The defeat of the Yekaterinoslav working group of anarchist-communists as a result of the police repressions in 1906 did not lead to the end of the anarchist movement in Yekaterinoslav. By the beginning of the next year, 1907, the anarchists managed to recover from their defeats and not only resume their activities, but also quickly increase the number of groups and circles to 70 activists and 220-230 sympathizers. Samuel Beilin did a lot for this, at the end of 1906 he arrived in Yekaterinoslav together with his wife Polina Krasnoshchekova.
Agitator "Sasha Schlumper"
Samuil Nakhimovich Beilin was born in 1882 in Pereyaslavl, into a Jewish intelligent family. Obviously, Samuel's parents were not poor people: the young man received a good musical education, sang superbly and had the talent of a mimicry actor. But it was not music, not literary creation and not the theatrical craft that did not interest the young man so much that he devoted his life to art. At another time, perhaps, he would have become an artist, but not during the years of the revolution. At the age of nineteen, in 1903 (or in 1904), Beilin joined the Socialist-Revolutionary organization.
He preferred to work in a combat squad and participated in the elimination of the provocateur in Kiev, after which he disappeared. In Berdichev, the police nevertheless overtook him. But Beilin managed to escape by sawing through the cell bars. Having swum across the Dnieper, he found himself on the territory of an Orthodox monastery. The young Jew was surrounded by monks. A rich imagination and the same acting talent came to the rescue. Samuel invented a story that he was a longtime follower of Christianity and dreamed of being baptized, but his parents are Orthodox Jews and categorically forbid him to convert to another faith. So he fled from his parents, who, meanwhile, are looking for him with the help of the police. The monks believed Samuel, blessed him and hid him on the territory of the monastery.
After some time, Samuel Beilin crossed the Russian border and went to England. In London, he got a job as an upholstery worker, where he met anarchists and adjusted his worldview. At the beginning of 1905, Samuel Beilin returned to Russia. He settled in Bialystok, joining the Black Banner group operating there, and took an active part in the famous weavers' strike in May-June 1905. He expropriated food and distributed it to striking workers gathering at the old Surazh cemetery. In the end, he was arrested. Beilin presented a fake passport, which listed the town of Orly as his place of residence. They were going to transfer him to an imaginary "homeland", but at the last moment the anarchist comrades managed to recapture Samuel from the guards.
Replacing Bialystok with Yekaterinoslav, Beilin, tirelessly, immediately began revolutionary work. He agitated workers at the Bryansk and Pipe-Rolling Plants, distributed leaflets in the workers' districts of Chechelevka and Amur. Beilin was characterized not only by good organizational skills, but also by great personal courage, participating in most expropriations and armed attacks.
It should be noted that in 1907 the Yekaterinoslav anarchist movement was somewhat reorganized. Its structural reform was influenced by the Kropotkin trend, which was focused on the creation of large federative-type associations based on professional or territorial principles. Four regional anarchist federations were created - Amurskaya, Kaidakskaya, Nizhnedneprovskaya and Gorodskaya, which united comrades on a territorial basis. In addition, there were shop federations of tailors, procurers and bakers, 20 propaganda circles and groups at all more or less significant enterprises in the city.
Anarchists gained significant influence at the metallurgical plant of the Bryansk joint-stock company, popularly called the Bryansk plant. The Bryantsians were one of the most numerous and conscious detachments of the Yekaterinoslav proletariat. Conflict situations arose constantly between the workers of the plant and the administration. The workers were not satisfied with the hard labor routine of the day, in which they worked 14 hours a day, the system of fines, and the tough management of the foremen.
Bryansk plant
Workers' demonstrations at the Bryansk plant began at the end of the 19th century. To prevent them, the management introduced strict political control at the plant. A worker getting a job at a factory had to go through the factory's checkpoint - a gateway with a personal desk, which was controlled by a policeman. The police officer was in charge of collecting information about each worker, his political and criminal reliability.
To pacify the workers, the factory administration hired a guard detachment of 80 Circassians, Ossetians and Lezgins. As always, those in power played on the national factor. The calculation was made on the fact that those who do not know the Russian language and are completely alien to the bulk of the workers in a cultural sense, the Caucasians will shamelessly deal with any attempts at disobedience at the plant. Indeed, these hired guards were particularly brutal and were hated by most of the workers of the enterprise.
GI Petrovsky, who worked at the plant, in the future a well-known Communist Party leader, recalled: “In those days, there was a famous senior watchman at the Bryansk plant, his name was Pavel Pavlovich, and Circassians, Ossetians and Lezgins who were discharged by the plant management from the mountainous Caucasus, who did not understand Russian language and were ready to serve not for life, but for death before the authorities, who did not give them especially generously. Pavel Pavlovich, strictly from the point of view of capitalist interests, understood his tasks correctly. If he notices any disorder near the time plates, when the worker comes up and takes off the number, he will beat him in the back of the head or right in the teeth with particular pleasure (Petrovsky GI Memories of work at the Bryansk plant in the 90s. Memoirs of Yekaterinoslav workers. 1893-1917. Dnepropetrovsk, 1978. P. 26).
The tragedy of May 29, 1898, when the worker Nikita Kutilin was killed by one of the Circassians, overflowed the cup of patience of the Bryant people. Outraged workers set fire to the factory office and consumer store, overturned the sentry boxes and nearly killed all the guards. They demanded to remove the Circassians and the hated senior watchman Pavel Pavlovich. The police arrived at the plant, accompanied by two infantry battalions. After these events, the enterprise created its own 6th police station, which was maintained at the expense of the plant (that is, at the expense of the workers against whom it was created).
In the fall of 1906, the management of the plant lowered the prices in the iron-rolling shop by 40 rubles, transferring workers from piecework to day wages. For Bryansk residents, this transfer was a real disaster - instead of 1-2 rubles a day, their earnings dropped to 30-70 kopecks, depending on qualifications. Fearing an explosion of discontent, the management went on to create a conciliation commission to regulate relations between the administration and the workers. But the commission included the Social Democrats, to whom the attitude at the plant was, to put it mildly, cool. The Federation of Workers Anarchists of the Bryansk Plant, created at the beginning of 1907, opposed the existence of the commission as acting in the interests of the administration, and on March 1, 1907, addressed the people of Bryansk with a leaflet "To all workers of the Bryansk plant", in which it condemned the activities of the commission and suggested not to elect it to the next once.
On March 26, 1907, near the building of the steam-power shop, the former head of the iron-rolling shop A. Mylov, who had recently been appointed director of the plant and was hated by the majority of workers for his "filtering" for political reliability, was shot dead. The bodyguard Zadorozhny, who was accompanying Mylov, was wounded. The nineteen-year-old anarchist Titus Mezhenny, who was shooting at the same factory, was captured.
After the murder of Mylov, the management of the plant, headed by Svitsyn, decided to close the plant. 5,300 workers were settled, and more than 20 who were considered politically unreliable were arrested. It is noteworthy that the Social Democrats condemned Mylov's murder and supported the actions of the administration, which earned them complete contempt from the workers. At the same time, the popularity of the anarchists, whose representative destroyed the director hated by all the workers of the plant, increased sharply, and not only at the Bryansk plant itself, but also at other enterprises of the city: for example, on March 30, 1907, a rally of Yekaterinoslav railway workshops was held, at which workers expressed their full solidarity with the Bryansk people.
In addition to the Bryansk plant, in 1907 workers' anarchist federations arose at some of Yekaterinoslav's factories. In particular, in the railway workshops, the Federation of Railway Workshops (anarchist) operated, uniting up to 100 sympathetic workers.
The anarchists were quite active at the Shoduar brothers' pipe-rolling plant. At the beginning of 1907, on the initiative of an anarchist militant Samuil Beilin ("Sasha Schlumper") who came from Bialystok, the Federation of Anarchist Communist Workers of the Pipe Rolling Plant was founded here.
Attempts to assassinate the masters
Apparent propaganda successes in enterprises contributed to the transition of some anarchists, who were formerly supporters of the tactics of "motiveless terror", to syndicalist activity. Among them was the well-known militant Fedosey Zubarev, one of the few survivors of the repressions and clashes at the end of 1906, a veteran of the Yekaterinoslav anarchist movement. However, focusing on syndicalist activity, Zubarev, who by this time was the de facto leader of the Amur-Nizhnedneprovsk regional organization of anarchist-communists, and other anarchists, were not going to abandon the old methods of armed resistance, primarily acts of economic terror.
It was obvious that the tactics of assassination attempts on the foremen and directors they most hated aroused only all-round support among the workers. This was evidenced both by the murder of the director Mylov at the Bryansk plant by the anarchist Titus Mezhenny, and the earlier murder of the head of the railway workshops in Aleksandrovsk, also committed by the Yekaterinoslav anarchist.
The head of the Alexandrovka railway workshops, Mr. Vasilenko, was known for turning over to the police more than 100 advanced workers who took part in the December 1905 strike. After those events, a year and a half had passed and Vasilenko, apparently, was fully confident that his treacherous actions went unpunished. On March 7, 1907, anarchist Pyotr Arshinov, who worked as a mechanic at the Shoduar pipe-rolling plant, avenged the extradited workers and killed Vasilenko. Arshinov was captured on the same day and on March 9, 1907, was sentenced to death by hanging. However, on the night of April 22, 1907, Arshinov successfully escaped from prison, avoiding death. He managed to cross the border and settle in France, from where, two years later, he returned to Russia.
Peter Arshinov, future prominent figure of the "Makhnovshchina" and chronicler of the Makhnovist movement
In early April 1907, the police managed to get on the trail of some of the Yekaterinoslav anarchists. On April 3, the police came to Ida Zilberblat's apartment and arrested the owner, Vovk and Polina Krasnoshchekova. In the apartment itself, they set up an ambush, expecting that someone else from the Yekaterinoslav anarchists was about to come. Indeed, the next morning the unsuspecting "Sasha Schlumper" came to Zilberblat. They grabbed him. But, going out into the street, accompanied by the police, the anarchist with a habitual gesture threw off his coat, which remained in the hands of the detainees, fired several shots from a revolver at the police and disappeared.
Willy-nilly, but anarchists often had to think about funding. To exist at the expense of membership dues, as the Social Democrats did, was, from their point of view, not entirely noble - how can a worker, who receives a pitiful penny for his hard work, also be forced to pay some kind of dues from his wages? So the anarchists had to continue to make expropriations.
Sevastopol escape
On July 24, 1907, the anarchists carried out three robberies at once, which had a natural outcome - the death of two militants and the arrest of two others. The history of these expropriations goes back to the famous escape of 21 prisoners from the Sevastopol prison, which took place on June 15, 1907. The escape, impressive in its audacity, became one of the brightest pages of resistance to the tsarist regime. However, let us tell about the escape in the words of one of the revolutionaries who helped him out of his will: “I glare into space with my eyes and clearly, clearly see a red kerchief in the prison window.
“So the escape will take place,” I reassure myself. I raise my right hand with a handkerchief - a conventional sign to my comrades standing in the ravine, awaiting my signal. Nikolai and his companion the anarchist must remove the shell hidden in the ravine from the garbage and deliver it to a predetermined place near the prison wall, where they must wait from the prison yard for a special signal for its explosion.
Indeed, less than two or three minutes later, two people appear out of the ravine, carrying a large purse, one of whom, leaning on a gnarled stick, walks with a heavy, tired gait. Approaching the wall and settling down as if to smoke, they first hang the load on the twig of their stick, leaning against the prison wall, and themselves, waiting for a new signal, sit close and light a cigarette. there was a noticeable movement into this frozen group near the wall. We see how one of them, an anarchist, quickly approaches the wallet and for some reason bends over it. This was followed by a flash of the fuse-cord, a leap of two pilgrims to the side, a column of thick smoke, a terrible rumble. All this is mixed into one whole, large, monstrous, incomprehensible … One moment there is deathly silence, and then … Oh, great joy! … The heart is ready to burst into pieces. We all clearly see how our comrades jump out of the gap formed in the wall, as if insane, and, without a moment's hesitation, upon receiving weapons, clothes and addresses from us, scatter in different directions (Tsitovich K. Escape from the Sevastopol prison in 1907. - Hard labor and exile, 1927, No. 4 (33). Pp. 136-137.).
Subsequently, the fugitives disappeared into the mountains in the area of the Inkerman station, where the farm of Karl Stahlberg, used by the Sevastopol anarchists and Socialist-Revolutionaries as a base, stood. Its owner and who himself took an active part in the revolutionary movement in the Crimea, readily sheltered the fugitives.
Among the fugitives were two communist anarchists - longtime members of the Yekaterinoslav working group, twenty-three-year-old Alexander Mudrov and nineteen-year-old Tit Lipovsky, who were arrested during the defeat of the Hydra printing house in Yalta (the third anarchist arrested in Yalta, Pyotr Fomin, refused to flee). The fleeing anarchists needed help, primarily money.
Deciding to support the fugitive anarchists, Zubarev's associates carried out three expropriations on July 24. On the way back, the expropriators were pursued for forty miles by police guards led by a non-commissioned officer. The anarchists shoot back and, in the end, kill the sergeant and injure several of the guards. It would seem that the pursuit has been repulsed. But at the Sukharevka station of the Yekaterinoslavskaya railway, the station gendarmes notice the anarchists. A firefight begins. During it, one anarchist is injured. They put the wounded on the captured steam locomotive and try to leave. At this moment, a military train is moving towards, and the gendarmes are overtaking from behind. Having surrounded the anarchists, the gendarmes grab two of them alive. But Fedosey Zubarev, defending the wounded man placed on the locomotive, continues to shoot from a Mauser and two Browning guns. The gendarmes manage to wound Fedosey as well. Bleeding, he puts a Mauser to his temple and pulls the trigger. Misfire … Zubarev tries to shoot again. This time the attempt succeeds.
An attempt by Samuil Beilin to arrange an escape from the women's corps of the Yekaterinoslav prison ended in failure. He was going to release the arrested anarchists Yulia Dembinskaya, Anna Solomakhina, Anna Dranova and Polina Krasnoshchekova. The latter feared that she would be exposed as a participant in the preparation of the assassination attempt on Governor-General Sukhomlinov (see below) and sentenced to severe punishment. In addition, the arrested revolutionaries by this time had a conflict with the prison administration, and they feared reprisals. However, only Julia Dembinskaya was able to get out of the dungeons. The rest of the anarchists were prudently transferred by the prison administration to a more guarded male corps. After the failure of his escape, Beilin left Yekaterinoslav.
Traffic crisis
By 1908, police repression had significantly weakened the Russian anarchist movement. Many prominent anarchists ended up behind bars or fled the country, died in shootings with gendarmes, committed suicide during detention, or were executed by court martial. This state of affairs allowed, subsequently, Soviet, as well as some modern Russian researchers to argue that in the period between 1908 and the February Revolution of 1917, Russian anarchism was almost destroyed.
The police repressions to which the anarchist groups of the Russian Empire underwent in 1907, 1908 and 1909, although they weakened the movement, but, nevertheless, could not destroy it in the bud. In spite of everything, old anarchist groups continued to exist and new ones appeared, including in regions previously not covered by the propaganda of ideas of anarchy. It was at this time that anarchism was gaining a stronger position not only in the Jewish townships of the western provinces, but also among the workers and peasants of the central regions of the empire, the Don and Kuban, the Caucasus, the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia.
Only the ideological orientation of the Russian anarchists has changed. After all, the repressions affected, first of all, the most radical part of the movement - the Black Banners and the Beznakhaltsy, oriented towards the armed struggle. The deaths of the most courageous activists in armed clashes, arrests and executions significantly weakened the Black Banners and the Beznakhalites.
In 1909, one after the other, the two main printed organs of the Black Banner movement ceased to appear - in January 1909, the Parisian magazine "Rebel", founded by Konstantin Erdelevsky, ceased to exist, and six months later, in September 1909, the journal, edited in the first time of its existence by Sandomierzsky, was closed. Anarchist, also published in Paris. The supporters of unmotivated terror and communes were replaced by the followers of the Khlebovolites - the syndicalist-oriented anarcho-communists. Some of the formerly active Black Banners, who blamed the "wrong" tactics for the deaths and arrests of anarchists, also inclined towards pro-syndicalist methods of struggle. As a result, the anarchists reoriented themselves to agitational work among peasant youth and factory workers, but the final abandonment of armed methods of resistance did not follow.
The last stronghold of anarchism, according to the Soviet historian V. Komin, by 1908 was only Yekaterinoslav - “the only place in Russia where there was a permanent group of anarchists, which continued to propagate their ideas among local workers and some part of the peasants” (V. V.. Anarchism in Russia. Kalinin, 1969. S. 110.). Ultimately, it was in the Yekaterinoslav province that the anarchist movement was destined to appear, which played a prominent role in the events of the Civil War in Russia and went down in history under the name "Makhnovshchina". It was from Yekaterinoslav that the anarchist worldview spread to neighboring Aleksandrovsk and further to the villages of the Aleksandrovsky district, including Gulyaypole, which was destined to become the “capital” of the Makhnovist movement.
