Surely everyone remembers the textbook episode from the film of the Vasiliev brothers "Chapaev", in which the legendary commander, fleeing machine-gun bursts, swims across the Urals. How did Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev (who was Chepaev according to his passport) actually die?
Death in the river
The Vasiliev brothers shot a film based on a novel that made one of the rank and file, in general, participants in the Civil War, famous. According to Dmitry Furmanov's book, in the fall of 1919, Chapaev died in a clash with White Cossacks in the Lbischensk region (now the village of Chapaev in the West Kazakhstan region). The commander wounded in the arm with three comrades tried to cross the river to get to the Bukhara side, i.e. to the steppe to the nomads. White killed two Red Army men at once, the latter was with Chapaev to the end.
“Two of them sailed, they were already at the very shore - and at that moment a predatory bullet hit Chapaev in the head. When the satellite, crawling into the sedge, looked around, there was no one behind: Chapaev was drowned in the waves of the Urals,”the novel says.
Furmanov based himself on the story of one of the signalmen of the Chapaevsk division, but this version of the events of September 5 is far from the only one. Fighters of the 25th division and local residents told differently about the death of the red commander. Even not all of those who agreed with the fact of his death in the Urals saw other fighters next to him - it is possible that Chapaev drowned alone.
In 1927, the newspaper Rabochy Klich, published in Ryazan, published a letter signed with the initials TZV. Its author, who allegedly served in the "Chapaevskaya" division, said that he sailed along the river with Vasily Ivanovich. However, there was no shooting. Chapaev drowned without even being wounded - having thrown himself into the cold water in only his underwear, he was exhausted and went to the bottom. However, before that, the nadchiv managed to save the life of his companion, supporting him with water for a while.
"Hungarian" version
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After the Great Patriotic War, Chapaev's daughter Claudia received a letter from Hungary. It stated that the last who were next to Vasily Ivanovich were the Hungarians-internationalists. They put Chapaev, wounded in the stomach, on a shutter from the gate seized in one of the peasant households. On this homemade raft, the division commander was transported to the other side of the river. Either in the process of crossing, or on the other side, the legendary commander died from blood loss. Why the "Hungarian comrades" were silent about this until Budapest was occupied by the Red Army is not entirely clear.
Chapaev's grave was supposed to be there, on the sandy bank of the Urals, among the reeds. According to one version, she was found after the Civil War, and Chapaev was even identified by her clothes and the remains of flesh on her face. However, for some reason, this truth was not made public - they say that the search participants were intimidated into keeping them silent about what they saw.
Chapaev's daughter, already in the 1960s looking for a burial place with the help of the Hungarians, could not find it, because the river often changed its course, and the bones of the division commander could be washed off with water.
Chapaev survived?
According to the testimony of an unnamed colleague of Chapaev, with whom the front-line soldier Vasily Sityaev met, the Hungarians really participated in the rescue of Vasily Ivanovich. Moreover, Chapaev allegedly managed to survive, and he went to Samara to Frunze "for punishment." Whether it is true or not, the narrator was so sure that the "folk hero" survived that he even kept his saber and cloak intact for him.
Finally, a man was found who claimed to have seen Chapaev alive many years after the Civil War. This is what a resident of the Tomsk region named Onyanov said in 1998. According to him, the division commander went blind and was forced to live under a different name, since the party deliberately decided to make a propaganda myth out of his death. It is possible, however, that Onyanov met the impostor.
The stories about the surviving Chapaev can be considered a variation of the "popular rumor" according to which Vasily Ivanovich, as a real epic hero, did not die, but swam and left for the Ural steppe, but at the same time "changed his nickname." This option, by the way, came in handy for filmmakers in 1941, when they showed how Chapaev, who had swam to the shore of the Urals, mounts a horse and calls on the Red Army to beat the fascists.
Timur Sagdiev