We went to power to hang, but we had to hang to come to power
The stream of articles and notes about the "good Tsar-Father", the noble white movement and the red ghouls-murderers opposing them does not become scarce. I'm not going to play for one or the other side. I'll just give you the facts. Just bare facts, taken from open sources, and nothing more. Tsar Nicholas II, who had abdicated the throne, was arrested on March 2, 1917 by General Mikhail Alekseev, his chief of staff. The Tsarina and the family of Nicholas II were arrested on March 7 by General Lavr Kornilov, the commander of the Petrograd Military District. Yes, yes, those very future heroes-founders of the white movement …
The Lenin government, which took responsibility for the country in November-17, invited the Romanov family to go to their relatives - in London, but the English royal family REFUSED their permission to move to England.
The overthrow of the tsar was welcomed by all of Russia. “Even close relatives of Nikolai put red bows on their chest,” writes historian Heinrich Ioffe. Grand Duke Michael, to whom Nicholas intended to transfer the crown, refused the throne. The Russian Orthodox Church, having committed the perjury of the Church's oath of allegiance, welcomed the news of the tsar's abdication.
Russian officers. 57% of them were supported by the white movement, of which 14 thousand later switched to the red ones. 43% (75 thousand people) immediately went for the Reds, that is, in the end, more than half of the officers supported the Soviet regime.
The first few months after the October uprising in Petrograd and Moscow were not in vain called "the triumphal march of Soviet power." Out of 84 provincial and other large cities, only 15 were established as a result of armed struggle. “At the end of November, in all the cities of the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia, the power of the Provisional Government no longer existed. It passed almost without any resistance into the hands of the Bolsheviks, Soviets were formed everywhere ", - testifies Major General Ivan Akulinin in his memoirs" The Orenburg Cossack army in the fight against the Bolsheviks 1917-1920 ". “Just at this time,” he writes further, “combat units - regiments and batteries - began to arrive in the Army from the Austro-Hungarian and Caucasian fronts, but it turned out to be absolutely impossible to count on their help: they did not even want to hear about the armed struggle against the Bolsheviks. ".
Russian officers were divided in their sympathies …
How, under such circumstances, did Soviet Russia suddenly find itself in a ring of fronts? And here's how: from the end of February - the beginning of March 1918, the imperialist powers of both coalitions fighting in the world war began a large-scale armed invasion of our territory.
On February 18, 1918, German and Austro-Hungarian troops (about 50 divisions) launched an offensive from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In two weeks they occupied vast territories.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on March 3, 1918, but the Germans did not stop. Taking advantage of the agreement with the Central Rada (by that time already firmly established in Germany), they continued their offensive in Ukraine, overthrew Soviet power in Kiev on March 1 and advanced further in the eastern and southern directions to Kharkov, Poltava, Yekaterinoslav, Nikolaev, Kherson and Odessa …
On March 5, German troops under the command of Major General von der Goltz invaded Finland, where they soon overthrew the Finnish Soviet government. On April 18, German troops invaded the Crimea, and on April 30 they captured Sevastopol.
By mid-June, more than 15,000 German troops with aviation and artillery were stationed in Transcaucasia, including 10,000 in Poti and 5,000 in Tiflis (Tbilisi).
Turkish troops have been operating in the Transcaucasus since mid-February.
On March 9, 1918, an English landing entered Murmansk under the pretext … of the need to protect warehouses of military property from the Germans.
On April 5, a Japanese landing party landed in Vladivostok, but already under the pretext of … protecting Japanese citizens "from banditry" in this city.
May 25 - the performance of the Czechoslovak corps, whose echelons were between Penza and Vladivostok.
It should be borne in mind that the "whites" (generals Alekseev, Kornilov, Anton Denikin, Pyotr Wrangel, Admiral Alexander Kolchak), who played a role in the overthrow of the tsar, renounced the oath of the Russian Empire, but did not accept the new power, starting a struggle for their own rule in Russia.
The landing of the Entente in Arkhangelsk, August 1918
In southern Russia, where the Russian Liberation Forces were mainly active, the situation was veiled by the Russian form of the White Movement. Ataman of the "Don Cossack" Pyotr Krasnov, when he was told about the "German orientation" and was set up as an example of Denikin's "volunteers", answered: "Yes, yes, gentlemen!" The volunteer army is pure and infallible.
But it is I, the Don chieftain, who take German shells and cartridges with my dirty hands, wash them in the waves of the quiet Don and hand them over to the Volunteer Army with my clean ones! The whole shame of this case lies with me!"
Kolchak Alexander Vasilievich, so beloved "romantic hero" of the modern "intelligentsia". Kolchak, breaking the oath of the Russian Empire, was the first in the Black Sea Fleet to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government. Having learned about the October Revolution, he handed the British ambassador a request for admission to the British army. The ambassador, after consulting with London, handed Kolchak the direction to the Mesopotamian front. On the way there, in Singapore, he was overtaken by a telegram from the Russian envoy to China, Nikolai Kudashev, who invited him to Manchuria to form Russian military units.
Murdered Bolshevik
So, by August 1918, the armed forces of the RSFSR were fully or almost completely opposed by foreign troops. “It would be a mistake to think that throughout this year we fought on the fronts for the cause of the Russians hostile to the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, the Russian White Guards fought for OUR cause,”Winston Churchill later wrote.
White liberators or murderers and robbers? Doctor of Historical Sciences Heinrich Ioffe in the journal "Science and Life" No. 12 for 2004 - and this magazine has managed in recent years to be noted for ardent anti-Sovietism - in an article about Denikin writes: "A real revanchist sabbath was going on in the liberated territories from the Reds. The old masters were returning, tyranny, robberies, terrible Jewish pogroms reigned …”.
The atrocities of Kolchak's troops are legendary. The number of those killed and tortured to death in Kolchak's dungeons could not be counted. In the Yekaterinburg province alone, about 25 thousand people were shot.
“In Eastern Siberia, horrible murders were committed, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks, as was usually thought. killed by anti-Bolshevik elements”.
The "ideology" of whites in this matter was clearly expressed by General Kornilov:
“We went to power in order to hang, but we had to hang in order to come to power” …
Americans and Scots guard Red Army prisoners in Bereznik
The "allies" of the white movement - the British, French and other Japanese - took everything away: metal, coal, bread, machinery and equipment, engines and furs. Hijacked civilian steamers and steam locomotives. Until October 1918, the Germans exported 52 thousand tons of grain and fodder, 34 thousand tons from Ukraine alone.tons of sugar, 45 million eggs, 53 thousand horses and 39 thousand heads of cattle. There was a large-scale plundering of Russia.
And about the atrocities (no less bloody and massive - no one argues) of the Red Army and the Chekists read in the writings of the democratic press. This text is intended solely to dispel the illusions of those who admire the romance and nobility of the "white knights of Russia". There was dirt, blood and suffering. Wars and revolutions cannot bring anything else …
"White Terror in Russia" is the title of the book of the famous historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences Pavel Golub. The documents and materials collected in it, stone on stone, do not leave fictions and myths widely circulating in the media and publications on a historical theme.
There was everything: from demonstrations of the force of the interventionists to the execution by the Czechs of the Red Army
Let's start with statements about the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Bolsheviks, who, they say, destroyed their political opponents at the slightest opportunity. In fact, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party began to treat them firmly and irreconcilably to the extent that they were convinced by their own bitter experience of the need for decisive measures. And at first there was a certain gullibility and even carelessness. Indeed, in just four months, October triumphantly marched from edge to edge of a huge country, which became possible thanks to the support of the power of the Soviets by the overwhelming majority of the people. Hence the hopes that its opponents themselves realize the obvious. Many leaders of the counter-revolution, as can be seen from the documentary materials - generals Krasnov, Vladimir Marushevsky, Vasily Boldyrev, a prominent politician Vladimir Purishkevich, ministers of the Provisional Government, Alexei Nikitin, Kuzma Gvozdev, Semyon Maslov, and many others - were released on fair word, although their hostility to the new government was not in doubt.
These gentlemen broke their word by taking an active part in the armed struggle, in organizing provocations and sabotage against their people. The generosity shown in relation to the obvious enemies of the Soviet regime turned into thousands and thousands of additional victims, suffering and torment of hundreds of thousands of people who supported the revolutionary changes. And then the leaders of the Russian communists drew the inevitable conclusions - they knew how to learn from their mistakes …
Tomsk residents transfer the bodies of the executed participants of the anti-Kolchak uprising
Having come to power, the Bolsheviks by no means banned the activities of their political opponents. They were not arrested, allowed to publish their own newspapers and magazines, hold rallies and processions, etc. The People's Socialists, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks continued their legal activities in the bodies of the new government, starting with the local Soviets and ending with the Central Executive Committee. And again, only after the transition of these parties to an open armed struggle against the new system, their factions were expelled from the Soviets by a decree of the Central Executive Committee of June 14, 1918. But even after that, the opposition parties continued to operate legally. Only those organizations or individuals who were found guilty of specific subversive activities were punished.
Excavation of the grave in which the victims of the Kolchak repressions of March 1919 are buried, Tomsk, 1920
As shown in the book, it was the White Guards who represented the interests of the overthrown exploiting classes who initiated the civil war. And the impetus for it, as one of the leaders of the white movement Denikin admitted, was the rebellion of the Czechoslovak corps, largely caused and supported by Western "friends" of Russia. Without the help of these “friends,” the leaders of the White Czechs, and then the White Guard generals, would never have achieved serious success. And the interventionists themselves actively participated both in operations against the Red Army and in terror against the insurgent people.
Kolchak's victims in Novosibirsk, 1919
"Civilized" Czechoslovak punishers dealt with their "brothers-Slavs" with fire and bayonet, literally wiping out entire villages and villages from the face of the earth. In Yeniseisk alone, for example, more than 700 people were shot for sympathizing with the Bolsheviks - almost a tenth of those who lived there. During the suppression of the uprising of the prisoners of the Alexander transit prison in September 1919, the Czechs shot them point-blank from machine guns and cannons. The massacre lasted three days, about 600 people died at the hands of the executioners. And there are a great many such examples.
Bolsheviks killed by Czechs near Vladivostok
By the way, foreign interventionists actively contributed to the deployment of new concentration camps on Russian territory for those who opposed the occupation or sympathized with the Bolsheviks. Concentration camps began to be created by the Provisional Government. This is an indisputable fact, which the denunciators of the “bloody atrocities” of the communists also keep silent about. When French and British troops landed in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, one of their leaders, General Poole, on behalf of the allies, solemnly promised the northerners to ensure "the triumph of law and justice" on the occupied territory. However, almost immediately after these words, a concentration camp was organized on the island of Mudyug seized by the invaders. Here are the testimonies of those who happened to be there: “Every night, several people died, and their corpses remained in the barracks until morning. And in the morning a French sergeant appeared and gloatingly asked: "How many Bolsheviks are Kaput today?" More than 50 percent of those imprisoned in Mudyuga lost their lives, many went mad …”.
American invader poses near the corpse of a murdered Bolshevik
After the departure of the Anglo-French interventionists, power in the North of Russia passed into the hands of the White Guard General Yevgeny Miller. He not only continued, but also intensified repression and terror, trying to stop the rapidly developing process of “Bolshevization of the masses”. Their most inhuman personification was the exiled convict prison in Yokanga, which one of the prisoners described as "the most brutal, sophisticated method of exterminating people by slow, painful death." Here are excerpts from the memoirs of those who miraculously managed to survive in this hell: "The dead lay on bunks with the living, and the living were no better than the dead: dirty, covered with scabs, in torn rags, decaying alive, they presented a nightmarish picture."
Red Army prisoner at work, Arkhangelsk, 1919
By the time Yokanga was liberated from the Whites, 576 of the 1,500 prisoners remained there, of whom 205 could no longer move.
The system of such concentration camps, as shown in the book, was deployed in Siberia and the Far East by Admiral Kolchak - perhaps the most cruel of all the White Guard rulers. They were created both on the basis of prisons and in those prisoner of war camps that were built by the Provisional Government. In more than 40 concentration camps, the regime drove almost a million (914,178) people who rejected the restoration of the pre-revolutionary order. To this must be added about 75 thousand more people languishing in white Siberia. The regime drove more than 520 thousand prisoners to slave, almost unpaid labor in enterprises and in agriculture.
However, neither in Solzhenitsyn's "GULAG Archipelago", nor in the writings of his followers Alexander Yakovlev, Dmitry Volkogonov and others about this monstrous archipelago - not a word. Although the same Solzhenitsyn begins his "Archipelago" with the Civil War, depicting the "Red Terror". A classic example of lying by simple silence!
American Bolshevik hunters
In anti-Soviet literature about the civil war, a lot is written with anguish about the "barges of death", which, they say, were used by the Bolsheviks to crack down on White Guard officers. The book by Pavel Golub contains facts and documents showing that the “barges” and “trains of death” began to be actively and massively used by the White Guards. When in the fall of 1918, on the eastern front, they began to suffer defeat from the Red Army, “barges” and “death trains” with prisoners of prisons and concentration camps were pulled to Siberia, and then to the Far East.
When the "death trains" were in Primorye, they were visited by American Red Cross staff. One of them - Buckley wrote in his diary: “Until the moment when we found this terrible caravan in Nikolsk, 800 passengers died of hunger, dirt and disease … until they died after months of daily agonizing torture from hunger, dirt and cold. I swear to God, I am not exaggerating!.. In Siberia, horror and death at every step on such a scale that would shake the hardest heart …”.
Horror and death - this is what the White Guard generals carried to the people who rejected the pre-revolutionary regime. And this is by no means a publicistic exaggeration. Kolchak himself frankly wrote about the “vertical of command” he created: “The activities of the chiefs of district militias, special forces, all kinds of commandants, chiefs of individual detachments is a continuous crime”. It would be good to ponder these words for those who admire today the “patriotism” and “dedication” of the white movement, which, in contrast to the Red Army, defended the interests of “Great Russia”.
Red Army prisoners in Arkhangelsk
Well, as for the “red terror”, its size was completely incomparable with the white one, and it was mainly of a reciprocal nature. Even General Grevs, the commander of the 10,000-strong American corps in Siberia, admitted this.
And this was the case not only in Eastern Siberia. This was the case throughout Russia.
However, the frank confessions of the American general by no means absolve him of his guilt for participating in the massacres of the people who rejected the pre-revolutionary order. The terror against him was carried out by the joint efforts of foreign invaders and white armies.
In total, there were more than a million invaders on the territory of Russia - 280 thousand Austro-German bayonets and about 850 thousand British, American, French and Japanese. The joint attempt of the White Guard armies and their foreign allies to inflict the Russian "Thermidor" cost the Russian people, even according to incomplete data, very dearly: about 8 million killed, tortured in concentration camps, died of wounds, hunger and epidemics. The material losses of the country, according to experts, amounted to an astronomical figure - 50 billion gold rubles …
