In 2013, on the embankment of Novorossiysk, a monument "Exodus" appeared, dedicated to the flight of the Armed Forces of Yugoslavia in 1920. The city's top officials from former party officials pushed speeches about the importance of perpetuating such a tragic page in our history, but even then between the lines there was a deep bias towards anti-communism, which in itself is the first step towards denying more than half a century of the country's history. Later, a scandal erupted, tk. The creators of the monument were such connoisseurs of history that they put on one of the memorial plaques the words of General Anton Turkul, the Knight of St. George, who multiplied his life to zero by close cooperation with the Nazis and traitors to the Motherland from Vlasov's formations.
Finally, the discontent of the townspeople reached such a limit that the name of Turkul had to be quickly put together, indicating that the words belonged to a certain "officer of the Drozdovsky regiment." True, it was already impossible to save the reputation of the monument among the indigenous Novorossiys. Some began to call the new monument simply "horse", others decided to perceive it as a monument to the great actor and singer Vladimir Vysotsky.
No conclusions were drawn from the unlearned lessons
Having filled reputational and social bigwigs on the "Horse" installation, the authorities did not bother to analyze how it happened. And so, by the centenary of the flight of the Armed Forces of the South of Russia, which will be celebrated at the highest level, and the development of an action plan is already taking place in the Russian Military-Historical Society, the local authorities decided to do their bit.
In Novorossiysk, at the level of the city administration, an organizing committee has been created, which is currently creating a program of events timed to coincide with the tragic date. According to media reports, the initiators were some "public organizations", which ones are not specified.
The Novorossiysk Cossacks of the Black Sea District of the Kuban Cossack Host also joined these events, proposing the installation of a worship cross. At the same time, as this initiative was discussed, the number of crosses increased to two: one for worship, and the other for St. George. And they are planning to install them directly next to the already standing monument "Exodus". One of the crosses will read:
“Passer-by! Bow your head to the memory of the innocently killed soldiers of the Russian Empire, the Armed Forces of the South of Russia, Cossacks and Russian citizens who were unable to accept the new political reality. The defeated but not conquered victims of the repression and terror of 1919, 1920. Many names and graves were carried away into the depths of the history of the Black Sea”.
And, of course, the new monument is already planned to be made a place of a kind of pilgrimage. And now political ears with a pronounced schismatic accent are creeping out of a seemingly noble idea. After all, once again, the next activists openly take a certain position and also consign to oblivion the memory of the side that they put in their opponents.
Finally, on January 24, on the anniversary of the decree on decossackization, the ataman of the Black Sea Cossack District, Sergei Savotin, dotted the i's, saying:
“Today we commemorate those innocently killed and perished during the years of repression of our ancestors. Millions of Cossacks, by order of the Bolshevik government, were shot, buried alive, crucified on Red Army stars …"
The author will not even reproach citizen Savotin for the fact that the Red Army star is one of the symbols of our Great Victory, and the Kuban Cossacks, who took part in the famous Victory Parade on Red Square, carried exactly the Red Army stars on their Kubanks. And the Nazis used the red star as torture, carving it on the chest of communists and Komsomol members. I'm just wondering if such a high-ranking Cossack knows that, according to the 1897 census, 2 million 880 thousand Cossacks lived in the Russian Empire. At the same time, children, women and old people also entered here. According to the most daring calculations, by the beginning of the revolution, the number of the Cossacks could not exceed 6 million, again including children and women.
During the years of the Civil War itself, about a third of all Cossacks in Russia fought in the ranks of the Red Army. In addition, according to the data cited by Dmitry Penkovsky, Doctor of Historical Sciences ("Emigration of the Cossacks from Russia and its consequences"), about 500 thousand Cossacks and their families emigrated from the Motherland. The numbers are simple, the fate is terrible. But the fashion for populist and blasphemous "millions", apparently, is notably rooted in modern political culture … or in the lack of culture.
Once again, the command "forget" was given?
Truly, Russia is a power with an unpredictable history. First, kings and emperors carefully wiped up the moments of history that interfered with them, then careerists from the party appeared, who walked like a hurricane both through history and over monuments and buildings. Then there was the period of citizen Khrushchev, who spat at his predecessor from the heart at the XX Congress of the CPSU. Finally, we got to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who have so upset the history of the great empire that we still cannot get out of a coma.
What is this time we are compulsively asked to forget? The original name of the event that attracted attention was the Novorossiysk disaster. Instead, a tragically romanticized game begins with the word "outcome", which in itself throws some of the victims to the sidelines of history.
Let's start with the fact that the bomb of fierce exasperation and the hell into which specifically the city of Novorossiysk plunged in the tragic 1920 was laid a couple of years earlier. The capture of Novorossiysk by units of the White Guards was accompanied by mass executions. First, the unreliable military men were shot. In the area of the Tsemesskaya grove, where the floodplains are located, the proletariat sympathizing with the Reds and several hundred Red Army men found their last refuge. At the time of Denikin's arrival, there were also many wounded in the city, who had once fought on the side of the Reds. The press of those times wrote that, in order not to disturb the local population with shots, they were chopped up with sabers.
And that was just the beginning. The shortsightedness of Denikin's policy is a vivid illustration of Berdyaev's phrase "one must love Russia and the Russian people more than hate the revolution and the Bolsheviks." Anton Ivanovich, who advocated "one and indivisible", in hatred of the Bolsheviks, went to an alliance with the Kuban Rada, which managed to declare the Kuban an independent republic, attracting all kinds of provocateurs, crooks and profit seekers into his ranks.
The direct consequences for Novorossiysk from this "union" were tragic. This is how the legendary Vladimir Kokkinaki, a native Novorossian, described the self-styled Cossacks:
“I will never forget the case. Two "fighters for the idea" are walking with rifles. Towards a well-dressed man, in boots. One of those with rifles pushes the other with his elbow in the side and points at the oncoming peasant: "Oh, Gritsko, look at the one we are joking about …" They put him against the wall, shot him in front of my eyes, took off his boots, took them away and left."
Because of the disorganized troops driven into the Novorossiysk "hollow", the level of unsanitary conditions jumped up. There was not enough water. Typhus began to rage, mowing down both the townspeople and the refugees. It was from typhus in Novorossiysk that famous personal stories died: Professor Prince Yevgeny Nikolaevich Trubetskoy and Vladimir Mitrofanovich Purishkevich.
Due to the criminal mistakes of the management, there were not enough transport ships, so there was a real panic in the port. Here is how those events were described by the above-mentioned Turkul, who does not have any warm feelings for red:
“We are loading the Yekaterinodar steamer. The officer company rolled out machine guns for order (!). Officers and volunteers are loaded. Hour of the night. The black wall of people standing at the back of the head moves almost silently. The pier has thousands of abandoned horses. From deck to hold, everything is packed with people, they stand shoulder to shoulder, and so on to the Crimea. No guns were loaded in Novorossiysk, everything was abandoned. The rest of the people huddled on a pier near the cement plants and begged to take them, stretching out their hands in the dark …"
At the same time, Colonel of the Don Combined Partisan Division Yatsevich reported to the commander:
“The hasty shameful loading was not caused by the real situation at the front, which was obvious to me, as the last one to withdraw. No significant forces were advancing."
Simultaneously with the flight, Denikin received the last "hello" from his "ally" - the Cossacks of the Kuban Rada, who refused to leave Novorossiysk. Thus, the demoralized self-styled Cossacks and gangs of "greens" received a whole city for their use, from which the White Guards left with their nominal order, but the soldiers of the Red Army had not yet arrived. The largest grain elevator in Europe ceased to exist, the port infrastructure was partially destroyed, and no one counted the number of killed and robbed citizens and refugees at all. A disaster for everyone.
Red Cossacks are also in the dustbin of history
In their speeches, politicians from the Cossacks also a priori completely erased the Red Cossacks from history. By the way, they did it in the best traditions of party officials of the times of communism. For example, they "forgot" that the ataman Pyotr Krasnov, the future Nazi criminal, deprived of the opportunity for the existence of almost all the Cossacks (and their families, respectively), who fought or sympathized with the Reds, on the Don. Not news and executions of the Red Cossacks.
However, let's return to the Kuban. Right in front of our eyes, the legendary cavalier of St. George, the senior sergeant of the Russian Imperial Army and the brigade commander of the Red Guard, the Cossack of the village of Georgievskaya, Ivan Antonovich Kochubei, went into the furnace of history. His figure was so popular among the Cossacks that when the whites managed to capture the brave brigade commander, they even decided to pardon him and give him an officer's rank in exchange for service in their ranks. Kochubei refused and was hanged. Monuments to him stand in Beysug, Nevinnomyssk, Georgievskaya, etc.
And I don’t know where to take the commanders of the defense of Yekaterinodar, the former cornet from the Don, Alexei Avtonomov, and the Cossack of the village of Petropavlovskaya, Ivan Sorokin? Both personalities are extremely contradictory, but both were Cossacks, and thousands of Red Cossacks fought under their command. In addition, Sorokin was eventually shot by the Bolsheviks themselves, but managed to earn the praise of Denikin himself:
"If in general the ideological leadership in strategy and tactics during the North Caucasian war belonged to Sorokin himself, then in the person of a nugget paramedic, Soviet Russia has lost a major military leader."
What to do with Yan Vasilyevich Poluyan, a Cossack of the Elizavetinskaya village, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Kuban Army, who was shot in 1937 and rehabilitated in 1955? What about the Cossack of Razdolnaya stanitsa, a participant in the First World War, and later the commander of the 1st shock Soviet Shariah Column, Grigory Ivanovich Mironenko, who survived the Civil War and devoted his whole life to serving the Soviet state and its people?
How long can you dance on this historical rake, solving your local petty problems? The rake has already gone in bubbles … And most importantly, there is a way out of this situation, and it is a disaster on the surface. The very concept screams about what happened and how to relate to it.
