolution” names over 3.4 million Russian prisoners of war. (M., 1987. P. 445).
According to E.Yu. Sergeev, a total of about 1.4 million soldiers and officers of the Russian army were captured. Sergeev E.Yu. Russian prisoners of war in Germany and Austria-Hungary // New and recent history. 1996. N 4. P. 66.
Historian O.S. Nagornaya names a similar figure - 1.5 million people (Nagornaya O.S. Another military experience: Russian prisoners of war of the First World War in Germany (1914-1922). M., 2010. P. 9).
Other data from S.N. Vasilyeva: “by January 1, 1918, the Russian army lost prisoners: soldiers - 3,395,105 people, and officers and class officials - 14,323 people, which amounted to 74.9% of all combat losses, or 21.2% of the total number of mobilized" . (Vasilieva S.N. Prisoners of war of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia during the First World War: Textbook for a special course. M., 1999. P. 14-15).
This discrepancy in numbers (more than 2 times) is apparently a consequence of poorly organized accounting and registration of prisoners of war.

But if you delve deeper into the statistics, all these figures do not look very convincing.

"Speaking of losses Russian population as a result of two wars and a revolution, writes historian Yu. Polyakov, a strange disparity in the population of pre-war Russia is striking, which, according to data different authors, reaches 30 million people. This discrepancy in the demographic literature is explained primarily by territorial discrepancies. Some take data on the territory of the Russian state in the pre-war (1914) borders, others - on the territory within the borders established in 1920-1921. and those that existed before 1939, the third - by territory within modern borders with a retrospective for 1917 and 1914. Calculations are sometimes carried out with the inclusion of Finland, the Bukhara Emirate and the Khanate of Khiva, sometimes without excluding them. We do not resort to population data in 1913-1920, calculated for the territory within modern borders. These data, while important for showing the growth dynamics of the current population, are not very applicable in historical research, dedicated to the First World War, the October Revolution and the Civil War.
These figures indicate the population in the territory that exists now, but in 1913-1920. it did not correspond to either the legal or actual borders of Russia. Let us recall that according to these data, the population of the country on the eve of the First World War was 159.2 million people, and at the beginning of 1917 - 163 million (USSR in figures in 1977 - M., 1978, p. 7). The difference in determining the size of the pre-war (at the end of 1913 or the beginning of 1914) population of Russia (within the boundaries established in 1920-1921 and existing before September 17, 1939) reaches 13 million people (from 132.8 million to 145.7 million).
Statistical collections of the 60s determine the population at that time at 139.3 million people. Confusing data is provided (for the territory within the borders before 1939) for 1917, 1919, 1920, 1921, etc.
An important source is the 1917 census. A significant part of its materials has been published. Studying them (including unpublished arrays stored in archives) is quite useful. But the census materials do not cover the country as a whole, war conditions affected the accuracy of the data, and in determining the national composition, its information has the same defects as all pre-revolutionary statistics, which made serious mistakes in determining nationality, based only on linguistic affiliation.
Meanwhile, the difference in determining the population size, according to citizens’ own statements (this principle is accepted by modern statistics), is very large. A number of nationalities were not taken into account at all before the revolution.
The 1920 census also, unfortunately, cannot be named among the basic sources, although its materials undoubtedly should be taken into account.
The census was carried out in the days (August 1920) when there was a war with bourgeois-landlord Poland and the front-line and front-line areas were inaccessible to census takers, when Wrangel still occupied the Crimea and Northern Taurida, when counter-revolutionary governments existed in Georgia and Armenia, and significant territories Siberia and the Far East were under the rule of interventionists and White Guards, when nationalist and kulak gangs operated in different parts of the country (many census takers were killed). Therefore, the population of many outlying territories was calculated according to pre-revolutionary information.
The census also had shortcomings in determining the national composition of the population (for example, the small peoples of the North were united in a group under the dubious name “Hyperboreans”). There are many contradictions in the data on population losses in the First World War and the Civil War (the number of killed, those who died from epidemics, etc.), on refugees from the front-line territories occupied by Austro-German troops in 1917, on the demographic consequences of crop failure and famine.
Statistical collections of the 60s give figures of 143.5 million people as of January 1, 1917, 138 million as of January 1, 1919, 136.8 million as of August 1920.
In 1973-1979 at the Institute of History of the USSR, under the leadership of the author of these lines (Polyakov), a method was developed and implemented for using (with the use of a computer) the 1926 census data to determine the country's population in previous years. This census recorded the composition of the country's population with an accuracy and scientific level unprecedented in Russia. The materials of the 1926 census were published widely and completely - in 56 volumes. The essence of the technique is general form is as follows: based on the 1926 census data, primarily based on the age structure of the population, the dynamic series of the country's population for 1917-1926 is restored. At the same time, data on natural and mechanical movement population for the indicated years. Therefore, this technique can be called a technique for the retrospective use of population census materials, taking into account the complex of additional data at the disposal of the historian.
As a result of the calculations, many hundreds of tables were obtained characterizing the population movement in 1917-1926. for different regions and the country as a whole, determining the number and proportion of the peoples of the country. In particular, the number and National composition population of Russia in the fall of 1917 in the territory within the borders of 1926 (147,644.3 thousand). It seemed to us extremely important to carry out calculations based on the actual territory of Russia in the fall of 1917 (i.e., without areas occupied by Austro-German troops), because the population located behind the front line was then excluded from the economic and political life Russia. We determined the actual territory on the basis of military maps recording the front line in the autumn of 1917.
The population size for the actual territory of Russia in the fall of 1917, excluding Finland, the Bukhara Emirate and the Khanate of Khiva, was determined to be 153,617 thousand people; without Finland, including Khiva and Bukhara - 156,617 thousand people; with Finland (together with the Pechenga volost), Khiva and Bukhara - 159,965 thousand people.” Polyakov Yu.A. Population of Soviet Russia in 1917-1920. (Historiography and sources). - On Sat. Russian problems social movement and historical science. M., Nauka, 1981. pp. 170-176.

If we recall the figure of 180.6 million people named in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, then which of those mentioned by Yu.A. Polyakov does not take any figures, but in the fall of 1917 the population deficit in Russia will not be 12 million, but will fluctuate between 27 and 37.5 million people.

How can these figures be compared? In 1917, the population of Sweden, for example, was estimated at 5.5 million people. In other words, this statistical error is equal to 5-7 Sweden.

The situation is similar with the losses of the country's population in the civil war.
“The countless victims suffered in the war against the White Guards and interventionists (the country’s population decreased by 13 million people from 1917 to 1923) were rightly attributed to the class enemy - the culprit, the instigator of the war.” Polyakov Yu.A. 20s: the mood of the party vanguard. Questions of the history of the CPSU, 1989, No. 10, p. 30.

In the reference book V.V. Erlichman "Population losses in the 20th century." (M.: Russian Panorama, 2004) it is said that in the civil war of 1918-1920. approximately 10.5 million people died.

According to historian A. Kilichenkov, “in three years of fratricidal civil massacre, the country lost 13 million people and retained only 9.5% of the previous (before 1913) gross national product.” Science and Life, 1995, No. 8, p. 80.

Moscow State University professor L. Semyannikova objects: “the civil war, extremely bloody and destructive, claimed, according to Russian historians, 15-16 million lives.” Science and Life, 1995, No. 9, p. 46.

Historian M. Bernshtam, in his work “Parties in the Civil War,” tried to compile a general balance of Russian population losses during the war years of 1917-1920: “According to the special reference book of the Central Statistical Office, the number of population on the territory of the USSR after 1917 does not take into account the population of territories that moved away from Russia and those not included in the USSR amounted to 146,755,520 people. - Administrative-territorial composition of the USSR as of July 1, 1925 and July 1, 1926, in comparison with the pre-war division of Russia. Experience in establishing a connection between the administrative-territorial composition of pre-war Russia and the modern composition of the USSR. Central Statistical Office of the USSR. - M., 1926, p.49-58.

This is the initial figure of the population who, since October 1917, found themselves in the zone socialist revolution. In the same territory, the census of August 28, 1920, including those in the army, found only 134,569,206 people. - Statistical Yearbook 1921. Vol. 1. Proceedings of the Central Statistical Office, vol. VIII, no. 3, M., 1922, p.8. The total population deficit is 12,186,314 people.
Thus, the historian summarizes, in less than the first three years of the socialist revolution on the territory of the former Russian Empire (from the autumn of 1917 to August 28, 1920), the population lost 8.3 percent of its original composition.
Over these years, emigration allegedly amounted to 86,000 people (Alekhin M. White Emigration. TSB, 1st ed., vol. 64. M., 1934, column 163), and natural decline - the excess of mortality over the birth rate - 873,623 people (Proceedings of the Central Statistical Office, vol. XVIII, M., 1924, p. 42).
Thus, losses from the revolution and civil war in the first less than three years of Soviet power, without emigration and natural decline, amounted to more than 11.2 million people. Here it is necessary to note, the author comments, that “natural decline” requires a reasonable interpretation: why the decline? Is the scientific term “natural” appropriate here? It is clear that the excess of mortality over birth rate is an unnatural phenomenon and relates to the demographic results of the revolution and the socialist experiment.”

However, if we assume that this war lasted 4 years (1918-1922), and take the total losses to be 15 million people, then the average annual losses of the country's population during this period amounted to 3.7 million people.
It turns out that the civil war was bloodier than the war with the Germans.

At the same time, the size of the Red Army reached 3 million people by the end of 1919, and 5.5 million people by the fall of 1920.
The famous demographer B.Ts. Urlanis, in his book “Wars and Population of Europe,” speaking about losses among the soldiers and commanders of the Red Army in the civil war, gives the following figures. The total number of killed and died, in his opinion, is 425 thousand people. About 125 thousand people were killed at the front, about 300 thousand people died in the active army and in military districts. Urlanis B. Ts. Wars and population of Europe. - M., 1960. pp. 183, 305. Moreover, the author writes that “comparison and absolute value figures give reason to assume that combat losses included killed and wounded.” Urlanis B.Ts. There, p. 181.

The reference book “National Economy of the USSR in Figures” (M., 1925) contains completely different information about the losses of the Red Army in 1918-1922. In this book, according to official data from the statistics department of the Main Directorate of the Red Army, the combat losses of the Red Army in the civil war are named - 631,758 Red Army soldiers, and sanitary (with evacuation) - 581,066, and in total - 1,212,824 people (p. 110).

The white movement was quite small. By the end of the winter of 1919, that is, by the time of its maximum development, it, according to Soviet military reports, did not exceed 537 thousand people. Of these, no more than 175 thousand people died. - Kakaurin N.E. How the revolution fought, vol. 2, M.-L., 1926, p. 137.

Thus, there were 10 times more reds than whites. But there were also many more casualties in the ranks of the Red Army - either 3 or 8 times.

But, if we compare the three-year losses of the two opposing armies with the losses of the Russian population, then there is no escaping the question: who fought with whom?
White and red?
Or both of them with the people?

“Cruelty is inherent in any war, but in the Russian civil war there was incredible mercilessness. White officers and volunteers knew what would happen to them if they were captured by the Reds: more than once I saw terribly disfigured bodies with shoulder straps cut out on their shoulders.” Orlov, G. Diary of a Drozdovite. // Star. - 2012. - No. 11.

The Reds were no less brutally destroyed. “As soon as the party affiliation of the communists was established, they were hanged on the first branch.” Reden, N. Through the hell of the Russian revolution. Memoirs of a midshipman 1914-1919. - M., 2006.

The atrocities of Denikin's, Annenkov's, Kalmykov's, and Kolchak's are well known.

At the beginning of the Ice Campaign, Kornilov declared: “I give you a very cruel order: do not take prisoners! I take responsibility for this order before God and the Russian people!” One of the participants in the campaign recalled the cruelty of ordinary volunteers during the “Ice March” when he wrote about the reprisals against those captured: “All the Bolsheviks captured by us with weapons in their hands were shot on the spot: alone, in dozens, hundreds. It was war "for extermination." Fedyuk V. P. White. Anti-Bolshevik movement in the south of Russia 1917-1918.

A witness, the writer William, spoke about the Denikinites in his memoirs. True, he is reluctant to talk about his own exploits, but he conveys in detail the stories of his accomplices in the struggle for the one and indivisible.
“They drove out the Reds - and how many of them were put down, the passion of the Lord! And they began to establish their own order. The liberation has begun. At first the sailors were harmed. Those stupid ones stayed, “our business, they say, is on the water, we will live with the cadets”... Well, everything is as it should be, in an amicable way: they kicked them out of the pier, forced them to dig a ditch for themselves, and then they will lead them to the edge and from revolvers one by one. So, can you believe it, they moved like crayfish in this ditch until they fell asleep. And then, in this place, the whole earth moved: that’s why they didn’t finish it off, so that others would be embarrassed.”

The commander of the US occupation corps in Siberia, General Greves, in turn, testifies: “Terrible murders were committed in Eastern Siberia, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks, as was usually thought. I will not be mistaken if I say that in Eastern Siberia for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, 100 people were killed by anti-Bolshevik elements.”

“It is possible to put an end to... the uprising as soon as possible, without stopping at the most severe, even cruel measures against not only the rebels, but also the population supporting them... For concealment... there must be merciless punishment... For reconnaissance and communications, use local residents, taking hostages . In case of incorrect and untimely information or treason, the hostages will be executed and the houses belonging to them will be burned.” These are quotes from the order of the Supreme Ruler of Russia, Admiral A.V. Kolchak from March 23, 1919

And here are excerpts from the order of the specially authorized Kolchak S. Rozanov, governor of the Yenisei and part of the Irkutsk province dated March 27, 1919: in villages that do not extradite the Reds, “shoot the tenth”; villages that resist are to be burned, and “the adult male population is to be shot without exception,” property and bread are completely taken away in favor of the treasury; In case of resistance from fellow villagers, hostages will be “shot mercilessly.”

The political leaders of the Czechoslovak corps B. Pavlu and V. Girsa stated in their official memorandum to the allies in November 1919: “Admiral Kolchak surrounded himself with former tsarist officials, and since the peasants did not want to take up arms and sacrifice their lives for the return of these people to power , they were beaten, flogged and killed in cold blood by the thousands, after which the world called them “Bolsheviks.”

“The most significant weakness of the Omsk government is that the overwhelming majority is in opposition to it. Roughly speaking, approximately 97% of the population of Siberia today is hostile to Kolchak.” Testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Eichelberg. New time, 1988. No. 34. pp. 35-37.

However, it is also true that the Reds brutally dealt with rebellious workers and peasants.

It is interesting that during the civil war there were almost no Russians in the Red Army, although few people know this...
“You shouldn’t become a soldier, Vanek.
In the Red Army there will be bayonets and tea,
The Bolsheviks will manage without you."

In addition to the Latvian riflemen, over 25 thousand Chinese took part in the defense of Petrograd from Yudenich, and in total there were at least 200 thousand Chinese internationalists in the Red Army units. In 1919, more than 20 Chinese units operated in the Red Army - near Arkhangelsk and Vladikavkaz, in Perm and near Voronezh, in the Urals and beyond the Urals...
There is probably no person who has not seen the film “The Elusive Avengers”, but not many people know that the film is based on the book by P. Blyakhin “Little Red Devils”, and there are very few people who remember that there is no gypsy Yashka in the book, there is Chinese Yu-yu, and in the film, shot in the 30s, instead of Yu there was a black Johnson.
The first organizer of Chinese units in the Red Army, Yakir, recalled that the Chinese were distinguished by high discipline, unquestioning obedience to orders, fatalism and self-sacrifice. In his book “Memoirs of the Civil War,” he writes: “The Chinese looked at salaries very seriously. You gave your life easily, but pay on time and feed well. Yes, that's it. Their representatives come to me and say that they hired 530 people and, therefore, I have to pay for all of them. And as many as there are no, then nothing - the rest of the money that is due to them, they will divide among everyone. I talked to them for a long time, convincing them that this was wrong, not our way. Still, they got theirs. Another argument was given - they say we should send the families of those killed to China. We had a lot of good things with them on the long, suffering journey through all of Ukraine, the entire Don, to the Voronezh province.”
What else?

There were approximately 90 thousand Latvians, plus 600 thousand Poles, 250 Hungarians, 150 Germans, 30 thousand Czechs and Slovaks, 50 thousand from Yugoslavia, there was a Finnish division, Persian regiments. In the Korean Red Army - 80 thousand, and in different parts about 100 more, there were Uighur, Estonian, Tatar, mountain units...

The personnel of the command staff is also curious.
“Many of Lenin’s fiercest enemies agreed to fight side by side with the hated Bolsheviks when it came to defending the Motherland.” Kerensky A.F. My life is underground. Smena, 1990, No. 11, p. 264.
The book by S. Kavtaradze “Military Specialists in the Service of Soviet Power” is well known. According to his calculations, 70% of the tsarist generals served in the Red Army, and 18% in all white armies. There is even a list of names - from general to captain - of General Staff officers who voluntarily joined the Red Army. Their motives were a mystery to me until I read the memoirs of N.M. Potapov, Quartermaster General of the Infantry, who led the counterintelligence of the General Staff in 1917. He was a difficult person.
I will briefly retell what I remember. I’ll just make a reservation first - part of his memoirs was published in the 60s in the Military Historical Journal, and I read the other in the Leninka manuscripts department.
So what's in the magazine?
In July 1917, Potapov met with M. Kedrov (they had been friends since childhood), N. Podvoisky and V. Bonch-Bruevich (the head of party intelligence, and his brother Mikhail for some time later headed the Field Operational Headquarters of the Red Army). These were the leaders of the Bolshevik Military, the future organizers of the Bolshevik coup. After long negotiations, they came to an agreement: 1. The General Staff will actively help the Bolsheviks in overthrowing the Provisional Government. 2. The people of the General Staff will move into the structures to create a new army to replace the disintegrated one.
Both parties fulfilled their obligations. After October, Potapov himself was appointed manager of the affairs of the War Ministry, since the People's Commissars were constantly on the move, in fact he served as the head of the People's Commissariat, and from June 1918 he worked as an expert. By the way, he played an important role in the Trest and Syndicate-2 operations. He was buried with honors in 1946.
Now about the manuscript. According to Potapov, the army, through the efforts of Kerensky and other democrats, was completely disintegrated. Russia was losing the war. The influence of the banking houses of Europe and the USA on the government was too noticeable.
The pragmatic Bolsheviks, in turn, needed to destroy false democracy in the army, establish iron discipline, and in addition, they defended the unity of Russia. The career patriotic officers understood perfectly well that Kolchak promised to give up Siberia to the Americans, and the British and French secured similar promises from Denikin and Wrangel. Actually, arms supplies from the West took place under these conditions. Order No. 1 was canceled.
Trotsky restored iron discipline and complete subordination of the rank and file to commanders within six months, resorting to the most severe measures, including executions. After the revolt of Stalin and Voroshilov, known as the military opposition, the Eighth Congress introduced unity of command in the army, prohibiting attempts by commissars to interfere. Tales of hostages were myths. The officers were well provided for, they were honored, awarded, their orders were unconditionally carried out, one after another the armies of their enemies were thrown out of Russia. This position suited them as professionals quite well. So, in any case, Potapov wrote.

Pitirim Sorokin, a contemporary of the events, testifies: “Since 1919, the government has actually ceased to be the power of the working masses and has become simply a tyranny, consisting of unprincipled intellectuals, declassed workers, criminals and assorted adventurers.” Terror, he noted, “began to a greater extent to be carried out against workers and peasants.” Sorokin P.A. The current state of Russia. New world. 1992. No. 4. P.198.

That's right - against workers and peasants. Suffice it to recall the executions in Tula and Astrakhan, Kronstadt and Antonovism, the suppression of hundreds of peasant revolts...

How can you not rebel when you are being robbed?

“If we in the cities can say that the revolutionary Soviet government is strong enough to withstand any attacks from the bourgeoisie, then this cannot be said in any case in the countryside. We must seriously pose the question of stratification in the countryside, about the creation of two opposing hostile forces in the village... Only if we can split the village into two irreconcilable hostile camps, if we can kindle there the same civil war that was going on not so long ago in the cities, if we manage to restore the village the poor against the rural bourgeoisie, - only then can we say that we will do in relation to the countryside what we were able to do for the cities." Yakov Sverdlov. Speech at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the IV convocation on May 20, 1918.

On June 29, 1918, speaking at the 3rd All-Russian Congress of the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, delegate from the Ural region N.I. Melkov exposed the exploits of food detachments in the Ufa province, where “the food issue was “well organized” by the chairman of the food administration, Tsyurupa, who was made commissar of food for all of Russia, but the other side of the matter is clearer for us, the left Socialist-Revolutionaries, than for anyone else. or. We know how this bread was squeezed out of the villages, what atrocities this Red Army committed in the villages: purely bandit gangs appeared who began to rob, it reached the point of debauchery, etc.” Party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Documents and materials. 1917-1925 In 3 volumes. T. 2. Part 1. M., 2010. P. 246-247.

For the Bolsheviks, suppressing the resistance of their opponents was the only way to maintain power in a peasant country with the aim of turning it into the base of the international socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks were confident in the historical justification and justice of using merciless violence against their enemies and “exploiters” in general, as well as coercion in relation to the wavering middle strata of the city and countryside, primarily the peasantry. Based on experience Paris Commune, V.I. Lenin considered the main reason for its death to be the inability to suppress the resistance of the overthrown exploiters. It is worth reflecting on his admission, repeated several times at the Tenth Congress of the RCP (b) in 1921, that “the petty-bourgeois counter-revolution is undoubtedly more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak combined,” and ... “represents a danger in many ways times greater than all the Denikins, Kolchaks and Yudenichs put together.”

He wrote: “...The last and most numerous of the exploiting classes has risen against us in our country.” PSS, 5th ed., vol. 37, p. 40.
“Everywhere the greedy, glutted, brutal kulak united with the landowners and capitalists against the workers and against the poor in general... Everywhere it entered into an alliance with foreign capitalists against the workers of their country... There will be no peace: the kulak can and can easily be reconciled with the landowner , tsar and priest, even if they quarreled, but never with the working class. And that’s why we call the battle against the fists the last, decisive battle.” Lenin V.I. PSS, vol. 37, p. 39-40.

Already in July 1918, there were 96 peasant armed uprisings against Soviet power and its food policy.

On August 5, 1918, an uprising of peasants in the Penza province, dissatisfied with the food requisitions of the Soviet government, broke out. It covered the volosts of Penza and neighboring Morshansky districts (8 volosts in total). See: Chronicle of the Penza regional organization of the CPSU. 1884-1937 Saratov, 1988, p. 58.

On August 9 and 10, V.I. Lenin received telegrams from the chairman of the Penza Provincial Committee of the RCP (b) E.B. Bosch and the chairman of the Council of Provincial Commissars V.V. Kuraev with a message about the uprising and in response telegrams gave instructions on organizing its suppression (see .: Lenin V.I. Biographical Chronicle, T. 6. M., 1975, pp. 41, 46, 51 and 55; Lenin V.I. Complete collected works, vol. 50, pp. 143-144 , 148, 149 and 156).

Lenin sends a letter to Penza addressed to V.V. Kuraev, E.B. Bosch, A.E. Minkin.
August 11, 1918
To T-scham Kuraev, Bosch, Minkin and other Penza communists
T-shchi! The uprising of the five kulak volosts must lead to merciless suppression.
This is required by the interests of the entire revolution, because now everywhere there is a “last decisive battle” with the kulaks. You need to give a sample.
1) Hang (be sure to hang, so that the people can see) at least 100 notorious kulaks, rich people, bloodsuckers.
2) Publish their names.
3) Take away all their bread.
4) Assign hostages.
Make it so that hundreds of miles around people see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle the bloodsucking kulaks.
Wire receipt and execution.
Your Lenin.
P.S. Find tougher people. Fund 2, on. 1, no. 6898 - autograph. Lenin V.I. Unknown documents. 1891-1922 - M.: ROSSPEN, 1999. Doc. 137.

The Penza riot was suppressed on August 12, 1918. Local authorities managed to do this through agitation, with limited use of military force. Participants in the murder of five pro-army members and three members of the village council. Kuchki of the Penza district and the organizers of the rebellion (13 people) were arrested and shot.

The Bolsheviks brought down all the punishments on farmers who did not hand over grain and food: peasants were arrested, beaten, and shot. Naturally, villages and volosts rebelled, men took up pitchforks and axes, dug up hidden weapons and brutally dealt with the “commissars”.

Already in 1918, more than 250 major uprisings took place in Smolensk, Yaroslavl, Oryol, Moscow and other provinces; More than 100 thousand peasants of the Simbirsk and Samara provinces rebelled.

During the Civil War, Don and Kuban Cossacks, peasants of the Volga region, Ukraine, Belarus and Central Asia.

In the summer of 1918, in Yaroslavl and the Yaroslavl province, thousands of urban workers and surrounding peasants rebelled against the Bolsheviks; in many volosts and villages, the entire population, including women, old people, and children, took up arms.

The report of the Headquarters of the Eastern Red Front contains a description of the uprising in the Sengileevsky and Belebeevsky districts of the Volga region in March 1919: “The peasants went wild, with pitchforks, with stakes and guns alone and in crowds climbing machine guns, despite the piles of corpses, their rage defies description.” Kubanin M.I. Anti-Soviet peasant movement during the civil war (war communism). - On the agrarian front, 1926, No. 2, p. 41.

Of all the anti-Soviet uprisings in the Nizhny Novgorod region, the most organized and large-scale was the uprising in Vetluzhsky and Varnavinsky districts in August 1918. The cause of the uprising was dissatisfaction with the food dictatorship of the Bolsheviks and the predatory actions of food detachments. The rebels numbered up to 10 thousand people. The open confrontation in the Urensky region lasted about a month, but individual gangs continued to operate until 1924.

A witness to the peasant revolt in the Shatsky district of the Tambov province in the fall of 1918 recalled: “I am a soldier, I was in many battles with the Germans, but I have never seen anything like this. A machine gun mows down the rows, and they walk, they see nothing, they crawl straight over the corpses, over the wounded, their eyes are terrible, the mothers of the children come forward, shouting: Mother, Intercessor, save, have mercy, we will all lie down for You. There was no longer any fear in them.” Steinberg I.Z. The moral face of the revolution. Berlin, 1923, p.62.

Since March 1918, Zlatoust and its environs have been fighting. At the same time, about two-thirds of the Kungur district was engulfed in the fire of the uprising.
By the summer of 1918, the “peasant” regions of the Urals also burst into flames of resistance.
Throughout the Ural region - from Verkhoturye and Novaya Lyalya to Verkhneuralsk and Zlatoust and from Bashkiria and the Kama region to Tyumen and Kurgan - detachments of peasants crushed the Bolsheviks. The number of rebels could not be counted. There were more than 40 thousand of them in the Okhanska-Osa area alone. 50 thousand rebels put the Reds to flight in the area of ​​Bakal - Satka - Mesyagutovskaya volost. On July 20, the peasants took Kuzino and cut Trans-Siberian Railway, blocking Yekaterinburg from the west.

In general, by the end of summer, vast territories were liberated from the Red rebels. This is almost the entire Southern and Middle, as well as part of the Western and Northern Urals (where there were no whites yet).
The Urals region was also burning: the peasants of the Glazov and Nolinsky districts of the Vyatka province took up arms. In the spring of 1918, the flames of the anti-Soviet uprising engulfed the Lauzinskaya, Duvinskaya, Tastubinskaya, Dyurtyulinskaya, Kizilbashskaya volosts of the Ufa province. In the Krasnoufimsk region, a battle took place between Yekaterinburg workers who came to requisition grain and local peasants who did not want to give up the grain. Workers against peasants! Neither one nor the other supported the whites, but this did not stop them from exterminating each other... On July 13-15 near Nyazepetrovsk and on July 16 near Upper Ufaley, the Krasnoufima rebels defeated units of the 3rd Red Army. Suvorov Dm. Unknown civil war, M., 2008.

N. Poletika, historian: “The Ukrainian village waged a brutal struggle against surplus appropriation and requisitions, ripping open the bellies of rural authorities and agents of Zagotzern and Zagotskot, filling these bellies with grain, carving Red Army stars on the forehead and chest, driving nails into the eyes, crucifying on crosses."

The uprisings were suppressed in the most brutal and usual way. In six months, 50 million hectares of land were confiscated from the kulaks and distributed between the poor and middle peasants.
As a result, by the end of 1918, the amount of land used by kulaks decreased from 80 million hectares to 30 million hectares.
Thus, the economic and political positions of the kulaks were greatly undermined.
The socio-economic face of the village has changed: the share of the peasant poor, which was 65% in 1917, decreased to 35% by the end of 1918; the middle peasants instead of 20% became 60%, and the kulaks instead of 15% became 5%.

But even a year later the situation has not changed.
Delegates from Tyumen told Lenin at the party congress: “To carry out surplus appropriation, they arranged the following things: those peasants who did not want to give appropriation, they were put in pits, filled with water and frozen...”

F. Mironov, commander of the Second Cavalry Army (1919, from an address to Lenin and Trotsky): “The people are groaning... I repeat, the people are ready to throw themselves into the arms of landowner bondage, if only the torment would not be as painful, as obvious as it is now. .."

In March 1919, at the VIII Congress of the RCP (b) G.E. Zinoviev briefly described the state of affairs in the countryside and the mood of the peasants: “If you go to the village now, you will see that they hate us with all their might.”

A.V. Lunacharsky in May 1919 informed V.I. Lenin about the situation in the Kostroma province: “In most districts there were no serious unrest. There were only purely hungry demands, not even riots, but simply demands for bread, which is not available... But in the east of the Kostroma province there are forest and grain kulak districts - Vetluzhsky and Varnavinsky, in the latter there is a whole rich, prosperous, Old Believer region, the so-called Urensky... A formal war is being waged with this region. We want to pump out those 200 or 300 thousand poods from there at any cost... The peasants are resisting and have become extremely embittered. I saw terrible photographs of our comrades, from whom Varnavin’s fists tore off the skin, whom they froze in the forest or burned alive...”

As noted in the same 1919 in a report to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the RCP (b), the chairman of the Higher Military Inspectorate N.I. Podvoisky:
"The workers and peasants who took the most direct part in the October Revolution, without understanding its historical significance, thought to use it to satisfy their immediate needs. Maximalist-minded with an anarcho-syndicalist bent, the peasants followed us during the destructive period of the October Revolution, showing no differences with its leaders in any way. During the creative period, they naturally had to diverge from our theory and practice."

Indeed, the peasants parted ways with the Bolsheviks: instead of respectfully giving them all the available bread, grown through labor, they tore out machine guns and sawn-off shotguns taken from the war from secluded places.

From the minutes of the meetings of the Special Commission for Supplying the Army and the Population of the Orenburg Province and the Kyrgyz Territory on providing assistance to the proletarian center on September 12, 1919.
We listened. Report by Comrade Martynov on the catastrophic food situation in the Center.
It was decided. Having heard the report of Comrade Martynov and the content of the conversation via direct wire with the authorized representative of the Council of People's Commissars, Comrade Blumberg, the Special Commission decides:
1. Mobilize members of the board, party and non-party workers of the provincial food committee to send them to the districts in order to strengthen the pouring of grain and its delivery to the stations.
2. Carry out a similar mobilization among the workers of the Special Commission, the food department of the Kyrgyz Revolutionary Committee and use the workers of the political department of the 1st Army to send them to the regions.
3. Urgently order the chairmen of the district food committees to take the most exceptional measures to strengthen the grain dumping, the responsibility of the chairmen and members of the boards of the district food committees.
4. The head of the transport department of the provincial food committee, Comrade Gorelkin, is ordered to show maximum energy to organize transport.
5. Send the following persons to the areas: Comrade Shchipkova - to the Orskaya railway area. (Saraktash, Orsk), t. Styvrina - to the district food committees of Isaevo-Dedovsky, Mikhailovsky and Pokrovsky, t. Andreeva - to Iletsky and Ak-Bulaksky, t. Golynicheva - to the Krasnokholmsky district produce committee, t. Chukhrita - to Aktyubinsk, giving him the broadest powers.
6.Send all available bread immediately to the centers.
7. Take all measures to remove from Iletsk all the stocks of bread and millet available there, for which purpose send the required number of wagons to Iletsk.
8. Apply to the Revolutionary Military Council with a request to take possible measures to provide the provincial food committee with transport in this urgent work, for which, if necessary, cancel the underwater patrol of the Revolutionary Military Council for some areas and issue a mandatory decree that the Revolutionary Military Council guarantees timely payment for drivers who brought grain.
9. Offer osprodivs 8 and 49 to temporarily serve the needs of the army with the help of their areas so that the remaining areas can be used to supply the centers...
Authentic with proper signatures
Archive of the KazSSR, f. 14. op. 2, d. 1. l 4. Certified copy.

Trinity-Pechora uprising, anti-Bolshevik rebellion in the upper Pechora during the civil war. The reason for it was the export of grain reserves by the Reds from Troitsko-Pechorsk to Vychegda. The initiator of the uprising was the chairman of the volost cell of the RCP (b), commandant of Troitsko-Pechorsk I.F. Melnikov. The conspirators included the commander of the Red Army company M.K. Pystin, priest V. Popov, deputy. Chairman of the Volost Executive Committee M.P. Pystin, forester N.S. Skorokhodov and others.
The uprising began on February 4, 1919. The rebels killed some of the Red Army soldiers, the rest went over to their side. During the uprising, the head of the Soviet garrison in Troitsko-Pechorsk, N.N., was killed. Suvorov, red commander A.M. Cheremnykh. District military commissar M.M. Frolov shot himself. The judicial panel of the rebels (chaired by P.A. Yudin) executed about 150 communists and activists of the Soviet regime - refugees from the Cherdyn district.

Then anti-Bolshevik riots broke out in the volost villages of Pokcha, Savinobor and Podcherye. After Kolchak’s army entered the upper reaches of Pechora, these volosts fell under the jurisdiction of the Siberian Provisional Government, and the participants in the uprising against Soviet power in Troitsko-Pechorsk entered the Separate Siberian Pechora Regiment, which proved to be one of the most combat-ready units of the Russian Army in offensive operations in the Urals.

Soviet historian M.I. Kubanin, reporting that 25-30% of the total population participated in the uprising against the Bolsheviks in the Tambov province, summed up: “There is no doubt that 25-30 percent of the village population means that the entire adult male population went to Antonov’s army.” Kubanin M.I. Anti-Soviet peasant movement during the civil war (war communism). - On the agrarian front, 1926, No. 2, p. 42.
M.I. Kubanin also writes about a number of other major uprisings during the years of military communism: about the Izhevsk People's Army, which had 70,000 people, which managed to hold out for over three months, about the Don Uprising, in which 30,000 armed Cossacks and peasants took part, and with a rear force of one hundred thousand man and broke through the red front.

In the summer-autumn of 1919, in the peasant uprising against the Bolsheviks in the Yaroslavl province, according to M.I. Lebedev, chairman of the Yaroslavl provincial Cheka, 25-30 thousand people took part. Regular units of the 6th Army of the Northern Front and detachments of the Cheka, as well as detachments of Yaroslavl workers (8.5 thousand people), who mercilessly dealt with the rebels, were thrown against the “white-greens”. In August 1919 alone, they killed 1,845 rebels and wounded 832, shot 485 rebels based on the verdicts of the revolutionary military tribunals, and sent more than 400 people to prison. Documentation Center for the Contemporary History of the Yaroslavl Region (CDNI YaO). F. 4773. Op. 6. D. 44. L. 62-63.

The scope of the insurgent movement in the Don and Kuban reached particular strength by the fall of 1921, when the Kuban insurgent army under the leadership of A.M. Przhevalsky made a desperate attempt to capture Krasnodar.

In 1920-1921 in the territory Western Siberia, liberated from Kolchak’s troops, a bloody 100,000-strong peasant revolt against the Bolsheviks blazed.
“In every village, in every hamlet,” wrote P. Turkhansky, “the peasants began to beat the communists: they killed their wives, children, relatives; They chopped with axes, cut off arms and legs, and opened up their stomachs. They dealt especially harshly with food workers.” Turkhansky P. Peasant uprising in Western Siberia in 1921. Memories. - Siberian Archive, Prague, 1929, No. 2.

The war for bread was fought to the death.
Here is an excerpt from the Report of the management department of the Novonikolayevsky district executive committee of the Soviets on the Kolyvan uprising to the management department of the Sibrevkom:
“In the rebellious areas, the komjacheki were almost completely exterminated. The only survivors were random ones who managed to escape. Even those expelled from the cell were exterminated. After the suppression of the uprising, the defeated cells were restored on their own, increased their activity, and a large influx of poor people into the cells was noticeable in the villages after the suppression of the uprising. The cells insist on arming them or creating special forces from them at the district party committees. There were no cases of cowardice or betrayal of cell members by individual cell members.
The police in Kolyvan were taken by surprise, 4 policemen and an assistant to the district police chief were killed. The remaining policemen (a small percentage fled) surrendered their weapons one by one to the rebels. About 10 policemen from the Kolyvan police took part in the uprising (passively). Of these, after we occupied Kolyvan, three were shot by order of the special department of the county check.
The reason for the unsatisfactoriness of the police is explained by its composition from local Kolyvan petty bourgeois (there are about 80-100 workers in the city).
The communist executive committees were killed, the kulak members took an active part in the uprising, often becoming the head of the rebel departments.”
http://basiliobasilid.livejournal.com/17945.html

The Siberian revolt was suppressed as ruthlessly as all the others.

“The experience of the civil war and peaceful socialist construction has convincingly proven that the kulaks are the enemies of Soviet power. Complete collectivization of agriculture was a method of eliminating the kulaks as a class.” (Essays on the Voronezh organization of the CPSU. M., 1979, p. 276).

The Statistical Directorate of the Red Army estimates the combat losses of the Red Army for 1919 at 131,396 people. In 1919 there was a war on 4 internal fronts against the White armies and on Western Front against Poland and the Baltic states.
In 1921, none of the fronts any longer existed, and the same department estimates the losses of the “workers’ and peasants’” Red Army for this year at 171,185 people. Units of the Cheka of the Red Army were not included and their losses are not included here. The losses of the ChON, VOKhR and other communist detachments, as well as the police, may not be included.
Same year peasant uprisings they fought against the Bolsheviks in the Don and Ukraine, in Chuvashia and the Stavropol region.

Soviet historian L.M. Spirin generalizes: “We can say with confidence that there was not only not a single province, but also not a single district where there were no protests and uprisings of the population against the communist regime.”

When the civil war was still in full swing, on the initiative of F.E. Dzerzhinsky in Soviet Russia, units and troops for special, special purposes are being created everywhere (based on the resolution of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) of April 17, 1919). These are military party detachments at factory party cells, district committees, city committees, regional party committees and provincial party committees, organized to assist the bodies of Soviet power in the fight against counter-revolution, to perform guard duty at particularly important facilities, etc. They were formed from communists and Komsomol members.

The first CHONs arose in Petrograd and Moscow, then in the central provinces of the RSFSR (by September 1919 they had been created in 33 provinces). CHON of the front line of the Southern, Western and Southwestern Fronts took part in front-line operations, although their main task was the fight against internal counter-revolution. CHON personnel were divided into personnel and police (variable).

On March 24, 1921, the Party Central Committee, based on the decision of the Tenth Congress of the RCP (b), adopted a resolution on the inclusion of ChON in the militia units of the Red Army. In September 1921, the command and headquarters of the country's ChON were established (commander A.K. Alexandrov, chief of staff V.A. Kangelari), for political leadership- Council of the ChON under the Central Committee of the RCP (b) (Secretary of the Central Committee V.V. Kuibyshev, deputy chairman of the Cheka I.S. Unshlikht, commissar of the headquarters of the Red Army and commander of the ChON), in the provinces and districts - command and headquarters of the ChON, Councils of the ChON under the provincial committees and party committees.

They were quite a serious police force. In December 1921, the CHON had 39,673 personnel. and variable - 323,372 people. The CHON included infantry, cavalry, artillery and armored units. More than 360 thousand armed fighters!

Who did they fight with if the civil war officially ended in 1920? After all, special-purpose units were disbanded by decision of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) only in 1924-1925.
Until the very end of 1922, martial law remained in 36 provinces, regions and autonomous republics country, i.e. almost the entire country was under martial law.

CHON. Regulations, guidelines and circulars. - M.: ShtaCHONresp., 1921; Naida S.F. Special purpose units (1917-1925). Party leadership in the creation and activities of the ChON // Military Historical Journal, 1969. No. 4. P.106-112; Telnov N.S. From the history of the creation and combat activities of communist special-purpose units during the civil war. // Scientific notes of the Kolomna Pedagogical Institute. - Kolomna, 1961. Volume 6. P.73-99; Gavrilova N.G. Activities of the Communist Party in the leadership of special-purpose units during the civil war and the restoration of the national economy (based on materials from the Tula, Ryazan, Ivanovo-Voznesensk provinces). Diss. Ph.D. ist. Sci. - Ryazan, 1983; Krotov V.L. Activity communist party Ukraine on the creation and combat use of special purpose units (CHON) in the fight against counter-revolution (1919-1924). dis. Ph.D. ist. Sci. - Kharkov, 1969; Murashko P.E. Communist Party of Belarus - organizer and leader of communist formations for special purposes (1918-1924) Diss. Ph.D. ist. Sciences - Minsk, 1973; Dementiev I.B. CHON of the Perm province in the fight against the enemies of Soviet power. Diss. Ph.D. ist. Sci. - Perm, 1972; Abramenko I.A. Creation of communist special forces in Western Siberia (1920). // Scientific notes of Tomsk University, 1962. No. 43. P.83-97; Vdovenko G.D. Communist detachments - Special purpose units of Eastern Siberia (1920-1921). - Dissertation. Ph.D. ist. nauk.- Tomsk, 1970; Fomin V.N. Special purpose units in the Far East in 1918-1925. - Bryansk, 1994; Dmitriev P. Special purpose units. - Soviet Review. No. 2.1980. P.44-45. Krotov V.L. Chonovtsy. - M.: Politizdat, 1974.

The time has come to finally look at the results of the civil war in order to realize: of the more than 11 million deaths, more than 10 million were civilians.
We need to admit: it was not just a civil war, but a war against the people, first of all, the peasantry of Russia, which was the main and most dangerous force in resisting the dictatorship of the exterminating power.

Like any war, it was waged in the interests of profit and robbery.

D. Mendeleev, creator periodic table elements, the most famous Russian scientist, studied not only chemistry, but also demography.
Hardly anyone would deny him a thorough approach to science. In his work “Towards a Knowledge of Russia,” Mendeleev predicted in 1905 (based on data from the All-Russian Population Census) that by the year 2000 the population of Russia would be 594 million people.

It was in 1905 that the Bolshevik Party actually began the struggle for power. The retribution for their so-called socialism turned out to be bitter.
On the land that for centuries was called Russia, by the end of the 20th century we were missing, judging by Mendeleev’s calculations, almost 300 million people (before the collapse of the USSR, about 270 million lived in it, and not about 600 million, as the scientist predicted).

B. Isakov, head of the department of statistics at the Plekhanov Moscow Institute of National Economy, states: “Roughly speaking, we are “halved.” Due to the “experiments” of the 20th century, the country lost every second inhabitant... Direct forms of genocide claimed from 80 to 100 million lives.”

Novosibirsk September 2013

Reviews of “Russia in 1917-1925. Arithmetic of losses" (Sergey Shramko)

A very interesting article rich in digital material. Thank you, Sergey!

Vladimir Eisner 02.10.2013 14:33.

I completely agree with the article, at least based on the example of my relatives.
My great-grandmother died young in 1918, when food detachments raked out all her grain, and she starved to eat somewhere in a rye field. As a result, she suffered a “volvulus” and died in terrible agony.
Further, my grandmother’s sister’s husband died from persecution already in 1920, when her two daughters were babies.
Another grandmother’s sister’s husband died of typhus in 1921, and her two daughters were also babies.
In my dad’s family, from 1918 to 1925, three brothers died of starvation when they were very young.
My mother’s two brothers died of hunger, and she herself, born in 1918, barely survived.
The food detachment wanted to shoot my grandmother when she was pregnant with my mother and shouted to them: “Oh, you robbers!”
But grandfather stood up and he was arrested, beaten and released barefoot 20 kilometers away.
Both my mother’s and my father’s parents had to leave with their families from warm houses in the city to remote villages in unsuitable houses. Due to hopelessness, contact with other relatives was lost, and we do not know the whole terrible picture from 1917 to 1925. Sincerely. Valentina Gazova 09/19/2013 09:06.

Reviews

Thank YOU Sergey for your enormous and clear work. Now, when the Khmer Rouge again begins to wave flags, erect terrible blocks to the tyrant here and there, mutter their utopian prayers, powder the brains of the youth, pollute fragile souls with heresy, WE must stand up with the whole world to defend our state in order to prevent the Middle Ages! Ignorance! - This is a terrible force, especially in the countryside, in the countryside. I see this in my native Siberian places. Those who knew real horror and went through it - they are no longer alive. Only the children of war remained. In my village, where 30 households remain, my aunt is the only one left - a child of the war. It turns out that she knows the horror of complete ruin, the destruction of high-quality human capital and all prospects. And the remaining youth are completely ignorant! She cares about that HISTORY! She needs to survive, she will survive! She’s drinking herself to death, ready to join the banner of the next proletarian even tomorrow; to divide, shred, exile and put against the wall! I lived in Siberia, from the stories of old people I know how a red bloody tornado swept through a land that did not know serfdom. Grandmother, remembering the time of peasant dispossession (dekulakization) collectivization, always started crying, praying and whispering: “Oh, poor Lord, what if you’re a granddaughter, you’ve been through such a thing, you’ve seen it with your own eyes, you’ve lived with it inside.” Now the fields are all abandoned, the farms are destroyed, and this all a consequence of those terrible times when the Stalinists and Leninists forged a new man, burning out in him the feelings of the owner, the master! The end result was completely dead villages. “Take the land, Vaska! After all, your grandfather went to the lead for it!” - I say to my fellow countryman, who recently turned fifty. And he’s sitting on a bench, already toothless, smoking a cigarette, spitting on the grass, wearing galoshes on his bare feet, and muttering a smoky smile” - “And fuck... I Nikolaich, it’s the land for me, what am I going to do with it!” The seed was thrown to this terrible fruit in the year 17. This mighty tree called HOLY RUSSIA collapsed, tearing out roots, roots, every single one from the fertile soil. Thank you very much for your work! Patience to YOU ​​and creative ideas. God save us, God forbid another breakdown, a revolutionary bacchanalia... As they say, don’t wake up the fool!

The main reasons for leaving the Motherland, stages and directions of the “first wave” of Russian emigration; attitude towards emigration as a “temporary evacuation”;

Mass emigration of Russian citizens began immediately after the October Revolution of 1917 and continued intensively to various countries until 1921-1922. It is from this moment that the number of emigration remains approximately constant in general, but its share in different countries is constantly changing, which is explained by internal migration in search of education and better material living conditions.

The process of integration and socio-cultural adaptation of Russian refugees in various social conditions European countries and China went through several stages and basically ended by 1939, when most emigrants no longer had the prospect of returning to their homeland. The main centers of dispersion of Russian emigration were Constantinople, Sofia, Prague, Berlin, Paris, Harbin. The first place of refugee was Constantinople - the center of Russian culture in the early 1920s. In the early 1920s, Berlin became the literary capital of Russian emigration. The Russian diaspora in Berlin before Hitler came to power amounted to 150 thousand people. When the hope for a quick return to Russia began to fade and an economic crisis began in Germany, the center of emigration moved to Paris, from the mid-1920s - the capital of the Russian diaspora. By 1923, 300 thousand Russian refugees settled in Paris. Eastern centers of dispersion - Harbin and Shanghai. Scientific Center of Russian Emigration for a long time was Prague. The Russian People's University was founded in Prague, and 5 thousand Russian students studied there for free. Many professors and university teachers also moved here. Important role The Prague Linguistic Circle played a role in the preservation of Slavic culture and the development of science.

The main reasons for the formation of Russian emigration as a stable social phenomenon were: the First World War, Russian revolutions and civil war, the political consequence of which was the redistribution of borders in Europe and, above all, a change in the borders of Russia. The turning point for the formation of emigration was the October Revolution of 1917 and the civil war it caused, which split the country's population into two irreconcilable camps. Formally, legally, this provision was enshrined later: on January 5, 1922, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars published a decree of December 15, 1921, depriving certain categories of persons abroad of citizenship rights.

According to the decree, citizenship rights were deprived of persons who had been abroad continuously for more than five years and had not received a passport from the Soviet government before June 1, 1922; persons who left Russia after November 7, 1917 without permission from the Soviet authorities; persons who voluntarily served in armies that fought against Soviet power or participated in counter-revolutionary organizations.

Article 2 of the same decree provided for the possibility of restoring citizenship. In practice, however, this opportunity could not be implemented - persons wishing to return to their homeland were required not only to apply for citizenship of the RSFSR or the USSR, but also to accept Soviet ideology.

In addition to this decree, at the end of 1925, the Commissariat of Internal Affairs issued rules on the procedure for returning to the USSR, according to which it was possible to delay the entry of these persons under the pretext of preventing increased unemployment in the country.

Persons intending to return to the USSR immediately after obtaining citizenship or an amnesty were advised to attach to their application documents on the possibility of employment, certifying that the applicant would not join the ranks of the unemployed.

The fundamental feature of Russian post-revolutionary emigration and its difference from similar emigrations of other major European revolutions is its wide social composition, including almost all (and not just previously privileged) social strata.

social composition of Russian emigration; adaptation problems;

Among the people who found themselves outside of Russia by 1922 were representatives of practically classes and estates, ranging from members of the former ruling classes to workers: “persons living off their capital, government officials, doctors, scientists, teachers, military personnel and numerous industrial and agricultural workers, peasants."

Their political views were also heterogeneous, reflecting the entire spectrum of political life in revolutionary Russia. The social differentiation of Russian emigration is explained by the heterogeneity of the social reasons that caused it and the methods of recruitment.

The main factors of this phenomenon were the First World War, the Civil War, the Bolshevik terror and the famine of 1921 - 1922.

Connected with this is the dominant trend in the gender composition of the emigration - the overwhelming preponderance of the male part of the Russian emigration of working age. This circumstance opens up the possibility of interpreting Russian emigration as a natural economic factor of post-war Europe, the possibility of viewing it in the categories of economic sociology (as large-scale migration of labor resources various levels professional qualifications, the so-called “labor emigration”).

The extreme conditions of the genesis of Russian emigration determined the specifics of its socio-economic position in the structure Western society. It was characterized, on the one hand, by the cheapness of the labor offered by emigrants, which acted as a competitor to national labor resources) and, on the other, by a potential source of unemployment (since during the economic crisis, emigrants were the first to lose their jobs).

Territories of primary settlement of Russian emigrants, reasons prompting a change of place of residence; cultural and political centers Russian emigration;

The fundamental factor determining the position of emigration as a sociocultural phenomenon is its legal insecurity. The lack of constitutional rights and freedoms among refugees (speech, press, the right to associate in unions and societies, join trade unions, freedom of movement, etc.) did not allow them to defend their position at a high political, legal and institutional level. The difficult economic and legal situation of Russian emigrants made it necessary to create a non-political public organization with the aim of providing social and legal assistance to Russian citizens living abroad. Such an organization for Russian emigrants in Europe was the Russian Zemstvo-City Committee for Assistance to Russian Citizens Abroad (Zemgor), created in Paris in February 1921. The first step taken by the Parisian Zemgor was to influence the French government in order to achieve its refusal to repatriate Russian refugees to Soviet Russia.

Another priority task was the resettlement of Russian refugees from Constantinople to the European countries of Serbia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, which were ready to accept a significant number of emigrants. Realizing the impossibility of simultaneously settling all Russian refugees abroad, Zemgor turned to the League of Nations for help. For this purpose, a Memorandum on the situation of refugees and ways to alleviate their situation was submitted to the League of Nations, drawn up and signed by representatives of 14 Russian refugee organizations in Paris, including Zemgor . Efforts Zemgor's efforts turned out to be effective, especially in the Slavic countries - Serbia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, where many educational institutions (both created in these countries and evacuated there from Constantinople) were taken over by the full budget funding of the governments of these states

The central event that determined the psychological mood and composition of this “cultural emigration” was the infamous expulsion of the intelligentsia in August - September 1922.

The peculiarity of this expulsion was that it was an action of state policy of the new Bolshevik government. The XII Conference of the RCP(b) in August 1922 equated the old intelligentsia, who sought to maintain political neutrality, with “enemies of the people”, with the Cadets. One of the initiators of the expulsion, L.D. Trotsky cynically explained that by this action Soviet authority saves them from execution. Yes, in fact, such an alternative was announced officially: if you return, you will be shot. Meanwhile, on the list of “social aliens” there is only one S.N. Trubetskoy could have been accused of specific anti-Soviet actions.

The composition of the group of expelled “unreliables” consisted entirely of intellectuals, mainly the intellectual elite of Russia: professors, philosophers, writers, journalists. The authorities' decision was a moral and political slap in the face for them. After all, N.A. Berdyaev has already given lectures, S.L. Frank taught at Moscow University, pedagogical activity were engaged in P.A. Florensky, P.A. Sorokin... But it turned out that they were thrown away like unnecessary trash.

the attitude of the Soviet government towards Russian emigration; expulsions abroad; re-emigration process;

Although the Bolshevik government tried to present those expelled as people insignificant for science and culture, emigrant newspapers called this action a “generous gift.” It was truly a “royal gift” for Russian culture abroad. Among the 161 people on the lists of this deportation were the rectors of both capital universities, historians L.P. Karsavin, M.M. Karpovich, philosophers N.A. Berdyaev, S.L. Frank, S.N. Bulgakov, P.A. Florensky, N.O. Lossky, sociologist P.A. Sorokin, publicist M.A. Osorgin and many other prominent figures of Russian culture. Abroad, they became the founders of historical and philosophical schools, modern sociology, and important directions in biology, zoology, and technology. The “generous gift” to the Russian diaspora turned out to be the loss of entire schools and directions for Soviet Russia, primarily in historical science, philosophy, cultural studies, and other humanitarian disciplines.

The expulsion of 1922 was the largest state action of the Bolshevik government against the intelligentsia after the revolution. But not the latest one. The trickle of expulsions, departures and simply flight of the intelligentsia from Soviet Russia dried up only by the end of the 20s, when the “iron curtain” of ideology fell between the new world of the Bolsheviks and the entire culture of the old world.

political and cultural life of the Russian emigration.

Thus, by 1925 - 1927. The composition of “Russia No. 2” was finally formed, and its significant cultural potential was identified. In emigration, the share of professionals and people with higher education exceeded the pre-war level. It was in exile that a community was formed. Former refugees quite consciously and purposefully sought to create a community, establish connections, resist assimilation, and not dissolve into the peoples who sheltered them. The understanding that an important period of Russian history and culture had irrevocably ended came to Russian emigrants quite early.