At the beginning of the twentieth century, Yekaterinoslav (now - Dnepropetrovsk) became one of the centers of the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire. This was facilitated, first of all, by the fact that Yekaterinoslav was the largest industrial center of Little Russia, and in terms of population it ranked fourth among Little Russian cities after Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa. In Yekaterinoslav there was a large industrial proletariat, due to the growth of which the population of the city also increased - so, if in 1897 there were 120 thousand people in Yekaterinoslav, then by 1903 the number of inhabitants of the city increased to 159 thousand people. A significant part of the international Yekaterinoslav proletariat worked in metallurgical plants, which formed the basis of the city's economy.
Working city
As the center of the metallurgical industry, Yekaterinoslav began to develop in the 19th century. On May 10, 1887, the Bryansk Metallurgical Plant, which belonged to the Bryansk Joint-Stock Company, was launched, two years later - the pipe-rolling conquest of the Belgian joint-stock company of the Shoduar brothers, in 1890 - another metallurgical plant of the joint-stock company Gantke, in 1895 - the Ezau plant, specializing in the production of steel shaped casting. In the same 1895, on the left bank of the Dnieper, the shops of another pipe-rolling plant of the Belgian industrialist P. Lange grew, and in 1899 the second Choduard pipe-rolling plant was built.
The development of the metallurgical industry required more and more new human resources. By the time of the opening of the Bryansk plant, about 1800 workers were working on it, a year later their number had already exceeded two thousand. As a rule, these were yesterday's peasants who arrived in Yekaterinoslav in search of work from the villages of Oryol, Kursk, Kaluga and other Central Russian provinces. If we take the ethnic composition of the workers of the Yekaterinoslav metallurgical enterprises, then the majority were Russians, the Ukrainians worked somewhat less, and only then came the Poles, Jews and representatives of other nationalities.
Working conditions at the enterprises of Yekaterinoslav were very difficult. In hot shops, they worked 12 hours a day: for example, in railway workshops, the working day began at five o'clock in the morning, and ended only at eight o'clock ten in the evening. At the same time, for the slightest offenses, the administration of factories and workshops strictly punished workers with fines and dismissals, since Yekaterinoslav did not experience a shortage of workers' hands - the stream of impoverished peasants who came to the city from the villages, ready for any job, did not stop.
Yekaterinoslav workers settled in settlements that arose abundantly on the outskirts of the city. One of the largest and most famous settlements was Chechelevka, which became famous in the days of the revolutionary uprisings of 1905. Chechelevka, according to legend, got its name in honor of a certain Chechel - a retired Nikolayev soldier who settled after demobilization at the edge of a grove. It is unknown whether it was true or not, but the fact is indisputable that by 1885, when the engineer Pupyrnikov drew up the plan of Yekaterinoslav, the Chechelevskaya settlement was already on it.
Tram on 1st Chechelevskaya Street
The "senior" Chechelevka, adjacent to the factory cemetery, was gradually built up with two-story houses with shops and shops. The skilled workers of the Bryansk plant who inhabited it strove to "ennoble" their lives and, as their incomes, improved their dwellings. The bulk of the unskilled proletariat, who arrived from the villages, did not have their own homes and either rented rooms and corners in the houses of more "prosperous" owners, or huddled in openly slum shacks - "wolf holes", as they were called in the city.
In addition to Chechelevka, the Yekaterinoslav proletariat settled in other similar settlements - Rybakovskaya, Staro-Fabrichnaya and Novo-Fabrichnaya, Monastyrskaya, Prozorovskaya, as well as in workers' suburbs located in the immediate vicinity of the city - in Kaidaki and Amur-Nizhnedneprovsk.
Among the industrial workers of Yekaterinoslav, the Social Democrats have long and fruitfully carried on propaganda. Nothing was heard about the activities of the anarchists until 1905. True, in 1904 in Yekaterinoslav there was a Makhaev group close to anarchism, which bore the loud name of the Party of Struggle against Small Property and All Power. It was headed by Nohim Brummer and Kopel Erdelevsky. Erdelevsky later noted himself as the organizer of anarcho-communist groups in Odessa. But the Makhaevites did not succeed in achieving any significant success in the working environment of Yekaterinoslav. The group issued several proclamations and then ceased to exist.
The first steps of the anarchists
In May 1905, the anarchist agitator from Bialystok, Fishel Steinberg, known by the nickname "Samuel", arrived in Yekaterinoslav. He noted with surprise that in such a large industrial center as Yekaterinoslav, the working masses knew absolutely nothing about anarchism. Bialystok anarchists, on the contrary, have long looked at Yekaterinoslav as an extremely fertile ground for the spread of anarchist ideas. After all, here, in contrast to the Jewish "small towns", there was a large and organized industrial proletariat, which life itself pushed to the perception of the ideas and methods of anarchism.
In June 1905, two more anarchists began their propaganda activities in Yekaterinoslav, who had recently arrived in the city from Kiev, where on April 30 the police defeated the South Russian group of communist anarchists. One of these propagandists was Nikolai Musil, better known in revolutionary circles as Rogdaev, or Uncle Vanya. Rogdaev began to hold campaign meetings that took place late in the evening or even at night and gathered up to two hundred listeners. After several such readings of reports, the Amur regional organization of socialist revolutionaries, including its secretary, twenty-two-year-old Arkhip Kravets, passed to the position of anarchism almost in full force. This is how the Yekaterinoslav working group of anarchists-communists appeared, initially uniting seven to ten activists, mainly young Jewish artisans and workers. The activity of the anarchists at the first stage was of a propaganda nature. They distributed leaflets and proclamations among the workers of the Yekaterinoslav suburbs, held lectures and read reports. The Yekaterinoslav proletariat showed a certain interest in anarchist propaganda. Even the Bolsheviks noted this.
Nikolay Musil (Rogdaev, Uncle Vanya)
The first combat sortie of the group followed in the fall - on October 4, 1905, anarchists threw a bomb into the apartment of the director of the Yekaterinoslav machine-building plant Herman, who had recently announced a lockout at his enterprise and had counted several hundred workers. Herman, who was in the house, died, and the bomber, using the darkness, managed to escape. In parallel with the murder of Herman, the anarchists planned to assassinate the director of the plant, Ezau Pinslin, who also counted hundreds of workers in his enterprise, but the prudent director, frightened by the fate of Herman, left Yekaterinoslav.
October strike of 1905
Meanwhile, the situation in the city became more and more tense. On October 10, 1905, a general strike broke out in Yekaterinoslav. The first, on the morning of October 10, were students of a number of city educational institutions. A group of pupils from music and commercial schools began to bypass all other educational institutions, demanding that classes be stopped. If other students refused to join the strike, a fetid chemical liquid spilled over the premises of educational institutions and classes were stopped for a forced reason. In the first real school, an inspector was pushed down the stairs, trying to put things in order. After classes were terminated, the students went to Yekaterininsky Prospekt and went to the building of a commercial school, at which a rally took place.
At the same time, the train operators of the railway depot and employees of the Administration of the Catherine Railway went on strike. A meeting of workers was organized in the yard of the railway workshops, who decided to start a strike in solidarity with the Moscow and St. Petersburg workers. The workers took a steam locomotive out of the depot, assembled trains and went to relieve the workers of the Bryansk plant, the Ezau plant, the pipe-rolling plant and all the factories in the village of Amur-Nizhnedneprovsk. By 5 pm, all factories had stopped working and several thousand workers gathered at the station, staging a rally. Only two hours later, by 19.00, when a company of armed soldiers summoned by the authorities arrived at the station, the workers dispersed.
The next day, October 11, 1905, groups of secondary school students gathered on Yekaterininsky Prospekt. They began to build barricades at the corner of Kudashevskaya Street, directly opposite the city police department. Planks and fences of the boulevard were used to build barricades. When the barricades were erected, a rally began, which lasted more than half an hour. By this time, a company of soldiers had left the courtyard of the police department. Several revolver shots were fired at her from the crowd. The company fired two volleys into the air. The protesters retreated, but immediately gathered at the next corner. The company was brought up there. The demonstrators responded to the officer's order to disperse with a hail of stones and revolver shots. After two volleys into the air, the soldiers fired into the crowd, killing and wounding eight people.
Large groups of railway and factory workers gathered in the vicinity of the Yekaterinoslav station. To the order of the commander of the second company of the Berdyansk infantry regiment to disperse, the workers responded with abuse and a shot from a revolver. After that, one of the company platoons fired a volley at the protesters, wounding the worker Fyodor Popko, and only then the protesters dispersed. In the evening, working and student youth gathered at the Yekaterinoslavskaya prison on Voennaya Street. Cossacks moved against her. Several revolver shots were fired at the Cossacks, two Cossacks were wounded.
With a return volley, the Cossacks killed several of the protesters. On Chechelevka, in the area of the fifth police unit, the workers built barricades and met the Cossacks and infantry with a hail of stones and shots. Then a bomb was thrown, the explosion of which killed two and injured about fifteen soldiers. In the end, the workers blew up two telegraph poles.
On October 13, a many-thousand-strong funeral demonstration took place, burying the workers who died in Chechelevka, among whom was the seventeen-year-old anarchist Illarion Koryakin - the first loss of an anarchist group that had begun its activities. Only on October 17, after receiving news of the Manifesto signed by the tsar and "granting democratic freedoms", the armed clashes in the city ceased.
Despite the fact that in the events of October 1905 the anarchists of Yekaterinoslav, due to their small number and insufficient material and technical equipment, did not manage to play a more significant role, they did not intend to give up the hope of an imminent armed uprising in the city. Of course, an armed uprising required slightly different resources than those that the Yekaterinoslav anarchists possessed by the fall of 1905. The group needed bombs, small arms, propaganda literature. Throughout the autumn of 1905, the Yekaterinoslav anarchists took steps to improve their activities. So, to establish contact with the Bialystok comrades, the former Socialist Revolutionary, and now an active communist anarchist Vasily Rakovets, went to Bialystok, this "Mecca" of Russian anarchists, who was instructed to bring printing equipment with him.
Zubar, Striga and other "bombers"
Fedosey Zubarev (1875-1907) undertook to supervise the military activities of the Yekaterinoslav anarchists. This thirty-year-old railway worker, who in the group was called "Zubar" by shortening his last name, became a valuable "acquisition" of the anarchist group during the days of the October strike. Despite the fact that Fedosey was eight or twelve years older than his other comrades in the anarchist group, he did not lack activity and energy. In the past, a prominent Socialist Revolutionary, a member of the Fighting Strike Committee, he met the anarchists on the barricades and, disillusioned with the moderation of the socialist parties, linked his future fate with the anarchist group.
By the end of 1905, a group of Communards, headed by Vladimir Striga, was formed in the ranks of the Russian anarchists - Chernoznamensky, focused on organizing armed uprisings similar to the Paris Commune in individual cities and towns of the Russian Empire. The Communards chose Yekaterinoslav as the venue for the first uprising. In their opinion, in this workers' city with a large share of the industrial proletariat, and even with fresh memories of armed uprisings during the October strike, it would be easier to organize an uprising than in Bialystok or any other city in Poland, Lithuania or Belarus. Paying attention to Yekaterinoslav, Striga began to prepare a detachment of communards, which was to arrive in the city, establish contacts with local comrades and start an uprising.
Events in the city itself spoke in favor of the arguments of Striga and other communards. On December 8, 1905, a general strike began in Yekaterinoslav. From the very beginning, the anarchists sought to turn the strike into an uprising, urging workers not to confine themselves to refusing to work and to rallies, but to begin expropriating money, food, weapons and houses. Although the striking workers blocked all railways and there was no railway communication with Yekaterinoslav, the uprising did not begin. Meanwhile, on December 8 and 10, the governor sent letters to the commander of the Odessa military district with a request to send military units to the city, since the Simferopol infantry regiment stationed in Yekaterinoslav had recently been sent to Crimea to suppress the uprising of Sevastopol sailors.
The command of the army satisfied the request of the governor and units of the Simferopol regiment fought their way to Yekaterinoslav, meeting the resistance of railway workers and workers in Aleksandrovka, located on the route. Finally, on December 18, the regiment's units arrived in the city. Immediately, the authorities issued a decree banning all political events and ordered the townspeople to surrender their weapons by December 27. On December 20, the city's enterprises began work, and on December 22, the Soviet of Workers' Deputies of Yekaterinoslav officially announced the end of the strike.
Simultaneously with the end of the strike, the Yekaterinoslav anarchists received the news that the Communards traveling from Bialystok had been arrested on the way, and that the Yekaterinoslav citizens Vasily Rakovets and Aleksey Strilets-Pastushenko, who were carrying printing equipment, were also seized by the police, who had made a forced stop in Kiev because of the strike of railway workers. Only Striga with a small group of communard comrades managed to break through to Yekaterinoslav.
Striga somewhat revived the work of the Yekaterinoslav anarchists. Theoretical studies in circles resumed, several leaflets were printed in circulation up to three thousand copies. However, the measured campaigning activity, although it made a considerable impression on the residents of the city, did not suit the Strigu, who was striving for a more active struggle. In January 1906, he, together with Zubar, Dotsenko, Nizborsky, Yelin and other Yekaterinoslav and Bialystok anarchists, went to the congress of non-motivated people in Chisinau. At the congress, Striga made a proposal to create a Russian flying terrorist group of anarchists, which would launch high-profile terrorist attacks.
The era of expropriations
It was decided to take money for the beginning of the terrorist struggle in Yekaterinoslav, having made a major expropriation. But, at the last moment, this expropriation had to be abandoned. The non-motivators who arrived in the city to carry it out and were in an illegal position needed safe apartments for the night, food, clothing and money. Therefore, to provide them with all the necessary anarchists had to carry out a whole series of expropriations. The most popular method of expropriation, as noted by the Ukrainian historian A. V. Dubovik, was the practice of sending "mandates" - written demands to pay a certain amount of money - to representatives of the large and middle bourgeoisie of Yekaterinoslav.
Refusal to pay the required money could have cost the entrepreneurs much more: for example, a bomb was thrown into the dishware shop of a certain Vaisman, who refused to pay the anarchists. Visitors and shop assistants were given a few seconds to escape, then an explosion rang out, causing the owner a damage of several thousand rubles. It also happened that the required money was not available at the moment. For example, on February 27, 1906, an anarchist came to one of the shops in the village of Amur, reminding the owner of the "mandate" for 500 rubles. But only 256 rubles were in the cash register and the expropriator demanded that the owner prepare the missing amount and 25 rubles as a fine for the next visit. There were also open robberies with the seizure of store proceeds: in Rosenberg's pharmacy on March 2, 1906, the anarchists seized 40 rubles, in Levoy's pharmacy on March 29 - 32 rubles. Despite the fact that in order to stop the robberies, the authorities placed soldiers' patrols on all more or less large streets of the city, the sorties continued.
The anarchists carried out their first relatively large expropriation at the end of February, having seized two thousand rubles from the cashier of the pier. The money was divided between the anarchists of Yekaterinoslav, Bialystok, Simferopol and the "flying group" of Striga, which soon moved to another city to carry out the next expropriation. The residents of Yekaterinoslav received 700 rubles from the expropriated funds, of which 65 rubles were purchased for typographic type, and 130 were spent to help the arrested anarchists who were sent into exile: Leonty Agibalov was exiled to Tobolsk at that time - for the storage of anarchist literature, the worker Pyotr Zudov, who collected money In support of the anarchists, comrades from the Baku Red Hundred of Communist Anarchists Nikolai Khmeletsky, Timofey Trusov and Ivan Kuznetsov, detained in Yekaterinoslav in March, were also detained. They intended to buy weapons for the remaining 500 rubles, but, at the request of the Odessa anarchists, they were donated to organize the planned escape from prison of the participants in the explosion in Liebman's coffee shop (however, it was not possible to arrange the escape of the Libmanites, and another active anarchist Lev escaped from prison with Yekaterinoslav money Tarlo).
Striga left, most of the money received as a result of expropriation went to help political prisoners and Odessa like-minded people, in addition to this, the group had lost active fighters the day before. So, on March 1, the anarchist Tikhon Kurnik, who deserted from the disciplinary battalion, shot two policemen in Kremenchug, but was captured by passers-by who did not want to shoot. On March 2, the anarchist worker Vyacheslav Vinogradov (“Stepan Klienko”) saw an officer (Warrant Officer Kaistrov) beating a private on the street. The anarchist decided to stop this outrage and shot at the officer, wounding him, but was seized by soldiers - colleagues of the beaten.
By the end of March 1906, the Yekaterinoslav anarchists found themselves in such a disadvantageous position when, in fact, the work of providing the group with money, weapons and printing equipment had to start from scratch. Having received 300 rubles on the "mandate", they bought several revolvers and part of the printing equipment. Organizational activity was revived and, by the beginning of April, new propaganda circles even appeared in the workers' Nizhnedneprovsk.
Pavel Golman, who was only twenty years old, by his age already had a revolutionary experience that was quite solid for those years. Like Kravets, Zubarev and many other Yekaterinoslav anarchists, Golman, before becoming an anarchist, was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and even carried the Socialist Revolutionary banner at the funeral of slain workers in October 1905. Although the revolutionary biography of the young activist began much earlier.
The son of a police officer, who was left without a father at the age of 12, Golman, already at this age, was forced to earn his own living on his own. He worked as a messenger in an office, and at the age of 15 he entered a locksmith at a nail plant. There he became acquainted with revolutionary ideas, starting to cooperate with the Social Democrats, and then with the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Having entered the Socialist Revolutionary Party at the age of eighteen, Golman, who by this time worked as a mechanic in railway workshops, quickly became one of the most active party members. During the December strike, he left the party and began to look closely at the anarchists.
To replenish the treasury of the group, on April 18, 1906, the anarchists went on the next major expropriation. Pavel Golman, Yakov Konoplev, Leonard Chernetsky ("Olik") and three other comrades attacked the collector of the state wine shop and seized 6,495 rubles. Anarchists immediately distributed a whole bag of small coins to the local peasant poor, and most of the seized funds were used to create printing houses - a small one in Yekaterinoslav itself and a larger one in the resort Yalta.
Special mention should be made of the Yalta printing house, called "Hydra" by the anarchists. It operated … on the territory of the royal estate "Oreanda" located in Yalta. The fact is that after the Tsar adopted the Manifesto on October 17, 1905, the royal possessions in Crimea, as a sign of the “democratization” of life in the country, were decided to be made available to ordinary citizens, and hundreds of tourists rushed to the territory of these excellent holiday destinations. It was easy for the underground workers to dissolve in the crowds of vacationers, and, at first, they held secret meetings and gatherings of circles in the grottoes of the rocks of Oreanda. Later, the anarchists decided to seize the moment and create a printing house in the place where they could least suspect its existence.
By the end of April - beginning of May 1906, the activities of anarchists in Yekaterinoslav significantly intensified. This was facilitated both by the emergence of their own printing houses, weapons and funds, and the arrival in the city of several very active and experienced comrades at once. Yekaterinoslavsky worker Sergei Borisov ("Sergei Cherny"), who had fled from hard labor shortly before that, showed up in the city and joined a group of anarchists. At the same time, a militant worker Samuil Beilin ("Sasha Schlumper") and his friend, twenty-two-year-old dressmaker Ida Zilberblat, arrived from Bialystok.
With the arrival of nonresident comrades, the terrorist component of the activities of the Yekaterinoslav anarchists increased. On April 27, Leonard Chernetsky ("Olik") single-handedly attacked three policemen in Kamenka, a workers' suburb of Yekaterinoslav, shooting one of them and seriously wounding two. A day later, the police managed to track down the Olik. Policemen accompanied by Cossacks came to the apartment where he spent the night. However, Chernetsky managed to escape, having previously wounded the assistant bailiff and the commander of the Cossack hundreds.
A louder terrorist attack took place a week later, on May 3, 1906. Having learned that at midnight a train with a commission headed by the Minister of Railways would pass through Nizhnedneprovsk, the anarchists decided to make an explosion. Pavel Golman, Semyon Trubitsyn and Fedosey Zubarev went to the railway. The train was delayed (by the way, the commission was headed not by the minister, but by the head of the Dnieper road) and the anarchists decided to throw a bomb into the first-class carriage of the courier train that appeared. Zubarev threw a bomb that damaged the wall of the carriage, but the train did not stop and rushed past. However, the explosion injured Pavel Golman, who had to be taken to the hospital.
Eight days later, on May 11, Fedosey Zubarev launched another terrorist act. He made two time bombs and set them up near the Cossack barracks in the Amur. The calculation was made that after the explosion of the first, relatively small bomb, the Cossacks would run out into the street to look for the attackers, and then the second, much more powerful, bomb would explode. In fact, everything turned out quite differently. Hearing the first explosion, the Cossacks did not run out into the street, but hid in the premises of the barracks. Therefore, the explosion of an eight-kilogram bomb that followed the first did not bring any casualties, but only knocked down part of the fence around the barracks.
In response to the military raids of the anarchists, the authorities undertook a series of searches and arrests. On May 13, at a crowd meeting in Yekaterinoslav itself, the police arrested 70 people, including almost all the activists of the city's own group. The detainees were placed in the former Cossack barracks, since the Yekaterinoslavskaya prison was overcrowded and could no longer accommodate new prisoners. Cossack barracks were guarded worse than prison and it was easy to escape from them. In the end, on July 1, twenty-one prisoners escaped from the barracks with the help of a sentry soldier.
The next major armed clash with the authorities took place on 26 July. On this day, in the steppe behind the workers' Chechelevka, there was a crowd gathering about 500 people. When the crowd ended and the sympathetic workers dispersed, 200 people remained directly involved in the anarchist movement. They held a meeting, and after it ended, they also moved towards the city. The returning group of thirty anarchists suddenly collided on the steppe road with 190 horse dragoons moving towards them. Using the darkness, the convenient location of the bushes along the road, the anarchists opened fire on the dragoons and successfully fought back, killing nine and wounding four soldiers. From the side of the anarchists, only the slightly wounded Zubarev suffered. The bison, armed with a bomb and a Browning, rushed into the first house that came across and demanded to provide him with medical assistance.
The summer of 1906 in Yekaterinoslav was distinguished by an unprecedented surge in the terrorist activity of anarchists, and almost all attacks and attempts were successful and passed without losses from the anarchists. The first place among the terrorist acts of anarchists at this time was occupied by attacks on police officials and informers. So, until August 1906 in Yekaterinoslav and the surrounding area, the organizer of the security department on the Amur Kalchenko, the head of the guards Morozov, three district warders and ten policemen were killed, and ten police officers were injured.
In addition to attacks on police officers, acts of economic terror against directors, engineers and foremen also played a significant role. At the same time, only four expropriations were carried out in the summer of 1906, but all of them were large: 1171 rubles were seized at the Amur freight station; in the office of the Kopylov sawmill - 2800 rubles; in the treasury chamber - 850 rubles and when leaving for Melitopol - 3500 rubles.
However, in August 1906, the group suffered the loss of two prominent activists. On August 5, at nine o'clock in the morning, seven anarchists, led by Golman's friend Semyon Trubitsyn, were at the zemstvo hospital, where the wounded Pavel Golman, who had been arrested for participating in the explosion of a courier train, was under police protection. They disarmed the policeman and burst into the wards shouting "Where is Golman?" Pavel ran out himself, threw off his crutches, got on a cab and drove off to the Amur. However, after a few hours, the police managed to track Golman: the cab driver who had taken him away was identified by the number and the address of the house where he had taken the fugitive and the anarchists accompanying him was found out from him. The house on the Amur, in which Golman was hiding, was surrounded. By this time, the comrades had left Paul alone in the house, and they themselves went to seek refuge for him. Seeing that the house was surrounded by the police, Golman began to shoot back, killed the guard and, seeing the futility of his position, shot himself.
During the attack on the government chamber on August 20, 1906, the policemen pursuing the anarchists wounded Anton Nizborsky ("Antek") in the leg. Undeterred, Antek rushed to the crew, in which the police officer was riding, and fired 7 shots, wounding the officer in the shoulder and arm. The police surrounded Antek from all sides, but the anarchist was not going to surrender alive into the hands of the police and fired the last bullet from the Browning into his temple.
Following the deaths of Pavel Golman and Anton Nizborsky, the Yekaterinoslav working group of anarchist communists was shaken by several more heavy blows. The group lost its underground printing house in Yalta. This happened under the following circumstances. Taking a check for 500 rubles during the expropriation at Felzemaer's dacha in Crimea, anarchists Vladimir Ushakov and Grigory Kholoptsev tried to cash it in a bank and were arrested right there. Kholoptsev, who wanted to save his life, surrendered to the police the location of the Hydra printing house in the grottoes of the tsarist possession, and on August 24, the police, accompanied by soldiers, raided into Oreanda. They confiscated 15 poods of typography, print runs of leaflets (including 3,300 copies of the Pavel Goldman leaflet) and brochures. Anarchists Alexander Mudrov, Pyotr Fomin and Tit Lipovsky, who were in the printing house, were also arrested.
Yekaterinoslav District Court
The next setback befell the group when attempting to expropriate. To raise money to reopen the printing house and to help those arrested, six anarchists: Semyon Trubitsyn, Grigory Bovshover, Fyodor Shvakh, Dmitry Rakhno, Pyotr Matveev and Onufry Kulakov, left for Kakhovka, where they planned to raid a branch of the International Bank. Having contacted three like-minded people from Kakhovka, on September 1, 1906, they took 11 thousand rubles from the bank, but were overtaken by the police. Despite the fact that the anarchists managed to shoot the four pursuers, they were arrested. On September 20, in a field outside the city, all Yekaterinoslav residents and one of the Kakhovites were shot, two of the Kakhovites were sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
Thus, we see that the history of the revolutionary struggle of the anarchists in industrial Yekaterinoslav is rich in examples of expropriations and armed attacks. Expecting by means of armed struggle to rouse the workers to revolt, the anarchists in many ways "dug the grave" of their movement themselves. Police repression, the death of activists in constant clashes - all this could not but affect the size of the movement, deprived of its most effective participants and, ultimately, contributed to the gradual decline of anarchist initiatives.
