Why did the General Staff "miss" the uprising prepared by a revolutionary who did not serve in the army for a single day
Konstantin Aksenov. Arrival of V. I. Lenin to Russia in 1917. Photo: M. Filimonov / RIA Novosti Konstantin Aksenov. Arrival of V. I. Lenin to Russia in 1917. Photo: M. Filimonov / RIA Novosti
The Bolsheviks thought about weapons …
At the end of August 1906, Lenin published in the newspaper Proletary an article "Lessons from the Moscow Uprising", which several decades ago were compulsorily studied by all students and schoolchildren of the Soviet Union. A small note irrefutably testifies that a professional revolutionary closely followed all military innovations and purposefully thought about how to use them in the coming battles with the authorities. "Military equipment has recently taken even new steps forward. The Japanese war has put forward a hand grenade. An arms factory has launched an automatic rifle on the market. Both are already beginning to be successfully used in the Russian revolution, but by far in insufficient quantities. We can and We must take advantage of the improvement of technology, teach the workers' detachments to prepare massive bombs, help them and our fighting squads to stock up on explosives, fuses and automatic rifles."
Division engineer V. I. Rdultovsky Photo: Homeland
How did the authorities react to these novelties? Slowly. The industrial production of hand grenades began only in 1912. It was only in 1914 that the RG-14 fragmentation grenade was adopted by the Russian army, which was invented by artillery captain Vladimir Iosifovich (Iosefovich) Rdultovsky and which "served" in the Red Army until 1930.
Lieutenant General V. G. Fedorov Photo: RIA Novosti
A similar situation has developed with an automatic rifle. Back in 1906, the outstanding Russian gunsmith Vladimir Grigorievich Fedorov designed it on the basis of the Mosin three-line rifle. However, Fedorov was engaged in the creation of automatic weapons exclusively as a personal initiative, without state support. There is a common tale: Tsar Nicholas II allegedly objected to the introduction, believing that there would not be enough cartridges for such a rifle.
General Staff Colonel Count A. A. Ignatiev. Photo: RGAKFD
General staff officers - about compromises …
In October 1905 of the General Staff, Captain Count Alexei Alekseevich Ignatiev, who had already received his baptism of fire during the Russo-Japanese War, was returning from Harbin to St. Petersburg. Traffic on the railroad was difficult: at almost every station, the train was met by demonstrators with red flags. The return to Russia was delayed indefinitely. As a result, Count Ignatiev was actually elected head of the echelon.
Aleksey Alekseevich himself very picturesquely told about what happened next in his famous memoirs:
"After making sure that the movement depends on the driver, and the order depends on the chief conductor, I entered into an unspoken alliance with them and with some mischief, as if to spite the authorities, invited them to the 1st class buffet. Train servants were strictly forbidden to enter there. Having had a drink and a snack at a separate table, I usually asked the driver: "And what, Ivan Ivanovich, isn't it time to move on?"
- Well, you can, perhaps! - answered a man in a black Swedish jacket, with a sooty face.
Then the head of the station respectfully protruded his chest, took his hand under the visor and reported that the way was clear 1.
Georgy Savitsky. General Railroad Strike. October 1905. Photo: RIA Novosti
There is no doubt that the General Staff Captain Count Ignatiev found a very ingenious way out of this contingency situation. However, the General Staff did not think that special forces should be created that could effectively unblock the railway track and fight the insurgents.
And if it were a private anecdotal case …
Bitter irony of history! Professional revolutionary Vladimir Lenin drew adequate conclusions from the unsuccessful Japanese war, while the government began to purposefully push the General Staff officers who had gone through this war. “We didn't have to stutter about the experience of the war. Few people asked about it. The Manchu General Staff officers turned out to be strangers among their own comrades who had spent the entire war in the rear. Siberia, some in Turkestan, and some abroad 2.
… and red bootlegs
In September 1917 (just a month before the October Revolution!) Lenin wrote an article "Marxism and the uprising", in which he clearly outlines the plan for the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks: all factories, all regiments, all points of armed struggle, etc. to him by telephone. " And he invites his comrades-in-arms in the very first minutes of the uprising to carry out not only the seizure of the Peter and Paul Fortress, but also to arrest the government and the General Staff.
And a few days before the storming of the Winter Palace, on October 8, 1917, the civilian "shtafirka" completes the small work "Advice of an outsider" - in fact, a professional combat order:
"Combine our three main forces: the fleet, workers and military units so that they will certainly be occupied and at the cost of any losses they will be kept: a) telephone, b) telegraph, c) railway stations, d) bridges in the first place."
Why was the government unable to timely recognize the challenges that threatened it? Why didn't you play ahead of the curve?
The hair stands on end when you find out what the "army's brain" was concerned with in those days …
General Staff Colonel A. A. Samoilo. Photo: Homeland
Of the General Staff, Colonel Alexander Alexandrovich Samoilo, who graduated from the Nikolaev Academy of the General Staff before the war and had solid experience in intelligence work, served in the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief during the First World War. To receive the rank of general, he had to take command of the regiment (these were the rules of rank production), but did not want to do it. Do you think the colonel was chickened out? Didn't he want to leave the Headquarters and end up in the trenches? If…
I hesitated, waiting for the vacancy of my native Yekaterinoslav regiment. However, I was ready to accept the Shirvan regiment too. I would gladly keep silent about the motives of my readiness now, if it were not for the principle I had taken: to lay out everything frankly. The Shirvan regiment was the only one in the army that was supposed to wear boots with red bootlegs!
The point is not even that the memory let the memoirist down: the only regiment in the Russian army had red lapels on boots, but not the Shirvan regiment, but the Absheron regiment. The essence of the matter is different: the brilliant officer of the General Staff at the height of the World War was thinking about red bootlegs. But Alexander Alexandrovich can in no way be accused of either a lack of a good education, or a lack of horizons: back in the 1890s, when he was a lieutenant of the 1st Life Grenadier of the Yekaterinoslav Regiment, Samoilo, as a volunteer, attended lectures at the historical and philological department of Moscow University.
But his native history, filled to the brim with riots and coups, taught him nothing.
Point of no return
Young officers, who were not formally assigned to the General Staff, but actually occupied positions of officers of the General Staff during the war, argued in a similar way. Acting senior adjutant of the headquarters of the XVIII Army Corps, Staff Captain N. N. Rozanov wrote on September 22, 1917: “When everyone is shouting and defending their rights, we, representatives of military thought, are waiting, like alms, for crumbs falling from the General Staff. Give us the right to decide our fate. especially if you know that you will be thrown out after the war."
He was echoed by the acting headquarters officer for assignments at the headquarters of the XVIII Army Corps, Staff Captain Reva: “It seems that they want to squeeze all the juices out of us, and then throw it away as an unnecessary thing … In the future, I see the following picture: the war is over, we are being seconded into our units, and we become under the command of those of our colleagues who were volunteers during the war or simply acted as soldiers during the war."
Soldiers of the 11th Fanagoria Grenadier Regiment (1914-1916). Photo: Homeland
This was the morale of the "siloviks" in a matter of days and hours before the coup …
Lenin, who had not served in the army for a single day, outright outplayed the combat, battle-hardened professionals. The General Staff was unable to formulate as clearly the idea of the need to create special units capable of withstanding the elements of an armed uprising. The Bolsheviks also played into the hands of the fact that at the beginning of the 20th century, the fight against any uprising a priori did not belong to the area of responsibility of the General Staff. Any contact with politics was psychologically unpleasant for them and extremely unsafe from the point of view of career growth. Therefore, in the structure of the Main Directorate of the General Staff there were no subdivisions responsible for the "policy" and no one was going to create them.
Of course, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in particular the Police Department, should have dealt with security issues within the country. However, even there, no one bothered to create special forces to fight the insurgents.
So the point of no return was mediocrely passed. The "brain of the army" lost to the "shtafirka".
P. S. After the revolution, the inventor of the hand grenade, Vladimir Iosifovich Rdultovsky, was successfully engaged in design and teaching activities, received the personal military rank of the divine engineer of the Red Army (two rhombuses in the collar tabs), became the founder of the theory of fuse design. In October 1929, he was arrested by the OGPU Collegium on a absurd charge of sabotage in the military industry, but released a month later. Safely survived the tragic 1937 and 1938, and in May 1939 was blown up while disassembling one of its products.
Outstanding gunsmith Vladimir Grigorievich Fedorov became the Hero of Labor and Lieutenant General of the Engineering Service of the Red Army. A lover of red tops, Alexander Alexandrovich Samoilo ended his career as a lieutenant general of aviation and a professor at the military academy. "Echelon Chief" Alexei Alekseevich Ignatiev rose to the rank of Lieutenant General of the Red Army.
All three died a natural death.
Notes (edit)
1. Ignatiev A. A. Fifty years in the ranks. M.: Voenizdat, 1986. S. 255-256.
2. Ignatiev A. A. Fifty years in the ranks. M.: Voenizdat, 1986. S. 258.
3. Samoilo A. A. Two lives. M.: Voenizdat, 1958. S. 146 (Military memoirs).
4. Ganin A. V. The decline of the Nikolaev military academy 1914-1922. M.: Knizhnitsa, 2014. S. 107-108.
