In the fall of 1915, the troops of the Western Front of the Russian Army fought fierce battles of the First World War on Belarusian soil. The 105th Orenburg regiment was located near the village of Mokraya Dubrova, Pinsk district. His glorious military past was reflected on the regimental St. George's banner with the embroidered words "3a Sevastopol in 1854 and 1855." and "1811-1911" (with the Alexander Jubilee Ribbon). The regiment had already withstood continuous enemy attacks and powerful shelling of German artillery for several days. The infirmary was overflowing with wounded. Doctors, nurses and orderlies were exhausted by the incessant dressings, operations and sleepless nights.
On the morning of September 9, the regiment commander decided to counterattack the German positions. And when, after the end of the artillery firefight, the next attack of the Germans began, the 10th company of the 105th Orenburg regiment was the first, by order of the command, to rush to the enemy. In a bayonet battle, the enemy was defeated and abandoned their forward positions. In the popular illustrated magazine Iskra a message appeared: “… during a battle on one of the front sectors, our sister of mercy Rimma Mikhailovna Ivanova, despite the persuasion of the officers and her brother, the regimental doctor, was constantly bandaging the wounded under strong enemy rifle and machine-gun fire.
Seeing that the commander and officers of the tenth company of his native regiment were killed, and, realizing the importance of the decisive moment of the battle, Rimma Ivanova, gathering the lower ranks of the company around her, rushed at their head, overturned enemy units and captured the enemy trench.
Unfortunately, an enemy bullet struck the female heroine. Seriously wounded, Ivanova quickly died at the scene of the battle ….
Everyone was especially shocked that the nurse was killed by a German explosive bullet, prohibited by the Hague Convention, as an unacceptably cruel murder weapon. This ban was put into effect even before the war at the initiative of Russia. Its Minister of War, Dmitry Alekseevich Milyutin, considered this weapon "a purely barbaric means, not justified by any military demands …". In a report written for a speech at the pre-war European peace conference, he, in particular, noted: “In the event of a burst of such a bullet inside a human body, the wound will be fatal and very painful, since these bullets are scattered into ten or more fragments. Moreover, the products of combustion of a powder charge, having a very harmful effect on the human body, make suffering even more painful …”.
The message about the heroic deed of the brave girl spread all over Russia … An extract from the regiment's combat operations journal was published in the capital's newspapers: “In the battle of September 9, Rimma Ivanova had to replace an officer and enthrall the soldiers with bravery. It all happened as simply as our heroes die. In the homeland of the heroine, her letters to her parents were published in the Stavropol newspapers. Here is one of them: “Lord, how I would like you to calm down. Yes, it would be time already. You should be glad, if you love me, that I managed to get settled and work where I wanted … But I did it not for fun and not for my own pleasure, but in order to help. Let me be a true sister of mercy. Let me do what is good and what needs to be done. Think what you want, but I give you my word of honor that I would give much, much in order to alleviate the suffering of those who shed blood. But don’t worry: our dressing station is not under fire …”.
The Georgievsk Duma of the Western Front received a petition from the commander of the 31st Army Corps, General from the artillery P. I. Mishchenko: “When sending the body, give military honors to the late gallant sister Rimma Ivanova. The mail has a long time to petition for the awarding of her memory with the Order of St. George of the 4th degree and admission to the list of the 10th company of the 105th regiment. … Russian women were awarded for military exploits only with the soldier's St. George Cross. Nevertheless, Emperor Nicholas II agreed with the proposal of the front-line St. George Duma and approved on September 17, 1915 a decree on the posthumous awarding of the front-line sister of mercy, knight of the soldier's St. George cross of the 4th degree and two St. George medals of Rimma Mikhailovna Ivanova with the officer's order of St. George 4th degree.
In his farewell speech at the burial of the heroine, Archpriest Semyon Nikolsky said: “France had a maiden of Orleans - Jeanne d'Arc. Russia has a Stavropol maiden - Rimma Ivanova. And her name will henceforth live forever in the kingdoms of the world."
This feat was striking, but not exceptional - tens of thousands of Russian women at the front or in the rear fulfilled their spiritual and patriotic duty, rescuing and taking care of the wounded soldiers of the Russian army. Moreover, this happened regardless of nationality, religion and class affiliation. Lyubov Konstantinova, a 19-year-old sister of mercy from the city of Ostrogozhsk, the daughter of a district military commander, died of typhus on the Romanian front, having become infected from the sick soldiers she was saving. The royal family was no exception, all of whose women, starting with Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, became either surgical nurses of mercy or nurses in military hospitals.
The wives of Russian officers, who from the first days of the war became sisters of mercy and performed their duty to the Fatherland as worthily as their husbands, proved to be excellent. As we have already emphasized, this movement did not know national and religious differences. Therefore, it is not surprising that the first woman in Russia who called on the wives of officers to become military sisters of mercy on August 1, 1914 in the newspaper “Russian invalid” was the wife of artillery colonel Ali-Aga Shikhlinsky - Nigar Huseyn Efendi gizi Shikhlinskaya, the first Azerbaijani sister of mercy.
Russian sisters of mercy were sent to the front or rear hospitals from 115 Red Cross communities. The largest community, numbering 1603 people, was the community of St. George, and the St. Petersburg Holy Cross Community of Sisters of Mercy, with which the Russian Red Cross Society (RRCS) began its activities, numbered 228 sisters.
… The first community of sisters of mercy in history was created in France by the Catholic saint Vincent de Paul (Vincent de Paul) in 1633. But the holy Christian feat of women - future sisters of mercy - began even earlier, from the time of the service of the wounded, sick and disadvantaged people of Byzantine Orthodox deacones … In confirmation of this, let us quote the words of the Apostle Paul about the merciful servant of Thebes in his letter to the Romans (about 58): "I present to you, your sister, the deaconess of the Church of Kenchreya. she will need you, for she was a helper to many and to myself."
In 1863, the International Committee for Assistance to the Wounded was organized in Switzerland, renamed in 1867 the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). In this committee, of which the Russian Empire became a member, a special distinctive sign was approved - a red cross, which provides medical personnel with legal protection on the battlefield.
The Russian Red Cross Society met the First World War under the patronage of the wife of Emperor Alexander III and mother of Nicholas II, Empress Maria Feodorovna, before the marriage of the Danish princess. Empress Maria Feodorovna, who became the favorite of Russian soldiers, considered her main charitable goal to take care of the wounded and crippled soldiers, officers, widows and orphans of servicemen. The Great War found her during a visit to Denmark and, mortally hating the German aggressive policy, she urgently returned to Russia and headed the organization of military hospitals, medical trains and ships for the outbreak of the war. In this work, she and the Red Cross were assisted at the local and regional level by zemstvo and city unions. The All-Russian Zemstvo Union for Aid to the Wounded and Sick Soldiers, created on June 30, 1914, was headed, by the way, by Prince Georgy Evgenievich Lvov, the future head of the Provisional Government.
Considering the number of seriously wounded among the command staff of the Russian army, the ROKK created a special sanatorium in the Crimea for recovering officers and a refuge for crippled soldiers at the Maximilian hospital. Under the auspices of the Red Cross, 150 community schools were urgently established to train military nurses.
By the end of 1914, 318 ROKK institutions were operating at the front, 436 evacuation hospitals with 1 million 167 thousand beds were deployed at the fronts and in the rear. 36 sanitary-epidemiological and 53 disinfection teams were created, as well as 11 bacteriological laboratories. The transportation of the wounded was carried out by ambulance trains and hospital ships. And the main employees and workers there were women - nurses and nurses.
One of the most important tasks of the sisters of mercy was interaction with the ICRC in helping Russian army prisoners of war who were in the camps of the Triple Alliance countries and Turkey. On the initiative of Empress Maria Feodorovna and the ICRC, as well as the Danish Red Cross, in 1915 the enemy states on the Eastern Front agreed to exchange delegations to inspect the POW camps.
Russian soldiers and officers were starving, sick and dying in these camps, being subjected to sophisticated torture and abuse in captivity. Executions were widely used for the slightest violation of discipline or at the whim of the guards.
The rejection of the illegal requirement to work at military facilities was seen as a riot and led to mass shootings. The evidence of this was so eloquent that already in the next world war, in 1942, the leadership of the USSR considered it necessary to make them public, obviously, so that there was no desire to surrender. The Department of State Archives of the NKVD of the USSR published a special collection of Documents on German atrocities in 1914-1918. (Moscow: OGIZ, Gospolitizdat, 1942). Who could then have guessed that the fascist war machine of World War II would many times surpass the inhumanity of the attitude towards prisoners of the First World War! Here are just a few examples from the 1942 collection.
“… When the news of the defeat of the German troops near Warsaw spread in the Schneidemühl camp, joy reigned among the Russian prisoners. Angered by the failure, the Germans forced the prisoners to strip naked and kept them in the cold for several hours, mocking them and thus avenging their failure on the battle front … . Pyotr Shimchak, who escaped from German captivity under oath, testified the following: “Once, four captured Cossacks were brought to the camp, whom I recognized by the yellow stripes sewn on their trousers … German soldiers with a bayonet-knife sequentially chopped off half of the thumb and middle fingers and little finger … A second Cossack was brought in, and the Germans pierced him with holes in the shells of both ears, and rotated the end of the bayonet-knife in the cuts with the obvious purpose of increasing the size of the holes … torturing the Cossack, a German soldier cut off the tip of his nose with a bayonet strike from top to bottom … Finally, a fourth was brought in. What exactly the Germans wanted to do with him is unknown, since the Cossack with a quick movement tore a bayonet from a nearby German and hit one of the German soldiers with it. Then all the Germans, there were about 15 of them, rushed at the Cossack and stabbed him to death with bayonets …”.
And these were not the most terrible tortures that Russian prisoners of war were subjected to. Most of the torture and murder is simply difficult to write about because of their enormity and sophistication …
Russian sisters of mercy selflessly, despite all sorts of prohibitions, and often the threats of the enemy side, penetrated into these camps as part of international commissions and did everything possible to expose war crimes and make life easier for their compatriots. The ICRC was forced to formally oblige these commissions to include Russian representatives of military nurses. POWs idolized these women and called them "white doves."
The heartfelt lines written in 1915 by Nikolai Nikolaev are dedicated to these "doves":
Kind, meek Russian faces …
White handkerchief and a cross on the chest …
Meet you dear sister
Lighter at heart, brighter ahead.
Youth, strength and living soul, A bright source of love and goodness, -
You gave everything in a dashing time, -
Our tireless sister!
Quiet, gentle … Sorrowful shadows
They lay deep in meek eyes …
I want to kneel before you
And bow down to you to the ground.
It has been repeatedly said that the war that began in 1914 was unprecedented for its time in terms of the number of victims and the scale of cruelty. This is also evidenced by war crimes against defenseless medical units and units of the Red Cross, despite their official protection by all kinds of international laws, conventions and agreements.
Ambulance trains and hospitals with dressing posts were fired upon by artillery and aircraft, despite the fact that flags and markings with red crosses installed on them were visible from all directions.
Particularly hypocritical and unworthy on the part of the enemy was the widely publicized trial organized by the German side in 1915 against the aforementioned sister of mercy Rimma Ivanova, who had committed a heroic act. German newspapers published an official protest by the chairman of the Kaiser Red Cross, General Pfühl, against her actions in battle. Referring to the Convention on the Neutrality of Medical Personnel, he stated that "it is not proper for the sisters of mercy to perform feats on the battlefield." Forgetting that the German soldiers shot the girl from weapons loaded with explosive bullets prohibited by the Hague Convention for use in battle, he had the audacity to send a protest to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. Meanwhile, German troops carried out gas attacks and used explosive bullets along the entire front of the Russian army. In this regard, the Russian command took the most decisive measures to protect its soldiers and medical personnel. Here, in particular, is a telegram from the commander-in-chief of the Northern Front, General Evert, sent in October 1915 to the chief of staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, General Alekseev: “Minsk, October 12, 11.30 pm. In recent times, the use of explosive bullets by the Germans has been noticed on the entire front. I would consider it necessary to inform the German government through diplomatic means that if they continue to use explosive bullets, then we will also start shooting explosive bullets, using for this Austrian rifles and Austrian explosive cartridges, of which we have a sufficient number. 7598/14559 Evert ".
Despite all the hardships of the war, by the beginning of the February Revolution, the Russian Red Cross had at its disposal some of the best military medical forces among the belligerent states. There were 118 medical institutions available, fully equipped and ready to receive from 13 to 26 thousand wounded. In 2,255 front-line medical institutions, including 149 hospitals, 2,450 doctors, 17,436 nurses, 275 nurse assistants, 100 pharmacists and 50,000 orderlies worked.
But the Provisional Government, which began its destructive activities in the field of military medicine with the reorganization of the Russian Red Cross, began to destroy this entire harmonious system by its "liberal-democratic" actions.
The National Conference of Red Cross Workers, created with his participation, in its I declaration of July 3/16, 1917, decided: “We will not stop the struggle until the remnants of the former Red Cross, which served the autocracy and officials, are completely destroyed, until a genuine temple is created. international philanthropy, what the new Russian national Red Cross will be like”. The revolutionaries have forgotten that philanthropy - concern for improving the lot of all mankind is wonderful in peacetime, and in order to defeat the enemy, mercy needs strict organization and military discipline.
Russian sisters of mercy of the Great War … What trials they had to endure in this world military conflict that struck all civilized countries, and later, through two bloody revolutions, go through even more terrible and merciless years of the Civil War to Russia. But always and everywhere they were next to the suffering warriors on the battlefield.
