Vasily Chapaev was born on January 28 (February 9), 1887 in the village of Budaika, Cheboksary district, Kazan province, into a Russian peasant family. Vasily was the sixth child in the family of Ivan Stepanovich Chapaev (1854-1921).
Some time later, in search of a better life, the Chapaev family moved to the village of Balakovo, Nikolaev district, Samara province. Ivan Stepanovich enrolled his son in a local parish school, the patron of which was his wealthy cousin. There were already priests in the Chapaev family, and the parents wanted Vasily to become a clergyman, but life decreed otherwise.
In the fall of 1908, Vasily was drafted into the army and sent to Kyiv. But already in the spring of the following year, for unknown reasons, Chapaev was transferred from the army to the reserve and transferred to first-class militia warriors. According to the official version, due to illness. The version about his political unreliability, because of which he was transferred to the warriors, is not confirmed by anything. Before the World War, he did not serve in the regular army. He worked as a carpenter. From 1912 to 1914, Chapaev and his family lived in the city of Melekess (now Dimitrovgrad, Ulyanovsk region) on Chuvashskaya Street. Here his son Arkady was born. At the beginning of the war, on September 20, 1914, Chapaev was called up to military service and was sent to the 159th reserve infantry regiment in the city of Atkarsk.
Chapaev went to the front in January 1915. He fought in the 326th Belgorai Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Infantry Division in the 9th Army of the Southwestern Front in Volyn and Galicia. Was injured. In July 1915 he graduated from the training team, received the rank of junior non-commissioned officer, and in October - senior officer. He finished the war with the rank of sergeant major. For his bravery, he was awarded the St. George Medal and soldiers' St. George Crosses of three degrees.
I met the February revolution in a hospital in Saratov; On September 28, 1917 he joined the RSDLP(b). He was elected commander of the 138th reserve infantry regiment stationed in Nikolaevsk. On December 18, the district congress of Soviets elected him military commissar of the Nikolaev district. In this position he led the dispersal of the Nikolaev district zemstvo. Organized the district Red Guard of 14 detachments. He took part in the campaign against General Kaledin (near Tsaritsyn), then (in the spring of 1918) in the campaign of the Special Army to Uralsk. On his initiative, on May 25, a decision was made to reorganize the Red Guard detachments into two Red Army regiments: them. Stepan Razin and them. Pugachev, united in the Pugachev brigade under the command of Chapaev. Later he took part in battles with the Czechoslovaks and the People's Army, from whom he recaptured Nikolaevsk, which was renamed Pugachev in honor of the brigade. On September 19, 1918, he was appointed commander of the 2nd Nikolaev Division. From November 1918 to February 1919 - at the Academy of the General Staff. Then - Commissioner of Internal Affairs of the Nikolaev district. From May 1919 - brigade commander of the Special Aleksandrovo-Gai Brigade, from June - head of the 25th Infantry Division, which participated in the Bugulminsky and Belebeyevsky operations against Kolchak's army. Under the leadership of Chapaev, this division occupied Ufa on June 9, 1919, and Uralsk on July 11. During the capture of Ufa, Chapaev was wounded in the head by a burst from an aircraft machine gun.
Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev died on September 5, 1919 as a result of a deep raid by the Cossack detachment of Colonel N. N. Borodin (1192 soldiers with 9 machine guns and 2 guns), which culminated in an unexpected attack on the well-guarded (about 1000 bayonets) and located in the deep rear of the city of Lbischensk (now the village of Chapaev, West Kazakhstan region of Kazakhstan), where the headquarters of the 25th division was located.
In 1908, Chapaev met 16-year-old Pelageya Metlina, the daughter of a priest. On July 5, 1909, 22-year-old Vasily Ivanovich Chepaev married a 17-year-old peasant woman from the village of Balakova, Pelageya Nikanorovna Metlina (State Archive of the Saratov Region F.637. Op.7. D.69. L.380ob-309.). They lived together for 6 years and had three children. Then the First began World War, and Chapaev went to the front. Pelageya lived in his parents’ house, then went with the children to a neighbor’s conductor.
At the beginning of 1917, Chapaev went to his native place and intended to divorce Pelageya, but was satisfied with taking the children from her and returning them to their parents’ house. Soon after this, he became friends with Pelageya Kamishkertseva, the widow of Pyotr Kamishkertsev, a friend of Chapaev, who died of a wound during the fighting in the Carpathians (Chapaev and Kamishkertsev promised each other that if one of the two was killed, the survivor would take care of his friend’s family). In 1919, Chapaev settled Kamishkertseva with her children (Chapaev’s children and Kamishkertsev’s daughters Olympiada and Vera) in the village. Klintsovka at the division’s artillery depot, after which Kamishkertseva cheated on Chapaev with the head of the artillery depot, Georgy Zhivolozhinov. This circumstance was revealed shortly before Chapaev’s death and dealt him a strong moral blow. In the last year of his life, Chapaev also had affairs with a certain Tanka-Cossack woman (the daughter of a Cossack colonel, with whom he was forced to separate under moral pressure from the Red Army) and the wife of Commissar Furmanov, Anna Nikitichnaya Steshenko, which led to an acute conflict with Furmanov and was the reason for his recall Furmanov from the division shortly before the death of Chapaev
Chapaev, according to her, immediately went back to division headquarters. Soon after this, Pelageya decided to make peace with her common-law husband and headed to Lbischensk, taking little Arkady with her. However, she was not allowed to see Chapaev. On the way back, Pelageya stopped at the white headquarters and reported information about the small number of forces stationed in Lbischensk. According to K. Chapaeva, she heard Pelageya boasting about this already in the 1930s. However, it should be noted that since the population of Lbischensk and the surrounding area, consisting of Ural Cossacks, completely sympathized with the whites and maintained contact with them, the latter were intimately aware of the situation in the city. Therefore, even if the story of Pelageya Kamishkertseva’s betrayal is true, the information she provided was not of particular value. There is no mention of this report in the White Guard documents.
Chapaev's division, cut off from the rear and suffering heavy losses, in early September settled down to rest in the Lbischensk area, and in Lbischensk itself the division headquarters, supply department, tribunal, revolutionary committee and other divisional institutions with a total number of almost two thousand people were located. In addition, there were about two thousand mobilized peasant transport workers in the city who did not have any weapons. The city was guarded by a divisional school of 600 people - it was these 600 active bayonets that were main force Chapaev at the time of the attack. The main forces of the division were located at a distance of 40-70 km from the city.
The Lbishchensky raid by Colonel Borodin’s detachment began on the evening of August 31. On September 4, Borodin’s detachment secretly approached the city and hid in the reeds in the backwaters of the Urals. Air reconnaissance (4 airplanes) did not report this to Chapaev, apparently due to the fact that the pilots sympathized with the whites (after the death of Chapaev, they all flew over to the side of the whites). At dawn on September 5, the Cossacks attacked Lbischensk. Panic and chaos began, some of the Red Army soldiers crowded into Cathedral Square, were surrounded there and taken prisoner; others were captured or killed while clearing the city; only a small part managed to break through to the Ural River. All prisoners were executed - they were shot in batches of 100-200 people on the banks of the Urals. Among those captured after the battle and shot was divisional commissar P. S. Baturin, who tried to hide in the oven of one of the houses. The chief of staff of the Ural White Army, Colonel Motornov, describes the results of this operation as follows:
As documents testify, for the capture of Chapaev, Borodin assigned a special platoon under the command of the guard Belonozhkin, who, led by a captured Red Army soldier, attacked the house where Chapaev was quartered, but let him go: the Cossacks attacked the Red Army soldier who appeared from the house, mistaking him for Chapaev himself, in while Chapaev jumped out the window and managed to escape. While fleeing, he was wounded in the arm by Belonozhkin's shot. Having gathered and organized the Red Army soldiers who fled to the river in panic, Chapaev organized a detachment of about a hundred people with a machine gun and was able to throw back Belonozhkin, who did not have machine guns. However, in the process he was wounded in the stomach. According to the story of Chapaev's eldest son, Alexander, two Hungarian Red Army soldiers put the wounded Chapaev on a raft made from half a gate and transported him across the Urals. But on the other side it turned out that Chapaev died from loss of blood. The Hungarians buried his body with their hands in the coastal sand and covered it with reeds so that the Cossacks would not find the grave. This story was subsequently confirmed by one of the participants in the events, who in 1962 sent a letter from Hungary to Chapaev’s daughter with a detailed description of the death of the division commander. The investigation carried out by whites also confirms these data; from the words of captured Red Army soldiers, “Chapaev, leading a group of Red Army soldiers towards us, was wounded in the stomach. The wound turned out to be so severe that after that he could no longer lead the battle and was transported on planks across the Urals... he [Chapaev] was already on the Asian side of the river. Ural died from a wound in the stomach.” The place where Chapaev was supposedly buried is now flooded - the river bed has changed.
Memory:
The Chapaevka River and the city of Chapaevsk in the Samara region were named in his honor.
In 1974, the Chapaev Museum was opened in Cheboksary near his birthplace.
In the city of Pugachev, Saratov region, there is a house-museum where Vasily Ivanovich lived and worked in 1919. The Chapaevskaya 25th Infantry Division was formed in this city.
In the village of Krasny Yar, Ufa region of the Republic of Bashkortostan, there is a house-museum named after the 25th Infantry Division in the building in which the division headquarters and field hospital were located during the liberation of Ufa.
There is a museum of V.I. Chapaev located in the village of Lbischenskaya (now the village of Chapaev, West Kazakhstan region) on the site of the division commander’s last battle, it has existed since the 1920s. It is located in the house where the headquarters of the 25th Infantry Division was located.
There is a house-museum of V. I. Chapaev located in Uralsk (West Kazakhstan region)
There is also a house-museum of V. I. Chapaev in the city of Balakovo, Saratov region (Address of the directorate: 413865, Saratov region, Balakovo, Chapaev St., 110). Founded in 1948 as a branch of the Pugachev Memorial House-Museum of V. I. Chapaev. In 1986, it became a branch of the Saratov Regional Museum of Local History. The initiators of the creation of the museum in the Chapaevs’ parental home were the Chapaevites and the Red partisans of the city of Balakovo and the region. Since this city is the second homeland of the Red Army commander V.I. Chapaev, famous during the Civil War. It was in the Sirotskaya Sloboda (the former outskirts of the city of Balakovo), where the house-museum of V.I. Chapaev is now located, that his childhood and youth years passed, the formation of his personality. This memorial museum shows the peaceful period in the life of the famous division commander.
In St. Petersburg, in school No. 146 of the Kalininsky district, a museum named after V. I. Chapaev was created by teachers and students in the 1970s. Groups of students acted as tour guides. Meetings were held with veterans of the legendary 25th division. Performances were held in which school students also acted as actors.
A river cruise double-deck motor ship of Project 305 was named in honor of Vasily Ivanovich.
Project 1134A large anti-submarine ship (BOD) of the Kronstadt type
Where did Chapaev die and how did it happen? Unfortunately, there is no clear answer to this question. Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev - legendary personality times of the Civil War. The life of this person, starting from a young age, is filled with mysteries and secrets. Let's try to unravel them based on some historical facts.
The Mystery of Birth
The hero of our story lived only 32 years. But what kind! Where Chapaev died and where he was buried is an unsolved mystery. Why did it happen so? Eyewitnesses of those distant times differ in their testimony.
Ivanovich (1887-1919) - this is how historical reference books present the date of birth and death of the legendary commander.
It’s only a pity that history has preserved more reliable facts about the birth of this man than about his death.
So, Vasily was born on February 9, 1887 in the family of a poor peasant. The very birth of the boy was marked by the seal of death: the midwife who delivered the birth of the mother of a poor family, seeing the premature baby, prophesied his quick death.
The grandmother came out to the stunted and half-dead boy. Despite the disappointing forecasts, she believed that he would pull through. The baby was wrapped in a piece of cloth and warmed near the stove. Thanks to the efforts and prayers of his grandmother, the boy survived.
Childhood
Soon the Chapaev family is in search of better life moves from the village of Budaiki, in Chuvashia, to the village of Balakovo, Nikolaev province.
Things went a little better for the family: Vasily was even sent to study science at a parochial educational institution. But the boy was not destined to receive a full education. In a little more than 2 years, he only learned to read and write. The training ended after one incident. The fact is that in parochial schools it was the practice to punish students for misconduct. Chapaev did not escape this fate either. In the cold winter, the boy was sent to a punishment cell with practically no clothes. The guy did not intend to die from the cold, so when it was no longer bearable to endure the cold, he jumped out of the window. The punishment cell was very high - the guy woke up with broken arms and legs. After this incident, Vasily did not go to school anymore. And since education was closed for the boy, his father took him to work, taught him carpentry, and they built buildings together.
Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev, whose biography grew with new and incredible facts every year, was remembered by his contemporaries after another incident. It was like this: during work, when it was necessary to install a cross on the very top of a newly built church, showing courage and skill, Chapaev Jr. took on this task. However, the guy could not resist and fell from a great height. Everyone saw a true miracle in the fact that after the fall Vasily did not have even a small scratch.
In the service of the Fatherland
At the age of 21, Chapaev began military service, which lasted only a year. In 1909 he was fired.
According to the official version, the reason was the illness of a serviceman: Chapaev was diagnosed. The unofficial reason was much more serious - Vasily’s brother, Andrei, was executed for speaking out against the tsar. After this, Vasily Chapaev himself began to be considered “unreliable.”
Chapaev Vasily Ivanovich, whose historical portrait emerges as the image of a man prone to bold and decisive actions, once decided to start a family. He got married.
Vasily's chosen one, Pelageya Metlina, was the daughter of a priest, so the elder Chapaev opposed these marriage ties. Despite the ban, the young people got married. Three children were born in this marriage, but the union broke up due to Pelageya’s betrayal.
In 1914, Chapaev was again called to serve. The First World War brought him awards: the St. George Medal and the 4th and 3rd degrees.
In addition to awards, soldier-Chapaev received the rank of senior non-commissioned officer. All achievements were gained by him during six months of service.
Chapaev and the Red Army
In July 1917, Vasily Chapaev, having recovered from his injury, joined an infantry regiment whose soldiers supported revolutionary views. Here, after active communication with the Bolsheviks, he joined the ranks of their party.
In December of the same year, the hero of our story becomes commissar of the Red Guard. He suppresses peasant uprisings and goes to study at the General Staff Academy.
For the smart commander, a new assignment will soon arrive - Chapaev is sent to the Eastern Front to fight with Kolchak.
After the successful liberation of Ufa from enemy troops and participation in military operation After the release of Uralsk, the headquarters of the 25th division, commanded by Chapaev, was suddenly attacked by the White Guards. According to the official version, Vasily Chapaev died in 1919.
Where did Chapaev die?
There is an answer to this question. The tragic event occurred in Lbischensk, on But historians are still arguing about how the famous commander of the Red Guard died. There are many different legends about the death of Chapaev. A lot of “eyewitnesses” tell their truth. Still, researchers of Chapaev’s life are inclined to believe that he drowned while swimming across the Urals.
This version is based on an investigation conducted by Chapaev’s contemporaries shortly after his death.
The fact that the division commander’s grave does not exist and his remains were not found gave rise to a new version that he escaped. When the Civil War ended, rumors began to circulate among the people about the rescue of Chapaev. It was rumored that he, having changed his last name, lived in the Arkhangelsk region. The first version is confirmed by a film that was released on Soviet screens in the 30s of the last century.
Film about Chapaev: myth or reality
In those years, the country needed new revolutionary heroes with an unblemished reputation. Chapaev's feat was exactly what Soviet propaganda felt necessary.
From the film we learn that the headquarters of the division commanded by Chapaev was taken by surprise by the enemies. The advantage was on the side of the White Guards. The Reds fired back, the battle was fierce. The only possibility the only way to escape and survive was to cross the Urals.
While crossing the river, Chapaev was already wounded in the arm. The next enemy bullet killed him and he drowned. The river where Chapaev died became his burial place.
However, the film, which was admired by all Soviet citizens, caused indignation among Chapaev's descendants. His daughter Claudia, referring to the story of Commissar Baturin, claimed that his comrades took his father to the other side of the river on a raft.
To the question: “Where did Chapaev die?” Baturin answered: “On the bank of the river.” According to him, the body was buried in the coastal sand and disguised by reeds.
Already the great-granddaughter of the red commander initiated the search for her great-grandfather’s grave. However, these plans were not destined to come true. At the place where, according to legend, the grave should have been located, a river now flowed.
Whose testimony was used as the basis for the film script?
How Chapaev died and where, the cornet Belonozhkin told after the end of the war. From his words, it became known that it was he who fired a bullet at the sailing commander. A denunciation was written against the former cornet, he confirmed his version during interrogation, and it was the basis for the film.
Belonozhkin's fate is also shrouded in mystery. He was convicted twice and amnestied the same number of times. He lived to a very old age. He fought during World War II, lost his hearing due to shell shock, and died at the age of 96.
The fact that Chapaev’s “killer” lived to such an old age and died a natural death suggests that representatives of the Soviet government, who took his story as the basis for the film, did not themselves believe in this version.
Version of the old-timers of the village of Lbischenskaya
How Chapaev died, history is silent. We can draw conclusions by referring only to eyewitness accounts, conducting all kinds of investigations and examinations.
The version of the old-timers of the village of Lbischenskaya (now the village of Chapaevo) also has the right to life. The investigation was conducted by Academician A. Cherekaev, and he wrote down the history of the defeat of Chapaev’s division. According to eyewitnesses, the weather on the day of the tragedy was autumn-like cold. The Cossacks drove all the Red Guards to the banks of the Urals, where many soldiers actually threw themselves into the river and drowned.
The victims were due to the fact that the place where Chapaev died is considered enchanted. No one has ever managed to swim across the river there, despite the fact that local daredevils, in honor of the memory of the deceased commissioner, organize such swims every year on the day of his death.
What Cherekaev learned about Chapaev’s fate was that he was caught, and after interrogation, under guard, he was sent to Guryev to Ataman Tolstov. This is where Chapaev's trail ends.
Where is the truth?
The fact that Chapaev’s death is indeed shrouded in mystery is an absolute fact. And the answer to this question is for researchers life path the legendary division commander has yet to be recognized.
It is noteworthy that the newspapers did not report Chapaev’s death at all. Although then the death of such famous person was considered an event that was learned about from the newspapers.
They began to talk about Chapaev's death after the release of the famous film. All the eyewitnesses of his death spoke at almost the same time - after 1935, in other words, after the film was shown.
In the encyclopedia “Civil War and Military Intervention in the USSR” the place where Chapaev died is also not indicated. The official, generalized version is indicated - near Lbischensk.
Let's hope that thanks to the opportunities latest research, this story will become clear someday.
When the first gymnasium in the city of Balakovo, Saratov region, following the example of the Rossiya TV channel, conducted their survey “The Name of Balakov,” they were very surprised: in first place was... Chapaev. Already almost forgotten by the official country, the hero of the civil war is alive in people's memory! And not only because in Balakovo there is his house-museum, a street named after him, not only because there is a story about him great amount jokes. It’s just that young people (and not only) always admire the courageous, strong and fair people. And this is exactly what Vasily Ivanovich was, whose years of childhood, youth and maturity fell on the Balakovo period of his biography. It is no coincidence that even during Chapaev’s life, during the years of the Civil War, legends were formed about him.
And today the identity of the legendary red commander causes a lot of controversy. Either they are trying to challenge his talent as a genius military leader, explaining Chapaev’s numerous victories by chance, or they are calling him almost an anarchist, who rushed with his troops between the Volga and the Urals, obeying no one. And in one of the recent publications, the ardent Bolshevik was presented as a deeply religious person and was almost offered to be canonized (!):
"Raised in Orthodox family, seasoned in war, Chapaev carried his sincere faith in God throughout his entire life. He knew many prayers by heart and asked the Lord for help before every serious matter. He prayed in the trenches of the First World War and on the fronts of the Civil War. Even after becoming a division commander, before each battle he kicked everyone out of his room so that he could say prayer alone.
Only God's help can be explained by his constant, amazing victories over opponents who were many times superior to the Chapaevites in numbers and weapons. Perhaps this is the main discovery that the hero’s great-granddaughter gives us on the occasion of the anniversary of her main ancestor. Trusting in the Lord God, calling upon Him for help in difficult circumstances more than made up for the lack of education that is so diligently shown to us in the feature film, books and anecdotes about Chapaev. Their authors did not understand at all, or concealed for political reasons, what was the secret of the invincibility of this unlearned commander. And he was in the righteousness and power of God. Truly “blessed are the poor in spirit”... division commanders.”
But the most mysterious and mysterious still remains his death.
It is believed that Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev died on September 5, 1919. The White Guards attacked the headquarters of his division in Lbischensk early in the morning. According to the official version, which was reflected in the Vasilyev brothers’ film “Chapaev,” Chapaev’s sentries fell asleep, so the White Guard attack was unexpected. In fact, everything was not like that.
Already in his famous story “Chapaev” Dmitry Furmanov asks the question: “it still remains surprising and unsolved: who took the divisional school off guard on that fateful night? Chapaev did not give such an order to anyone.” And in the essay “The Lbischenskaya Drama,” which was written a year earlier than the story, the writer-commissar had another question: why “didn’t they notice” the Cossacks approaching Lbischensk?
the reconnaissance pilots who flew on the eve of the tragedy, or the mounted reconnaissance, which was tasked with exploring the steppe as deeply as possible?
The “truth” was discovered by the daughter of the legendary division commander (chief of the division), Klavdiya Vasilievna. Having studied a huge number of documents, she came to the conclusion that the command of the 4th Army was to blame for the death of Chapaev. His inept, and perhaps deliberate, actions led to Chapaev’s headquarters in Lbischensk being isolated from his regiments, which were scattered dozens of miles from each other. Any White Guard unit would have broken through into such a “hole.” “A catastrophe could happen any day now,” Chapaev warned the army staff the day before the Lbischensk tragedy and, having learned that enemy patrols had appeared nearby, he ordered his troops to be on full combat readiness. And these guys are only 200-300 fighters from the training team, and even practically without weapons. Try to fight! And yet the Chapaevites gave the enemies a real fight!
According to the official version, the wounded Chapai, who was fleeing by swimming through the Urals, was caught by an enemy bullet in the middle of the river. However, when the Reds entered Lbischensk, they found neither witnesses to the death of the division commander nor his body. Thinking that he had been carried downstream, the command even announced a reward of 10 thousand rubles in gold for the one who found the hero. But alas...
In the early 60s. XX century Klavdia Vasilievna received a strange letter from a Soviet officer who served in Hungary. He wrote that after watching the film “Chapaev” in the cinema, two Hungarians approached him and said that Vasily Ivanovich did not die like that. According to them, when the division commander was wounded three times (in the arm, in the head and in the stomach), Commissar Baturin, who took command, ordered the commander to be transported to the other side of the Urals at any cost. In one of the courtyards, the gate was removed from its hinges, the seriously wounded Chapaev was placed on it, like on a raft, and, accompanied by four soldiers (these two Hungarians were allegedly among them), they were sent across the river. But during the crossing, Vasily Ivanovich died. The Chapaevites buried him on the shore so that the White Guards would not violate the body of their beloved commander. After such news, Klavdia Vasilievna tried to find her father’s body and went to Lbischensk. But it turned out that the Urals had changed its course, and the grave, if there was one, was most likely washed away.
And during the so-called perestroika (80-90s of the XX century) in some means mass media Another version was published: Chapaev, for his obstinacy and people’s love for him, was arrested by his own people. They, after many years, having kept the hero in dungeons, shot him. This option was voiced quite recently, in the spring of 2008, in one of the television “series” of “The Battle of Psychics,” when clairvoyants were given the task of finding out from Chapaev’s belongings how he died.
And the imagination of a certain Vladimir Savchenko ran wild even more. In his story “The Fifth Dimension”, he put another, completely absurd “version” into the mouth of the “Chapaevite father”:
“He wasted his division there. Gave the Cossacks the opportunity to behead the headquarters. He barely escaped by swimming across the Ural River and hid in the reeds, wounded, until we recaptured Lbischensk... Well, we found him wounded in the reeds, barely alive. To the hospital, of course. Out of the division, of course. They wanted to put him on trial: they don’t let you do something like that in war, so that he would have his headquarters, the head of the division, destroyed. But... they hushed it up taking into account past merits. After recovery, I heard, he was assigned to a regiment. Not in twenty-five, of course. And then, to tell the truth, I lost sight of him. They said he fought on the Don, then in Central Asia- and not bad. Then, in 1930, I saw his book “With Kutyakov in the Ural steppes”…”
Comments, as they say, are unnecessary. It is enough to clarify that it was Kutyakov who wrote the book “With Chapaev in the Ural Steppes,” and everything immediately becomes clear. But an ignorant person would certainly perceive (and, perhaps, perceive) these words as “discovery”, “truth”. The only “excuse” for the author is that this story is fantastic and was published in the “Golden (!) Shelf of Fantasy” series.
And Chapaev’s great-granddaughter Evgenia is convinced that her great-grandfather died in battle, but she has repeatedly stated in her interviews that he was simply handed over to the whites: “ Soviet government“at one fine moment Chapai got into trouble, and he had to be stopped at any cost so that the revolution did not take an unplanned course.” Evgenia is trying to prove that Chapaev’s headquarters was deliberately left without cover. However, in her opinion, allegedly based on the memories of her grandmother, the daughter of the legendary division commander Claudia Vasilievna, his common-law wife is also to blame for Chapaev’s death:
“Pelageya became interested in the head of the artillery depot, Georgy Zhivolozhinov. Zhivozhinov rushed between the whites and the reds, just like Furmanov: whoever wins, we’ll join him. At that time, he was kind of for the Reds and couldn’t stand Chapaev. But fame flew across the country not about him, but about Chapaev. Envy led Zhivolozhinov to the idea of seducing Vasily Ivanovich’s common-law wife, Pelageya. And he began to visit her in the absence of Vasily Ivanovich. One day Chapaev came home from the front on leave and found his opponent in his house. His machine gunner Mikhail Zhivaev broke out a window and began firing a machine gun on top of the bed with his lovers. Pelageya immediately covered herself with Chapaev’s youngest son. Chapaev left for the front on the same day. The next day, Klavdia Vasilievna recalled, Pelageya took Chapaev’s youngest son Arkady and went to the front to make peace with him. The son was allowed to see his father, and the unfaithful wife was sent home. Pelageya got angry and on the way back she stopped at the Whites’ headquarters and said that Chapaev’s headquarters was not covered at all and the soldiers had training rifles... So Pelageya took revenge on her husband purely in a woman’s way. By the way, when Chapaev died, Zhivolozhinov continued to live with Pelageya, taking his children into his care as a guardian. They say that when the family sat down at the table, he took a revolver and shot off the ends of the children’s hair - such was his hatred of Chapaev, which he transferred to his children.”
At the instigation of Evgenia, this news spread like a fan through the media - “Chapaev died due to his wife’s betrayal.”
And in last years“White Guard” versions of Chapaev’s death also appeared.
The article “Chapayev – destroy!” was posted on the website of the educational, methodological, informational and organizational portal of military-patriotic education “Styag”. Author Sergei Balmasov calls the defeat of Chapaev’s headquarters in Lbischensk “one of the most outstanding and amazing victories of the White Guards over the Bolsheviks.” He even states that this " special operation... must go down in the history of military art.”
Balmasov claims that, “according to the most conservative estimates, during the Battle of Lbischen the Reds lost at least 2,500 killed and captured, and the total losses of the Whites amounted to only 118 people: 24 killed and 94 wounded.” The same article states that “the trophies taken in Lbischensk turned out to be huge. Ammunition, food, equipment for 2 divisions, a radio station, machine guns, cinematographic devices, 4 airplanes were captured.” But these figures do not fit in with the data that has been replicated many times by various publications, including those that are sympathetic to the fighters against Soviet power:
“The Reds there were 300 cadets of the division school, the headquarters and political department of the division, signalmen,” reports Valery Shambarov in the book “White Guard”.
In addition, according to Balmasov, “Combat General N.N. was placed at the head of a detachment with a total number of 1,192 people with 9 machine guns and 2 guns. Borodin." Shambarov claims that the White Guard detachment consisted of only 300 sabers, one gun and one machine gun and defeated the Chapaevites only thanks to an unexpected attack. And another “researcher” attributes the “merit” in the destruction of Chapaev not to Borodin at all, but to a certain Colonel M.I. Izergin, whose “finest hour” “was the Lbischensky raid of units of the 1st Ural Corps, planned by him and carried out under his leadership, which ended with the defeat of the headquarters of the 25th Red Infantry Division located in Lbischensk and the death of division commander Chapaev.”
All these “true” stories are nothing more than fiction or distortion of facts. This is indicated by the fact that they mention Chapaev’s assistant Pyotr Isaev, who allegedly saved the division commander. But, firstly, in fact, Isaev was never Chapaev’s adjutant. First, he served as commander of a communications battalion, then as regimental commissar, and finally, he was entrusted with special assignments: for example, delivering a report to army headquarters. And secondly, Isaev was not in Lbischensk that night. His life ended tragically later: he could not forgive himself for not being with Chapaev in the last minutes of his life, and committed suicide.
The testimony of another White Guard, a certain Nikolai Trofimov-Mirsky, is closer to the truth. They for a long time were kept in the secret archives of the NKVD-KGB-FSB and were published only in 2002 - in the Parliamentary Gazette. Trofimov-Mirsky admitted that Chapaev did not drown, but, on his orders, was hacked to pieces with swords. And then the Cossacks burned about three hundred Red Army soldiers in a barn. This partly explains why Chapaev’s body was not found.
This “version,” by the way, echoes the oral memories of some Chapaevites. When in 1934 the Vasilyev brothers’ film Chapaev, which became a world bestseller, was released on the country’s screens, many of those who fought under the legendary division commander were outraged by the fiction of the scriptwriters and directors. First of all, they didn’t like that Chapaev was portrayed as a tramp, semi-literate and sloppy. Their commander was different: he was always smart, disciplined and demanded the same from his subordinates. And he was, as they say, a strategist from God. Despite his parochial education, he thought big, like a real commander. No wonder I had St. George's crosses of all degrees and was considered practically invincible.
Among the dissatisfied Chapaevites was Arkhip Mayorov. A native of the village. Maloye Perekopnoye (a village not far from Balakovo), he created a detachment of Red Guards in his native village, liberated Samara from the White Czechs, and after the death of Chapaev, he led the vanguard of his 25th division. Mayorov did not believe that Chapaev could succumb to panic and retreat: the cadets could, but Chapaev could not. He told his niece Maria, who served for many years in the Balakovo police, that when the Reds, two days after the tragedy, entered Lbischensk, they saw that in the building where the Chapaev headquarters was located, there was blood everywhere, the furniture was all scattered and chopped up. This means that there was a real hand-to-hand battle going on here: Chapaev and his staff fought until their last breath...
However, by that time the official version of the hero’s death had already taken shape, and no one was going to find out the truth. And how will you find out if there are no witnesses left?..
By the way, when they learned about the death of Chapaev in Balakovo, the local executive committee, firstly, decided to bury the hero in his second homeland and sent a certain Rachkin for the body of the “leader of the Balakovo proletariat”, and, secondly, proposed to file a petition with the center to rename the city Balakovo to Chepaev (then the division commander's surname was written with an "e"). For preliminary expenses, 2 thousand rubles were even allocated from local departments. However, Chapaev’s body was not found, and the city was not renamed.
But the hero’s name was given to his division. By order of the RVS (Revolutionary Military Council) of the Turkfront on September 10 (according to other sources, October 4), 1919.
Chapaev became a symbol of the courageous and selfless struggle for a bright future. And not only in the USSR. In 1937-39, for example, the international battalion named after Chapaev was organized in the Spanish People's Army, which heroically fought against fascist invaders. In this battalion a song was composed:
Franco and Hitler, destruction awaits you.
Here we are - a faithful stronghold of Spain!
After all, Chapaev’s son is each of us!
With the name of Chapaev they went on the attack during the Great Patriotic War. To raise the morale of the Soviet people and further strengthen their faith in victory, a short film “Chapaev is with us” was urgently shot, in which Chapaev (actor Babochkin) sails out of the Urals, puts on his famous burka and goes to beat the fascists.
This desire to “revive” your favorite heroes, to immortalize them, is characteristic of any nation. Couldn't get around like this special attention and Chapaeva. In 1938 in the village. In Kurilovka, Kuibyshev region (now Samara), a fairy tale was written down that ends with these words: “Chapayev survived and changed his nickname, he began to call himself not Chapaev, but something else. For your mistake, it means that there is no shame in public. And now, people say, Chapaev is alive, he has become a big boss, so fair and kind.”
And in Balakovo they always remembered their fellow countryman. Even before the film appeared (at the beginning of 1934), the Balakovites came up with a proposal to organize a fundraiser for the construction of a squadron of Red Partisan aircraft, including an aircraft named after V.I. Chapaev, and raise money for a monument, restore the house in which he lived, installing a memorial plaque on it.
But the city council took up the matter only two years later. Then local residents and public organizations collected various documents, household items and carpentry tools that Chapaev used. The authorities restored the house and surrounded it with a fence, but did not manage to create a full-fledged museum: the war began.
It officially opened only in 1948. True, in the house in which not Chapaev lived, but his parents, after the death of their son.
About this in Soviet time they immediately “forgot”, and in 1969 a memorial plaque was installed on the house with the inscription “Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev lived in this house from 1897 to 1913.” This discrepancy between real and book biography became the reason for the fact that during the period of “democratic transformations” of the late 80-90s. XX century an attempt was made to overthrow the hero from his pedestal. In Balakovo, a huge building, built next to Chapaev’s house for a full-fledged museum, was given over to a communications center. But this attempt failed miserably. To destroy the myths of the past, we need to replace them with something. But there is nothing to replace it yet. Therefore, Chapaev still remains a legend that will be attractive to researchers for a long time.
P.S. The material was written in 2011. But last year, in the Samara archive, I found a passport for this house, drawn up in 1912 for the purpose of taxing city real estate, where it is written that Ivan Stepanovich Chepaev acquired it in 1900, and there were 6 people in his family. Thus, after all, the future people's commander grew up in this small and cramped house. I decided not to amend this text. Let it be seen how, over time, on the basis of newly identified documents, historical axioms change, the proof of which, it would seem, is no longer needed.
More details about this in the article “Legend returns registration”, which is posted on my page.
Vasily Chapaev was born on February 9, 1887 in the small village of Budaika, in the Kazan province. Today this place is part of Cheboksary - the capital of Chuvashia. Chapaev was Russian by origin - he was the sixth child in a large peasant family. When it was time for Vasily to study, his parents moved to Balakovo (then modern Samara province).
early years
The boy was sent to a school assigned to the church parish. Father wanted Vasily to become a priest. However, his son's subsequent life had nothing to do with the church. In 1908, Vasily Chapaev was drafted into the army. He was sent to Ukraine, to Kyiv. For some unknown reason, the soldier was returned to the reserve ahead of schedule end of service.
The blank spots in the biography of the famous revolutionary are associated with the banal lack of verified documents. In Soviet historiography, the official point of view was that Vasily Chapaev was actually kicked out of the army because of his views. But there is still no documentary evidence of this theory.
World War I
In peacetime, Vasily Chapaev worked as a carpenter and lived with his family in the city of Melekess. In 1914, the First World War began, and the soldier who was in the reserve was again drafted into the tsarist army. Chapaev ended up in the 82nd Infantry Division, which fought the Austrians and Germans in Galicia and Volhynia. At the front he was wounded and promoted to senior non-commissioned officer.
Due to his breakdown, Chapaev was sent to a rear hospital in Saratov. There the non-commissioned officer met the February Revolution. Having recovered, Vasily Ivanovich decided to join the Bolsheviks, which he did on September 28, 1917. His military talents and skills gave him the best recommendation in the conditions of the approaching
In the Red Army
At the end of 1917, Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev was appointed commander of the reserve regiment located in Nikolaevsk. Today this city is called Pugachev. First time former officer tsarist army organized the local Red Guard, which the Bolsheviks established after they came to power. At first there were only 35 people in his squad. The Bolsheviks were joined by the poor, flour-milling peasants, etc. In January 1918, the Chapaevites fought with local kulaks, dissatisfied October Revolution. Gradually the detachment grew and grew thanks to effective propaganda and military victories.
This military formation very soon left their native barracks and went to fight the whites. Here, in the lower reaches of the Volga, the offensive of the forces of General Kaledin developed. Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev took part in the campaign against this. The key battle began near the city of Tsaritsyn, where party organizer Stalin was also located at that time.
Pugachev brigade
After the Kaledin offensive failed, the biography of Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev turned out to be connected with the Eastern Front. By the spring of 1918, the Bolsheviks controlled only the European part of Russia (and even then not all of it). In the east, starting from the left bank of the Volga, white power remained.
Chapaev fought most of all with the People's Army of KOMUCH and the Czechoslovak Corps. On May 25, he decided to rename the Red Guard units under his control into the regiment named after Stepan Razin and the regiment named after Pugachev. The new names were references to the famous leaders of popular uprisings in the Volga region in the 17th and 18th centuries. Thus, Chapaev eloquently stated that supporters of the Bolsheviks defended the rights of the lowest strata of the population of the warring country - the peasantry and workers. On August 21, 1918, his army expelled the Czechoslovak Corps from Nikolaevsk. A little later (in November), the head of the Pugachev brigade initiated the renaming of the city to Pugachev.
Fighting with the Czechoslovak Corps
In the summer, the Chapaevites found themselves for the first time on the outskirts of Uralsk, occupied by the White Czechs. Then the Red Guard had to retreat due to lack of food and weapons. But after the success in Nikolaevsk, the division found itself with ten captured machine guns and a lot of other useful requisitioned property. With this goods, the Chapaevites went to fight the People's Army of KOMUCH.
11 thousand armed supporters White movement broke through down the Volga in order to unite with the army of the Cossack ataman Krasnov. There were one and a half times less red ones. The proportions in comparison of weapons were approximately the same. However, this lag did not prevent the Pugachev brigade from defeating and scattering the enemy. During that risky operation, the biography of Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev became known throughout the Volga region. And thanks Soviet propaganda his name became known to the whole country. However, this happened after the death of the famous division commander.
In Moscow
In the fall of 1918, the Academy of the General Staff of the Red Army received its first students. Among them was Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev. short biography this man's life was full of all kinds of battles. He was responsible for many people under his command.
At the same time, he did not have any systematic education. Chapaev achieved his success in the Red Army thanks to his natural ingenuity and charisma. But now the time has come for him to complete his course at the General Staff Academy.
Chapaev's image
At the educational institution, the director amazed those around him, on the one hand, with the agility of his mind, and on the other, with his ignorance of the simplest general educational facts. For example, there is a well-known historical anecdote that says that Chapaev could not show on the map where London was and because he simply had no idea about their existence. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, like everything connected with the myth about one of the most legendary characters of the civil war, but it is difficult to deny that the head of the Pugachev division was typical representative the lower strata of the people, which, however, only benefited his image among his comrades.
Of course, in the rear calm of Moscow, such an energetic person who did not like to sit still, like Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev, languished. The brief elimination of tactical illiteracy could not deprive him of the feeling that his place as a commander was only at the front. Several times he wrote to headquarters with requests to recall him in the thick of events. Meanwhile, in February 1919, on Eastern Front There was another aggravation associated with Kolchak’s counter-offensive. At the end of winter, Chapaev finally went back to his native army.
Back at the front
The commander of the 4th Army, Mikhail Frunze, appointed Chapaev as head of the 25th Division, which he commanded until his death. Over the course of six months, this formation, consisting mainly of proletarian conscripts, carried out dozens of tactical operations against the whites. It was here that Chapaev revealed himself to the fullest as a military leader. In the 25th Division, he became known throughout the country thanks to his fiery speeches to the soldiers. In general, the division commander was always inseparable from his subordinates. This feature revealed the romantic nature of the Civil War, which was later praised in Soviet literature.
Vasily Chapaev, whose biography spoke of him as a typical person from the masses, was remembered by his descendants for his unbreakable connection with this very people in the person of ordinary Red Army soldiers who fought in the Volga region and the Ural steppes.
Tactician
As a tactician, Chapaev mastered several techniques, which he successfully used during the division's march to the east. Characteristic feature was that it acted in isolation from the allied units. The Chapaevites have always been in the vanguard. It was they who launched the offensive, and often finished off the enemies on their own. It is known about Vasily Chapaev that he often resorted to maneuver tactics. His division was distinguished by its efficiency and mobility. The Whites often did not keep up with her movements, even if they wanted to organize a counterattack.
Chapaev always kept a specially trained group on one of the flanks, which was supposed to deliver the decisive blow during the battle. With the help of such a maneuver, the Red Army soldiers brought chaos into the enemy ranks and surrounded their enemies. Since the fighting took place mainly in the steppe zone, the soldiers always had room for maneuver. Sometimes they took on a reckless character, but the Chapaevites were invariably lucky. In addition, their courage baffled their opponents.
Ufa operation
Chapaev never acted in a stereotyped manner. In the midst of a battle, he could give the most unexpected order, which turned the course of events upside down. For example, in May 1919, during clashes near Bugulma, the commander initiated an attack on a wide front, despite the risk of such a maneuver.
Vasily Chapaev moved tirelessly to the east. The brief biography of this military leader also contains information about the successful Ufa operation, during which the future capital of Bashkiria was captured. On the night of June 8, 1919, the Belaya River was crossed. Now Ufa has become a springboard for the further advance of the Reds to the east.
Since the Chapaevites were at the forefront of the attack, having been the first to cross the Belaya, they actually found themselves surrounded. The division commander himself was wounded in the head, but continued to command, being directly among his soldiers. Next to him was Mikhail Frunze. In a stubborn battle, the Red Army recaptured street after street. It is believed that it was then that the whites decided to break the opponents of the so-called psychic attack. This episode formed the basis for one of the most famous scenes of the cult film “Chapaev”.
Death
For the victory in Ufa, Vasily Chapaev received. In the summer, he and his division defended the approaches to the Volga. The division commander became one of the first Bolsheviks to arrive in Samara. With his direct participation, this strategically important city was finally taken and cleared of the White Czechs.
By the beginning of autumn, Chapaev found himself on the banks of the Ural River. While in Lbischensk with his headquarters, he and his division were unexpectedly attacked by the White Cossacks. It was a bold, deep enemy raid organized by General Nikolai Borodin. The target of the attack was largely Chapaev himself, who turned into a painful headache for White. In the ensuing battle the division commander died.
For Soviet culture and propaganda, Chapaev became a uniquely popular character. A great contribution to the creation of this image was made by the Vasilyev brothers’ film, which was also loved by Stalin. In 1974, the house where Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev was born was turned into his museum. Numerous settlements are named after the division commander.
January 10th, 2015
V. I. Chapaev, commander of the 2nd Nikolaev Soviet Regiment I. Kutyakov, battalion commander I. Bubenets and Commissar A. Semennikov. 1918
From July 15 to 25, fierce battles took place in the Usikha area between the Chapaev units and the Beluralsk army. Having overcome all the obstacles on their way, enduring thirst and hardship, feeling a lack of ammunition, the Chapaevites occupied not only Lbischensk (now the city of Chapaev in the West Kazakhstan region of Kazakhstan, the regional center of the Akzhaik region. Located 130 km south of Uralsk, on the right bank of the river . Ural.), but also the village of Sakharnaya, having covered a path of over 200 kilometers.
The Belouralsk Cossack army began to retreat south, stopping in every village. The White generals created plans for “mass cavalry attacks”, and then launched energetic preparations for a raid on Lbischensk, where Chapaev’s base and headquarters were located.
Late in the evening, some of the transport workers who had gone to the steppe for hay returned there. They reported that the Cossacks attacked them and stole the carts. This was reported to the arriving Chapaev and Baturin. Vasily Ivanovich urgently demanded to report intelligence reports and aerial reconnaissance data in the direction of the villages of Slomikhinskaya and Kazil-Ubimskaya. Chief of Staff Novikov reported that neither the mounted reconnaissance nor the reconnaissance flights of the air detachment, carried out in the morning and evening for several days, had detected the enemy. And the appearance of relatively small Cossack detachments and patrols was no longer uncommon. According to the version set out in the book by Evgenia Chapaeva (great-granddaughter of Vasily Chapaev) in the book “My Unknown Chapaev” in early September, the security of Lbischensk was not strengthened enough, since aerial reconnaissance reported that whites were nearby No.
This is what she wrote...
Chapaev calmed down, but gave orders to strengthen security. Novikov, a former officer who worked as an assistant to the division chief of staff and who had recently become head of headquarters, was beyond suspicion. And the information he reported about the enemy did not correspond to reality: the enemy large forces The cavalry was no longer far away and aimed at Lbischensk.
As they say, the enemy does not sleep... This is exactly what some people from the arriving air squad and division headquarters did. The technical capabilities of the aircraft of that time and the lack of anti-aircraft weapons to combat them allowed flights at low altitudes. The pilots, who took to the air twice a day, could not help but notice a cavalry of several thousand horsemen... Moreover, the reeds of the dry Kushum River are not a forest to hide such a mass of the enemy.
SO, PILOTS...
It is about them that special mention must be made. The fact that they were traitors became clear even then, on September 4, 1919. But few could have guessed what motivated them... Do you think it was incredible love for the abdicated Tsar Nicholas? Or fierce hatred of the Bolsheviks? YOU ARE WRONG!!!
Everything is much more prosaic - MONEY, MONEY and once again MONEY... And very big ones. 25 thousand in gold... Yes, that’s exactly what they gave for Chapaev’s head, living or dead...
There were four pilots. I will allow myself to name the names of only those who died, like Chapaev, on September 5, 1919. These are Sladkovsky and Sadovsky. And the survivors, that is, 2 pilots, divided the resulting profit and settled into a bright future.
And yet man is constructed in an incomprehensible way. Very little time will pass, the gunpowder years of the forties will come, and two traitors in civilian life will become heroes Soviet Union to the Patriotic War... But that’s not all. They will occupy responsible positions in the government and throughout their lives they will “cover up” the topic of the civil war and especially Chapaev. They were probably ashamed...
Information about traitorous pilots is also available in the book by I.S. Kutyakov “Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev”, published in 1935. Kutyakov Ivan Semenovich - commander of the 73rd brigade of the 25th division, after the death of V.I. Chapaev led the division, subsequently commanded the division until 1920, awarded three Orders of the Red Banner, the Order of the Red Banner of the Khorezm Republic, honorary revolutionary weapons, arrested and shot in 1938.
However, there is an opinion that the pilots did report information about the whites. On the Chronograph website, in the article “The Mystery of Chapaev’s Death,” it is written that Red aviation reconnaissance, flying over the steppe, discovered a Cossack corps in the reeds. The message about this immediately reached the army headquarters, but never went beyond its walls. A version has been put forward that perhaps there were traitors operating at the headquarters, probably from among the military experts of the tsarist army, attracted to cooperation by Lenin and Trotsky. In addition, military experts were not among those killed during the assault on Lbischensk.
However, the version of the betrayal of the pilots is refuted by the article “Chapaev - Destroy!” , from the white side, telling about the attack of the White Cossacks on Lbischensk.
It was a very grueling campaign: on September 1, the detachment stood all day in the steppe in the heat, being in a swampy lowland, the exit from which could not go unnoticed by the enemy. At the same time, the location of the special squad was almost noticed by the red pilots - they flew very close. When airplanes appeared in the sky, General Borodin ordered the horses to be driven into the reeds, the carts and cannons to be thrown with branches and armfuls of grass, and to lie down nearby. There was no certainty that the pilots had not noticed them, but they had no choice, and as night fell the Cossacks had to march at an accelerated pace to move away from the dangerous place. By the evening, on the 3rd day of the journey, Borodin’s detachment cut the Lbischensk-Slomikhinsk road, approaching Lbischensk 12 versts.
The same article talks about betrayal by the Reds, but differently:
In order not to be discovered by the Reds, the Cossacks occupied a depression not far from the village itself and sent out patrols in all directions to reconnaissance and capture the “tongues”. Ensign Portnov's patrol attacked the Red grain train, partially capturing it. The captured transporters were taken to the detachment, where they were interrogated and found out that Chapaev was in Lbischensk. At the same time, one Red Army soldier volunteered to indicate his apartment.
Another version is connected with the pilots. Mikhail Dmitruk in his article “What Chapaev prayed for” concludes that the commander died as a result of Trotsky’s machinations:
It seems that he began to strive for something different, better world, where he could enter only after performing great feats, defending the Faith and the Fatherland. Hence the amazing, simply fantastic courage and heroism of Vasily Chapaev. But “the bullet fears the brave, the bayonet does not take the brave” - he had to fight a lot, terrifying his opponents, before achieving his desired goal... When Vasily Ivanovich realized that the Soviet government was engaged in the extermination of the Russian people, he began to actively interfere with this. Chapaev stopped carrying out the orders of Lev Davydovich Trotsky, as erroneous, and led the division away from unnecessary losses, which the commander-in-chief demanded. Since then, Vasily Ivanovich became dangerous to the Bolshevik leadership, because he thwarted his secret plan to drown all of Russia in blood. As a result, the division commander began to be hunted... by his superiors.
One betrayal followed another. The division headquarters was continually cut off from the main forces - so that it would be attacked by an enemy ten times larger than a handful of Chapaevites. But each time he managed to miraculously outwit and defeat his opponent.
Finally, Leon Trotsky presented Vasily Chapaev with the last “gift”: four airplanes, supposedly for reconnaissance of enemy forces, but in fact for informing the whites. The pilots cheerfully reported to the division commander that everything was calm around while huge forces of White Guards were gathering from all sides. Here his headquarters was again, as if by accident, cut off from the main forces. They cut it off when several soldiers from the training company remained with the division commander. They were doomed, but bravely accepted the battle and died heroes.
This version, of course, is delusional if only for the reason that Trotsky, although he was one of the founders of the Red Army and the People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and the Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR, was not Chapaev's immediate superior. Secondly, there is no evidence that Chapaev suddenly became an opponent of the Bolshevik rule. Chapaev actually had a conflict with the commander of the 4th Army, Khvesin, who did not send reinforcements to Chapaev when he and his division found themselves surrounded. You can read about this in detail in Chapter 10 of the book “My Unknown Chapaev”.
This is what he wrote in his report to the commander of the 4th Army:
I've been waiting for two days. If reinforcements don’t come, I’ll fight my way to the rear. The division was brought to this situation by the headquarters of the 4th Army, which received two telegrams every day demanding help, and to this day there is not a single soldier. I doubt whether there is that LEAVEN at the headquarters of the 4th Army in CONNECTION WITH BURENINY FOR TWO MILLIONS. (Meaning uncovered conspiracy at the headquarters of the 4th Army.)
I ask you to pay attention to all division commanders and revolutionary councils, if you value your comradely blood, do not shed it in vain. I WAS DECEPTED BY THE SCAM KHVESINY, COMMANDER OF THE 4TH ARMY, who told me that reinforcements were coming to me - the entire cavalry of the Ural Division and an armored vehicle and the 4th Malouzensky Regiment, with which I was given the order to attack the village. I fell in love on October 23, but not only could I not complete the task with the Malouzensky regiment, but at this time (I don’t know) where it is located.
As a result, Khvesin was removed from command of the 4th Army on November 4, 1918 - long before Chapaev’s death. What is noteworthy about this telegram is that it is addressed to the commander of the 4th Army, that is, Khvesin, and Chapaev calls Khvesin in the third person a scoundrel.
There is another version. Chapaev's second common-law wife was Pelageya Kamishkertseva. It is also written about in the book in chapter 4. However, Chapaev’s relationship with her did not work out - Chapaev was looking for any convenient excuse to appear at home less often. As a result, Pelageya began an affair with the head of the artillery depot, Georgy Zhivolozhinov. All the women in the area went crazy about him: he seemed to hypnotize them. Kamishkertseva also could not resist his charms. One day Vasily Ivanovich returned home... And then - everything was like in the joke about a deceived husband and an unfaithful wife. The moment was the most intimate, and one of the division soldiers accompanying Chapaev broke the window and began firing a machine gun.
Kamishkertseva quickly realized what treason threatened her with, grabbed Chapaev’s children and began to hide behind them. Vasily Ivanovich reacted more calmly to what happened and simply stopped talking to Kamishkertseva. Pelageya suffered greatly and one day, taking Chapaev’s youngest son, Arkady, she went to Vasily Ivanovich’s headquarters.
He didn't even let her in the door. And Kamishkertseva, out of anger, drove into the White headquarters and said that Chapaev’s fighters had training rifles, and the headquarters had no cover. This version is also told by Evgenia Chapaeva, but it is not voiced in her book.
So, let’s move on to the actual version of Chapaev’s death. The canonical one shown in the film is that he, wounded, drowns while crossing the Urals, escaping from the whites. There is another option, also connected with the Ural River.
In the newspaper “Bolshevik Smena” (dated April 22, 1938), Chapaev’s youngest son, Arkady, wrote an article about the death of his father. Surely he was guided by the story of one of the participants in those tragic events:
Three assault groups gradually moved towards the center of the village, disarming the resisting Chapaevites. The Cossacks were unable to cordon off the house where Chapaev was located. Chapaev managed to escape from the house, he ran down the street, the platoon commander Belonozhkin shot at him and hit him in the arm. Chapaev managed to rally a hundred soldiers with machine guns around him and rushed towards this special platoon.
He was wounded in the stomach. They laid him on a hastily knocked together raft made from half a gate. Two Hungarians (and many internationalists fought in the Chapaev division - Hungarians, Czechs, Serbs...) helped him cross the Urals. When we reached the shore, it turned out that the commander died from loss of blood. The Hungarians buried the body with their hands right on the shore in the sand and covered the grave with reeds so that the enemies would not find and abuse the deceased.
The version with the Hungarians finds further confirmation. This is what Klavdiya Chapaeva, daughter of Vasily Chapaev, recalls:
...In 1962 I received a letter from Hungary. Former Chapaevites who now lived in Budapest wrote to me. They watched the film “Chapaev” and were outraged by its content; According to their story, everything turned out completely wrong...
From the letter: “...When Vasily Ivanovich was wounded, Commissar Baturin ordered us (two Hungarians) and two more Russians to make a raft from the gate and fence and, by hook or by crook, be able to transport Chapaev to the other side of the Urals. We made a raft, but we ourselves were bleeding too. And Vasily Ivanovich was finally transported to the other side. When they rowed, he was alive, moaning... But when they swam to the shore, he was gone. And so that his body would not be mocked, we buried it in the coastal sand. They buried them and covered them with reeds. Then they themselves lost consciousness from loss of blood..."
There is another option, also connected with the Ural River. Victor Senin recalls:
In 1982, I, then a correspondent for the Pravda newspaper, had the opportunity, together with Viktor Ivanovich Molchanov (deputy editor of the Pravda information department), to visit the Ural River, where the story with Chapaev happened.
So, as local old-timers said, Chapaev swam across the river with the soldiers and hid in nearby houses. The local Cossacks handed over the division commander to the whites. Chapaev's last fight began. In that saber battle, Chapaev killed 16 soldiers. He had no equal in saber fights. They shot the division commander in the back...Wrote an essay " Last Stand Chapaev”, but, of course, it was not published...
In the already cited article “Chapayev - Destroy”, Chapaev’s death is also associated with the crossing of the Urals.
A special platoon assigned to capture Chapaev broke through to his apartment - headquarters. The captured Red Army soldier did not deceive the Cossacks. At this time, the following happened near Chapaev’s headquarters. The special platoon commander Belonozhkin immediately made a mistake: he did not cordon off the entire house, but immediately led his men into the headquarters courtyard. There the Cossacks saw a horse saddled at the entrance to the house, which someone was holding inside by the reins, which had been pushed through the closed door. When Belonozhkin ordered those in the house to leave, the answer was silence. Then he shot into the house through the dormer window. The frightened horse darted to the side and dragged the Red Army soldier holding him out from behind the door. Apparently, it was Chapaev’s personal orderly Pyotr Isaev. Everyone rushed to him, thinking that this was Chapaev. At this time, the second person ran out of the house to the gate. Belonozhkin shot him with a rifle and wounded him in the arm. This was Chapaev. In the ensuing confusion, while almost the entire platoon was occupied by the Red Army, he managed to escape through the gate. No one was found in the house except two typists. According to the testimony of the prisoners, the following happened: when the Red Army soldiers rushed to the Urals in panic, they were stopped by Chapaev, who rallied around a hundred soldiers with machine guns, and led them into a counterattack against Belonozhkin’s special platoon, which had no machine guns and was forced to retreat. Having knocked out the special platoon from the headquarters, the Reds settled behind its walls and began to fire back. According to the prisoners, during a short battle with a special platoon, Chapaev was wounded in the stomach a second time. The wound turned out to be so severe that he could no longer lead the battle and was transported on planks across the Urals. Sotnik V. Novikov, who was observing the Urals, saw how, against the center of Lbischensk, before the very end of the battle, someone was transported across the Urals. According to eyewitnesses, on the Asian side of the Ural River, Chapaev died from a wound in the stomach.
In addition to the conspiracy theory with Trotsky, there is another conspiracy theory around Chapaev. According to her letter to the Hungarians Claudia Chapaeva, it was organized by the KGB. Here is what Yuri Moskalenko writes on the portal shkolazhizni.ru:
Aren't you embarrassed by the fact that the letter definitely found the addressee? Even if Vasily Ivanovich had told his daughter’s name to his rescuers, and they had remembered a name that was not so simple for Hungarians, could they have hoped that three decades later, in the crucible of a terrible war, the daughter would survive and be at the same address?
According to it, the legendary division commander did not perish in the cold waters of the Urals, but safely crossed to the other side, sat in the reeds until dark, and then went to the headquarters of the 4th Army to the commander Frunze to “atone for his sins” for the defeat of the division.
There are two pieces of evidence for this. The first belongs to a certain Vasily Sityaev, who mentioned his meeting in 1941 with a colleague of the division commander, who sacredly kept the cloak and saber of the missing Chapaev. The former Chapaevite said that a platoon of Hungarians ferried him safely across the river, and the division commander released his guards to “beat the whites” and headed to Samara to see Frunze.
The second evidence is much “fresh” and began to “walk” immediately after the crisis of 1998, when one of the division veterans “sold” a “sensational” fact to journalists, saying that he met Vasily Ivanovich already gray-haired and blind, but with a different last name. The division commander said that, having released the Hungarians, he wandered to Samara, but on the way he became seriously ill and spent three weeks resting on one of the farms in the steppe. And then he spent a certain amount of time under Frunze’s arrest. By that time, the division commander was already on the list of those who died heroically, and the party leadership considered it more useful to use Chapaev as a legend than to announce a miraculous “resurrection.” There was a reason for this - if the Red Army had learned that the legendary division commander had killed his personnel, and he himself had escaped from the whites - this would have cast a shameful stain on the entire “worker-peasant army”.
In a word, the division commander was declared an “information” blockade, and when he “let slip” in 1934, he was hidden in one of the Stalin's camps. And only after the death of the leader of the peoples was he released and placed in a home for the disabled. By that time he was no longer dangerous: who would believe the old man’s ravings? Yes, in any madhouse you can find not only Chapaev, but two or three Napoleons and Marat and Robespierre. And even more so, he would hardly have lived to see 1998 - at that time he should have already turned 111 years old!
And this “version” is very similar to the story of Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, who supposedly did not die in March 1968, but was safely hidden in the KGB basements because he allegedly saw a cloud with angels next to the Moon...
Well, the author of this text himself denied this conspiracy theory. As we see, Chapaev, like any legendary person, is surrounded by legends regarding the circumstances of his death. Moreover, the soil for legends is fertile - after all, Chapaev’s body was never found.
On the website centrasia.ru, Gulmira Kenzhegalieva outlines the version according to which Chapaev was captured:
Academician Alexey Cherekaev cites the story of the death of the Chapaev division, which he heard from the lips of old-timers: “The Chapaevites, who were in the village of Lbischenskoye, were driven by the Cossacks to the Urals with whoops, whistles and shots into the air. Many threw themselves into the river and immediately drowned. It was already September, the water was cold. It’s difficult for even an experienced Cossack to swim across, but here are men, and even in clothes.” Almost every year, on September 5, the day of remembrance of the national hero, the village boys tried to swim across the Urals from Krasny Yar, working with both one hand and two hands. Even from Moscow at one time a team of special swimmers came. But no one has ever managed to cross the river in this exact place.
Local old-timers told Cherekaev what actually happened to Chapaev: “He was caught and interrogated. Then, together with the staff chests, they were loaded into carts, transported by ferry across the Urals and sent under escort towards Guryev. Ataman Tolstov was there.” Further traces of Chapaev are lost. They said that the protocols of his interrogations are in Australia, where General Tolstov moved. Academician Cherekaev, who at one time worked as an adviser to the USSR Embassy in Australia, tried to get to these documents. But the descendants of the White Guard Tolstoy did not even want to show them. So it is unknown whether they really exist or whether this is another legend about Chapaev.
And finally, there is another version of the circumstances of Chapaev’s death, also related to his captivity. It was outlined in an article by Leonid Tokar in the newspaper “Your Privy Councilor” No. 13 (29) dated November 5, 2001. According to this version, Chapaev, along with his headquarters, was captured by the Whites and killed. Read it at the link if you are interested in its entirety.
So, the novel “Chapaev” was written by Furmanov in 1923. It would seem that everything that is written in the novel is an axiom. However, the existing ambiguities and inconsistencies in the history of the death of V.I. Chapaev allow us to conclude that the commander of the 25th division died on the territory of Lbischensk, and not while swimming across the Urals.
To clarify the facts stated in the articles, I turned to official sources.
First of all, if a legendary or well-known person dies, then the central newspapers must invariably report his death. However, when studying the central press for September-October 1919, no mention of Chapaev’s death was found. Newspapers wrote about the deaths of commanders, commissars of regiments and divisions, but not a single line about Chapaev. This is all the more strange since, according to the data of the “Soviet Military Encyclopedia” (3), by a decree of the Turkestan Front dated September 10, 1919, the twenty-fifth rifle division was named after V.I. Chapaev. Everything is explained quite simply. Vasily Ivanovich was the only commander of the 25th division who died in the civil war. The earliest publication of the novel “Chapaev” that I found dates back to 1931, and all the memories of eyewitnesses date back to 1935 at the earliest, that is, after the release of the film “Chapaev”. Only a few eyewitnesses have been identified. Another interesting fact. The further from the events of those years, the more eyewitnesses of Chapaev’s death appear, the more textbook these memories become. ...
… If you read the recollections of eyewitnesses, it becomes clear that you can only trust the recollections of I.S. Kutyakov, who writes about everything from the words of the only surviving commander - the chief of staff of the division Novikov. Kutyakov at this moment was the head of the 25th division and directly reconstructed the course of events that occurred in Lbischensk. In September 1919, D.A. Furmanov was in the political department of the 4th Army and could write his novel only from the words of Kutyakov and Novikov. The memories of the rest of the division’s fighters should be approached with a huge amount of skepticism. Thus, having read the memoirs of the chief in charge of organizing the division’s supply of flour, Kadnikov, and a division fighter, Maksimov, the only ones who were interviewed as witnesses to the death of Chapaev in 1938 (10), one gets the impression that Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev moved around the city as he wanted and was in many places at the same time . Well, how can you trust the words of a person who says: “The shooting was carried out at random, in the direction from which explosive “dum-dum” bullets were flying in a thick rain” (11).
The chief of staff of the Ural White Army, Colonel Motornov, describes the events in Lbischensk as follows: “Lbischensk was taken on September 5 with a stubborn battle that lasted 6 hours. As a result, the headquarters of the 25th division, the instructor school, and divisional institutions were destroyed and captured. Four airplanes, five cars and other military spoils were captured” (12).
After the capture of the city, the Whites carried out brutal reprisals against the captured soldiers and commanders of the 25th Division. The Cossacks shot in batches of 100-200 people. At the sites of executions, many suicide notes were found on scraps of newspaper and smoking paper. On September 6, the 73rd brigade of the 25th division liberated the city from the whites. The Reds were in the city for only a few hours. At this time, a search for Chapaev’s body was organized, but it did not bring any results. In the bathhouse, under the floor, they found Chief of Staff Novikov, seriously wounded in the leg. He reported everything that happened in Lbischensk. The fact of the search proves that Chapaev died in the city, and not while crossing the river. Otherwise, why was it necessary to look for his body among the dead in the city? Moreover, in total, up to five thousand people died in the Lbischensk area. In his novel, D.A. Furmanov writes that there are three huge pits behind the village (read Lbischensky) - they are filled to the top with the corpses of those executed.
The capture and subsequent death of Chapaev is also supported by the fact that even according to eyewitnesses there are several versions of his death. Only those Chapaevites who were on the square could say whether Chapaev went to the Urals, but they all died. The only surviving chief of staff, Novikov, saw Chapaev there the entire time he was on the square. Novikov simply could not see Chapaev’s death while crossing the Urals, since he hid under the floor of the bathhouse so as not to be destroyed by the whites.
Additional information can be provided by the materials of Trofimov-Mirsky’s investigative case, which should be kept in the archives of the Penza FSB.
Based on the above, we can confidently say that the unidentified body of Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev was buried in one of the mass graves in the city of Lbischensk (now Chapaev)«.
The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy was made -
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