For more than 90 years, the death of the poet has haunted historians, researchers and fans of his work. What really happened at the Angleterre Hotel?
Violated protocol
A lot of accusations come to the address of the district warden of the 2nd police department Nikolai Gorbov. The act of finding the body of S. Yesenin, signed by Gorbov, does not inspire confidence either in terms of grammar or professionally. A person who worked in an active-secret department of the criminal investigation department should be aware that this document is called a protocol and is drawn up according to a model. Removing the corpse from the noose, as well as describing the scene and evidence, according to all the rules, should be in the presence of attesting witnesses.
Gorbov's act (or just signed with his name?) Does not give a clear picture of what happened. And it’s hard to imagine that this district warden was so illiterate, because 19 years before that he worked as a typesetter in a printing house. The handwriting and signature of this person can be restored from his surviving documents: a statement and autobiography. Neither handwriting nor signature match.
Lack of hotel check-in
Not a single document was found confirming that Yesenin lived in the Angleterre Hotel in December 1925. And it is not clear why the poet had to stop there, if he could stay with his close friends. Yesenin probably never lived in Angleterre. Then the version that he was killed in another place, and after that they played out the story of suicide in a hotel room, looks more convincing.
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Incomplete medical examination
The act of medical examination, drawn up by forensic expert Gilyarevsky, also seems dubious. His conclusion reads: “Based on the autopsy data, it should be concluded that Yesenin's death followed from asphyxiation, produced by compression of the airways through hanging. The pressure on the forehead could have come from hanging pressure. The dark purple color of the lower extremities, punctate bruises on them indicate that the deceased was hanging for a long time."
However, for some reason, this act does not indicate all the injuries on the poet's face. This is confirmed by the photo of Yesenin, preserved in the National Public Library in St. Petersburg in a special section. In this photograph, one can clearly distinguish a bullet hole in the poet's forehead and a mark from a blow under his right eye. This blow could have been inflicted with the handle of a pistol, which, by the way, the poet himself had.
Predicament
Then the question arises: why was Yesenin hanged? Wasn't it easier to shoot him in order to present the case as suicide? Many historians are inclined to believe that Trotsky personally approved the murder of the poet. And the black work was entrusted to the famous revolutionary Yakov Blumkin, who was in a difficult situation during the murder, and therefore he had to play the hanging option.
Why hanging?
The question arises, why then it was necessary to "hang" the poet, if everything could be attributed to death from a shot from a revolver, which Yesenin himself had? Although, on the other hand, why did the poet himself, according to the official version, hang himself, and not shoot himself?
Valuable witness
The magazine "Miracles and Adventures" published a letter from retired military man Viktor Titarenko from the Khabarovsk Territory, in which he spoke about his conversation in the mid-70s with the former prisoner Nikolai Leontyev. According to him, in 1925 he served in the OGPU along with Blumkin. Once Blumkin received an order from Trotsky to physically punish Yesenin with dignity. The Chekists planned to deprive the poet of his masculinity and, as if in jest, began to pull off his trousers. The poet grabbed a brass candlestick and hit Blumkin on the head with it. He fell unconscious, and the frightened Leontyev grabbed a revolver and shot at Yesenin.
Titarenko says that Blumkin, waking up, hit Yesenin's forehead with the handle of his revolver, and then contacted Trotsky and agreed with him about staging a suicide and about measures to eliminate the bloody traces. And Nikolai Leontyev was sent a few days later to the Far East to work underground at the headquarters of Ataman Semyonov. There, after the war, he received a 25-year sentence for treason to the Chekist cause.
It is difficult to rely on one letter in reasoning. But in the drawing by V. Svarog, made on the morning of December 28, 1925, the poet's trousers are unbuttoned and lowered. The artist also reports that he noticed traces of a struggle in the room and a lot of lint from the carpet on the shirt and in the poet's hair. V. Svarog even then suggested that Yesenin was wrapped in a carpet after the murder.
Bullying
It was not easy to live in the USSR in 1923-1925. Trotsky considered murder a justified means of establishing the communist idea. “We must,” he wrote, “turn Russia into a desert inhabited by white negroes, to which we will give such tyranny that even the inhabitants of the East have never dreamed of. By means of blood baths we will bring the Russian intelligentsia to a complete stupidity, to idiocy, to an animal state …"
Yesenin, it seems, knew what was interfering with the plan:
And the first
You need to hang me
With my arms crossed behind my back
For being a song
Hoarse and ill
I disturbed sleep
Native country.
It is also known that in the last years of the poet's life, the authorities subjected him to massive psychological harassment.
The truth about the death of the last poet of the village will be revealed only together with the archives of the NKVD (FSB).