So different - soldier and sailor
In fact, in those years there were a lot of such dissimilar and at the same time absolutely typical revolutionaries like Nikolai Krylenko and Pavel Dybenko. A lot has been written about them, including on the pages of "Military Review" (Himself the Commander-in-Chief) and ("Rehabilitated posthumously." The Merry Life of Pavel Dybenko).
They are not very suitable for a pair portrait in the style of Plutarch. But for many years they followed parallel courses, often overlapping. In the October days they went together against the Provisional Government. And they even died on the same day - July 29, 1938 at the training ground in Kommunarka.
However, their origin can be considered the same, both come from peasants. But if Pavlo Dibenko-Dybenko was able to complete only three classes in his native Novozybkov, then Kolya Krylenko's education was much better.
His student father was also expelled from the university for agitation, he worked in a museum, was an employee and even an opposition journalist, and Nikolai himself graduated from high school and St. Petersburg University, albeit interspersed with Kharkov.
Social Democracy accepted both of them very young - in 1904 and 1912 Krylenko and Dybenko became members of the RSDLP, and almost immediately - the Bolsheviks. As a result, the party lost both of them once, moreover, due to their tendency to anarchy.
Only in Krylenko (pictured) everything was connected with theory, when he began to write works with a clear bias towards syndicalism, which for some reason was revealed only in 1937, and in Dybenko - with practice. He was expelled in 1918 after the fall of Narva, in the very battles when the Red Army was born.
But Dybenko, together with his sailors, could not resist near Narva, largely because they did not understand very well whether we were at war with the Germans or still peace, and, without ceasing, held a meeting. In those days, negotiations were in full swing in Brest-Litovsk, and the commander, General Parsky, screwed up there more.
The Russian revolution, as you know, had a grandmother - the notorious Breshko-Breshkovskaya, Plekhanov can be called a grandfather, Lenin and Trotsky became fathers, and children are hard to count. But people like our two heroes, rather, considered the revolution a bride.
Children in October
In 1917, they were very young - one 32, the other only 29. But both Krylenko and Dybenko had enough revolutionary experience, and their path to revolution was different, but still similar.
Dybenko served in the navy, learned to be a miner and an electrician, and campaigned with might and main on battleships - both on the "Emperor Paul I", and on the "Gangut", and on the "Petropavlovsk", for which he was sent to the front in the world war. Krylenko managed to serve even before the war, with the production of dismissal in the reserve ensign, and in the summer of 1914 he emigrated.
When he returned to Russia for illegal work, he was immediately mobilized as an evading officer. With a “yellow ticket”, of course, where “” was indicated. Dybenko also thrived in propaganda, and in 1917 they passed through all committees and Soviets on their way to leading positions in the Bolshevik government.
October 17th made it so that Warrant Officer Krylenko and sailor Dybenko were at the head of the War Ministry, transformed into the People's Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs. We ended up with Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, when the first was responsible for the front and even became the Commander-in-Chief, and the second, as the chairman of Tsentrobalt, was quite logically assigned to the fleet.
Warrant Officer Nikolai Krylenko did not stay at Headquarters, in reality he managed only one thing - instead of simply displacing the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, General Dukhonin (pictured), he actually allowed the soldiers to kill him.
However, it was hardly in his power to interfere - the intelligent ensign Krylenko was simply not allowed into the carriage, where they dealt with the general, but the terrible words “” in the days of the Civil War acquired a completely special meaning.
But the sailor Pavel Dybenko steered the Red Fleet until the beginning of 1918, to Narva. It was by order of Dybenko that the cruiser Aurora never left Petrograd on the eve of the storming of the Winter Palace. But historians are still arguing about whether Dybenko gave the order to fire the famous shot. In any case, he was not on the Aurora then.
Three in a boat
Immediately after the seizure of power, the Bolsheviks created, instead of the War Ministry, the so-called Council of People's Commissars for Military and Naval Affairs, which, due to the complete repetition of the name of the revolutionary government, was immediately renamed the Committee. He was instructed to lead the troika - Antonov-Ovseenko, Krylenko and Dybenko.
In fact, neither one nor the other managed to work as people's commissars, but Krylenko at least did something in Mogilev, in addition to eliminating Dukhonin. Dybenko, at the same time, at the head of several thousand sailors, went to fight the rebels Krasnov and Kerensky near Gatchina, where he unquestioningly obeyed Trotsky.
Trotsky's military authority did not raise any doubts among anyone in the RSDLP (b), and among the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and anarchists who were at the same time with them, too. If it were not for the urgent need to seek peace with the Germans, Trotsky would immediately become the head of the military department, and not the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.
November 22, 1917 P. E. Dybenko spoke at the I All-Russian Congress of Seamen in Petrograd with a report "On the reorganization of the management of the maritime department." And then he got this naval department under his command. The committee itself, like the triumvirate, as it turned out, was absolutely incapacitated due to the need to coordinate everything and everyone, it was decided to replace it with two people's commissariats.
The military commissariat, however, already on November 23 was headed not by one of the triumvirate, but by Nikolai Podvoisky, the real leader of the October coup. Antonov-Ovseenko went to the Ukrainian front, and Krylenko returned to Petrograd to the city defense committee.
Only in March 1918 did he ask Lenin directly, as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, to relieve him of the post of supreme commander-in-chief, forgotten, it seems, by everyone, and commissar for war affairs. There was no refusal, and the position itself was abolished, although it had to be restored during the Civil War.
Twists of fate
Krylenko somewhat unexpectedly left the military path, finding himself among the members of the collegium of the People's Commissariat of Justice. The appointment of Krylenko as chairman of the revolutionary tribunal made many remember Dukhonin, and he was directly related to the organization of the repressive apparatus.
When the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Lenin had already lost the ability to manage something, Nikolai Krylenko became the Deputy People's Commissar of Justice and the senior assistant to the Prosecutor of the RSFSR. He was actively involved in writing software legal papers, drawing on his own pre-revolutionary experience.
And for Pavel Dybenko, who managed to get close to Alexandra Kollontai, the twists and turns of fate were more and more reminiscent of an adventure novel. Even for Narva, he was expelled from the party, stripped of all posts, and then arrested, although he was released on bail. But the main thing is that they disarmed his loyal sailors, without whom he was forced to flee to Samara.
Already in May 1918, he was captured, tried and sentenced to death, but Kollontai, Lenin's comrade-in-arms since 1905, managed to somehow recapture her husband. Dybenko was sent to Crimea for underground work, and in August he was captured by the Germans, but he was exchanged for a whole group of Kaiser's officers.
The revolutionary sailor Pavel Dybenko was transferred to Ukraine, given a regiment, a brigade, and then the 1st Zadneprovsk division. The chairman of Tsentrobalt was familiar with Russian anarchy firsthand, and it was in his division that the detachments of Nestor Makhno and the lesser-known anarchist Nikifor Grigoriev joined.
And in 1919, Dybenko was already in the party again, with the return of experience from 1912, and again the People's Commissariat for Military Affairs - now in the Crimea. From there, the reckless sailor, who became one of the commanders of the revolution with obvious gaps in education, was sent to the Military Academy, which was soon given back the name of the General Staff, only this time the Red Army.
However, I had to study intermittently - Dybenko fought at Tsaritsyn, took part in the storming of the Crimea, smashed uprisings in Kronstadt and in the Tambov region. But Pavel Fedorovich graduated from the academy in 1922 quite successfully, later he wrote several chaotic, but bright books, one of which is about military doctrine.
By this time, the newly-minted lawyer Nikolai Krylenko for the first time comes up with a very original idea that
"Soviet law, like bourgeois law, is exploitative."
Subsequently, he will develop his thought, since from this it follows
"One of the tasks of socialist construction is to curtail the legal form of the Soviet state."
Already in 1922, Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko, a 37-year-old "old" Bolshevik, was elected professor of the legal department of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Moscow State University. And in 1929 he was already the prosecutor of the republic, in 1936 - the people's commissar of justice of the USSR. None of this helped Krylenko, when almost everyone was reminded of an acquaintance, and even worse, friendship with Trotsky.
In the first years after the Civil War, Pavel Dybenko was promoted with paint no less confidently than his fellow lawyer and his wife, a diplomat, who became a long-term ambassador to neutral Sweden. He commanded divisions, corps, districts, received orders, as well as in the Civil. But the closeness with Trotsky and Tukhachevsky was not forgiven him either.
Under arrest and execution at a training ground in a communal apartment N. V. Krylenko and P. E. Dybenko was by no means the first to hit - in 1938, when Tukhachevsky was no longer there, and Trotsky was hiding from the NKVD agents in Mexico.
