Worked on the program: S. Unigovskaya, S. Postriganev The program was attended by: Nikolai Sergeevich Kirmel, candidate of historical sciences, senior lecturer of the Department of Journalism at the Military University, editor of the Chekist.ru website, member of the Society for the Study of the History of Russian Special Services; Dmitry Nikolaevich Filippovyh, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Missile and Artillery Sciences, Full Member of the Academy of Military Sciences, Member of the Presidium of the Academy of Military Sciences.
The history of domestic counterintelligence goes back more than one century, during which time its art has gone a long way of development - from seemingly primitive operational measures to the most complex combinations. However, after the February Revolution, the structures of political investigation of tsarist Russia were abolished, and soon the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission was formed. Many books and films have been made about the Cheka, but not much is known about the activities of the counterintelligence service of the White movement.
When creating intelligence and counterintelligence, the leaders of the White Guard relied on the experience of building the special services of the Russian Empire, which, judging by documents and modern research, were far from perfect. Thus, the shortcomings inherent in the existence of the autocracy were transferred to the special services of the white governments and armies. And one more important circumstance: after the February Revolution, the gendarme department ceased to exist, all its officers already enrolled in counterintelligence were subject to immediate dismissal.
Ustinov, assistant chief of counterintelligence of the Black Sea Fleet, later recalled what was happening in those days: “All members of the police department and agents of the former suburban branch were fired. This measure deprived counterintelligence of experienced workers, in some respects even irreplaceable. " A similar situation has developed in Petrograd. By order of the Naval General Staff of April 26, 1917, the Petrograd Naval KRO was reorganized, and its chief, Colonel Nikolaev, was dismissed. Instead, Serebryakov became the head of the squad, who had the rank of ensign!
The leaders of the white movement, in particular, Anton Ivanovich Denikin, also did not favor the gendarmes ...
Nikolai KIRMEL: Unlike Kolchak, who put former gendarmes and counterintelligence officers at the head of the counterintelligence agencies, Denikin's counterintelligence leaders were officers of the General Staff, and the positions of the operational staff were occupied by combat officers. And who were, as they say, these combat officers? These are not those who have been associated with the army all their lives, have gone through a certain army school. Those officers had their own caste notions of honor, the dignity of an officer - most of these officers died on the fronts of the First World War.
Who then made up for the impoverished ranks of the volunteer armies? The officers were people of peaceful professions who had little idea about the art of war and about army honor. Nevertheless, these people held various positions in the army hierarchy and often ended up in counterintelligence.
What kind of professionalism, especially the moral code of the Russian officers, could we talk about! Moreover, the Fatherland, which they were proud of and defended, collapsed in an instant. And in the confusion and confusion of the chaos that gripped the country, few people understood the political situation, who are the Reds, who are the Whites ... True, the Reds had understandable slogans addressed to the powerful social strata of the "humiliated and insulted", they promised : "Peace to the peoples!", "All power to the Soviets!", "The land to the peasants!", "Liquidation of private property" and the like. Another thing is that these promises were not fulfilled, but that was later, and then, in the civil society, these laconic, capacious promises stirred the souls of the masses ... What did the White movement oppose to the Bolshevik propaganda? "For the Great United and Indivisible Russia"? "For the monarchy"? What is this, to return the land to the landlords? .. The so-called slogan of "no permission" was especially vague. In other words, speaking out in the fight against Soviet power, the leaders of the White movement did not have a specific program of action. They did not offer the people a formalized political ideal, therefore they were unable to win over a significant part of it. The primary task of the White movement was to defeat the Bolsheviks, and the fate of Russia was to be decided by the Constituent Assembly ... And this means that the future structure of the country will be taken up by those who have suffered from the revolution: representatives of the commercial and industrial class and large landowners ... will continue ... Therefore, the white regimes began to restore the old order: private property and free trade. The economy was destroyed, prices jumped dozens of times, since they were freed from any state control. The White Guard governments did not have enough funds to support the state apparatus and maintain the army ...
Nikolai KIRMEL: In Soviet literature, it was said a lot about what the allies supplied with everything. Yes, there really were supplies of weapons, equipment and so on, but all this did not reach the army, for example. Because it was plundered somewhere in warehouses, sold for fabulous sums. And those, let's say in modern language, businessmen for whom the white army, so to speak, returned them to their places, they were in no hurry to give money to the army. Here. Held back. Even Denikin was indignant about this, being in exile ...
“Everyone demanded that the authorities protect their rights and interests, but very few were inclined to provide real help. - Anton Ivanovich Denikin wrote in exile. - This feature was especially terrible in relation to the attitude of the majority of the bourgeoisie to the government that restored the bourgeois system and property. Material assistance to the army and the government from the possessing classes was expressed in figures that were insignificant in the full sense of the word. And while the claims of these classes were very great. "
The deplorable situation of the White Army forced them to engage in requisitions - food, fodder, horses, and livestock were constantly confiscated from the population. All this resulted in a real robbery of their own people. If at first whites were greeted as liberators, the attitude towards them soon changed to the opposite. Incidentally, only later, in exile, the White Guards themselves recognized this.
And, as it always happens in times of trouble, against the background of general decline (or maybe thanks to it), many dubious personalities, businessmen and swindlers, shamelessly stuffed their pockets, making fabulous fortunes ...
A distinctive feature of all state institutions in the territory controlled by whites was the phenomenal dominance of the bureaucracy. There were many reasons for this. First, the rear offices were a safe haven from being drafted into the army. Secondly, all government structures were built in advance at the all-Russian level and according to the old schemes. A demonstrative emphasis on pre-revolutionary traditions was manifested in the fact that the old spelling and the Julian calendar operated in the areas captured by the whites. Even astronomy was ignored - all the offices of the Volunteer Army in Yekaterinodar worked according to Petrograd time. The flourishing of Denikin's bureaucracy was also facilitated by the fact that a huge number of officials of all stripes and ranks who had fled from central Russia had accumulated in the "white south". By the end of 1919, there were 8 former senators, 18 generals, 50 actual state councilors, 22 state councilors, 49 leaders of the nobility in the apparatus of the Special Council. And it is absolutely impossible to calculate the number of small officials who were trying to get, in an atmosphere of devastation and high cost, albeit minimal, but still guaranteed earnings. The constant growth in the number of state institutions has turned into a serious financial burden. In order to save money, the minimum salaries were set for officials - from 300 to 600 rubles. At the same time, a pound of bread on the market cost about 20 rubles. But the economy on salaries for officials turned into an unprecedented rampant corruption. For most of them, bribes have become almost the only way to support their families.
In Soviet times, in the course of the history of the Civil War, there was practically no information about the activities of the special services of the white movement in the fight against corruption, manifestations of smuggling in the rear of the White Guard troops ...
Dmitry FILIPPOVYKH: We can say that in general, the provision of the activities of the troops by the White Guard special services - this topic was terra incognito until the early 90s ... At the same time, the Soviet audience still had a certain idea of \u200b\u200bthe activities of the White Guard special services, at least from the cult film in the 70s "Adjutant to His Excellency." Well, which in importance was in no way inferior to such a film as "17 Moments of Spring".
A small note: the script of the film was based on a real story, the main character of which (in the film - Staff Captain Koltsov) bore the name Makarov. The prototype of the commander of the Volunteer Army, General Kovalevsky, was also a real person, Vadim Zenonovich Mai-Mayevsky, - here he is in the photo ... The prototype of the head of counterintelligence of the Volunteer Army, Colonel Shchukin, bore the name Shchuchkin ...
Dmitry FILIPPOVYKH: So, this film clearly shows the moment when the counterintelligence of the Volunteer Army tried to fight against violations of various kinds - smuggling, embezzlement on railway transport, in principle, everything related to the logistical support of the active army. The counterintelligence prison held detainees for various offenses - railroad workers, an official, and it’s probably easy to remember the plot when a counterintelligence officer who came in asked: what are you doing?
FRAGMENT from the movie "His Excellency's Adjutant".
Dmitry Filippov: But all this concerned train crews. But, in addition to train brigades, in the counterintelligence chambers of the Volunteer Army, and, in principle, counterintelligence and Denikin's army and Yudenich's army and Kolchak's army, and Wrangel's army, there were not only members of train brigades. There were also officials who were dishonest, who were trying to prosecute the bodies responsible for maintaining law and order in the rear of the active army ...
The activities of counterintelligence, an institution that played a significant role in the days of the white dictatorships, were not limited only to the fight against the Bolshevik underground, sabotage and sabotage ... This unit of the White Guard special services was also charged with the fight against corruption in the rear of the active army. Bribery and speculation affected all strata in the days of white rule. The lawyer of the Special Council, the commandant of Novocherkassk, and many other rear commanders were put on trial for speculation. When, on the eve of the surrender of Odessa, General Schilling tried to suppress the bacchanalia that gripped the city and ordered the closure of a number of restaurants, a rumor immediately spread that he was a secret shareholder of the Zolotaya Rybka restaurant and thus seeks to remove competitors.
A special klondike for bribery was railway stations and ports in southern Russia, where military supplies from abroad came ...
Nikolay KIRMEL: Captains of sea and river vessels, they transported anyone, anyone, for money. And smugglers and Bolshevik emissaries, Bolshevik agents, presenting them even in the form of ship crews. It was also beneficial for the captain - to receive, as they say, money for transporting smuggled persons, or smuggled goods.
In 1923, in Moscow, the State Publishing House published a book by Georgy Williams, The Disintegration of the Volunteers or the Vanquished, from the White Guard press. Essayist, poet, translator Georgy Yakovlevich William fled abroad after the revolution, and then returned to fight the Bolsheviks. After the defeat of Denikin, he again found himself in emigration, where he wrote memoirs about what he saw with his own eyes in civil society ... The Soviet state-political leadership decided to print a hostile White émigré author only for the purpose of propaganda ... But be that as it may, information Williams claim to be objective for one simple reason - they were written by a person sympathetic to the White movement ... So, the events in which the author was a direct participant took place in Novorossiysk. There were only a few days left until the collapse of the Denikin army ... The last commandant of the Novorossiysk railway junction told Georgy Williams about this episode ... At the moment when the Denikinites were still fighting bloody battles with the Red Army troops, some dodgers made money for themselves in their rear states ...
Dmitry FILIPPOVYKH: In a conversation with a former Guards Colonel who was the commandant of the Novorossiysk railway junction, the author learns that the previous military commandant practically did not care about the supply of weapons, military equipment, equipment to the active army, but was engaged in commerce. For a moderate bribe he transported a manufactory, silk gloves, stockings, perfumery. It was enough to load one box of shrapnel into such an echelon so that the train received the status of a letter and in fact passed non-stop where it needed to go. But not to the front lines at all.
By the way, the first thing that William heard when he arrived in Novorossiysk was: “They drove out the Reds - and how many of them were put, the passion of God! - and began to establish their own rules. Liberation has begun. First the sailors were tortured<...> they drove them out for a pier, forced them to dig a ditch for themselves, and then lead them to the edge and out of revolvers one by one. And then now into the ditch. So, believe me, how the crayfish moved in this ditch until they fell asleep. And then, at this place, the whole earth moved: that's why they did not finish off, so that others would be discouraged. "
The port city of Novorossiysk was a real Mecca for crooks and swindlers during the Civil War. It was not for nothing that Denikin's counterintelligence bodies were concentrated here. So in October-1919, the representative of the special department of the General Staff of the Military Directorate under the Black Sea military governor, Colonel Mergin, reported to the authorities that the local unit was filled with wagons not sent to their destination ...
Nikolai Kirmel: In this case, the reason for the delays was the sabotage of workers and artisans, who prevented the sending of shells to the front. But in this case, the sabotage of the workers, perhaps, was associated with the Bolsheviks, who thus tried to prevent the sending of the necessary equipment to the front in order to facilitate the task of the Red Army. But at the same time, the cars standing at the stations were mostly plundered ...
The head of the Novorossiysk counterintelligence point, Captain Musienko, was one of the few who was able to complete the investigation into the abuse at the Novorossiysk railway junction. He made sure that many of the officials involved in the bribery were brought to justice. The fact, unfortunately, is almost an isolated one ...
Nikolay KIRMEL: In particular, he managed to prevent the illegal export of food products to Georgia. Here, and on December 13, 18, counterintelligence officials detained a certain Tselinsky, who was trying to hide from mobilization. Also from Georgia, from the permission illegally issued by the commander of a military port to export almost 300 poods of flour.
That is, one part of the army fought, as they say, sparing no belly, and at that time those who had access to material values \u200b\u200bwere diligently enriching themselves. The saddest thing is that Captain Musienko and honest officers like him, not only were not encouraged by the command, on the contrary, they paid a lot for their valiant work ...
Nikolay KIRMEL: “Shtrenk received a permit in Yekaterinodar for 150 wagons of flour to be exported to Georgia. Primak - for 560 poods of pasta in Sukhumi. How to proceed?". So he asks, but instead of making a decision about imprisonment, he was called to the phone at about midnight, and the Black Sea military governor, Major General Kutepov, was accused of careerism. Those. these positions at the top were so strong, one might say, that they tried in different ways put pressure on those people through senior management to discourage some kind of crime fighting.
As a result, without any explanation, Captain Musienko was removed from his post ...
The apogee of corruption was the sale of the Russian merchant fleet under Wrangel under the guise of scrap metal. The situation in the rear was absolutely the same in all white armies: Kolchak, and Wrangel, and Yudenich ...
The part of the Kornilov division that survived the defeat was urgently evacuated to Marseille ... In this regard, one of the participants in the White movement recalled an interesting fact ...
Dmitry FILIPPOVYKH: There were 400 people left in the division, who retreated. But when they were loaded for evacuation, it turned out that there were already three thousand men in the Kornilov division. Perhaps, somewhere, a participant in fierce battles admits some inaccuracy, but the fact remains. Three thousand people in the Kornilov division ended up only due to the fact that the rear staff were so inflated that it was a good feeding trough for those who wanted to sit away from the front, save their lives, fill their pockets with money unjustly received from smuggling and from transporting contraband goods.
The rear was characterized by low mobilization readiness and the absence of trained operational reserves. The quartermaster and medical service functioned generally unsatisfactorily, which could not but affect the morale of the troops at the front. In the rear of the army speculation, looting, embezzlement, protectionism flourished. General Boris Aleksandrovich Shteifon testified: "At a time when volunteer units were bleeding to death in permanent, heavy battles, the unsettled, corrupted rear inflicted heavier blows on the front than the red enemy." His opinion was also shared by Anton Ivanovich Denikin: “The armies overcame incredible obstacles, fought heroically, resignedly suffered grave losses and liberated vast territories from the power of the Soviets step by step. This was the front side of the struggle, its heroic epic.
The "Troubadour of the White Army" the liberal press also resented the moral decay of the rear, "homeric revelry" at fabulous sums during the bloodshed at the front. In July 1919, the Tomsk newspaper Sibirskaya Zhizn wrote that the possessing classes, calling on the people to patriotism, must first set an example for them by their own behavior.
Against the background of bloody battles, repressions, hunger, someone frantically burned their lives in restaurants and at the gambling tables ... Newspapers now and then were full of notes about drunken brawls ... The press did not ignore the fight against corruption. The case on fraudulent embezzlement of diamonds by the head of the capital's criminal police Sukhodolsky, the case on charges of the Minister of Food and Supply Zefirov in concluding unprofitable transactions for the treasury to purchase imported tea, dubbed "tea panama", and the case of the chief chief of military communications, General Kasatkin, on charges of harboring machinations of railwaysah, nicknamed "Panama carriage". A natural question: why the counterintelligence of the White movement was unable to restore order in the rear?
Nikolai Kirmel: Because the same counterintelligence was corrupt. They had such a business. If the army was robbing the population, then, the way of business for counterintelligence was to catch the Bolsheviks. Those. someone was caught on something and demanded money for release. Those who had money, but the Bolsheviks had it, they were freed. Those who did not have money could be attributed to the innocent victims.
The memoirs of another proponent of the White Cause, Zinovy \u200b\u200bArbatov, who lived in Yekaterinoslav during the Denikin era, are quite consistent with the memoirs of William: “In the city, counterintelligence introduced a nightmarish system of“ expelling ”those people who, for some reason, they didn’t like, but who were not at all against no accusatory material. These people disappeared, and when their corpses fell to relatives or other close persons, the counterintelligence service, which was listed as killed, gave a stereotypical answer: "Killed while trying to escape" ... There was no one to complain. The governor Shchetinin, together with the head of the district Stepanov, having taken all the State guards from the city, went to hunt for living people in the forests of the Pavlograd district ... the governor from the guards drove hundreds of peasants fleeing from mobilization to the edge of the forest and mowed them down with machine-gun fire.
Incidentally, counterintelligence then existed in great numbers - in all military units, in transport, personal counterintelligence services of large white generals.
"Wild" counterintelligence services arose and operated, not subordinate to anyone. For the most part, they were engaged in blackmail, extortion, or even just raids and robberies. Counterintelligence turned into a real mafia, from whose attacks even the highest ranks of the Volunteer Army were not insured.
Dmitry FILIPPOVYKH: But this paradox that private agencies were created, yes, counterintelligence agencies, this led precisely to the fact that if these private agencies managed to requisition something, including smuggling, then it became the property of the regiment, which hid these requisition from a division or division, which hid these requisitions or what they managed to do, get, get from the corps, the corps hid from the front, from the army, or rather, and so on. In short, there was complete autonomy in the activities of these counterintelligence units.
In April 1920, Denikin resigned from the rank of commander-in-chief and, together with his chief of staff, General Romanovsky, departed for Constantinople. Here, in the building of the Russian embassy, \u200b\u200bRomanovsky was killed by an unknown officer. The name of the murderer was revealed only after many years - it turned out to be a certain lieutenant Kharuzin. As it became known, Kharuzin in 1919 was a member of one of the "wild" counterintelligence services - the "special task force" of Captain Baranov.
And again we turn to the notes of the counterintelligence investigator Captain Ustinov about the facts of corruption and moral decay of the White Guard special services employees ...
Dmitry FILIPPOVYKH: Here he writes that a special counterintelligence service was formed in the port, leaving Odessa was prohibited without special permits. Thousands of unfortunate people, accidentally stuck in Odessa, during the last evacuation, hurried to return to their home and besieged the steamer. But counterintelligence with weapons in hand blocked their path. The more shrewd, so as not to ... live in Odessa, paid immediately counterintelligence on the ship, and thus avoided vain, long ordeals. Port counterintelligence thus gained hundreds of thousands. It was some kind of legalized robbery of those leaving.
Only in 1919 the composition of the Odessa counterintelligence changed three times! It didn't help ... The extortion continued.
Denikin, having analyzed the mistakes and miscalculations in the domestic policy of the period of his reign, bitterly admitted: “None of the governments has managed to create a flexible and strong apparatus capable of rapidly and quickly overtaking, forcing, acting, forcing others to act. The Bolsheviks also did not capture the soul of the people, they also did not become a national phenomenon, but infinitely ahead of us in the pace of their actions, in energy, mobility and ability to coerce. We, with our old methods, old psychology, old vices of the military and civil bureaucracy, with the Peter's table of ranks, did not keep up with them. "
Nikolai KIRMEL: The Bolsheviks knew what they wanted, what they wanted, and they mobilized all the might of the state repressive apparatus, in particular the Cheka, they subjugated the people. Somewhere by slogans, somewhere by force, somewhere by some promises. As we know already after the Civil War, there were uprisings that were suppressed for a long time. Whites, however, did not create a flexible-controlled state apparatus subordinate to an iron will, and did not attract the people with ideas.
Periodically issued orders of Wrangel threatened bribe-takers and embezzlers, "undermining the foundations of the destroyed Russian statehood," with hard labor and the death penalty, which he introduced in October 20th. However, they did not have any deterrent effect. The arguments of the semi-official press that “insignificant salaries, high prices, families — all this is not an excuse for bribery” was just as ineffective as the campaign under the slogan “Taking a bribe now means trading in Russia!” Appealing to the patriotic feelings of officials .. ...
Kolchak.By the time of my arrival, it was observed that in the seemingly small detachments special bodies were being created - counter-intelligence. The creation of these bodies was completely self-directed, since counter-intelligence can only be at the headquarters of the corps. In such detachments there can be only reconnaissance departments, but counter-intelligence, as a body directed to fight the enemy, can exist only in the corps headquarters. Meanwhile, counter-intelligence existed in all such detachments, especially in such detachments that were created by themselves. Where later military units were created on the basis of all the rules of organization, they, of course, were not there, but in all independently formed detachments there was counterintelligence.
These counterintelligence bodies carried out on their own the police and mainly political work, which consisted in tracking down, recognizing and arresting the Bolsheviks. It must be said that these counter-intelligence agencies for the most part consisted of people completely unprepared for such work, volunteers, and the grounds on which the actions of the counter-intelligence agencies were carried out were completely arbitrary, were not provided for by any rules. As a rule, all counterintelligence bodies should be in close contact with the prosecutor's office and in all cases are obliged to act by alerting it. Here, however, there was no connection with the prosecutor's office, and the very concept of "Bolshevik" was so vague that it could be summed up as anything.
What were the reasons for this? From conversations with the officers, I got the impression that these bodies were created on the model of those that existed in Siberia under Soviet Power. During the Bolshevik rule in Siberia, in a number of points along the railway, there were such outposts that controlled passengers on trains and immediately made their arrests if they turned out to be counter-revolutionaries. According to this type, these detachments also created similar bodies. They were engaged in completely unauthorized inspection of trains, and when they found someone who, in their opinion, was involved in Bolshevism or was suspected of doing so, they arrested. Such phenomena existed along the entire railway line. After my arrival there, when this picture became clear, I talked with the chiefs of the detachments and said that, in essence, counter-intelligence should only be in my headquarters, since the existing counter-intelligence interfered with each other and spoiled the whole thing. To this I was quite reasonably answered that we are fighting, and what we did to us, we will do too, since there is no other guarantee that we will not all be cut. We will fight in the same way that our enemy fought us. Harassment was arranged behind us all the way, and where we are, we are obliged in the same way to ensure ourselves from the penetration here of persons who are our enemies. Therefore, although such counterintelligence bodies were never officially listed, in fact they continued to function. In the detachments that were subordinate to me, mine managed to arrange the case in such a way that the arrest was immediately reported to me and the prosecutor. The arrested persons were transferred to the prosecutor's supervision, and a quick investigation of the case was carried out there.
I remember that a significant number were arrested for completely unfounded reasons. When it became clear, they were released. But those persons who were personally known to these units, of course, were not given out, and the military units dealt with them on their own accord. In those cases, when there was only suspicion, they complied with this requirement and handed over to the prosecutor's supervision, which carried out the investigation, which for the most part did not lead to any results. I had counter-intelligence at the headquarters, but counter-intelligence at the detachments operated completely independently.
Formally, they never existed, and thus any unit could say that it had no counter-intelligence. From the point of view of all military officials, it was a means of struggle. They said: "We are defending ourselves, we are fighting and we consider it necessary to apply the same measure that was applied to us." It must be said that in Harbin there were many stories about the activities of these bodies. I don’t know how fair they were, but it was a sheer nightmare that stood along the entire railway line both from the Bolsheviks and from those who fought against them. For me, as a new person, these stories seemed completely incredible. At first I didn’t believe them and considered them more in words, but then, of course, I got to know each other closely and saw that the most severe mutual persecution was going on on the railway all the time, both from those areas where the Bolsheviks ruled and in those areas where their opponents ruled. ... The methods of struggle were the same.
Alekseevsky.When the facts of unauthorized searches, arrests and executions were established, were measures taken to bring those responsible to justice and accountability?
Kolchak.Such things never gave grounds for prosecution - it was impossible to find out who did it and when. Such things were never done openly. Usually it happened like this: several armed persons, officers and soldiers entered the car, they were arrested and taken away. Then the arrested persons disappeared, and it was impossible to establish who did this and when.
Alekseevsky.But after all, in Harbin itself or at st. Harbin had certain police units, and they carried an external police service, which was supposed to prevent such arbitrary actions. Were measures taken so that the outside militia was the master of the situation at the station?
Kolchak.This was not done at the central station. There have been cases of arrests in the city. For the most part, this happened along the line of the road, in Harbin itself it was relatively rare, since there was a station commandant, there was a military guard, there was a well-known station guard. Let me give you a case that I had to face, which happened on the second day of my arrival and consisted of the following. The chief of militia in Harbin at that time was von Arnold, who was in the office of the Croat. On the morning of that day, he called me on the phone and said in French that on the way from Harbin to the slaughterhouse (the only highway) the body of the murdered teacher Umansky had been found, that the prosecutor had already been given to know about this, that he and the investigator had gone to the scene and made inquiry. "I will come to you and tell you everything in detail."
After a while, he personally came to me and said that he strongly suspects that this murder was committed by former pupils of the Khabarovsk corps. The cadets of the Khabarovsk corps were everywhere - in the detachments of Semenov, Orlov, Kalmykov and others.Umansky recently arrived here, did nothing, and, obviously, his murder is in connection with the accusations that were brought against him that, being in Khabarovsk , he betrayed the Cadets and their parents to the Bolsheviks, allegedly participating in counter-revolutionary conspiracies, due to which the mass of the people perished. The senior pupils of the corps who fled from Khabarovsk swore that they would take revenge on him. “That's all I suspect,” von Arnold said, “the rest is up to the investigating authorities.”
The investigation seemed to give well-known traces, and, in the end, the investigator went to Orlov's detachment. But, of course, he was not allowed there. The prosecutor came to me and said that they wanted to inspect the entire premises of the detachment, barracks, cars, etc., but that they were not allowed there. I immediately issued an order by telephone not only to admit, but also to provide full assistance to the judicial authorities in the inspection and search that they intended to do. To this came the reply that it would be done and that they would be admitted. After a while I had them, and I asked what the results were. They replied: "None, there are strong suspicions, but nothing definite can be established."
Of course, the most important thing was to establish who left the barracks in the evening and during the night. As a rule, the units keep exact lists of the dismissed, in the unit there was nothing of the kind. People were dismissed simply by the duty officer who released them. No books, no lists were kept by the detachment. Therefore, it was impossible to establish the fact which people were outside the barracks, and all the work of the prosecutor did not lead to anything.Near the bridge where the body was found, a fresh trace of the car was found on which, apparently, the body was brought, but no characteristic features it was not established - neither the tires, nor the size of the car. There are a lot of such cars in Harbin, and therefore inspection of them in the barracks did not give any results. This incident happened in the first days of my stay there.
The second case was as follows. One evening, when I was sitting in my carriage and studying, I was informed that a young lady had come and asked to receive her. I said to ask her to come to me. She enters and rushes to me with a request to save her husband, an officer who was arrested on Harbin street by an officer of the Semyonov detachment. “I know he was arrested on the orders of Semyonov's assistant, who is his personal enemy. He was ordered to be arrested and taken to Hailar, and those who are taken to Hailar never come back. I am sure that he will be killed, and only you can save him. " I believed that, first of all, Harbin was part of the territory in which I was in charge, and such arrests without my knowledge were contrary to basic military discipline. Semyonov could not reckon with me, but in Harbin, of course, he could not arrest an officer without my authorization. Then I knew perfectly well that talking in this case was completely useless. So I called a guard, summoned two officers and said: “Probably, tonight a convoy with an arrested officer will come to the train that is to leave for Hailar. Arrest them all and bring them to me. "
The officer was escorted by four soldiers and one officer. I sent half a company, 20-30 people, who were hidden at the station. When a convoy with an arrested officer entered the station, they were surrounded and said: "By order of the commander of the troops, you are arrested." They saw that it was useless to resist, since the forces were much greater, they obeyed and were brought to me. I summoned the head of the Semyonov detachment. He told me: “Your Excellency, I am a subordinate person. I was ordered by my boss to do it, and I had to do it. I can neither justify nor prove why I did it. I received an order from my superior to deliver to Hailar and I can say nothing more. I carried out the order given to me, and everything else is unknown to me. "
Then I let the convoy go, leaving the arrested officer with me. I called him and said: "The only way to save you is to arrest you so that you are under my protection."
I did so and sent him to the guardhouse in the Oryol detachment. At the same time, I ordered to make sure that no one except his wife could penetrate to him, in case of an attempt to take him by force, to use weapons. He sat in this way for a while, then I handed him over to Horvat, who released him after a while (I then left for Vladivostok). Here's a way to combat this influence, but it was only possible when you knew about it. If his wife did not come to me, I would not know anything about it. How few officers travel with soldiers? At first glance, it is difficult to find out whether the arrested person is being led or whether he is just going with them. As for what Kalmykov did, these were already absolutely fantastic stories. For example, I personally know that arrests were made there that were not of a completely political nature, arrests of a purely criminal nature. For example, there was a proper hunt for opium dealers. But the line of the Chinese railway. the roads were constantly smuggling opium with a lot of people, women and men, who smuggled opium, which was very expensive. Here, very often, it was no longer counterintelligence, but simply enterprising people, under the guise of political arrest, hunted down these merchants, arrested them, confiscated opium and killed them, and if this was discovered, they referred to the fact that they were Bolshevik agents or spies.
Of course, these were not Bolsheviks, they were just predators engaged in transporting opium, which gave them a lot of money. They were hunted systematically. Soldiers and individuals were engaged in this. Usually a bunch of soldiers entered the carriage, declared to such an opium dealer: “Bolshevik spy”, arrested him, took out the opium and then killed him, and sold the opium.
Alekseevsky.Could you give a few examples from Kalmykov's activities, regarding which you say that it exceeded everything that was done then?
Kolchak.He had a big story, and I don't know how it worked out. This happened some time before my departure. Kalmykov caught a Swedish or Danish citizen near the Borderline, a representative of the Red Cross, whom he recognized as some kind of Bolshevik agent. He hanged him, taking away all his money, a large sum of several hundred thousand. The Croat's demand to send the arrested person to Harbin, the measures taken by the consul, did not help anything. The scandal was of a wild nature, since nothing could justify it. Horvath was extremely worried about this incident, but nothing could be done. We couldn't even get money. It was a case of outright robbery. Such phenomena existed along the railway line, and it was almost impossible to combat them.
Border station
It was necessary to see what the police was like - the only body that could fight these phenomena. Where there is an organized police that monitors order, it could prevent the emergence of unauthorized actions, it is not known from whom outgoing, the inspection of carriages, the arrest of people, etc. But no, the police that existed at that time, maybe , even participated in it herself. It must be said that at the time when I was in Harbin, the police presented something amazing in their promiscuity and even in their outward disgrace. In Harbin, our and Chinese police were on all the streets. The Chinese - we must give them justice - did their job very well. True, the Chinese did not interfere in anything, but in any case the Chinese policemen made a normal impression of people standing in the east and engaged in business and carrying the city's security and personal safety.
As for our militiamen, they were mostly dissolute, drunk people, absolutely not familiar with any police duties. The Chinese very often (I myself saw this) beat them, saying: "We are the captain now, you are walking now." Arnold had a small squad of old policemen who were on duty at the station and kept order there. In general, the police presented there one continuous nightmare.
Alekseevsky.Thus, it was not possible to take any systematic measures to ensure the safety of personal and property along the entire railway line with the help of the formed detachments?
Kolchak.At that time, things were only getting better. Maybe later this could be done. When later, in the autumn, I had to pass there, such phenomena no longer existed - at least no one complained. And at that time the police, guards and guards on the railway were in such a sad state that I am deeply convinced that the same police officers were calmly engaged in enterprises like catching opio-traders, etc.
Alekseevsky.Have you ever thought that you and the top government officials are getting information about the victims of such arbitrariness, who only belong to the so-called society? The wife of an officer has come to you, for the wife of a worker or peasant it would be more difficult, not only in the sense of physical penetration, but also in the psychological sense. Have you ever thought that such cases of arbitrariness are many times greater than those individual cases that you have heard of?
Kolchak.I think that all these cases could hardly touch the lower classes, since there was no point in touching these people. At least from the side of the railroad employees there were no complaints about any arrests or searches. Yes, this is quite understandable, since it hardly made sense for the organizers of such enterprises to arrest lower employees.
Popov.Who were the victims of the massacre?
Kolchak.For the most part, over those who traveled by rail, and, of course, all this work was carried out mainly in class cars. The question stood in such a way, as far as I can imagine: they constantly traveled there from the Amur region, Khabarovsk on business; if there were people who were known earlier as being involved in the Bolsheviks, they were seized and arrested. They also grabbed people who were known to have a valuable cargo of opium with them. All this relates to the area of \u200b\u200bcriminal acts.
Alekseevsky.When we tried to find out why counterintelligence services were formed, you answered that this was a method borrowed from the enemy. At the same time, you have formed a central counter-intelligence service in order to streamline all these counter-intelligence agencies. Would your central counter-intelligence also apply those measures and methods that these counter-intelligence of individual detachments used?
Kolchak.If counter-intelligence discovered the existence of such Bolshevik agents, whom I would recognize as dangerous, then, of course, they would have to be arrested. Each of the bosses can embark on this path, can do anything, but within the limits of legal norms. I have always held this point of view. You can shoot, you can do anything, but everything must be done on the basis of legal norms. Things like counterintelligence arrests, if they were investigated and reported to the prosecutor, could be done. During all this time, I personally did not have a single case of a field trial. The headquarters arrested several people who had arrived from Vladivostok with the aim of buying bread, and their money was taken away from them. Then it was considered what kind of money it was - public or private. The public ones were handed over to the bank, while the private ones were returned. Then, as far as I remember, these people were released, since there was no evidence against them. They really belonged to the Bolshevik organization and came to buy bread, but still there was no reason to do anything with these people.
Alekseevsky.You have been told that this is a method learned by the enemy, but have you learned that this is the law?
Kolchak.No, I didn't. Undoubtedly, it was necessary to fight this way, and I considered it necessary to do it, but I did not allow this to be done by self-directed organizations unknown to me.
Alekseevsky.The officers told you that they could be slaughtered by their adversary if they did not learn how to defend the enemy. I asked you whether these arrests were more numerous among the masses of the population. In your opinion, these arrests were carried out mainly among passengers. Consequently, it was as if there were no Bolsheviks among the Russian population of Manchuria, there were no those aggressive forms of militant Bolshevism, as in Russia and Siberia? You should have noticed, when you were referring to the need to create counter-intelligence in Maichuria, that this was only a means and a reason for revenge on the part of the officers.
Kolchak.I repeat that there were grounds for this. Of course, it is quite understandable that when a fight is being waged, it is undesirable for the enemy's agents to penetrate into the territory in which you are fighting. But here the question is different. For the most part, it was a matter of revenge. People who made their way here with the greatest risk and dangers, at least through Slyudyanka, where at least 400 officers died, people who went through this school, of course, hunted down the people they recognized on the road, and, of course, took revenge. It was clear to me that the main motive for this activity was revenge, that all the horrors that were happening along the railway line were based on revenge.
Denike. Your relationship with Semyonov is clearly highlighted here. The role of Croat in relation to you and Semyonov, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the role of Croat in relation to Japan, is not clear to me.
Kolchak.Horvath always adhered to a strange policy of reconciliation. After the separation of Semyonov, who did not recognize either Horvat or me, Horvat nevertheless, against my order, provided assistance to Semyonov. On that night, I had several incidents of collision with him, since Horvat was giving known items of equipment from the railroad’s reserves to Semyonov, while I insisted that this transfer should not take place. This could have been done with my knowledge, but Horvath did it several times outside of me, and it caused clashes. With regard to the Japanese, Horvat at that time adhered to a policy of not aggravating relations, although in general he did not work with them and had no connection with them.
Denike. Did he support you in everything?
Kolchak.I think that he did not support me. In connection with the attitude of Semyonov and the Japanese, I told Horvat that it was impossible to work in such conditions, that the situation that was created in the alienation zone excluded any possibility of maintaining our position, our prestige, and in this case I saw that Horvat was working against me. He thought I was too anxious and too unrestrained, and perhaps Horvath wanted to get rid of me.
Alekseevsky.What was the attitude of the Croat to the repression against the Bolsheviks?
Kolchak.Horvath deeply resented all this and, for his part, did everything as it depended on him to stop it. When this story happened with Kalmykov with a Swedish citizen, Horvat imposed a ban on the weapons that were intended for Kalmykov's detachment and stayed at station. Harbin to influence him. But this weapon belonged to the Japanese, and, in the end, he had to release it.
Alekseevsky.So, he was a man who, if he tried to fight the Bolsheviks, then within the limits of legal norms? Was he even more decisive in this sense than you: was he holding you back, or were you him?
Kolchak.In this respect, we did not differ. Horvath all the time stood by the point of view of legal norms of struggle. In general, I cannot talk about his struggle with the Bolsheviks, since at that time the struggle was only being prepared. With regard to the railway workers, who were directly subordinate to him, he tried to adhere to a strange policy of pacification, pacification and satisfaction of all the requirements set forth by the railway workers. So the measures he took were always supremely humane ... He tried to achieve everything good, by smoothing out sharp corners; talked constantly with the workers and brought a lot of comfort to their environment. As far as I know, there was only one strike, when trains were stopped, and my train was declared free for movement, and I drove fine. The strike was ended, as far as I remember, without any reprisals from the Croat.
Alskseevsky. Now continue your story.
Kolchak.I realized that my return was undesirable. At this time, an intervention was being prepared, i.e. the introduction of foreign troops into our territory. In all likelihood, the impression that the Japanese had left was that I would interfere with this business. Therefore, they wanted me not to interfere in the affairs of the East.
Alekseevsky.Have you heard rumors that in parallel with the power of Derber there is the power of the regional zemstvo? What was your attitude towards these three power organizations?
Kolchak.From the information that I had, I could know more or less definitely only the composition of the Derber government, since I stood in Harbin next to them in the carriages. As for the Primorsky Zemstvo, initially I had only information on the erroneous order. During the formation of these governments, I could only use sources from newspapers that were in Japan. On this occasion, I spoke with Dudorov, our agent in Tokyo, who presented me with a number of orders and decrees that were made by these three authorities in the East. I must say that the Zemstvo seemed to me the only serious body that was going about its business, since all the acts that were submitted by other government organizations were only in the nature of a political struggle. I got the impression that there was a struggle for power between all these organizations, and one organization overturned another's decision. Meanwhile, the zemstvo passed a number of decisions of a business nature. Therefore, I got the impression that the Zemstvo is the only power that can create something in the East, since it develops work of a purely business nature.
I was deeply impressed by the disarmament of Colonel Tolstoy's detachment at that time. I saw that the Croat government could do nothing, and that, therefore, it had no strength. The allies ruled in Vladivostok. The Czechs, for example, did not let Khrzheshatitsky's detachment into Nikolsk-Ussuriysk, detaining him at Grodekovo. It was clear to me that Horvath and his government were not masters in the East and were not in a position to make any orders. The allies are in charge there, and only the zemstvo remains the only business apparatus. I received more detailed information after I sent one of the officers accompanying me - Vuich - to Vladivostok to collect information and outline the picture, since the newspapers gave the impression of complete chaos and confusion, and it was difficult to understand anything. In essence, this was what determined my attitude towards these governments. I had no connection with them and was not even interested in them, since at that time I was at the resort. I decided that now the domination of the allies has come, who will be in charge without even considering us.
Alekseevsky.What impression did the very act of declaring the Croatian supreme ruler make on you?
Kolchak.I believed that of all the people who were in the Far East, Horvat was the only one who could claim this, since he had long been in the East as the chief of the line of alienation, was known to everyone in the East, and if he tried to form government power there, then, thank God, there was no one else to do it. I was not at all surprised by this, since Horvat was the only authority figure who could do this.
Alekseevsky.This presupposes a certain premise in your mind that you need one-man rule. After all, the supreme ruler is essentially a dictator.
Kolchak.I believed that it is necessary to bring the Far East to some kind of order , therefore, I considered it completely backward if Horvat extended his power, in addition to the right of way, and to the adjoining Primorsky region. I thought it was quite natural that Horvath was trying to establish governance. In any case, I did not think that this was a triumph of the idea of \u200b\u200bsole power.
In recent years, against the background of an active study of the punitive policy and the bodies of the political search of the Bolshevik dictatorship during the Civil War, the lag in the study of the system of political control of the White movement has become increasingly noticeable. In this direction, especially in relation to the power of A.V. Kolchak, only the first steps are being taken.
Accordingly, the documents created in the depths of the white political control bodies have not yet become the subject of special study, although they are unique sources reflecting the internal political situation in the territories occupied by the white armies. In this respect, Kolchak's counterintelligence was especially "unlucky", whose documents were seized by units of the Red Army and were kept secret for a long time. In the 60s. they began to be studied by historians, but the rigid ideological framework did not allow revealing their information potential. Currently, despite the massive declassification of documents and ideological pluralism, they still remain outside the field of vision of specialists.
The importance of a comprehensive study of the documents of white institutions that collected and analyzed information about the political moods of the population also lies in the fact that in the historical literature the presentation of events that took place in the Kolchak rear is often mostly illustrative and fragmentary and does not rely much on a specific factual base. Meanwhile, there are still many unresolved problems in the history of the Civil War in the east of Russia. In particular, the question has not yet been clarified why the peasantry of Siberia, who did not know serfdom, preferred the Bolshevik regime, in which mass shootings of hostages, indemnities and seizure of surpluses, and sometimes the entire stock of grain, and ruthless reprisals against those who resisted were mandatory elements.
Under the rule of the Supreme Ruler A.V. Kolchak, which existed in Siberia for more than a year, a ramified system of political investigation was created, in which the leading role belonged to the army counterintelligence agencies. From the first days after the coup of November 1918, the military was the force in whose hands real political, administrative and judicial power was concentrated. The priority of the military authorities over the civilians was explained by the fact that even before the fall of Soviet power, in all large cities from Kansk to Chelyabinsk, there were underground officers' organizations, which in June 1918 formed the backbone of the emerging West Siberian army. In the future, the constant internal political struggle in the government prevented the Council of Ministers from focusing on military issues, so the main headquarters and the army command were given the opportunity to solve them independently. The military felt independent of the government.
Initially, several volunteer regiments were part of the West Siberian (since July - Siberian) army, in July the formation of the Steppe Siberian and Central Siberian corps, consisting exclusively of intelligentsia and officers, began. The size of the army grew, new corps were formed. For their recruitment and supply, as well as for the "protection of state order", the entire territory of the Urals, Siberia and Transbaikalia was divided into five corps regions, in which the institute of "authorized persons for the protection of state order" was introduced.
Attempts to establish agencies in the army to combat espionage and political anti-government actions began from the very first days of its formation. The counterintelligence bodies that existed even before the overthrow of Soviet power under secret officer organizations, after the coup were transformed into intelligence departments at the headquarters of garrisons, corps, corps commanders and performed the functions of both military intelligence and military-political counterintelligence. They exercised control over the political moods of workers and prisoners of war, arrested leaders of the Soviet government, Bolsheviks and Red Army men.
In parallel, at the initiative of the Provisional Siberian Government, similar structures were also formed at the headquarters of the Siberian Army. According to personal negotiations with the representative of the Provisional Siberian Government Lindberg, in June 1918, political matters were transferred to the Special Forces detachment at the headquarters of the army commander, and criminal matters were subject to the conduct of the criminal police. On July 10, the commander of the army A.N. Grishin-Almazov announced the creation of a military control department at the headquarters of the Siberian army. The squad was headed by the captain of the Czechoslovak troops Zaichek, who was given the right, depending on the situation, to establish divisions and points in cities and corps of Western Siberia. In September, the General Staff of the War Ministry defined the tasks of military control "in relation to the existing conditions", which boiled down to "the detection of enemy spies and their organizations, as well as individuals and organizations supporting Soviet power or working against the rebirth and liberation of Russia." Until September 1918, the military control department of the Siberian Army operated on the basis of the "Temporary Regulation on the Rights and Duties of the Officers of Land and Naval Counterintelligence" dated June 17, 1917. However, in practice, the activities of the military control of Captain Zaichek in the summer and autumn of 1918 were mainly directed on the solution of organizational and legal issues, the direct political control over the population in this period was engaged in similar structures at the headquarters of the Siberian army corps.
In July - September 1918, the Siberian army liberated almost the entire Urals, Siberia and the Far East from the Bolsheviks. In connection with the further centralization of command and control, the post of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of all land and naval forces of Russia was introduced and the reorganization of the military department system began. The Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief was created, which, together with other units, constituted the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Reforming the military control system was on the agenda. On November 29, 1918, the Central Department of Military Control was created at the Headquarters, whose task was to unite the activities of the entire counterintelligence service in the territory liberated from the Bolsheviks. The military control of the Siberian Army merged with the newly created structure. Colonel Zlobin headed the Central Department until the end of 1919. During the reorganizations of 1919, the department was renamed several times and changed its subordination, but retained the functions of the governing body of counterintelligence and military control of the army in the field, and subsequently of the rear counterintelligence
After the coup of Admiral A.V. Kolchak and his appointment as the Supreme Ruler and Supreme Commander-in-Chief of all land and naval forces of Russia, the process of reorganizing all army structures began. During the winter of 1918/19. armed forces were created, including the Western, Siberian, Orenburg and Ural armies, numbering up to 400 thousand people, including about 30 thousand officers, on the fountain - 130 - 140 thousand bayonets and sabers. Military districts were restored.
During this period, attempts to establish the work of the military control service of the Headquarters met with stubborn resistance from the squads formed by Captain Zaichek, as well as emerging independently. The system of organs and their subordination was extremely complex and confusing, which made it impossible to establish systematic reporting.
Therefore, the process of creating a coherent system of counterintelligence agencies in the army and rear districts required additional reorganizations: in February, a network of offices was established at the headquarters of the Siberian, Western and Orenburg armies, and at the headquarters of the 2nd Siberian army separate corps, at the headquarters of the corps that make up armies, as well as in the theater of operations - a network of local institutions (points). A strict vertical subordination and procedure for providing information were established. The heads of the departments were obliged to submit copies of reports on the results of their activities to the head of the counterintelligence department at the headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief and to the head of the Central Counterintelligence Directorate at the General Staff of the War Ministry.
At the beginning of March, by order of the Minister of War, counterintelligence bodies were restored in all districts in relation to the Provisional Regulations of June 17, 1917. The management of their activities was entrusted to the Chief of the Informative Department of the General Staff. Released on March 26, 1919, the "Temporary Regulation on Military Counterintelligence in the Internal Districts" determined their relationship with the counterintelligence of the active army and navy. The management of the entire land counterintelligence service was generally entrusted to the chief of the General Staff, and the closest to the chief of the Investigative Department. Until May 1919, the Ministry of War, through the counterintelligence unit of the Investigative Department of the General Staff, carried out general management and coordination of the political control bodies of the rear military districts and controlled the activities of the Counterintelligence Department of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief's Headquarters in the army.
After major successes near Perm at the end of 1918 and the successful spring offensive of the army of A.V. Kolchak advanced to the Volga, approaching Kazan and Samara. The government of A.V. Kolchak, claiming the role of an all-Russian, began to create a state apparatus of an all-Russian scale, to serve the entire country. During this period, the formation of a system of political investigation in the structure of the Ministry of Internal Affairs began. On March 7, the Supreme Ruler approved a resolution of the Council of Ministers on the establishment of a Special Department of State Protection and relevant local directorates under the MIA Police Department. In the provinces (regions) and counties, special-purpose detachments were created. However, due to the extremely low salaries, and the lack of personnel in general, this work was delayed and almost never completed. At the same time, the status of the administrative bodies of the provinces was significantly increased. Governors (regions) and counties were headed by governors. In the front line, the position of the chief chief of the region was introduced with the functions of the governor-general. In fact, the civil administration of the front-line fell into direct dependence on the commander of the army stationed in this area.
The functions of special departments and local administrations included the task of informing the Ministry of Internal Affairs about the political situation in the areas entrusted to them. On the basis of the data received, a general summary was compiled and for the purpose of familiarization was sent to the central bodies of military control and counterintelligence of the army. In turn, at the direction of the Chief of the General Staff (later the Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief), similar reports were sent to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, compiled according to the data of the military censorship bureau and counterintelligence.
By the spring of 1919, a cumbersome system of civil and military administration had been created, the functions of which were often duplicated. For this reason, an attempt was made to put some order in the system of political investigation of the army and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
On April 18, 1919, by order of the Chief of Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, the "Temporary Regulation on counterintelligence and military control service in the theater of operations" was approved, which regulated the counterintelligence activities of the active army. Its overall leadership was entrusted to the Quartermaster General under the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. So, the duty of the counterintelligence bodies located in the military area was to keep an eye on the servicemen, while observing at the same time the civilian population. All the information obtained was to be reported to the chief of staff of the army for an operational decision. The organs of military control were called upon to serve the entire rest of the region of the army, fighting mainly with the civilian population, observing also the military personnel. This division of functions was explained by the ongoing civil war and subsequently it was supposed to limit the work of counterintelligence only to the fight against spies and their organizations, and military control as ensuring state order and public peace was supposed to be transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The counterintelligence unit with the counterintelligence department of the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief became the central registration and reporting body, in which all the material received from the branches of the active army was to be concentrated and systematized. The procedure for compiling reports, keeping diaries of external observation and the frequency of reporting, organizing a file cabinet, forming clerical affairs and informing the same bodies from which the information was received with generalized information related to the organization, methods and techniques of enemy espionage was established.
In April-May, the organization of a network of offices and points in the army and military districts was completed, systematic reporting was established, according to which the head of the Informative Department of the General Staff of the War Ministry compiled an overview of the political moods of various segments of the population, the activities of political parties and public organizations.
The constant rivalry between the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief and the War Ministry led to a new reorganization of the central military command and the concentration of all power in Headquarters. Counterintelligence and military control issues came to be in charge of the Office of the 2nd Quartermaster General, which included the Counterintelligence and Military Control Department and the Registration Department. This negatively affected the analysis and generalization of information about the political situation in the region, since the new procedure for compiling summaries focused on registering information about the subversive activities of the enemy, therefore, all information regarding the immediate political mood of the population, mainly continued to come from the branches and points of the active army and districts, was included in the overview in a small number.
In order to directly inform the government about the political moods of the population in the summer of 1919, information offices were created at the armies, but their activity in collecting and analyzing information about the mood of the population was not widely disseminated.
During the retreat of Kolchak's army in September - October 1919, the military command and control bodies were reorganized, the Headquarters was liquidated, counterintelligence was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Chief Chief of the Military Administrative Directorate of the Eastern Front, which was named the local counterintelligence department. Its tasks remained the same, only a little more concretized - the military counterintelligence was engaged in the elimination of enemy spies and agitators in the ranks of the troops, the local counterintelligence bodies were supposed to fight the anti-state elements of the country. The agents had to reach the smallest subunits, right down to companies and squadrons, penetrate into all settlements, in parallel finding out the attitude of the masses to the existing system. In the overview reports, more attention is paid to the attitude of the population towards the warring parties. And despite the collapse of the army, the counterintelligence service functioned until the final fall of government power in January 1919.
Construction and activity in 1918 - 1919 the pyramidal structure of the counterintelligence service, which permeated the network of institutions throughout almost the entire territory of the Urals, Siberia, Transbaikalia and the Far East, led to the creation of an array of information materials (reports and summaries). The information material transmitted to inform the high command of the armed forces and the Supreme Ruler was a general summary of messages received from departments and points of counterintelligence and military control, as well as supplemented by information from other sources. The desire of the heads of departments and points to go beyond instructions and provide as much information as possible about the political situation in the areas entrusted to them, as well as the literal reproduction of the most vivid and apt statements by the population in relation to the government and the enemy camp make this source unique and distinguished by a high degree of reliability and information content. On the other hand, like any source, the summaries and reports of departments and points of counterintelligence are permeated with the political views of their compilers. All resisting strata of the population, as a rule, are referred to as "Reds" or "Bolsheviks", similarly counterintelligence agents tended to characterize the anti-government sentiments primarily as "inclination to Bolshevism."
The surviving materials of Kolchak's counterintelligence can be divided into two main groups: documents created in the course of a political investigation (outdoor observation diaries, reports, reports of offices and points, overviews and reports of the head of the Counterintelligence Department) and investigative cases against persons accused of anti-state activities and propaganda ... Despite the fact that the goals and objectives of counterintelligence were reduced mainly to the fight against the Bolshevik underground, the subjects of the reports and reports were much broader. They reflect the causes and nature of peasant and urban uprisings, the mood of the peasantry, workers, intelligentsia, military personnel, including foreign (Czech, Polish, American and other) units, information about the activities of the Bolshevik underground, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, city and zemstvo self-government, public and other organizations. The value of the documents that arose in the course of the activities of branches and points is also increased by the fact that, when analyzing and generalizing the information received, the counterintelligence officers not only checked it for reliability, but also identified the reasons for the fluctuations in the mood of the population and the growth of anti-government protests, without hiding the negative aspects of the activity civil and military administration, and sometimes for comparison, they cited information about the actions of the enemy in the field of winning the sympathy of the population, methods and techniques of agitation.
The mood, reasons and nature of peasant uprisings have mainly been the subject of study by counterintelligence since the end of 1918, when military control departments of the Siberian Army were formed. Prior to that, similar information passed through the reports and reports of punitive expeditions of the army corps and commissioners for the protection of state order, telegrams from the places of peasant demonstrations. The most characteristic reasons for the unrest of the peasants in the summer and autumn of 1918 in Slavgorod, Minusinsk and some other counties were considered to be counterintelligence conflicts over giving recruits and collecting taxes, which arose, as a rule, due to ignorance of the goals and motives of the government. Instead of settling these problems peacefully and through agitation, punitive detachments were sent. In reports and telegrams from the places of demonstrations, it was noted that "the peasants are against any power that brings them violence", they considered the peasants' congress the highest power, which can only decide whether to give recruits and whether to collect taxes, are ready to "recognize the really popular power, elected by the people, chosen from persons known to the peasants, and not from lists. " In a telegram from 16 villages of Minusinsk district, sent from the center of the uprising in the village of Shemonaikha, the peasants demanded that the government “stop sending punitive detachments, accept their fair popular demands, do not act by force, but peacefully, do not mix with Bolshevism, otherwise the people will stand up for their rights. " Other reasons for peasant uprisings were the abuses of the Cossack chieftains, the arrest of deserters and the fight against moonshine factories. The instigators in the latter case were, as a rule, the owners of these factories, who tried to involve as many people as possible in order to "avoid responsibility for the reprisals against the police." The general goal of the uprisings was to "throw off the Cossack yoke, to establish peasant rule."
Materials of the late 1918 - 1919 about the reasons driving forces, the leaders and the course of the uprisings are represented mainly by summaries and reports of heads of departments and counterintelligence points. After analyzing the general summaries and reviews compiled for the provinces of the Urals, Siberia and the Far East, one can single out the most characteristic features of peasant uprisings, in general, similar to the summer-autumn uprisings. The motives for the speeches were the atrocities of the punitive detachments, the district militia and military units. The instigators and leaders were local residents: peasants, privately wealthy, teachers, front-line soldiers, students. The revolted villages involved neighboring settlements through threats; violent mobilizations, requisitions, etc. were carried out. The bulk of the detachments, in addition to the forcibly involved peasants, consisted of deserters, young people from 16 to 25 years old. The older peasants, on the other hand, were sharply negative about the uprisings. In areas where there were coal mines or near cities, the rebellious peasants tried to establish contact with the workers and win them over to their side, which is evident mainly from the leaflets and appeals of the peasant armies.
Kolchak's counterintelligence saw one of the main reasons for the success of the insurgent and partisan movement in the ignorance of the population about the goals and objectives of the government and the general absence of any information in areas located 200-300 versts from the railways, where residents did not know who Kolchak was, but who are the Bolsheviks. In the Urals, for example, the Kreiatians believed that the government was "Cossack".
Another no less serious reason, in the opinion of counterintelligence officials, was that Siberia did not experience the rule of the Bolsheviks as the inhabitants of European Russia, for example, occupied only at the end of December 1918, Perm province. The peasants perceived with great distrust the stories of refugees from Perm after the seizure of it by the Red Army in the summer of 1919, about violence, hunger and requisitions, since they "do not remember anything like that about the Bolsheviks."
In the reports of the chiefs of departments and points of front and rear counterintelligence for November 1918 - March 1919. special attention was paid to the mood of various categories of peasants: old-timers, migrants, as well as those living in agricultural, mixed (peasant-factory), remote, wooded and hard-to-reach areas. The peasants of the "grain-growing" regions, who especially had time to suffer from the Bolshevik requisitions (Perm province), during this period were almost monarchist, especially the stories of the soldiers returning to their villages about the famine and terror that reigned in Soviet Russia acted on them. Mobilization until March was successful, the old people willingly gave their children away, the general desire was to end Bolshevism as soon as possible.
At the same time, already from March to April, the reports noted deaf, wooded and hard-to-reach areas (Zmeinogorodsky, Zayskansky, Semipalatinsky and Pavlodar districts), where mainly migrants lived. Those, in comparison, for example, with the neighboring Ust-Kamenogorsk district, are a "hornet's nest", where "dark personalities" constantly prowl and hidden propaganda is conducted by hiding former leaders of Soviet power. At the same time, the peasants begin to feel a shortage of workers and agricultural machinery. Thus, until May 1919, according to counterintelligence, there were two trends in the villages: "passive bias towards pre-revolutionary life" (old-timers) and "inclination towards Bolshevism" (immigrants of recent years, refugees from the Baltic states, colonists).
In the summer, the mood of the peasants was assessed by counterintelligence officers as indifferent or distrustful of the government, and in the fall, after the summer uprisings in the rear, as dejected. The peasants explained this by the hopeless situation in which they found themselves caught between two fires - punitive detachments of government troops and partisan detachments that acted no less brutally towards the “non-aligned” villages: “The Reds will come, plunder, shoot whoever is needed, and leave, then Kolchak people come, Kalmyk people, Japanese - they burn houses, kill whoever they suspect, and leave. We don't know what to do. "
The inability of the authorities to suppress peasant unrest led to the fact that in many villages of Siberia and the Far East in the summer and autumn, self-defense units began to be organized. The peasants of other villages joined the insurgents, explaining that they were forced to join the insurgent regions, because otherwise they would face revenge from the partisans.
Since the fall of 1919, after another reorganization of counterintelligence, special attention in the reports began to be paid to the mood of the population of the front line. Here, the fluctuations in the mood of the peasantry mainly depended on the behavior of the troops of one side or another passing through their villages. The peasants said: "Previously, the Reds had a disorder - they were being persecuted, but now the Whites are being driven."
On the other hand, the inhabitants of the front line in a number of areas, who had heard a lot about the methods of government of the Bolsheviks, were sympathetic to all the hardships of the war. The most stable anti-Bolshevik sentiments persisted among the Cossacks, Tatars, Kirghiz, and the Old Believer population.
In December, according to the reports of agents, the authority of the government finally fell, trust in the Irkutsk, Tomsk and Yenisei provinces was preserved only in the zemstvo. In the Far East, the government has not enjoyed authority since the summer; preference was given to the Constituent Assembly.
Information about the attitudes of the workers was developed from the very first days of the fall of Soviet power, since the military authorities saw in them potential "Bolsheviks". However, in the intelligence reports of the Siberian Army units, it was objectively noted that the workers were opposed to Soviet power and were in favor of the Constituent Assembly. However, since the fall, due to falling wages and the abolition of the 8-hour working day, strikes sometimes took on a political character, but were short-lived and were quickly suppressed by the authorities.
The greatest activity was shown during this period by railroad workers. In October 1918, they organized a strike with economic demands along the entire Trans-Siberian Railway, covering up to a dozen cities. In the winter of 1918/19. they were the most active part of the workers, especially after the formation of the bloc of Socialist-Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks, who had a direct influence on them.
The information about the workers for 1919, contrary to the expectations of the counterintelligence officers themselves, is striking in its scarcity and monotony. Although the work issue was initially given great importance in the reports, since, according to the head of the Irkutsk branch of military control, the strikes of the miners of the Sudzhensky and Anzhersky mines could paralyze traffic on the entire Trans-Siberian railway. Since February 1919, workers' complaints about low wages have been a pervasive leitmotif of reports. In general, after the suppression of the urban uprisings of the winter of 1918/19, inspired by the Bolsheviks, as well as the arrest of most trade unionists, the mood of the workers was assessed as "depressed", and no serious protests were expected from them. Counterintelligence materials for the second half of 1919 indicate that despite a further drop in living standards, strikes were carried out on rare occasions and under economic demands. So, for example, when in the summer of 1919 the miners of the Cheremkhovsky mines went on strike, the agents reported that, although the workers were absolutely Bolshevik, there could be no action due to the lack of weapons and organizers. According to agents, Yakovlev, the manager of the Irkutsk province, came to the miners and urged them to stand up for their rights more amicably, since, in his opinion, their actions were spontaneous.
In October - December 1919, there was also no particular activity of the workers, and armed uprisings took place only when the front approached, when it was obvious that the power of the Omsk government no longer existed.
The workers of the Urals, in the opinion of the agents, firmly stood on the position of rejection of both the power of the Bolsheviks and the Kolchak government. In their opinion, as stated in the resolution of the congress of trade unions of the proletariat of the Urals of June 18, 1919, instead of restoring industry, it pursues a reactionary policy under the banner of the struggle against Bolshevism, and therefore the workers, who carried the regime of the Bolshevik and bourgeois dictatorship on their shoulders, consider it necessary to fight for the exercise of democracy and political freedoms. And only when the front approached Yekaterinburg, all the factories of the district went on strike and the movement of workers, as the agent reported, took on a Bolshevik character.
Against this background, only the workers of Vladivostok were especially active. The reports for January - September 1919 constantly contain information about the connections between the workers of Vladivostok and partisan detachments.
In addition to their sympathetic attitude towards the Bolsheviks, the agents noted that in Irkutsk and Troitsk, the attitude of workers towards the existing government for a long time was "benevolent", especially after the increase in salaries for Troitsk workers after A.V. Kolchak's visit to the city, and only growing speculation caused discontent. An extremely hostile attitude towards the Bolsheviks was noted among workers who fled from Izhevsk, Votkinsk and Perm. The Perm workers who had evacuated deep into Siberia in the summer of 1919 were unpleasantly struck by the “presence of Bolsheviks in all strata of society,” that is, the sympathetic attitude of the population to the authorities, about which they knew practically nothing. They said that "Siberia must sip bitter to tears," since under the Bolshevik rule "the peasants would not have had 5-10 cows."
But on the whole, despite the anti-government mood that prevailed among the majority of the workers, they did not resort to active actions after the repressions that fell upon them, unlike the peasantry, taking a wait-and-see attitude and becoming more active only with the approach of the Red Army.
Analysis of materials on political sentiments in the army shows that discontent and desertion from December 1918 was primarily caused by a poor supply of food and uniforms. The most staunch adherents of the Omsk government until December 1919 were the so-called "Europeans", that is, the soldiers of those regions that were under the rule of the Bolsheviks for a long time, as well as the Cossacks. The most unreliable element in the army were the "Siberians", who had not experienced the Bolshevik dictatorship and requisitions in the summer and autumn of 1918, as well as mobilized soldiers from the areas affected by the actions of punitive detachments. They did not understand the goals of the struggle between the Whites and the Reds, they wanted "an early reconciliation with the Bolsheviks," they easily succumbed to panic and, at an opportunity, went over to the side of the Reds. The agents of counterintelligence were especially concerned about the "front-line soldiers" propagandized by the Bolsheviks during the period of the disintegration of the old Russian army.
The summaries of departments and points of military counterintelligence, as well as special reports of the head of the counterintelligence department, contain a lot of information about the activities of not only the Bolsheviks, but also other socialist parties, the zemstvo-socialist movement and its role in destabilizing the political situation in Kolchak's rear.
The agents of counterintelligence and military control of the army in the field also monitored the enemy's relationship with the local population, the state of discipline in the Red Army, etc. So, from September 1919, according to reports of all levels, information about a sharp change in the enemy's tactics in relation to the local population passed as the most important: firstly, the Red Army began to pay with money for food and carts, did not make violent requisitions, and secondly, the Bolsheviks in the territory they occupied, they began to establish relations with the church, seeking to enlist the support of clergy, which made a particularly strong positive impression on the residents. These facts significantly influenced the attitude of the population towards the Bolsheviks not only in rural areas, but also in cities: if before, when units of the Red Army approached, many residents tried to evacuate deep into Siberia, then from September they began to remain in place. In a special analytical report of the head of the press subdivision under the Informative Department of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief's headquarters in July 1919, dedicated to "Bolshevism", it was noted that in Siberia "there is no clear idea of \u200b\u200bBolshevism, its causes, the danger to all cultured humanity" "I tried only the initial temptation, and did not taste its bitter fruits, which heal forever." The author saw the adversary's advantages in "solidarity, capacity, implementation of decisions by telegraph", and it was also emphasized that "their decisions meet the conditions of the moment, they are not shy by any means."
Thus, the materials of counterintelligence allow: a new look at the picture of social and political life in the rear of the armies A.V. Kolchak, to determine the entire set of factors that determined the fluctuations in the mood of the population, to resolve the long-standing dispute of historians about the time of the transition of the Siberian peasantry to the side of Soviet power, to understand how the peasantry understood this power, and to understand how the popularity of a particular power depends on its ability to quickly to respond to the needs of the population.
Archival documents:
Russian state military archive.
F. 40218 - Counterintelligence Department of the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of all land and naval armed forces of Russia.
The Russian historian of the special services A. Martirosyan wrote an article about the betrayal of Admiral A. V. Kolchak, who was recruited by the special services of Great Britain and the United States. The very one who was so glamorously painted in the film "Admiral" with Khabensky in the title role.
Something in her he knew, something - no. For example, that Kolchak was a descendant of the Crimean Tatar commander Ilias Kalchak Pasha. In general, judge for yourself.
Recently, more and more demands have been heard about the rehabilitation of Admiral Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak as an allegedly innocent victim political repression Bolsheviks. Sometimes it almost comes to hysteria on the part of the "democrats-rehabilitators" demanding full justification for the actions of this traitor to Russia. So, shortly before his death, the extremely odious "architect of perestroika" and the same traitor - Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev, foaming at his mouth from the TV screens, demanded the complete rehabilitation of A.V. Kolchak. What for? Why do some traitors care so much about the "fair name" of other traitors who preceded them ?! Indeed, since the gray biblical times, betrayal is the only a priori unforgivable act and, therefore, regardless of any previous services to Russia, a traitor must remain a traitor! Have we managed to erect a monument in Irkutsk for the traitor who officially entered the service of the British king !? And a multiple traitor. Even worse. A traitor who not only managed to formalize his transition to the side of ardent enemies of Russia, but also de jure to formalize the forcible dismemberment of the Russian State! After all, many territorial and political problems, in particular, with the same Baltic limitrophes, are generated precisely by his activities! Judge for yourself.
Kolchak was recruited by British intelligence when he was a captain of the 1st rank and commander of a mine division in the Baltic Fleet. It happened at the turn of 1915-1916. This was already treason to the Tsar and the Fatherland, to whom he swore allegiance and kissed the cross! Have you ever wondered why the Entente fleets calmly entered the Russian sector of the Baltic Sea in 1918 ?! After all, he was mined! In addition, in the confusion of the two revolutions of 1917, no one removed the minefields. Yes, because Kolchak's entrance ticket to the British intelligence service was the delivery of all information about the location of minefields and obstacles in the Russian sector of the Baltic Sea! After all, it was he who carried out this mining and he had all the maps of minefields and obstacles in his hands!
Further. As you know, on June 28, 1916, Kolchak was appointed commander of the Black Sea Fleet. However, this happened with the direct patronage of the British intelligence resident in Russia, Colonel Samuel Hoare, and the British ambassador to the Russian Empire Byukenen (the tsar is also good - no, to send English allies to the Bigben's mother so that they do not interfere in the internal affairs of the empire). This is the second betrayal, because, under such patronage, becoming the commander of one of the then most important fleets of Russia, Kolchak assumed obligations to fulfill the official task of British intelligence to disorganize and reduce the combat effectiveness of this fleet. And, in the end, he fulfilled it - he simply abandoned the fleet and in August 1917 secretly fled to England. How can you call the commander of a fleet who, during the war, basely abandons his fleet and secretly flees from the country to the border ?! What does he deserve in this case ?! At least, more than a clear definition - a TRAITOR and a CHECKER!
Kolchak received the title of Admiral from the hands of the Provisional Government, to which he also swore allegiance. And which he also betrayed! At least by the fact that, having secretly escaped to England, in August 1917, together with the chief of the British Naval General Staff, General Hall, he discussed the need to establish a dictatorship in Russia! Simply put, the question of overthrowing the Provisional Government! If it's even simpler, then the question of a coup d'état. Otherwise, mi, sorry, how could a dictatorship be established ?! To swear allegiance to the already vile Provisional Government that overthrew the tsar, to get a promotion from him and immediately betray him too !? This is already a genetic pathology! Below I will explain what is the matter.
Then, at the request of the American ambassador to England, Kolchak was sent to the United States, where he was also recruited by the diplomatic intelligence of the US State Department. The recruitment was carried out by former Secretary of State Eliahu Ruth. That is, along the way, he has now betrayed the British too. Although the Britons, of course, knew about this recruitment. The fact that he temporarily betrayed the British is to hell with him and with them. The point is different. Going to recruit the Americans, for the second time in a short time he betrayed the same Provisional Government, to which he also swore an oath and thanks to which he became an admiral. On the whole, the list of his betrayals only lengthened.
As a result, becoming a double Anglo-American agent, Kolchak immediately after the October coup of 1917 turned to the British envoy to Japan K. Green with a request to the government of His Majesty King George V of England to take him into service! So, after all, he wrote in his petition: "... I completely put myself at the disposal of His government ...". "His Governments" means the government of His Majesty King George V of England! On December 30, 1917, the British government officially granted Kolchak's request. From that moment, Kolchak had already officially gone over to the side of the enemy, dressed in an ally's toga. Why the enemy ?! Because at that time only the laziest of the agents of England, the United States and the Entente in general could not have known that, firstly, on November 15 (28), 1917, the Entente Supreme Soviet made an official decision to intervene in Russia. Secondly, on December 10 (23), 1917, the leaders of the European core of the Entente - England and France - signed a convention on the division of Russia into spheres of influence! And almost a year later, when in November 1918 the German Empire (and the Austro-Hungarian one too) was sent to the dustbin of History, and Kolchak was finally thrown back into Russia, under the patronage of the United States, the Anglo-French allies on November 13, 1918 confirmed that the convention itself, or, in a purely legal language, prolonged its effect. And Kolchak, who knew all this and was already a double Anglo-American agent, after the confirmation of this convention, under the patronage of the same states, agreed to become the alleged Supreme Ruler. That is why I say that it was a scumbag and a traitor who was officially in the service of the enemy! If he simply cooperated (for example, within the framework of military-technical supplies) with former allies in the Entente, as many White Guard generals did, this would be one thing. Even in spite of the fact that they, too, took upon themselves not too benevolent obligations that affected the honor and dignity of Russia. However, they at least de facto acted as something independent, not formally turning to the service of a foreign state. But Kolchak officially went into the service of Great Britain. And the very Admiral Kolchak, who was shot by the Bolsheviks like a mad dog, was not just the self-proclaimed Supreme Ruler of Russia, Admiral Kolchak, against whom the Bolsheviks fought, but the official representative of the English king and his government, who was officially in their service, who was trying to rule the whole of Russia! British General Knox, who was in charge of Kolchak in Siberia, at one time openly admitted that the British were directly responsible for the creation of Kolchak's government! All this is now well known, including from foreign sources.
And along the way, Kolchak carried out another equally important task of the Americans. It was not for nothing that E. Ruth “trained” him for the role of the future Cromwell of Russia. And you know why ?! Yes, because too much "compassionate" E. Ruth developed a barbaric plan for the enslavement of Russia, which had a decent name - "The plan of American activities to preserve and strengthen the morale of the army and the civilian population of Russia", the essence of which was simple, like the revered Yankees popcorn ... Russia had to continue to "supply" the Entente with "cannon fodder", that is, to fight for the interests of the Anglo-Saxons alien to Russia, paying at the same time with its political and economic enslavement, in which the United States had to play the "first fiddle". I emphasize that the central place in this plan was occupied precisely by the economic enslavement of Russia, primarily the seizure of its railways, especially the Trans-Siberian Railway. The damned Yankees even formed a special "railway corps" to manage the Russian railways, especially the Trans-Siberian (by the way, the British at this time were targeting Russian railways in our North, in the region of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk). And in parallel, the Yankees were targeting the natural resources of Russia.
So it's time to end the hysterical screeching about the allegedly innocently killed allegedly honest and decent Admiral A.V. Kolchak. Scum and traitor - he is scum and traitor! And this should remain in history (while not denying his previous scientific services to Russia, one cannot help but notice that he crossed them out with his own hand). Now it has been definitively and documented that he was a traitor to Russia and that he must and will remain in its history of the twentieth century. In the documents of British intelligence, the US State Department, in the personal correspondence of the "gray eminence" of American politics during the First World War - Colonel House - A. V. Kolchak is directly called their double agent (these documents are known to historians). And just as their double agent, he was supposed to implement the most criminal plans of the West in relation to Russia. And the "finest hour" of this traitor came in 1919. However, the West began to tread the path for his future crimes against Russia back in November 1918, at the time of the end of the First World War.
As you know, on November 11, 1918 in the suburb of Paris - Compiegne - the Compiegne Agreement was signed, which put an end to the First World War. When he is remembered, it is usually very “elegant” to forget to mention that it was just a ceasefire agreement for a period of 36 days. In addition, it was signed without the participation of Russia, which endured the brunt of the war in the status of a tsarist empire, and then, having already become Soviet, rendered a colossal service to the same Entente with its revolutionary banditry in Germany. Without the help of Lenin and Co., the Entente would have been busy with Kaiser's Germany for a long time to come. But this is so, a saying ...
The main thing is that Article 12 of the Compiegne Armistice Agreement said: “All German troops that are now in the territories that made up Russia before the war must equally return to Germany as soon as the Allies recognize that the moment has come for this, having accepted into account the internal situation of these territories. " However, the secret sub-clause of the same article 12 already directly obliged Germany to keep its troops in the Baltic to fight Soviet Russia until the arrival of troops and fleets (in the Baltic Sea) of the Entente member states. Such actions of the Entente were openly anti-Russian, for no one had the slightest right to decide the fate of the occupied Russian territories without the participation of Russia, I emphasize, even the Soviet one. But that is still "flowers".
The fact is that the terminological "pearl" - "... in the territories that constituted Russia before the war" - meant that the Entente de facto and de jure not only agreed with the results of the German occupation of the territories, the legality of which had become part of Russia before August 1 1914 and even throughout the entire First World War, it never entered anyone's head, at least openly, but in the same way, that is, both de facto and de jure trying to reject, or, as then the Anglo-French allies expressed themselves "gracefully", to "evacuate" these territories after the fact of the German occupation. Simply put, as if in the order of a "legitimate trophy" obtained from the defeated enemy - Germany.
And in this connection I would like to draw attention to the following circumstance. As mentioned above, on November 15 (28), 1917, the Entente Supreme Soviet made an official decision to intervene in Russia. Unofficially, this decision was agreed upon back in December 1916 - they were only waiting for the now vaunted "temporary workers-February" to thrust their "revolutionary ax" into the back of the most faithful ally of the Entente - Nicholas II. And in development of this decision, on December 10 (23), 1917, the Anglo-French convention on the division of the territory of Russia was signed. For the information of readers: this dastardly convention has not been officially annulled until now! According to this convention, the allies deigned to divide Russia as follows: the North of Russia and the Baltic countries fell into the zone english influence (This, of course, did not exhaust the "appetites" of the Britons, but this is a separate conversation). France got Ukraine and the South of Russia. On November 13, 1918, the same Anglo-French allies under US patronage impudently prolonged the term of this convention. Simply put, Russia was declared for the second time, even if it was Soviet, really war, and really world war, and really the second in a scenario "off the wheels" of the First World War! In fact, it really was a re-declaration of the first "World War II" in the 20th century in the scenario "off the wheels" of the First World War.
As for the second "pearl" from Article 12 of the Compiegne Agreement - "taking into account the internal situation of these territories" - here is another international legal "focus" of the Entente. Without risking to call these territories states - the issue of recognizing their fake sovereignty will be raised only on February 15, 1919 during the so-called "peace" conference in Versailles - the Entente, nevertheless, was prepared to steal them. Especially in the part concerning the Baltics, although I knew perfectly well that it would be completely illegal! Because in this way, secretly and without any participation of Russia, the Treaty of Nishtad of August 30, 1721 between Russia and Sweden will be impudently broken! Under this agreement, the territories of Ingermanland, part of Karelia, all of Estonia and Livonia with the cities of Riga, Revel (Talinn), Dorpat, Narva, Vyborg, Kexholm, the islands of Ezel and Dago were transferred to Russia and its successors into complete, undeniable and eternal possession and property! By the time the Armistice of Compiegne was signed, for almost two centuries no one in the world even tried to dispute, especially since the Treaty of Nystad itself was confirmed in writing and guaranteed by the same England and France.
But the Entente was afraid to openly steal. First of all, because during the period of the actual German occupation, as well as after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the German occupation authorities forcibly slaughtered huge chunks of purely Russian territories to the Baltic territories. To Estonia - parts of the Petersburg and Pskov provinces, in particular, Narva, Pechora and Izborsk, to Latvia - Dvinsky, Lyudinsky and Rezhitsky districts of the Vitebsk province and part of the Ostrovsky district of the Pskov province, to Lithuania - parts of the Suvalka and Vilenskaya provinces inhabited by Belarusians (not very , obviously capable of understanding something, but with giblets sold to the West, the authorities of the modern Baltic limitrophes are now all the time trying, speaking in a purely folk language, to “spread the mitten” to these lands wider). The Entente was also afraid because first it was necessary to replace the power structures of a purely pro-German orientation formed by the German occupation authorities (German intelligence widely planted its agents of influence there) by government bodies with a pro-Antante orientation. But this is just one side of the "coin". The second was as follows.
Under the direct pressure of the Entente, which had set this up as a tough precondition for an armistice, the Kaiser's government of Germany on November 5, 1918 unilaterally severed diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia. Fortunately, there was no need to look for a reason - the Soviet embassy, \u200b\u200bled by a longtime patient of the best European and Russian psychiatrists A. Ioffe, interfered so openly and so brazenly in the internal affairs of Germany that it was impossible not to notice it. However, it was, as they say, “debt payment is red” - a year before that, the nemchura behaved in the same way in Russia.
The break in diplomatic relations meant that even according to the norms of the then robbery international law, all previously signed and ratified treaties between the two states automatically lost their legal force. Moreover, on November 9, 1918, the Kaiser's empire also sank into oblivion: the monarchy fell, the Kaiser went on the run (took refuge in Holland), and the Social Democrats, led by Ebert-Scheidemann, came to power in Germany. At the time of the signing of the Compiegne armistice on November 11, 1918, the Social Democratic armistice, we use the parliamentary rule and put an edge so as not to speak obscenely…. headed by Ebert-Scheidemann, she practiced a super-unique, super-unprecedented trick even for the robber history of the West and its same jurisprudence. Automatically deprived of any legal force, and without that the robber Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 3, 1918, just six days after its automatic denunciation by the German side, it is suddenly resurrected by the Social Democrats who came to power in Germany ... Even worse. Together with the function of monitoring its execution, how is it supposedly continuing to operate, the treaty was voluntarily transferred to the Entente as a "trophy" !? Naturally, with all the ensuing extremely negative geopolitical, strategic and economic consequences for Russia, even the Soviet one! After all, it was about the theft of a Million Square Kilometers of the Strategically Important Territories of the Russian State, together with their natural, economic and demographic resources! Resources, which even at that time were measured by more than one tens of billions of gold rubles!
Lenin, who tried to recapture the Baltic states by armed means, was absolutely right de facto, no matter how you treat him personally. And, what is especially important in this regard, de jure too. Because official diplomatic relations were unilaterally severed by the Kaiser's Germany, which soon collapsed, and the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was automatically deprived of any force. Consequently, the Baltic states, which remained under German occupation, both de facto and de jure, turned into the territory of Russia illegally torn away and occupied by the troops of the deceased state, which the Entente is also openly stealing! Moreover, declaring for the second time Russia, albeit a Soviet one, another, that is, the next world war, the second in a row and in the scenario “from the wheels of the first”! From a purely military-geopolitical point of view, the armed onslaught of the Bolsheviks on the Baltic states, which began on November 13, 1918, had an absolutely justified character of an objectively necessary counter-offensive in order to protect the state's own territory.
But from an ideological point of view, Lenin was just as wrong, for he gave this armed campaign the appearance of an attempt to "come to the aid of the German revolution," which was fiercely rejected by all of Germany, which Ilyich and Co. did not want to understand, since their enthusiasm at that moment, gently In other words, the idea of \u200b\u200ba "field revolution", which was inadequate to the realities of that time, simply cut off in their minds even the shadow of a hint of any kind of rational thinking. The result was logical - defeat was inevitable, especially since all of Europe, with desperate efforts, right up to the incitement of evil anti-Semitism in most of its countries, repulsed the attacks of Lenin, Trotsky and Co., stunned by the bloody taste of the "world revolution" ...
But, in spite of the failure of this armed campaign, the fate of these territories could not be decided without the participation of Russia, even if in the person of some traitor. And the Entente entrusted this vile deed to the now praised Admiral Kolchak, who by that time had become a direct agent of the strategic influence of the Entente.
On May 26, 1919, the Supreme Council of the Entente sent Admiral Kolchak, completely controlled by British intelligence (his actions on behalf of the allied command were led directly by British General Knox and, subsequently, by the legendary British geopolitician, and then, by the way, until the end of his life, the most authoritative British military intelligence-intellectual J. Halford Mackinder) a note in which, announcing the break in relations with the Soviet government, he expressed his readiness to recognize his own double agent of strategic influence in admiral's shoulder straps for the Supreme Ruler of Russia !? And that's what is characteristic. They recognized him, but only de facto. But de jure - miles sorry, the Entente's three-fingered were shown. But with all this, they demanded from him purely legal actions - they put forward a tough ultimatum, according to which Kolchak had to agree in writing to:
1. The secession of Poland and Finland from Russia, which made no sense, especially in relation to Finland, was not, except for the fierce desire, especially of Great Britain, to arrange everything so that these countries received independence supposedly from the hands of the Entente (West). The fact is that the independence of Finland was granted by the Soviet government on December 31, 1917, which, by the way, is still celebrated by Finland. That was the right step, because her stay in Russia, where, according to the Treaty of Fredericksham in 1809, she was included by Alexander I (by the way, at the request of the ancestor of the future Fuhrer of Finland - Mannerheim), was not only senseless, but also dangerous due to separatism blazing there a purely nationalistic sense.
As for Poland, after the events of October 1917, she already became independent - Lenin did not interfere. Consequently, from this point of view, the ultimatum to Kolchak was also meaningless.
2. Submitting the issue of secession of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania (as well as the Caucasus and the Trans-Caspian region) from Russia to the arbitration of the League of Nations in the event that the agreements necessary for the West are not reached between Kolchak and the puppet governments of these territories.
Along the way, Kolchak was presented with an ultimatum that he should recognize for the Versailles "peace" conference the right to decide the fate of Bessarabia as well.
In addition, Kolchak had to guarantee the following:
1. That as soon as it seizes Moscow (the Entente, obviously, naturally "went crazy" that set him such a task), he will immediately convene the Constituent Assembly.
2. That it will not interfere with the free election of local self-government bodies. A little explanation. The fact is that under the seemingly very attractive formulation was hidden a time bomb, colossal in its destructive power. The country was then blazing fire of separatism of various stripes. From purely nationalistic to regional and even small-town. Moreover, literally everyone was involved in this destructive process, including, unfortunately, even purely Russian territories, almost absolutely Russian in terms of population. And giving them the freedom to elect local self-government bodies automatically meant giving them the freedom to separately declare the independence of their territory, and, accordingly, to secede from Russia. That is, the ultimate goal was to destroy the territorial integrity of Russia by the hands of its own population! The West, by the way, always tries to do just that. In the same way, by the way, in 1991 the USSR was destroyed.
3. That he will not restore "special privileges in favor of any class or organization" and, in general, the previous regime that constrained civil and religious freedoms. A little explanation. Simply put, the Entente was not at all satisfied with not only the restoration of the tsarist regime, but even the regime of the Provisional Government. And if even simpler, then a united and indivisible Russia as a state and country. It is at this point, not to mention others, that the meanness of Kolchak's repeated betrayal is manifested most prominently. To someone, but he knew perfectly well that the news of the overthrow of the tsar was received, in particular, in the same England, whose service to the king he volunteered, by the British Parliament with a standing ovation, and its Prime Minister - Lloyd- George just exclaimed: "The goal of the war has been achieved!" That is, he openly admitted that the First World War was started precisely for this! And, consequently, recognizing this point of the Entente ultimatum, Kolchak once again proved that he is a deliberate traitor against Russia!
On June 12, 1919, Kolchak gave the necessary written answer to the Entente, which she considered satisfactory. Once again, I draw your attention to the special meanness of the Entente. After all, she recognized Kolchak only de facto, but she issued an ultimatum de jure. And the Entente acknowledged the answer from the de facto only de facto traitor to Russia! That's what the West means!
As a result, some Kolchak in one fell swoop crossed out all the conquests of Peter the Great and the Treaty of Nishtad itself of August 30, 1721! When he fulfilled the tasks assigned to him and huge chunks of the territory of the Russian state were de jure torn away, his fate was decided. The Moor did his job - the Moor can not just leave, but he must be killed, preferably by someone else's hands. So that all ends really would be in the water. By the hands of the representative of the Entente under Kolchak - General Janin (the Anglo-Saxons remained true to themselves even here - they set up the representative of France for this unseemly deed) - and with the assistance of the Czechoslovak corps (they were still enemies of Russia who raged at the direction of their western masters on the Trans-Siberian), the puppet admiral was surrendered the Bolsheviks. Well, they shot him like a dog, and rightly so! There is no need to squander the collected territory of a great state and a great country for centuries!
It remains to say about the following. On what the Anglo-Saxons "took" Kolchak - whether on immense vanity, whether on the use of drugs (Kolchak was an avid cocaine addict) or on both at the same time, or on something else - now it is impossible to establish. But you can still say something about it. Apparently, in Kolchak, they "kindled" a sense of patrimonial revenge for their distant ancestor - the commander of the Khotyn fortress in 1739 Ilias Kalchak-Pasha, from whom the Kalchak family in Russia began. Ilias Kalchak Pasha - this is how his name was written in the 18th century. - was forced to surrender to the Russian troops under the command of Minich during the next Russian-Turkish war. After 180 years, a distant descendant of Ilias Kalchak Pasha - A.V. Kolchak - surrendered to the West all the conquests of Peter I and his heirs!
It was an openly Jesuitical course of the West! By the hands of a traitor in admiral's shoulder straps, besides, not Russian by origin - after all, Kolchak was a "Crimean", that is, a Crimean Tatar - to deprive Russia of access to the Baltic Sea, for the right to have which, Russia of Peter the Great fought the Northern War with Sweden for over 20 years ! All the works of Peter the Great, his predecessors and successors were completely crossed out, including the famous Nishtad Peace Treaty of August 30, 1721, which legalized Russia's right to free access to the Baltic Sea and further to the Atlantic! Moreover. This is how Russia got a headache in the face of the viciously Russophobic so-called Baltic states. This was the case even before the Second World War, and this is the way it continues today.
And now "the scum ruling in democracy" - this inherently charming expression belongs to one of the most respected people in the whole world, "the king of dynamite" and the founder of the world famous Nobel Prizes, Alfred Nobel - they praise Kolchak not only allegedly as a patriot of Russia, but also as the innocently murdered victim of the Bolsheviks' political repression !?
E.A. Korneva
COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE A. V. KOLCHAK: ORGANIZATION AND COVERAGE OF POLITICAL MOOD OF THE POPULATION AND THE TROOPS
In recent years, against the background of an active study of the punitive policy and the bodies of the political search of the Bolshevik dictatorship during the Civil War, the lag in the study of the system of political control of the White movement has become increasingly noticeable. Only the first steps are being taken in this direction, especially in relation to A.V. Kolchak's power.
Accordingly, the documents created in the depths of the white political control bodies have not yet become the subject of special study, although they are unique sources reflecting the internal political situation in the territories occupied by the white armies. In this respect, Kolchak's counterintelligence was especially "unlucky", whose documents were seized by units of the Red Army and were kept secret for a long time. In the 60s. they began to be studied by historians, but the rigid ideological framework did not allow revealing their information potential. Currently, despite the massive declassification of documents and ideological pluralism, they still remain outside the field of vision of specialists.
The importance of a comprehensive study of the documents of white institutions that collected and analyzed information about the political moods of the population also lies in the fact that in the historical literature the presentation of events that took place in the Kolchak rear is often mostly illustrative and fragmentary and does not rely much on a specific factual base. Meanwhile, there are still many unresolved problems in the history of the Civil War in the east of Russia. In particular, the question has not yet been clarified why the peasantry of Siberia, who did not know serfdom, preferred the Bolshevik regime, in which mass shootings of hostages, indemnities and seizure of surpluses, and sometimes the entire stock of grain, and ruthless reprisals against those who resisted were mandatory elements.
Under the rule of the Supreme Ruler A.V. Kolchak, who existed in Siberia for more than a year, an extensive system of political investigation was created, in which the leading role belonged to the army counterintelligence bodies. From the first days after the coup of November 1918, the military was the force in whose hands real political, administrative and judicial power was concentrated. The priority of the military authorities over the civilians was explained by the fact that even before the fall of Soviet power, in all large cities from Kansk to Chelyabinsk, there were underground officers' organizations, which in June 1918 formed the backbone of the emerging West Siberian army. In the future, the constant internal political struggle in the government prevented the Council of Ministers from focusing on military issues, so the main headquarters and the army command were given the opportunity to solve them independently. The military felt independent of the government.
Initially, several volunteer regiments were part of the West Siberian (since July - Siberian) army; in July, the formation of the Steppe Siberian and Central Siberian corps, consisting exclusively of intelligentsia and officers, began. The size of the army grew, new corps were formed. For their recruitment and supply, as well as for the "protection of state order", the entire territory of the Urals, Siberia and Transbaikalia was divided into five corps regions, in which the institute of "authorized persons for the protection of state order" was introduced.
Attempts to establish agencies in the army to combat espionage and political anti-government actions began from the very first days of its formation. The counterintelligence bodies that existed even before the overthrow of Soviet power under secret officer organizations, after the coup were transformed into intelligence departments at the headquarters of garrisons, corps, corps commanders and performed the functions of both military intelligence and military-political counterintelligence. They exercised control over the political moods of workers and prisoners of war, arrested leaders of the Soviet government, Bolsheviks and Red Army men.
In parallel, at the initiative of the Provisional Siberian Government, similar structures were also formed at the headquarters of the Siberian Army. According to personal negotiations with the representative of the Provisional Siberian Government Lindberg, in June 1918, political matters were transferred to the Special Forces detachment at the headquarters of the army commander, and criminal matters were subject to the conduct of the criminal police. On July 10, the commander of the army A.N. Grishin-Almazov announced the creation of a military control department at the headquarters of the Siberian army. The squad was headed by the captain of the Czechoslovak troops Zaichek, who was given the right, depending on the situation, to establish divisions and points in cities and corps of Western Siberia. In September, the General Staff of the War Ministry defined the tasks of military control "in relation to existing conditions", which boiled down to "the detection of enemy spies and their organizations, as well as individuals and organizations supporting Soviet power or working against the rebirth and liberation of Russia." Until September 1918, the military control department of the Siberian Army acted on the basis of the "Temporary Regulation on the Rights and Duties of the Officers of Land and Naval Counterintelligence" dated June 17, 1917. However, in practice, the activities of the military control of Captain Zaichek in the summer and autumn of 1918 were mainly directed on the solution of organizational and legal issues, the direct political control over the population in this period were engaged in similar structures at the headquarters of the Siberian army corps.
In July - September 1918, the Siberian army liberated almost the entire Urals, Siberia and the Far East from the Bolsheviks. In connection with the further centralization of command and control, the post of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of all land and naval forces of Russia was introduced and the reorganization of the military department system began. The Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief was created, which, together with other units, constituted the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Reforming the military control system was on the agenda. On November 29, 1918, the Central Department of Military Control was created at the Headquarters, whose task was to unite the activities of the entire counterintelligence service in the territory liberated from the Bolsheviks. The military control of the Siberian Army merged with the newly created structure. Colonel Zlobin headed the Central Department until the end of 1919. During the reorganizations of 1919, the department was renamed several times and changed its subordination, but retained the functions of the governing body of counterintelligence and military control of the army in the field, and subsequently of the rear counterintelligence
After the coup of Admiral A.V. Kolchak and his appointment as the Supreme Ruler and Supreme Commander-in-Chief of all land and naval forces of Russia, the process of reorganization of all army structures began. During the winter of 1918/19. armed forces were created, including the Western, Siberian, Orenburg and Ural armies, numbering up to 400 thousand people, including about 30 thousand officers, on the fountain - 130 - 140 thousand bayonets and sabers. Military districts were restored.
During this period, attempts to establish the work of the military control service of the Headquarters met with stubborn resistance from the squads formed by Captain Zaichek, as well as emerging independently. The organ system and their subordination was extremely complex and
confused, which did not allow for systematic reporting.
Therefore, the process of creating a coherent system of counterintelligence agencies in the army and rear districts required additional reorganizations: in February, a network of departments was established at the headquarters of the Siberian, Western and Orenburg armies, and at the headquarters of the 2nd Siberian Army Corps, at the headquarters of the corps that make up armies, as well as in the theater of military operations - a network of local institutions (points). A strict vertical subordination and procedure for providing information were established. The heads of the departments were obliged to submit copies of reports on the results of their activities to the head of the counterintelligence department at the headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief and to the head of the Central Counterintelligence Directorate at the General Staff of the War Ministry.
At the beginning of March, by order of the Minister of War, counterintelligence bodies were restored in all districts in relation to the Provisional Regulations of June 17, 1917. The management of their activities was entrusted to the Chief of the Informative Department of the General Staff. Released on March 26, 1919, "Temporary regulations on military counterintelligence in the internal districts" determined their relationship with the counterintelligence of the army and navy. The management of the entire land counterintelligence service was generally entrusted to the chief of the General Staff, and the closest to the chief of the Investigative Department. Until May 1919, the Ministry of War, through the counterintelligence unit of the Investigative Department of the General Staff, carried out general management and coordination of the political control bodies of the rear military districts and controlled the activities of the Counterintelligence Department of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief's Headquarters in the army.
After major successes near Perm at the end of 1918 and a successful spring offensive, A.V. Kolchak's armies advanced towards the Volga, approaching Kazan and Samara. The government of A.V. Kolchak, claiming to be an all-Russian one, began to create a state apparatus of an all-Russian scale to serve the entire country. During this period, the formation of a system of political investigation in the structure of the Ministry of Internal Affairs began. On March 7, the Supreme Ruler approved a resolution of the Council of Ministers on the establishment of a Special Department of State Protection and relevant local directorates under the MIA Police Department. In the provinces (regions) and counties, special-purpose detachments were created. However, due to the extremely low salaries, and the lack of personnel in general, this work was delayed and almost never completed. At the same time, the status of the administrative bodies of the provinces was significantly increased. Governors (regions) and counties were headed by governors. In the front line, the position of the chief chief of the region was introduced with the functions of the governor-general [11]. In fact, the civil administration of the front-line fell into direct dependence on the commander of the army stationed in this area.
The functions of special departments and local administrations included the task of informing the Ministry of Internal Affairs about the political situation in the areas entrusted to them. On the basis of the data received, a general summary was compiled and for the purpose of familiarization was sent to the central bodies of military control and counterintelligence of the army. In turn, at the direction of the Chief of the General Staff (later the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief), similar reports were sent to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, compiled according to the data of the military censorship bureau and counterintelligence.
By the spring of 1919, a cumbersome system of civil and military administration had been created, the functions of which were often duplicated. For this reason, an attempt was made to put some order in the system of political investigation of the army and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
approved the "Temporary regulations on counterintelligence and military control service in the theater of operations", which regulated the activities of the counterintelligence of the army. Its overall leadership was entrusted to the Quartermaster General under the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. So, the duty of the counterintelligence bodies located in the military area was to keep an eye on the servicemen, while observing at the same time the civilian population. All the information obtained was to be reported to the chief of staff of the army for an operational decision. The organs of military control were called upon to serve the entire rest of the region of the army, fighting mainly with the civilian population, observing also the military personnel. This division of functions was explained by the ongoing civil war and subsequently it was supposed to limit the work of counterintelligence only to the fight against spies and their organizations, and military control as ensuring state order and public peace was supposed to be transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The counterintelligence unit with the counterintelligence department of the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief became the central registration and reporting body, in which all the material received from the branches of the active army was to be concentrated and systematized. The procedure for compiling reports, keeping diaries of external observation and the frequency of reporting, organizing a file cabinet, forming clerical affairs and informing the same bodies from which the information was received with generalized information related to the organization, methods and techniques of enemy espionage was established.
In April-May, the organization of a network of offices and points in the army and military districts was completed, systematic reporting was established, according to which the head of the Informative Department of the General Staff of the War Ministry compiled an overview of the political moods of various segments of the population, the activities of political parties and public organizations.
The constant rivalry between the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief and the War Ministry led to a new reorganization of the central military command and the concentration of all power in Headquarters. Counterintelligence and military control issues came to be in charge of the Office of the 2nd Quartermaster General, which included the Counterintelligence and Military Control Department and the Registration Department. This negatively affected the analysis and generalization of information about the political situation in the region, since the new procedure for compiling summaries focused on registering information about the subversive activities of the enemy, therefore, all information regarding the immediate political mood of the population, mainly continued to come from the branches and points of the active army and districts, was included in the overview in a small number.
In order to directly inform the government about the political moods of the population in the summer of 1919, information offices were created at the armies, but their activity in collecting and analyzing information about the mood of the population was not widely disseminated.
During the retreat of Kolchak's army in September - October 1919, the military command and control bodies were reorganized, the Headquarters was liquidated, counterintelligence was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Chief Chief of the Military Administrative Directorate of the Eastern Front, which was named the local counterintelligence department. Its tasks remained the same, only a little more concretized - the military counterintelligence was engaged in the elimination of enemy spies and agitators in the ranks of the troops, the local counterintelligence bodies were supposed to fight the anti-state elements of the country. The agents had to reach the smallest units, right down to the companies and
squadrons, to penetrate into all settlements, in parallel finding out the attitude of the masses to the existing system. In the overview reports, more attention is paid to the attitude of the population towards the warring parties. And despite the collapse of the army, the counterintelligence service functioned until the final fall of government power in January 1919.
Construction and activity in 1918 - 1919 pyramidal structure
the counterintelligence service, which permeated a network of institutions practically throughout the entire territory of the Urals, Siberia, Transbaikalia and the Far East, entailed the creation of an array of information materials (reports and reports). The information material transmitted to inform the high command of the armed forces and the Supreme Ruler was a general summary of messages received from departments and points of counterintelligence and military control, as well as supplemented by information from other sources. The desire of the heads of departments and points to go beyond instructions and provide as much information as possible about the political situation in the areas entrusted to them, as well as the literal reproduction of the most vivid and apt statements by the population in relation to the government and the enemy camp make this source unique and distinguished by a high degree of reliability and information content. On the other hand, like any source, the summaries and reports of departments and points of counterintelligence are permeated with the political views of their compilers. All resisting strata of the population, as a rule, are called “Reds” or “Bolsheviks”, similarly counterintelligence agents tended to characterize anti-government sentiments primarily as “inclination to Bolshevism”.
The surviving materials of Kolchak's counterintelligence can be divided into two main groups: documents created in the course of a political investigation (diaries of an external
observations, reports, summaries of offices and points, overview reports and reports of the head of the Counterintelligence Department) and investigative cases against persons accused of anti-state activities and propaganda. Despite the fact that the goals and objectives of counterintelligence were reduced mainly to the fight against the Bolshevik underground, the subjects of the reports and reports were much broader. They reflect the causes and nature of peasant and urban uprisings, the mood of the peasantry, workers, intelligentsia, military personnel, including foreign (Czech, Polish, American and other) units, information about the activities of the Bolshevik underground, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, city and zemstvo self-government, public and other organizations. The value of the documents that arose in the course of the activities of branches and points is also increased by the fact that, when analyzing and generalizing the information received, the counterintelligence officers not only checked it for reliability, but also identified the reasons for the fluctuations in the mood of the population and the growth of anti-government protests, without hiding the negative aspects of the activity civil and military administration, and sometimes for comparison, they cited information about the actions of the enemy in the field of winning the sympathy of the population, methods and techniques of agitation.
The mood, reasons and nature of peasant uprisings have mainly been the subject of study by counterintelligence since the end of 1918, when military control departments of the Siberian Army were formed. Prior to that, similar information passed through the reports and reports of punitive expeditions of the army corps and commissioners for the protection of state order, telegrams from the places of peasant demonstrations. The most characteristic reasons for the unrest of the peasants in the summer and autumn of 1918 in Slavgorod, Minusinsk and some other counties were considered to be counterintelligence conflicts over giving recruits and collecting taxes, which arose, as a rule, due to ignorance of the goals and motives of the government. Instead of settling these problems peacefully and through agitation, punitive detachments were sent. In reports and telegrams from the places of demonstrations, it was noted that "the peasants are against any power that brings them violence," they considered the peasants' congress the highest power, which can only decide whether to give recruits and whether to collect taxes, are ready
"To recognize a truly popular power, elected by the people, elected from persons known to the peasants, and not from lists." In a telegram from 16 villages of Minusinsk district, sent from the center of the uprising in the village of Shemonaikha, the peasants demanded that the government “stop sending punitive detachments, accept their fair popular demands, do not act by force, but peacefully, do not mix with Bolshevism, otherwise the people will stand up for their rights. " Other reasons for peasant uprisings were the abuses of the Cossack chieftains, the arrest of deserters and the fight against moonshine factories. The instigators in the latter case were, as a rule, the owners of these factories, who tried to involve as many people as possible in order to “avoid responsibility for reprisals against the police”. The general goal of the uprisings was to "throw off the Cossack yoke, to establish peasant rule."
Materials of the late 1918 - 1919 The reasons, driving forces, leaders and the course of the uprisings are mainly presented in reports and reports of the heads of departments and counterintelligence points. After analyzing the general summaries and reviews compiled for the provinces of the Urals, Siberia and the Far East, one can single out the most characteristic features of peasant uprisings, in general, similar to the summer-autumn uprisings. The motives for the speeches were the atrocities of the punitive detachments, the district militia and military units. The instigators and leaders were local residents: peasants, privately wealthy, teachers, front-line soldiers, students. The revolted villages involved neighboring settlements through threats; violent mobilizations, requisitions, etc. were carried out. The bulk of the detachments, in addition to the forcibly involved peasants, consisted of deserters, young people from 16 to 25 years old. The older peasants, on the other hand, were sharply negative about the uprisings. In areas where there were coal mines or near cities, the rebellious peasants tried to establish contact with the workers and win them over to their side, which is evident mainly from the leaflets and appeals of the peasant armies.
Kolchak's counterintelligence saw one of the main reasons for the success of the insurgent and partisan movement in the ignorance of the population about the goals and objectives of the government and the general absence of any information in areas located 200-300 versts from the railways, where residents did not know who Kolchak was, but who are the Bolsheviks. In the Urals, for example, the Kreiatians believed that the government was "Cossack".
Another no less serious reason, in the opinion of counterintelligence officials, was that Siberia did not experience the rule of the Bolsheviks as the inhabitants of European Russia, for example, occupied only at the end of December 1918, Perm province. The peasants perceived with great distrust the stories of refugees from Perm after the seizure of it by the Red Army in the summer of 1919, about violence, hunger and requisitions, since they "remember nothing of the kind about the Bolsheviks."
In the reports of the chiefs of departments and points of the front and rear counterintelligence for November
1918 - March 1919 special attention was paid to the mood of various categories of peasants: old-timers, migrants, as well as those living in agricultural, mixed (peasant-factory), remote, wooded and hard-to-reach areas. The peasants of the "grain-growing" regions, especially those who had time to suffer from the Bolshevik requisitions (Perm province), during this period were almost monarchist, especially the stories of the soldiers returning to their villages about the famine and terror that reigned in Soviet Russia acted on them. Mobilization until March was successful, the old people willingly gave their children away, the general desire was to end Bolshevism as soon as possible.
At the same time, already from March to April, the reports noted deaf, wooded and hard-to-reach areas (Zmeinogorodsky, Zayskansky, Semipalatinsky and Pavlodar districts), where mainly migrants lived. Those, in comparison, for example, with the neighboring Ust-Kamenogorsk district, are a “hornet’s nest”, where “dark
personality ”and hidden propaganda is conducted by hiding former leaders of the Soviet power. At the same time, the peasants begin to feel a shortage of workers and agricultural machinery. Thus, until May 1919, according to counterintelligence, there were two trends in the villages: “a passive bias towards the pre-revolutionary
life ”(old-timers) and“ inclination to Bolshevism ”(immigrants of recent years, refugees from the Baltic states, colonists).
In the summer, the mood of the peasants was assessed by counterintelligence officers as indifferent or distrustful of the government, and in the fall, after the summer uprisings in the rear, as dejected. The peasants explained this by the hopeless situation in which they found themselves caught between two fires - punitive detachments of government troops and partisan detachments who acted no less brutally towards the “non-aligned” villages: “The Reds will come, plunder, shoot whoever is needed, and leave, then Kolchak people come, Kalmyk people, Japanese - they burn houses, kill whoever they suspect, and leave. We don’t know what to do ”.
The inability of the authorities to suppress peasant unrest led to the fact that in many villages of Siberia and the Far East in the summer and autumn, self-defense units began to be organized. The peasants of other villages joined the insurgents, explaining that they were forced to join the insurgent regions, because otherwise they would face revenge from the partisans.
Since the fall of 1919, after another reorganization of counterintelligence, special attention in the reports began to be paid to the mood of the population of the front line. Here, the fluctuations in the mood of the peasantry mainly depended on the behavior of the troops of one side or another passing through their villages. The peasants said: “Previously, the Reds had a disorder - they were being persecuted, but now we are being driven away by the Whites”.
On the other hand, the inhabitants of the front line in a number of areas, who had heard a lot about the methods of government of the Bolsheviks, were sympathetic to all the hardships of the war. The most stable anti-Bolshevik sentiments persisted among the Cossacks, Tatars, Kirghiz, and the Old Believer population.
In December, according to the reports of agents, the authority of the government finally fell, trust in the Irkutsk, Tomsk and Yenisei provinces was preserved only in the zemstvo. In the Far East, the government has not enjoyed authority since the summer; preference was given to the Constituent Assembly.
Information about the attitudes of the workers was developed from the very first days of the fall of Soviet power, since the military authorities saw in them potential “Bolsheviks”. However, in the intelligence reports of the Siberian Army units, it was objectively noted that the workers were opposed to Soviet power and were in favor of the Constituent Assembly. However, since the fall, due to falling wages and the abolition of the 8-hour working day, strikes sometimes took on a political character, but were short-lived and were quickly suppressed by the authorities.
The greatest activity was shown during this period by railroad workers. In October 1918, they organized a strike with economic demands along the entire Trans-Siberian Railway, covering up to a dozen cities. In the winter of 1918/19. they were the most active part of the workers, especially after the formation of the bloc of Socialist-Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks, who had a direct influence on them.
The information about the workers for 1919, contrary to the expectations of the counterintelligence officers themselves, is striking in its scarcity and monotony. Although the work issue was initially given great importance in the summaries, since, according to the head of the Irkutsk branch of the military
control, strikes by miners of the Sudzhensky and Anzhersky mines could paralyze traffic on the entire Trans-Siberian railway. Since February 1919, workers' complaints about low wages have been a pervasive leitmotif of reports. In general, after the suppression of the city uprisings of the winter of 1918/19, inspired by the Bolsheviks, as well as the arrest of most trade unionists, the mood of the workers was assessed as “depressed” and no serious protests were expected from them. Counterintelligence materials for the second half of 1919 indicate that despite a further drop in living standards, strikes were carried out on rare occasions and under economic demands. So, for example, when in the summer of 1919 the miners of the Cheremkhovsky mines went on strike, the agents reported that, although the workers were absolutely Bolshevik, there could be no action due to the lack of weapons and organizers. According to agents, Yakovlev, the manager of the Irkutsk province, came to the miners and urged them to stand up for their rights more amicably, since, in his opinion, their actions were spontaneous.
In October - December 1919, there was also no particular activity of the workers, and armed uprisings took place only when the front approached, when it was obvious that the power of the Omsk government no longer existed.
The workers of the Urals, in the opinion of the agents, firmly stood on the position of rejection of both the power of the Bolsheviks and the Kolchak government. In their opinion, as stated in the resolution of the congress of trade unions of the proletariat of the Urals of June 18, 1919, instead of restoring industry, it pursues a reactionary policy under the banner of the struggle against Bolshevism, and therefore the workers, who carried the regime of the Bolshevik and bourgeois dictatorship on their shoulders, consider it necessary to fight for the exercise of democracy and political freedoms. And only when the front approached Yekaterinburg, all the factories of the district went on strike and the movement of workers, as the agent reported, took on a Bolshevik character.
Against this background, only the workers of Vladivostok were especially active. The reports for January - September 1919 constantly contain information about the connections between the workers of Vladivostok and partisan detachments.
In addition to their sympathetic attitude towards the Bolsheviks, the agents noted that in Irkutsk and Troitsk, the attitude of workers towards the existing government for a long time was "benevolent", especially after the increase in salaries for Troitsk workers after A.V. Kolchak's visit to the city, and only growing speculation caused discontent. An extremely hostile attitude towards the Bolsheviks was noted among workers who fled from Izhevsk, Votkinsk and Perm. Perm workers evacuated deep into Siberia in summer
1919 were unpleasantly struck by the “presence of the Bolsheviks in all strata of society,” that is, the sympathetic attitude of the population to the authorities, about which they knew practically nothing. They said that “Siberia must sip bitter things to tears”, since under the Bolshevik rule “the peasants would not have 5-10 cows each”.
But on the whole, despite the anti-government mood that prevailed among the majority of the workers, they did not resort to active actions after the repressions that fell upon them, unlike the peasantry, taking a wait-and-see attitude and becoming more active only with the approach of the Red Army.
Analysis of materials on political sentiments in the army shows that discontent and desertion from December 1918 was primarily caused by a poor supply of food and uniforms. The most staunch adherents of the Omsk government until December 1919 were the so-called "Europeans", that is, the soldiers of those areas that were under the rule of the Bolsheviks for a long time, as well as the Cossacks. The most unreliable element in the army were the "Siberians" who had not experienced the Bolshevik dictatorship and requisitions of the summer and autumn of 1918, as well as mobilized
soldiers from areas affected by the actions of punitive detachments. They did not understand the goals of the struggle between the Whites and the Reds, they wanted "an early reconciliation with the Bolsheviks," they easily succumbed to panic and, at an opportunity, went over to the side of the Reds. Counterintelligence agents were especially concerned about the "front-line soldiers" propagandized by the Bolsheviks during the period of the disintegration of the old Russian army.
The summaries of departments and points of military counterintelligence, as well as special reports of the head of the counterintelligence department, contain a lot of information about the activities of not only the Bolsheviks, but also other socialist parties, the zemstvo-socialist movement and its role in destabilizing the political situation in Kolchak's rear.
The agents of counterintelligence and military control of the army in the field also monitored the enemy's relationship with the local population, the state of discipline in the Red Army, etc. So, from September 1919, according to reports of all levels, information about a sharp change in the enemy's tactics in relation to the local population: firstly, the Red Army began to pay with money for food and carts, did not make violent requisitions, and secondly, the Bolsheviks in the territory they occupied began to establish relations with the church, seeking to enlist the support of clergy, which made a particularly strong positive impression on the residents. These facts significantly influenced the attitude of the population towards the Bolsheviks not only in rural areas, but also in cities: if before, when units of the Red Army approached, many residents tried to evacuate deep into Siberia, then from September they began to remain in place. In a special analytical report of the head of the press subdivision under the Informative Department of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief's Headquarters in July 1919, dedicated to “Bolshevism”, it was noted that in Siberia “there is no clear idea of \u200b\u200bBolshevism, its causes, the danger to all cultured humanity” and it was emphasized that the population of Siberia "I tasted only the initial temptation, and did not taste its bitter fruits that heal forever." The author saw the advantages of the enemy in "solidarity, capacity, implementation of decisions by telegraph", and it was also emphasized that "their decisions meet the conditions of the moment, they are not constrained by any means."
Thus, a comprehensive study of counterintelligence materials allows us not only to take a fresh look at the picture of social and political life in the rear of the armies of A.V. Kolchak, to determine the entire set of factors that determined the fluctuations in the mood of the population, to resolve the long-standing dispute of Soviet historians about the time of the transition of the Siberian peasantry to the side Soviet power, and most importantly, to understand how the peasantry understood this power, but also to understand how the popularity of this or that power depends on its ability to quickly respond to the needs of the population.
Notes:
Grekov N.V. Formation of the counterintelligence service of Kolchak's army // History of White Siberia. Kemerovo., 1995. S. 59-61; Buyanov A.M. Political investigation in Siberia and the Far East under A.V. Kolchak // History of White Siberia. Kemerovo., 1999, pp. 67-72; Nikitin A.N. Documentary sources on the history of the civil war in Siberia. Tomsk., 1994; and etc.
Gins K.G. Siberia, allies and Kolchak. Pekin., 1921. Vol. 1, p. 201.
RGVA.F.39617.Op.1.D.54.L.87-101.
RGVA.F.39617.Op.1.D. 241.L.267, 267
RGVA.F.40218. Op. 1. D. 44.L. 5.
RGVA. F. 40218, op. 1. D. 7.L. 73, 82, 82 ob.
RGVA.F.39617.Op.1.D.54.L.19; F.40218.Op.1.D.7.L.64-64 ob.
RGVA.F.40218.Op.1.D.19.L.46.
RGVA.F.40218.Op.1.D.118.L.14.15; D.66.L.5-6.8 ob.
Plotnikov, I.F., Kolchak, Moscow, 1998, pp. 230,188,213.
RGVA.F.39499.Op.1D.17.L.84; Form 40218, item 1, file 1a, sheet 36.
RGVA.F.39499.Op.1.D.18.L.84-88.
RGVA.F.39515.Op.1.D.63.L.243.
RGVA.F.40218.Op.1.D.9.L.81-84,161-165; D.12.L.15.
RGVA.F.40218.Op.1.D.11.L.184-185; D.9.L.111-115,176-178.
RGVA.F.39515.Op.1.D.80.L.48-49.
RGVA.F.40218.Op.1.D.127.L.172-173.
RGVA.F.39617.Op.1.D.196.L.18; F.40218.Op.1.D.116.L.7-10 .; D.12.L.13, 17ob.-18.71.74; F.39515.Op.1.D.246.L.6-9.
GRVA.F.39515.Op.1.D.196.L.3-4.
RGVA.F.40218.Op.1.D.420.L.221.