Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev is one of the most tragic and mysterious figures of the Civil War in Russia. This is due to the mysterious death of the famous red commander. Until now, discussions about the circumstances of the murder of the legendary commander do not subside. The official Soviet version of the death of Vasily Chapaev says that the division commander, who, by the way, was only 32 years old at the time of his death, was killed in the Urals by White Cossacks from the combined detachment of the 2nd division of Colonel Sladkov and the 6th division of Colonel Borodin. The famous Soviet writer Dmitry Furmanov, who at one time served as the political commissar of the "Chapaevskaya" 25th rifle division, in his most famous book "Chapaev" told that the division commander was allegedly killed in the waves of the Urals.
First, about the official version of Chapaev's death. He died on September 5, 1919 on the Ural front. Shortly before the death of Chapaev, the 25th Infantry Division, which was under his command, received an order from the commander of the Turkestan Front, Mikhail Frunze, to take active steps on the left bank of the Urals in order to prevent active interaction between the Ural Cossacks and the armed formations of the Kazakh Alash Horde. The headquarters of the Chapayev division was at that time in the district town of Lbischensk. There were also governing bodies, including the tribunal and the revolutionary committee. The city was protected by 600 people from the divisional school, in addition, there were unarmed and untrained mobilized peasants in the city. Under these conditions, the Ural Cossacks decided to abandon a frontal attack on the Red positions and instead make a raid on Lbischensk in order to immediately defeat the division headquarters. Colonel Nikolai Nikolayevich Borodin, the commander of the 6th division of the Ural separate army, headed the consolidated group of the Ural Cossacks, aimed at routing the Chapaevsky headquarters and personally destroying Vasily Chapaev.
Borodin's Cossacks were able to approach Lbischensk, remaining unnoticed by the Reds. They succeeded thanks to the timely shelter in the reeds in the Kuzda-Gora tract. At 3 am on September 5, the division launched an offensive against Lbischensk from the west and north. The 2nd division of Colonel Timofey Ippolitovich Sladkov moved from the south to Lbischensk. For the Reds, the situation was complicated by the fact that both divisions of the Ural army were staffed in the bulk of the Cossacks - natives of Lbischensk, who were well-versed in the terrain and could successfully operate in the vicinity of the town. The suddenness of the attack also played into the hands of the Ural Cossacks. The Red Army immediately began to surrender, only some units tried to resist, but to no avail.
Local residents - the Ural Cossacks and Cossacks - also actively helped their fellow countrymen from the "Borodino" division. For example, the commissar of the 25th division Baturin was handed over to the Cossacks, who tried to hide in the oven. About where he climbed, said the hostess of the house where he lodged. Cossacks from Borodin's division staged a massacre of the captured Red Army soldiers. At least 1,500 Red Army soldiers were killed, another 800 Red Army soldiers remained in captivity. To capture the commander of the 25th division Vasily Chapaev, Colonel Borodin formed a special platoon of the most trained Cossacks, which he appointed a lieutenant Belonozhkin to command. Belonozhkin's people found the house where Chapaev was quartered and attacked him. However, the division commander managed to jump out the window and run to the river. On the way, he gathered the remnants of the Red Army - about a hundred people. The detachment had a machine gun and Chapaev organized a defense.
The official version says that it was during this retreat that Chapaev died. None of the Cossacks, however, could find his body, even in spite of the promised reward for the "Chapay's head". What happened to the division commander? According to one version, he drowned in the Ural River. According to the other, the wounded Chapaev was placed on a raft by two Hungarians - the Red Army and transported across the river. However, during the crossing, Chapaev died of blood loss. Hungarian Red Army men buried him in the sand and covered the grave with reeds.
By the way, Colonel Nikolai Borodin himself also died in Lbischensk, and on the same day as Vasily Chapaev. When the colonel drove along the street in a car, the Red Army soldier Volkov, who was hiding in a haystack, who served in the protection of the 30th squadron, killed the commander of the 6th division with a shot in the back. The colonel's body was taken to the village of Kalyony in the Ural region, where he was buried with military honors. Nikolai Borodin was posthumously awarded the rank of Major General, so in many publications he is referred to as "General Borodin", although he was still a colonel during the storming of Lbischensk.
In fact, the death of a military commander during the Civil War was not something extraordinary. However, in Soviet times, a kind of cult of Vasily Chapaev was created, who was remembered and revered much more than many other prominent red commanders. To whom, for example, apart from professional historians - specialists in the history of the Civil War, the name of Vladimir Azin, the commander of the 28th Infantry Division, who was captured by the Whites and was brutally killed (according to some sources, even torn alive, being tied to two trees or, according to another version, to two horses)? But during the Civil War, Vladimir Azin was no less famous and successful commander than Chapaev.
First of all, let us recall that during the Civil War or immediately after its end, a number of Red commanders died, moreover the most charismatic and talented, who enjoyed great popularity "among the people", but were very skeptical about the party leadership. Not only Chapaev, but also Vasily Kikvidze, Nikolai Shchors, Nestor Kalandarishvili and some other red commanders died under very strange circumstances. This gave rise to a fairly widespread version that the Bolsheviks themselves were behind their deaths, who were unhappy with the "deviation from the party course" of the listed military leaders. And Chapaev, and Kikvidze, and Kalandarishvili, and Shchors, and Kotovsky came from the Socialist-Revolutionary and anarchist circles, which were then perceived by the Bolsheviks as dangerous rivals in the struggle for the leadership of the revolution. The Bolshevik leadership did not trust such popular commanders with a "wrong" past. Party leaders associated them with "partisanism", "anarchy", they were perceived as people unable to obey and very dangerous. For example, Nestor Makhno was also a Red commander at one time, but then again opposed the Bolsheviks and turned into one of the most dangerous opponents of the Reds in Novorossiya and Little Russia.
It is known that Chapaev had repeated conflicts with the commissars. Actually, due to conflicts, Dmitry Furmanov also left the 25th division, by the way, he himself is a former anarchist. The reasons for the conflict between the commander and the commissar lay not only in the "managerial" plane, but also in the sphere of intimate relations. Chapaev began to show too persistent signs of attention to Furmanov's wife Anna, who complained to her husband, who openly expressed his displeasure with Chapaev and quarreled with the commander. An open conflict began, which led to the fact that Furmanov left the post of the division commissar. In that situation, the command decided that Chapaev was a more valuable personnel in the post of division commander than Furmanov was in the post of commissar.
Interestingly, after the death of Chapaev, it was Furmanov who wrote a book about the division commander, in many ways laying the foundations for the subsequent popularization of Chapaev as a hero of the Civil War. Quarrels with the divisional commander did not prevent his former commissar from maintaining respect for the figure of his commander. The book "Chapaev" became a really successful work of Furmanov as a writer. She drew the attention of the entire young Soviet Union to the figure of the red commander, especially since in 1923 the memories of the Civil War were very fresh. It is possible that if it were not for Furmanov's work, then the name of Chapaev would have suffered the fate of the names of other famous red commanders of the Civil War - only professional historians and residents of their native places would remember him.
Chapaev has three children - daughter Claudius (1912-1999), sons Arkady (1914-1939) and Alexander (1910-1985). After the death of their father, they remained with their grandfather - the father of Vasily Ivanovich, but he soon died. The children of the division commander ended up in orphanages. They were remembered only after the book by Dmitry Furmanov was published in 1923. After this event, the former commander of the Turkestan Front Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze became interested in the children of Chapaev. Alexander Vasilyevich Chapaev graduated from a technical school and worked as an agronomist in the Orenburg region, but after his military service he entered a military school. By the time the Second World War began, he served as a captain in the Podolsk Artillery School, went to the front, after the war he served in artillery in command positions and rose to the rank of Major General, Deputy Artillery Commander of the Moscow Military District. Arkady Chapaev became a military pilot, commanded an aircraft link, but died in 1939 as a result of an aircraft accident. Klavdia Vasilievna graduated from the Moscow Food Institute, then worked at party work.
Meanwhile, another version, contradicting the official one, appeared about the circumstances of Vasily Chapaev's death, more precisely, about the motives for giving out the location of the red commander. It was voiced back in 1999 by the daughter of Vasily Ivanovich, 87-year-old Klavdia Vasilievna, still alive at that time, to the correspondent of Argumenty i Fakty. She believed that her stepmother, the second wife of Vasily Ivanovich Pelageya Kameshkertsev, was the culprit in the death of her father, the famous chief of the division. Allegedly, she cheated on Vasily Ivanovich with the head of the artillery warehouse Georgy Zhivolozhinov, but was exposed by Chapaev. The divisional commander arranged a tough showdown for his wife, and Pelageya, out of revenge, brought white people to the house where the red commander was hiding. At the same time, she acted out of momentary emotions, without calculating the consequences of her act and even, most likely, simply not thinking with her head.
Of course, such a version could not have been voiced in Soviet times. After all, she would have questioned the created appearance of the hero, showing that passions, such as adultery and subsequent female revenge, were not alien to “mere mortals” in his family. At the same time, Klavdia Vasilievna did not question the version that Chapaev was transported across the Urals by the Red Army Hungarians, who buried his body in the sand. This version, by the way, does not contradict the fact that Pelageya could get out of Chapaev's house and “hand over” his whereabouts to the whites. By the way, Pelageya Kameshkertseva herself was already in Soviet times placed in a psychiatric hospital and therefore even if her guilt in the death of Chapaev was found out, they would not have brought her to justice. The fate of Georgy Zhivolozhinov was also tragic - he was placed in a camp for agitating the kulaks against Soviet power.
Meanwhile, the version of a cheating wife seems unlikely to many. Firstly, it is unlikely that the whites would talk with the wife of the red divisional commander, and all the more they would believe her. Secondly, it is unlikely that Pelageya herself would have dared to go to the whites, as she could have feared reprisals. It's another matter if she was a "link" in the chain of treachery of the chief, which could be organized by his haters from the party apparatus. At that time, a rather tough confrontation was planned between the "commissar" part of the Red Army, focused on Leon Trotsky, and the "commander" part, to which the entire glorious galaxy of red commanders who had come out of the people belonged. And it was Trotsky's supporters who could, if not directly kill Chapaev with a shot in the back while crossing the Urals, then “substitute” him for the bullets of the Cossacks.
The saddest thing is that Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev, a truly combatant and honored commander, no matter how you treat him, in the late Soviet and post-Soviet times, completely undeservedly became a character of completely stupid anecdotes, humorous stories and even television programs. Their authors scoffed at the tragic death of this man, at the circumstances of his life. Chapaev was portrayed as a narrow-minded person, although it is unlikely that such a character as a hero of anecdotes could not only lead a division of the Red Army, but also rise to the rank of sergeant major in tsarist times. Although the sergeant-major is not an officer, only the best of the soldiers, able to command, the most intelligent, and in wartime, the bravest, became them. By the way, the rank of junior non-commissioned officer, and senior non-commissioned officer, and sergeant major Vasily Chapaev received during the First World War. In addition, he was wounded more than once - under Tsumanyu he was severed by a tendon of his arm, then, returning to duty, he was again wounded - with shrapnel in his left leg.
Chapaev's nobility as a person is fully demonstrated by the story of his life with Pelageya Kameshkertseva. When Chapaev's friend Pyotr Kameshkertsev was killed in battle during the First World War, Chapaev gave his word to take care of his children. He came to Peter's widow Pelageya and told her that she alone would not be able to take care of Peter's daughters, so he would take them to the house of his father Ivan Chapaev. But Pelageya decided to get along with Vasily Ivanovich herself, so as not to part with the children.
Feldwebel Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev finished the First World War as a Knight of St. George, having survived in battles with the Germans. And the Civil War brought him death - at the hands of his fellow countrymen, and maybe those whom he considered his comrades-in-arms.
