WHO KILLED THE LEGENDARY COMMANDER NIKOLAY SHHORS?
In the Soviet Union, his name was a legend. Throughout the country, schoolchildren in the classroom learned a song about how "a regiment commander walked under a red banner, his head was wounded, blood on his sleeve …" It is about Shchors, the famous hero of the Civil War. Or, in modern terms, a field commander who fought on the side of the Bolsheviks.
This is how the country has known Nikolai Shchors since the mid-1930s. IZOGIZ postcard.
Under the democrats, the attitude towards Shchors changed. Today's schoolchildren have heard practically nothing about him. And those who are older know that the "red division commander" was a Ukrainian from Snovsk (now the town of Shchors, Chernihiv region). After the outbreak of the First World War, he passed accelerated officer courses and, with the rank of warrant officer, got to the South-Western Front. He rose to the rank of second lieutenant.
After the establishment of Soviet power, Shchors became the commander of the First Red Ukrainian Regiment. In January 1919, the regiment occupied Kiev, where Shchors became commandant. A bloody terror was established in the city. Drunken security officers shot hundreds of people every day. Shchors himself did not like shootings, but he often dabbled in vodka (they said that cocaine too - although the White Guard “hit” cocaine more).
It is difficult to judge his leadership talents: in the very first major clash with the regular Denikin army, Shchors was defeated, and died in October 1919 at the Beloshnitsa station. He was twenty-four years old.
On the same days, another legendary paint died in the Urals - Vasily Chapaev, who survived Shchors for five days. He became more famous - rather, because the film "Chapaev" with the brilliant Boris Babochkin came out earlier and was more talented than the film "Shchors".
This, in sum, is a scanty and fragmentary assessment of the personality of Nikolai Shchors, gleaned from Moscow publications.
BACK SHOT
I learned about the fate of Shchors from his maternal grandson, Alexander Alekseevich Drozdov. He had a solid journalistic experience, the rank of lieutenant colonel and twenty-one years of service in the KGB. He spent eight of them in Tokyo, combining the work of a journalist under the roof of a Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent and a Soviet intelligence officer. Then he returned home, in 1988-1990 he worked as the executive editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda, and then headed the newspaper of the Russian parliament - the weekly Rossiya.
Once, when we were on a business trip in Kiev, Drozdov began to talk about Shchors and some family legends, and already in Moscow he showed materials on this topic. So in my mind the image of the "Ukrainian Chapaev" (Stalin's definition) received a new interpretation.
… Nikolai Shchors was buried at the Orthodox All Saints cemetery in Samara - away from Ukraine. Prior to this, the body was transported to Korosten without an autopsy and medical examination, and from there by a funeral train to Klintsy, where a farewell ceremony for relatives and colleagues with the division commander took place.
Shchors was transported to the final resting place by a freight train in a zinc coffin. Before, in Klintsy, the body was embalmed. The doctors dipped it into a steep solution of table salt. Buried at night, in haste. Essentially - secretly, avoiding publicity.
Shchors' common-law wife, an employee of the Cheka, Fruma Khaikina, wrote in 1935: “… The soldiers, like children, cried at his coffin. These were difficult times for the young Soviet republic. The enemy, feeling close to death, made his last desperate efforts. The brutalized gangs brutally dealt with not only the living fighters, but also mocked the corpses of the dead. We could not leave Shchors to desecrate the enemy … The political department of the army forbade burying Shchors in threatened areas. With the coffin of a friend we drove north. A permanent guard of honor stood by the body, placed in a zinc coffin. We decided to bury him in Samara "(collection" The Legendary Chief of the Division ", 1935).
The reason why the command took such measures became known only in 1949 after the exhumation of the body. Thirty years have passed since the death of Shchors. The surviving veterans sent a letter to Moscow, in which they were indignant at the disappearance of the commander's grave. The Kuibyshev authorities received a scolding, and in order to smooth over the guilt, they urgently created a commission, which got down to business.
The first attempt to find the burial place of Shchors was made in the spring of 1936, the excavations were carried out by the NKVD Directorate for a month. The second attempt took place in May 1939, but it was also unsuccessful.
The place where the grave was located was indicated by a casual witness of the funeral - citizen Ferapontov. In 1919, as a street boy, he helped a cemetery watchman. Thirty years later, on May 5, he brought the members of the commission to the territory of the cable plant and there, taking a long time to figure it out, indicated an approximate square where the search should be conducted. As it turned out later, Shchors's grave was covered with a half-meter layer of rubble.
The commission found that "on the territory of the Kuibyshev cable plant (formerly an Orthodox cemetery), 3 meters from the right corner of the western facade of the electrical shop, a grave was found in which in September 1919 the body of N. A. Shchors was buried."
On July 10, 1949, the coffin with the remains of Shchors was moved to the main alley of the Kuibyshev cemetery, a few years later a granite monument was erected on the grave, to which wreaths and flowers were laid on the red days of the calendar. Pioneers and Komsomol members came here, who did not suspect that along with the remains of Shchors, the truth about his death was buried.
Monument to Nikolai Shchors in Kiev.
Let us turn to the official document: “At the first moment after the removal of the coffin lid, the general contours of the head of the corpse with the characteristic Shchors hairstyle, mustache and beard were clearly distinguishable. On the head was also clearly visible a mark left by a gauze bandage in the form of a wide falling strip running across the forehead and along the cheeks. Immediately after removing the lid of the coffin, before the eyes of those present, the characteristic features, due to the free access of air, began to change rapidly, turned into a shapeless mass of a monotonous structure …"
The forensic experts determined that the skull injuries were "inflicted by a bullet from a rifled firearm." She entered the back of the head, and exited in the region of the crown. And here's the most important thing: "The shot was fired at close range, presumably 5-10 steps."
Consequently, Shchors was shot at by someone who was nearby, and not at all by Petliura's machine gunner, as it was reproduced many times in the "canon" books and a feature film. Is it really … someone of your own?
OAK AND KVYATEK
Now is the time to turn to the memories of eyewitnesses of that battle. In 1935, the collection "The Legendary Chief of the Division" was published. Among the memoirs of relatives and friends, there is a testimony of the person in whose arms Shchors died - Ivan Dubovoy, assistant commander of the Kiev military district.
He reports: “I am reminded of August 1919. I was appointed deputy commander of the Shchors division. It was under Korosten. Then it was the only bridgehead in Ukraine where the red banner fluttered victoriously. We were
surrounded by enemies: on the one hand, the Galician-Petliura troops, on the other, the Denikinites, on the third, the White Poles were squeezing tighter and tighter ring around the division, which by that time had received the numbering 44th."
And further: “Shchors and I arrived at Bongardt's Bogunsk brigade. The regiment commanded by Comrade Kvyatek (now the commander-commissar of the 17th corps). We drove up to the village of Beloshitsy, where our soldiers lay in a chain, preparing for an offensive."
“The enemy opened strong machine-gun fire,” says Dubovoy, “and especially, I remember, one machine gun at the railway booth showed“daring”. This machine gun made us lie down, for the bullets literally dug the ground around us.
When we lay down, Shchors turned his head to me and said.
- Vanya, watch how the machine gunner shoots accurately.
After that, Shchors took the binoculars and began to look towards the direction of the machine-gun fire. But a moment later the binoculars fell out of Shchors 'hands, fell to the ground, and Shchors' head too. I called out to him:
- Nikolai!
But he didn’t respond. Then I crawled up to him and started looking. I see there is blood on the back of my head. I took off his cap - the bullet hit the left temple and went into the back of the head. Fifteen minutes later, Shchors, without regaining consciousness, died in my arms."
So, we see that the man in whose arms Shchors died is deliberately lying, misleading readers about the direction of the bullet's flight. Such a free interpretation of the facts makes one think.
The army commander of the 2nd rank Ivan Dubovoy himself was shot in 1937 on the then standard charge of "treason". The collection "The Legendary Chief of the Division" ended up on the shelf of the special guard.
During the investigation, Dubovoy made a shocking confession, stating that the murder of Shchors was his work. Explaining the motives of the crime, he said that he had killed the division commander out of personal hatred and the desire to take his place himself.
The interrogation report of December 3, 1937 reads: “When Shchors turned his head to me and said this phrase (“Galicians have a good machine gun, damn it”), I shot him in the head with a revolver and hit him in the temple. The then commander of the 388th Infantry Regiment Kvyatek, who was lying next to Shchors, shouted: "Shchors was killed!" I crawled up to Shchors, and he was in my arms, after 10-15 minutes, without regaining consciousness, he died."
In addition to Dubovoy's own confession, Kazimir Kvyatek made similar accusations against him on March 14, 1938, who wrote a statement from the Lefortovo prison to the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Yezhov, where he indicated that he directly suspected Dubovoy of the murder of Shchors.
Despite such revelations, no one brought charges of the murder of Shchors to Dubovoy. Moreover, the recognition did not have any consequences at all and for many years fell on the shelves of the state security archives.
ANOTHER CANDIDATE
Researcher Nikolai Zenkovich, one of the largest specialists in historical riddles, spent a lot of time looking for the printed works of the former commander of the Bogunsky regiment. No trace. And suddenly, when the last hope seemed to have disappeared, in the filing of the Ukrainian newspaper Kommunist for March 1935, the stubborn historian discovered a small note signed by the person sought.
So, Kazimir Kvyatek writes: “On August 30, at dawn, the enemy launched an offensive on the left flank of the front, covering Korosten … The headquarters of the Bogunsky regiment was then in Mogilny. I drove to the left flank to the village of Beloshitsa. I was warned by phone that the regiment headquarters in the village. Mogilnoe profits division commander Comrade Shchors, his deputy comrade Dubovoy and authorized by the Revolutionary Military Council of the 12th Army comrade. Tankhil-Tankhilevich. I reported on the situation by telephone … After a while Comrade. Shchors and those accompanying him drove up to our front line … We lay down. Comrade Shchors raised his head, took the binoculars to look. At that moment, an enemy bullet hit him …"
In March 1989, the newspaper "Radianska Ukraina" directly pointed to the criminal who shot Shchors with the sanction of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 12th Army. The authors of the publication managed to get some information about him. Tankhil-Tankhilevich Pavel Samuilovich. Twenty six years old. Originally from Odessa. Dandy. He graduated from high school. He spoke fairly well in French and German. In the summer of 1919, he became a political inspector of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 12th Army.
Two months after the death of Shchors, he hastily disappears from the Ukraine and is declared on the Southern Front, already as a senior censor-controller of the Military Censorship Department of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 10th Army.
The investigation was continued by the Rabochaya Gazeta newspaper published in Kiev. She published downright sensational material - excerpts from the memoirs of Major General Sergei Ivanovich Petrikovsky (Petrenko), written back in 1962, but not published for reasons of Soviet censorship. At the time of Shchors' death, he commanded the 44th Army's Separate Cavalry Brigade - and, it turns out, also accompanied the divisional commander to the front line.
“On August 30,” the general reports, “Shchors, Dubovoy, I and the political inspector from the 12th Army were going to leave for units along the front. Shchors's car seems to have been repaired. We decided to use my … We left 30 in the afternoon. In front, Kasso (the driver) and I, in the back seat - Shchors, Dubovoy and the political inspector. At the site of the Bogunsky brigade, Shchors decided to stay. We agreed that I was going to Ushomir by car and from there I would send the car for them. And then they will come to Ushomir in the cavalry brigade and take me back to Korosten.
Arriving in Ushomir, I sent a car for them, but a few minutes later they reported on the field telephone that Shchors had been killed … I rode on horseback to Korosten, where he was taken.
The driver Kasso was taking the already dead Shchors to Korosten. In addition to Dubovoy and the nurse, a lot of all kinds of people were attached to the car, obviously commanders and soldiers.
I saw Shchors in his carriage. He was lying on the couch, his head was powerlessly bandaged. For some reason, Dubovoy was in my carriage. He gave the impression of an agitated person, repeated several times how Shchors was killed, thought for a long time, looked out the carriage window for a long time. His behavior then seemed to me normal for a person next to whom his comrade was suddenly killed. I didn’t like only one thing … Dubovoy began to tell several times, trying to give a humorous shade to his story, when he heard the words of a Red Army man lying on the right: “What kind of bastard is shooting from a liververt?..” A spent cartridge case fell on the Red Army man's head. The political inspector shot from the Browning, according to Dubovoy. Even when he parted for the night, he told me again how the political inspector had fired at the enemy at such a great distance …"
The general is convinced that the shot that killed Shchors came after the Red artillery smashed to pieces the railway booth behind which he was.
“When the enemy machine gun was firing,” the general reports, “Dubovoy lay down near Shchors on one side, and a political inspector on the other. Who is on the right and who is on the left - I have not yet established, but this is no longer essential. I still think it was the political inspector who fired, not Dubovoy. But without the assistance of the Oak murder, there could be no … Only relying on the assistance of the authorities in the person of the deputy Shchors - Dubovoy, on the support of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 12th Army, the criminal committed this terrorist act.
I think that Dubovoy became an unwitting accomplice, perhaps even believing that this was for the benefit of the revolution. How many such cases do we know !!! I knew Dubovoy, and not only from the civil war. He seemed to me an honest man. But he also seemed weak-willed to me, without any special talents. He was nominated, and he wanted to be nominated. That's why I think he was made an accomplice. And he didn't have the courage to prevent the murder.
Dubovoy himself bandaged the head of the dead Shchors right there, on the battlefield. When the nurse of the Bogunsky regiment, Rosenblum, Anna Anatolyevna (now she lives in Moscow), suggested dressing more carefully, Dubovoy did not allow her. By order of Oak, Shchors' body was sent without a medical examination for farewell and burial …"
Obviously, Dubovoy could not fail to know that the bullet "exit" hole is always larger than the "entry" one. Therefore, apparently, he forbade taking off the bandages.
A member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 12th Army was Semyon Aralov, a confidant of Leon Trotsky. He twice wanted to remove the "indomitable partisan" and "the enemy of the regular troops", as Shchors was called, but he was afraid of the riot of the Red Army.
After an inspection trip to Shchors, which lasted no more than three hours, Semyon Aralov turned to Trotsky with a convincing request to find a new division chief - just not from the locals, for the "Ukrainians" are all "with kulak sentiments." In response, the Demon of the Revolution ordered a strict purge and "refresh" of the command staff. A conciliatory policy is unacceptable. Any measure is good. You need to start "from the head".
Apparently, Aralov was jealous of fulfilling the instructions of his formidable master. In his manuscript "In Ukraine 40 Years Ago (1919)", he involuntarily blurted out: "Unfortunately, persistence in personal behavior led Shchors to an untimely death."
Yes, about the discipline. During the reorganization of the armed forces of Red Ukraine, the Shchors division was supposed to be transferred to the Southern Front. In particular, Podvoisky, the people's commissar of the republic for military and naval affairs, insisted on this. Justifying his proposal in a memo addressed to the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Ulyanov-Lenin of June 15, he emphasized that, having visited parts of the 1st Army, he finds the only combat division on this front, which includes the most well-coordinated regiments.
Evgeny Samoilov as "Ukrainian Chapaev" Nikolai Shchors
In the Soviet Union, five monuments to the legendary divisional commander were erected and the same number of Shchors museums were opened. Comrade Stalin called him "Ukrainian Chapaev", director Alexander Dovzhenko dedicated a film to him, writer Semyon Sklyarenko - the trilogy "Go to Kiev", and composer Boris Lyatoshinsky - "personalized" opera.
ORIGIN
However, the most, undoubtedly, famous artistic embodiment of Shchors was the work of the songwriter Mikhail Golodny (Mikhail Semyonovich Epshtein) "Song of Shchors". The people called her by the first lines: "A detachment was walking along the shore."
The old railway station of Snovsk, since 1935 - the city of Shchors. Not used for its intended purpose, episodes of the film "Heavy Sand" were filmed here
After the death of the Soviet Union, the pendulum swung in the other direction. It got to the point that in 1991 one thick Moscow magazine in all seriousness asserted that there was no Shchors in sight.
Say, the origin of the myth began with the famous meeting of Stalin with artists in March 1935. It was then, at that meeting, that the leader turned to Oleksandr Dovzhenko with the question: "Why do the Russian people have a hero Chapaev and a film about a hero, but the Ukrainian people do not have such a hero?"
This is how the Legend began …
A detachment walked along the shore, Walked from afar
Walked under the red banner
Regiment commander.
The head is tied
Blood on my sleeve
The bloody trail spreads
On the damp grass.
“Whose lads you will be, Who is leading you into battle?
Who is under the red banner
Is the wounded man coming?"
We are farm laborers' sons, We are for a new world
Shchors goes under the banner -
Red commander.
"N. A. Shchors in the battle near Chernigov ". Artist N. Samokish, 1938
Shchors' father, Alexander Nikolaevich, was a native of Belarusian peasants. In search of a better life, he moved from the Minsk province to the small Ukrainian village of Snovsk. From here he was taken to the imperial army.
Returning to Snovsk, Alexander Nikolayevich got a job at the local railway depot. In August 1894, he married his compatriot, Alexandra Mikhailovna Tabelchuk, and in the same year he built his own house.
Shchors knew the Tabelchuk family for a long time, since its head, Mikhail Tabelchuk, led an artel of Belarusians who worked in the Chernihiv region. It also included Alexander Shchors at one time.
The future divisional commander Nikolai Shchors quickly learned to read and write - at the age of six he already knew how to read and write tolerably well. In 1905 he entered the parish school.
And a year later, a great grief happened in the Shchors family - being pregnant with the sixth child, the mother, Alexandra Mikhailovna, died of bleeding. This happened when she was in her small homeland, in Stolbtsy (modern Minsk region). She was also buried there.
Six months after the death of his wife, the head of the Shchorsov family remarried. Maria Konstantinovna Podbelo became his new chosen one. From this marriage, Nikolai had two half-brothers, Grigory and Boris, and three half-sisters - Zinaida, Raisa and Lydia.
THERE WAS NO SEMINARY
In 1909, Nikolai graduated from school and the next year, together with his brother Konstantin, entered the Kiev military paramedic school. Her pupils were fully supported by the state.
Shchors studied conscientiously and four years later, in July 1914, he received a diploma of a medical paramedic and the right of a volunteer of the 2nd category.
“The whole problem was that after leaving the school, Shchors was obliged to serve at least three years as a paramedic,” according to the UNECHAonline website. - Let us recall that Shchors graduated from college in 1914. At the same time, according to a number of sources, in order to avoid the obligatory three-year paramedic service, he decides to falsify and forwards in his diploma (certificate) the date of graduation from the paramedic school from 1914 to 1912, which gives him the right to get rid of the status in 1915 volunteer.
In the archives of the Unech Museum there is an electronic copy of this certificate, from which it really follows that Shchors entered school on August 15, 1910 and graduated from it in June 1912. However, the number “2” is made somewhat unnaturally, and it is very likely that it was actually transferred from the four.”
As "authoritatively" asserted in some sources, Shchors studied at the Poltava Teachers' Seminary - from September 1911 to March 1915. There is a clear discrepancy. So we can conclude: Shchors did not study at the seminary, and the certificate of graduation is fake.
“This version,” writes UNECAonline, “may be evidenced by the fact that in August 1918 Shchors, when submitting documents for admission to the medical faculty of Moscow University, among other papers, presented a certificate of graduation from the Poltava Seminary, which, unlike from a certificate of graduation from 4 classes of a paramedic school, gave the right to enter the university.
So this evidence, a copy of which is also available in the Unech Museum, was obviously corrected by Shchors just for presentation to Moscow University.
WHOSE WILL YOU BE?
After his studies, Nikolai was assigned to the troops of the Vilnius military district, which became front-line with the outbreak of the First World War. As part of the 3rd light artillery battalion, Shchors was sent to Vilno, where he was wounded in one of the battles and was sent for treatment.
Ensign of the Russian Imperial Army Nikolai Shchors
In 1915, Shchors was already among the cadets of the Vilna military school, evacuated to Poltava, where non-commissioned officers and warrant officers, due to martial law, began to be trained according to a shortened four-month program. In 1916, Shchors successfully completed the course of the military school and, with the rank of warrant officer, left for the rear troops in Simbirsk.
In the fall of 1916, the young officer was transferred to serve in the 335th Anapa Regiment of the 84th Infantry Division of the Southwestern Front, where Shchors rose to the rank of second lieutenant.
At the end of 1917, his short military career ended abruptly. His health let down - Shchors fell ill (almost an open form of tuberculosis) and after a short treatment in Simferopol on December 30, 1917, he was discharged due to unsuitability for further service.
Finding himself out of work, Nikolai Shchors at the end of 1917 decides to return home. The estimated time of his appearance in Snovsk is January of the eighteenth year. By this time, colossal changes had taken place in the country, which had fallen apart. In Ukraine, at the same time, the independent Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed.
Around the spring of 1918, the period of the creation of a combat unit, headed by Nikolai Shchors, began. In the history of the civil war, in its red chronicle, it entered under the name of the Bogunsky regiment.
On August 1, 1919, near Rovno, during a mutiny, under mysterious circumstances, a Shchors member Timofey Chernyak, the commander of the Novgorod-Seversk brigade, was killed.
On August 21 of the same year, the "indomitable father" Vasily Bozhenko, the commander of the Tarashchansk brigade, suddenly died in Zhitomir. It is alleged that he was poisoned - according to the official version, he died of pneumonia.
The grave of Nikolai Shchors in the city of Samara. At the Kuibyshevkabel plant, where his first grave was located, a bust of the legendary chief of the division was installed
Both commanders were the closest associates of Nikolai Shchors.
Until 1935, his name was not widely known; even the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of the first edition did not mention him. In February 1935, presenting the Order of Lenin to Alexander Dovzhenko at a meeting of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Stalin invited the director to create a film about the "Ukrainian Chapaev."
- Do you know Shchors?
- Yes.
- Think about it.
Soon the personal artistic and political order was masterfully executed. The main role in the film was brilliantly played by Evgeny Samoilov.
Later, several books, songs, even an opera were written about Shchors. Schools, streets, villages and even a city were named after him. As mentioned at the beginning, Matvey Blanter and Mikhail Golodny wrote the famous "Song of Shchors" in the same 1935.
Hungry and cold
His life has passed
But it was not for nothing that it was shed
His blood was.
Thrown over the cordon
A fierce enemy
Tempered from a young age
Honor is dear to us.
Silence by the shore
The voices fell silent
The sun is leaning down
The dew is falling.
The cavalry is dashing, The clatter of hooves is heard
Shchors banner red
It makes a noise in the wind.
Parental home of Nikolai Shchors in Snovsk
Like many field commanders, Nikolai Shchors was only a "bargaining chip" in the hands of the mighty of this world. He died at the hands of those for whom their own ambitions and political goals were more important than human lives.
As E. Shchadenko, a former member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Ukrainian Front, said, “Only enemies could tear Shchors away from the division into whose consciousness he was rooted. And they tore it off. However, the truth about the death of Nikolai Shchors still made its way.
