130 years ago, on February 9, 1887, the future hero of the Civil War, people's commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev was born. Vasily Chapaev fought heroically during the First World War, and during the Civil War he became a legendary figure, self-taught, who was promoted to high command posts due to his own abilities in the absence of special military education. He became a real legend, when not only official myths, but also fictional fictions firmly overshadowed the real historical figure.
Chapaev was born on January 28 (February 9), 1887 in the village of Budayka in Chuvashia. The ancestors of the Chapaevs lived here for a long time. He was the sixth child in a poor Russian peasant family. The baby was weak, premature, but his grandmother was leaving him. His father, Ivan Stepanovich, was a carpenter by profession, had a small allotment of land, but his bread was never enough, and therefore he worked as a cabman in Cheboksary. Grandfather, Stepan Gavrilovich, was written by Gavrilov in the documents. And the surname Chapaev came from the nickname - "chapay, chepay, chain" ("take").
In search of a better life, the Chapaev family moved to the village of Balakovo in the Nikolaevsky district of the Samara province. Since childhood, Vasily worked hard, worked as a sex worker in a teahouse, as an assistant organ-grinder, a merchant, and helped his father in carpentry. Ivan Stepanovich assigned his son to a local parish school, the patron of which was his wealthy cousin. There were already priests in the Chapaev family, and the parents wanted Vasily to become a clergyman, but life decided otherwise. At the church school, Vasily learned to write and read syllables. Once he was punished for offense - Vasily was put in a cold winter punishment cell in only his underwear. Realizing an hour later that he was freezing, the child knocked out the window and jumped from the height of the third floor, breaking his arms and legs. So Chapaev's studies ended.
In the fall of 1908, Vasily was drafted into the army and sent to Kiev. But in the spring of next year, apparently due to illness, Chapaev was dismissed from the army to the reserve and transferred to the first-class militia warriors. Before the First World War he worked as a carpenter. In 1909, Vasily Ivanovich married Pelageya Nikanorovna Metlina, the daughter of a priest. They lived together for 6 years, they had three children. From 1912 to 1914, Chapaev lived with his family in the city of Melekess (now Dimitrovgrad, Ulyanovsk region).
It is worth noting that Vasily Ivanovich's family life did not work out. Pelageya, when Vasily went to the front, went with the children to a neighbor. At the beginning of 1917, Chapaev drove to his native place and intended to divorce Pelageya, but was satisfied that he took the children from her and returned them to their parents' house. Soon after that, he became friends with Pelageya Kamishkertseva, the widow of Peter Kamishkertsev, a friend of Chapaev, who died of a wound during the fighting in the Carpathians (Chapaev and Kamishkertsev promised each other that if one of the two was killed, the survivor would take care of the friend's family). However, Kamishkertseva also betrayed Chapaeva. This circumstance was revealed shortly before the death of Chapaev and dealt him a strong moral blow. In the last year of his life, Chapaev also had an affair with the wife of the commissar Furmanov, Anna (it is believed that it was she who became the prototype of Anka the machine gunner), which led to an acute conflict with Furmanov. Furmanov scribbled denunciations of Chapaev, but later admitted in his diaries that he was simply jealous of the legendary divisional commander.
At the beginning of the war, on September 20, 1914, Chapaev was drafted into military service and sent to the 159th reserve infantry regiment in the city of Atkarsk. In January 1915, he went to the front as part of the 326th Belgoraisky Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Infantry Division from the 9th Army of the Southwestern Front. Was injured. In July 1915, he graduated from the training team, received the rank of junior non-commissioned officer, and in October - senior. Participated in the Brusilov breakthrough. He ended the war with the rank of sergeant major. He fought well, was wounded and contused several times, for his courage he was awarded the St. George medal and the soldiers' St. George crosses of three degrees. Thus, Chapaev was one of those soldiers and non-commissioned officers of the tsarist imperial army who went through the cruellest school of the First World War and soon became the nucleus of the Red Army.
Feldwebel Chapaev with his wife Pelageya Nikanorovna, 1916
Civil War
I met the February revolution in a hospital in Saratov. On September 28, 1917 he joined the RSDLP (b). He was elected commander of the 138th infantry reserve regiment, stationed in Nikolaevsk. On December 18, by the county congress of Soviets, he was elected military commissar of the Nikolaev district. Organized the county Red Guard of 14 detachments. He took part in the campaign against General Kaledin (near Tsaritsyn), then in the spring of 1918 in the campaign of the Special Army against Uralsk. On his initiative, on May 25, a decision was made to reorganize the Red Guard units into two Red Army regiments: named after Stepan Razin and named after Pugachev, united in the Pugachev brigade under the command of Vasily Chapaev. Later he took part in battles with the Czechoslovakians and the People's Army, from which Nikolayevsk was recaptured, renamed Pugachev.
On September 19, 1918, he was appointed commander of the 2nd Nikolaev division. In battles with whites, Cossacks and Czech interventionists, Chapaev proved himself to be a firm commander and an excellent tactician, skillfully assessing the situation and proposing an optimal solution, as well as personally a brave man who enjoyed the authority and love of the soldiers. During this period, Chapaev personally led the troops into the attack on several occasions. According to the temporarily commander of the 4th Soviet Army, the former General Staff, Major General AA Baltiyskiy, Chapaev “lack of general military education affects the technique of command and control and the lack of breadth to cover military affairs. Full of initiative, but uses it unbalanced, due to the lack of military education. However, Comrade Chapaev clearly identifies all the data on the basis of which, with an appropriate military education, both technology and a justified military scale will undoubtedly appear. The desire to get a military education in order to get out of the state of "military darkness", and then again become in the ranks of the military front. You can be sure that the natural talents of Comrade Chapaev, combined with military education, will give vivid results."
In November 1918, Chapaev was sent to the newly created Academy of the General Staff of the Red Army in Moscow to improve his education. He stayed at the Academy until February 1919, then voluntarily dropped out and returned to the front. “Studying at the academy is a good and very important thing, but it's a shame and a pity that the White Guards are beaten without us,” said the red commander. Chapaev noted about his studies: “I have not read about Hannibal before, but I see that he was an experienced commander. But I largely disagree with his actions. He made many unnecessary rearrangements in full view of the enemy and thus revealed his plan to him, hesitated in his actions and did not show persistence for the final defeat of the enemy. I had an incident similar to the situation during the Battle of Cannes. It was in August, on the N. River. We allowed up to two regiments of white men with artillery across the bridge to our bank, gave them the opportunity to stretch out along the road, and then opened a hurricane of artillery fire across the bridge and rushed to the attack from all sides. The stunned enemy did not have time to recover, as he was surrounded and almost completely destroyed. The remnants of it rushed to the destroyed bridge and were forced to rush into the river, where most of them were drowned. 6 guns, 40 machine guns and 600 prisoners fell into our hands. We achieved these successes thanks to the swiftness and surprise of our attack."
Chapaev was appointed commissar of the internal affairs of the Nikolaev district. From May 1919 - brigade commander of the Special Aleksandrovo-Gai brigade, from June - 25th rifle division. The division acted against the main forces of the Whites, participated in repelling the spring offensive of the armies of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, participated in the Buguruslan, Belebey and Ufa operations. These operations predetermined the crossing of the Ural ridge by the red troops and the defeat of Kolchak's army. In these operations, Chapaev's division acted on enemy communications and made rounds. Maneuverable tactics became a feature of Chapaev and his division. Even the white commanders singled out Chapaev and noted his organizational skills. A major success was the crossing of the Belaya River, which led to the capture of Ufa on June 9, 1919 and the further retreat of the White troops. Then Chapaev, who was on the front line, was wounded in the head, but remained in the ranks. For military distinctions he was awarded the highest award of Soviet Russia - the Order of the Red Banner, and his division was awarded the honorary revolutionary Red Banner.
Chapaev loved his fighters, and they paid him the same. His division was considered one of the best on the Eastern Front. In many ways, he was precisely the people's leader, at the same time possessing a real military leadership gift, tremendous energy and initiative that infect those around him. Vasily Ivanovich was a commander who strove to constantly learn in practice, directly in the course of battles, a simple and cunning man at the same time (this was the quality of a real representative of the people). Chapaev was well aware of the combat area located on the far from the center of the right flank of the Eastern Front.
After the Ufa operation, Chapaev's division was again transferred to the front against the Ural Cossacks. They had to act in the steppe area, far from communications, with the superiority of the Cossacks in the cavalry. The struggle here was accompanied by mutual bitterness and uncompromising confrontation. Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev died on September 5, 1919 as a result of a deep raid by the Cossack detachment of Colonel N. N. Borodin, crowned with an unexpected attack on the city of Lbischensk, located deep in the rear, where the headquarters of the 25th division was located. The Chapaev division, which broke away from the rear and suffered heavy losses, settled down to rest in the Lbischensk region in early September. Moreover, in Lbischensk itself, the division headquarters, the supply department, the tribunal, the revolutionary committee and other divisional institutions were located. The main forces of the division were removed from the city. The command of the white Ural army decided to undertake a raid on Lbischensk. In the evening of August 31, a select detachment under the command of Colonel Nikolai Borodin left the village of Kalyony. On September 4, Borodin's detachment secretly approached the city and hid in the reeds in the backwaters of the Urals. Air reconnaissance did not report this to Chapaev, although it might not have detected the enemy. It is believed that due to the fact that the pilots sympathized with the whites (after the defeat, they went over to the whites' side).
At dawn on September 5, the Cossacks attacked Lbischensk. The battle was over in a few hours. Most of the Red Army men were not ready to attack, panicked, surrounded and surrendered. It ended with a massacre, all the prisoners were killed - in parties of 100-200 people on the banks of the Urals. Only a small part was able to break through to the river. Among them was Vasily Chapaev, who gathered a small detachment and organized resistance. According to the testimony of the General Staff of Colonel MI Izergin: "Chapaev himself held out the longest with a small detachment, with whom he took refuge in one of the houses on the banks of the Urals, from where he had to survive with artillery fire."
During the battle, Chapaev was seriously wounded in the stomach, he was transported to the other side on a raft. According to the story of the eldest son of Chapaev, Alexander, two Hungarian Red Army soldiers put the wounded Chapaev on a raft made of half a gate and transported it across the Ural River. But on the other side it turned out that Chapaev died of blood loss. The Red Army soldiers buried his body with their hands in the coastal sand and threw it with reeds so that the whites would not find the grave. This story was later confirmed by one of the participants in the events, who in 1962 sent a letter from Hungary to Chapaev's daughter with a detailed description of the death of the red division commander. White's investigation also corroborates these findings. According to the captives of the Red Army, “Chapaev, leading a group of Red Army men at us, was wounded in the stomach. The wound turned out to be so serious that after that he could not already lead the battle and was transported on planks across the Urals … he [Chapaev] was already on the Asian side of the river. Ural died from a wound in the stomach. " During this battle, the commander of the Whites, Colonel Nikolai Nikolaevich Borodin, was also killed (he was posthumously promoted to the rank of Major General).
There are other versions of Chapaev's fate. Thanks to Dmitry Furmanov, who served as a commissar in the Chapaev division and wrote the novel "Chapaev" about him and especially the film "Chapaev", the version of the death of the wounded Chapaev in the waves of the Urals became popular. This version arose immediately after the death of Chapaev and was, in fact, the fruit of an assumption, based on the fact that Chapaev was seen on the European coast, but he did not come to the Asian coast, and his corpse was not found. There is also a version that Chapaev was killed in captivity.
According to one of the versions, Chapaev was eliminated as a disobedient people's commander (in modern terms, a "field commander"). Chapaev had a conflict with L. Trotsky. According to this version, the pilots, who were supposed to inform the division commander of information about the approach of the whites, carried out the order of the high command of the Red Army. The independence of the "red field commander" irritated Trotsky, he saw in Chapaev an anarchist who could disobey orders. Thus, it is possible that Trotsky also "ordered" Chapaev. White acted as a tool, nothing more. During the battle, Chapaev was simply shot. According to a similar scheme, Trotsky and other red commanders, who, not understanding international intrigues, fought for the common people, were eliminated by Trotsky. A week earlier, Chapaev was killed in Ukraine, the legendary divisional commander Nikolai Shchors. And a few years later, in 1925, the famous Grigory Kotovsky was also shot under unclear circumstances. In the same 1925, Mikhail Frunze was killed on the surgical table, also by order of Trotsky's team.
During this period in Russia there was a tough battle between the internationalist revolutionaries led by Trotsky, who planned to use and burn Russian civilization during the "world revolution" by order of their masters from the West. And real Russian communists, mostly from the common people, such as Chapaev, Frunze and Stalin, who believed in a "bright future" and a life without social parasites. Trotsky and his team methodically destroyed all those leaders of the people who could rise up and turn the bayonets of the fighters loyal to them against the traitors if the enemies of the people surrendered the country to the West.
Chapaev lived a short (died at 32), but bright life. As a result, the legend of the red division commander arose. The country needed a hero whose reputation was not tarnished. People watched this film dozens of times, all Soviet boys dreamed of repeating Chapaev's feat. Later, Chapaev entered folklore as the hero of many popular anecdotes. In this mythology, the image of Chapaev was distorted beyond recognition. In particular, according to anecdotes, he is such a cheerful, swaggering person, a drinker. In fact, Vasily Ivanovich did not drink alcohol at all, tea was his favorite drink. The orderly drove a samovar everywhere for him. Arriving at any location, Chapaev immediately started drinking tea and at the same time always invited the locals. So the fame of a very good-natured and hospitable person was established behind him. One more point. In the film, Chapaev is a dashing horseman rushing towards the enemy with a sword bald. In fact, Chapaev had no particular love for horses. Preferred a car. The widespread legend that Chapaev fought against the famous General V. O. Kappel also does not correspond to reality.
