Sometimes you start reading all sorts of versions of well-known events and realize that something is probably wrong! However, in the process of studying, arguing, discussing interesting information appears that you would never have learned if you had not started digging “all sorts of nonsense” and often this interesting information does not even apply to the object of study. So my approach is that any information is useful.
So, what do the documents say about the death of the famous divisional commander Vasily Chapaev?
From 15 to 25 July, in the Usikha region, fierce battles were fought between the Chapaevsk units and the Belouralsk army. Having overcome all the obstacles on their way, enduring thirst and hardships, feeling a lack of ammunition, the Chapayevites occupied not only Lbischensk (now the city of Chapaev in the West Kazakhstan region of Kazakhstan, the regional center of the Akzhaik district. It is located 130 km south of Uralsk, on the right bank of the river. Ural.), But also the village of Sakharnaya, having traveled over 200 kilometers.
The Belouralsk Cossack army began to retreat to the south, stopping at every farm. White generals created plans for "massive horse attacks", and then launched an energetic preparation of a raid on Lbischensk, where Chapaev's base and headquarters were located.
Late in the evening, some of the carriages who went to the steppe for hay returned there. They reported that Cossacks attacked them and hijacked carts. Chapaev and Baturin, who had arrived, were reported about this. Vasily Ivanovich urgently demanded to report intelligence and air reconnaissance data in the direction of the villages of Slomikhinskaya and Kazil-Ubimskaya. Chief of Staff Novikov reported that no enemy had been found either by horse reconnaissance or by reconnaissance flights of the squadron, carried out in the morning and evening, for several days. And the appearance of relatively small Cossack detachments and patrols was no longer a rarity. According to the version set forth in the book by Evgenia Chapaeva (great-granddaughter of Vasily Chapaev) in the book "My Unknown Chapaev" in early September, the security of Lbischensk was not sufficiently strengthened, as air reconnaissance reported that white people were nearby no.
This is what she wrote …
To quote an excerpt from chapter 16 of this book:
Promotional video:
Chapaev calmed down, but gave the order to strengthen the security. Novikov, a former officer who had served as an assistant chief of staff for a division and had recently headed headquarters, was above suspicion. And the information he reported about the enemy did not correspond to reality: the enemy with large forces of cavalry was no longer far away and aimed at Lbischensk.
As they say, the enemy is not asleep … This is exactly what some people from the arriving squadron and division headquarters did. The technical capabilities of the aircraft of that time and the absence of anti-aircraft weapons against them allowed flights at low altitudes. The pilots, who took off twice a day, could not help but notice the cavalry of several thousand horsemen … Moreover, the reeds of the dry Kushum River are not a forest to hide such a mass of the enemy.
SO FLYERS …
About them, it is about them, and it is necessary to say especially. The fact that they were traitors became clear even then, on September 4, 1919. But few could have guessed what drove them … Do you think the incredible love for the renounced Tsar Nicholas? Or fierce hatred of the Bolsheviks? WRONG !!!
Everything is much more prosaic - MONEY, MONEY and again MONEY … Moreover, it is very large. 25 thousand gold … Yes, for the head of Chapaev, dead or alive, they gave just that much …
There were four pilots. I will allow myself to name only those who died, like Chapaev, on September 5, 1919. These are Sladkovsky and Sadovsky. And the survivors, that is, 2 pilots, shared the profits and settled down perfectly in the bright future.
And yet man is incomprehensibly arranged. Quite a little time will pass, the powdery forties will come, and two traitors in the civil war will become heroes of the Soviet Union in the Patriotic War … But that's not all. They will occupy responsible posts in the government and all their lives will "cover" the topic of the civil war, and especially about Chapaev. Perhaps they were ashamed …
Information about the traitorous pilots is also available in the book of I. S. Kutyakova "Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev", published in 1935. Kutyakov Ivan Semenovich - commander of the 73rd brigade of the 25th division, after the death of V. I. Chapaev led the division, later commanded the division until 1920, was awarded three Orders of the Red Banner, the Order of the Red Banner of the Khorezm Republic, an honorary revolutionary weapon, was arrested and shot in 1938.
However, there is an opinion that the pilots still reported information about the whites. On the website "Chronograph" in the article "The Mystery of Chapaev's Death" it is written that the air reconnaissance of the Reds, flying over the steppe, found a Cossack corps in the reeds. The message about this immediately went to the army headquarters, but it never got out of its walls. A version is being put forward that, perhaps, traitors were acting at the headquarters, probably from among the military experts of the tsarist army, attracted by Lenin and Trotsky to cooperation. In addition, military experts were not among those killed during the assault on Lbischensk.
However, the version of the pilots' betrayal is refuted by the article "Chapaev - to destroy!", From the side of the Whites, which tells about the attack of the White Cossacks on Lbischensk.
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 remain 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 to drive off the horses in the reeds, toss the carts and cannons with branches and armfuls of grass, and lie down beside them. There was no certainty that the pilots did not notice them, but they did not have to choose, and the Cossacks had to march with the onset of night in order to move away from the dangerous place. Towards evening, on the third day of the journey, Borodin's detachment cut the Lbischensk-Slomikhinsk road, approaching Lbischensk by 12 versts.
In the same article, it is said about the betrayal of the Reds, but different: In order not to be discovered by the Reds, the Cossacks occupied a depression not far from the village itself and sent out patrols in all directions for reconnaissance and capture of "languages". Warrant officer Portnov's departure attacked the Red grain wagon train, partially capturing it. The prisoners 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 indicate his apartment. Another version is connected with pilots. Mikhail Dmitruk, in his article "What Chapaev Prayed About", concludes that the divisional commander died due to Trotsky's intrigues: It seems that he began to strive for a different, better world, where he could enter only after performing great deeds, defending the Faith and the Fatherland. Hence - the amazing, simply fantastic courage and heroism of Vasily Chapaev. But "the bullet is afraid of the bold, the bayonet does not take the bold" - he had to fight a lot, terrifying his opponents before reaching the desired goal … When Vasily Ivanovich realized that the Soviet government was engaged in the extermination of the Russian people, he began to actively interfere with this. Chapaev stopped following the orders of Lev Davydovich Trotsky, as erroneous, and led the division away from unnecessary losses, which the commander-in-chief demanded. Since then, Vasily Ivanovich became dangerous to the Bolshevik leadership, because he thwarted his secret plan to drown all of Russia in blood. As a result, the division commander began to hunt … his superiors. One betrayal followed another. The division headquarters was now and then cut off from the main forces - so that an enemy attacked it, ten times superior to a handful of Chapayevites. But each time he managed to miraculously outwit and defeat the enemy. Finally, Leon Trotsky presented Vasily Chapaev with the last "gift": four airplanes, ostensibly for reconnaissance of the enemy's forces, but in reality - for informing the white people. The pilots cheerfully reported to the division commander that everything was calm around, while huge forces of White Guards were drawn from all sides. Here his headquarters again, as if by accident, were cut off from the main forces. They cut it off when several soldiers of the training company remained with the division commander. They were doomed, but they bravely accepted the battle and died as heroes. This version, of course, is delusional, if only for the reason that Trotsky, although he was one of the founders of the Red Army and the people's commissar for military and naval affairs and the chairman of the revolutionary military council of the RSFSR, was not Chapaev's immediate superior. Secondly, there is no evidence thatthat Chapaev suddenly became an opponent of the power of the Bolsheviks, no. Chapaev really had a conflict with the commander of the 4th Army Khvesin, who did not send reinforcements to Chapaev when he was surrounded with his division. You can read more about this in Chapter 10 of the book "My Unknown Chapaev".
This is what he wrote in his report to the commander of the 4th Army:
I wait two days. If no reinforcements come, I will fight my way to the rear. The division was brought to such a position by the headquarters of the 4th army, which received two telegrams every day demanding help, and to this day there is not a single soldier. I doubt if that ZAKVASK is not in the headquarters of the 4th Army in CONNECTION WITH THE TWO MILLION BURENIN. (This refers to the uncovered conspiracy at the headquarters of the 4th army.)
I ask you to pay attention to all the chiefs of the division and revolutionary councils, if you care about your comrade's blood, DO NOT SPILL IT MISSING. I WILL BE DECEPTUED BY THE BOTTLE HVESIN, THE COMMANDER OF THE 4 ARMY, who told me that reinforcements were coming to me - all the cavalry of the Ural division and an armored vehicle and the 4th Malouzensky regiment, with which I was ordered to advance on the village. Perelyub on October 23, but not only could I not complete the task with the Malousen regiment, but this time (I do not know) where it is.
As a result, Khvesin was removed from the command of the 4th Army on November 4, 1918 - long before Chapaev's death. In this telegram, it is noteworthy that it is addressed to the commander of the 4th Army, that is, Khvesin, and Chapaev calls Khvesin in the third person a scoundrel.
There is one more version. Chapaev's second common-law wife was Pelageya Kamishkertseva. It is also written about her in the book in Chapter 4. However, the relationship between Chapaev and her did not work out - Chapaev was looking for any convenient excuse to appear at home less often. As a result, Pelageya began an affair with the head of the artillery depot Georgy Zhivozhinov. All the women in the neighborhood went crazy for him: he seemed to hypnotize them. Kamishkertseva, too, could not resist his spell. Once Vasily Ivanovich returned home … And then - everything is like in a joke about a deceived husband and an unfaithful wife. The moment was the most intimate, and one of the division fighters, accompanying Chapaev, broke a window and began to scribble from a machine gun.
Kamishkertseva quickly realized what she was in danger of treason, grabbed the children of Chapaev and began to hide behind them. Vasily Ivanovich reacted more calmly to what had happened and simply stopped talking to Kamishkertseva. Pelageya was very tormented and one day, taking Chapaev's youngest son, Arkady, went to Vasily Ivanovich at the headquarters.
He didn't even let her in. And Kamishkertseva, out of anger, drove into the white headquarters and said that Chapaev's fighters had training rifles, and the headquarters had no cover. This version was also told by Evgenia Chapaeva, but it is not voiced in her book.
So, let's move on to the actual version of Chapaev's death. Canonical, shown in the film - he, wounded, drowns, swimming across the Urals, fleeing the whites. There is another option, also associated with the Ural River. In the newspaper "Bolshevik Smena" (April 22, 1938), Chapaev's youngest son, Arkady, wrote an article about the death of his father. Surely he was guided by the story of one of the participants in those tragic events: Three assault groups were gradually moving towards the center of the village, disarming the resisting Chapaevites. The Cossacks were unable to cordon off the house where Chapaev was. Chapaev managed to escape from the house, he ran down the street, the platoon commander Belonozhkin shot at him and hit him in the arm. Chapaev managed to rally around a hundred soldiers with machine guns and rushed to this special platoon. He was wounded in the stomach. They put him on a hastily put together raft made of half a gate. Two Hungarians (and many internationalists fought in the Chapayev division - Hungarians, Czechs, Serbs …) helped him to cross the Urals. When they reached the coast, it turned out that the divisional commander had died of blood loss. The Hungarians buried the body with their hands right on the beach in the sand and covered the grave with reeds so that the enemies would not find and abuse the deceased. The version with the Hungarians finds another confirmation. This is what Klavdia Chapaeva, daughter of Vasily Chapaev, recalls: … In 1962 I received a letter from Hungary. Former Chapayevites who now lived in Budapest wrote to me. They watched the film "Chapaev" and were indignant at its content; according to their story, everything came out quite differently … From the letter: “… When Vasily Ivanovich was wounded,Commissar Baturin ordered us (two Hungarians) and two more Russians to make a raft from the gate and the fence and by hook or crook be able to transport Chapaev to the other side of the Urals. We made a raft, but we were already bleeding ourselves. And Vasily Ivanovich was nevertheless transported to the other side. When rowing, he was alive, moaning … But when they swam to the shore, he was gone. And so that his body would not be mocked, we buried him in the coastal sand. They buried it and covered it with reeds. Then they themselves lost consciousness from loss of blood …”There is another option, also associated with the Ural River. Viktor Senin recalls: In 1982, I, then a correspondent for the Pravda newspaper, had to go with Viktor Ivanovich Molchanov (deputy editor of the Pravda information department) to the Ural River, where the story with Chapaev happened. So, as local old-timers said,Chapaev swam across the river with the soldiers and hid in nearby houses. Local Cossacks gave the divisional commander to the white. Chapaev's last fight ensued. In that saber battle, Chapaev killed 16 soldiers. There was no equal to him in saber fights. They shot the divisional commander in the back … They wrote the essay "The last battle of Chapaev", but it, of course, was not published … In the already cited article "Chapaev - to destroy" Chapaev's death is also associated with the crossing of the Urals. A special platoon, allocated for the capture of Chapaev, broke through to his apartment - headquarters. The captured Red Army soldier did not deceive the Cossacks. At this time, the following happened 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 into the headquarters yard. There, the Cossacks saw a horse sitting at the entrance to the house, which someone was holding inside by the rein, thrust through the closed door. Silence was the answer to Belonozhkin's order for those in the house to leave. Then he fired into the house through the skylight. The frightened horse jumped to the side and dragged out from behind the door of the Red Army man who was holding him. Apparently, it was Chapaev's personal orderly Pyotr 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 the Red Army, 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 men rushed to the Urals in panic, they were stopped by Chapaev, who rallied around a hundred soldiers 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 again in the stomach. The wound turned out to be so serious that he could no longer lead the battle and was transported on planks across the Urals. Sotnik V. Novikov, who was watching the Urals, saw how someone was transported across the Urals against the center of Lbischensk just before the end of the battle. According to eyewitnesses, on the Asian side of the Ural River, Chapaev died from a wound in the stomach. In addition to the conspiracy theory with Trotsky, there is another conspiracy theories around Chapaev. According to her letter from the Hungarians, Klavdia Chapaeva, was organized by the KGB. Here is what Yuri Moskalenko writes on the shkolazhizni.ru portal: You are not confused by the fact thatthat the letter found the addressee for sure? Even if Vasily Ivanovich called his daughter's name to his rescuers, and they remembered a name that was not so simple for the Hungarians, could they really hope that after three decades, in the crucible of a terrible war, the daughter would survive and stay at the same address? According to her, the legendary commander did not disappear in the cold waters of the Urals, but safely moved to the other side, sat in the reeds until nightfall, and then went to the headquarters of the 4th army to the commander of Frunze to “atone for sins” for the defeat of the division. There are two pieces of evidence for this. The first belongs to a certain Vasily Sityaev, who mentioned his meeting in 1941 with a colleague of the division commander, who sacredly kept the cloak and saber of the missing Chapaev. The former Chapaevite said that a platoon of Hungarians had safely ferried him across the river,and the divisional commander dismissed the guards "to beat the whites" and went to Samara to Frunze. The second evidence is much "fresh" and began to "walk" right after the 1998 crisis, when one of the division's veterans "sold" a "sensational" fact to journalists, they say, he met Vasily Ivanovich already gray-haired and blind, but with a different surname. The chief told that, having released the Hungarians, he wandered off to Samara, but on the way he fell seriously ill and lay for three weeks on one of the farms in the steppe. And then he spent a certain amount of time under Frunze's arrest. By that time, the divisional commander was already on the list of heroically dead, and the party leadership found it more useful to use Chapaev as a legend than to announce a miraculous "resurrection". There was a reason in this - if the Red Army learned that the legendary division commander killed the personnel,and he himself ran away from the whites - it would be a shameful stain on the entire "workers and peasants" In short, the division commander was declared an "information" blockade, and when he "blabbed" in 1934, he was hid in one of Stalin's camps. And only after the death of the leader of the peoples was he released and placed in a home for the disabled. By that time he was already harmless: who would have believed in the old man's ravings? Yes, in any insane asylum you can find not only Chapaev, but two or three Napoleons and Marat with Robespierre. And even more so, he would hardly have lived until 1998 - at that time he should have already turned 111 years old! And this "version" really looks like a story with Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, who allegedly did not die in March 1968, but was safely hidden in the basements of the KGB because he seemed to see a cloud with angels next to the Moon … Well, the author of this of the text he himself refuted this conspiracy theory. As you can see, Chapaev, like any legendary person, has overgrown with legends about the circumstances of his death. Moreover, the soil for legends is nutritious - after all, Chapaev's body was never found. On the website centrasia.ru, Gulmira Kenzhegalieva sets out a version according to which Chapaev was captured: Academician Aleksey Cherekaev gives the story of the death of the Chapaevsk division, which he heard from the mouths of old-timers: drove to the Urals. Many threw themselves into the river and immediately drowned. September was already standing, the water was cold. It is difficult to swim across it even for a seasoned Cossack, and here there are men, and even in clothes”. Almost every year, the village boys on September 5, the day of memory of the national hero, tried to swim across the Urals from Krasny Yar, working with one hand and with two hands. Even from Moscow at one time a team of special swimmers came. But no one has yet managed to swim across the river in this particular place.
Local old-timers told Cherekaev about what actually happened to Chapaev: “They caught him and interrogated him. Then, together with the staff chests, they were loaded into carts, transported by ferry across the Urals and sent under escort in the direction of Guryev. Ataman Tolstov was there”. Further traces of Chapaev are lost. They said that the protocols of his interrogations were in Australia, where General Tolstov had moved. Academician Cherekaev, who at one time worked as an adviser to the USSR embassy in Australia, tried to get to these documents. But the descendants of the White Guard Tolstov did not even want to show them. So it is not known if they really exist or if this is another legend about Chapaev.
And, finally, there is another version of the circumstances of Chapaev's death, also connected with the capture. It was presented in an article by Leonid Tokar in the newspaper "Your secret councilor" No. 13 (29) of November 5, 2001. According to this version, Chapaev, together with the headquarters, was captured by the Whites and killed. Read it on the link who is interested in full.
So, the novel "Chapaev" was written by Furmanov in 1923. It would seem that everything that is written in the novel is an axiom. However, the existing ambiguities and inconsistencies in the history of the death of V. I. Chapaev allow us to conclude that the chief of the 25th division died on the territory of Lbischensk, and not crossing the Urals.
To clarify the facts stated in the articles, I turned to official sources.
First of all, if a legendary or well-known person dies, then the central newspapers must invariably report his death. However, when studying the central press for September-October 1919, no mention of Chapaev's death was found. The newspapers wrote about the death of commanders, commissars of regiments and divisions, but not a single line about Chapaev. This is all the more strange because, according to the data of the "Soviet Military Encyclopedia" (3), by the decree of the Turkestan Front dated September 10, 1919, the twenty-fifth rifle division was named after V. I. Chapaev. The explanation is quite simple. Vasily Ivanovich - the only commander of the 25th division died in the civil war. The earliest publication of the novel "Chapaev", which I found, dates back to 1931, and all eyewitness memories date from 1935 at the earliest.that is, after the release of the film "Chapaev". There were only a few of these eyewitnesses. Another fact is interesting. The further from the events of those years, the more eyewitnesses to Chapaev's death appear, the more textbook these memories become. …
… If you get acquainted with the recollections of eyewitnesses, it becomes clear that you can only trust the recollections of I. S. Kutyakov, who writes about everything from the words of the only surviving commander - Chief of Staff of the Division Novikov. Kutyakov at that moment was the head of the 25th division and directly reconstructed the course of events in Lbischensk. In September 1919, D. A. Furmanov was in the political department of the 4th Army and could write his novel only from the words of Kutyakov and Novikov. The memories of the rest of the division's fighters should be approached with a great deal of skepticism. So after reading the memoirs of the chief for organizing the supply of the division with flour Kadnikov and the divisional fighter Maksimov - the only ones who were interviewed, as a witness to the death of Chapaev in 1938 (10), one gets the impression thatthat Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev moved around the city as he wanted and was simultaneously in many places. Well, how can you trust the words of a person who says: “The shooting was carried out at random, in the direction from which the explosive dum-dum bullets were flying in a thick rain” (11).
The chief of staff of the White Ural Army, Colonel Motornov, describes the events in Lbischensk as follows: “Lbischensk was taken on September 5 with a stubborn battle that lasted 6 hours. As a result, they were destroyed and taken prisoner: the headquarters of the 25th division, an instructor school, divisional institutions. Four airplanes, five cars and other military booty were captured”(12).
After the capture of the city, the whites perpetrated a cruel reprisal against the captured soldiers and commanders of the 25th division. The Cossacks shot in batches of 100-200 people. At the places of executions, many suicide notes were found on scraps of newsprint and smoking paper. On September 6, the 73rd brigade of the 25th division liberated the city from the whites. The Reds were in the cities for only a few hours. At this time, searches for Chapaev's body were organized, but they did not bring any results. In the bathhouse under the floor they found Chief of Staff Novikov, seriously wounded in the leg. He reported everything that happened in Lbischensk. The fact of the search proves that Chapaev died in the city, and not while crossing the river. Otherwise, why would his body have been searched for among the dead in the city. Moreover, up to five thousand people died in the Lbischensk region. In his novel, D. A. Furmanov writes that behind the stanitsa (read - Lbischensky) there are three huge pits - they are filled to the brim with the corpses of those shot.
In favor of the capture and subsequent death of Chapaev is the fact that even according to eyewitnesses there are several versions of his death. Whether Chapaev left for the Urals, only those Chapaevites who were in the square could say, but they all died. The only surviving chief of staff, Novikov, saw Chapaev there all the time he was on the square. Novikov simply could not see the death of Chapaev while crossing the Ural, as he hid under the floor of the bath, so as not to be destroyed by the whites.
Additional information can be provided by the materials of the Trofimov-Mirsky investigation file, which should be kept in the archives of the Penza FSB.
Based on the foregoing, it can be confidently asserted that the unidentified body of Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev was buried in one of the mass graves in the city of Lbischensk (now Chapaev)"