White terror during the civil years. White terror in Russia. Who unleashed the Civil War. American Bolshevik hunters

In the USSR, it was customary to view the White Guards as enemies of Soviet power and to depict their atrocities. In the post-perestroika era, the term "Red Terror" came into use, which is customary to denote the Bolshevik policy towards the nobility, the bourgeoisie and other "alien classes." But what about the "white terror"? Did it take place in principle?

Shooting near the Kremlin

“White Terror” is a rather conventional term used by modern historians to denote repressive measures directed against the Bolsheviks and their supporters.

As a rule, violent acts were spontaneous, disorganized, but in some cases they were sanctioned by the provisional military and political authorities.

The first officially recorded act of "white terror" took place on October 28, 1917. The cadets, who were liberating the Moscow Kremlin from the rebels, lined up unarmed soldiers of the 56th reserve regiment, who had gone over to the side of the Bolsheviks, at the monument to Alexander II, ostensibly for the purpose of checking, and opened fire on them with rifles and machine guns. As a result of this action, about 300 people were killed.

Kornilov's "answer"

It is believed that one of the White Guard "leaders", General L.G. Kornilov allegedly gave the order not to take prisoners, but to shoot them on the spot. But no official order on this matter was found. A.R. Kornilovets Trushnovich later said that, unlike the Bolsheviks, who declared terror by law, ideologically justifying it, Kornilov's army advocated law and order, so it avoided requisitioning property and unnecessary bloodshed. However, it also happened that circumstances forced the Kornilovites to respond with cruelty to cruelty on the part of their enemies.

For example, in the area of \u200b\u200bthe village of Gnilovskaya near Rostov, the Bolsheviks murdered several wounded Kornilov officers and a sister of mercy who accompanied them. In the area of \u200b\u200bLezhanka, a Cossack patrol was captured by the Bolsheviks and buried alive in the ground. In the same place they ripped open the stomach of the local priest and dragged him by the intestines throughout the village. Many relatives of the Kornilovites were tortured to death by the Bolsheviks, and then they began to kill prisoners ...

From the Volga region to Siberia

In the summer of 1918, supporters of the Constituent Assembly came to power in the Volga region. The White Guards perpetrated reprisals against many party and Soviet workers. On the territory under the control of Komuch, security structures, military-field courts were created, so-called "death barges" were used to execute Bolshevik-minded persons. In September-October, workers' uprisings in Kazan and Ivaschenkovo \u200b\u200bwere brutally suppressed.

In the north of Russia, 38 thousand people were imprisoned in Arkhangelsk on charges of Bolshevik activities. About 8 thousand prisoners were shot, more than a thousand died within the walls of the prison.

In the same 1918, about 30 thousand people became victims of the "white terror" in the territories under the control of General P.N. Krasnova. Here are the lines from the order of the commandant of the Makeyevsky district of November 10, 1918: “I forbid to arrest the workers, but I order them to be shot or hanged; I order all arrested workers to be hanged on the main street and not filmed for three days. "

In November 1918, Admiral A.V. Kolchak actively pursued a policy of deportation and execution of the Siberian Socialist-Revolutionaries. Member of the Central Committee of the Party of Right Social Revolutionaries D.F. Rakov wrote: “Omsk simply froze with horror ... The killed ... there were an infinite number, at least not less than 2500 people. Whole carts of corpses were transported around the city, as they carry in winter lamb and pork carcasses ... "

White terror in Russia

White terror in Russia - a concept that denotes the extreme forms of the repressive policy of anti-Bolshevik forces during the Civil War. The concept includes a set of repressive legislative acts, as well as their practical implementation in the form of radical measures directed against representatives of the Soviet government, the Bolsheviks and forces sympathetic to them. White terror also includes repressive actions outside the framework of any legislation on the part of various military and political structures of anti-Bolshevik movements of various kinds. Apart from these measures, the white movement used a system of preventive measures of terror, as acts of intimidation in relation to resisting groups of the population in the territories under its control under conditions of emergency.

The concept of white terror entered the political terminology of the period of the revolution and civil war and is traditionally used in modern historiography, although the term itself is conditional and collective, since the anti-Bolshevik forces included not only representatives of the white movement, but also very heterogeneous forces.

Unlike the “red terror”, proclaimed by the Bolsheviks in law as a response to the white terror, the term “white terror” itself had neither legislative nor even propaganda approval in the White movement during the civil war.

A number of researchers believe that a feature of the white terror was its unorganized, spontaneous nature, that it did not rise to the rank of state policy, did not act as a means of intimidating the population and did not serve as a means of destroying social classes or ethnic groups (Cossacks, Kalmyks), which was it differs from the Red Terror.

At the same time, modern Russian historians point out that orders emanating from high officials of the white movement, as well as legislative acts of white governments, testify to the authorization by the military and political authorities of repressive actions and acts of terror against the Bolsheviks and the population that supports them. the organized nature of these acts and their role in intimidating the population of the controlled territories. ...

The beginning of the white terror

Some consider the date of the first act of White Terror to be October 28, when, according to the widespread version, in Moscow the cadets who were liberating the Kremlin from the rebels captured the soldiers of the 56th reserve regiment who were there. They were ordered to line up, ostensibly to check, at the monument to Alexander II, and then machine-gun and rifle fire was suddenly opened at unarmed people. About 300 people were killed.

Sergei Melgunov, characterizing the white terror, defines it as "excesses motivated by the unbridled power and revenge", because, unlike the red terror, the white terror did not come directly from the white authorities and was not justified "in acts of government policy and even in journalism this camp ”, while the terror of the Bolsheviks was enshrined in a number of decrees and orders. White decrees and the white press did not call for mass killings on the basis of class, did not call for revenge and the destruction of social groups, unlike those of the Bolsheviks. As Kolchak himself testified, he was powerless over the phenomenon called "atamanism".

A very important point is the attitude towards the so-called. "White terror" by such a leader of the White movement as was the General Staff General of Infantry L. G. Kornilov... In Soviet historiography, quite often his words are quoted, allegedly said at the beginning of the Ice Campaign: “I give you an order, very cruel: do not take prisoners! I take responsibility for this order before God and the Russian people! " The modern historian and researcher of the White movement V. Zh. Tsvetkov, who investigated this issue, draws attention in his work that no formalized "order" with such content was found in any of the sources. At the same time, there is evidence of A. Suvorin, the only one who managed to publish his work "in hot pursuit" - in Rostov in 1919:

In the white armies, the death sentences of the military field courts and the orders of individual chiefs were carried out by the commandant's directorates, which, however, did not exclude the participation of volunteers from among the military ranks in the executions of captured Red Army soldiers. During the "Ice campaign", according to the testimony of N. N. Bogdanov - a participant in this campaign:

Those taken prisoner, after receiving information about the actions of the Bolsheviks, were shot by the commandant's detachment. The officers of the commandant's detachment at the end of the march were very sick people, before that they got nervous. Korvin-Krukovsky developed some kind of special painful cruelty. The officers of the commandant's detachment had a heavy duty to shoot the Bolsheviks, but, unfortunately, I knew many cases when, under the influence of hatred for the Bolsheviks, the officers took upon themselves the responsibility of voluntarily shooting those taken prisoner. The executions were necessary. Under the conditions in which the Volunteer Army was moving, it could not take prisoners, there was no one to lead them, and if the prisoners were released, then the next day they would fight again against the detachment.

Nevertheless, such actions in the white South, as well as in other territories in the first half of 1918, did not have the character of a state-legal repressive policy of the white authorities, they were carried out by the military in the conditions of a “theater of war” and corresponded to the ubiquitous practice of “laws of military time ".

Another eyewitness to the events, A.R. Trushnovich, who later became a well-known Kornilovite, described these circumstances in this way: unlike the Bolsheviks, whose leaders proclaimed robbery and terror as ideologically justified actions, slogans of law and order were inscribed on the banners of Kornilov's army, so it tried to avoid requisitions and unnecessary bloodshed. However, circumstances forced the volunteers at a certain moment to begin to respond with cruelty to the atrocities of the Bolsheviks:

The coming to power of supporters of the Constituent Assembly in the cities of the Volga region in the summer of 1918 was accompanied by the massacre of many party and Soviet workers, the prohibition of the Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries to serve in power structures. On the territory controlled by Komuch, state security structures, martial courts were created, and death barges were used.

In 1918, under the "white" government in the northern territory with a population of about 400 thousand people, 38 thousand arrested were sent to the Arkhangelsk prison, of which about 8 thousand were shot, more than a thousand died from beatings and diseases.

Mass executions occurred in 1918 in other territories occupied by the white armies. So, in response to the brutal murder by the Bolsheviks of the captured regiment commander M.A.Zhebrak (he was burned alive), as well as all the ranks of the regiment headquarters captured with him, as well as in response to the use of the enemy in this battle near Belaya Glina for the first time in Throughout the history of the Civil War of explosive bullets, the commander of the 3rd division of the Volunteer Army M.G. Drozdovsky ordered the execution of about 1000 captured Red Army soldiers. Before the headquarters of the Commander could intervene, they were shot several parties of the Bolsheviks who were in the area of \u200b\u200bthe battle where the Red Drozdovites died... Sources indicate that not all of the Red Army soldiers taken prisoner by Drozdovsky in the battle at Belaya Glina were shot: most of them were poured into the Soldier's Battalion and other parts of the Volunteer Army.

In the territories controlled by P.N. Krasnov, the total number of victims in 1918 reached more than 30 thousand people. “I forbid to arrest the workers, but I order them to be shot or hanged; I order all the arrested workers to be hanged on the main street and not to be filmed for three days ”- this is from the orders of the Krasnovsky chief of the Makeyevsky district commandant of November 10, 1918.

The data on the victims of the White Terror are quite different depending on the source, it is reported that in June 1918, supporters of the white movement in the territories they occupied, shot 824 people from among the Bolsheviks and sympathizers, in July 1918 - 4,141 people, in August 1918 - more than 6,000 people ...

Since mid-1918, in the legal practice of the white governments, a line has been visible on the separation of cases related to the performance of the Bolsheviks into separate proceedings. Almost simultaneously, the decisions of the Supreme Directorate of the Northern Region were issued. "On the abolition of all organs of Soviet power" of August 2, 1918 and the Provisional Siberian government "On determining the fate of former representatives of Soviet power in Siberia" of August 3, 1918 According to the first, all Soviet workers and commissars of the Bolsheviks were arrested. The arrest continued “until the investigating authorities clarified the degree of their guilt in the crimes committed by the Soviet government - murder, robbery, betrayal of the motherland, the initiation of a civil war between the classes and nationalities of Russia, theft and malicious destruction of state, public and private property under the pretext of fulfilling official duties and other violations of the basic laws of human society, honor and morality. "

According to the second act, "supporters of Bolshevism" could be subject to both criminal and political responsibility: "all representatives of the so-called Soviet power are subject to the political court of the All-Siberian Constituent Assembly" and "are kept in custody until its convocation."

The justification for the use of harsh repressive measures against activists and supporters of the Bolshevik Party, employees of the Cheka, soldiers and officers of the Red Army was the consideration of more than 150 cases by a special commission of inquiry to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks, formed by order of the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the South of Russia, General A. I. Denikin, reports, reports on mass executions and the use of torture, desecration of the shrines of the Russian Orthodox Church, murders of civilians, and other facts of the Red Terror. "All materials concluding indications of criminal acts and the guilt of individuals, the Special Commission reported to the investigating and judicial authorities ... leaving the most insignificant participants in a crime without reprisals leads to the need to deal with them over time as the main culprits of another homogeneous crime"

Similar commissions were created in 1919 in other "areas just liberated from the Bolsheviks, ... from persons who held judicial positions"

Since the summer of 1918 on the territory of Soviet Russia, the number of cases of individual white terror has increased significantly. In early June, an attempt was made on the life of Bogdanov, an investigator of the Regional Commissariat of Internal Affairs, in Petrozavodsk. On June 20, 1918, V. Volodarsky, Commissioner of the Northern Commune for Press, Propaganda and Agitation, was killed by a terrorist. On August 7, there was an attempt on the life of Reingold Berzin, at the end of the same month, Penza's commissar of internal affairs Olenin was killed, on August 27, at the Astoria hotel, an attempt was made to assassinate G.E. On August 30, 1918, as a result of assassination attempts, the chairman of the PCGC, the commissar of internal affairs of the Northern Commune M.S. Uritsky was killed and Lenin was wounded.

A number of terrorist acts in the second half of June were carried out by the organization of M.M. Filonenko. In total, in 22 provinces of Central Russia, counterrevolutionaries killed 4141 Soviet workers in July 1918. According to incomplete data, in the last 7 months of 1918, in the territory of 13 provinces, the White Guards shot 22,780 people, and the total number of victims of "kulak" uprisings in the Soviet Republic exceeded 15 thousand people by September 1918.

White terror at Kolchak

The attitude of Admiral Kolchak to the Bolsheviks, whom he called "a gang of robbers", "enemies of the people" was extremely negative.

With the coming to power of Kolchak, the Russian Council of Ministers, by its Decree of December 3, 1918, "in order to preserve the existing state system and the power of the Supreme Ruler", amended the articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Empire from 1903. Articles 99, 100 established the death penalty as an attempt on the Supreme Ruler, and for an attempt to violently overthrow the government, the seizure of territories. “Preparations” for these crimes, according to Article 101, were punishable by “urgent hard labor”. Written, printed and oral insults to the IDP were punishable by imprisonment in accordance with Art. 103. Bureaucratic sabotage, failure to comply with orders and direct duties by employees, according to Art. 329, punished with hard labor for a period of 15 to 20 years. Acts according to the Code, were considered by military district or field-naval courts in the frontline zone. Separately, it was indicated that these changes are valid only "until the establishment of the basic state laws by the people's representatives." According to these articles, for example, the actions of the Bolshevik-Socialist-Revolutionary underground, which organized the uprising in Omsk at the end of December 1918, were qualified.

The rather mild repressive measures against the Bolsheviks and their supporters were explained, first of all, by the need to preserve democratic elements in the conditions of the subsequent appeal to the world community with a proposal to recognize the sovereign state and the Supreme Ruler of Russia.

At the same time, the presence of Articles 99-101 in the temporary edition of the Criminal Code of December 3, 1918 made it possible, if necessary, to qualify the actions of "opponents of the government" according to the norms of the Criminal Code, which provided for the death penalty, hard labor and imprisonment and were not imposed by the Investigative Commissions , but by the military justice authorities.

From documentary evidence - an excerpt from the order of the governor of the Yenisei and part of the Irkutsk province, General S.N. Rozanov, special authorized Kolchak in Krasnoyarsk) dated March 27, 1919:

To the chiefs of military detachments operating in the area of \u200b\u200bthe uprising:
1. When occupying villages previously captured by robbers, demand the extradition of their leaders and leaders; if this does not happen, and there is reliable information about their presence, shoot the tenth.
2. Settlements, the population of which will meet government troops with weapons, burn; the adult male population to be shot without exception; property, horses, carts, bread and so on to take away in favor of the treasury.
Note. Everything selected must be carried out by order of the detachment ...
6. To take hostages among the population, in the event of an action by fellow villagers directed against government troops, to shoot the hostages mercilessly.

The political leaders of the Czechoslovak corps B. Pavlu and V. Girs in an official memorandum to the allies in November 1919 stated:

In the Yekaterinburg province, one of the 12 provinces under Kolchak's control, at least 25 thousand people were destroyed under Kolchak, about 10% of the two million population were overturned. They flogged both men and women and children.

The merciless attitude of Kolchak's punishers towards the workers and peasants provoked mass uprisings. As A.L. Litvin notes about Kolchak's regime, “it is difficult to talk about support for his policy in Siberia and the Urals, if out of about 400 thousand Red partisans of that time, 150 thousand acted against him, and among them 4-5% were wealthy peasants, or, as they were then called, kulaks. "

White terror under Denikin

Denikin, speaking about the mistakes of the white movement and the acts of cruelty on the part of white officers during the war with the "red misfortune" in the struggle for "Great, United and Indivisible Russia", said:

Anton Ivanovich himself recognized the level of widespread rampant cruelty and violence in the ranks of his army:

G.Ya. William notes in his memoirs:

With the formation of the Special Meeting at the Civil Code of the Armed Forces of Yugoslavia and the creation of the Office of Justice in its composition, it became possible to bring into the system the measures of responsibility of the leaders of the Soviet government and activists of the Bolshevik Party. In Siberia and in the South, the white authorities considered it necessary to amend the articles of the 1903 Criminal Code. On January 8, 1919, the Justice Department proposed to restore in its original form the wording of Articles 100 and 101 of August 4, 1917. However, the minutes of the meeting of Special Meeting No. 25 was not approved by Denikin, with his resolution: “You can change the edition. But change the repression ( death penalty) is completely impossible. The Bolshevik leaders are suing these articles - what then ?! Small - the death penalty, and the leaders - hard labor? I do not approve. Denikin ".

At a Special Meeting No. 38 of February 22, 1919, the Department of Justice approved the sanctions according to the norms of the Code of 1903, establishing the death penalty and compulsory hard labor as a sanction under article 100, hard labor for not more than 10 years under article 101, restoring the wording of article 102, which provided for liability " for participation in a community formed for the commission of a grave crime "with a sanction in the form of hard labor for up to 8 years, for" conspiracy to form a community "followed hard labor for no more than 8 years. This decision was approved by Denikin and the minutes of the meeting were signed.

It should be noted that this law contained a clarification that for "the guilty who provided insignificant assistance or favors due to unfortunate circumstances for them, fear of possible coercion or other respectable reason" came "exemption from responsibility", in other words, only voluntary supporters were punished and "Accomplices" of the Soviets and the Bolshevik government.

These measures seemed insufficient to punish the "criminal acts" of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet regime. Influenced by the Meinhardt Commission to Investigate the Acts of the Red Terror, Special Meeting No. 112 of November 15, 1919 considered the July 23 law, intensifying the repression. The category of “participants in the establishment of Soviet power” included members of “a community called the Party of Communists (Bolsheviks) or another community that established the power of the Soviets”, or “other similar organizations”. The punishable acts were: "Deprivation of life, attempted murder, torture or grievous bodily harm, or rape." The sanction was left unchanged - the death penalty with confiscation.

Denikin excluded the “fear of possible coercion” from the “exemption from liability” section, since, according to his resolution, he was “elusive for the court”.

Five members of the Special Meeting opposed execution for the mere fact of membership in communist party... Prince G.N. Trubetskoy, a member of the Cadet Party, who expressed their opinion, did not object to the execution of the communists during the time that immediately follows "the hostilities." But he considered it politically short-sighted to pass such a law on the use of such measures in peacetime. This law, stressed Trubetskoy in his note to the magazine dated November 15, will inevitably become an act "not so much an act of justice as a mass terror", and the Special Conference actually "itself takes the path of Bolshevik legislation." He proposed “to establish a wide range of punishments, from arrest to hard labor. Thus, the court would be given the opportunity to conform to the specifics of each individual case "," to differentiate the responsibility of the Communists who showed their affiliation to the party by criminal actions, from the responsibility of those who, although they were part of the party, did not commit any criminal actions in connection with the party affiliation. perpetrated ", while the death penalty will cause widespread discontent among the masses and" ideological delusions are not eradicated, but intensified by punishment. "

Mitigating Terror and Aministries

At the same time, under the conditions of inevitability of punishment for complicity with the RCP (b), in 1919 an amnesty of the RKKA officials was proclaimed several times - everyone who "voluntarily goes over to the side of the legitimate government." On May 28, 1919, an appeal was issued "From the Supreme Ruler and Supreme Commander-in-Chief to the Officers and Soldiers of the Red Army":

After the defeat of the ARSUR and the armies of the Eastern Front in 1919-1920, the work of the commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks practically ceased, and amnesty was increasingly followed. For example, January 23, 1920 Chief chief In the Amur Military District, General V.V. Rozanov in Vladivostok issues order No. 4, which states that the captured partisans and Red Army men who participated in the battles because of "a wrong or peculiar understanding of love for the Motherland" were subject to a complete amnesty "with oblivion of all they had done." ...

Back in 1918, a rather unique punishment from the time of the White Terror was introduced - expulsion to the Council of Deputies. Legislatively, it was enshrined in the Order of May 11, 1920, the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Yugoslavia P.N. speeches and other methods of agitation, but not in print, to the organization or continuation of the strike, participation in unauthorized, by agreement between the workers, termination of work, in obvious sympathy for the Bolsheviks, in exorbitant personal gain, in evading the execution of work to assist the front "

According to the decree of the Governor of the Amur Territory, General MK Dieterikhs No. 25 of August 29, 1922, which became practically the last act of judicial practice of the white governments, the death penalty is excluded, the captured Red partisans and the peasants sympathetic to them are subjected to a rather unusual punishment: “release to their homes under the supervision of the respective rural societies "," to persuade them to lag behind the criminal work and return to their peaceful home ", as well as the traditional decision -" to send them to the Far Eastern Republic. "

Torture

The memoirs tell about the facts of the use of torture in the White Army:

The minister of the Kolchak government, Baron Budberg, wrote in his diary:

Memory of the victims of the white terror

On the territory of the former Soviet Union, there are a significant number of monuments dedicated to the victims of the White Terror. Often, monuments were erected at the sites of mass graves (mass graves) of victims of terror.

Mass grave of the victims of the white terror in Volgograd is located in a public garden on Dobrolyubov Street. The monument was built in 1920 on the site of a common grave of 24 Red Army soldiers who were shot by whites. The now existing monument in the form of a rectangular stele was created by the architect D.V. Ershova in 1965.

In memory of the victims of the white terror in Voronezh is located in a park near the regional Nikitin library. The monument was opened in 1920 on the site of a public execution in 1919 by the troops of K. Mamontov of the city's party leaders; it has a modern look since 1929 (architect A.I. Popov-Shaman).

The monument to the victims of the White Terror in Vyborg was opened in 1961 at the 4th kilometer of the Leningradskoye Highway. The monument is dedicated to 600 prisoners shot by whites from a machine gun on the rampart of the city.

Bibliography

• A. Lytvyn. Red and white terror 1918-1922. - M .: Eksmo, 2004
• Tsvetkov V. Zh. White terror - a crime or a punishment? Evolution of judicial and legal norms of responsibility for state crimes in the legislation of white governments in 1917-1922.
• S. V. Drokov, L. I. Ermakova, S. V. Konina. The Supreme Ruler of Russia: Documents and Materials of the Investigative File of Admiral A.V. Kolchak - M., 2003 // Institute Russian history RAS, Directorate of the RiAF FSB of Russia
• V. D. Zimina The White Cause of Rebellious Russia: Political Regimes of the Civil War. 1917-1920 M .: Ros. humanizes. un-t, 2006.467 p (Ser. History and memory). ISBN 5-7281-0806-7

Notes

1. V. D. Zimina The White Cause of Rebellious Russia: Political Regimes of the Civil War. 1917-1920 M .: Ros. humanizes. un-t, 2006.467 p (Ser. History and memory). ISBN 5-7281-0806-7, p. 38
2. Tsvetkov V. Zh. White Terror - Crime or Punishment? Evolution of judicial and legal norms of responsibility for state crimes in the legislation of white governments in 1917-1922.
3. A. Lytvyn. Red and white terror 1918-1922. - M .: Eksmo, 2004
4. Terror of the White Army. Selection of documents.
5. Ya. Ya. Peche "The Red Guard in Moscow in the battles for October", Moscow-Leningrad, 1929
6. S. P. Melgunov. "Red Terror" in Russia 1918-1923
7. Tsvetkov V.Zh. V. Zh. Tsvetkov Lavr Georgievich Kornilov
8. Trushnovich A.R. Memoirs of a Kornilovite: 1914-1934 / Comp. Ya.A. Trushnovich. - Moscow-Frankfurt: Posev, 2004 .-- 336 p., 8 ill. ISBN 5-85824-153-0, pp. 82-84
9. I. S. Ratkovsky, The Red Terror and the Activities of the Cheka in 1918, St. Petersburg: Publishing House of St. Petersburg. University, 2006, p. 110, 111
10. R. G. Gagkuev The Last Knight // Drozdovsky and Drozdovtsy. M .: NP "Posev", 2006. ISBN 5-85824-165-4, p. 86

We went to power to hang, but we had to hang in order 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 is not depleted. I am not going to play for one or the other side. I'll just give 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, those very future heroes-founders of the white movement ...

Lenin's government, which took responsibility for the country in November-17, invited the Romanov family to go to their relatives - in London, but the English the 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 chests. ", - writes the 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 after the Reds, that is, ultimately - 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 that 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? Here's how: from late February - early March 1918, the imperialist powers of both coalitions fighting in the world war began a large-scale armed invasion of our territory.

February 18, 1918german and Austro-Hungarian troops (about 50 divisions) launched an offensive from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In two weeks they occupied vast territories.

March 3, 1918the Brest Peace was signed, 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 ...

5th of Marchgerman troops under the command of Major General von der Goltz invaded Finland, where they soon overthrew the Finnish Soviet government. April 18thgerman troops invaded the Crimea, and on April 30 they captured Sevastopol.

TO mid Junemore than 15 thousand German troops with aviation and artillery were stationed in Transcaucasia, including 10 thousand people in Poti and 5 thousand in Tiflis (Tbilisi).

Turkish troops operated in Transcaucasia since mid-February.

March 9, 1918the British landing entered Murmansk under the pretext ... of the need to protect warehouses of military equipment from the Germans.

5th of Apriljapanese troops landed in Vladivostok, but under the pretext ... of protecting Japanese citizens "from banditry" in this city.

May 25- Speech by the Czechoslovak Corps, whose echelons were located 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 their 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 they pointed out to him the "German orientation" and set up Denikin's "volunteers" as an example, 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 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 marked by 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 returned, tyranny, robberies, terrible Jewish pogroms reigned ... ".

The atrocities of Kolchak's troops are legendary. The number of those killed and tortured 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. I will not be mistaken if I say,” American General William Sidney Greves, an eyewitness to those events, later admitted, “that for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were 100 people. killed by anti-Bolshevik elements ”.

The "ideology" of whites in this matter was clearly expressed by General Kornilov:
“We went to power to hang, but we had to hang in order to come to power” ...

Americans and Scots guard the captured Red Army soldiers 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 alone, the Germans exported 52 thousand tons of grain and fodder, 34 thousand tons of sugar, 45 million eggs, 53 thousand horses and 39 thousand head of cattle from Ukraine. There was a large-scale looting of Russia.

And about the atrocities (no less bloody and massive - no one argues) of the Red Army and the KGB, 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 misery. 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 the 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 Soviet government 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 ...

Tomichi carry 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, they were 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 organs 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 caught in specific subversive actions 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 revolt 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 “Slavic brothers” 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 sympathy for 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 invaders 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 captured by the invaders. Here are the testimonies of those who had been 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 on Mudyuga lost their lives, many went mad ... ”.

American interventionist 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”. The most inhuman embodiment of them 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 the bunk 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 freed 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 into 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 that indicate that the “barges” and “trains of death” have become 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.

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. So it was all over 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 the 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 from wounds, hunger and epidemics. The material losses of the country, according to experts, amounted to an astronomical figure - 50 billion gold rubles ...

The White Terror in Russia is a concept that denotes the extreme forms of the repressive policy of anti-Bolshevik forces during the Civil War. The concept includes a set of repressive legislative acts, as well as their practical implementation in the form of radical measures directed against representatives of the Soviet government, the Bolsheviks and forces sympathetic to them. White terror also includes repressive actions outside the framework of any legislation on the part of various military and political structures of anti-Bolshevik movements of various kinds. Apart from these measures, the white movement used a system of preventive measures of terror, as acts of intimidation in relation to resisting groups of the population in the territories under its control under conditions of emergency.

The concept of white terror entered the political terminology of the period of the revolution and civil war and is traditionally used in modern historiography, although the term itself is conditional and collective, since the anti-Bolshevik forces included not only representatives of the white movement, but also very heterogeneous forces.

Unlike the “red terror”, proclaimed by the Bolsheviks in law as a response to the white terror, the term “white terror” itself had neither legislative nor even propaganda approval in the White movement during the civil war.

Researchers such as S.P. Melgunov, V.P. Buldakov, I. V. Mikhailov believe that the peculiarity of the white terror was its unorganized, spontaneous character, that it did not rise to the rank of state policy, did not act as a means of intimidating the population and did not serve as a means of destroying social classes or ethnic groups (Cossacks, Kalmyks), which was its unlike the Red Terror.

At the same time, modern Russian historians point out that orders emanating from high officials of the white movement, as well as legislative acts of white governments, testify to the authorization by the military and political authorities of repressive actions and acts of terror against the Bolsheviks and the population that supports them. the organized nature of these acts and their role in intimidating the population of the controlled territories.

None of the leaders of the opposing sides escaped the use of terror against their opponents and the civilian population. The forms and methods of terror varied. But they were also used by the adherents of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch in Samara, the Provisional Regional Government in the Urals, the Provisional Siberian Government, the Supreme Administration of the Northern Region), and the White movement itself.

Terror was used by whites as a means of attracting the population into their own forces, a means of demoralizing the enemy.

The main organizers of the "white" terror were A.I. Denikin, A.V. Kolchak, P.N. Wrangel, V. S. Denisov, K. V. Sakharov.

Some consider the date of the first act of White Terror to be October 28, 1917, when, according to the widespread version, in Moscow the cadets, who were liberating the Kremlin from the rebels, captured the soldiers of the 56th reserve regiment who were there. They were ordered to line up, ostensibly for checking, at the monument to Alexander II, and then machine-gun and rifle fire was suddenly opened at unarmed people. About 300 people were killed.

A very important point is the attitude towards the so-called. "White terror" by such a leader of the White movement as the General Staff of the General Staff of Infantry L. G. Kornilov. In Soviet historiography, quite often his words are quoted, allegedly said at the beginning of the Ice Campaign: “I give you an order, very cruel: do not take prisoners! I take responsibility for this order before God and the Russian people! " The modern historian and researcher of the White movement V. Zh. Tsvetkov, who investigated this issue, draws attention in his work that no formalized "order" with such content was found in any of the sources. At the same time, there is evidence of A. Suvorin, the only one who managed to publish his work "in hot pursuit" - in Rostov in 1919:

“The first battle of the army, organized and given its current name [Volunteer], was the attack on Gukov in mid-January. Releasing the officer's battalion from Novocherkassk, Kornilov admonished him with words that expressed his exact view of Bolshevism: in his opinion, it was not socialism, even the most extreme, but a call for people without conscience, people without conscience, to pogrom all working and state workers. Russia [in his assessment of “Bolshevism,” Kornilov repeated its typical assessment by many of the then Social Democrats, for example, Plekhanov]. He said: “Don't take these scoundrels prisoner for me! The more terror, the more victory will be with them! "Subsequently, he added to this harsh instruction:" We are not waging war with the wounded! "..."

In the white armies, the death sentences of the military field courts and the orders of individual chiefs were carried out by the commandant's directorates, which, however, did not exclude the participation of volunteers from among the military ranks in the executions of captured Red Army soldiers. During the "Ice campaign", according to the testimony of N. N. Bogdanov - a participant in this campaign:

Those taken prisoner, after receiving information about the actions of the Bolsheviks, were shot by the commandant's detachment. The officers of the commandant's detachment at the end of the march were very sick people, before they got nervous. Korvin-Krukovsky developed some kind of special painful cruelty. The officers of the commandant's detachment had a heavy duty to shoot the Bolsheviks, but, unfortunately, I knew many cases when, under the influence of hatred for the Bolsheviks, the officers took upon themselves the responsibility of voluntarily shooting those taken prisoner. The executions were necessary. Under the conditions in which the Volunteer Army was moving, it could not take prisoners, there was no one to lead them, and if the prisoners were released, then the next day they would fight again against the detachment.

Nevertheless, such actions in the white South, as well as in other territories in the first half of 1918, did not have the character of a state-legal repressive policy of the white authorities, they were carried out by the military in a “theater of war” and corresponded to the ubiquitous practice of “laws wartime".

Another eyewitness to the events, A.R. Trushnovich, who later became a well-known Kornilovite, described these circumstances in this way: unlike the Bolsheviks, whose leaders proclaimed robbery and terror as ideologically justified actions, slogans of law and order were inscribed on the banners of Kornilov's army, so she tried to avoid requisitions and unnecessary bloodshed. However, circumstances forced the volunteers at a certain moment to begin to respond with cruelty to the atrocities of the Bolsheviks:

“Near the village of Gnilovskaya, the Bolsheviks killed the wounded Kornilov officers and a sister of mercy. Near Lezhanka the patrol was taken prisoner and buried alive in the ground. In the same place the Bolsheviks ripped open the priest's stomach and dragged him by the guts along the village. Their atrocities multiplied, and almost every Kornilovite had among his loved ones those who were tortured by the Bolsheviks. In response to this, the Kornilovites stopped taking prisoners ... It worked. The fear of death joined the consciousness of the invincibility of the White Army "

The coming to power of supporters of the Constituent Assembly in the cities of the Volga region in the summer of 1918 was accompanied by reprisals against many party and Soviet workers, the prohibition of the Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries to serve in power structures. On the territory controlled by Komuch, state security structures, martial courts were created, and death barges were used.

On September 3, 1918, the workers' protest in Kazan was harshly suppressed, on October 1 - in Ivaschenkovo. According to the employee Komuch S. Nikolaev, "the terror regime took on especially cruel forms in the Middle Volga region, through which the movement of Czechoslovak legionnaires took place."

On the night of July 6, 1918, armed anti-Soviet demonstrations began in Yaroslavl, and then in Rybinsk and Murom.

Having captured part of the city, the leaders of the demonstration began a merciless terror. Brutal reprisals were carried out against Soviet party workers. Thus, the commissar of the military district S. M. Nakimson and the chairman of the executive committee of the city council D. S. Zakim were killed. 200 of those arrested were taken to the “death barge”, anchored in the middle of the Volga. Hundreds of people who were shot, destroyed houses, the remains of fires, ruins. A similar picture was observed in other Volga cities.

This was only the beginning of the "white" terror.

In the Urals, Siberia and Arkhangelsk, the Social Revolutionaries and People's Socialists immediately declared their commitment The Constituent Assembly and the arrests of Soviet workers and communists.

In just a year in power in the northern territory with a population of 400 thousand people, 38 thousand arrested persons passed through the Arkhangelsk prison. Of these, 8 thousand were shot and more than a thousand died from beatings and diseases. The political regimes established in 1918 in Russia are quite comparable, first of all, in terms of the predominantly violent methods of resolving the issues of organizing power.

In November 1918, Kolchak, who came to power in Siberia, began by deporting and killing the Social Revolutionaries. "I forbid to arrest the workers, but I order them to be shot or hanged"; "I order all the arrested workers to hang on the main street and not to shoot for three days" - this is from the orders of the Krasnovsky esaul commandant of the Makeyevsky district of November 10, 1918. Terror served as a means of retaining power for the confronting parties.

AI Denikin in his "Sketches of Russian Troubles" admitted that the volunteer troops left "a dirty mud in the form of violence, robberies and Jewish pogroms. As for the enemy (Soviet) warehouses, shops, carts or property of the Red Army, they were dismantled randomly, without a system. " The White General noted that his counterintelligence institutions "covering the territory of the south with a dense network, were centers of provocations and organized robbery."

Already in 1918. in Russia, the "terror of the environment" began to rule, when the symmetry of the actions of the parties became inevitably similar. This found its continuation in 1919-1920, when both the Reds and the Whites synchronously built dictatorial militarized states, where the implementation of a given goal prevailed over the value of human life. Kolchak and Denikin were professional military men, patriots who had their own views on the future of the country. For many years, in Soviet historiography, Kolchak was characterized as a reactionary and a hidden monarchist; abroad, the image of a liberal was created, enjoying the support of the population.

These are extreme points of view

During interrogations in the Irkutsk Cheka in January 1920. Kolchak said that he did not know about many facts of the ruthless attitude towards the workers and peasants on the part of his punishers. Perhaps he was telling the truth. But it is difficult to talk about support for his policy in Siberia and the Urals, if out of about 400 thousand Red partisans of that time, 150 thousand acted against him, and among them 4-5% were wealthy peasants, or, as they were then called, kulaks. ...

The Kolchak government created the punitive apparatus on the basis of the traditions of pre-revolutionary Russia, but changing the names: instead of the gendarmerie - the state security, the police - the militia, etc. The managers of the punitive bodies in the provinces in the spring of 1919 demanded not to comply with the legal norms created for peacetime, but proceed from expediency.

This was the case, especially during the punitive actions. “A year ago,” A. Budberg, Minister of War of the Kolchak government, wrote in his diary on August 4, 1919, “the population saw us as deliverers from the heavy commissar captivity, and now they hate us just as they hated the commissars, if not more; and, even worse than hatred, it no longer believes us, it does not expect anything good from us. " A dictatorship is inconceivable without a strong repressive apparatus and terror. The word "execution" was one of the most popular in the vocabulary of the Civil War. The Denikin government was no exception in this regard.

The police in the territory captured by the general were called state guards

Its number reached by September 1919 almost 78 thousand people (note that Denikin's active army then had about 110 thousand bayonets and sabers). Denikin, like Kolchak, denied his involvement in any repressive measures.

He blamed counterintelligence, which had become a "hotbed of provocation and organized robbery," of the governors and military leaders of this. Oswag's reports told Denikin about robberies, looting, military brutality against the civilian population, it was under his command that 226 Jewish pogroms took place, as a result of which thousands of innocent people died.

Numerous testimonies speak of the cruelty of the punitive policy of Wrangel 81, Yudenich and other generals. They were complemented by the actions of many atamans who spoke on behalf of the regular white armies.

Since the summer of 1918 on the territory of Soviet Russia, the number of cases of individual white terror has increased significantly. In early June, in Petrozavodsk, an attempt was organized on the life of the investigator of the Regional Commissariat of Internal Affairs Bogdanov. On June 20, 1918, V. Volodarsky, Commissioner of the Northern Commune for Press, Propaganda and Agitation, was killed by a terrorist. On August 7 there was an attempt on Reingold Berzin's life, at the end of the same month Penza's commissar of internal affairs Olenin was killed, on August 27 at the Astoria hotel an attempt was made to assassinate the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Northern Commune G. Ye. On August 30, 1918, as a result of the assassination attempts, the chairman of the PCGC, the commissar of internal affairs of the Northern Commune M.S. Uritsky was killed and Lenin was wounded.

A number of terrorist acts in the second half of June were carried out by the organization of M.M. Filonenko. In total, in 22 provinces of Central Russia, counterrevolutionaries killed 4141 Soviet workers in July 1918. According to incomplete data, in the last 7 months of 1918, in the territory of 13 provinces, the White Guards shot 22,780 people, and the total number of victims of "kulak" uprisings in the Soviet Republic exceeded 15 thousand by September 1918.

There are no exact estimates of the number of victims of the White and Red Terror.

The commission set up by Denikin to investigate the acts of the Bolsheviks in 1918-1919 named 1,700 victims of the Red Terror. Latsis reported that during these two years, the number of arrested by the Cheka was 128,010, of which 8,641 people were shot.

Modern Soviet historians have calculated that in 1917-1922. killed 15-16 million Russians, of which 1.3 million were steel in 1918-1920. victims of terror, banditry, pogroms, participation in peasant uprisings and their suppression.

The White Terror turned out to be as senseless for achieving the set goal as any other.

... "White Terror" is a rather generalized term that includes phenomena that took place under various "political signs", both of the White movement itself and of the anti-Bolshevik resistance in general, including the right-wing socialist regimes of "democratic counter-revolution" in the summer of autumn 1918.

These regimes themselves, for example the Samara KOMUCH, despite the predominance of the "socialist element" in the leadership, relied in their practical activities on volunteer white military formations, often even establishing themselves with the direct participation of the officers' underground.

Thus, the anti-Bolshevik terror of even socialist governments was often based on white terror. The difference between "right-wing socialist" and "white" regimes is all the more insignificant, since the white regimes cannot be unambiguously opposed to the "popular Socialist-Revolutionary regimes" in the matter of choosing the future form of government.

It should also be added that the scale of the terror of the "Socialist-Revolutionary" state formations was by no means connected with their political rhetoric. So, in the Volga region during the period of "Socialist Revolutionary" state building in the summer of autumn 1918, at least 5 thousand people became victims of the anti-Bolshevik terror.

White (anti-Bolshevik) terror during the Civil War in Russia also includes the terror of the White Finns, White Czechs, White Poles, German and other occupation forces (for example, Japan), since their actions extended to large areas of Russia and solved one problem: the establishment of anti-Bolshevik principles on the controlled their territories. A number of these foreign formations were directly subordinate to the White authorities, others acted in concert with them, or with the "popular socialist regimes" or local "national regimes" of anti-Bolshevik orientation.

White terror during the Civil War should also be understood as such diverse phenomena as individual anti-Bolshevik terror and armed counterrevolutionary demonstrations, during which lynch executions of Soviet workers were recorded (this study is considered more briefly than the "mass white terror").

Thus, a variety of violent actions directed against the Bolshevik power in the territory soviet republic (or its former territory), which have signs of terror, can ultimately be counted among the manifestations of white (anti-Bolshevik) terror. This formulation of the question, perhaps, does not quite justifiably expand the concept of white terror in relation, in particular, to the peasant movement.

However, in a simplified version and when compared with the Red Terror and repression (in the same broad interpretation), in their confrontation, mutual causation, mutual influence, it seems acceptable to consider the White Terror as an integral phenomenon (including this aspect).

The quantitative indicators of the victims of insurgency and the victims of individual white terror on the territory of Soviet Russia are difficult to establish. There are general statistics only for individual periods. Thus, in 22 provinces of Central Russia in July 1918, counter-revolutionaries killed 4141 Soviet workers. The general figures of the Bolshevik victims are more often evaluative and subjective. Thus, according to the research of M. Bernshtam (a researcher who is critical of the Soviet regime), during the Civil War, only the rebels and the “greens” killed 100 thousand supporters of Soviet power and Soviet employees.

This “internal” anti-Bolshevik terror should be taken into account when analyzing white (anti-Bolshevik) terror in general, despite its more complex socio-political characteristics. This seems all the more permissible since the Red Terror itself did not exist in the sense that it is presented in publications of the period of the Civil War.

Both the white state terror (the terror of "white governments") and the red (the terror of the central government) have clear boundaries - spatial and temporal. Terror, white and red in general, are more vague terms, expressing rather a simplified reduction of the opposing sides to red and white, revolution and counter-revolution ...

The first information about the mass white terror is often attributed to April June 1918. This period can be described as the beginning of the frontal stage of the Civil War and, therefore, as the beginning of a new round of mutual brutality and repression. First of all, the bloody suppression of the communist revolution in Finland should be noted.

If during the Civil War in Finland military and civilian losses on both sides amounted to 25 thousand people, then after the suppression of the revolution, about 8 thousand people were shot by the White Finns, and up to 90 thousand participants in the revolution were imprisoned. These data are also confirmed by modern Finnish research.

According to the famous Finnish historian, 8,400 Red prisoners were executed in Finland by whites, including 364 young girls. After the end of the Civil War, 12,500 people died from hunger and its consequences in Finnish concentration camps. A study by Marjo Liukkonen of the University of Lapland provides new details on the execution of women and children in one of the largest concentration camps in Hennal. Only women were shot there without trial 218.

This "white experience" of Finland is important in that it preceded the Russian experience of large-scale white terror and was one of the reasons for the brutality of the Civil War in Russia on both sides. It is also important that it was a consequence of the establishment of a new Finnish white statehood in the territories liberated from the Finnish revolutionaries.

The fact that these events took place in a neighboring country did not diminish their impact on the situation in Russia, especially since there were a large number of Russian citizens among those shot in Tammerfors and Vyborg. As events unfolded in Finland, the population (and even more so the country's leadership) could compare them with the situation in Russia and draw certain conclusions and forecasts for the development of the situation already in Russian conditions, in particular, for the possible behavior of the victorious counter-revolution.

Subsequently, this brutality in the suppression of the Finnish revolution was pointed out as one of the reasons for the introduction of the Red Terror in Soviet Russia in the fall of 1918. The experience of the "Finnish pacification" was also considered by the white side. This does not limit the influence of the factor of Finnish terror on Russian events. It should also be noted that in the future from the Finnish lands, numerous military formations will penetrate into the territory of Russia, confirming on the ground the practice of destroying Bolshevism in the broadest sense.

The beginning of the wave of mass "Czechoslovak repressions" also dates back to this period. The line of the Eastern (Czechoslovak) Front at the beginning of the summer of 1918 was rapidly rolling back to the west, and along with the movement of the troops of the Czechoslovak corps, anti-Bolshevik terror came here. The Czechoslovak events duplicated the Finnish ones in many ways.

In Kazan alone, during the relatively short stay of Czech and White troops (a little more than a month), at least 1,500 people will become victims of terror. The total number of "Bolshevik victims" of the advance of the Czechoslovak corps in the summer of 1918 approached 5 thousand people. Thus, the uprising of the Czechoslovak corps contributed not only to the establishment of anti-Bolshevik regimes in the East of Russia, but also to the overall deepening (tightening) of the Civil War.

The terror in the Volga region was accompanied by similar actions in the territories of the Orenburg and neighboring Ural Cossacks, as well as in the region of Izhevsk and Votkinsk. The scale of these repressions varied. But even in Izhevsk and Votkinsk, the anti-Bolshevik "workers' territories," in the fall of 1918, terror became a reality.

The total number of victims of the punitive policy in this working-class region in the fall of 1918 is in the range of 500-1000 people. The Cossack terror of 1918 in the above-mentioned regions was not inferior to the Czechoslovak terror, even outstripping it in frequency of use. At the same time, the actions of the Cossacks and Czechoslovak units often complemented each other in repressive practice, as was the case in Chelyabinsk.

It can be argued that the White Terror in the summer of 1918 is already becoming systemic, being one of the components of the new stage of the frontal Civil War, accompanying the formation of an alternative Soviet system of statehood.

Similar manifestations of punitive policy during this period also occur in the North Caucasus, where the white statehood acquired territorial independence in the summer, until that moment being an extraterritorial “invited” phenomenon in the Don and Kuban. Gaining control of initially two provinces in the North Caucasus, and then large territories, led to intensive white state building and the corresponding punitive practice.

However, the statement about the absence of white terror in the earlier period of the Civil War would be erroneous. The manifestations of anti-Bolshevik terror, including mass terror, are already recorded during the so-called "echelon" war. We can note both the incipient individual terror and the numerous excesses of the partisan war.

So, pioneering was directly associated with the practice of white terror, with mass shootings and hostages. The small number of personnel, social and territorial isolation, provoked a reaction in the form of numerous acts of terror. The repressive practice of 1917, which was among the leaders of the white movement, also partly affected. Kornilov's order "Take no prisoners!" - just an iceberg of the radical sentiments of the partisan period of the white movement.

For example, the partisan detachment of the Esaul V.M. Chernetsov (formed on November 30, 1917) was marked by mass executions back in 1917, and at the beginning of 1918 he repeatedly used the practice of terror. Only two combat episodes of the detachment give about 400 people who were shot after the battle: Yasinovsky mine 118 people, Likhaya station - 250. In addition to Chernetsov's partisan detachment, a number of volunteer detachments carried out similar actions on the Don.

The famous spring campaign of Yassy - Rostov-on-Don of Colonel M.G.Drozdovsky in 1918 was also accompanied by mass executions. Only according to the documents of the personal origin of the participants in the campaign, the number of Drozdovites executed during the movement was at least 700 people, moreover, these data are clearly not complete. After the connection of Drozdovsky's detachment with the Volunteer Army, the situation will not change. In Belaya Glina alone during the Second Kuban campaign, the Drozdovites, according to various sources, will shoot from 1300 to 2 thousand people.

The famous First Kuban ("Ice") campaign, led by General L. G. Kornilov, was marked by no less repressions. In one Lezhanka, at least 500 people were shot by the Kornilovites. However, even before this campaign, the repressive practice of volunteers knew the mass shootings of prisoners. Thus, during the occupation of Rostov-on-Don at the end of 1917, volunteer detachments carried out the first mass white executions in the region.

The first repressions during this period are also recorded in the practice of the Kuban detachments under the command of the then captain, and soon already General VL Pokrovsky. The practice of these mob military executions was carried over by the White movement to a later period.

A similar situation was in the Cossack territories, where the explosion of violence in the first half of 1918 was caused by the confrontation between the Cossacks and nonresidents, frontline Cossacks and old Cossacks. The social conflict, intensified by the demobilization processes during the formation of Soviet power in the localities, became the basis for a whole series of bloody conflicts during this period. The withdrawal of the red units from Ukraine only increased the tension in the region. A striking example is the bloody destruction of the two thousandth red Tiraspol detachment, which surrendered in early April 1918.

Thus, if it is possible to assert with confidence about the systemic white terror since the beginning of the summer of 1918, then in an earlier period, while not yet a system-forming (state) element, it was also a mass phenomenon. Individual cases of white terror, often individual or lynching, are recorded even in the late autumn of 1917.

At the same time, the summer of 1918, revealing a new round of violence on both sides, marked the onset of a period of mass white and red terror in the fall of 1918. This was partly caused by mobilization processes (the suppression of the September 1918 Slavgorod uprising and a whole series of similar Siberian and Volga peasants uprisings), partly by the need for greater control over the newly occupied territories (the North Caucasus, where the "Maikop massacre" stands out).

The military factor and the movement of the front line also played an important role. The "echelons and barges of death" with political prisoners moved to them became widely known. Only in the course of such transportations in the autumn winter of 1918 and at the beginning of 1919 at least three thousand people will die. And the new territories were subjected to total cleansing (the Perm events of December 1918).

The widespread development of the system of white concentration camps was also characteristic of this period. At the same time, both existing, for example, in Siberia, concentration camps for prisoners of war during the First World War, and new prisons and concentration camps were used. At the same time, the scale of new prison construction in the "white" territories exceeded that of the Bolsheviks, who had at their disposal a sufficient prison base.

The subsequent period of territorial confrontation between the two key states in the Civil War will reveal an even greater extent of mutual terror. We will cite only two generalizing figures for 1918-1919, widely known to specialists. Incomplete data collected by the All-Ukrainian Society for Assistance to the Victims of the Intervention gives an idea of \u200b\u200bthe size of the victims for 1918-1919. on the territory of Ukraine (territorially much smaller than the modern one).

From April 1, 1924 to April 1, 1925, he registered 237,227 claims for the total amount of material losses - 626,737,390 rubles. 87 k. Killed - 38.436 people, mutilated - 15.385 people, raped - 1.048 women, cases of arrest, flogging, etc. - 45.803. In the Yekaterinburg province, according to incomplete data collected by the Chekists for the 1920 process over the Kolchak ministers, in 1918-1919. at least twenty-five thousand people were shot by the white authorities.

The Yekaterinburg and Verkhotursky counties were subjected to special repressions. “The Kizelovskiy mines alone - shot, about 8 thousand were buried alive, Tagil and Nadezhdinsky districts - about ten thousand were shot. Yekaterinburg and other districts - no less than eight thousand people.

Turnover of about 10% of the two million population. They flogged men, women, children. Ruined - all the poor, all sympathizers of the Soviet regime. " Subsequently, these data were included in many publications.

Of course, these figures should be taken critically, especially in the Kizelovsky mines, but the very fact of massive repressions in the region took place. In neighboring provinces, the level of repression was lower, but we note that only when the Omsk December uprising of 1918 was suppressed, up to one and a half thousand people died. It is therefore no coincidence that the famous remark of American General W. S. Greves:
« In Eastern Siberia, there were terrible murders, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks, and I will not be mistaken if I say that in Eastern Siberia for every person killed by the Bolsheviks, there were 100 people killed by anti-Bolshevikelements» .

S. S. Aksakov, who served in white units in the East of Russia, later recalled: “ This is the worst thing, but the most terrible thing is the civil war. After all, there brother killed brother! With a shudder I recalled how they, 19 years old, were ordered to shoot prisoners. He avoided it when he could, but there was no rear and there was nowhere to send them. It was the same with the red» .

There are other generalizing data on the White Terror for 1918-1919, for example, in Udmurtia. Here, according to the published archival materials, 8298 people were shot and died as a result of torture, 10,937 people were subjected to various forms of violence, and 2,786 more people became disabled as a result of the actions of the authorities.

White repressions were also large-scale this year in other regions of Russia: in the North and Northwest of Russia, in the North Caucasus, etc. Almost every month of this year gives several cases of the use of mass casualties. The first half of 1919 is typical.

January was marked by Cossack shootings in the Ural region, where 1,050 people will be killed.

In February, at least 800 participants in the Yenisei Maklakov uprising will be shot by whites, executions of many thousands are taking place in the North Caucasus, where 1300 people will be executed during the peace of the Terek region, and in Vladikavkaz the number of deaths is difficult to count.

In March, mass executions take place in Ufa (670 victims), Tyumen (400-500), the destruction of the village of Semenovka (at least 257 people) by Japanese troops, and the suppression of the Chechen village of Alkhan Yurt (up to 1000 people) are known.

The scale of repressions was no less significant in April, when participants in the Kolchuginsky uprising (up to 600 people), the Kustanai uprising (3000 people), and the Mariinsky uprising (2000) were executed. Let us also point out the Jewish and Soviet pogroms, of which the Grigoriev revolt (more than 1,500 victims) stood out. The victims of the ataman Grigoriev, given his successful attempts to rapprochement with the white movement, can, in our opinion, not only not be taken beyond the framework of the anti-Bolshevik terror, but at a certain stage even taken into account when counting the victims of the white terror.

The white offensive of General A.I.Denikin's troops and the retreat of A.V. Kolchak's troops give no less large-scale figures for the summer shootings of 1919. Just as the greatest volcanic activity is recorded on the faults of tectonic platforms, in the zone of contact between the red and white statehood in 1919. , in the front zone, there will be massive incidents of white terror.

Votkinsk, Kharkov, Yekaterinoslav, Bakhmach, and Tsaritsyn - each of these cities gave many hundreds of executed, sometimes thousands, and in the summer of 1919 there was also the suppression of the Semirechye uprising (at least 3000 victims), the capture of the partisan capital Taseevo (hundreds of people died) and many other cases of white terror: Aleksandrovsk (680), Lebyazhye (357), Romny (500), Sakharnoe (700), Krasnoyarsk (600), Budarin and Lbischensk (up to 5, 5 thousand victims).

During this period, numerous new evacuations of prisoners were carried out, with hundreds and even thousands of victims, suffice it to mention the evacuation of prisoners to Tyumen. A number of these figures can be challenged in one direction or another, but the explosion of white repression during this period is undeniable. The total number of victims of the White Terror in August 1919 alone is about 30 thousand people.

The autumn of 1919, with its ebb and flow of the positions of the white troops, was characterized by no less scale of white terror. The raid on Moscow, the retreat to Omsk, give new hundreds and thousands of victims.

However, it would be deeply wrong to reduce mutual terror to military excesses only. Terror in the Civil War from a social phenomenon becomes political, inherent in the activities of all parties. Red, pink, yellow, black, green, white terror is just a conventional designation of one and the same phenomenon, the refraction of terrorist thinking in the prism of political views. Social conflicts were far behind the front lines, deep in the rear. The "Internal Front" often recorded the same scale of white terror as in the newly acquired territories.

At the same time, the interventionists also contributed. “Were the allies at war with Soviet Russia? Of course not, but they killed Soviet people as soon as they caught their eye, they remained on Russian soil as conquerors, they supplied the enemies of the Soviet government with weapons, they blocked its ports, they sunk its ships. They ardently strove for the downfall of the Soviet government and made plans for this downfall, ”W. Churchill argued. The Society for Assistance to the Victims of the Intervention, created in 1924, had collected by July 1, 1927, over 1.3 million applications from Soviet citizens, who recorded 111,730 murders and deaths, including 71,704 for the rural population and 40,026 for the urban population. , for which the invaders were responsible.

Against the background of 1918-1919. the white repressions of 1920 are smaller. However, this is not due to the liberalization of the white regimes, but to the "smaller area" of the use of repression in the face of the approaching defeat of the white movement. The intensity of the white repressions during this period is no less than before, and mass executions of several hundred people are documented. Thousands of executions are also known.

It is enough to look at the memoirs of only two well-known Drozdovites A. V. Turkul, V. M. Kravchenko. Already on them alone, during the summer autumn offensive of the Wrangel troops of 1920, the number of captured Red Army soldiers killed by the Drozdov division alone exceeds 1000 people. Moreover, this figure (only, we will note, from two memories) clearly does not include all the "Drozdov" victims.

The hostage of a similar practice of execution by the Drozdovites, as well as other white units during this period, will become in the Crimea in the autumn of 1920 the officers who did not manage to evacuate. Among the significant tragedies, we should also mention the fate of several thousand Orenburg Cossacks who became victims of the Annenko terror, as well as the “Belarusian executions” of the ataman SN Bulak Balakhovich in 1920. The Semyonov executions of this period are also known.

The presented work examines the chronologically white terror from October 1917 to 1920 inclusive. This does not mean that the white terror ceased to exist after the defeat of the white territorial statehood in the European part of Russia and Siberia.

However, the white repressions of this period are already characteristic of a smaller part of the former territory of the Russian Empire. In this respect, the Far East, Transbaikalia, partly Central Asia and a number of border territories of Russia (for example, the Pskov province, which experienced the "Savinka" terror during this period) should be highlighted.

Other regions, such as the Don, have also been subject to "residual" terror. To a large extent, the white terror of this period was no longer the result of white state practice, but the revenge of those already doomed to defeat. Thus, the anti-Bolshevik terror, having changed its content, was not limited only to 1917-1920, continuing to increase the number of its victims in the subsequent period.

The total number of victims of the anti-Bolshevik terror in the Civil War, in our opinion, can be estimated at more than 500 thousand people. At the same time, this figure can be increased taking into account the Jewish pogroms, which often also had an anti-Bolshevik orientation, whether they were organized by representatives of the white movement or Ukrainian atamans ...