Exactly 127 years ago, beloved Vasily Chapaev, the famous commander of the Red Army and a popular character in jokes, was born in the village of Budaika. In honor of this event, we have selected seven of the most interesting facts about real life hero.
Hard childhood
Vasily Ivanovich was born into a poor family of peasants. The only wealth of his parents is nine eternally hungry children, of which the famous commander was the sixth. As the legend says, he was born prematurely and kept warm in his father's fur mitten on the stove. When the son grew up a little, his father assigned him to the seminary, in the hope that he would become a priest. But, when one day, the guilty Vasya was put in a wooden punishment cell in a severe frost in one shirt, the boy ran away. He tried to become a merchant, but he couldn’t - the main trading commandment was too disgusting for him: “If you don’t cheat, you won’t sell, you won’t cheat, you won’t make money.” “My childhood was dark and difficult. I had to humiliate myself and starve a lot. From an early age, he ran around strangers, ”the divisional commander later recalled.
"Chapaev"
It is believed that the family of Vasily Ivanovich bore the name of Gavrilov. "Chapaev" or "Chepai" was the nickname that the grandfather of the divisional commander, Stepan Gavrilovich, received. Either in 1882, or in 1883, they loaded logs with their comrades, and Stepan, as the eldest, constantly commanded - “Chop, scoop!”, Which meant: “take it, take it”. So it stuck to him - Chepai, and the nickname later turned into a surname. They say that the original "Chepai" became "Chapaev" with light hand Dmitry Furmanov, the author of the famous novel about Vasily Ivanovich, who decided that "it sounds better this way." But in the surviving documents from the time of the civil war, Vasily appears under both options. Perhaps the name "Chapaev" appeared as a result of a typo.
Academy student
The education of the famous hero, contrary to popular belief, was not limited to two years of parish school. In 1918, already an experienced soldier, he was enrolled in military academy The Red Army, where many fighters were "driven" to improve their general literacy and strategy training. According to the memoirs of his classmate, the peaceful student life weighed heavily on Chapaev: “Damn it! I'm leaving! To come up with such nonsense - fighting people at a desk! Two months later, he filed a report with a request to release him from this "prison" to the front.
Several stories have been preserved about Vasily Ivanovich's stay at the academy. The first one says that at the geography exam, in response to the question of the old general about the significance of the Neman River, Chapaev asked the professor if he knew about the significance of the Solyanka River, where he fought with the Cossacks. According to the second, in a discussion of the battle at Cannae, he called the Romans "blind kittens", telling the teacher - military theorist Sechenov: "We have already shown generals like you how to fight!"
Motorist
We all imagine Chapaev as a courageous fighter with a fluffy mustache, a naked saber and galloping on a dashing horse. This image was created by the national actor Boris Babochkin. But, in fact, Vasily Ivanovich preferred cars to horses. Even on the fronts of the First World War, he received a serious wound in the thigh, so riding became a problem. But Chapaev became one of the first red commanders who moved to the car. He chose iron horses very meticulously. The first - he rejected the American "Stever" due to strong shaking, the red "Packard", which replaced him, also had to be abandoned - he was not suitable for military operations in the steppe. But Ford, who then squeezed 70 miles off-road, liked the red commander. Chapaev also selected the best drivers. One of them, Nikolai Ivanov, was practically taken to Moscow by force and put as the personal driver of Lenin's sister, Anna Ulyanova-Elizarova.
Women's deceit
The famous commander Chapaev was the eternal loser on the personal front. His first wife, the petty-bourgeois Pelageya Metlina, whom Chapaev's parents disapproved of, calling her the "urban white hand", bore him three children, but did not wait for her husband from the front - she went to a neighbor. Vasily Ivanovich was very upset by her act - he loved his wife. Chapaev often repeated to his daughter Claudia: “Oh, you are beautiful. Looks like a mother."
The second companion of Chapaev, however, already a civilian, was also called Pelageya. She was the widow of Vasily's comrade-in-arms, Pyotr Kamishkertsev, to whom the division commander promised to take care of his family. At first he sent her benefits, then they decided to move in together. But history repeated itself - during the absence of her husband, Pelageya had an affair with a certain Georgy Zhivolozhinov. Once Chapaev found them together and almost sent the unfortunate lover to the next world. When the passions subsided, Kamishkertseva decided to go to the world, took the children and went to her husband's headquarters. The children were allowed to visit their father, but she was not. Speaking, after that she took revenge on Chapaev, giving the Whites the location of the Red Army troops and data on their numbers.
fatal water
The death of Vasily Ivanovich is shrouded in mystery. On September 4, 1919, Borodin's detachments approached the city of Lbischensk, where the headquarters of Chapaev's division was located with a small number of fighters. During the defense, Chapaev was severely wounded in the stomach, his soldiers put the commander on a raft and ferried across the Urals, but he died from loss of blood. The body was buried in the coastal sand, and the traces were hidden so that the Cossacks would not find it. Searching for the grave subsequently became useless, as the river changed its course. This story was confirmed by a participant in the events. According to another version, being wounded in the arm, Chapaev drowned, unable to cope with the current.
“Maybe he floated out?”
Despite a long search, neither the body nor the grave of Chapaev could be found. This gave rise to a completely logical version of the surviving hero. Someone said that due to a severe wound, he lost his memory and lived somewhere under a different name. Some claimed that he was safely transported to the other side, from where he went to Frunze, to be responsible for the surrendered city. In Samara, he was put under arrest, and then they decided to officially “kill the hero”, ending his military career with a beautiful end. This story was told by a certain Onyanov from the Tomsk region, who allegedly met his aged commander many years later. The story looks doubtful, because in the difficult conditions of the civil war it was inappropriate to "scatter" experienced military leaders, who were highly respected by the soldiers. Most likely, this is a myth generated by the hope that the hero was saved.
Probably there is no such person - at least in the open spaces former USSR, who could not answer the question "who is Chapaev?"
In terms of the number of jokes, only Stirlitz can compete with him, but ... in real life - the real one - the divisional commander was completely different. Tough, talented, smart. He liked to flaunt, to impress, as they say, and, unlike his mythical counterpart, he preferred ... "Ford" to a war horse. And he fought not only on the front line, but also on love front where he suffered defeat after defeat ...
Boy from the outback
Vasily Chapaev (he himself always wrote "Chepaev") was born in 1887 into a large peasant family - besides him, there were eight more children. The land allotment of the parents barely reached two acres, and a large family lived from hand to mouth. Fleeing from starvation, in 1897 the Chapaevs moved from their native Chuvashia to the Volga, to the city of Balakovo, Samara province. The children had to leave school - Vasya managed to learn only the alphabet.
The Chapaevs had priests in their family. The legend says that the father gave Vasily to his uncle, a clergyman, so that his son could continue family tradition. But when once the uncle of the guilty Vasya in severe frost put him in a wooden punishment cell in one shirt, the boy ran away - from his uncle and from God. He didn't make a priest.
At the age of 12, Vasya was assigned by his father to a merchant as an errand boy. The boy worked for a piece of bread. The merchant began to teach him the trade, where the main commandment was "do not deceive - do not sell." But the bright boy suddenly turned out to be dull - he did not want to deceive. “My childhood was dark and difficult. I had to humiliate myself and starve a lot. From an early age, he roamed around strangers, ”the divisional commander later complained about fate.
Two Pelagia
Unable to adapt to the trading business, the guy returned to his parents to work as a carpenter with his brothers. And at that time he passionately fell in love with a bourgeois named Pelageya. “If I don’t marry her, then I’ll cut off my head,” Chapaev decided. But the "sacrifice" was not needed - the young people got married safely, they had three children.
However, Vasily did not have time to fully enjoy family happiness - he was taken into the soldiers. And when the First World War began, they were sent to the front. So the red commander first served the tsar-father and even received either three or four "George" for personal courage. And only then he went to fight "either for the Communists, or for the Bolsheviks." The Bolsheviks had problems with personnel, so they appointed a lieutenant immediately to the colonel's position - to command the 138th reserve infantry regiment.
When the red commander came home for a visit, it turned out that no one was waiting for him there. His beloved wife exchanged him for another, and Chapaev had only one road left - again to war.
Vasily Ivanovich had a comrade-in-arms at the front, and they gave each other a word: if one of them is killed, then the survivor will take the other's children. A friend died, and when Chapaev came for four orphans, their mother humbly said: "Take me too." He took it. And the commander had seven children - three of his own and four adopted. new wife, also Pelageya, without thinking twice, moved with the children to Chapaev's parents.
Pelageya II with children
However, the red commander had no luck with women. Pelageya-second spun love with the head of the artillery warehouse Georgy Zhivolozhinov, who was ten years younger than her. They say that Vasily Ivanovich caught the lovers on the hot.
Friends Rivals
The country had Time of Troubles. The fight was not for life, but for death. Brother went against brother, his - against his. And Chapaev, who was in the thick of this struggle, fell recklessly in love. Naya (Anna Steshenko) was the wife of Commissar Furmanov, who came to serve in Chapaev's division. And she reciprocated. And what? Chapai is a prominent man, he earned his fame in battles.
Dmitry Furmanov himself met Naya in 1915, when they were sister and brother of mercy on an ambulance train. Instead of a wedding in the spirit of the time, they signed the "Project of love-free-marital relations." And Furmanov was not going to give up his positions. Between the divisional commander and the commissar of the best division, a battle began for a woman. It was a war of vanities and ambitions.
Dmitry FURMANOV and his wife Anna Steshenko spent their honeymoon in the Chapaev division, one might say, in front of the soldiers
Furmanov was ready to surrender the division commander at any moment. And he had the opportunity - the powerful chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, Lev Trotsky, did not like Chapaev. It remained only to find a reason, but Kuibyshev and Frunze saved the situation - they sent Furmanov to Turkestan, and Naya left with her husband. All this love story was swift and brief - Chapaev and Naya had known each other for only six months. She left at the end of August 1919, and on September 5 Vasily Ivanovich died. He was only 32 years old.
The eldest son of Chapaev became an officer, went through the war, rose to the rank of major general. The younger went into aviation, was a friend of Chkalov and, like him, died while testing a new fighter. Daughter Claudia made a party career.
It's all about jealousy
Beloved survived the division commander for 23 years and died in obscurity and loneliness. The fate of Pelageya, Chapaev's first wife, was also unenviable: having learned about his death, she went to pick up the children, fell into an ice hole along the way, caught a cold and died in the same year.
As for the second wife ... Years later, it became known that the White Guards received information about the small number of guards at the father's headquarters from Pelageya II - Chapaev's daughter overheard a conversation between her stepmother and her lover, Georgy Zhivolozhinov. The girl wrote a letter to Krupskaya, which ended up in the OGPU. But the Chekists did not arrest the stepmother, but the head of the artillery depot, Zhivolozhinov. He was accused of propaganda against the Soviets and given 10 years in the camps.
Furmanov suffered the death of Chapaev hard. “No matter how you dismiss it, no matter how you look for serious grounds on which I tried all the time to blame Chapai, but I see that jealousy set me on fire, set me on fire all the time,” Dmitry Andreevich recalled in his diaries. And in 1923, quite unexpectedly, he wrote the book Chapaev, which became more of a contribution to party history than to literature.
Dmitry Furmanov and Anna Steshenko
Three years after the creation of the novel, Furmanov died. Before his death, the writer wanted to debunk the image he had created, wanted to repent on the pages of a new novel, but he was not allowed to do this. He died in 1926 from meningitis, never knowing that a film had been made based on his book, and that Chapaev and himself had become popularly known.
The Second Life of the Divisional Commander
The film "Chapaev" appeared in 1934. The Soviet government needed a hero outside of time and space. And it is desirable that it was not a real man, and the symbol. Chapaev was an ideal candidate for this role, and thanks to the tape, the ordinary commander became one of the most revered heroes of the Civil War. At the same time, the method of socialist realism was "legalized" for the first time.
The film was "supervised" by the father of nations - Stalin, who personally intervened in the process of creating the picture. Having redrawn the plot, Iosif Vissarionovich introduced four characters into the script: commander Chapaev - a native of the people, a commissar as the embodiment of the leading role of the party, an ordinary fighter and another heroine - to reveal the role of a woman in the Civil War. So Anka and Petka appeared. By the way, in the 30s and 40s. Ankami and Petka, like today's Hollywood stars, dreamed of becoming millions of Soviet girls and boys.
The picture turned out to be grandiose - Stalin himself watched it as many as 38 times! And it doesn’t matter that the plot of the film was far from reality, the main thing is that the epic about the Chapaev heroes brought up a whole generation of Soviet people. Maxim Gorky sincerely admired: “A convincing picture! I admired the heroes... Here Chapaev and Petka are flying on a cart... Where to? Forward to the future! All this is damn talented!”
The only problem was that the people did not want to believe in the death of their idol. There was a legend about a boy who went to the cinema every day in the hope that Chapai would come up… There were many rumors and even versions of historians that the hero managed to escape. Many were looking for his grave, including his daughter, Claudia Vasilievna. Alas, unsuccessfully. During this time, the Ural River changed its course, where the bottom used to be - vegetable gardens appeared. And no one knows what really happened.
Chapaev is perhaps the only hero of the Civil War, whom descendants call by name and patronymic: Vasil Ivanovich. They laugh at him, but they also love him. He is credited with reckless courage, daring resourcefulness and wit. He is one of the few who was not left on dusty archival shelves, but taken into the future. September 5 marks the 90th anniversary of the death of the division commander, but the legendary Chapai is still with us.
JOKE MAN
Chapaev is walking through the village all ragged, covered in mud, straw and some feathers, drunk in smoke.
Petka scaredly asks:
- Vasily Ivanovich, where are you from?
- From jokes, Petka, from jokes ...
How did it happen that a person in whose biography there was nothing funny became a character in jokes? He, not Budyonny, Voroshilov, Kotovsky or Lazo. There are several versions on this score, the main one of which lies in the film, shot by the directors the Vasilyev brothers based on the novel by Dmitry Furmanov.
There are so many anecdotes about the legendary hero of the Civil War Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev that it is difficult to understand where is the truth and where is fiction. Here is a small selection of facts from his biography, moreover, taken not from anecdotes, but from sources that have at least some reason to be considered reliable.
Vasily Ivanovich was born in 1887 in the village of Budaika, Kazan province, into a poor peasant family. Chapaev's countrymen claim that his grandfather was a loader, hence the surname. "Chapai" means "take, grab."
In 1907, Vasily was called to military service, but after a few months he was transferred to the reserve. Chapaev's biographers have not been able to establish the true reason for the dismissal. Some say it's because of illness, others because of political unreliability.
The second time Chapaev was mobilized into the army during the First World War. During the war years, he rose to the rank of sergeant major and was awarded three St. George's crosses and the George medal.
But Chapaev received national fame during the years of the Civil War, where he already commanded a division, despite the fact that he did not have a serious military education. When Vasily Ivanovich entered the accelerated courses of the General Staff, in the column "education" he wrote - "self-taught." The conclusion of the attestation commission was as follows: “Enroll as having a revolutionary combat experience. Almost illiterate."
One of the teachers reproached Chapaev for not being able to indicate the Neman River on the map. In response, Vasily Ivanovich told the professor: “Do you know where the Solyanka River is? I fought there."
Interestingly, many famous people. For example, the Czech Yaroslav Gashek, who later became famous writer, author of the book "The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik".
Sidor Artemyevich Kovpak, during the Great Patriotic War who became the commander of a large partisan detachment, was the head of the trophy team in the Chapaev division.
General Ivan Panfilov, whose fighters courageously defended the approaches to Moscow in 1941, commanded a platoon in Chapaev's division during the Civil War.
Thanks to the film "Chapaev", the divisional commander is presented as a dashing horseman. Vasily Ivanovich was really a good rider, but back in the First World War he received a serious thigh wound. Therefore, in Civil often preferred to use a car. Moreover, Chapaev's cars were solid - "Stever", "Packard", "Ford". The division chief selected the drivers personally.
Around the death of Chapaev there are no less legends than about his life. According to the official version, the wounded commander drowned in the Ural River, trying to swim to the other side under fire from bloggers. There is also an opinion: Chapaev swam across the Urals, but soon died from his wounds. The soldiers buried him on the bank of the river, but later the bank was washed away, and the grave of the hero was under water.
In 1941, a short video called “Chapaev is with us” was released on the screens of the country. According to the story, Chapaev was able to swim across the Urals, having risen ashore, he called on the soldiers of the Red Army to smash the Nazis.
Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev lived such a bright life. And this despite the fact that he died very young - at thirty-two years.
There are many legends and myths about the life and death of Chapaev. And it's not that the truth is not known! By no means! The events are quite meticulously documented. I offer you two views on historical event They do not radically contradict each other, but complement each other. First, White's point of view.
CHAPAYEV - DESTROY!
What do we know about the life and death of Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev, a man who has truly become an idol for the older generation? What his commissioner Dmitry Furmanov told in his book, and even, perhaps, what everyone saw in the film of the same name. However, both of these sources turned out to be far from the truth.
The destruction of the legendary hero of the Reds - V.I. Chapaev with the headquarters and a significant part of the considered invincible Red 25th Infantry Division, which crushed the famous Kappelites, is one of the most outstanding and surprising victories of the White Guards over the Bolsheviks. Until now, this special operation, which should go down in the history of military art, has not been studied. About what really happened on that distant day, September 5, 1919, and how it was destroyed large detachment Reds, led by Chapaev, is our story today.
Retreat
It was August 1919. On the Ural front, the Cossacks, desperately resisting, retreated under the powerful onslaught of the 4th and 11th Red armies. The Soviet command paid this front Special attention, realizing that it was through the lands of the Ural Cossack army that it was easiest to connect the troops of Kolchak and Denikin, that the Ural Cossacks could keep communications between Soviet Russia and Red Turkestan under constant threat, and that this area was strategically important, as it represented not only a grain granary capable of feeding a large army, but also a territory rich in oil.
Ural Cossacks
At this time, the Ural Cossacks were in a difficult situation: most of its territory was under the occupation of the Reds and was ruined by them; a typhoid epidemic raged among the population and personnel of the army, daily pulling out dozens of irreplaceable fighters; not enough officers; the army experienced a catastrophic shortage of weapons, uniforms, ammunition, shells, medicines, and medical personnel. The Ural Cossacks largely had to get everything in battle, since there was almost no help from Kolchak and Denikin. At this time, the Bolsheviks had already pushed the Whites behind the village of Sakharnaya, beyond which the sandy, infertile lower reaches of the Ural River began, where there was nothing to feed the horses. A little more - and the Cossacks will lose their horses, their main strength ...
"Adventure"
To try to find a way out, the ataman of the Urals, Lieutenant-General V.S. Tolstov, convened a circle of officers from hundreds to corps commanders. On it, the old commanders, led by General Titruev, advocated a conventional offensive operation, proposing to unite the cavalry units of the Urals from 3 thousand checkers into 3 lavas and attack the well-fortified village of Sakharnaya with 15 thousand red infantry, a large number of machine guns and guns. Such an attack across the steppe, flat as a table, would be obvious suicide and the plan of the "old men" was rejected. They accepted the plan proposed by the "youth", which the "old men" called "adventure". According to this plan, a small but well-armed detachment of the best fighters on the most enduring horses stood out from the Ural separate white army, which was supposed to secretly go through the location of the red troops, without engaging in battle with them, and penetrate them deep into the rear. Just as secretly, he had to approach the Lbishenskaya village, occupied by the Reds, take it with a sudden blow and cut off the Red troops from the bases, forcing them to retreat. At this time, the Cossack patrols caught two orderlies of the Reds with secret documents, from which it became clear that the headquarters of the entire Chapaev group was located in Lbischensk, depots of weapons, ammunition, ammunition for two rifle divisions, the number of red forces was determined. According to Dmitry Furmanov, commissar of the 25th Infantry Division, “the Cossacks knew this and took this into account in their undeniably talented raid ... They had very strong hopes for their operation and therefore put the most experienced military leaders in charge.”
Special squad
The White Guard special detachment included the Cossacks of the 1st Division of the 1st Ural Corps, Colonel T.I. Sladkov, and the White Guard peasants, Lieutenant Colonel F.F. Poznyakov. Combat General N.N. Borodin was placed at the head of the detachment with a total strength of 1192 people with 9 machine guns and 2 guns. On the campaign, they ordered to take food only for a week and more cartridges, abandoning the convoy for speed of movement.
The task before the detachment was almost impossible: Lbischensk was guarded by the Red forces up to 4000 bayonets and checkers with in large numbers machine guns, two red airplanes patrolled in the area of the village during the day. To carry out a special operation, it was necessary to travel about 150 kilometers across the bare steppe, and only at night, since daytime movement could not have gone unnoticed by the red pilots. In this case, the further conduct of the operation became meaningless, since its success depended entirely on surprise.
Special squad goes on a raid
On August 31, at nightfall, a white special detachment left the village of Kalenoy for the steppe to the west. During the entire raid, both Cossacks and officers were forbidden to make noise, talk loudly, or smoke.
Naturally, there was no need to even think about any fires, and I had to forget about hot food for several days. The rejection of the usual rules of military operations of the Cossacks - dashing horse attacks with a whistle and a boom with naked sparkling checkers - was also not understood by everyone. Some of the participants in the raid grumbled: “Well, what kind of war is this, we sneak at night like thieves! ..” All night, at high speed, the Cossacks went as deep as possible into the steppes so that the Reds would not notice their maneuver. In the afternoon, the detachment received a 5-hour rest, after which, having entered the Kushumskaya lowland, it changed the direction of movement and went up the Ural River, being 50-60 kilometers from it. It was a very exhausting campaign: on September 1, the detachment stood all day in the steppe in the heat, being in a swampy lowland, the exit from which could not go unnoticed by the enemy. At the same time, the location of the special squad was almost noticed by the red pilots - they flew very close. When airplanes appeared in the sky, General Borodin ordered the horses to be driven away into the reeds, carts and cannons to be thrown with branches and armfuls of grass, and to lie down next to them. There was no certainty that the pilots had not noticed them, but they did not have to choose, and the Cossacks, with the onset of night, had to go on an accelerated march in order to get away from the dangerous place. By evening, on the 3rd day of the journey, Borodin's detachment cut the Lbishensk-Slomikhinsk road, approaching Lbischensk by 12 versts.
In order not to be discovered by the Reds, the Cossacks occupied a depression not far from the village itself and sent patrols in all directions to reconnaissance and capture the "tongues".
Ensign Portnov's convoy attacked the Reds' grain convoy, partially capturing it. The captured guards were taken to the detachment, where they were interrogated and found out that Chapaev was in Lbischensk. At the same time, one Red Army soldier volunteered to show his apartment. It was decided to spend the night in the same hollow, wait out the day there, during which to put oneself in order, rest after a hard hike and wait until the alarm raised by the patrols subsided. On September 4, reinforced patrols were sent to Lbischensk with the task not to let anyone in or let anyone out of there, but also not to come close, so as not to alert the enemy. The patrols caught all 10 Reds who tried to drive to Lbischensk or leave it, no one was missed.
The first miscalculations of the Reds
As it turned out, the red foragers noticed the sidings, but Chapaev did not give this of great importance. He and the divisional commissar Baturin only laughed at the fact that "they go to the steppe." According to red intelligence, fewer and fewer fighters remained in the ranks of the whites, who retreated further and further to the Caspian. Naturally, they could not believe that the Whites would dare such a bold raid and be able to slip through the dense ranks of the Red troops unnoticed. Even when it was reported that an attack had been made on the convoy, Chapaev did not see the danger in this. He considered that these were the actions of someone who had wandered far from his patrol.
By his order on September 4, 1919, scouts - horse patrols and two airplanes carried out search operations, but did not find anything suspicious. The calculation of the White Guard commanders turned out to be correct: it could not have occurred to any of the Reds that the White detachment was located near Lbischensk itself, under the noses of the Bolsheviks! On the other hand, this shows not only the wisdom of the commanders of the special detachment who chose such a good place for parking, but also the negligent performance of their duties by the red intelligence: it is hard to believe that the mounted scouts did not meet the Cossacks, and the pilots could not notice them from above!
When discussing the plan to capture Lbishensk, it was decided to take Chapaev alive, for which a special platoon of the lieutenant Belonozhkin was allocated. This platoon was given a difficult and dangerous task: to attack Lbishensk in the 1st chain, while occupying its outskirts, it had to, without paying attention to anything, together with the Red Army soldier who volunteered to show Chapaev’s apartment, rush there and grab the red commander. Esaul Faddeev proposed a more risky but sure plan for capturing Chapaev; the special platoon was to go on horseback and, quickly sweeping through the streets of Lbischensk, dismount at Chapaev's house, cordon it off and take the commander sleeping. This plan was rejected because of the fear that most of the people and the cavalry of the platoon might die.
Capture of Lbischensk
At 10 pm on September 4, 1919, the special squad went to Lbischensk. Before leaving, Colonel Sladkov addressed a parting word to the fighters, asking them to be in battle together, when taking the village, not to get carried away collecting trophies and not to disperse, as this could lead to a disruption of the operation.
he also remembered that the worst enemy of the Ural Cossacks, Chapaev, was in Lbischensk, mercilessly destroying the prisoners, that twice he slipped out of their hands - in October 1918 and in April 1919, but on the third time he must be liquidated. After that, they read a common prayer and moved. We approached 3 versts to the village and lay down, waiting for dawn. According to the plan for the capture of Lbischensk, Poznyakov's soldiers attacked the middle of the village, which stretched along the Urals, most of the Cossacks were supposed to act on the flanks, 300 Cossacks remained in reserve. Before the start of the attack, grenades were handed out to the participants in the assault, the commanders of hundreds received orders: after occupying the outskirts of Lbischensk, collect hundreds of platoons, each platoon was charged with cleaning one side of the street, having a small reserve with them in case of unexpected counterattacks.
The enemy did not suspect anything, it was quiet in the village, only the dog barked.
At 3 o'clock in the morning, still in the darkness, the chains of whites moved forward. The scouts who came forward captured the red guards. Without a single shot fired, the outskirts of the village were occupied, the detachment began to be drawn into the streets. At that moment, a rifle salvo rang out into the air - this was fired by the guard of the Reds, who was at the mill and noticed the advance of the Whites from it. He immediately ran away. The "cleansing" of Lbischensk began.
According to the participant in the battle, Yesaul Faddeev, “yard after yard, house after house, the platoons were“ cleared ”, those who surrendered peacefully were sent to the reserve. Those who resisted were destined to be torn apart by a bomb or chopped up by a saber.” Grenades flew into the windows of houses, from where fire was opened on the Whites, but most of the Reds, taken by surprise, surrendered without resistance. In one house, six regimental commissars were captured. A participant in the battle, Pogodaev, described the capture of six commissars as follows; “... One has a jaw jump. They are pale. Two Russians keep themselves calmer. But they also had doom in their eyes. They look at Borodin with fear. Their trembling hands reach for the visors. They give honor. This is getting ridiculous. On the caps - red stars with a sickle and a hammer, there are no epaulettes on the overcoats, ”
There were so many prisoners that at first they were shot, fearing an uprising on their part. Then they began to drive them into one crowd.
The fighters of the special detachment, embracing the village, gradually converged towards its center. A wild panic began among the Reds, in one underwear they jumped out through the windows into the street and darted into different sides, not understanding where to run, as shots and noise were heard from all sides. Those who managed to grab their weapons randomly fired in different directions, but there was little harm from such shooting for the Whites - the Red Army men themselves suffered mainly from it.
How Chapaev died
The special platoon, allocated to capture Chapaev, broke through to his apartment - headquarters.
The honored Red Army soldier did not deceive the Cossacks. At this time, the following was happening near Chapaev's headquarters. The commander of the special platoon, Belonozhkin, immediately made a mistake: he did not cordon off the whole house, but immediately led his people to the courtyard of the headquarters. There, the Cossacks saw a saddled horse at the entrance to the house, which someone was holding inside by the rein closed door. The answer to Belonozhkin's order to those in the house to leave was silence. Then he shot at the house through the dormer window. The frightened horse shied aside and dragged the Red Army soldier holding him out from behind the door. Apparently, it was Chapaev's personal orderly Petr Isaev. Everyone rushed to him, thinking that this was Chapaev. At this time, the second person ran out of the house to the gate. Belonozhkin shot him with a rifle and wounded him in the arm. This was Chapaev. In the ensuing confusion, while almost the entire platoon was occupied by a Red Army soldier, he managed to escape through the gate. In the house, except for two typists, no one was found. According to the testimony of the prisoners, the following happened: when the Red Army soldiers rushed to the Urals in a panic, they were stopped by Chapaev, who rallied around him about a hundred fighters with machine guns, and led a counterattack on Belonozhkin’s special platoon, who had no machine guns and was forced to retreat. Having knocked out the special platoon from the headquarters, the Reds sat down behind its walls and began to shoot back. According to the prisoners, during a short battle with a special platoon, Chapaev was wounded for the second time in the stomach. The wound turned out to be so severe that he could no longer direct the battle and was transported across the Urals on the boards. Sotnik V. Novikov, who was watching the Urals, saw how someone was transported across the Urals against the center of Lbischensk before the very end of the battle. According to eyewitnesses, on the Asian side of the Ural River, Chapaev died from a wound in the stomach.
Party committee resistance
Esaul Faddeev saw how a group of Reds appeared from the direction of the river, counterattacked the Whites and settled in the headquarters. This group covered the Chapaev crossing, trying at all costs to detain the Whites, whose main forces had not yet approached the center of Lbischensk, and Chapaev was missed. The defense of the headquarters was headed by its chief, 23-year-old Nochkov, a former officer in the tsarist army. By this time, the detachment, which had settled in the headquarters, paralyzed all attempts by the Whites to capture the center of Lbischensk with brutal machine-gun and rifle fire. The headquarters was in such a place that all approaches to the center of the village could be shot from it. After several unsuccessful attacks, the Cossacks and soldiers began to accumulate behind the walls of neighboring houses. The Reds recovered, began to stubbornly defend themselves, and even made several attempts to counterattack the Whites. According to the recollections of eyewitnesses of the battle, the shooting was such that no one even heard commander's orders. At this time, part of the communists and soldiers of the red escort (execution) team, headed by Commissar Baturin, who had nothing to lose, occupied the party committee on the outskirts of the village with a machine gun, repelling attempts by the whites to capture Chapaev's headquarters from the other side. On the third side, the Urals flowed with a high bank. The situation was so serious that a hundred Cossacks, blocking the road from Lbischensk, were pulled up to the village and attacked the party committee several times, but rolled back, unable to withstand the fire.
Red headquarters taken
At this time, the Cossacks of the cornet Safarov, seeing the delay at the headquarters, quickly jumped out on a cart 50 steps from him, hoping to suppress the resistance with machine-gun fire. They did not even manage to turn around: the horses that were carrying the cart, and everyone who was in it, were immediately killed and wounded. One of the wounded remained in the cart under the lead shower of the Reds. The Cossacks tried to help him, running out from behind the corners of the houses, but they suffered the same fate. Seeing this, General Borodin led his headquarters to his rescue. The houses were already almost cleared of reds, but in one of them a Red Army soldier hid, who, seeing the general's epaulettes flashing in the morning sun, fired from a rifle. The bullet hit Borodin in the head. This happened when the Reds no longer had any hope of holding the village behind them. Colonel Sladkov, who took command of the special detachment, ordered the machine-gun special platoon to take the house where Baturin sat down, and then take possession of the red headquarters. While some were distracting the Reds by exchanging fire with them, others, taking two Lewis light machine guns, climbed onto the roof of a neighboring, more high house. After some half a minute, the resistance of the party committee was broken: the Cossack machine guns turned the roof of his house into a sieve, breaking most defenders.
At this time, the Cossacks pulled up the battery. The Reds could not stand the cannon fire and fled to the Urals. The headquarters was taken. The wounded Nochkov was abandoned, he crawled under the bench, where he was found and killed by the Cossacks.
Losses of the Chapaevs
The only and major omission of the organizers of the Lbischensky raid was that they did not promptly send a detachment to the other side of the Urals that could destroy all the fugitives. Thus, for a long time, the Reds would not have known about the catastrophe in Lbischensk, continuing to send carts through it to Sakharnaya, which would invariably be intercepted by the Whites. During this time, it was possible to surround and liquidate the unsuspecting red garrisons not only of Sakharnaya, but also of Uralsk, thereby causing the collapse of the entire Soviet Turkestan front ...
A chase was sent for the few who had crossed the Urals, but they were not caught up. By 10 o'clock on September 5, the organized resistance of the Reds in Lbischensk was broken, and by 12 o'clock in the afternoon the battle had ceased. In the area of the village, up to 1,500 Reds were killed, 800 were taken prisoner. Many drowned or were killed while crossing the Urals and on the other side. In the next 2 days of the Cossacks' stay in Lbischensk, about a hundred more Reds were caught hiding in attics, cellars, and haylofts. The population betrayed them all without exception. P.S. Baturin, the commissar of the 25th division, who replaced Furmanov, hid under the stove in one of the huts, but the hostess betrayed him to the Cossacks. According to the most conservative estimates, during the Lbischensky battle, the Reds lost at least -2500 killed and captured. The total losses of the whites during this operation amounted to 118 people - 24 killed and 94 wounded. The most severe loss for the Cossacks was the death of the valiant General Borodin.
Knowing nothing about the battle that had taken place, soon large red wagon trains, rear institutions, staff workers, a school of red cadets, and a punitive "special purpose detachment", which were sadly "famous" during decossackization, came to the village. From surprise, they were so confused that they did not even have time to resist. All of them were immediately captured. The cadets and the "special purpose detachment" were almost completely cut down by checkers.
The trophies taken in Lbischensk turned out to be huge. Ammunition, food, equipment for 2 divisions, a radio station, machine guns, cinematographic cameras, 4 airplanes were captured. On the same day, one more was added to these four. The red pilot, not knowing what had happened, landed in Lbischensk. There were other trophies too. Colonel Izergin talks about them like this: “In Lbischensk, Chapaev’s headquarters was located not without amenities and a pleasant pastime: among the prisoners - or trophies - there were a large number of typists and stenographers. Obviously, in the red headquarters they write a lot ... "
"I rewarded myself"
Not without curiosities. Pogodaev describes one of them: “The Cossack Kuzma Minovskov galloped up to Myakushkin on horseback. Instead of a cap, he had a pilot's helmet on his head, and as many as five orders of the Red Banner adorned his chest from one shoulder to the other. “What the hell, what a masquerade, Kuzma?! Do you wear red orders ?! Myakushkin asked him menacingly. “Yes, I took off the rubber cap from the Soviet pilot, and we got these orders at the Chapaev headquarters. There are several boxes of them ... The guys took as much as they wanted ... The prisoners say: Chapaya had just been sent to the Red Army for fighting, but he didn’t even have time to distribute them - we came here ... But how, in a fair fight he earned. That Petka and Ma-karka were supposed to wear, and now the Cossack Kuzma Potapovich Minovskov wears ... Wait until you are rewarded - you rewarded yourself, ”the fighter replied. Nikolai marveled at the inexhaustible cheerfulness of his Cossack and let him go ... "
Reasons for the defeat
Furmanov, speaking about the reasons for such a stunning defeat of the Reds, writes that in Chapaev’s entourage there was someone who removed the most “vigilant fighters of the revolution” - the Red cadets from the guard, and that during the battle in Lbischensk itself, a rebellion was raised by the inhabitants of the village at the very the wrong moment for the Bolsheviks, and that warehouses and offices were captured immediately. Not a single document speaks in favor of Furmanov's arguments. Firstly, it was impossible to put the cadets on guard, since they simply were not in Lbischensk on September 4, because they did not have time to arrive there and arrived when everything was over. Secondly, only children, decrepit old men and women remained among the inhabitants of Lbischensk, and all men are in the ranks of the whites. Thirdly, about where the Reds have posts and where the most important points are located, the captured guards told.
As reasons for the complete success of the Whites, one should note the highest professionalism of the White Guard command and officers, the dedication and heroism of the rank and file, and the carelessness of Chapaev himself.
Now about the "inconsistencies" of the film and the book "Chapaev". This article is based on archival materials. “Why, then, was it necessary to deceive the people with the beautiful death of Chapai?” the reader will ask. Everything is simple. Such a hero as Chapaev, in the opinion of the Soviet authorities, should have died as a hero. It was impossible to show that he almost fell asleep in captivity and was taken out of the battle in a helpless state and died from a wound in the stomach. It turned out somehow ugly. In addition, there was a party order: to expose Chapaev in the most heroic light! For this, they invented a white armored car that did not really exist, which he allegedly threw grenades from the headquarters. If there were armored cars in the White detachment, then it would be immediately revealed, since the noise of engines in the silence of the night can be heard in the steppe for many kilometers!
conclusions
What was the significance of the Lbischenskaya special operation? First, it showed that by actions of relatively small numbers special forces in the course of one strike, which took a total of 5 days, it is possible to nullify the two-month efforts of an enemy many times superior. Secondly, results were achieved that are difficult to obtain by conducting fighting"in normal mode": the headquarters of the entire military group of the Red Army of the Turkestan Front was destroyed, there was a break in communication between the red troops and their demoralization, which forced them to flee to Uralsk. As a result, the Reds were thrown back to the borders, from where they launched their offensive against the Urals in July 1919. The moral significance for the Cossacks of the very fact that Chapaev, who boasted at every rally of crushing victories over the Urals (in fact, not a single regiment of Cossacks was defeated by him), was destroyed by their own hands, was truly enormous. This fact showed that even the best Red commanders can be successfully beaten. However, the repetition of such a special operation in Uralsk was prevented by the inconsistency of actions between the commanders, the catastrophic development of the typhus epidemic among the personnel and sharp increase Red forces on the Turkestan front, which were able to recover only after 3 months due to the collapse of the Kolchak front.
Sergei Balmasov.
magazine "Soldier of Fortune"
How did Chapaev die?
Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev one of the most tragic mysterious figures Civil War in Russia. This is due to the mysterious death of the famous red commander. Until now, discussions have not ceased about the circumstances of the murder of the legendary commander.
The official Soviet version of the death of Vasily Chapaev says that the division commander, who, by the way, was only 32 years old at the time of his death, was killed in the Urals by white Cossacks from the combined detachment of the 2nd division of Colonel Sladkov and the 6th division of Colonel Borodin. The famous Soviet writer Dmitry Furmanov, who at one time served as the political commissar of the "Chapaev" 25th Infantry Division, in his own famous book"Chapaev" talked about the fact that the division commander allegedly died in the waves of the Urals.
First - about the official version of the death of Chapaev. He died on September 5, 1919 on the Ural front. Shortly before the death of Chapaev, the 25th Infantry Division, which was under his command, received an order from the commander of the Turkestan Front, Mikhail Frunze, to active actions on the left bank of the Urals - in order to prevent active interaction between the Ural Cossacks and the armed formations of the Kazakh Alash-Orda.
The headquarters of the Chapaev division was at that time in the county town of Lbischensk. There were also governing bodies, including the tribunal and the Revolutionary Committee. The protection of the city was carried out by 600 people from the divisional school, in addition, there were unarmed and untrained mobilized peasants in the city. Under these conditions, the Ural Cossacks decided to abandon the frontal attack on the positions of the Reds and instead make a raid on Lbischensk in order to immediately defeat the division headquarters.
Consolidated group Ural Cossacks, aimed at defeating the Chapaev headquarters and personally destroying Vasily Chapaev, was led by Colonel Nikolai Nikolaevich Borodin, commander of the 6th division of the Ural Separate Army. The Cossacks of Borodin were able to approach Lbischensk, remaining unnoticed by the Reds. They succeeded thanks to timely shelter in the reeds in the Kuzda Gora tract.
At 3 am on September 5, the division launched an attack on Lbischensk from the west and north. The 2nd division of Colonel Timofey Ippolitovich Sladkov moved from the south to Lbischensk. For the Reds, the situation was complicated by the fact that both divisions of the Ural army were mostly equipped with Cossacks - natives of Lbischensk, who were well versed in the terrain and could successfully operate in the vicinity of the town. The suddenness of the attack also played into the hands of the Ural Cossacks. The Red Army immediately began to surrender, only some units tried to resist, but to no avail.
Local residents - Ural Cossacks and Cossacks - also actively helped their countrymen from the "Borodino" division. For example, the commissar of the 25th division, Baturin, was issued to the Cossacks, who tried to hide in the oven. About where he climbed, said the mistress of the house where he lodged. Cossacks from Borodin's division staged a massacre of captured Red Army soldiers. At least 1500 Red Army soldiers were killed, another 800 Red Army soldiers remained in captivity. To catch the commander of the 25th division, Vasily Chapaev, Colonel Borodin formed a special platoon of the most trained Cossacks, and appointed the lieutenant Belonozhkin to command it.
Belonozhkin's people figured out the house where Chapaev lodged and attacked him. However, the division commander managed to jump out the window and run to the river. Along the way, he gathered the remnants of the Red Army - about a hundred people. The detachment turned out to have a machine gun and Chapaev organized the defense. The official version says that it was during this retreat that Chapaev died. None of the Cossacks, however, could find his body, even despite the reward promised for "Chapai's head". What happened to the chief? According to one version, he drowned in the Ural River. According to another, the wounded Chapaev was placed by two Hungarians - Red Army soldiers on a raft and transported across the river.
However, during the crossing, Chapaev died from blood loss. The Hungarian Red Army soldiers buried him in the sand and threw reeds over the grave. By the way, Colonel Nikolai Borodin himself also died in Lbischensk, and on the same day as Vasily Chapaev. When the colonel was driving down the street in a car, the Red Army soldier Volkov, who was serving in the guards of the 30th air detachment, hid in a haystack, shot the commander of the 6th division with a shot in the back.
The body of the colonel was taken to the village of Kalyony, Ural Region, where he was buried with military honors. Posthumously, Nikolai Borodin was awarded the rank of major general, so in many publications he is referred to as "General Borodin", although during the assault on Lbischensk he was still a colonel. In fact, the death of a military commander during the Civil War was not something extraordinary. However, in Soviet time a kind of cult of Vasily Chapaev was created, who was remembered and revered much more than many other prominent red commanders.
Who, for example, besides professional historians - specialists in the history of the Civil War, today says something about the name of Vladimir Azin - the commander of the 28th Infantry Division, who was captured by the Whites and was brutally killed (according to some reports, even torn alive, being tied to two trees or, according to another version, to two horses)? But during the years of the Civil War, Vladimir Azin was no less famous and successful commander than Chapaev.
First of all, we recall that during the years of the Civil War or immediately after its end, a number of Red commanders died, moreover, the most charismatic and talented, who were very popular "among the people", but were very skeptically perceived by the party leadership. Not only Chapaev, but also Vasily Kikvidze, Nikolai Shchors, Nestor Kalandarishvili and some other Red military leaders died under very strange circumstances. This gave rise to a fairly common version that the Bolsheviks themselves were behind their deaths, who were unhappy with the "deviation from the party course" of the listed military leaders.
Both Chapaev, and Kikvidze, and Kalandarishvili, and Shchors, and Kotovsky came from Socialist-Revolutionary and anarchist circles, which were then perceived by the Bolsheviks as dangerous rivals in the struggle for the leadership of the revolution. The Bolshevik leadership did not trust such popular commanders with a “wrong” past. Party leaders associated them with “partisanism”, “anarchy”, they were perceived as people unable to obey and very dangerous.
For example, Nestor Makhno was also at one time a Red commander, but then he again opposed the Bolsheviks and turned into one of the most dangerous opponents of the Reds in New Russia and Little Russia. It is known that Chapaev had repeated conflicts with the commissars. Actually, due to conflicts, Dmitry Furmanov also left the 25th division, by the way, he himself is a former anarchist. The reasons for the conflict between the commander and the commissar lay not only in the "administrative" plane, but also in the sphere of intimate relations.
Chapaev began to show too persistent signs of attention to Furmanov's wife Anna, who complained to her husband, and he openly expressed his dissatisfaction with Chapaev and quarreled with the commander. An open conflict began, which led to the fact that Furmanov left the post of division commissar. In that situation, the command decided that Chapaev was a more valuable asset as division commander than Furmanov as commissar. It is interesting that after the death of Chapaev, it was Furmanov who wrote a book about the division commander, in many respects laying the foundations for the subsequent popularization of Chapaev as a hero of the Civil War.
Quarrels with the commander did not prevent his former commissar from maintaining respect for the figure of his commander. The book "Chapaev" became a really successful work of Furmanov as a writer. She drew the attention of the entire young Soviet Union to the figure of the red commander, especially since in 1923 the memories of the Civil War were very fresh. It is possible that if not for the work of Furmanov, then the name of Chapaev would have suffered the fate of the names of other famous Red commanders of the Civil War - only professional historians and residents of their native places would remember him. Chapaev left three children - daughter Claudia (1912-1999), sons Arkady (1914-1939) and Alexander (1910-1985). After the death of their father, they remained with their grandfather, the father of Vasily Ivanovich, but he soon died too. The children of the divisional commander ended up in shelters.
They were remembered only after the book by Dmitry Furmanov was published in 1923. After this event, the former commander of the Turkestan Front, Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze, became interested in Chapaev's children. Alexander Vasilyevich Chapaev graduated from a technical school and worked as an agronomist in the Orenburg region, but after military service he entered a military school. By the time the Second World War began, he served as a captain in the Podolsky Artillery School, went to the front, after the war he served in artillery in command positions and rose to the rank of major general, deputy artillery commander of the Moscow Military District.
Arkady Chapaev became a military pilot, commanded an air unit, but died in 1939 as a result of a plane crash. Claudia Vasilievna graduated from the Moscow Food Institute, then worked in party work. Meanwhile, another version appeared, contradicting the official one, about the circumstances of the death of Vasily Chapaev, more precisely, about the motives for issuing the location of the red commander.
She was voiced back in 1999 to the correspondent of Arguments and Facts by the daughter of Vasily Ivanovich, 87-year-old Claudia Vasilievna, who was still alive at that time. She believed that the stepmother, the second wife of Vasily Ivanovich Pelageya Kameshkertsev, was the culprit in the death of her father, the illustrious commander. Allegedly, she cheated on Vasily Ivanovich with the head of the artillery warehouse, Georgy Zhivolozhinov, but was exposed by Chapaev. The division commander arranged a tough showdown for his wife, and out of revenge, Pelageya brought whites to the house where the red commander was hiding.
At the same time, she acted out of momentary emotions, without calculating the consequences of her act, and even, most likely, simply without thinking with her head. Of course, such a version could not be voiced in Soviet times. After all, she would question the created image of the hero, showing that in his family there were passions that were not alien to “mere mortals” like adultery and subsequent female revenge. At the same time, Claudia Vasilievna did not question the version that Chapaev was transported across the Urals by the Hungarian Red Army soldiers, who buried his body in the sand. This version, by the way, does not contradict the fact that Pelageya could get out of Chapaev's house and "surrender" his whereabouts to the whites.
By the way, Pelageya Kameshkertseva herself was already in Soviet times placed in mental asylum and therefore, even if it turned out her guilt in the death of Chapaev, they would not bring her to justice. The fate of Georgy Zhivolozhinov was also tragic - he was placed in a camp for agitating the kulaks against the Soviet regime. Meanwhile, the version of the wife - a traitor to many seems unlikely. Firstly, it is unlikely that whites would talk to the wife of a red commander, and even more so they would believe her. Secondly, it is unlikely that Pelageya herself would have dared to go to the whites, since she could have feared reprisals. Another thing is if she was a “link” in the chain of betrayal of the division chief, which could be organized by his haters from the party apparatus.
At that time, a rather tough confrontation was planned between the “commissar” part of the Red Army, oriented towards Leon Trotsky, and the “commander” part, to which the whole glorious galaxy of red commanders who came from the people belonged. And it was Trotsky's supporters who could, if not directly kill Chapaev with a shot in the back during the crossing of the Urals, then "substitute" him for the bullets of the Cossacks.
The saddest thing is that Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev, a truly combat and honored commander, no matter how you treat him, in the late Soviet and post-Soviet times, completely undeservedly became the character of completely stupid jokes, humorous stories and even television programs. Their authors sneered at the tragic death of this man, at the circumstances of his life. Chapaev was portrayed as a narrow-minded person, although it is unlikely that such a character as a hero of jokes could not only lead a division of the Red Army, but also rise to the rank of sergeant major in tsarist times.
Although the sergeant major was not an officer, only the best of the soldiers, capable of commanding, the most intelligent, and in wartime, the bravest, became them. By the way, Vasily Chapaev received the titles of junior non-commissioned officer, senior non-commissioned officer, and sergeant major during the First World War. In addition, he was wounded more than once - near Tsuman, the tendon of his arm was interrupted, then, returning to duty, he was again wounded - by shrapnel in left leg. The nobility of Chapaev as a person is fully demonstrated by the story of his life with Pelageya Kameshkertseva. When Chapaev's friend Pyotr Kameshkertsev was killed in battle during World War I, Chapaev promised to take care of his children.
He came to the widow of Peter Pelageya and told her that she alone would not be able to take care of Peter's daughters, so he would take them to the house of his father Ivan Chapaev. But Pelageya decided to get along with Vasily Ivanovich herself, so as not to part with her children. St. George Cavalier graduated from sergeant major Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev First world war, surviving in battles with the Germans. And the Civil War brought him death - at the hands of his countrymen, and maybe those whom he considered his comrades-in-arms.
The consolidated Cossack detachment of Colonel of the Ural Army Timofey Sladkov, having made a covert raid on the rear of the Reds, on September 4, 1919, reached the approaches to Lbischensk. The headquarters of the 25th Infantry Division of the 4th Army of the Turkestan Front was located in the village, which was then considered the best and most combat-ready division in almost the entire Red Army.
And in terms of its numbers, power and armament, it was quite comparable with other army formations of that time: 21.5 thousand bayonets and sabers, at least 203 machine guns, 43 guns, an armored detachment, and even an assigned aviation detachment.
Directly in Lbischensk, the Reds had from three to four thousand people, although a significant part of them were headquarters services and rear units. Head of division - Vasily Chapaev.
MASSACRE IN LBISHCHENSK
Having cut the telegraph wires at night, silently removing the Red Army posts and guards, the strike group of the Sladkov detachment broke into the village at dawn on September 5, 1919, and by ten in the morning it was all over.
Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev
According to the operational report of the headquarters of the 4th Army No. 01083, dated 10 o'clock in the morning on September 6, 1919, “on the night of September 4 to 5, the enemy in the amount of up to 300 people, with one machine gun with one gun, raided Lbishensk and outpost Kozheharovsky, captured them and moved towards the outpost Budarinsky.
The Red Army units stationed in Lbischensk and the outpost Kozhekharovsky retreated in disorder to the outpost Budarinsky. The shtadiv, which was in Lbischensk, was completely captured. The employees of the headquarters were cut down, the commander Chapaev with several telegraph operators tried to hide on the Bukhara side, but was seriously wounded and left by the telegraph operators.
Usually, fear has big eyes, but here, out of fright, the number of the enemy was greatly underestimated: according to white memoirists, 1,192 fighters with nine machine guns took part in the raid on Lbischensk, and there was even a gun.
Of course, all this mass simply had nowhere to turn around at night on the narrow streets of the village, so it is likely that there really were no more than 300 people in the strike group, the rest on the flanks and in reserve.
But that was enough, the defeat was so horrifying that even a day later there was no one to convey to the army headquarters the real details and details.
And who could believe that such a significant detachment of the enemy - which the headquarters of the Turkestan Front believed was already practically defeated and retreating randomly to the Caspian Sea - managed not only to penetrate unhindered into the rear of the red group, but also to go unnoticed over 150 km across the bare and scorched steppe, approaching the village, over which airplanes tirelessly patrolled during the day.
Nevertheless, the division headquarters was cut out, the divisional units of logistic support, artillery and engineering departments were destroyed - with sapper units, a command and communications center, foot and horse reconnaissance teams, a divisional school of junior commanders, a political department, a special department, a revolutionary tribunal, part of an armored detachment.
Vasily Chapaev (center, sitting) with military commanders. 1918
In total, over 2,400 Red Army soldiers were killed and captured by the Cossacks, considerable trophies were taken - over 2,000 carts with various property, a radio station, five cars, five airplanes with pilots and maintenance personnel were captured.
Of the taken, the Whites were able to take out "only" 500 carts, the rest they had to destroy - weapons, ammunition, ammunition and food in the carts and warehouses of Lbischensk turned out to be as much as two divisions. But the main loss was the division commander himself - Chapaev.
What exactly happened to him never became known: he simply disappeared without a trace, neither among the living nor among the dead he was ever found - neither white nor red. And all versions of what happened to him - killed, chopped up beyond recognition, drowned in the Urals, died of wounds, secretly buried - are not based on documents or evidence.
But the most deceitful version is the canonical one, launched in 1923 by the former commissar of the Chapaev division Dmitry Furmanov, and already from his novel Chapaev it migrated to the famous film.
Frame from the film "Chapaev" (1934)
THE OPPOSITION OF THE DIRECTOR AND THE COMMISSIONER
What could Furmanov know about the Lbischenskaya tragedy? He also could not work with original documents - due to their complete absence in nature, which will be discussed below. And he didn’t actually communicate with direct witnesses from among the former Chapaevs either, because in the three months of his commissar with Chapaev he did not acquire any authority among the fighters, and remained a stranger for them, sent solely to spy on their beloved commander.
Yes, he himself never really hid his frank contempt for the Chapaevs: "bandits commanded by a mustachioed sergeant major" - this is from personal records Furmanov himself. Furmanov himself composed the legend of the wonderful and even supposedly friendly relations between the commissar and Chapaev.
In real life, judging by the documents, the commissioner hated Chapaev. In any case, this is eloquently evidenced by the letters published by the historian Andrei Ganin and diary entries from the Furmanov collection, located in the department of manuscripts of the RSL.
Yes, and the commander did not burn with love for the commissars as such, he was known as a anti-Semite and always deliberately distorted the name of the commissar, calling him “Comrade Furman”, as if hinting at his nationality.
“How many times have you mocked and mocked the commissars, how you hate the political departments,” Furmanov, who had already been transferred from the division, wrote to Chapaev, “... you are mocking what the Central Committee created.” With a frank threat, he added: "After all, for these evil ridicule and for the boorish attitude towards the commissars, such fellows are expelled from the party and handed over to the Cheka."
And everything, it turns out, is also because the men did not divide the woman - Chapaev fell for Furmanov's wife! “He wanted my death,” Furmanov boiled indignantly, “so that Naya would go to him ... He can be decisive not only for noble, but also for“ vile deeds ”.
Offended by Chapaev's tender attention to his wife (who, by the way, does not reject these courtship at all), Furmanov sends an angry message to Chapaev. But the duel, even on feathers, did not work out: the commander, apparently, simply beat his commissar. And he writes a report to the front commander Frunze, complaining about the offensive actions of the division commander, "reaching the point of assault."
Painting by P. Vasiliev “V. I. Chapaev in battle "
The head of the division is hinted that it would be necessary to be more delicate with the commissioner, and Vasily Ivanovich takes a step towards reconciliation. In Furmanov's papers, some of which were published by the historian Andrey Ganin, the following note was preserved (the style of the original is preserved):
“Comrade Furman! If you need a young lady, then come, two will come to me, I will give up one. CHAPAEV.
In response, Furmanov continues to write complaints against Frunze Chapaev and to political authorities, calling the commander a vain careerist, an adventurer intoxicated with power, and even a coward!
“I was told,” he writes to Chapaev himself, “that you were once a brave warrior. But now, not for a minute lagging behind you in battles, I am convinced that you no longer have courage, and your caution for your valuable life is very similar to cowardice ... ". In response, Chapaev pours out his soul ... to Furmanov's wife: "I can no longer work with such idiots, he should not be a commissar, but a coachman."
Furmanov, going crazy with jealousy, writes new denunciations, accusing his opponent of betraying the revolution, anarchism, and that he specifically sends Furmanov to the most dangerous places in order to take possession of his wife!
High authorities carefully send inspections, which get the head of the inquiry, as if he had nothing more to do. Enraged Chapaev in response reports that his commissar completely launched the entire division in the division political work. Shakespeare's passions are resting, but this is a front, a war!
Furmanov was not even too lazy to tell Chapaev himself that he had accumulated dirt on him:
“By the way, remember that I have documents, facts and witnesses in my hands.”
“I have all these documents in my hands, and on occasion I will show them to the right person in order to expose your vile game. ... When it is necessary, I will expose the documents and comb all your meanness to the bones.
And after all, he exposed, sending another lengthy denunciation of Chapaev. But the front command, tired of the slanderous epic, dismissed and punished Furmanov himself, sending him to Turkestan.
CLEANING "BATEK"
In fact, Furmanov was in Chapaev's division the supervising eye of Leon Trotsky. It's not that the leader of the Red Army did not personally tolerate Chapaev (although not without it) - he simply hated and feared "batek" as such, elected (and former elected) commanders. The year 1919 is just notable for the massive “death” of the most popular elected red commanders; the purge of the “people’s commanders” organized by Trotsky unfolded.
From an "accidental" bullet in the back during reconnaissance, division commander Vasily Kikvidze dies.
At the direction of Trotsky, "for failure to comply with orders" and "discrediting political workers," the commander of the so-called southern Yaroslavl front, Yuri Guzarsky, was shot.
Shot - again by order of Trotsky - the popular Ukrainian brigade commander Anton Shary-Bogunsky. “Accidentally” killed Timofei Chernyak, also a commander of the Novgorod-Seversk brigade, also popular among the fighters. The “dad” Vasily Bozhenko, the commander of the Tarashchanskaya brigade, an ally of Bogunsky, Chernyak and Shchors, was liquidated.
On August 30, 1919, the turn of Shchors himself came, who received a bullet in the back of the head - also “accidental”, also from his own.
Like Chapaev: yes, yes, he also received a bullet in the back of the head - at least the members of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 4th Army did not doubt this. A recording of the conversation has been saved straight wire a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 4th Army, Sundukov, with the newly appointed commissar of the 25th division, Sysoikin.
Sundukov instructs Sysoikin:
"Tov. Chapaev, apparently, was at first slightly wounded in the arm and during the general retreat to the Bukhara side he also tried to swim across the Urals, but did not have time to enter the water, as he was killed by an accidental bullet in the back of the head and fell near the water, where he remained. Thus, we now also have data on the untimely death of the leader of the 25th division ... ".
This is the installation version with interesting details! No witnesses, no body, but a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the army, sitting tens or even hundreds of miles from Lbischensk, speaks so convincingly about the "accidental" bullet in the back of the head, as if he himself was holding a candle! Or received a detailed report from the performer?
True, the fresh commissar of the 25th division, realizing that it’s better not to stutter about a bullet in the back of the head, immediately offers a more interesting version: “Regarding Chapaev, this is correct, such testimony was given by the Cossack to the residents of the Kozhekharovsky outpost, the latter handed it over to me. But there were a lot of corpses lying on the banks of the Urals, Comrade Chapaev was not there. He was killed in the middle of the Urals and drowned to the bottom ... ". A member of the Revolutionary Military Council agrees: to the bottom, so to the bottom, it’s even better ...
Also noteworthy is the order signed by the commander of the Turkestan Front, Frunze and a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Eliava Front, dated September 11, 1919:
“Let the insignificant success of the enemy, who managed to upset the rear of the glorious 25th division with a cavalry raid, and force its units to retreat somewhat to the north, not bother you. Let the news of the death of the valiant leader of the 25th division Chapaev and its military commissar Baturin not bother you. They died the death of the brave, before last drop blood and up to the last opportunity defending the cause of his native people.
Only five days passed, not a single witness, and Frunze's headquarters also figured out everything: there was not a disorderly stampede, and not even a "general retreat", but only "an insignificant success of the enemy", which forced parts of the glorious 25th division "several move north." What exactly happened to the commander is also clear to the front headquarters: "to the last drop of blood" - and so on.
Was the very fact of Chapaev's death the subject of a separate investigation? Or was it carried out so secretly and swiftly that it left absolutely no trace in the documents? The fact that the documents of the division disappeared before the last piece of paper can still be understood. But it was precisely for that period that there was nothing in the documents of the army headquarters - a huge documentary layer, like a cow licked with its tongue. Everything was cleaned up and cleaned up, moreover, at the same time - between September 5 and 11, 1919.
FOR COTTON AND OIL
Meanwhile, shortly before the Lbischenskaya tragedy, it became known that the Southern Group of the Eastern Front was not just renamed the Turkestan Front: the front, like its 25th division, would soon have to go beyond the Ural River - to Bukhara. As early as August 5, 1919, the chairman of the RVSR and People's Commissar of the Navy, Lev Trotsky, submitted a note to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), proposing to expand to the Hindustan foothills, through Bukhara and Afghanistan, to strike at the British Empire.
So the Turkestan Front was preparing for a general offensive and the next conquests, which would create a completely new geopolitical situation. In the above-mentioned order of Frunze dated September 11, 1919, it was stated as follows: "The glorious troops of the Turkestan Front, breaking through Russia's path to cotton and oil, are on the eve of completing their task."
Then Frunze sternly adds: "I expect all the troops of the 4th Army to strictly and steadily fulfill their revolutionary duty." An absolutely unambiguous hint that not all comrades fulfill their revolutionary duty as strictly and unswervingly as the Party demands of them.
Yes, it was so: Vasily Ivanovich, although he was the commander regular army, but, in fact, still remained a typical peasant leader, "father". He clashed with the commissars and beat them in the face, sent obscenities over a direct wire not only to the Revolutionary Military Council of the 4th Army, but sometimes even Commander Lazarevich, a former tsarist officer, could not stand the Chekists, but his attitude towards representatives of some nationalities has already been said above.
And his division itself was, in fact, a huge peasant camp, albeit nomadic, but did not want to leave the usual theater of operations, moving away from their native lands "to the Bukhara side." The offensive against Bukhara was still being prepared, and in the division there were already shortages of provisions and such that the fighters of one of the brigades rebelled from hunger.
I had to cut the bread ration for all the soldiers of the division by half a pound. There have already been problems with drinking water, food for horses and draft animals in general - this is in their own area, but what awaited you on the campaign? There was a ferment among the fighters, which could easily turn into a mutiny. The upcoming campaign in the Khorezmian sands did not arouse enthusiasm even in Chapaev himself, he did not have the slightest desire to get into this adventure.
On the other hand, the organizers of the expedition "for cotton and oil" also had to protect themselves from potential surprises. Chapaev was already superfluous here. Therefore, it was in September 1919, when the Turkestan Front was to launch a general offensive to the Hindustan foothills, that the time had come to get rid of the obstinate commander. For example, having dealt with him by proxy, substituting for Cossack checkers. What, historians believe, Trotsky did - through the army commander Lazarevich and the Revolutionary Military Council of the army, which was under his special control.
It was on the orders of the command of the 4th Army of the Chapaev division that such a strange deployment was determined, in which all its parts were, as it were, deliberately torn apart: between its disparate brigades there were holes of tens, or even 100-200 miles of steppe, through which they could easily infiltrate the Cossack detachments.
The headquarters in Lbischensk was completely located in isolation from the brigades. He, like a bait for the whites, loomed literally on the frontier, right on the banks of the Urals, beyond which the hostile "Bukhara side" began: come and take it! They couldn't help coming, and they did. Moreover, they had something and whom to take revenge for - the Chapaevites exterminated the "kazara" ruthlessly, sometimes cleanly cutting out entire villages.
As the same Furmanov wrote, “None of the Cossacks ordered Chapaev to take prisoners. “Everyone,” he says, “end scoundrels!” In the same Lbischensk, all houses were robbed, crops were taken away from the inhabitants, all young women were raped, shot and hacked to death, everyone who had relatives of officers ...
THE LAST RESURRECTION
However, whites are white, and it didn’t hurt to insure your executor, otherwise, where did a member of the RVS get such accurate information about an “accidental bullet in the back of the head”? Although, perhaps, the commander was never shot. In the documents of the secretariat of the secretariat of the People's Commissar of Defense Voroshilov there is a curious memo addressed to him by the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Yagoda for 1936.
Poster "Chapaev"
One people's commissar informs another that shortly after the release of the film "Chapaev", a certain legless invalid was discovered, who claimed that he was Chapaev. The Chekists treated him with all seriousness, initiating a full-fledged inquiry. They even wanted to confront him with the former Chapaev brigade commander, Ivan Kutyakov, who in 1936 was the deputy commander of the PriVO troops.
Apparently, Kutyakov was in shock, he categorically refused a confrontation with a disabled person, citing employment, although he agreed to identification from the photographs brought to him by special officers. He peered at them for a long time, hesitated - he seemed to be similar. Then he said not too confidently: neon.
An impostor claiming heroic laurels after the release of the film "Chapaev"? But it followed from the document that the disabled person did not at all rush into heroes of his own free will, but was identified by vigilant authorities - most likely, during the certification that was then carried out.
If Vasily Ivanovich survived in Lbishensk, becoming an invalid, which is quite possible, then after healing his wounds, when he was already declared dead hero, - he no longer had a reason to resurrect himself from the dead.
He perfectly understood where that “accidental bullet in the back of the head” came from, guessing just as well what would happen to him if he suddenly appeared after he “drowned to the bottom” of the Urals. So I sat quietly until passportization came. By the way, such serious people's commissars in life would not conduct correspondence about some kind of impostor, not their level.
So, they knew perfectly well that he was not an impostor ?! But since a live Chapaev has not been needed since 1919, he must go where he was - to the pantheon of dead heroes of the Civil War. That's it.
On February 9, 1887, the legendary commander of the Red Army Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev was born. Nowadays, the name "Chapaev" is more associated with the hero of numerous jokes than with the legendary commander. We decided to correct this misunderstanding and today, on the birthday of Vasily Ivanovich, we publish little-known facts from his biography
Chapaev was born into a poor peasant family. The greatest wealth of the parents were 9 eternally hungry children, of which the famous chief was the sixth. The legend says that Vasily Ivanovich was born prematurely and kept warm in his father's fur mitten on the stove. When the son grew up a little, his father assigned him to the seminary, in the hope that he would become a priest.
But relations with the church did not work out for Chapaev. When once guilty Vasya was put in a wooden punishment cell in a severe frost in one shirt, he escaped. “My childhood was gloomy, difficult. I had to humiliate myself and starve a lot. From an early age I ran around strangers,” the commander later recalled.
There is an opinion that the family of Vasily Ivanovich bore the name of Gavrilov. "Chapaev" or "Chepai" was the nickname that the grandfather of the divisional commander, Stepan Gavrilovich, received. They once loaded logs with their comrades, and Stepan, as the eldest, constantly commanded - "Chop, chop!", Which meant: "take it, take it." So it stuck to him - Chepai, and the nickname later turned into a surname.
They say that the original "Chepai" became "Chapaev" with the light hand of Dmitry Furmanov, the author of the famous novel, who decided that "it sounds better this way." But in the surviving documents from the time of the civil war, Vasily Ivanovich appears under both options. Perhaps the name "Chapaev" appeared as a result of a typo.
The education of the division chief, contrary to popular belief, was not limited to two years of parochial school. In 1918, he was enrolled in the military academy of the Red Army, where many fighters and commanders were driven to improve their general literacy and strategy training. According to the memoirs of his classmate, the peaceful student life weighed on Chapaev: "Damn it! I'll leave! To come up with such nonsense - fighting people at the desk!" Two months later, he filed a report with a request to release him from this "prison" to the front.
Several stories have been preserved about Vasily Ivanovich's stay at the academy. The first one says that in a geography exam, in response to an old general's question about the significance of the Neman River, Chapaev asked the professor if he knew about the significance of the Solyanka River, where he fought with the Cossacks. According to the second, in a discussion of the battle at Cannae, he called the Romans "blind kittens", telling the teacher - military theorist Sechenov: "We have already shown generals like you how to fight!"
In the view of many, Chapaev is such a courageous fighter with a mustache, a naked saber and galloping on a dashing horse. At least this image was created by the national actor Boris Babochkin. In real life, Vasily Ivanovich preferred cars to horses. Even on the fronts of the First World War, he received a serious wound in the thigh, so riding became a big problem for him.
That is how Chapaev became one of the first red commanders who moved to the car. He chose iron horses very meticulously. The first - the American "Stever", he rejected because of the strong shaking, the red "Packard", which replaced him, also had to be abandoned - he was not suitable for military operations in the steppe. But Ford, who then squeezed 70 miles off-road, liked the red commander.
The legendary commander Chapaev suffered constant losses on the personal front. His first wife, the petty-bourgeois Pelageya Metlina, whom Chapaev's parents disapproved of, calling her the "urban white-handed woman", bore him three children, but she did not wait for her husband from the front - she went to a neighbor.
The second wife of Chapaev, though already a civilian, was also called Pelageya. She was the widow of Vasily's comrade-in-arms, Pyotr Kamishkertsev, to whom the division commander promised to take care of his family. At first he sent her benefits, and then they decided to move in together. But history repeated itself - during the absence of her husband, Pelageya had an affair with a certain Georgy Zhivolozhinov.
Once Chapaev found them together and almost sent the unfortunate lover to the next world. When the passions subsided, Kamishkertseva decided to go to the world, took the children and went to her husband's headquarters. The children were allowed to see Chapaev, but she was not there. They say that after that she took revenge on Vasily Ivanovich, giving the Whites the location of the Red Army troops and data on their numbers.
THE DEATH OF CHAPAEV
The epic death of Vasily Ivanovich is shrouded in mystery. On September 4, 1919, Borodin's detachments approached the city of Lbischensk, where the headquarters of Chapaev's division was located with a small number of fighters. During the defense, Chapaev was severely wounded in the stomach, his soldiers put the commander on a raft and ferried across the Urals, but he died from loss of blood. The body was buried in the coastal sand, and the traces were hidden so that the Cossacks would not find it.
Searching for the grave subsequently became useless, as the river changed its course. This story was confirmed by a participant in the events. According to another version, being wounded in the arm, Chapaev drowned, unable to cope with the current.
